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W. C. Fields
way entrance. The winners had scarcely time to congratulate themselves before police reinforcements stampeded over them like cattle. Fields spent a cooling-off period in jail, clanging on his bars with tin cups, bawling for the American ambassador, and building up a profane, international understanding with the acrobat, whose apartment was just across the way.
He was beset by other woes. A good many of these appeared to strike him at the Wintergarten, in Berlin. He had successes there, but not for the usual reasons. One time, when he had forwarded his equipment to the Wintergarten from Paris, he arrived to find the top of his billiard table in the theater, as per schedule, and the sides, according to a telegram, in a depot on the Russian border. It was a puzzling situation. Billiards is, or are, an exacting and even a dangerous game on a table without sides. Hastily, Fields engaged a carpenter, who went right to work without having the flimsiest idea what he was building. He and Fields communicated through a sort of emergency esperanto consisting of gutturals, signs, and marks scratched on boards. In the beginning, Fields decided, the man thought he was constructing a cofhn for some good-sized but flattish animal, such as a starved goat. Accordingly, the sides emerged from six to eight inches tall, which was too high for an audience to see anything of the balls. As the work progressed, in the rear of the man's shop, which was adjacent to a beer garden, Fields rushed back and forth with a crock. The day wore on, and the carpenter hacked and whittled. At one point he got the sides down to a respectable billiards size, but by the time they finished the work, and ten or twelve crocks of beer, the table bore no resemblance to anything in their previous experience, and it was probable, as Fields remarked, that no self-respecting goat would have been found dead on it.
That evening he opened at the Wintergarten. He was in a moist humor and, aided by the carpenter's additions, broke new
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