“No, thank you,” crisply, absently. “This is quite all right. This will do very nicely…Hm!” meditatively, as he pressed his full lower lip between two freckled fingers. “Best place, I should think, would be over there,” he indicated the opposite wall, “facing the door here, the people all round on the other three sides…Hm! Yes…Just about the centre there, I should think, posters on the bookshelves…We can clear all this stuff away, of course,” he make a quick but expansive gesture with his hand which seemed to dispose of a large part of the furnishings. “Yes! That ought to do it very well!...Now, if you don’t mind,” he turned to her rather peremptorily and said: “I’ll have to change to costume. If you have a room----”
“Oh, yes,” she answered quickly, “here, just down the hall, the first room on the right. But won’t you have a drink and something to eat before you start? You must be terribly----”
“No, thank you,” said Mr. Logan crisply. “It’s very nice of you,” he smiled swiftly under his bushy brows, “but I never take anything before a performance. Now”—he crouched, gripped the handles of the big cases, and heaved mightly—“if you’ll just—excuse me,” he grunted.
“Is there anything we can do?” Mrs. Jack asked helpfully.
“No—thank you—nothing,” Mr. Logan somewhat gruntingly replied, and began to stagger down the hall with his tremendous freight. “I can—get along—quite nicely—thank you,” he grunted as he staggered through the door of the room to which she had directed him; and then, more faintly: “Nothing—at all.”
She heard the two ponderous bags hit the floor with a leaden thump, and then Mr. Logan’s long, expiring “Whush!” of exhausted relief.
For a moment after the young man’s lurching departure, his hostess continued to look after him with a somewhat dazed expression, touched faintly with alarm. His businesslike dispatch and the nonchalance with which he had suggested widespread alterations in her beloved room filled her with vague apprehension. But—she shook her head and reassured herself with sharp decision—it was bound to be all right. She had heard so many people speak of him: he was really all the rage this year, everyone was talking of his show, there had been write-ups of him everywhere. He was the darling of all the smart society crowd—all those “rich” Long Island and Park Avenue people. Here the lady’s nostrils curved again in a faint dilation of patronising scorn; nevertheless, she could not help feeling a pleasant sense of triumph that she had landed him.
Yes, Mr. Piggy Logan was the rage that year. He was the creator of a puppet circus of wire dolls, and the applause with which this curious entertainment had been greeted was astonishing. Not to be able to discuss him and his little dolls intelligently was, in smart circles, akin to never having heard of Jean Cocteau or Surrealism; it was like being completely at a loss when such names as Picasso and Brancusi and Utrillo and Gertrude Stein were mentioned. Mr. Piggy Logan and his art were spoken of with the same animated reverence that the knowing used when they spoke of one of these.
And, like all of these, Mr. Piggy Logan and his art demanded their own vocabulary. To speak of them correctly one must know a language whose subtle nuances were becoming more highly specialised month by month, as each succeeding critic outdid his predecessor and delved deeper into the bewildering complexities, the infinite shadings and associations, of Mr. Piggy Logan and his circus of wire dolls.
True, at the beginning there had been those among the cognoscenti—those happy pioneers who had got in at the very start of Mr. Piggy Logan’s vogue—who had characterised his performance as “frightfully amusing”. But that was old stuff, and anyone who now dared to qualify Mr. Logan’s art with such a paltry adjective as “amusing” was instantly dismissed as a person of no cultural importance. Mr. Logan’s circus had ceased to be “amusing” when one of the more sophisticated columnists of the daily press discovered that “not since the early Chaplin has the art of tragic humour through the use of pantomime reached such a faultless elevation.”
After this, the procession formed on the right, and each newcomer paid his tribute with a new and more glittering coin. The articles in the daily press were followed by others in all the smarter publications, with eulogistic essays on Mr. Logan and pictures of his little dolls. Then the dramatic critics joined the chorus, and held up the offerings of the current stage to a withering fire of comparative criticism. The leading tragedians of the theatre were instructed to pay special attention to Mr. Logan’s clown before they next essayed the role of Hamlet.