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The Bull Called Emily
by
“From that time on, for quite a spell, we’re just the same as one big happy family, as we goes a-jauntily touring from place to place.
“We’re playin’ the Big Time, which means week stands and no hard jumps. Emily’s a hit, a knock-out and a riot wherever she appears. She knows it too, but success don’t go to her head, and she don’t never get no attacks of this here complaint which they calls temper’ment. I always figgered out that temper’ment, when a grand wopra singster has it, is just plain old temper when it afflicts a bricklayer. I don’t know what form it would take if it should seize on a bull, but Emily appears to be absolutely immune. Give her a ton of hay and one sack of peanuts a day, and she’s just as placid as a great gross of guinea pigs. Behind the scenes she never makes no trouble, but chums with the stage-hands and even sometimes with the actors, thus proving that she ain’t stuck up.
“When the time comes for Emily to do her turn, she just goes ambling on behind Windy and cuts up more didoes than any trick-mule that ever lived. She smokes a pipe, and she toots on a brass horn, and waits on table while Windy pretends to eat, and stands on her head, and plays baseball with him and so forth and so on, for fifteen minutes, winding up by waving the Amurikin flag over her head. But all this time she’s keeping one eye on me, where I’m standing in the wings with a sack of peanuts in my pocket waiting for her to come off. Every time she works over toward my side of the stage, she makes little hoydenish remarks to me in her native language. It ain’t long until I can make out everything she says. I’ve been pedling the bull too long not to be able to understand it when spoke by a native.
“For upwards of two months things goes along just beautiful. Then we strikes a town out in Illinois where business ain’t what it used to be, if indeed it ever was. Along about the middle of the week the young feller that’s doing the press-work for the house comes to me and asks me if I ain’t got an idea in my system that might make a good press-stunt.
“There’s an inspiration comes to me and I suggests to him that maybe he might go ahead and make an announcement that following the Saturday matinee, Emily the Pluperfect, Ponderous, Pachydermical Performer, direct from the court of the reigning Roger of Simla County, India, will hold a reception on the stage to meet her little friends, each and every one of whom will be expected to bring her a bag of peanuts.
“‘That listens all right,’ says this lad, ‘providing she likes peanuts.’
“‘Providing she likes ’em?’ I says. ‘Son,’ I says, ‘if that bull ever has to take the cure for the drug-habit, it’ll be on account of peanuts. If you don’t think she likes peanuts, a dime will win you a trip to the Holy Lands,’ I says. ‘Why,’ I says, ‘Emily’s middle name is Peanuts. Offhand,’ I says, ‘I don’t know precisely how many peanuts there are,’ I says, ‘because if I ever heard the exact figures, I’ve forgot ’em, but I’d like to lay you a little eight to five that Emily can chamber all the peanuts in the world and then set down right where she happens to be, to wait for next year’s crop to come onto the market. That’s how much she cares for peanuts,’ I says.
“Well, that convinces him, and he hurries off to write his little piece about Emily’s peanut reception. The next day, which is Friday, the announcement is in both the papers. Saturday after lunch when I strolls round to the show-shop for the matinee, one glance around the corner from the stage entrance proves to me that our little social function is certainly starting out to be a success. The street in front is lined on both sides with dagos with peanut-stands, selling peanuts to the population as fast as they can pass ’em out; and there’s a long line, mainly kids, at the box-office. I goes on in and takes a flash at the front of the house through the peephole in the curtain, and the place is already jam full. If there’s one kid out there, there’s a thousand, and every tiny tot has got a sack of peanuts clutched in his or her chubby fist, as the case may be. And say, listen: there’s a smell in the air like a prairie fire running through a Georgia goober-king’s plantation.