THE ENCHANTMENT OF LONG DISTANCE
Lorraine Hunter always maintained that she was a Western girl. If she
reached the point of furnishing details she would tell you that she had
ridden horses from the time that she could walk, and that her father
was a cattle-king of Idaho, whose cattle fed upon a thousand hills.
When she was twelve she told her playmates exciting tales about
rattlesnakes. When she was fifteen she sat breathless in the movies
and watched picturesque horsemen careering up and down and around the
thousand hills, and believed in her heart that half the Western
pictures were taken on or near her father's ranch. She seemed to
remember certain landmarks, and would point them out to her companions
and whisper a desultory lecture on the cattle industry as illustrated
by the picture. She was much inclined to criticism of the costuming
and the acting.
At eighteen she knew definitely that she hated the very name Casa
Grande. She hated the narrow, half-lighted hallway with its "tree"
where no one ever hung a hat, and the seat beneath where no one ever
sat down. She hated the row of key-and-mail boxes on the wall, with
the bell buttons above each apartment number. She hated the jangling
of the hall telephone, the scurrying to answer, the prodding of
whichever bell button would summon the tenant asked for by the caller.
She hated the meek little Filipino boy who swept that ugly hall every
morning. She hated the scrubby palms in front. She hated the pillars
where the paint was peeling badly. She hated the conflicting odours
that seeped into the atmosphere at certain hours of the day. She hated
the three old maids on the third floor and the frowsy woman on the
first, who sat on the front steps in her soiled breakfast cap and
bungalow apron. She hated the nervous tenant who occupied the
apartment just over her mother's three-room-and-bath, and pounded with
a broom handle on the floor when Lorraine practised overtime on
chromatic scales.
At eighteen Lorraine managed somehow to obtain work in a Western
picture, and being unusually pretty she so far distinguished herself
that she was given a small part in the next production. Her glorious
duty it was to ride madly through the little cow-town "set" to the
post-office where the sheriff's posse lounged conspicuously, and there
pull her horse to an abrupt stand and point quite excitedly to the
distant hills. Also she danced quite close to the camera in the
"Typical Cowboy Dance" which was a feature of this particular
production.
Lorraine thereby earned enough money to buy her fall suit and coat and
cheap furs, and learned to ride a horse at a gallop and to dance what
passed in pictures as a "square dance."
At nineteen years of age Lorraine Hunter, daughter of old Brit Hunter
of the TJ up-and-down, became a real "range-bred girl" with a real
Stetson hat of her own, a green corduroy riding skirt, gray flannel
shirt, brilliant neckerchief, boots and spurs. A third picture gave
her further practice in riding a real horse,--albeit an extremely
docile animal called Mouse with good reason. She became known on the
lot as a real cattle-king's daughter, though she did not know the name
of her father's brand and in all her life had seen no herd larger than
the thirty head of tame cattle which were chased past the camera again
and again to make them look like ten thousand, and which were so
thoroughly "camera broke" that they stopped when they were out of the
scene, turned and were ready to repeat the performance _ad lib_.
Had she lived her life on the Quirt ranch she would have known a great
deal more about horseback riding and cattle and range dances. She
would have known a great deal less about the romance of the West,
however, and she would probably never have seen a sheriff's posse
riding twenty strong and bunched like bird-shot when it leaves the
muzzle of the gun. Indeed, I am very sure she would not. Killings
such as her father heard of with his lips drawn tight and the cords
standing out on the sides of his skinny neck she would have considered
the grim tragedies they were, without once thinking of the "picture
value" of the crime.
As it was, her West was filled with men who died suddenly in gobs of
red paint and girls who rode loose-haired and panting with hand held
over the heart, hurrying for doctors, and cowboys and parsons and such.
She had seen many a man whip pistol from holster and dare a mob with
lips drawn back in a wolfish grin over his white, even teeth, and
kidnappings were the inevitable accompaniment of youth and beauty.
Lorraine learned rapidly. In three years she thrilled to more
blood-curdling adventure than all the Bad Men in all the West could
have furnished had they lived to be old and worked hard at being bad
all their lives. For in that third year she worked her way
enthusiastically through a sixteen-episode movie serial called "The
Terror of the Range." She was past mistress of romance by that time.
She knew her West.
It was just after the "Terror of the Range" was finished that a great
revulsion in the management of this particular company stopped
production with a stunning completeness that left actors and actresses
feeling very much as if the studio roof had fallen upon them.
Lorraine's West vanished. The little cow-town "set" was being torn
down to make room for something else quite different. The cowboys
appeared in tailored suits and drifted away. Lorraine went home to the
Casa Grande, hating it more than ever she had hated it in her life.
Some one up-stairs was frying liver and onions, which was in flagrant
defiance of the Rule Four which mentioned cabbage, onions and fried
fish as undesirable foodstuffs. Outside, the palm leaves were dripping
in the night fog that had swept soggily in from the ocean. Her mother
was trying to collect a gas bill from the dressmaker down the hall, who
protested shrilly that she distinctly remembered having paid that gas
bill once and had no intention of paying it twice.
Lorraine opened the door marked LANDLADY, and closed it with a slam
intended to remind her mother that bickerings in the hall were less
desirable than the odour of fried onions. She had often spoken to her
mother about the vulgarity of arguing in public with the tenants, but
her mother never seemed to see things as Lorraine saw them.
In the apartment sat a man who had been too frequent a visitor, as
Lorraine judged him. He was an oldish man with the lines of failure in
his face and on his lean form the sprightly clothing of youth. He had
been a reporter,--was still, he maintained. But Lorraine suspected
shrewdly that he scarcely made a living for himself, and that he was
home-hunting in more ways than one when he came to visit her mother.
The affair had progressed appreciably in her absence, it would appear.
He greeted her with a fatherly "Hello, kiddie," and would have kissed
her had Lorraine not evaded him skilfully.
Her mother came in then and complained intimately to the man, and
declared that the dressmaker would have to pay that bill or have her
gas turned off. He offered sympathy, assistance in the turning off of
the gas, and a kiss which was perfectly audible to Lorraine in the next
room. The affair had indeed progressed!
"L'raine, d'you know you've got a new papa?" her mother called out in
the peculiar, chirpy tone she used when she was exuberantly happy. "I
knew you'd be surprised!"
"I am," Lorraine agreed, pulling aside the cheap green portières and
looked in upon the two. Her tone was unenthusiastic. "A superfluous
gift of doubtful value. I do not feel the need of a papa, thank you.
If you want him for a husband, mother, that is entirely your own
affair. I hope you'll be very happy."
"The kid don't want a papa; husbands are what means the most in her
young life," chuckled the groom, restraining his bride when she would
have risen from his knee.
"I hope you'll both be very happy indeed," said Lorraine gravely. "Now
you won't mind, mother, when I tell you that I am going to dad's ranch
in Idaho. I really meant it for a vacation, but since you won't be
alone, I may stay with dad permanently. I'm leaving to-morrow or the
next day--just as soon as I can pack my trunk and get a Pullman berth."
She did not wait to see the relief in her mother's face contradicting
the expostulations on her lips. She went out to the telephone in the
hall, remembered suddenly that her business would be overheard by half
the tenants, and decided to use the public telephone in a hotel farther
down the street. Her decision to go to her dad had been born with the
words on her lips. But it was a lusty, full-voiced young decision, and
it was growing at an amazing rate.
Of course she would go to her dad in Idaho! She was astonished that
the idea had never before crystallised into action. Why should she
feed her imagination upon a mimic West, when the great, glorious real
West was there? What if her dad had not written a word for more than a
year? He must be alive; they would surely have heard of his death, for
she and Royal were his sole heirs, and his partner would have their
address.
She walked fast and arrived at the telephone booth so breathless that
she was compelled to wait a few minutes before she could call her
number. She inquired about trains and rates to Echo, Idaho!
Echo, Idaho! While she waited for the information clerk to look it up
the very words conjured visions of wide horizons and clean winds and
high adventure. If she pictured Echo, Idaho, as being a replica of the
"set" used in the movie serial, can you wonder? If she saw herself,
the beloved queen of her father's cowboys, dashing into Echo, Idaho, on
a crimply-maned broncho that pirouetted gaily before the post-office
while handsome young men in chaps and spurs and "big four" Stetsons
watched her yearningly, she was merely living mentally the only West
that she knew.
From that beatific vision Lorraine floated into others more entrancing.
All the hairbreadth escapes of the heroine of the movie serial were
hers, adapted by her native logic to fit within the bounds of
possibility,--though I must admit they bulged here and there and
threatened to overlap and to encroach upon the impossible. Over the
hills where her father's vast herds grazed, sleek and wild and
long-horned and prone to stampede, galloped the Lorraine of Lorraine's
dreams, on horses sure-footed and swift. With her galloped strong men
whose faces limned the features of her favourite Western "lead."
That for all her three years of intermittent intimacy with a
disillusioning world of mimicry, her dreams were pure romance, proved
that Lorraine had still the unclouded innocence of her girlhood
unspoiled.