him but not in so pronounced, so flagrant a manner. The blight of Broadway became more apparent than ever upon his face. The girl’s hand still fluttered upon his sleeve as the music came and dancers shuffled by them.
“Say, you’re the actin’ kid, all right.” She was tapping the floor with the heel of a satin slipper. He wished above all things that she wouldn’t call him “Kid.” He meditated putting a little of Broadway’s blight upon her by saying in a dignified way that his real name was Clifford Armytage. Still, this might not blight her– you couldn’t tell about the girl.
“You certainly are the actin’est kid on this set, I’ll tell the lot that. Of course these close-ups won’t mean much, just about one second, or half that maybe. Or some hick in the cuttin’ room may kill ’em dead. Come on, give me the fish-eye again. That’s it. Say, I’m glad I didn’t have to smoke cigarettes in this scene. They wouldn’t do for my type, standin’ where the brook and river meet up. I hate a cigarette worse’n anything. You–I bet you’d give up food first.”
“I hate ’em, too,” he muttered grudgingly, glad to be able to say this, even though only to one whose attentions he meant to discourage. “If I have to smoke one more it’ll finish me.”
“Now, ain’t that the limit? Too bad, Kid!”
“I didn’t even have any of my own. That Spanish girl gave me these.”
The Montague girl glanced over his shoulder at the young woman whose place she had usurped. “Spanish, eh? If she’s Spanish I’m a Swede right out of Switzerland. Any-way, I never could like to smoke. I started to learn one summer when I was eight. Pa and Ma and I was out with a tent Tom-show, me doing Little Eva, and between acts I had to put on pants and come out and do a smoking song, all about a kid learning to smoke his first cigar and not doin’ well with it, see? But they had to cut it out. Gosh, what us artists suffer at times! Pa had me try it a couple of years later when I was doin’ Louise the blind girl in the Two Orphans, playin’ thirty cents top. It was a good song, all right, with lots of funny gags. I’d ‘a’ been the laughing hit of the bill if I could ‘a’ learned not to swallow. We had to cut it out again after the second night. Talk about entering into your part. Me? I was too good.”
If the distant camera glanced this way it caught merely the persistent efforts of a beautiful debutante who had not yet felt the blight of Broadway to melt the cynicism of one who suffered it more and more acutely each moment. Her hand fluttered on his sleeve and her left eye continuously beguiled him from under the overhanging curl. As often as he thought it desirable he put the bored glance upon her, though mostly he stared in dejection at the coffee cup or the empty wine glass. He was sorry that she had had that trouble with the cigar, but one who as Little Eva or poor persecuted Louise, the blind girl, had to do a song and dance between the acts must surely come from a low plane of art. He was relieved when, at megaphoned directions, an elderly fop came to whirl her off in the dance. Her last speech was: “That poor Henshaw–the gelatin master’ll have megaphone-lip by to-night.”
He was left alone at his table. He wondered if they might want a close-up of him this way, uncompanioned, jaded, tired of it all, as if he would be saying: “There’s always the river!” But nothing of this sort happened. There was more dancing, more close-ups of Muriel Mercer being stricken with her vision of tenement misery under the foul glare of a middle-aged roue inflamed with wine. And there was a shot of Muriel perceiving at last the blight of Broadway and going to a table at which sat a pale, noble-looking young man with a high forehead, who presently led her out into the night to the real life of the worthy poor. Later the deserted admirer became again a roue inflamed with wine and submitted to a close-up that would depict his baffled rage. He clenched his hands in this and seemed to convey, with a snarling lift of his lip, that the girl would yet be his. Merton Gill had ceased to smoke. He had sounded on Broadway even the shallow pleasure of cigarettes. He was thoroughly blighted.
At last a megaphoned announcement from the assistant director dismissing the extras, keeping the star, the lead, and a few small- part people, to clean up medium shots, “dramatics,” and other work requiring no crowd. “All you extra people here to-morrow morning, eight-thirty, same clothes and make-up.” There was a quick breaking up of the revelry. The Broadway pleasure-seekers threw off the blight and stormed the assistant director for slips of paper which he was now issuing. Merton Gill received one, labelled “Talent check.” There was fine print upon it which he took no pains to read, beyond gathering its general effect that the Victor Film-art Company had the full right to use any photographs of him that its agents might that day have obtained. What engrossed him to the exclusion of this legal formality was the item that he would now be paid seven dollars and fifty cents for his day’s work–and once he had been forced to toil half a week for this sum! Emerging from the stage into the sunlight he encountered the Montague girl who hailed him as he would have turned to avoid her.
“Say, trouper, I thought I’d tell you in case you didn’t know–we don’t take our slips to that dame in that outside cafeteria any more. She always pinches off a quarter or may be four bits. They got it fixed now so the cash is always on tap in the office. I just thought I’d tell you.”
“Thanks,” he said, still with the jaded air of the disillusioned. He had only the vaguest notion of her meaning, but her intention had been kindly. “Thank you very much.”
“Oh, don’t mention it. I just thought I’d tell you.” She glanced after him shrewdly.
Nearing the office he observed a long line of Broadway revellers waiting to cash their slips. Its head was lost inside the building and it trailed far outside. No longer was any blight to be perceived. The slips were ready in hand. Instead of joining the line Merton decided upon luncheon. It was two o’clock, and though waiters with trays had been abundant in the gilded cabaret, the best screen art had not seemed to demand a serving of actual food. Further, he would eat in the cafeteria in evening dress, his make-up still on, like a real actor. The other time he had felt conspicuous because nothing had identified him with the ordinary clientele of the place.
The room was not crowded now. Only a table here and there held late comers, and the choice of foods when he reached the serving counter at the back was limited. He permitted himself to complain of this in a practised manner, but made a selection and bore his tray to the centre of the room. He had chosen a table and was about to sit, when he detected Henshaw farther down the room, and promptly took the one next him. It was probable that Henshaw would recall him and praise the work he had done. But the director merely rolled unseeing eyes over him as he seated himself, and continued his speech to the man Merton had before seen him with, the grizzled dark man with the stubby gray mustache whom he called Governor. Merton wondered if he could be the governor of California, but decided not. Perhaps an ex- governor.
“She’s working out well,” he was saying. “I consider it one of the best continuities Belmore has done. Not a line of smut in it, but to make up for that we’ll have over thirty changes of costume.”
Merton Gill coughed violently, then stared moodily at his plate of baked beans. He hoped that this, at least, would recall him to Henshaw who might fix an eye on him to say: “And, by the way, here is a young actor that was of great help to me this morning.” But neither man even glanced up. Seemingly this young actor could choke to death without exciting their notice. He stared less moodily at the baked beans. Henshaw would notice him sometime, and you couldn’t do everything at once.
The men had finished their luncheon and were smoking. The animated Henshaw continued his talk. “And about that other thing we were discussing, Governor, I want to go into that with you. I tell you if we can do Robinson Crusoe, and do it right, a regular five-thousand- foot program feature, the thing ought to gross a million. A good, clean, censor-proof picture–great kid show, run forever. Shipwreck stuff, loading the raft, island stuff, hut stuff, goats, finding the footprint, cannibals, the man Friday–can’t you see it?”
The Governor seemed to see it. “Fine–that’s so!” He stared above the director’s head for the space of two inhalations from his cigarette, imbuing Merton Gill with gratitude that he need not smoke again that day. “But say, look here, how about your love interest?”
Henshaw waved this aside with his own cigarette and began to make marks on the back of an envelope. “Easy enough–Belmore can fix that up. We talked over one or two ways. How about having Friday’s sister brought over with him to this island? The cannibals are going to eat her, too. Then the cannibals run to their canoes when they hear the gun, just the same as in the book. And Crusoe rescues the two. And when he cuts the girl’s bonds he finds she can’t be Friday’s real sister, because she’s white–see what I mean? Well, we work it out later that she’s the daughter of an English Earl that was wrecked near the cannibal island, and they rescued her, and Friday’s mother brought her up as her own child. She’s saved the papers that came ashore, and she has the Earl’s coat-of-arms tattooed on her shoulder blade, and finally, after Crusoe has fallen in love with her, and she’s remembered a good deal of her past, along comes the old Earl, her father, in a ship and rescues them all. How about that?” Henshaw, brightly expectant, awaited the verdict of his chief.
” Well–I don’t know.” The other considered. “Where’s your conflict, after the girl is saved from the savages? And Crusoe in the book wears a long beard. How about that? He won’t look like anything– sort of hairy, and that’s all.”
Henshaw from the envelope on which he drew squares and oblongs appeared to gain fresh inspiration. He looked up with new light in his eyes. “I got it–got the whole thing. Modernize it. This chap is a rich young New Yorker, cruising on his yacht, and he’s wrecked on this island and gets a lot of stuff ashore and his valet is saved, too–say there’s some good comedy, see what I mean?–valet is one of these stiff English lads, never been wrecked on an island before and complains all the time about the lack of conveniences. I can see a lot of good gags for him, having to milk the goats, and getting scared of the other animals, and no place to press his master’s clothes–things like that, you know. Well, the young fellow explores the island and finds another party that’s been wrecked on the other side, and it’s the girl and the man that got her father into his power and got all of his estate and is going to make beggars of them if the girl won’t marry him, and she comes on the young fellow under some palms and they fall in love and fix it up to double-cross the villain–Belmore can work it out from there. How about that? And say, we can use a lot of trims from that South Sea piece we did last year, all that yacht and island stuff–see what I mean?”
The other considered profoundly. “Yes, you got a story there, but it won’t be Robinson Crusoe, don’t you see?”
Again Henshaw glanced up from his envelope with the light of inspiration. “Well, how about this? Call it Robinson Crusoe, Junior! There you are. We get the value of the name and do the story the way we want it, the young fellow being shaved every day by the valet, and he can invite the other party over to dine with him and receive them in evening dress and everything. Can’t you see it? If that story wouldn’t gross big then I don’t know a story. And all easy stuff. We can use the trims for the long shots, and use that inlet, toward the other end of Catalina for the hut and the beach; sure- fire stuff, Governor–and Robinson Crusoe, Junior is a cinch title.”
“Well, give Belmore as much dope as you’ve got, and see what he can work out.”
They arose and stood by the counter to pay their checks.
“If you want to see the rushes of that stuff we shot this morning be over to the projection room at five,” said Henshaw as they went out. Neither had observed the rising young screen actor, Clifford Armytage, though he had coughed violently again as they left. He had coughed most plausibly, moreover, because of the cigarettes.
At the cashier’s window, no longer obstructed, he received his money, another five-dollar bill adorned with the cheerfully prosperous face of Benjamin Harrison and half that amount in silver coin. Then, although loath to do this, he went to the dressing room and removed his make-up. That grease paint had given him a world of confidence.
At the casting office he stopped to tell his friend of the day’s camera triumph, how the director had seemed to single him out from a hundred or so revellers to portray facially the deadly effect of Broadway’s night life.
“Good work!” she applauded. “Before long you’ll be having jobs oftener. And don’t forget, you’re called again to-morrow morning for the gambling-house scene.”
She was a funny woman; always afraid he would forget something he could not possibly forget. Once more in the Patterson kitchen he pressed his suit and dreamt of new eminences in his chosen art.
The following morning he was again the first to reach the long dressing room, the first to be made up by the grumbling extra, the first to reach the big stage. The cabaret of yesterday had overnight been transformed into a palatial gambling hell. Along the sides of the room and at its centre were tables equipped for strange games of chance which only his picture knowledge enabled him to recognize. He might tarry at these tables, he thought, but he must remember to look bored in the near presence of Henshaw. The Spanish girl of yesterday appeared and he greeted her warmly. “I got some cigarettes this time,” he said, “so let me pay you back all those I smoked of yours yesterday.” Together they filled the golden case that hung from her girdle.
“It’s swell, all right,” said the girl, gazing about the vast room now filling with richly clad gamblers.
“But I thought it was all over except the tenement-house scenes where Vera Vanderpool has gone to relieve the poor,” he said.
The girl explained. “This scene comes before the one we did yesterday. It’s where the rich old boy first sees Vera playing roulette, and she loses a lot of money and is going to leave her string of pearls, but he says it’s a mere trifle and let him pay her gambling losses, so in a weak moment she does, and that’s how he starts to get her into his power. You’ll see how it works out. Say, they spent some money on this set, all right.”
It was indeed a rich set, as the girl had said. It seemed to Merton Gill that it would be called on the screen “One of those Plague Spots that Eat like a Cancer at the Heart of New York.” He lighted a cigarette and leaned nonchalantly against a pillar to smile a tired little smile at the pleasure-mad victims of this life who were now grouping around the roulette and faro tables. He must try for his jaded look.
“Some swell shack!” The speaker was back of him, but he knew her for the Montague girl, and was instantly enabled to increase the blighted look for which he had been trying. “One natty little hovel, I’ll tell the world,” the girl continued. “Say, this puts it all over the Grand Central station, don’t it? Must be right smack at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. Well, start the little ball rolling, so I can make a killing.” He turned his head slightly and saw her dance off to one of the roulette tables, accompanied by the middle-aged fop who had been her companion yesterday.
Henshaw and his assistant now appeared and began grouping the players at the various tables. Merton Gill remained leaning wearily against his massive pillar, trying to appear blase under the chatter of the Spanish girl. The groups were arranged to the liking of Henshaw, though only after many trials. The roulette ball was twirled and the lively rattle of chips could be heard. Scanning his scene, he noted Merton and his companion.
“Oh, there you are, you two. Sister, you go and stand back of that crowd around the faro table. Keep craning to look over their shoulders, and give us your side view. I want to use this man alone. Here.” He led Merton to a round table on which were a deck of cards and some neatly stacked chips. “Sit here, facing the camera. Keep one hand on the cards, sort of toying with ’em, see what I mean?”
He scattered the piled chips loosely about the table, and called to a black waiter: “Here, George, put one of those wine glasses on his left.”
The wine glass was placed. “Now kind of slump down in your chair, like you saw the hollowness of it all–see what I mean?”
Merton Gill thought he saw. He exhaled smoke, toyed contemptuously with the cards at his right hand and, with a gesture of repulsion, pushed the wine glass farther away. He saw the hollowness of it all. The spirit of wine sang in his glass but to deaf ears. Chance could no longer entice him. It might again have been suspected that cigarettes were ceasing to allure.
“Good work! Keep it up,” said Henshaw and went back to his cameras.
The lights jarred on; desperate gaming was filmed. “More life at the roulette tables,” megaphoned Henshaw. “Crowd closer around that left-hand faro table. You’re playing for big stakes.” The gaming became more feverish. The mad light of pleasure was in every eye, yet one felt that the blight of Broadway was real.
The camera was wheeled forward and Merton Gill joyously quit smoking while Henshaw secured flashes of various groups, chiefly of losers who were seeing the hollowness of it all. He did not, however, disdain a bit of comedy.
“Miss Montague.”
“Yes, Mr. Henshaw.” The Montague girl paused in the act of sprinkling chips over a roulette lay-out.
“Your escort has lost all his chips and you’ve lost all he bought for you–“
The girl and her escort passed to other players the chips before them, and waited.
“Your escort takes out his wallet, shows it to you empty, and shrugs his shoulders. You shrug, too, but turn your back on him, facing the camera, and take some bills out of your stocking–see what I mean? Give her some bills, someone.”
“Never mind, Mr. Henshaw; I already got some there.” The pantomime was done, the girl turned, stooped, withdrew flattened bills from one of the salmon-pink stockings and flourished them at her escort who achieved a transition from gloom to joy. Merton Gill, observing this shameless procedure, plumbed the nether depths of disgust for Broadway’s night life.
The camera was now wheeled toward him and he wearily lighted another cigarette. “Get a flash of this chap,” Henshaw was saying. The subject leaned forward in his chair, gazing with cynical eyes at the fevered throng. Wine, women, song, all had palled. Gambling had no charm–he looked with disrelish at the cigarette he had but just lighted.
“All right, Paul, that’s good. Now get that bunch over at the crap table.”
Merton Gill lost no time in relinquishing his cigarette. He dropped it into the wine glass which became a symbol of Broadway’s dead-sea fruit. Thereafter he smoked only when he was in the picture. He felt that he was becoming screen wise. And Henshaw had remembered him. The cast of The Blight of Broadway might not be jewelled with his name, but his work would stand out. He had given the best that was in him.
He watched the entrance of Muriel Mercer, maddest of all the mad throng, accompanied by the two young men and the girl who was not so beautiful. He watched her lose steadily, and saw her string of pearls saved by the elderly scoundrel who had long watched the beautiful girl as only the Wolf of Wall Street could watch one so fair. He saw her leave upon his arm, perhaps for further unwholesome adventure along Broadway. The lights were out, the revelry done.
Merton Gill beyond a doubt preferred Western stuff, some heart- gripping tale of the open spaces, or perhaps of the frozen north, where he could be the hard-riding, straight-shooting, two-fisted wonder-man, and not have to smoke so many cigarettes–only one now and then, which he would roll himself and toss away after a few puffs. Still, he had shown above the mob of extra people, he thought. Henshaw had noticed him. He was coming on.
The Montague girl hailed him as he left the set. “Hullo, old trouper. I caught you actin’ again to-day, right out before the white folks. Well, so far so good. But say, I’m glad all that roulette and stuff was for the up-and-down stage and not on the level. I’d certainly have lost everything but my make-up. So long, Kid!” She danced off to join a group of other women who were leaving. He felt a kindly pity for the child. There could be little future in this difficult art for one who took it so lightly; who talked so frankly to strangers without being introduced.
At luncheon in the cafeteria he waited a long time in the hope of encountering Henshaw, who would perhaps command his further services in the cause of creative screen art. He meant to be animated at this meeting, to show the director that he could be something more than an actor who had probed the shams of Broadway. But he lingered in vain. He thought Henshaw would perhaps be doing without food in order to work on the scenario for Robinson Crusoe, Junior.
He again stopped to thank his friend, the casting director, for securing him his first chance. She accepted his thanks smilingly, and asked him to drop around often. “Mind, you don’t forget our number,” she said.
He was on the point of making her understand once for all that he would not forget the number, that he would never forget Gashwiler’s address, that he had been coming to this studio too often to forget its location. But someone engaged her at the window, so he was obliged to go on without enlightening the woman. She seemed to be curiously dense.
CHAPTER VII
“NOTHING TO-DAY, DEAR!”
The savings had been opportunely replenished. In two days he had accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, “Nothing to-day–sorry!” He might have been a grouch and given to unreasonable nagging, but with him there was always a very definite something to-day which he would specify, in short words if the occasion seemed to demand. There was not only a definite something every day but a definite if not considerable sum of money to be paid over every Saturday night, and in the meantime three very definite and quite satisfying meals to be freely partaken of at stated hours each day.
The leisure enforced by truly creative screen art was often occupied now with really moving pictures of Metta Judson placing practicable food upon the Gashwiler table. This had been no table in a gilded Broadway resort, holding empty coffee cups and half empty wine glasses, passed and repassed by apparently busy waiters with laden trays who never left anything of a practicable nature. Doubtless the set would not have appealed to Henshaw. He would never have been moved to take close-ups, even for mere flashes, of those who ate this food. And yet, more and more as the days went by, this old-time film would unreel itself before the eager eyes of Merton Gill. Often now it thrilled him as might have an installment of The Hazards of Hortense, for the food of his favourite pharmacy was beginning to pall and Metta Judson, though giving her shallow mind to base village gossip, was a good cook. She became the adored heroine of an apparently endless serial to be entitled The Hazards of Clifford Armytage, in which the hero had tragically little to do but sit upon a bench and wait while tempting repasts were served.
Sometimes on the little bench around the eucalyptus tree he would run an entire five-thousand-foot program feature, beginning with the Sunday midday dinner of roast chicken, and abounding in tense dramatic moments such as corned-beef and cabbage on Tuesday night, and corned-beef hash on Wednesday morning. He would pause to take superb closeups of these, the corned beef on its spreading platter hemmed about with boiled potatoes and turnips and cabbage, and the corned beef hash with its richly browned surface. The thrilling climax would be the roast of beef on Saturday night, with close-ups taken in the very eye of the camera, of the mashed potatoes and the apple pie drenched with cream. And there were close-ups of Metta Judson, who had never seriously contemplated a screen career, placing upon the table a tower of steaming hot cakes, while a platter of small sausages loomed eloquently in the foreground.
With eyes closed he would run this film again and again, cutting here, rearranging sequences, adding trims from suddenly remembered meals of the dead past, devising more intimate close-ups, such as the one of Metta withdrawing pies from the oven or smoothing hot chocolate caressingly over the top of a giant cake, or broiling chops, or saying in a large-lettered subtitle–artistically decorated with cooked foods–“How about some hot coffee, Merton?”
He became an able producer of this drama. He devised a hundred sympathetic little touches that Henshaw would probably never have thought of. He used footage on a mere platter of steak that another director might have ignored utterly. He made it gripping–the supreme heart-interest drama of his season a big thing done in a big way, and yet censor-proof. Not even the white-souled censors of the great state of Pennsylvania could have outlawed its realism, brutal though this was in such great moments as when Gashwiler carved the roast beef. So able was his artistry that Merton’s nostrils would sometimes betray him–he could swear they caught rich aromas from that distant board.
Not only had the fare purveyed by his favourite pharmacy put a blight upon him equal to Broadway’s blight, but even of this tasteless stuff he must be cautious in his buying. A sandwich, not too meaty at the centre, coffee tasting strangely of other things sold in a pharmacy, a segment of pie fair–seeming on its surface, but lacking the punch, as he put it, of Metta Judson’s pie, a standardized, factory-made, altogether formal and perfunctory pie– these were the meagre items of his accustomed luncheon and dinner.
He had abandoned breakfast, partly because it cost money and partly because a gentleman in eastern Ohio had recently celebrated his hundred and third birthday by reason, so he confided to the press, of having always breakfasted upon a glass of clear cold water. Probably ham and eggs or corned–beef hash would have cut him off at ninety, and water from the tap in the Patterson kitchen was both clear and cold. It was not so much that he cared to live beyond ninety or so, but he wished to survive until things began to pick up on the Holden lot, and if this did bring him many more years, well and good. Further, if the woman in the casting office persisted, as she had for ten days, in saying “Nothing yet” to inquiring screen artists, he might be compelled to intensify the regime of the Ohio centenarian. Perhaps a glass of clear cold water at night, after a hearty midday meal of drug–store sandwiches and pie, would work new wonders.
It seemed to be the present opinion of other waiters on the extra bench that things were never going to pick up on the Holden lot nor on any other lot. Strongly marked types, ready to add distinction to the screen of painted shadows, freely expressed a view that the motion-picture business was on the rocks. Unaffected by the optimists who wrote in the picture magazines, they saw no future for it. More than one of them threatened to desert the industry and return to previous callings. As they were likely to put it, they were going to leave the pictures flat and go back to type-writing or selling standard art-works or waiting on table or something where you could count on your little bit every week.
Under the eucalyptus tree one morning Merton Gill, making some appetizing changes in the fifth reel of Eating at Gashwiler’s, was accosted by a youngish woman whom he could not at first recall. She had come from the casting office and paused when she saw him.
“Hello, I thought it was you, but I wasn’t sure in them clothes. How they coming?”
He stared blankly, startled at the sudden transposition he had been compelled to make, for the gleaming knife of Gashwiler, standing up to carve, had just then hovered above the well-browned roast of beef. Then he placed the speaker by reason of her eyes. It was the Spanish girl, his companion of the gilded cabaret, later encountered in the palatial gambling hell that ate like a cancer at the heart of New York–probably at the corner of Broadway and Fifth Avenue.
He arose and shook hands cordially. He had supposed, when he thought of the girl at all, that she would always be rather Spanish, an exotic creature rather garishly dressed, nervously eager, craving excitement such as may be had in cabarets on Broadway, with a marked inclination for the lighter life of pleasure. But she wore not so much as a rose in her smoothly combed hair. She was not only not excited but she was not exciting. She was plainly dressed in skirt and shirtwaist of no distinction, her foot-gear was of the most ordinary, and well worn, and her face under a hat of no allure was without make-up, a commonplace, somewhat anxious face with lines about the eyes. But her voice as well as her eyes helped him to recall her.
She spoke with an effort at jauntiness after Merton had greeted her. “That’s one great slogan, ‘Business as Usual!’ ain’t it? Well, it’s business as usual here, so I just found out from the Countess–as usual, rotten. I ain’t had but three days since I seen you last.”
“I haven’t had even one,” he told her.
“No? Say, that’s tough. You’re registered with the Service Bureau, ain’t you?”
“Well, I didn’t do that, because they might send me any place, and I sort of wanted to work on this particular lot.” Instantly he saw himself saving Beulah Baxter, for the next installment, from a fate worse than death, but the one-time Spanish girl did not share this vision.
“Oh, well, little I care where I work. I had two days at the Bigart in a hop-joint scene, and one over at the United doin’ some board- walk stuff. I could ‘a’ had another day there, but the director said I wasn’t just the type for a chick bathing-suit. He was very nice about it. Of course I know my legs ain’t the best part of me–I sure ain’t one of them like the girl that says she’s wasted in skirts.” She grinned ruefully.
He felt that some expression of sympathy would be graceful here, yet he divined that it must be very discreetly, almost delicately, worded. He could easily be too blunt.
“I guess I’d be pretty skinny in a bathing-suit myself, right now. I know they won’t be giving me any such part pretty soon if I have to cut down on the meals the way I been doing.”
“Oh, of course I don’t mean I’m actually skinny–“
He felt he had been blunt, after all.
“Not to say skinny.” she went on, “but–well, you know–more like home-folks, I guess. Anyway, I got no future as a bathing beauty– none whatever. And this walkin’ around to the different lots ain’t helpin’ me any, either. Of course it ain’t as if I couldn’t go back to the insurance office. Mr. Gropp, he’s office manager, he was very nice about it. He says, ‘I wish you all the luck in the world, girlie, and remember your job as filin’ clerk will always be here for you.’ Wasn’t that gentlemanly of him? Still, I’d rather act than stand on my feet all day filing letters. I won’t go back till I have to.”
“Me either,” said Merton Gill, struggling against the obsession of Saturday-night dinner at Gashwiler’s.
Grimly he resumed his seat when the girl with a friendly “So long!” had trudged on. In spite of himself he found something base in his nature picturing his return to the emporium and to the thrice-daily encounter with Metta Judson’s cookery. He let his lower instincts toy with the unworthy vision. Gashwiler would advance him the money to return, and the job would be there. Probably Spencer Grant had before this tired of the work and gone into insurance or some other line, and probably Gashwiler would be only too glad to have the wanderer back. He would get off No. 3 just in time for breakfast.
He brushed the monstrous scene from his eyes, shrugged it from his shoulders. He would not give up. They had all struggled and sacrificed, and why should he shrink from the common ordeal? But he wished the Spanish girl hadn’t talked about going back to her job. He regretted not having stopped her with words of confident cheer that would have stiffened his own resolution. He could see her far down the street, on her way to the next lot, her narrow shoulders switching from light to shadow as she trudged under the line of eucalyptus trees. He hoped she wouldn’t give up. No one should ever give up–least of all Merton Gill.
The days wore wearily on. He began to feel on his own face the tired little smile of the woman in the casting office as she would look up to shake her head, often from the telephone over which she was saying: “Nothing to-day, dear. Sorry!” She didn’t exactly feel that the motion-picture business had gone on the rocks, but she knew it wasn’t picking up as it should. And ever and again she would have Merton Gill assure her that he hadn’t forgotten the home address, the town where lived Gighampton or Gumwash or whoever it was that held the good old job open for him. He had divined that it was a jest of some sort when she warned him not to forget the address and he would patiently smile at this, but he always put her right about the name of Gashwiler. Of course it was a name any one might forget, though the woman always seemed to make the most earnest effort to remember it.
Each day, after his brief chat with her in which he learned that there would be nothing to-day, he would sit on the waiting-room bench or out under the eucalyptus tree and consecrate himself anew to the art of the perpendicular screen. And each day, as the little hoard was diminished by even those slender repasts at the drug store, he ran his film of the Gashwiler dining room in action.
From time to time he would see the Montague girl, alone or with her mother, entering the casting office or perhaps issuing from the guarded gate. He avoided her when possible. She persisted in behaving as if they had been properly introduced and had known each other a long time. She was too familiar, and her levity jarred upon his more serious mood. So far as he could see, the girl had no screen future, though doubtless she was her own worst enemy. If someone had only taught her to be serious, her career might have been worth while. She had seemed not wholly negligible in the salmon-pink dancing frock, though of course the blonde curls had not been true.
Then the days passed until eating merely at a drug-store lunch counter became not the only matter of concern. There was the item of room rent. Mrs. Patterson, the Los Angeles society woman, had, upon the occasion of their first interview, made it all too clear that the money, trifling though it must seem for a well-furnished room with the privilege of electric iron in the kitchen, must be paid each week in advance. Strictly in advance. Her eye had held a cold light as she dwelt upon this.
There had been times lately when, upon his tree bench, he would try to dramatize Mrs. Patterson as a woman with a soft heart under that polished society exterior, chilled by daily contact with other society people at the Iowa or Kansas or other society picnics, yet ready to melt at the true human touch. But he had never quite succeeded in this bit of character work. Something told him that she was cold all through, a society woman without a flaw in her armour. He could not make her seem to listen patiently while he explained that only one company was now shooting on the lot, but that big things were expected to be on in another week or so. A certain skeptic hardness was in her gaze as he visioned it.
He decided, indeed, that he could never bring himself even to attempt this scene with the woman, so remote was he from seeing her eye soften and her voice warm with the assurance that a few weeks more or less need not matter. The room rent, he was confident, would have to be paid strictly in advance so long as their relations continued. She was the kind who would insist upon this formality even after he began to play, at an enormous salary, a certain outstanding part in the Hazards of Hortense. The exigencies, even the adversities, of art would never make the slightest appeal to this hardened soul. So much for that. And daily the hoard waned.
Yet his was not the only tragedy. In the waiting room, where he now spent more of his time, he listened one day to the Montague girl chat through the window with the woman she called Countess.
“Yeah, Pa was double-crossed over at the Bigart. He raised that lovely set of whiskers for Camillia of the Cumberlands and what did he get for it?–just two weeks. Fact! What do you know about that? Hugo has him killed off in the second spool with a squirrel rifle from ambush, and Pa thinking he would draw pay for at least another three weeks. He kicked, but Hugo says the plot demanded it. I bet, at that, he was just trying to cut down his salary list. I bet that continuity this minute shows Pa drinking his corn out of a jug and playing a fiddle for the dance right down to the last scene. Don’t artists get the razz, though. And that Hugo, he’d spend a week in the hot place to save a thin dime. Let me tell you, Countess, don’t you ever get your lemon in his squeezer.”
There were audible murmurs of sympathy from the Countess.
“And so the old trouper had to start out Monday morning to peddle the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then it’s nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In here now he is–something the Acme people are doing. He’s had three days, just lying down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He’s not to wake up even when the fight starts, but sleep right on through it, which they say will be a good gag. Well, maybe. But it’s tough on his home. He gets all his rest daytimes and keeps us restless all night making a new kind of beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he’s through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day he was born. Pa’s so temperamental–like that time he was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I’m having a bit of my own in this Acme piece–God’s Great Outdoors, I think it is–anyway, I’m to be a little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting on the miners’ knees and all like that, so they’ll order more drinks. It certainly takes all kinds of art to make an artist. And next week I got some shipwreck stuff for Baxter, and me with bronchial pneumonia right this minute, and hating tank stuff, anyway. Well, Countess, don’t take any counterfeit money. So long.”
She danced through a doorway and was gone–she was one who seldom descended to plain walking. She would manage a dance step even in the short distance from the casting–office door to the window. It was not of such material, Merton Gill was sure, that creative artists were moulded. And there was no question now of his own utter seriousness. The situation hourly grew more desperate. For a week he had foregone the drug-store pie, so that now he recalled it as very wonderful pie indeed, but he dared no longer indulge in this luxury. An occasional small bag of candy and as much sugar as he could juggle into his coffee must satisfy his craving for sweets. Stoically he awaited the end–some end. The moving-picture business seemed to be still on the rocks, but things must take a turn.
He went over the talk of the Montague girl. Her father had perhaps been unfairly treated, but at least he was working again. And there were other actors who would go unshaven for even a sleeping part in the bar-room scene of God’s Great Outdoors. Merton Gill knew one, and rubbed his shaven chin. He thought, too, of the girl’s warning about counterfeit money. He had not known that the casting director’s duties required her to handle money, but probably he had overlooked this item in her routine. And was counterfeit money about? He drew out his own remaining bill and scrutinized it anxiously. It seemed to be genuine. He hoped it was, for Mrs. Patterson’s sake, and was relieved when she accepted it without question that night.
Later he tested the handful of silver that remained to him and prayed earnestly that an increase of prosperity be granted to producers of the motion picture. With the silver he eked out another barren week, only to face a day the evening of which must witness another fiscal transaction with Mrs. Patterson. And there was no longer a bill for this heartless society creature. He took a long look at the pleasant little room as he left it that morning. The day must bring something but it might not bring him back that night.
At the drug store he purchased a bowl of vegetable soup, loaded it heavily with catsup at intervals when the attendant had other matters on his mind, and seized an extra half–portion of crackers left on their plate by a satiated neighbour. He cared little for catsup, but it doubtless bore nourishing elements, and nourishment was now important. He crumpled his paper napkin and laid upon the marble slab a trifling silver coin. It was the last of his hoard. When he should eat next and under what circumstances were now as uncertain as where he should sleep that night, though he was already resolving that catsup would be no part of his meal. It might be well enough in its place, but he had abundantly proved that it was not, strictly speaking, a food.
He reached the Holden studios and loitered outside for half an hour before daring the daily inquiry at the window. Yet, when at last he did approach it, his waning faith in prayer was renewed, for here in his direst hour was cheering news. It seemed even that his friend beyond the window had been impatient at his coming.
“Just like you to be late when there’s something doing!” she called to him with friendly impatience. “Get over to the dressing rooms on the double-quick. It’s the Victor people doing some Egyptian stuff– they’ll give you a costume. Hurry along!”
And he had lingered over a bowl of soggy crackers soaked, at the last, chiefly in catsup! He hurried, with a swift word of thanks.
In the same dressing room where he had once been made up as a Broadway pleasure seeker he now donned the flowing robe and burnoose of a Bedouin, and by the same grumbling extra his face and hands were stained the rich brown of children of the desert. A dozen other men of the paler race had undergone the same treatment. A sheik of great stature and noble mien smoked an idle cigarette in the doorway. He was accoutred with musket and with pistols in his belt.
An assistant director presently herded the desert men down an alley between two of the big stages and to the beginning of the oriental street that Merton had noticed on his first day within the Holden walls. It was now peopled picturesquely with other Bedouins. Banners hung from the walls and veiled ladies peeped from the latticed balconies. A camel was led excitingly through the crowded way, and donkeys and goats were to be observed. It was a noisy street until a whistle sounded at the farther end, then all was silence while the voice of Henshaw came through the megaphone.
It appeared that long shots of the street were Henshaw’s first need. Up and down it Merton Gill strolled in a negligent manner, stopping perhaps to haggle with the vendor who sold sweetmeats from a tray, or to chat with a tribal brother fresh from the sandy wastes, or to purchase a glass of milk from the man with the goats. He secured a rose from the flower seller, and had the inspiration to toss it to one of the discreet balconies above him, but as he stepped back to do this he was stopped by the watchful assistant director who stood just inside a doorway. “Hey, Bill, none of that! Keep your head down, and pay no attention to the dames. It ain’t done.”
He strolled on with the rose in his hand. Later, and much nearer the end of the street where the cameras were, he saw the sheik of noble mien halt the flower seller, haggle for another rose, place this daintily behind his left ear and stalk on, his musket held over one shoulder, his other hand on a belted pistol. Merton disposed of his rose in the same manner. He admired the sheik for his stature, his majestic carriage, his dark, handsome, yet sinister face with its brooding eyes. He thought this man, at least, would be a true Arab, some real son of the desert who had wandered afar. His manner was so much more authentic than that of the extra people all about.
A whistle blew and the street action was suspended. There was a long wait while cameras were moved up and groups formed under the direction of Henshaw and his assistant. A band of Bedouins were now to worship in the porch of a mosque. Merton Gill was among these. The assistant director initiated them briefly into Moslem rites. Upon prayer rugs they bowed their foreheads to earth in the direction of Mecca.
“What’s the idea of this here?” demanded Merton Gill’s neighbour in aggrieved tones.
“Ssh!” cautioned Merton. “It’s Mass or something like that.” And they bent in unison to this noon-tide devotion.
When this was done Henshaw bustled into the group. “I want about a dozen or fifteen good types for the cafe,” he explained to his assistant. Merton Gill instinctively stood forward, and was presently among those selected. “You’ll do,” said Henshaw, nodding. The director, of course, had not remembered that this was the actor he had distinguished in The Blight of Broadway, yet he had again chosen him for eminence. It showed, Merton felt, that his conviction about the screen value of his face was not ill founded.
The selected types were now herded into a dark, narrow, low-ceiled room with a divan effect along its three walls. A grizzled Arab made coffee over a glowing brazier. Merton Gill sat cross-legged on the divan and became fearful that he would be asked to smoke the narghileh which the assistant director was now preparing. To one who balked at mere cigarettes, it was an evil-appearing device. His neighbour who had been puzzled at prayer-time now hitched up his flowing robe to withdraw a paper of cigarettes from the pocket of a quite occidental garment.
“Go on, smoke cigarettes,” said the assistant director.
“Have one?” said Merton’s neighbour, and he took one. It seemed you couldn’t get away from cigarettes on the screen. East and West were here one. He lighted it, though smoking warily. The noble sheik, of undoubtedly Asiatic origin, came to the doorway overlooking the assistant director’s work on the narghileh. A laden camel halted near him, sneered in an evil manner at the bystanders, and then, lifting an incredible length of upper lip, set his yellow teeth in the nearest shoulder. It was the shoulder of the noble sheik, who instantly rent the air with a plaintive cry: “For the love of Mike!–keep that man-eater off’n me, can’t you?”
His accent had not been that of the Arabian waste-land. Merton Gill was disappointed. So the fellow was only an actor, after all. If he had felt sympathy at all, it would now have been for the camel. The beast was jerked back with profane words and the sheik, rubbing his bitten shoulder, entered the cafe, sitting cross-legged at the end of the divan nearest the door.
“All right, Bob.” The assistant director handed him the tube of the water pipe, and the sheik smoked with every sign of enjoyment. Merton Gill resolved never to play the part of an Arab sheik–at the mercy of man-eating camels and having to smoke something that looked murderous.
Under Henshaw’s direction the grizzled proprietor now served tiny cups of coffee to the sheik and his lesser patrons. Two of these played dominoes, and one or two reclined as in sleep. Cameras were brought up. The interior being to his satisfaction, Henshaw rehearsed the entrance of a little band of European tourists. A beautiful girl in sports garb, a beautiful young man in khaki and puttees, a fine old British father with gray side whiskers shaded by a sun-hat with a flowing veil twined about it. These people sat and were served coffee, staring in a tourist manner at their novel surroundings. The Bedouins, under stern command, ignored them, conversing among themselves over their coffee–all but the sheik.
The sheik had been instantly struck by the fair young English girl. His sinister eyes hung constantly upon her, shifting only when she regarded him, furtively returning when she ceased. When they left the cafe, the sheik arose and placed himself partly in the girl’s way. She paused while his dark eyes caught and held hers. A long moment went before she seemed able to free herself from the hypnotic tension he put upon her. Then he bowed low, and the girl with a nervous laugh passed him.
It could be seen that the sheik meant her no good. He stepped to the door and looked after the group. There was evil purpose in his gaze.
Merton Gill recalled something of Henshaw’s words the first day he had eaten at the cafeteria: “They find this deserted tomb just at nightfall, and he’s alone there with the girl, and he could do anything, but the kick for the audience is that he’s a gentleman and never lays a finger on her.”
This would be the story. Probably the sheik would now arrange with the old gentleman in the sun-hat to guide the party over the desert, and would betray them in order to get the beautiful girl into his power. Of course there would be a kick for the audience when the young fellow proved to be a gentleman in the deserted tomb for a whole night–any moving-picture audience would expect him under these propitious circumstances to be quite otherwise, if the girl were as beautiful as this one. But there would surely be a greater kick when the sheik found them in the tomb and bore the girl off on his camel, after a fight in which the gentleman was momentarily worsted. But the girl would be rescued in time. And probably the piece would be called Desert Passion.
He wished he could know the ending of the story. Indeed he sincerely wished he could work in it to the end, not alone because he was curious about the fate of the young girl in the bad sheik’s power. Undoubtedly the sheik would not prove to be a gentleman, but Merton would like to work to the end of the story because he had no place to sleep and but little assurance of wholesome food. Yet this, it appeared, was not to be. Already word had run among the extra people. Those hired to-day were to be used for to-day only. Tomorrow the desert drama would unfold without them.
Still, he had a day’s pay coming. This time, though, it would be but five dollars–his dress suit had not been needed. And five dollars would appease Mrs. Patterson for another week. Yet what would be the good of sleeping if he had nothing to eat? He was hungry now. Thin soup, ever so plenteously spiced with catsup, was inadequate provender for a working artist. He knew, even as he sat there cross- legged, an apparently self-supporting and care-free Bedouin, that this ensuing five dollars would never be seen by Mrs. Patterson.
There were a few more shots of the cafe’s interior during which one of the inmates carefully permitted his half–consumed cigarette to go out. After that a few more shots of the lively street which, it was now learned, was a street in Cairo. Earnest efforts were made by the throngs in these scenes to give the murderous camel plenty of head room. Some close-ups were taken of the European tourists while they bargained with a native merchant for hammered brassware and rare shawls.
The bad sheik was caught near the group bending an evil glare upon the beauteous English girl, and once the camera turned while she faced him with a little shiver of apprehension. Later the sheik was caught bargaining for a camel train with the innocent-looking old gentleman in the sun-hat. Undoubtedly the sheik was about to lead them into the desert for no good purpose. A dreadful fate seemed in store for the girl, but she must be left to face it without the support of Merton Gill.
The lately hired extras were now dismissed. They trooped back to the dressing room to doff their flowing robes and remove the Bedouin make-up. Merton Gill went from the dressing room to the little window through which he had received his robe and his slip was returned to him signed by the assistant director. It had now become a paper of value, even to Mrs. Patterson; but she was never to know this, for its owner went down the street to another window and relinquished it for a five-dollar bill.
The bill was adorned with a portrait of Benjamin Harrison smugly radiating prosperity from every hair in his beard. He was clearly one who had never gone hungry nor betrayed the confidence of a society woman counting upon her room rent strictly in advance. The portrait of this successful man was borne swiftly to the cafeteria where its present owner lavishly heaped a tray with excellent food and hastened with it to a table. He ate with but slight regard for his surroundings. Beulah Baxter herself might have occupied a neighbouring table without coming to his notice at once. He was very hungry. The catsup-laden soup had proved to be little more than an appetizer.
In his first ardour he forgot his plight. It was not until later in the meal that the accusing face of Mrs. Patterson came between him and the last of his stew which he secured with blotters of bread. Even then he ignored the woman. He had other things to think of. He had to think of where he should sleep that night. But for once he had eaten enough; his optimism was again enthroned.
Sleeping, after all, was not like eating. There were more ways to manage it. The law of sleep would in time enforce itself, while eating did nothing of the sort. You might sleep for nothing, but someone had to be paid if you ate. He cheerfully paid eighty cents for his repast. The catsup as an appetizer had been ruinous.
It was late in the afternoon when he left the cafeteria and the cheerful activities of the lot were drawing to a close. Extra people from the various stages were hurrying to the big dressing room, whence they would presently stream, slips in hand, toward the cashier’s window. Belated principals came in from their work to resume their choice street garments and be driven off in choice motor cars.
Merton Gill in deep thought traversed the street between the big stages and the dressing rooms. Still in deep thought he retraced his steps, and at the front office turned off to the right on a road that led to the deserted street of the Western town. His head bowed in thought he went down this silent thoroughfare, his footsteps echoing along the way lined by the closed shops. The Happy Days Saloon and Joe–Buy or Sell, the pool-room and the restaurant, alike slept for want of custom. He felt again the eeriness of this desertion, and hurried on past the silent places.
Emerging from the lower end of this street he came upon a log cabin where activity still survived. He joined the group before its door. Inside two cameras were recording some drama of the rude frontier. Over glowing coals in the stone fireplace a beautiful young girl prepared food in a long-handled frying pan. At a table in the room’s centre two bearded miners seemed to be appraising a buckskin pouch of nuggets, pouring them from hand to hand. A candle stuck in a bottle flickered beside them. They were honest, kindly faced miners, roughly dressed and heavily bearded, but it could be seen that they had hearts of gold. The beautiful young girl, who wore a simple dress of blue calico, and whose hair hung about her fair face in curls of a radiant buff, now served them food and poured steaming coffee from a large pot.
The miners seemed loth to eat, being excited by the gold nuggets. They must have struck it rich that day, Merton Gill divined, and now with wealth untold they would be planning to send the girl East to school. They both patted her affectionately, keeping from her the great surprise they had in store.
The girl was arch with them, and prettily kissed each upon his bald head. Merton at once saw that she would be the daughter of neither; she would be their ward. And perhaps they weren’t planning to send her to school. Perhaps they were going to send her to fashionable relatives in the East, where she would unwittingly become the rival of her beautiful but cold-hearted cousin for the hand of a rich young stock-broker, and be ill-treated and long for the old miners who would get word of it and buy some fine clothes from Joe–Buy or Sell, and go East to the consternation of the rich relatives and see that their little mountain flower was treated right.
As he identified this photo-play he studied the interior of the cabin, the rough table at which the three now ate, the makeshift chairs, the rifle over the fireplace, the picks and shovels, the shelf along the wall with its crude dishes, the calico curtain screening off what would be the dressing room of the little mountain flower. It was a home-like room, for all its roughness. Along one wall were two bunks, one above the other, well supplied with blankets.
The director, after a final shot of one of the miners being scalded by his coffee which he drank from a saucer, had said, “All right, boys! We’ll have the fight first thing in the morning.”
Merton Gill passed on. He didn’t quite know what the fight would be about. Surely the two miners wouldn’t fight. Perhaps another miner of loose character would come along and try to jump their claim, or attempt some dirty work with the little girl. Something like that. He carried with him the picture of the homey little ulterior, the fireplace with its cooking utensils, the two bunks with their ample stock of blankets–the crude door closed with a wooden bar and a leather latch-string, which hung trustfully outside.
In other circumstances–chiefly those in which Merton Gill had now been the prominent figure in the film world he meant one day to become–he would on this night have undoubtedly won public attention for his mysterious disappearance. The modest room in the Patterson home, to which for three months he had unfailingly come after the first picture show, on this night went untenanted. The guardian at the Holden gate would have testified that he had not passed out that way, and the way through the offices had been closed at five, subsequent to which hour several witnesses could have sworn to seeing him still on the lot.
In the ensuing search even the tank at the lower end of the lot might have been dragged–without result.
Being little known to the public, however, and in the Patterson home it being supposed that you could never tell about motion-picture actors, his disappearance for the night caused absolutely no slightest ripple. Public attention as regarded the young man remained at a mirror-like calm, unflawed by even the mildest curiosity. He had been seen, perhaps, though certainly not noted with any interest, to be one of the group watching a night scene in front of one of the Fifth Avenue mansions.
Lights shone from the draped windows of this mansion and from its portals issued none other than Muriel Mercer, who, as Vera Vanderpool, freed at last from the blight of Broadway, was leaving her palatial home to cast her lot finally with the ardent young tenement worker with the high forehead. She descended the brown- stone steps, paused once to look back upon the old home where she had been taught to love pleasure above the worth-while things of life, then came on to the waiting limousine, being greeted here by the young man with the earnest forehead who had won her to the better way.
The missing youth might later have been observed, but probably was not, walking briskly in the chill night toward the gate that led to the outer world. But he wheeled abruptly before reaching this gate, and walked again briskly, this time debouching from the main thoroughfare into the black silence of the Western village. Here his pace slackened, and halfway down the street he paused irresolutely. He was under the wooden porch of the Fashion Restaurant–Give our Tamales a Trial. He lingered here but a moment, however, then lurked on down the still thoroughfare, keeping well within the shadow of the low buildings. Just beyond the street was the log cabin of the big-hearted miners. A moment later he could not have been observed even by the keenest eye.
Nothing marked his disappearance, at least nothing that would have been noted by the casual minded. He had simply gone. He was now no more than the long-vanished cowboys and sheriffs and gamblers and petty tradesmen who had once peopled this street of silence and desolation.
A night watchman came walking presently, flashing an electric torch from side to side. He noticed nothing. He was, indeed, a rather imaginative man, and he hoped he would not notice anything. He did not like coming down this ghostly street, which his weak mind would persist in peopling with phantom crowds from long-played picture dramas. It gave him the creeps, as he had more than once confessed. He hurried on, flashing his torch along the blind fronts of the shops in a perfunctory manner. He was especially nervous when he came to corners. And he was glad when he issued from the little street into the wider one that was well lighted.
How could he have been expected to notice a very trifling incongruous detail as he passed the log cabin? Indeed many a keener- eyed and entirely valorous night watchman might have neglected to observe that the leathern latch-string of the cabin’s closed door was no longer hanging outside.
CHAPTER VIII
CLIFFORD ARMYTAGE, THE OUTLAW
Dawn brought the wide stretches of the Holden lot into gray relief. It lightened the big yellow stages and crept down the narrow street of the Western town where only the ghosts of dead plays stalked. It burnished the rich fronts of the Fifth Avenue mansions and in the next block illumined the rough sides of a miner’s cabin.
With more difficulty it seeped through the blurred glass of the one window in this structure and lightened the shadows of its interior to a pale gray. The long-handled frying-pan rested on the hearth where the little girl had left it. The dishes of the overnight meal were still on the table; the vacant chairs sprawled about it; and the rifle was in its place above the rude mantel; the picks and shovels awaited the toil of a new day. All seemed as it had been when the director had closed the door upon it the previous night.
But then the blankets in the lower bunk were seen to heave and to be thrust back from the pale face of Merton Gill. An elbow came into play, and the head was raised. A gaze still vague with sleep travelled about the room in dull alarm. He was waking up in his little room at the Patterson house and he couldn’t make it look right. He rubbed his eyes vigorously and pushed himself farther up. His mind resumed its broken threads. He was where he had meant to be from the moment he had spied the blankets in those bunks.
In quicker alarm, now, he reached for his watch. Perhaps he had slept too late and would be discovered–arrested, jailed! He found his watch on the floor beside the bunk. Seven o’clock. He was safe. He could dress at leisure, and presently be an early-arriving actor on the Holden lot. He wondered how soon he could get food at the cafeteria. Sleeping in this mountain cabin had cursed him with a ravenous appetite, as if he had indeed been far off in the keen air of the North Woods.
He crept from the warm blankets, and from under the straw mattress– in which one of the miners had hidden the pouch of nuggets–he took his newly pressed trousers. Upon a low bench across the room was a battered tin wash–basin, a bucket of water brought by the little girl from the spring, and a bar of yellow soap. He made a quick toilet, and at seven-thirty, a good hour before the lot would wake up, he was dressed and at the door.
It might be chancy, opening that door; so he peered through a narrow crack at first, listening intently. He could hear nothing and no one was in sight. He pushed the latch–string through its hole, then opened the door enough to emit his slender shape.
A moment later, ten feet from the closed door, he stood at ease, scanning the log cabin as one who, passing by, had been attracted by its quaint architecture. Then glancing in both directions to be again sure that he was unobserved, he walked away from his new home.
He did not slink furtively. He took the middle of the street and there was a bit of swagger to his gait. He felt rather set up about this adventure. He reached what might have been called the lot’s civic centre and cast a patronizing eye along the ends of the big stages and the long, low dressing–room building across from them. Before the open door of the warehouse he paused to watch a truck being loaded with handsome furniture–a drawing room was evidently to be set on one of the stages. Rare rugs and beautiful chairs and tables were carefully brought out. He had rather a superintending air as he watched this process. He might have been taken for the owner of these costly things, watching to see that no harm befell them. He strolled on when the truck had received its load. Such people as he had met were only artisans, carpenters, electricians, property-men. He faced them all confidently, with glances of slightly amused tolerance. They were good men in their way but they were not actors–not artists.
In the neatly landscaped little green place back of the office building a climbing rose grew on a trellis. He plucked a pink bud, fixed it in his lapel, and strolled down the street past the dressing rooms. Across from these the doors of the big stages were slid back, and inside he could see that sets were being assembled. The truckload of furniture came to one of these doors and he again watched it as the stuff was carried inside.
For all these workmen knew, he might presently be earning a princely salary as he acted amid these beautiful objects, perhaps attending a reception in a Fifth Avenue mansion where the father of a beautiful New York society girl would tell him that he must first make good before he could aspire to her hand. And he would make good–out there in the great open spaces, where the girl would come to him after many adventures and where they would settle to an untroubled future in the West they both loved.
He had slept; he knew where–with luck–he could sleep again; and he had money in his pocket for several more ample meals. At this moment he felt equal to anything. No more than pleasantly aware of his hunger, sharpened by the walk in this keen morning air, he made a nonchalant progress toward the cafeteria. Motor cars were now streaming through the gate, disgorging other actors–trim young men and beautiful young women who must hurry to the dressing rooms while he could sit at ease in a first-class cafeteria and eat heavily of sustaining foods. Inside he chose from the restricted menu offered by the place at this early hour and ate in a leisurely, almost condescending manner. Half-a-dozen other early comers wolfed their food as if they feared to be late for work, but he suffered no such anxiety. He consumed the last morsel that his tray held, drained his cup of coffee, and jingled the abundant silver coin in his pocket.
True, underneath it, as he plumed himself upon his adventure, was a certain pestering consciousness that all was not so well with him as observers might guess. But he resolutely put this away each time it threatened to overwhelm him. He would cross no bridge until he came to it. He even combated this undercurrent of sanity by wording part of an interview with himself some day to appear in Photo Land:
“Clifford Armytage smiled that rare smile which his admirers have found so winning on the silver screen–a smile reminiscent, tender, eloquent of adversities happily surmounted. ‘Yes,’ he said frankly in the mellow tones that are his, ‘I guess there were times when I almost gave up the struggle. I recall one spell, not so many years ago, when I camped informally on the Holden lot, sleeping where I could find a bed and stinting myself in food to eke out my little savings. Yet I look back upon that time’–he mischievously pulled the ears of the magnificent Great Dane that lolled at his feet–‘as one of the happiest in my career, because I always knew that my day would come. I had done only a few little bits, but they had stood out, and the directors had noticed me. Not once did I permit myself to become discouraged, and so I say to your readers who may feel that they have in them the stuff for truly creative screen art–‘”
He said it, dreaming above the barren tray, said it as Harold Parmalee had said it in a late interview extorted from him by Augusta Blivens for the refreshment of his host of admirers who read Photo Land. He was still saying it as he paid his check at the counter, breaking off only to reflect that fifty-five cents was a good deal to be paying for food so early in the day. For of course he must eat again before seeking shelter of the humble miner’s cabin.
It occurred to him that the blankets might be gone by nightfall. He hoped they would have trouble with the fight scene. He hoped there would be those annoying delays that so notoriously added to the cost of producing the screen drama–long waits, when no one seemed to know what was being waited for, and bored actors lounged about in apathy. He hoped the fight would be a long fight. You needed blankets even in sunny California.
He went out to pass an enlivening day, fairly free of misgiving. He found an abundance of entertainment. On one stage he overlooked for half an hour a fragment of the desert drama which he had assisted the previous day. A covered incline led duskily down to the deserted tomb in which the young man and the beautiful English girl were to take shelter for the night. They would have eluded the bad sheik for a little while, and in the tomb the young man would show himself to be a gentleman by laying not so much as a finger upon the defenceless girl.
But this soon palled upon the watching connoisseur. The actual shots were few and separated by barren intervals of waiting for that mysterious something which photoplays in production seemed to need. Being no longer identified with this drama he had lost much of his concern over the fate in store for the girl, though he knew she would emerge from the ordeal as pure as she was beautiful–a bit foolish at moments, perhaps, but good.
He found that he was especially interested in bedroom scenes. On Stage Four a sumptuous bedroom, vacant for the moment, enchained him for a long period of contemplation. The bed was of some rare wood ornately carved, with a silken canopy, spread with finest linen and quilts of down, its pillows opulent in their embroidered cases. The hide of a polar bear, its head mounted with open jaws, spread over the rich rug beside the bed. He wondered about this interestingly. Probably the stage would be locked at night. Still, at a suitable hour, he could descreetly find out. On another stage a bedroom likewise intrigued him, though this was a squalid room in a tenement and the bed was a cheap thing sparsely covered and in sad disorder. People were working on this set, and he presently identified the play, for Muriel Mercer in a neat black dress entered to bring comfort to the tenement dwellers. But this play, too, had ceased to interest him. He knew that Vera Vanderpool had escaped the blight of Broadway to choose the worthwhile, the true, the vital things of life, and that was about all he now cared to know of the actual play. This tenement bed had become for him its outstanding dramatic value. He saw himself in it for a good night’s rest, waking refreshed in plenty of time to be dressed and out before the tenement people would need it. He must surely learn if the big sliding doors to these stages were locked overnight.
He loitered about the stages until late afternoon, with especial attention to sleeping apartments. In one gripping drama he felt cheated. The set showed the elaborately fitted establishment of a fashionable modiste. Mannequins in wondrous gowns came through parted curtains to parade before the shop’s clientele, mostly composed of society butterflies. One man hovered attentive about the most beautiful of these, and whispered entertainingly as she scanned the gowns submitted to her choice. He was a dissolute–looking man, although faultlessly arrayed. His hair was thin, his eyes were cruel, and his face bespoke self-indulgence.
The expert Merton Gill at once detected that the beautiful young woman he whispered to would be one of those light–headed wives who care more for fashionable dress than for the good name of their husbands. He foresaw that the creature would be trapped into the power of this villain by her love of finery, though he was sure that the end would find her still a good woman. The mannequins finished their parade and the throng of patrons broke up. The cameras were pushed to an adjoining room where the French proprietor of the place figured at a desk. The dissolute pleasure-seeker came back to question him. His errant fancy had been caught by one of the mannequins–the most beautiful of them, a blonde with a flowerlike face and a figure whose perfection had been boldly attested by the gowns she had worn. The unprincipled proprietor at once demanded from a severe-faced forewoman that this girl be sent for, after which he discreetly withdrew. The waiting scoundrel sat and complacently pinched the ends of his small dark mustache. It could be seen that he was one of those who believe that money will buy anything.
The fair girl entered and was leeringly entreated to go out to dinner with him. It appeared that she never went out to dinner with any one, but spent her evenings with her mother who was very, very ill. Her unworthy admirer persisted. Then the telephone on the manager’s desk called her. Her mother was getting worse. The beautiful face was now suffused with agony, but this did not deter the man from his loathsome advances. There was another telephone call. She must come at once if she were to see her mother alive. The man seized her. They struggled. All seemed lost, even the choice gown she still wore; but she broke away to be told over the telephone that her mother had died. Even this sad news made no impression upon the wretch. He seemed to be a man of one idea. Again he seized her, and the maddened girl stabbed him with a pair of long gleaming shears that had lain on the manager’s desk. He fell lifeless at her feet, while the girl stared in horror at the weapon she still grasped.
Merton Gill would not have lingered for this. There were tedious waits, and scenes must be rehearsed again and again. Even the agony of the girl as she learned of her mother’s passing must be done over and over at the insistence of a director who seemed to know what a young girl should feel at these moments. But Merton had watched from his place back of the lights with fresh interest from the moment it was known that the girl’s poor old mother was an invalid, for he had at first believed that the mother’s bedroom would be near by. He left promptly when it became apparent that the mother’s bedroom would not be seen in this drama. They would probably show the doctor at the other telephone urging the girl to hurry home, and show him again announcing that all was over, but the expense of mother and her deathbed had been saved. He cared little for the ending of this play. Already he was becoming a little callous to the plight of beautiful young girls threatened with the loss of that which they held most dear.
Purposely all day he had avoided the neighbourhood of his humble miner’s home. He thought it as well that he should not be seen much around there. He ate again at four o’clock, heartily and rather expensively, and loafed about the stages until six. Then he strolled leisurely down the village street and out the lower end to where he could view the cabin. Work for the day was plainly over. The director and his assistant lingered before the open door in consultation. A property man and an electrician were engaged inside, but a glance as he passed showed that the blankets were still in the bunks. He did not wait to see more, but passed on with all evidences of disinterest in this lowly abode.
He ascertained that night that the fight must have been had. The table was overturned, one of the chairs wrecked, and there were other signs of disorder. Probably it had been an excellent fight; probably these primitive men of the woods had battled desperately. But he gave little consideration to the combat, and again slept warmly under the blankets. Perhaps they would fight again to-morrow, or perhaps there would be less violent bits of the drama that would secure him another night of calm repose.
The following morning found him slightly disturbed by two unforeseen needs arising from his novel situation. He looked carefully at his collar, wondering how many days he would be able to keep it looking like a fresh collar, and he regretted that he had not brought his safety-razor to this new home. Still the collar was in excellent shape as yet, and a scrutiny of his face in the cracked mirror hanging on the log wall determined that he could go at least another day without shaving. His beard was of a light growth, gentle in texture, and he was yet far from the plight of Mr. Montague. Eventually, to be sure, he would have to go to the barber shop on the lot and pay money to be shaved, which seemed a pity, because an actor could live indefinitely unshaven but could live without food for the merest fragment of time.
He resolved to be on the lookout that day for a barber-shop set. He believed they were not common in the photodrama, still one might be found.
He limited himself to the lightest of breakfasts. He had timidly refrained from counting his silver but he knew he must be frugal. He rejoiced at this economy until late afternoon when, because of it, he simply had to eat a heavier dinner than he had expected to need. There was something so implacable about this demand for food. If you skimped in the morning you must make amends at the next meal. He passed the time as on the previous day, a somewhat blase actor resting between pictures, and condescending to beguile the tedium by overlooking the efforts of his professional brethren. He could find no set that included a barber shop, although they were beds on every hand. He hoped for another night in the cabin, but if that were not to be, there was a bed easy of access on Stage Three. When he had observed it, a ghastly old father was coughing out his life under its blankets, nursed only by his daughter, a beautiful young creature who sewed by his bedside, and who would doubtless be thrown upon the world in the very next reel, though–Merton was glad to note–probably not until the next day.
Yet there was no need for this couch of the tubercular father, for action in the little cabin was still on. After making the unhappy discovery in the cafeteria that his appetite could not be hoodwinked by the clumsy subterfuge of calling coffee and rolls a breakfast some six hours previously, he went boldly down to stand before his home. Both miners were at work inside. The room had been placed in order again, though the little mountain flower was gone. A letter, he gathered, had been received from her, and one of the miners was about to leave on a long journey.
Merton could not be sure, but he supposed that the letter from the little girl told that she was unhappy in her new surroundings, perhaps being ill-treated by the supercilious Eastern relatives. The miner who was to remain helped the other to pack his belongings in a quaint old carpet sack, and together they undid a bundle which proved to contain a splendid new suit. Not only this, but now came a scene of eloquent appeal to the watcher outside the door. The miner who was to remain expressed stern disapproval of the departing miner’s beard. It would never do, he was seen to intimate, and when the other miner portrayed helplessness a new package was unwrapped and a safety razor revealed to his shocked gaze.
At this sight Merton Gill felt himself growing too emotional for a mere careless bystander, and withdrew to a distance where he could regain better control of himself. When he left the miner to be shorn was betraying comic dismay while the other pantomimed the correct use of the implement his thoughtfulness had provided. When he returned after half–an-hour’s rather nervous walk up another street, the departing miner was clean shaven and one might note the new razor glittering on the low bench beside the battered tin basin.
They worked late in his home that night; trifling scenes were taken and retaken. The departing miner had to dress in his splendid but ill-fitting new garments and to bid an affectionate farewell to his partner, then had to dress in his old clothes again for some bit that had been forgotten, only to don the new suit for close-ups. At another time Merton Gill might have resented this tediously drawn- out affair which was keeping him from his rest, for he had come to look upon this structure as one having rights in it after a certain hour, but a sight of the razor which had not been touched allayed any possible feeling of irritation.
It was nine-thirty before the big lights jarred finally off and the director said, “That’s all, boys.” Then he turned to call, “Jimmie! Hey, Jimmie! Where’s that prop-rustler gone to now?”
“Here, Mr. Burke, yes, sir.”
“We’ve finished the shack stuff. Let’s see–” He looked at the watch on his wrist–“That’ll be all for tonight. Strike this first thing tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jimmie. The door was closed and the men walked away. Merton trailed them a bit, not remaining too pointedly near the cabin. He circled around through Fifth Avenue to regain the place.
Softly he let himself in and groped through the dark until his hand closed upon the abandoned razor. Satisfying himself that fresh blades had accompanied it, he made ready for bed. He knew it was to be his last night in this shelter. The director had told Jimmie to strike it first thing in the morning. The cabin would still be there, but it would contain no homely furniture, no chairs, no table, no wash-basin, no safety-razor and, most vital of lacks–it would be devoid of blankets.
Yet this knowledge did not dismay him. He slept peacefully after praying that something good would happen to him. He put it that way very simply. He had placed himself, it seemed, where things could only happen to him. He was, he felt, beyond bringing them about.
CHAPTER IX
MORE WAYS THAN ONE
Early he was up to bathe and shave. He shaved close to make it last longer, until his tender face reddened under the scraping. Probably he would not find another cabin in which a miner would part with his beard for an Eastern trip. Probably he would have to go to the barber the next time. He also succeeded, with soap and water, in removing a stain from his collar. It was still a decent collar; not immaculate, perhaps, but entirely possible.
This day he took eggs with his breakfast, intending to wheedle his appetite with a lighter second meal than it had demanded the day before. He must see if this would not average better on the day’s overhead.
After breakfast he was irresistibly drawn to view the moving picture of his old home being dismantled. He knew now that he might stand brazenly there without possible criticism. He found Jimmy and a companion property-boy already busy. Much of the furniture was outside to be carted away. Jimmy, as Merton lolled idly in the doorway, emptied the blackened coffee pot into the ashes of the fireplace and then proceeded to spoon into the same refuse heap half a kettle of beans upon which the honest miners had once feasted. The watcher deplored that he had not done more than taste the beans when he had taken his final survey of the place this morning. They had been good beans, but to do more than taste them would have been stealing. Now he saw them thrown away and regretted that he could not have known what their fate was to be. There had been enough of them to save him a day’s expenses.
He stood aside as the two boys brought out the cooking utensils, the rifle, the miners’ tools, to stow them in a waiting handcart. When they had loaded this vehicle they trundled it on up the narrow street of the Western town. Yet they went only a little way, halting before one of the street’s largest buildings. A sign above its wooden porch flaunted the name Crystal Palace Hotel. They unlocked its front door and took the things from the cart inside.
From the street the watcher could see them stowing these away. The room appeared to contain a miscellaneous collection of articles needed in the ruder sort of photodrama. Emptying their cart, they returned with it to the cabin for another load. Merton Gill stepped to the doorway and peered in from apparently idle curiosity. He could see a row of saddles on wooden supports; there were kitchen stoves, lamps, painted chairs, and heavy earthenware dishes on shelves. His eyes wandered over these articles until they came to rest upon a pile of blankets at one side of the room. They were neatly folded, and they were many.
Down before the cabin he could see the handcart being reloaded by Jimmie and his helper. Otherwise the street was empty. The young man at the doorway stepped lightly in and regarded the windows on either side of the door. He sauntered to the street and appeared to be wondering what he would examine next in this curious world. He passed Jimmie and the other boy returning with the last load from the cabin. He noted at the top of the load the mattress on which he had lain for three nights and the blankets that had warmed him. But he was proved not to be so helpless as he had thought. Again he knew where a good night’s rest might be had by one using ordinary discretion.
Again that day, the fourth of his double life, he went the mad pace, a well-fed, carefree youth, sauntering idly from stage to stage, regarding nonchalantly the joys and griefs, the twistings of human destiny there variously unfolded. Not only was he this to the casual public notice; to himself he was this, at least consciously. True, in those nether regions of the mind so lately discovered and now being so expertly probed by Science, in the mind’s dark basement, so to say, a certain unlovely fronted dragon of reality would issue from the gloom where it seemed to have been lurking and force itself upon his notice.
This would be at oddly contented moments when he least feared the future, when he was most successfully being to himself all that he must seem to others. At such times when he leisurely walked a world of plenty and fruition, the dragon would half-emerge from its subconscious lair to chill him with its head composed entirely of repellent facts. Then a stout effort would be required to send the thing back where it belonged, to those lower, decently hidden levels of the mind–life.
And the dragon was cunning. From hour to hour, growing more restive, it employed devices of craft and subtlety. As when Merton Gill, carefree to the best of his knowledge, strolling lightly to another point of interest, graciously receptive to the pleasant life about him, would suddenly discover that a part of his mind without superintendence had for some moments been composing a letter, something that ran in effect:
“Mr. Gashwiler, dear sir, I have made certain changes in my plans since I first came to sunny California and getting quite a little homesick for good old Simsbury and I thought I would write you about taking back my old job in the emporium, and now about the money for the ticket back to Simsbury, the railroad fare is–“
He was truly amazed when he found this sort of thing going on in that part of his mind he didn’t watch. It was scandalous. He would indignantly snatch the half-finished letter and tear it up each time he found it unaccountably under way.
It was surely funny the way your mind would keep doing things you didn’t want it to do. As, again, this very morning when, with his silver coin out in his hand, he had merely wished to regard it as a great deal of silver coin, a store of plenty against famine, which indeed it looked to be under a not-too-minute scrutiny. It looked like as much as two dollars and fifty cents, and he would have preferred to pocket it again with this impression. Yet that rebellious other part of his mind had basely counted the coin even while he eyed it approvingly, and it had persisted in shouting aloud that it was not two dollars and fifty cents but one dollar and eighty–five cents.
The counting part of the mind made no comment on this discrepancy; it did not say that this discovery put things in a very different light. It merely counted, registered the result, and ceased to function, with an air of saying that it would ascertain the facts without prejudice and you could do what you liked about them. It didn’t care.
That night a solitary guest enjoyed the quiet hospitality of the Crystal Palace Hotel. He might have been seen–but was not–to effect a late evening entrance to this snug inn by means of a front window which had, it would seem, at some earlier hour of the day, been unfastened from within. Here a not-too-luxurious but sufficing bed was contrived on the floor of the lobby from a pile of neatly folded blankets at hand, and a second night’s repose was enjoyed by the lonely patron, who again at an early hour of the morning, after thoughtfully refolding the blankets that had protected him, was at some pains to leave the place as he had entered it without attracting public notice, perchance of unpleasant character.
On this day it would not have been possible for any part of the mind whatsoever to misvalue the remaining treasure of silver coin. It had become inconsiderable, and even if kept from view could be, and was, counted again and again by mere blind fingertips. They contracted, indeed, a senseless habit of confining themselves in a trouser’s pocket to count the half-dollar, the quarter, and the two dimes long after the total was too well known to its owner.
Nor did this total, unimpressive at best, long retain even these poor dimensions. A visit to the cafeteria, in response to the imperious demands of a familiar organic process, resulted in less labour, by two dimes, for the stubbornly reiterative fingertips.
An ensuing visit to the Holden lot barber, in obedience to social demands construed to be equally imperious with the physical, reduced all subsequent counting, whether by fingertips or a glance of the eye, to barest mechanical routine. A single half-dollar is easy to count. Still, on the following morning there were two coins to count. True, both were dimes.
A diligent search among the miscellany of the Crystal Palace Hotel had failed to reveal a single razor. The razor used by the miner should in all reason have been found, but there was neither that nor any other. The baffled seeker believed there must have been crooked work somewhere. Without hesitation he found either Jimmie or his companion to be guilty of malfeasance in office. But at least one item of more or less worried debate was eliminated. He need no longer weigh mere surface gentility against the stern demands of an active metabolism. A shave cost a quarter. Twenty cents would not buy a shave, but it would buy at the cafeteria something more needful to any one but a fop.
He saw himself in the days to come–if there were very many days to come, of which he was now not too certain–descending to the unwholesome artistic level of the elder Montague. He would, in short, be compelled to peddle the brush. And of course as yet it was nothing like a brush–nothing to kindle the eye of a director needing genuine brushes. In the early morning light he fingered a somewhat gaunt chin and wondered how long “they” would require to grow. Not yet could he be taken for one of those actors compelled by the rigorous exactions of creative screen art to let Nature have its course with his beard. At present he merely needed a shave.
And the collar had not improved with usage. Also, as the day wore on, coffee with one egg proved to have been not long-enduring fare for this private in the army of the unemployed. Still, his morale was but slightly impaired. There were always ways, it seemed. And the later hours of the hungry afternoon were rather pleasantly occupied in dwelling upon one of them.
The sole guest of the Crystal Palace Hotel entered the hostelry that night somewhat earlier than was usual; indeed at the very earliest moment that foot traffic through the narrow street seemed to have diminished to a point where the entry could be effected without incurring the public notice which he at these moments so sincerely shunned. After a brief interval inside the lobby he issued from his window with certain objects in hand, one of which dropped as he clambered out. The resulting clamour seemed to rouse far echoes along the dead street, and he hastily withdrew, with a smothered exclamation of dismay, about the nearest corner of the building until it could be ascertained that echoes alone had been aroused.
After a little breathless waiting he slunk down the street, keeping well within friendly shadows, stepping softly, until he reached the humble cabin where so lately the honest miners had enacted their heart-tragedy. He jerked the latch-string of the door and was swiftly inside, groping a way to the fireplace. Here he lighted matches, thoughtfully appropriated that morning from the cafeteria counter. He shielded the blaze with one hand while with the other he put to use the articles he had brought from his hotel.
Into a tin cooking pot with a long handle he now hastily ladled well-cooked beans from the discarded heap in the fireplace, by means of an iron spoon. He was not too careful. More or less ashes accompanied the nutritious vegetables as the pot grew to be half full. That was a thing to be corrected later, and at leisure. When the last bean had been salvaged the flame of another match revealed an unsuspected item–a half-loaf of bread nestled in the ashes at the far corner of the fireplace. It lacked freshness; was, in truth, withered and firm to the touch, but doubtless more wholesome than bread freshly baked.
He was again on his humble cot in the seclusion of the Crystal Palace Hotel. Half-reclining, he ate at leisure. It being inadvisable to light matches here he ate chiefly by the touch system. There was a marked alkaline flavour to the repast, not unpleasantly counteracted by a growth of vegetable mould of delicate lavender tints which Nature had been decently spreading over the final reduction of this provender to its basic elements. But the time was not one in which to cavil about minor infelicities. Ashes wouldn’t hurt any one if taken in moderation; you couldn’t see the mould in a perfectly dark hotel; and the bread was good.
The feast was prolonged until a late hour, but the finger–tips that had accurately counted money in a dark pocket could ascertain in a dark hotel that a store of food still remained. He pulled the blankets about him and sank comfortably to rest. There was always some way.
Breakfast the next morning began with the promise of only moderate enjoyment. Somehow in the gray light sifting through the windows the beans did not look as good as they had tasted the night before, and the early mouthfuls were less blithesome on the palate than the remembered ones of yesterday. He thought perhaps he was not so hungry as he had been at his first encounter with them. He delicately removed a pocket of ashes from the centre, and tried again. They tasted better now. The mould of tender tints was again visible but he made no effort to avoid it. For his appetite had reawakened. He was truly hungry, and ate with an entire singleness of purpose.
Toward the last of the meal his conscious self feebly prompted him to quit, to save against the inevitable hunger of the night. But the voice was ignored. He was now clay to the moulding of the subconscious. He could have saved a few of the beans when reason was again enthroned, but they were so very few that he fatuously thought them not worth saving. Might as well make a clean job of it. He restored the stewpan and spoon to their places and left his hotel. He was fed. To-day something else would have to happen.
The plush hat cocked at a rakish angle, he walked abroad with something of the old confident swagger. Once he doubtfully fingered the sprouting beard, but resolutely dismissed a half-formed notion of finding out how the Holden lot barber would regard a proposition from a new patron to open a charge account. If nothing worse than remaining unshaven was going to happen to him, what cared he? The collar was still pretty good. Why let his beard be an incubus? He forgot it presently in noticing that the people arriving on the Holden lot all looked so extremely well fed. He thought it singular that he should never before have noticed how many well-fed people one saw in a day.
Late in the afternoon his explorations took him beyond the lower end of his little home street, and he was attracted by sounds of the picture drama from a rude board structure labelled the High Gear Dance Hall. He approached and entered with that calm ease of manner which his days on the lot had brought to a perfect bloom. No one now would ever suppose that he was a mere sightseer or chained to the Holden lot by circumstances over which he had ceased to exert the slightest control.
The interior of the High Gear Dance Hall presented nothing new to his seasoned eye. It was the dance-hall made familiar by many a smashing five-reel Western. The picture was, quite normally, waiting. Electricians were shoving about the big light standards, cameras were being moved, and bored actors were loafing informally at the round tables or chatting in groups about the set.
One actor alone was keeping in his part. A ragged, bearded, unkempt elderly man in red shirt and frayed overalls, a repellent fell hat pulled low over his brow, reclined on the floor at the end of the bar, his back against a barrel. Apparently he slept. A flash of remembrance from the Montague girl’s talk identified this wretched creature. This was what happened to an actor who had to peddle the brush. Perhaps for days he had been compelled to sleep there in the interests of dance-hall atmosphere.
He again scanned the group, for he remembered, too, that the Montague girl would also be working here in God’s Great Outdoors. His eyes presently found her. She was indeed a blonde hussy, short- skirted, low-necked, pitifully rouged, depraved beyond redemption. She stood at the end of the piano, and in company with another of the dance-hall girls who played the accompaniment, she was singing a ballad the refrain of which he caught as “God calls them Angels in Heaven, we call them Mothers here.”
The song ended, the Montague girl stepped to the centre of the room, looked aimlessly about her, then seized an innocent bystander, one of the rough characters frequenting this unsavoury resort, and did a dance with him among the tables. Tiring of this, she flitted across the room and addressed the bored director who impatiently awaited the changing of lights. She affected to consider him a reporter who had sought an interview with her. She stood erect, facing him with one hand on a hip, the other patting and readjusting her blonde coiffure.
“Really,” she began in a voice of pained dignity, “I am at a loss to understand why the public should be so interested in me. What can I say to your readers–I who am so wholly absorbed in my art that I can’t think of hardly anything else? Why will not the world let us alone? Hold on–don’t go!”
She had here pretended that the reporter was taking her at her word. She seized him by a lapel to which she clung while with her other arm she encircled a post, thus anchoring the supposed intruder into her private affairs. “As I was saying,” she resumed, “all this publicity is highly distasteful to the artist, and yet since you have forced yourself in here I may as well say a few little things about how good I am and how I got that way. Yes, I have nine motor cars, and I just bought a lace tablecloth for twelve hundred bones–“
She broke off inconsequently, poor victim of her constitutional frivolity. The director grinned after her as she danced away, though Merton Gill had considered her levity in the worst of taste. Then her eye caught him as he stood modestly back of the working electricians and she danced forward again in his direction. He would have liked to evade her but saw that he could not do this gracefully.
She greeted him with an impudent grin. “Why, hello, trouper! As I live, the actin’ Kid!” She held out a hand to him and he could not well refuse it. He would have preferred to “up-stage” her once more, as she had phrased it in her low jargon, but he was cornered. Her grip of his hand quite astonished him with its vigour.
“Well, how’s everything with you? Everything jake?” He tried for a show of easy confidence. “Oh, yes, yes, indeed, everything is.”
“Well, that’s good, Kid.” But she was now without the grin, and was running a practised eye over what might have been called his production. The hat was jaunty enough, truly a hat of the successful, but all below that, the not-too-fresh collar, the somewhat rumpled coat, the trousers crying for an iron despite their nightly compression beneath their slumbering owner, the shoes not too recently polished, and, more than all, a certain hunted though still-defiant look in the young man’s eyes, seemed to speak eloquently under the shrewd glance she bent on him.
“Say, listen here, Old-timer, remember I been trouping man and boy for over forty year and it’s hard to fool me–you working?”
He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the very apparent real kindness in her tone. “Well,” he looked about the set vaguely in his discomfort, “you see, right now I’m between pictures–you know how it is.”
Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: “Well, all right–but you needn’t blush about it, Kid.” The blush she detected became more flagrant.
“Well, I–you see–” he began again, but he was saved from being explicit by the call of an assistant director.
“Miss Montague. Miss Montague–where’s that Flips girl–on the set, please.” She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little later to look for him he had gone.
He went to bed that night when darkness had made this practicable, and under his blankets whiled away a couple of wakeful hours by running tensely dramatic films of breakfast, dinner, and supper at the Gashwiler home. It seemed that you didn’t fall asleep so quickly when you had eaten nothing since early morning. Never had he achieved such perfect photography as now of the Gashwiler corned- beef hash and light biscuits, the Gashwiler hot cakes and sausage, and never had Gashwiler so impressively carved the Saturday night four-rib roast of tender beef. Gashwiler achieved a sensational triumph in the scene, being accorded all the close–ups that the most exacting of screen actors could wish. His knife-work was perfect. He held his audience enthralled by his technique.
Mrs. Gashwiler, too, had a small but telling part in the drama to- night; only a character bit, but one of those poignant bits that stand out in the memory. The subtitle was, “Merton, won’t you let me give you another piece of the mince pie?” That was all, and yet, as screen artists say, it got over. There came very near to being not a dry eye in the house when the simple words were flashed beside an insert of thick, flaky-topped mince pies with quarters cut from them to reveal their noble interiors
Sleep came at last while he was regretting that lawless orgy of the morning. He needn’t have cleaned up those beans in that silly way. He could have left a good half of them. He ran what might have been considered a split-reel comedy of the stew-pan’s bottom still covered with perfectly edible beans lightly protected with Nature’s own pastel-tinted shroud for perishing vegetable matter and diversified here and there with casual small deposits of ashes.
In the morning something good really did happen. As he folded his blankets in the gray light a hard object rattled along the floor from them. He picked this up before he recognized it as a mutilated fragment from the stale half–loaf of bread he had salvaged. He wondered how he could have forgotten it, even in the plenitude of his banquet. There it was, a mere nubbin of crust and so hard it might almost have been taken for a petrified specimen of prehistoric bread. Yet it proved to be rarely palatable. It’s flavour was exquisite. It melted in the mouth.
Somewhat refreshed by this modest cheer, he climbed from the window of the Crystal Palace with his mind busy on two tracks. While the letter to Gashwiler composed itself, with especially clear directions about where the return money should be sent, he was also warning himself to remain throughout the day at a safe distance from the door of the cafeteria. He had proved the wisdom of this even the day before that had started with a bounteous breakfast. To-day the aroma of cooked food occasionally wafted from the cafeteria door would prove, he was sure, to be more than he could bear.
He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself. The collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye, what a successful screen-actor’s collar should be. The sprouting beard might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director sanctified to realism–every day it was getting to look more like that–but no director would have commanded the wearing of such a collar except in actual work where it might have been a striking detail in the apparel of an underworldling, one of those creatures who became the tools of rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent upon the moral destruction of beautiful young screen heroines. He knew it was now that sort of collar. No use now in pretending that it had been worn yesterday for the first time.
CHAPTER X
OF SHATTERED ILLUSIONS
The next morning he sat a long time in the genial sunlight watching carpenters finish a scaffolding beside the pool that had once floated logs to a sawmill. The scaffolding was a stout affair supporting an immense tank that would, evidently for some occult reason important to screen art, hold a great deal of water. The sawmill was gone; at one end of the pool rode a small sail-boat with one mast, its canvas flapping idly in a gentle breeze. Its deck was littered with rigging upon which two men worked. They seemed to be getting things shipshape for a cruise.
When he had tired of this he started off toward the High Gear Dance Hall. Something all day had been drawing him there against his will. He hesitated to believe it was the Montague girl’s kindly manner toward him the day before, yet he could identify no other influence. Probably it was that. Yet he didn’t want to face her again, even if for a moment she had quit trying to be funny, even if for a moment her eyes had searched his quite earnestly, her broad, amiable face glowing with that sudden friendly concern. It had been hard to withstand this yesterday; he had been in actual danger of confiding to her that engagements of late were not plentiful–something like