First published in the anthology ‘The Four Million’ from 1906. the VDO short film ‘The Investigator’ probably takes place in the 1930s. The potentially racially offensive “Negro” character is changed to Frank Collison (he played Horace Bing on ‘Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman) but is still outlandishly costumed. Also for the film, Rudolf Steiner piano salesman becomes Ephraim MacDougall, claims investigator.
Read on… that is, if you’re not ‘grown stiff with the ramrod of convention’…
Challenging music ‘Sirius’ by ‘The Alan Parsons Project’
‘The Green Door’ by O. Henry
Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly a hand is laid upon your arm. You turn to look into the thrilling eyes of a beautiful woman, wonderful in diamonds and Russian sables. She thrusts hurriedly into your hand an extremely hot buttered roll, flashes out a tiny pair of scissors, snips off the second button of your overcoat, meaningly ejaculates the one word, “parallelogram!” and swiftly flies down a cross street, looking back fearfully over her shoulder.
That would be pure adventure. Would you accept it? Not you. You would flush with embarrassment; you would sheepishly drop the roll and continue down Broadway, fumbling feebly for the missing button. This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted–golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son–when he started back home.
Half-adventurers–brave and splendid figures–have been numerous. From the Crusades to the Palisades they have enriched the arts of history and fiction and the trade of historical fiction. But each of them had a prize to win, a goal to kick, an axe to grind, a race to run, a new thrust in tierce to deliver, a name to carve, a crow to pick–so they were not followers of true adventure.
In the big city the twin spirits Romance and Adventure are always abroad seeking worthy wooers. As we roam the streets they slyly peep at us and challenge us in twenty different guises. Without knowing why, we look up suddenly to see in a window a face that seems to belong to our gallery of intimate portraits; in a sleeping thoroughfare we hear a cry of agony and fear coming from an empty and shuttered house; instead of at our familiar curb, a cab-driver deposits us before a strange door, which one, with a smile, opens for
us and bids us enter; a slip of paper, written upon, flutters down to our feet from the high lattices of Chance; we exchange glances of instantaneous hate, affection and fear with hurrying strangers in the passing crowds; a sudden douse of rain–and our umbrella may be sheltering the daughter of the Full Moon and first cousin of the Sidereal System; at every corner handkerchiefs drop, fingers beckon,
eyes besiege, and the lost, the lonely, the rapturous, the
mysterious, the perilous, changing clues of adventure are slipped into our fingers. But few of us are willing to hold and follow them. We are grown stiff with the ramrod of convention down our backs. We pass on; and some day we come, at the end of a very dull life, to reflect that our romance has been a pallid thing of a marriage or two, a satin rosette kept in a safe-deposit drawer, and a lifelong feud with a steam radiator.
Rudolf Steiner was a true adventurer. Few were the evenings on which he did not go forth from his hall bedchamber in search of the unexpected and the egregious. The most interesting thing in life seemed to him to be what might lie just around the next corner. Sometimes his willingness to tempt fate led him into strange paths. Twice he had spent the night in a station-house; again and again he had found himself the dupe of ingenious and mercenary tricksters; his
watch and money had been the price of one flattering allurement. But with undiminished ardour he picked up every glove cast before him into the merry lists of adventure.
One evening Rudolf was strolling along a crosstown street in the older central part of the city. Two streams of people filled the sidewalks–the home-hurrying, and that restless contingent that abandons home for the specious welcome of the thousand-candle-power table d’hote. [colloquialism for romantic restaurant]
The young adventurer was of pleasing presence, and moved serenely and watchfully. By daylight he was a salesman in a piano store. He wore his tie drawn through a topaz ring instead of fastened with a stick pin; and once he had written to the editor of a magazine that “Junie’s Love Test” by Miss Libbey, had been the book that had most influenced his life.
During his walk a violent chattering of teeth in a glass case on the sidewalk seemed at first to draw his attention (with a qualm), to a restaurant before which it was set; but a second glance revealed the electric letters of a dentist’s sign high above the next door. A giant negro, fantastically dressed in a red embroidered coat, yellow trousers and a military cap, discreetly distributed cards to those of the passing crowd who consented to take them.
This mode of dentistic advertising was a common sight to Rudolf. Usually he passed the dispenser of the dentist’s cards without reducing his store; but tonight the African slipped one into his hand so deftly that he retained it there smiling a little at the successful feat.
When he had travelled a few yards further he glanced at the card indifferently. Surprised, he turned it over and looked again with interest. One side of the card was blank; on the other was written in ink three words, “The Green Door.” And then Rudolf saw, three steps in front of him, a man throw down the card the negro had given him as he passed. Rudolf picked it up. It was printed with the dentist’s name and address and the usual schedule of “plate work” and “bridge work” and specious promises of “painless” operations.
The adventurous piano salesman halted at the corner and considered. Then he crossed the street, walked down a block, recrossed and joined the upward current of people again. Without seeming to notice the negro as he passed the second time, he carelessly took the card that was handed him. Ten steps away he inspected it. In the same handwriting that appeared on the first card “The Green Door” was
inscribed upon it. Three or four cards were tossed to the pavement by pedestrians both following and leading him. These fell blank side up. Rudolf turned them over. Every one bore the printed legend of the dental “parlours.”
Rarely did the arch sprite Adventure need to beckon twice to Rudolf Steiner, his true follower. But twice it had been done, and the quest was on.
Rudolf walked slowly back to where the giant negro stood by the case of rattling teeth. This time as he passed he received no card. In spite of his gaudy and ridiculous garb, the Ethiopian displayed a natural barbaric dignity as he stood, offering the cards suavely to some, allowing others to pass unmolested. Every half minute he chanted a harsh, unintelligible phrase akin to the jabber of car conductors and grand opera. And not only did he withhold a card this time, but it seemed to Rudolf that he received from the shining and
massive black countenance a look of cold, almost contemptuous disdain.
The look stung the adventurer. He read in it a silent accusation that he had been found wanting. Whatever the mysterious written words on the cards might mean, the black had selected him twice from the throng for their recipient; and now seemed to have condemned him as deficient in the wit and spirit to engage the enigma.
Standing aside from the rush, the young man made a rapid estimate of the building in which he conceived that his adventure must lie. Five stories high it rose. A small restaurant occupied the basement.
The first floor, now closed, seemed to house millinery or furs. The second floor, by the winking electric letters, was the dentist’s. Above this a polyglot babel of signs struggled to indicate the abodes of palmists, dressmakers, musicians and doctors. Still higher up draped curtains and milk bottles white on the window sills proclaimed the regions of domesticity.
After concluding his survey Rudolf walked briskly up the high flight of stone steps into the house. Up two flights of the carpeted stairway he continued; and at its top paused. The hallway there was dimly lighted by two pale jets of gas one–far to his right, the other nearer, to his left. He looked toward the nearer light and saw, within its wan halo, a green door. For one moment he hesitated; then he seemed to see the contumelious sneer of the African juggler of cards; and then he walked straight to the green door and knocked against it.
Moments like those that passed before his knock was answered measure the quick breath of true adventure. What might not be behind those green panels! Gamesters at play; cunning rogues baiting their traps with subtle skill; beauty in love with courage, and thus planning to be sought by it; danger, death, love, disappointment, ridicule–any of these might respond to that temerarious rap.
A faint rustle was heard inside, and the door slowly opened. A girl not yet twenty stood there, white-faced and tottering. She loosed the knob and swayed weakly, groping with one hand. Rudolf caught her and laid her on a faded couch that stood against the wall. He closed the door and took a swift glance around the room by the light of a flickering gas jet. Neat, but extreme poverty was the story that he read.
The girl lay still, as if in a faint. Rudolf looked around the room excitedly for a barrel. People must be rolled upon a barrel who–no, no; that was for drowned persons. He began to fan her with his hat. That was successful, for he struck her nose with the brim of his derby and she opened her eyes. And then the young man saw that hers, indeed, was the one missing face from his heart’s gallery of intimate portraits. The frank, grey eyes, the little nose, turning pertly outward; the chestnut hair, curling like the tendrils of a pea vine, seemed the right end and reward of all his wonderful adventures. But
the face was woefully thin and pale.
The girl looked at him calmly, and then smiled.
“Fainted, didn’t I?” she asked, weakly. “Well, who wouldn’t? You try going without anything to eat for three days and see!”
“Himmel!” exclaimed Rudolf, jumping up. “Wait till I come back.”
He dashed out the green door and down the stairs. In twenty minutes he was back again, kicking at the door with his toe for her to open it. With both arms he hugged an array of wares from the grocery and the restaurant. On the table he laid them–bread and butter, cold meats, cakes, pies, pickles, oysters, a roasted chicken, a bottle of milk and one of redhot tea.
“This is ridiculous,” said Rudolf, blusteringly, “to go without
eating. You must quit making election bets of this kind. Supper is ready.” He helped her to a chair at the table and asked: “Is there a cup for the tea?”
“On the shelf by the window,” she answered.
When he turned again with the cup he saw her, with eyes shining rapturously, beginning upon a huge dill pickle that she had rooted out from the paper bags with a woman’s unerring instinct. He took it from her, laughingly, and poured the cup full of milk. “Drink that first” he ordered, “and then you shall have some tea, and then a chicken wing. If you are very good you shall have a pickle to-morrow. And now, if you’ll allow me to be your guest we’ll have supper.”
He drew up the other chair. The tea brightened the girl’s eyes and brought back some of her colour. She began to eat with a sort of dainty ferocity like some starved wild animal. She seemed to regard the young man’s presence and the aid he had rendered her as a natural thing–not as though she undervalued the conventions; but as one whose great stress gave her the right to put aside the artificial for the human. But gradually, with the return of strength and comfort,
came also a sense of the little conventions that belong; and she began to tell him her little story. It was one of a thousand such as the city yawns at every day–the shop girl’s story of insufficient wages, further reduced by “fines” that go to swell the store’s profits; of time lost through illness; and then of lost positions, lost hope, and–the knock of the adventurer upon the green door.
But to Rudolf the history sounded as big as the Iliad or the crisis in “Junie’s Love Test.”
“To think of you going through all that,” he exclaimed.
“It was something fierce,” said the girl, solemnly.
“And you have no relatives or friends in the city?”
“None whatever.”
“I am all alone in the world, too,” said Rudolf, after a pause.
“I am glad of that,” said the girl, promptly; and somehow it pleased the young man to hear that she approved of his bereft condition.
Very suddenly her eyelids dropped and she sighed deeply.
“I’m awfully sleepy,” she said, “and I feel so good.”
Then Rudolf rose and took his hat. “I’ll say good-night. A long night’s sleep will be fine for you.”
He held out his hand, and she took it and said “good-night.” But her eyes asked a question so eloquently, so frankly and pathetically that he answered it with words.
“Oh, I’m coming back tomorrow to see how you are getting along. You can’t get rid of me so easily.”
Then, at the door, as though the way of his coming had been so much less important than the fact that he had come, she asked: “How did you come to knock at my door?”
He looked at her for a moment, remembering the cards, and felt a sudden jealous pain. What if they had fallen into other hands as adventurous as his? Quickly he decided that she must never know the truth. He would never let her know that he was aware of the strange expedient to which she had been driven by her great distress.
“One of our piano tuners lives in this house,” he said. “I knocked at your door by mistake.”
The last thing he saw in the room before the green door closed was her smile.
At the head of the stairway he paused and looked curiously about him. And then he went along the hallway to its other end; and, coming back, ascended to the floor above and continued his puzzled explorations. Every door that he found in the house was painted green.
Wondering, he descended to the sidewalk. The fantastic African was still there. Rudolf confronted him with his two cards in his hand.
“Will you tell me why you gave me these cards and what they mean?” he asked.
In a broad, good-natured grin the negro exhibited a splendid
advertisement of his master’s profession.
“Dar it is, boss,” he said, pointing down the street. “But I ‘spect you is a little late for de fust act.”
Looking the way he pointed Rudolf saw above the entrance to a theatre the blazing electric sign of its new play, “The Green Door.”
“I’m informed dat it’s a fust-rate show, sah,” said the negro. “De agent what represents it pussented me with a dollar, sah, to distribute a few of his cards along with de doctah’s. May I offer you one of de doctah’s cards, sah?”
At the corner of the block in which he lived Rudolf stopped for a glass of beer and a cigar. When he had come out with his lighted weed he buttoned his coat, pushed back his hat and said, stoutly, to the lamp post on the corner:
“All the same, I believe it was the hand of Fate that doped out the way for me to find her.”
Which conclusion, under the circumstances, certainly admits Rudolf Steiner to the ranks of the true followers of Romance and Adventure.
Well to continue with this popular series on hard to get VDO movies (here are the links for those who missed out on the first 2 articles on ‘It Don’t Pay To Be An Honest Citizen’ and ‘Hotel Paradise’)
Today’s movie is the short film ‘The Investigator’ with Anne Heche.
Playing the part of ‘Ephraim MacDougall, heeereees VDO!!!
For Americans (or for that matter for anyone) without an all region DVD player, their best bet is to pickup a VCD set from Hong Kong called Perverse Destiny Volume 1 from America Video Film.
VCD stands for ‘Video Compact Disc’ and basically it is a CD that contains moving pictures and sound. If you’re familiar with regular audio/music CDs, then you will know what a VCD looks like. A VCD has the capacity to hold up to 74/80 minutes on 650MB/700MB CDs respectively of full-motion video along with quality stereo sound. VCDs use a compression standard called MPEG to store the video and audio. A VCD can be played on almost all standalone DVD Players and of course on all computers with a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive with the help of a software based decoder / player. It is also possible to use menus and chapters, similiar to DVDs, on a VCD and also simple photo album/slide shows with background audio. The quality of a very good VCD is about the same as a VHS tape based movie.
What do you have to have to watch a VCD?
Either you need to have a computer with a CD-ROM drive or a DVD-ROM drive and VCD player software (Windows Media Player is one option for software, others are mentioned at http://www.videohelp.com/play.htm#vcd )
VCD is sort of the poor man in Asia’s way of watching movies without having to use a VCR. There are tons of legitimately released movies on VCD and they are very inexpensive (it has never cost me more than $15 to get one and that includes shipping to me in the USA from far off Asia).
Of the VCDs I have like Perverse Destiny, it’s handy to be able to watch them on my computer or on my DVD player. In fact I’m watching another VCD of another hard to get VDO movie as I type this :)
Here a picture of the Perverse Destiny VCD:
If you are in Europe you can get Perverse Destiny Volume 1 on a Region 2 PAL DVD from the Netherlands (RCV / America Video Film K6056 DVD, UPC Code #8 713045 202699). It looks like this:
If you are in Australia, you can get Perverse Destiny Volume 1 on a Region 4 PAL DVD (MRA Entertainment Group D0128, UPC Code #9 316797 415288).
The price for one of these DVDs with shipping to the USA will be closer to $20 and of course it won’t do you any good if you don’t have an ‘all-region’ DVD player.
All three versions of Perverse Destiny come with 3 short films: ‘The Investigator’ with VDO and Anne Heche, ‘Teach 109’ with Elizabeth Perkins, Jason Patric and James Earl Jones and ‘Override’ with Erika Alexander and Lou Diamond Phillips.
There are more VCDs and DVDs in the Perverse Destiny series with more short films with a science fiction/Twilight Zone kind of bent to them so if you end up liking these, you can get more of them to watch.
This just in…if you’re in the UK, you want to get your hands on a copy of this Region 2 PAL DVD:
This Cinema Collection Volumes 1 & 2 PAL DVD is from ILC Prime (IPD11302, UPC # 5 031932 113020) and has the short films ‘The Investigator’ ‘Teach 109’ ‘Another Round’ with Alison Elliot and Brett Cullen), ‘Hogg’s Heaven’ (with Keith Gordon and Shirley Knight), ‘Texan’ (with Dana Delaney, directed by Treat Williams), ‘Museum Of Love’ (with Samantha Mathis, directed by Christian Slater), ‘Once In A Blue Moon’ (with Viggo Mortensen, Fisher Stevens & Jeff Silverman) and ‘Hearts Of Stone’ (with Glen Plummer). Sorry but this volume doesn’t have ‘Override’ like Perverse Destiny Volume 1 does.
I know for sure that ‘Texan’ and ‘Museum Of Love’ are definitely in the Perverse Destiny series of films but I’m not sure which DVDs they are included on. The other films are all new to me (and I’m psyched to have more to watch).
By the way, it wouldn’t hurt you to read O. Henry’s ‘The Green Door’ before you see ‘The Investigator’.
I am biased as all get out on this, but this is my all time favorite O. Henry short story and VDO playing the lead character in an adaptation of ‘The Green Door’ impressed me to no end – I absolutely love this short film.
VDO Vault 