The Monmouth Inquirer

Search For A Celebrity

Six months on the Daily Emulator, and only small details, handed out like cold potatoes! That is hard on an ambitious young woman. My heart beat high when the managing editor called me into his private office.

"Have you much of the detective in you?" he asked, looking at me keenly.

My heart went higher still. I felt it thump my palate. I put as much effort on my reply as on a half-column article. "Try me," I said, reasoning that anybody who blue pencils as he does would prefer a laconic answer.

"You know Woodrow Wardham has left town, and nobody knows his whereabouts." I assented.

"I want you to dig him up and give him a page with photographs in the Sunday paper."

"What clues?" I asked.

"You'll find them. You don't need to be reminded that it isn't precisely as if he were a regular criminal."

"Not exactly."

"No, but still he hasn't any right to drop out of sight this way. When a man is as noted as he is, the public expects to know everything, and yet it isn't advisable to trail him by exactly the same methods that would be used if he were an embezzler."

"I agree with you," I said, with mental reservations.

"Use your own methods, but find him. His absence is deudedly inconvenient. We want the first interview on his novel, 'Tarsus of Metatarsus.'"

Mr. Derry told me later that Elmer Mount of the Morning Imitator had been sent out after Wardham.

"He's a novelist with a soul, is Wardham," continued Derry. "Whichever of you finds him first will be treated royally, and the next will get courtesy but no story. He used to be on a newspaper himself. You've met him."

"At the Bronton reception," I returned.

"He never forgets anybody. Success to your search."

The servants at the house refused to say where Wardham was. Then I bought a steamer rug and got Derry to take it to the house and tell the maid he thought it belonged to Wardham. You see she was almost certain to reply in one or two ways. And she did:

"No, his rug is here in the house."

So I returned my purchase to the store and sang, "Not gone abroad."

And after that good detective work, my brother-in-law, who is with the Driyer Realty Company, told me Wardham would be in town on the first and again on the tenth to attend to some real estate business. Then I felt sure he was in the state.

I sat down with a map, and beginning with the southern towns, put a line through every place where I thought he was not. Big hotels, the popular places, even the Imitator people might have found him there.

Presently my map looked as if it were covered with a drawing of a torn mosquito-net. This was getting interesting. I appreciated the subtle compliment of the editor's detail more and more. It was possible, of course, that Wardham was in the northern Coast Range. He was not with the Sierra Club, I knew. As he is neither hunter nor horseback rider, he was probably not far from the railroad.

I had not read Chesterton's "Man Who Was Thursday" for nothing, so I looked for my man where no one would think of hiding. "I'll look for him in the village where everybody is a celebrity," I exclaimed.

Now a reporter on the Imitator would never think of looking for him at Carmel. I reasoned it out another way and got the same result; a thief hides among other thieves; when a celebrity wants to hide, why should he not mingle his fame with the celebrity glow? I bought a ticket to Carmel.

You know Carmel, a village where everybody who isn't a novelist is a painter, and everybody who isn't a painter is a poet, and every mother's son of them is an artist in the broad sense. Water and oil doesn't refer there to the People's Company or Coaling stock. Nobody eats canvas-back for fear of mutilating the canvas.

If you want to do anybody a kindness you offer to read proof for his next book, and expect him to mention it in the preface.

When I left the train for the stage the celebrities seek retirement three miles from the station—there was not a celebrity aboard. Evidently I just missed one, for the stage driver put an artist's paint-box under the seat with the remark, "A painter-feller from the city told me not to forget this. Said he was going pencil-sketching around here and would come out on a later stage."

The box was initialed E. M. I could not think of any well-known artist whose name fitted. He was in a good field for sketching at any rate, for the old town has not lost its quaint Spanish air. I might make a story of that, some time.

I left the stage—as a retired actor would say—without a new fact about Carmel or its celebrities, for the driver was almost a stranger to the place. I felt that the Carmel stage people were breaking the pure food law, palming off some one "just as good," when I wanted an original package stage driver from whom to extract information.

There was not so much as a profile view of a celebrity when I first trod the sacred soil of Carmel, not even an easel under the pines. I began to wish Wardham were a painter.

Writers can be more secretive.

Come to think of it, authors are rather like whales that keep quiet till they are ready to spout. Resolving to be ready for emergencies, I tried to think what speech would be appropriate to any kind of celebrity.

"When will your next book be out?" was too specialized.

Then I decided on, "What are you working on now?"

That struck me as rather neat.

In front of the postoffice I noticed a man I had often seen in the city, with no thought of his being a celebrity. I put on a tourist air and asked, "How far is it to the Mission?"

"About a mile; an easy walk."

"Thank you. What a charming place this is for sketching. What are you working on?"

"That," and he pointed off through the trees.

"I'm shingling Professor White's new cottage. That's Professor White building the fence."

Professor White, whose fame is international because he came nearer to not seeing the comet than any other astronomer on the continent!

If I had made one blunder, I had seen one celebrity thereby. I looked over the registers of the two hotels. Celebrities I found there, some real, some merely mercerized, but no Woodrow Wardham. The postoffice clerk knew the rules and recited, "No information may be given as to those who receive mail!"

"We have neither sold nor rented to W. Wardham," said the clerk in the real estate office. To tell the truth, I did not want to find him by these every-day methods. An Imitator reporter would have used such tactics.

I went back to the real estate office, however, and asked, "Are not there some noted people in this town?"

The clerk spoke as one would speak of raisins at Fresno or prunes in the Santa Clara Valley: "Quantities of them. There are Lapham Wright and Mrs. Augusta Lloyd, the novelists, and Sargent West, the painter, and ever so many more."

"Is Mr. Woodrow Wardham here?"

"Very likely. I never heard of him, though."

I wandered to the beach and stared at the little lines of white that make the Bay of Monterey appear like a large blue-print. If I were not a reporter with a leaning toward detective work, I would be a painter.

The beach was somewhat deserted, but sheltered by a sand-dune right in front of me sat a painter, hard at work. A battered paint-box lay at the foot of easel. It is only the novices, they say, who have new paint-boxes.

Was I not quite tourist-like in pausing to look at his work?

"It's shockingly hard to get that purple light," he explained, almost as if talking to himself. "I want that reflection," and he went on with technical phrases about composition and texture.

"The sand-dunes by the sea were made for artists," I said with enthusiasm.

"Yes, this has been the ideal place to paint or to write till those scandalous newspapers dragged us into their columns. Here we are just normal people who should neither be pitied nor blamed because we write or paint.

All the world are painters or poets, don't you know, only fortunately, it may be, the publishers and picture buyers have not found it out. It's a pity that the newspapers should thrust a vulgar notoriety upon us."

Two groups of khaki-clad women passed; there was the chatter of several small girls, and a child's voice shouted joyously. I murmured a sentence of pained acquiescence to his complaint, and followed the child's voice.

"He's all in. He's all in," he cried in uproarious joy. "Watch him volley, canoe out." He waved his plump arms over a palpitating patch of khaki lightly covered with sand that heaved a moment, and then with a splurge there came forth a large man with his khaki coat drawn over his head.

It was like Woodrow Wardham to speak as if the Bronton reception were yesterday. He adjusted his coat as he asked: "Are you here to write or to paint or to persecute?" and he held out his hand.

"The Emulator told me to dig up."

"And Rodney-boy dug me up for you. Have you been to the house? My wife's mother owns a cottage here, and I shall build next year if the place doesn't get too much into public notice. Raines will want to meet you—you may know his pictures."

Indeed I did, though I had not recognized his half-finished work.

"Raines is especially fond of reporters." A moment after he presented the artist, who came in response to his signal. And Raines is Wardham's brother-in-law; I didn't know that before.

I got a wonder of an article with snapshots of the big pine under which Wardham writes; at least he says he sometimes writes there, and it helps the story. I even got a picture of Rodney-boy's shoes and stockings strung out on the sand. Nothing associated with a celebrity is uninteresting to the public. While Mrs. Wardham served us with tea on the veranda, the Celebrity gave me inside information about how he came to write "Tarsus of Metatarsus."

One of Raines's fraternity, observed Wardham, as a new paint-box with the initials E. M. and an unfamiliar easel, borne by a familiar figure appeared from among the pines and came toward us. Elmer Mount of the Imitator, out in the guise of a painter!

While he posed, I scooped.—Laura Bel Everett