Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY IliliiiitlillillliiiiiiiifflfllfllitlllilliJLllfllllitiilillillffiliillifnflffUIiillitfilfllJIlfllliflllllliinifiUilj liilii!III!lllilU!lllil!ll!IIH!IIIilHI!i!ilHiK "The ship's going down,'' said Charlie. "Will you have a life-preserver?" "Good morning !" the man greeted her around a bend in the walk, lifting his high hat, with a bow. The girl stopped before a bench that happened to be standing vacant there, and looked up at him, with a smile that registered no hint of displeasure at his daring, a stranger, to address her. "Oh, why, how do you do?" she exclaimed in the tone of one who is surprised, and, at the same time, pleased, at unexpectedly meeting an old friend. She seated herself on the bench, with an inviting lift of her eyebrows. The man promptly sat down beside her. And, with the same alacrity, he encircled her waist with his arm. "What is there about me that makes you like me so much ?" he inquired confidentially. "You're so handsome !" she replied. The man brushed up the ends of his mustache, under a nose that made up in quantity for what it lacked in quality of symmetry and other details of beauty, and raised a pair of cross eyes of a peagreen hue to the neighboring trees, with a self-satisfied smile that seemed to say to those inanimate observers of his tetea-tete with the girl : "You see what a perfect rascal I am with the ladies, when I want to be !" At that moment, across the sward in back of the bench on which they sat, a young man came walking, in defiance of the signs which were stuck up in the turf with their warning, "Keep Off the Grass." He was short of stature and slight of build. On his upper lip was a little black mustache, which shifted from side to side as he set down first one foot and then the other in a manner reminiscent of the German militia's "goose step." Perched squarely on top of his bushy hair was a derby of at least ten summers, that looked as though it felt every winter of it. His coat was short, rusty with age, and buttoned tight across his insignificant chest. His trousers were baggy enough to suit the sartorial fancy of even a Hollander. In his hand he carried a little bamboo cane, which he twirled blithely as he shoved himself along, rather than walked, on the heels of a pair of dilapidated shoes that any self-respecting rubbish heap would have picked itself up and moved away rather than have submitted to the insult of receiving. A tramp of the comic-weekly type, was what the young man looked like. And yet he seemed happy, without a care in the world. That is. until he caught sight of the man and the girl on the bench ahead of him. At once his expression became woebegone, and he ceased the blithe twirling of his cane. That was how the sight of lovers spooning together on a bench always affected our hero, who — as you will doubtless have guessed before this — was none other than Charlie Chaplin. It saddened him, to think that another had a pretty girl to spoon with while he had not, and made him want to set out at once to rectify that mistake. Any pretty girl at such a time would do — even the one the other fellow happened to be spooning with. Now Charlie approached the bench on which the crosseyed man with the bushy mustache was sitting with the girl, and stopped beside her. He attracted her attention to his presence by hooking the handle of his cane around her arm and giving it a couple of gentle pulls. When she looked around at him. Charlie raised his battered derby to her, with a smile. "Don't you want to take a little walk with me?" he inquired softly. The man who had left his wife and daughter asleep on the other bench