Evening Star Newspaper, January 21, 1929, Page 17

THE EVENING STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, MONDAY, JANUARY 21, 1929. THE VICARION (Copyright, 1928, by Public Ledger) Gardner Hunting. the year 1935 Radley Brainard has per- his invention, the Vicarion. so calied it permits people to live Vicariously by showing them completely events out of the past, thus far outdistancing the efforts of Complete Illusions. Inc. the company Which then controls all the improvements ©of the motion picture. Radley first demonstrates his device to his sweetheart, 'Phyllis Norman; her father, other and "brother John 's sw Carol Gould, and Brainard's Aunt While he is showing them a dinner moyie actress who has since ering from amnesia_stag- d_though he is unable . Norman's home being robbed. and then the police, Who have been looking in on a similar pro- jection, arrive with the criminal, Honer, but e escapes. Besides the large machine in- tended for public showing, Brainard invenis & small “receiving set.” While looking into one of them Carol faints Six_weeks after the first private showing the Vicarion has been installed in all the theaters of Brainard's home city. Ferdinand | Mortimer and “Jerry” ~Ballard. heads of Complete Tilusions, call on Brainard. He yefuses to make terms with them and insists he will keep sole control of his invention. (Coytinued From Yesterday's Star.) INSTALLMENT XV. S HE entered his private office suite his Diana greeted him as if he had waited at the door. “A crowd of newspaper men are here—they seem to be from ever S0 many cit he told him. She had a sheaf of cards in her hand. She held them up, turning to shuffle them before his eyes, her shoul- der against him—but as if she were utterly unconscious of the contact. He glanced across at staid and gray Miss Ashcroft at the desk by the window; he had had the forethought to provide a safeguard to his experience. He was in a mood now to wonder why. As Diana raised her eyes at his silence he looked straight into them; and she had | the grac® to blush, charmingly, and drop her gaze. “You may as well tell our news- paper friends to come in, Miss Arden,” he told her. “We can’t hold them off forever, I suppose—and they may as well know the worst.” He went on into his own office and closed the door. He shivered slightly —he was not sure whether the cause was Mortimer’s ghastly begging, or Miss Arden’s slim shoulder. Then he lighted a cigarette. He had kept the newspapers care- fully at arm's length, denying himself to reporters, letting Van Winkle talk for him. Van Winkle was singularly discreet in what he said; he had a story of his own he preferred not to discuss. Now, however, since the great story was, out, Brainard must see these men. fancied he could’ rid himself of them quickly. They came in a troop—more of them than he had expected, certainly, long and short, narrow and broad, gray and brown, glib and terse. They crowd- ed in about him in the small room where he sat, and a spokesman named Lindlay introduced himself and them. ‘They wanted interviews and photo- graphs and statements from Brainard for their respective periodicals, and in- side experience of Brainard’s doings for themselves. They were the most disturbed group of news-gatherers Brainard had ever seen. Knowing their breed for the most utterly blase brand of human being extant, the object of their at- tentions was duly flattered. But the chief reaction he got out of the thing was a feeling of maturity and sophis- tication as compared with these pant- ing young men—all young, Wwhatever their ages, from his new standpoint. But he refused to talk—then. He waited till they had fired their ques- tions at him, then he got up from his chair. “1 have just one answer to all ques- vtions from any source, boys,” he told them. Newspaper men were always boys to a man on a pinnacle, he reflected; it was all part of the joke! *“You've all been in the theater down below, I sup- pose, I haven’t much to add to wi they will tell you if you are as quick wit as you are reputed to be. Never- theless—" He walked across to his door and called Miss Arden. “Show these gentlemen down into the multiple-unit room, on the tenth floor,” he instructed her, as she turned up to him a face of limpid guileless- ‘They flocked after her, out and down the stairs—17 of them by count as they filed past Brainard at the door. He followed them. Two tried to button- hole him, but they flinched before his Bt crowing Geasp on Bis posion, was | growing grasp on on was endowing him with a quality he had not foreseen. were afraid of him— his grave dignif lance, eh! He, Radley Brain- ssed of the eye of jue; a filwher with a new curve to acquire such a glance! ‘The room into which they went was lined with white fabric, like all his ex- hibition rooms. He had told no one that this was a bit of staging—part of & somewhat elaborately tem, to which lenses and c varying lights also belonged, for clut- tering the road to his secrets with ef- fective but useless paraphernalia and properties over which intruding feet might stumble. Here were two long rows of curtained booths in which men and women who chose to witness selections of their own by private arrangement were being experimentally accommodated. Miss Arden left them, with a luminous backward glance at Brainard. He closed the door behind her; she did not ook like one who would be apt to run away from him. He turned to his gues ts. B ‘The room was filled with a soft light, in which figures were easily distin- guished. Brainard swung the curtain aside from a booth at hand. “Here,” he said, “sitsa young man so intent on what he is seeing and hear- ing !.‘hat we shall probably not disturb 8 { A boy, perhaps 16, lay in a swinging | swivel chair, not unlike that luxurious trap of barbers, a-design never excelled | for comfort during the enjoyment of | sensations—while you wait. | His face and head were enveloped in & hood, from which extended a sacklike projection to the wall, opening hornwise to its fastenings. He looked like a creature with its head enveloped in the | small end of a gigantic white morning glory! Brainard put a hand on the! boyish arm; it was rigid. | “No,” he said, “we shall not disturb him. Let’s see what he is looking at. of the features of the Vicarion which every one seems to get.” No one -else spoke. He smiled and turned to the next booth. “Here is an old gentleman,” he sald, looking inside, “who is_probably listen- ing to an oration of Demosthenes—or watching them bury a Pharaoh! Look!” He threw over a switch. In the stage space at the end of the room there was suddenly the glint of sparkling water laughter and shouting arose, and a dozen white-skinned, naked boys plunged at once into the frothing back- water of an old-time mill-race! As a rainbow struck across the spray they came to the surface, shrieking with boast, and challenge, and accusation, and ‘in- discriminate insult, in joyous, meaning- less babel of youth and frolic and free- dom and fun! And a tricky breeze, which fluttered a white shirt on the bank, brought out to the watching men the warm fragrance of sweet clover and June hay! Brainard turned his key, and the breathless group of reporters dropped back to the door of the multiple-unit room. “Man, man!” gasped Lindlay. “The old boy is back in Connecticut, himself at 141" “Or watching his own boys,” returned Brainard, “grown up now, maybe, and gone away.” No one moved. They seemed hardly to breathe, these blase scions of dis- illusion. amid embowering green. A chatter of | Brainard swung the curtain of a third booth, and dropped it again. “Nice old lady,” he told them, “with tears running down the side of her neck. Shall we take a look at what sees?"” ‘Sob-stuff!” somebody suggested. “Prob'ly the little old worn shoe— what?” It was that sort of iodide of cyniclsm with which young men often paint their nerve ends to hide the too obvious fact | that they come to the surface. Brainard | turned his switch. | An old woman, with scant hair, and | steel-bowed glasses askew, rocked slowly | out of mists into a chair and an old- fashioned room of worsted mottoes, a square piano and a brussels hassock. | Patiently she rocked, and rubbed old- fashioned cosmoline into old-fashioned | cracks from suds and salt rheum in her fingers, while her cracked old voice slurred from note to note of a gospel | hymn that people sang to melodions in | the days of convalescence from the | Civil War. Perhaps that faintly creak- ing rocker, that twittering canary in his gilt cage, that old voice with its in- terpolated grace notes, had made their homely sounds somewhere in the 708 or the 80s of the last century! As they looked, the old lady dropped her sore hands into her aproned lap and laid her head back against the tidy on her chair; in a moment she was | dropping into the nap that had perhaps | freshened her courage to go on living, 50 years ago! The scene faded and went out—it had reached its rhythmic end. There was a sound in the booth at the side of the watching group, and the men stepped | back as a gray, matronly woman, ber hair somewhat disarrayed, her face wet, her hands on the doorposts assisting un- certain feet, came out. She looked at them and did not_see them. She looked in Radley Brainard's face and seemed not to know that he was there. She | walked out of the room like one feeling her way in a fog. “Guess Ma’s been spendin’ the after- lnovn with Gran'ma,” remarked Lind- ay. But Brainard did not reply. The woman who had been in the booth was Phyllis Norman’s mother! They followed him back to his private office. “I s'pose you can show us what went on in Wall Street yesterday,” said Lindlay. “It's in your papers, isn't it?” asked Brainard. Under his breath he was damning them now, these men of the press, traditionally licenséd to quiz. | Presently he would doubtless be damn- !ing them aloud—he might allow himself also that luxury. “I don't mean what happened on ‘change,” Lindlay answered. “I mean in operators’ private offices.” Brainard was wondering if the woman in the room downstairs could possibly have been so absorbed in her emotions that she had really not recognized him. Or had she known that he was show- ing a group of visitors a_row of ex- hibits? hated him. “I can also tell you where you had | your last drink, how much there is in your pay envelope, what your boss said about you yesterday and the color of your underwear!” Lindlay was a loose figure of a man. But he straightened. “Well,” he re- plied slowly, “where did you have your last drink?” ut some one else broke in. “But Mr. Brainard, how can you provide records fast enough for the cénsumption that must already be under way2 I don't see—"" “I've_been making them for two years. I have machines downstairs that are doing nothing but duplicating them automatically.” “But people don't all want the same thing. They'll want—-"" “I know what they want.” “But,” cried another, “it's all right, this giving a boy his hero and an old !man his youth! But to give business He looked up at Lindlay, and | men each other’s secrets! Don't you see you're going to—raise hell?” “Yes,” Brainard smiled grimly. Grim- ness seemed to be the proper note— and it covered any weak signals of tri- umph his yet unschooleq face might fly. “But, damn it, man, you'll kill busi- ness! You'll upset soclety!”, “I'll be busifess—and society, too— if necessary.” Back _in the group somebody snick- ered. But the man Lindlay had re- covered his professional poise. “Do you think running a world is a one-man game?” he demanded. “I can get all the help I need,” said Brainard. “I told you I could look into your pay envelope.” “If I thought you weren't a fraud,” returned Lindlay, “I'd think & could dam’ well serve the world by spilling your brains here on the rug!"” “Think what you like. Only now— get out.” “And you don’t mind what we say about you, then?" asked a slim young- ster at Lindlay’s side. “Mind?” answered Brainard, turning | his eyes sharply on the boy. home and think that one over.” They went, some of them cowed, some of them leering, some of them grave-eyed, some of them furtive. To Brainard that group epitomized the cloud of his critics. Literally he snapped his fingers after them when they were gone; then laughed and sneered at once at his own gesture. It occurred to him to wonder why he was watching himself like this; was there an eitquette one must study to observe for this unique position of his? Man- ners were for the man who had some- thing to ask of some one else. Whom had he to placate? Witn whom should he ingratiate himself? He struck a pose. A man against the world! He laughed. Then he shut his eyes, and wave after dizzy wave of ecstasy swept through him as Realization trailed the tf’ar‘ I':cm of her garment across his rain! WooDpwARD & 1O 10™ 11™ F axp G STREETS “You go | He came back to the commonplace, wondering what and how much other men could realize of his position. It| was beyond the grasp even of the man whose “hand -was on the reins. The| commonplace was a refuge. But olhex‘ men had been conquerors and Kkings. Had they lived strung to consciousness | of empire? Doubtless they had eaten | their dinners, winced at their own in- discretions and stroked the cat! He took up the telephone and called the Norman home. He had been punc- tilious in the matter of calling on| Phyllis. Punctilious and perfunctor: |see him, with a hundred other little luxuries as she became able to sit up and look at him and them. They cov- ered the restraints of meetings in which ment cdrefully hidden, while hers had stood in her questioning eyes. No one clse had been#ill as a result of looking backward upon a whirling world. It had made some of them dizzy, perhaps. Did women fall sick al will, to fasten their | control upon men—or because they couldn't? Well, she touched him!— with the thinness of her hands, the golden loveliness of her hair, the fragile modeling of her chin and her lips. Beauty, likely! She haa it. It might easily be merely that toward which he was ténder. Yet there was something in her—lonely, desolate, dependent?— what was it that held him while he aged at her notion of bridling him? here were other women—in millions— from the Miss Ardens up, and down! Doubtless every man had wondered why any one woman held him in special thrall, He talked to Phyllis, gently. She was up and about now. She had been out in the car. When was she coming down? Oh, everything was moving along. He had much to tell her—if she wanted to hear it. John? Yes, he was in and out: and her mother, today. Yes, he would be up—maybe tomorrow. g with flowers while she was too ill to' his thoughts had been largely of resent-§ Dear! Was she still dear? at she thought after she had seen Carol again; what she thought of her mother’s obsession—it was nothing less —with the things she found through his agency; how she looked upon those possibilities of the -future, contempla-~ tion of which was the assigned cause of her illness—these things she did not discuss during his calls. He attempted in her presence mostly to do what he was yet unwilling not to do—and get away from her as soon | | quick glance Yes. Good-by—dear. . 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