Act One

by Moss Hart

  “No,” I said. “I just had to lie down some place. I’m dead tired.” It was true. The full flavor and scope of the morning’s disasters seemed to have swept over me as I stood in that sweltering, filthy room, and I was suddenly desperately, deeply tired. I doubt if I could have walked another hundred yards.

  Herb sat down beside me and chewed on a blade of grass for a while without speaking. “It won’t be easy to get that fare back to New York out of him,” he finally said. “That’s been tried before.”

  I lay face down for another moment or two without answering. Then I sat up and looked back at the tool shed and the social hall. “No, I’m going to stay, Herb,” I said. “I’ve got no choice—I’ve got to.” I told him briefly of our plight, of our stuff in storage and no place to go back to, even if I could find another job in the city quickly, which I very much doubted.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re stuck,” he said. “But you know something?” he went on. “Now that you know you’re hooked and you’ve seen it, crummy as it is, it won’t seem so terrible now. You’ll see—that’s the way it was with me.”

  He rose and stood peering down at me. “Anything else I can do or tell you about before I kick off? I’ve got to be getting back.”

  “No, thanks, Herb,” I answered gratefully. “You’ve helped a lot just being around. Just tell me where I go to get my mail. I’m expecting some.”

  “There’s no mail here for you yet,” he said. “I’m in charge of the mail. No letters came for you at all.”

  “Not letters,” I said, “packages. Some large packages. They must be here some place. They were sent up over two weeks ago.”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t seen a sign of ’em,” he said. “Did you send ’em c.o.d. or express collect? Because if you did, they won’t deliver them up here—you got to go down into town and claim them at the post office.”

  “Oh, no,” I answered, “they weren’t shipped c.o.d. They were charged to Mr. Axeler personally but shipped direct.”

  Herb stared at me wide-eyed. “Charged to Mr. Axeler personally,” he said.

  “That’s right,” I replied. “He told me to charge it. I needed some clothes and he sent me to a friend of his and told me to charge anything I wanted to him and have it sent up.”

  Herb continued to stare. “And the man said he would?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, “the owner of the store wasn’t there when I went, but the clerk who waited on me said he would tell him and send it up the next day. That was over two weeks ago,” I added, “they must be here some place. You’re sure they’re not, Herb?”

  Herb gave me a slow, patient smile, the smile of forbearance one gives to a not too bright child. “Yes, I’m sure they’re not,” he said. “How much did the bill come to?”

  “It was quite a lot,” I admitted. “I went a little crazy. I bought a hundred and thirty-five dollars’ worth of clothes.”

  He burst into laughter and flopped down on the ground beside me, still laughing. “You’re crazy, all right,” he said. “Not because you bought that many clothes, but because you believed anybody who knew Mr. Axeler more than five minutes would let him charge a package of spearmint gum. Why, they won’t trust him for a nickel around here. He has to pay cash before they even take a bunch of celery off the truck. You’ve got about as much chance of seeing those clothes up here as I have of flying over the lake by waving my arms up and down.” He waved his arms up and down and fell to laughing again.

  “But why would he send me there, Herb?” I protested. “Why would he do a thing like that if he knew the man would never send them?”

  “Search me, brother.” Herb shrugged. “He’ll do anything or say anything to get out of a tight spot or to get you up here. The first time I walked out of that office he had me believing I was like his son and that by the end of the summer he might make me a partner in the damn place. He can make you believe the moon is green if he wants to. Those clothes are still right in that store where you bought them, boy, believe me!”

  I looked at Herb and drew a deep breath. There was no question that what he was saying was true. I knew those clothes would never arrive now, and it was almost the cruelest disappointment of all. In some ridiculous fashion those clothes had remained at the forefront of my mind all through this horrible morning, and my first thought, once I knew that I would have to stay, had been of those packages waiting to be opened. They would have made up for a great deal.

  For the second time in my adult life I felt like crying, and almost did. I was silent for so long a time that Herb finally turned to me and said, “What the hell? It’s only clothes, and you won’t have to pay for them now. Just wear what you’ve got.”

  “That’s the trouble,” I said bitterly. “This is what I’ve got.” I gestured to the badly rumpled blue serge suit on my person.

  “You mean that’s all you’ve got?” asked Herb. “You came up here with that and nothing else?”

  “That’s all,” I replied, “except for some bathing trunks and two sport shirts. What am I going to do, Herb?” I went on anxiously. “I can’t walk around like this all summer.”

  “Gee, you can have anything I’ve got,” he answered, quickly sympathetic, “but my stuff won’t fit you. I’m too fat. Maybe when the waiters get up here you can borrow some things from them. They’re a nice bunch, but they don’t usually have too much in the way of clothes, I can tell you.” He sighed. “You’ll just have to hit him for some dough and go into town and buy some stuff, I guess,” he said doubtfully.

  “But will he give it to me?” I persisted. “That’s what I did before and that’s why he sent me to that store. He wouldn’t advance me a cent.”

  “Oh, that’s why he did it,” said Herb. “Now I begin to see the light! Yes, sir, he parts from a dollar very slowly, I can tell you. You’ll just have to keep after him till you get it, I suppose. Wait till he gets off that horse to go to the bathroom or something, then hit him over the head. Hey, lookit,” he suddenly exclaimed, “over there.” He leapt to his feet and pointed to a small building some distance away across the field. Two men, arms waving wildly above their heads, were running around the building and looking over their shoulders as they ran.

  Herb squealed and jumped up and down with pleasure. “You’ll see the Mad Cossack and his horse in a minute now,” he yelled. “He’s chasing ’em back inside.”

  “What is it?” I shouted back at him. “What’s happening? Who are those men?”

  “That’s the bake shop,” said Herb, “and those poor jerks are two Hunkies or Poles—they don’t speak hardly any English—that he got up here as bakers. They took one look at the Iron Maiden they were supposed to work in and decided to quit beginning yesterday morning. He’s been chasing ’em back in ever since with a whip. Yep, here he comes!”

  With a wild Cossack yell, or what I took to be a wild Cossack yell, Mr. Axeler rounded the corner of the building on his horse. It was a large black animal and he rode it well. He was dressed in riding breeches and puttees and a glaring red shirt, his uniform for the summer, I was to learn. And sure enough he carried a long black whip, which he used with extreme skill and dexterity.

  At the sight of him the two men fled around the corner of the building, arms still waving, only to come back into sight a moment later with Mr. Axeler close at their heels and snapping the whip around their feet, so that blobs of mud spattered over their clothes. I watched, dumfounded. He was obviously not trying to hit them with the whip, for he could have easily sliced them to shreds, but only to frighten them back into the bake shop. They all circled the building two or three times more, the two men running wildly in front of the horse, the whip slashing the ground all around them, until finally the poor creatures gave up and retreated to the doorway where they stood shaking their fists at Mr. Axeler. He motioned them back into the bake shop with the butt end of the whip, and with a last shaking of fists, they went in and closed the door behind them.

  Herb was still hoppin
g up and down beside me. “Hey, you Mad Cossack you,” he now yelled across the fields, knowing full well Mr. Axeler could not hear the words, “hey, you son-of-a-bitch you, your poor bastard social director is here. Come on over, you son-of-a-bitch Cossack, and say hello.”

  Mr. Axeler, conscious of someone yelling across the fields, turned the horse around and looked in our direction. Herb waved cordially at him. “You stink on ice, you Mad Cossack you,” he yelled exuberantly and waved him toward us.

  Mr. Axeler nudged the horse and galloped quickly over. He reined the horse to a circus-like stop directly in front of me and smiled down. It was the same candid, forthright smile, a little more dazzling in fact now that he was seated on a horse.

  “Welcome, welcome,” he said, “welcome to our Half Moon family.”

  I looked up at him and opened my mouth to speak. Before I could get a word out, he had reined the horse around and was galloping off, calling back over his shoulder, “We’ll talk, we’ll talk. Lots to do first; lots to do. Anything you want, anything you need, just ask.”

  We watched in silence until he disappeared over the horizon. “Yeah,” said Herb sourly, breaking the silence, “anything you want, just ask. Some fat chance … and first you gotta catch him. Now you see what I mean, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I answered heavily, “now I see. Thanks for everything, Herb.” I held out my hand to him and we shook hands rather solemnly. His unfailing good spirits seemed to have deserted him momentarily and he walked away dispiritedly without another word. I stood for a moment longer in the open field, then I moved slowly toward the Bastille. If I was going to sleep there tonight, there was certainly, as Mr. Axeler phrased it, lots to do, lots to do.

  I kicked open the door and walked in. There flashed to my mind the fantasy I had concocted back in New York of playing host to a select party and wearing that glorious but now non-existent smoking jacket, and I laughed aloud as I looked around me. My second season at camp and my first as a full-fledged social director has officially begun, I thought bitterly, as I reached down and began to gather up the mess from beneath the slats of the floor. I wondered ruefully if the theatre was really worth it!

  SOME TEN days later, the weekend before Decoration Day, the first guests began to arrive, and the summer of my discontent swung into full gear. It was not, I must record truthfully, a summer of complete, unrelieved misery. At twenty one does not remain utterly miserable for long stretches of time, no matter how bad the conditions may be under which one lives and works. At twenty one awakes every morning with the dewy-eyed illusion that this day cannot be as bad as the day before, and the resilience of twenty—the ability to bounce back in spite of bad food, long hours and sleeping in a wet, airless hole—is prodigious. Until the very end of the summer I was never quite as miserable as I had been the day of our arrival, because there was literally never any time after that to stop and think of how miserable one was. The small daily miseries of the Half Moon Country Club faded into the large catastrophes that came along one by one and reached a climax at the end of the summer in a disaster of Götterdämmerung dimensions. These recurrent catastrophes were the peaks of the icebergs that dotted the journey across the sodden sea of that summer, and one or two of them, I must admit, were of my own making.

  The first one came with the very first show and on that Decoration Day weekend. Pigheadedly, I had chosen to go ahead with my program of O’Neill, Shaw and Kelly, despite the pathetically inadequate facilities of the Half Moon’s social-hall stage, and for the big Decoration Day splash I elected to put on The Emperor Jones and play the leading role myself. This was stubbornness of a very tall order indeed, particularly since those sterling actors I had been promised, the counselors of the children’s camp, had not yet arrived and I was left with only the six musicians and the operatic nurse to help me put on the play.

  Doggedly, almost revengefully, I went ahead nevertheless; mainly I think as a just punishment for Mr. Axeler, for from the very beginning it was easily apparent how bad it was going to be and I could certainly have switched to something else. But I suppose it must have given me some sort of grim satisfaction to know that the first and one of the most important shows of the season was going to be a fiasco, for this was one of the few ways I had of getting back at Mr. Axeler.

  The Decoration Day show, the July Fourth show and the Labor Day show were the high-water marks of the camp season that a social director tried to make as good as possible—presenting himself and his staff as contenders for the laurels of the competitive camp circuit and trying to insure a better job for himself the following season. Not only was his own reputation as a social director at stake with these three shows, but the reputation of the camp as well. For on those weekends the camp was at its most crowded, and on the Decoration Day weekend especially, the guests who saw the first show of the season were the ones most likely to go back to the city and spread the word that Camp So-and-So had a fine social director that summer. Moreover, a good report spread by the guest grapevine after the Decoration Day weekend could easily help to keep the camp filled for the rest of the summer.

  I was thoroughly aware of this, and of the fact that I was quite likely digging my own grave as well as burying Mr. Axeler, since other camp owners kept an up-to-the-minute check on what was going on in rival camps and which social directors were doing the best shows. But my fury and resentment at Mr. Axeler were such that I was perfectly willing to foul my own nest if I succeeded in unfeathering his. For one thing, I still smoldered and smarted over the slick way I had been completely hoodwinked and trapped, and for another, my clothes problem, with the arrival of the first guests, had become suddenly and painfully acute. It was the clothes, I think, more than anything else that made me plunge implacably and vengefully ahead with The Emperor Jones. For though I had caught Mr. Axeler unhorsed two or three times, my pleading had got me exactly nowhere. He feigned astonishment at his friend the haberdasher’s failure to send up the clothes and blandly suggested I drive into the village, get what I needed and charge it to him. But not one cent of hard cash could he be pried loose from.

  When I taxed him with downright dishonesty and refused to go on another fool’s errand, far from being outraged, he was charm and urbanity itself. “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted, “these Vermont shopkeepers are funny about money.”

  “Everyone’s funny about money,” I said acidly, “especially when they don’t get paid.”

  He laughed delightedly, as though I had just made a quip of Oscar Wildeian flavor. “Money, money, money,” he chortled. “It’s good I don’t think about it too much—I wouldn’t sleep nights. Come,” he added, smiling that damnably honest smile of his, “I’ll show you the books—I’ll open the safe in the office. Any money you find there, you take and go buy the clothes. Every cent of ready cash we have we use to get the camp open every year, and until the guests start to pay there’s not a penny left over. The cupboard is bare, my boy,” he sighed, “but come around and ask me again next week and you won’t go away empty-handed.”

  As usual he was lying. It was not until the end of June, some five weeks later, that I was able to gouge twenty-five dollars out of him and finally buy that pair of white flannel trousers and a blue sport coat with brass buttons. Meanwhile, it was necessary to come to terms and quickly with my lack of wearing apparel. I knew I couldn’t appear in the dining room for all three meals in the same blue serge suit without advertising my plight, and while I could walk around camp during the day in bathing trunks and a shirt, a jacket was demanded in the dining room for all meals, and I could not forever continue to wear bathing trunks at night in order to preserve for the shows the one good pair of pants I possessed, even if that were feasible.

  I solved the problem ingeniously enough, since it had to be solved, but it was a painful and humiliating solution that I came up with. To this very day I can still feel a flush of embarrassment when I think of the absurd spectacle I must have presented for five solid weeks, and for year
s afterward I would cross to the other side of the street if I recognized a guest of that summer who had seen me in one of the grotesque getups I affected, for I used the costumes in the camp wardrobe trunk and pretended that my comic appearance was part of a social director’s job of “making fun” for the customers.

  Actually, I suppose, I was lucky to find even a wardrobe trunk at the Half Moon Country Club, though every camp no matter how small possessed a costume trunk which was replenished from year to year by purchasing cheap castoff outfits of any description from the big Broadway costume companies, Eaves and Brooks. For a hundred dollars or so, Eaves and Brooks would ship to camps a conglomerate assortment of costumes that were too threadbare for further rentals, but which might still be usable in camp shows, and the wardrobe trunk was considered as necessary a part of social-hall equipment as the front curtain.

  The costumes, needless to say, were discolored and musty, and sometimes almost in shreds, but by switching them around with a redoing here and there, they could be made to serve well enough for a season and were invaluable if one were doing a play or skit that called for a military uniform or a Spanish dancer’s outfit or the inevitable Indian chief’s headdress.

  Once my mind was made up as to what I had to do, and that appearing in the costumes was the only way out, I took the stuff out of the trunk in the dressing room and spread them about me on the stage. True to form, Mr. Axeler had purchased the cheapest and oldest rags that could be bought, and most of them were stiff not only with the sweat of last summer, but with the perspiration of the hundreds of panic-stricken amateurs who had worn them all across the country and sweated off their stagefright in them.

  I selected the least smelly and disreputable of the lot, then summoned the six musicians, who were at the moment my complete social staff. “I’m going to pep things up a little in the dining room and the social hall,” I announced. “I’m going to come in in a different costume for each meal and also in the social hall at night, and whatever I wear I want the trumpet and the sax to give me an appropriate fanfare before I appear. See?”