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The Broken Shoelace
by
“You kin stay in the background if you want to,” he said. “Believe me, I’m perfectly willing to take all the credit for pulling off this pinch.”
As he said this they were passing along Broadway just above the subway terminal. The straggling line of new shops was on one side and the park stretched away on the other. Green was on the inner side of the pavement. Getting no answer to his suggestion, Mr. Cassidy started to repeat it.
“I heard you,” said Green, stopping now dead short, directly in front of the resplendent front of the Regal Motion Picture Palace. He contemplated with an apparently unwarranted interest the illuminated and lithographed announcements of the morrow’s bill.
“I’m perfectly willing to stay in the background,” he said. “But–but I’ve just this very minute thought of a plan that ought to make us absolutely sure of our man–providing the plan works! Are you at all familiar with the tragedy of ‘Macbeth’?”
“I don’t know as I am,” admitted Mr. Cassidy honestly. “When did it happen and who done it?”
Again his employer seemed not to hear him.
“Let’s go into this place,” he said, turning in towards the hospitable portals of the Regal. “I want to have a business talk with the proprietor of this establishment, if he’s in.”
The manager was in, and they had their talk; but after all it was money–which in New York speaks with such a clarion-loud and convincing voice–that did most of the talking. As soon as Judson Green had produced a bill-roll of august proportions, the proprietor, doubtful until that moment, showed himself to be a man open to all reasonable arguments. Moreover, he presently scented in this enterprise much free advertisement for his place.
VI
On the following afternoon, the weather being rainy, the Regal opened its doors for the three-o’clock performance to an audience that was smaller than common and mostly made up of dependable neighbourhood patrons. However, there were at least two newcomers present. They sat side by side, next to central aisle, in the rearmost row of chairs–Judson Green and Michael J. Cassidy. Their man was almost directly in front of them, perhaps halfway down toward the stage. Above a scattering line of heads of women and children they could see, in the half light of the darkened house, his head and shoulders as he bent his body forward at an interested angle.
Promptly on the hour, a big bull’s-eye of light flashed on, making a shimmering white target in the middle of the screen. The music started up, and a moving-picture soloist with a moving-picture soloist’s voice, appeared in the edge of the illuminated space and rendered a moving-picture ballad, having reference to the joys of life down in Old Alabam’, where the birds are forever singing in the trees and the cotton-blossoms bloom practically without cessation. This, mercifully, being soon over, a film entitled “The Sheriff’s Sweetheart” was offered, and for a time, in shifting pictures, horse-thieves in leather “chaps,” and heroes in open-necked shirts, and dashing cow-girls in divided skirts, played out a thrilling drama of the West, while behind them danced and quivered a background labelled Arizona, but suggesting New Jersey. When the dashing and intrepid sheriff had, after many trials, won his lady love, the ballad singer again obliged throatily, and then from his coop in the little gallery the lantern man made an announcement, in large, flickering letters, of a film depicting William Shakespeare’s play, “Macbeth.”
Thereupon scene succeeded scene, unfolding the tragic tale. The ill-fated Duncan was slain; the Witches of Endor capered fearsomely about their fearsome cauldron of snaky, froggy horrors; and then–taking some liberties with the theme as set down by the original author–the operator presented a picture wherein Macbeth, tortured by sleeplessness and hag-ridden with remorse, saw, in imagination, the dripping blood upon his hands and vainly sought to scour it off.
Right here, too, came another innovation which might or might not have pleased the Bard of Avon. For as Macbeth wrestled with his fears, the phantom of the murdered Duncan, a cloaked, shadowy shape, crossed slowly by him from right to left, traversing the breadth of the screen, while the orchestra rendered shivery music in appropriate accompaniment.