Evening Star Newspaper, March 17, 1935, Page 83

Illustration by Harry Beckhoff THIS WEEK Seven Million Dollars (‘ordwood discovers that no matter how wise a man may be, he can never know all about women «Lester McGinnis Doggins! You put that chair down right away!” (oncluding a new satire on Americans abroad by SINCLAIR LEWIS SYNOPSIS OF PRECEDING CHAPTERS “C()RDWOOD" McGash tilted back his chair in front of the Sunset Hotel '| in Jackrabbit Creek, stuck thumbs in sus- penders, and surveyed a world with only one flaw. As climax to a (partly) sober career as sewing machine salesman, carpenter, pros- pector, fortune teller, store keeper and lumberman, he had faced bankruptcy. Then iron ore had been discovered on his cut-over acres, and he had sold — handsomely. Now he had seven million dollars but no way to spend them! Supplies of bright vests and socks, candy for every child in town, — these had made no dent. A $500,000 Community Hall had taken some, and Les Doggins, master of six musical instruments including the mouth organ, and now studying in Paris at Cordwood’s expense, had taken more, but there was still a lot of cash remaining to be spent. It was at this auspicious moment, in June, 1933, that Percy Willoughby, former Jack- rabbitite but more recently ‘‘cashier or president or something in a Milwaukee bank," dropped into town for a visit. He remained to be Cordwood's secretary, business manager and social mentor. He helped him buy a big house. furnish it grandly, and persuaded him to entertain not only friends of lumbering and prospecting days, but more respectable citizens. including the- widow Maybelle Benner, intellectual and social leader of Jack- rabbit Creek. One day Cordwood had his big inspiration to make a trip to Paris - -so glowingly de- scribed by Les Doggins — and take-the whole town along! After several months of planning hy Percy and check-signing by Cordwood, the expedition started, — nine hundred strong. Then Cordwood's real education began. From an encounter with New York reporters. he learned the perils of publicity; during the voyage. - by steamer specially chartered - he found out that there is frequently no one so critical as the person to whom one has heen extravagantly generous; most important of all. he discovered that Maybelle Benner wasn't too highbrow to be human, and he hunself wasn't too human to be just a little lnghbrow. Maybelle went to a café with him and liked it, and he went to the Louvre with her and liked it CHAPTER IV HE second time that Les Doggins took him out, he almost fulfilled Cordwood's first panic fears about artiness. Les had not, in two days, grown a spade beard, but he had put his Jackrabbit Creek suit back into the mothballs — Cordwood felt suspicious about that, some- how - - and he appeared in a ballooning belted suit of corduroys, a blue flannel shirt with an orange tie of crinkly raw silk, and a vast and flapping black hat. And he took Cord- wood not to a dependable place like Eddie's Bar, where you could meet catsup-salesmen and congressmen, but to a dismal stone- floored cellar on the Left Bank. “Now I'll show vou a real, genuine French place, tonight, and if Madame Mogador likes vou, you'll be right in with the real inner set. And incidentally, what food! Ah!” Les kissed his finger tips. Cordwood re- strained himself from homicide, not . yet having looked up in Baedeker the French laws on the subject. Madame Mogador's establishment was in- deed French, except for perhaps one hundred per cent of its patrons. It had a magpie in a cage, menus written in what looked like indelible pencil that had been exposed to the rain, damp napkins, and a poster of the P.L.M. railway, advocating a journey to Roman ruins which pleasingly resembled a partly consumed cheese. Madame Mogador herself had a wig and she had not shaved that morning. She sat at a cashier’s desk that was reminiscent of a pulpit and she nodded, but coldly, to Les Doggin's perfervid ‘‘B'soir, M'dame.” “*We're great friends, the Madame and me. 1 tell you, Cordwood, there’s folks from the Right Bank, dukes and cabinet ministers and American bankers and everybody, that've been coming here for years, trying to get chummy with her, but she don't care who you are — she’s just as likely to take in some little painter you never heard of as she is the Prince of Wales," said Les. 1 see.” Cordwood did not sound his usual sunny, Maymorning, wildrose self. ‘I've heard about folks like her. I heard in New York that if you can get one of these fancy Wop hair-dressers to okay you, that just fixes you up socially for life. Wouldn't it be hell — wouldn't it just about ruin my sojourn in Paris, if the Madame didn’t like me! Say! 1 know now —- she looks like the cook I had once on my ranch." ““Who ‘was she?" “She? Hell! He was a he. But he didn't have as good a moustache as the Madame. Well say, my boy, d’ you think your influence with the Madame is strong enough to get that waiter to quit picking his teeth and come take an order?” But, Cordwood admitted, the ministrone Mogador was really good — as good as any canned soup he had ever opened. They wound up at the Ecrevisse Interna- tionale, where exiled white Russians sang negro spirituals, and Alabama negroes sang Cossack folk-songs. very depressing and beautiful, and Les Doggins who, for a Jack- rabbit Creek boy, seemed to know a lot of Parisian girls, brought any number of mon- key-chattering young females to the table and signified that they were broad-minded and would be willing to have Cordwood buy for them, if he was nice about it. But Cord- wood himself, since he was again going to the Louvre with Maybelle next morning, stuck to Italian vermouth. He went home at eleven. It was on the next night, after he had gone to a motion-picture (American) with the Tengboms and Mrs. Tinkerbun, when he was respectably retiring at midnight, that Les clamored at his bedroom door, leapt in, bolted the door, and gasped, “My God, you've got to hide me!” In slippers, cotton undershirt, and trousers with suspenders wreathed about his middle, Cordwood was in no costume nor mood to play melodrama with this Bohemian figure with blue shirt, orange tie, desperately waving hat, and disordered hair. He growled, ‘‘What the —" ; . *I've killed a man!'"” ‘“Whaaaaat !” “Just now! I was crossing the Luxembourg Gardens when a man came up to me, a perfect su::nger. he was an Italian count, and he &l _~'l ‘‘How juh know he was an Italian count?" *‘Oh, how? Oh, I knew. He was drunk.” ‘“This count, or you?" i ‘‘He was. I was perfectly sober.” ‘““You're not now.” “Iknow it. I had a drink. Would you stay sober if you'd just killed a man?” ““Not if he was an Italian count, I wouldn't. I'd be drinking myself. But there, boy. I'll watch out for you, What really happened?” ‘‘He come up -— came up to me, and he said, ‘All Americans are sons of inferior animals —' "’ (“Not all,”” muttered Cordwood, thinking of his caravan, but it was not loud enough to interrupt Les's agony.) “—and I said to him, ‘You take.that back,’ and he sneered at me, and I hit him, and he fell and cracked his skull open on a bench —oh, will I ever forget that sight? — and I sneaked away, and you’ve got to hide me from the police!” Sobbing, Les fell upon the bed, and slipped instantly into a happy dreamless sleep, smiling with such sweet boyishness that his mother would have remembered his babyhood and crooned above his slumbers. Cordwood re- membered nothing of thekind. He remembered only the time when Les had with scholarly patience punched holes in a dozen costly muskmellons in Cordwood’s general store, and poured kerosene into themi. Still and all, the chump had obviously done something careless. Not that it seemed to the Cordwood who had lived in gold-rush camps and oil boom-towns important to have killed a count, especially a count who didn't owe you any recoverable money, but Europeans were, he reflected, pernickety about things like that. So he turned in, most uncom-— fortably, on the settee in his salon, and slid off it all night long. Les was gone, in the morning, and when Cordwood got him on the telephone at the Café Pourquoi-— Les had explained that he used the café merely as a handy address, as there was no telephone at his violin instructor’s — Les grumbled, rather sourly, “Heard nothing about it. Guess it'll be all right.” Cordwood had reason to think of Les that evening, for he had invited the young genius to a dinner which he was giving at the Hotel