Amuse me, dear

MARGARET CASE MORGAN

Dispassionately showing that a great many things are funnier than the home life of a professional humourist

All of their friends admitted that the Bannings were a happily married couple— that is, they admitted it when they spoke of the Bannings in the plural at all. When you considered Eliot Banning, it was difficult to think of Florence, his wife; for Eliot was a famous man. His third volume of humourous essays was in its eleventh edition; the play on which he had collaborated wras running into its eighth month on Broadway; the current magazines were gaudy with his wit. Eliot Banning was a celebrity. He was, with Ring Lardner, Irvin Cobb and Bob Benchley, one of the leading humourists of his time.

He was a leading humourist everywhere except at home. His humour was instinctive— but the words in which he clothed it had the pure, authentic quality that does not spring easily from the brain. He worked hard at it —and often, at the end of a day, he was tired. At home, with Florence, he did not have to sparkle; there, he could rest. And there he rested so completely that sometimes he sat in the room with her for a long time without saying anything at all.

Florence Banning was a small, pleasant woman with brown hair and pretty hands and feet. She was always busy, in an apologetic sort of way, with things that seemed not to matter very much to anyone else. She moved quietly through her life as a comfortable background for Eliot, doing the right things at the right time, saying what everyone expected her to say. She was a woman with no surprises in her.

The things that Banning briskly caricatured in every word that he wrote were, to his wife, the realities of life. Domestic virtues, comments on the weather, the bright sayings of children (the Bannings had none)—these were what interested Florence. She never really understood or enjoyed her husband's humour; and although she smiled adequately when she read his books and when she went to the opening night of one of his plays, secretly she preferred the simpler antics of Bringing Up Father in the comic strip, or of Mickey Mouse on the screen. She always laughed when a fat man fell down in the moving pictures, and cried when lovers were parted.

It was perhaps her instinctive simplicity that had helped her to maintain her heroworship of Eliot. She was the perfect audience for him. When he said, "Did I tell you what Benchley said at the poker-game last Thursday night?" she never answered, "Yes, dear, you did." Invariably her pleasant face lighted with anticipation, and she listened with little murmurs of encouragement to the story— sometimes for a third or fourth time. She was the kind of wife who, at dinner parties, said to her husband, "Tell them that story about the taxi-driver, Eliot—the one that everyone thought wras so funny the other night." And Eliot, his audience thus delicately prepared, would tell the story superbly while Florence contrived to listen and at the same time to watch the effect of her husband's wit upon the other people at the table with as complacent a pleasure as though he were something she had recently, herself, invented.

Of course, she spoiled him. But it was on these occasions that everybody agreed that the Bannings were a happy couple. The women said that Florence managed Eliot beautifully. The men said that she appreciated him.

On a cold, blue afternoon in February, Florence was arranging flowers in their living-room, just off Park Avenue. Eliot sat silently in the window, doing nothing, his attractive and rather rigid profile dark against the deej) light of dusk. For a while he watched, distrustfully, his wife's efficient gestures among the tulips and roses and vases of clear water on the table. Then he spoke.

"I hope to God," said Eliot, "that nobody's coming to see us this afternoon."

Florence looked distressed. "I asked a few people in for cocktails, dear," she explained. "They needn't bother you, if you don't want to see them. You can go up to your study if you like, until they're gone. They won't stay very long. It's only the Robinsons and the Colts and Maisie Jeffer. . . ." She turned hopefully, a yellow tulip clinging to her wet fingers. But Eliot was halfway up the stairs.

He stayed upstairs throughout the warm clatter of arriving guests and the dim murmur of what they called conversation that ensued. He stayed there until what seemed to him to be an uncouth noise rose painfully to his ears. Eliot was not musical. Annoyed, then, he got up and went down to the living-room.

A woman whom he knew slightly and disliked vehemently came to him through the fragrant cloud of smoke and diluted alcohol, and waved her hands in his face. This was Maisie Jeffer.

"Why, it's Mr. Banning!" she cried, rattling her great bracelets of brass and jade and putting her face so close to Eliot's that he could see himself in the pupils of her eyes. "I just know that lie's going to tell us all a screamingly funny story—aren't you, Mr. Banning?"

Eliot reached for a cocktail. "No," he said.

Mrs. Jeffer looked at him sharply, suspecting wit. She went on talking, vivaciously. "Mr. Banning, I want you to meet a very great celebrity whom I have taken the liberty of bringing to your party. But perhaps you know" him? You must have met Harry Sellers . . . you know, the famous blues singer?" She was dragging him across the room as she talked, and Eliot became reluctantly conscious of a young man leaning against tin; piano, who now passed a hand lightly over shining hair and came forward. Anyone could have told at a glance that he was a balladsinger . . . one of those boys who live in front of the Palace Theatre but are generally pretty confident of being somewhere else when the dogwood blossom blooms.

"How do you do?" said Eliot.

Harry Sellers greeted him with a warm handclasp and a firm grip on the shoulder. "I'm just giving the boys and girls a little treat, Mr. Banning, with the aid of your little woman. No, no!" he protested comically, "don't thank me—never refer to it. 1 give my all for Art, don't I, Mrs. Jeffer? Some fonn, some fonn, hah, keed?"

Eliot had the impression that he had been poked jovially in the ribs. Mr. Sellers laughed easily through perfect teeth, and Mrs. Jeffer clasped her hands romantically.

The first meeting thus had been accomplished between the leading humourist of his time and the man who had achieved fame through singing songs of sorrow.

Eliot sat down and noticed with some surprise that Florence was seated at the piano. He had almost forgotten that she 1 iked to play. She was looking at Harry Sellers, and now she struck a soft, minor chord. The room settled to a waiting hush, and the blues singer lifted up his voice once more, and sang.

He sang softly, plaintively, and always he sang of one who had been sorely deprived of nearly everything—the moon and you, roses and you, love and you-u-u. These, it seemed, were no longer his, and in song he mourned their loss. He sang with his head back and his eyes closed, and his handsome mouth shaped the little, sad words tenderly, as though reluctant to force them into the harsh world of which the singer told, where there was no more love, no moon above, only sighing, only crying.

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Continued from page 51

Am I blue-woo-woo?

Am / blue-woo-wooo?

Ain't these teardrops in my eyes

Tell in you-u-u?

lie was consistently, unbearably blue. Sorrow was his mother, his sister, his twin. Before the muted melancholy of his voice, the ghosts of a hundred dead loves drifted through the room until even the tulips that Florence had freshly arranged an hour before drooped in the dim, disastrous air. The strings of the piano ached under Florence's sympathetic touch, and one feminine guest, slightly in wine, took out her handkerchief. "He makes me feel so sad," she confided in a choked whisper to her neighbour, "I almost want to get married again."

Without love (Harry sang)

Life's a match that doesn't strike

And blues begin to fit you like a glove

.... Without la-ahve ....

(Eliot drank his third cocktail)

Without love, there's something missing,

Ask our friend, the dove . . .

Eliot rose quietly and left the room. Florence intercepted him, a moment later, in the hall.

"Are you leaving, dear?"

IIis eyes rested on her, uncomprehending and grim. "I'm going out," he told her, "and get drunk with my friend, the dove."

Florence patted his arm sympathetically. When he had gone she went hack and sat down at the piano again.

. . . Harry Sellers came and went like a blue breeze in the Banning

house, after that. When he was not, with Florence, being musically mournful he was doing card-tricks or putting hard-boiled eggs through the neck of a bottle. He was alternately the mouthpiece of tragedy and the cut-up. Eliot detested him, when he thought about him at all. But Eliot was working hard on a new play, and seldom thought of anything else. The end of the second act was all wrong.

It was nearly two months, after long rehearsals and try-outs outside of New York, that he got it right. The dialogue had needed a sure-fire laugh just before the second-act curtain, and at last he had thought of it. He hurried home through the Spring twilight, that day after the rehearsal, to tell Florence the line he had written—not that he ever relied very much on her judgment; but when he knew himself that a thing was good, her approval, which he could rely on, was always pleasant.

He went upstairs quickly and left his hat on the bureau, then turned toward his wife's room. It was then that he saw the note on his pincushion. For a second he was able to reflect that this was just like a scene in a bad play. The banality of the note, pinned so securely there, subsconsciously offended him, even before he had touched it. He read it slowly.

Eliot, dear (she had written)

1 hate to hurt you—but I have felt for some time that my life with you was making me morbid. I guess it's because you work so hard making other people laugh that you almost never laugh yourself—and you know, I have rather a fun-loving nature. 1 have gone away with Harry Sellers, and when I have divorced you I will marry him. He says he loves me, and —forgive me for saying this, dear— but he is so much more amusing than you are.

Florence.

Eliot sat down on the bed with the note in his hand. His face looked the same as it always did.