Kedzie wore her new frock when she reached the studio on Monday morning.
She greeted Mr. Garfinkel with an entreating smile, and was alarmed by
the remoteness of his response. He was cold because she was not for him.
He led her respectfully to the anteroom of the sacred inclosure where
Ferriday was behaving like a lion in a cage, belching his wrath at his
keepers, ordering the fund-finders to find more funds for his great
picture. It threatened to bankrupt them before it was finished, but he
derided them as imbeciles, moneychangers, misers.
Garfinkel was manifestly afraid of Ferriday's very echo, and he cowered
a little when Ferriday burst through the door with mane bristling and
fangs bared.
“Well, well, well!” Ferriday stormed. “What do you want, Garfinkel? What
do you want, Garfinkel? What do you want?”
“You told me to bring Miss Adair to you as soon as she arrived, and--”
The lion roared as gentle as a sucking dove.
“And this is Miss Adair, is it? Of course it is. Welcome to our little
boiler-factory, my dear. Come in and sit down. Garfinkel, get her a
chair and then get out. Sit down, child. I never bite pretty girls.”
Kedzie was pleasantly terrified, and she wondered what would befall her
next. She gave the retreating Garfinkel no further thought. She sat and
trembled before the devouring gaze of the great Ferriday. He studied her
professionally, but he was intensely, extravagantly human. That was why
he appealed to the public so potently. He took their feelings and set
them on fire and juggled with them flaming.
He had such caloric that he kindled actors and actresses to unsuspected
brilliances. He made tinder of the dry-as-dusts, and he brought the
warm-hearted to a white-hot glow.
He dealt with primary emotions crudely but vigorously. A soldier
saluting an officer became in a Ferriday picture a zealot rendering
a national homage. A maid watching her lover walk away angry became
a Juliet letting Romeo go; a child weeping over a broken doll was an
epitome of all regret. A mother putting a light in the window for an
erring daughter's guidance was something new, an allegory as great as
Bartholdi's Liberty putting her lamp in the window of the nation.
He was as intense with humor as with sorrow. A girl washing dishes
brought shrieks of laughter at the little things she did--the struggle
with the slippery soap, the recoil from the hot plate, the carelessness
with the towel.
Ferriday had not talked to Kedzie two minutes before she was wringing
her hands with excitement. He was discovering her to herself. He told
her the story of a picture he wanted to put her in. He had withheld it
for months, looking for the right interpreter. He resolved to postpone
the completion of the big picture till he had finished a five-reel idyl
for the apotheosis of Kedzie.
“The backers of the enterprise will have apoplexy when they hear of it,”
he laughed. “But what do I care?”
The whole army of the studio stood meanwhile at ease, drawing salary and
waiting for Ferriday to remember his day's program and give the order
to go ahead. But he was busy with his new story, in the throes of
nympholepsy, seeing visions, hearing voices.
Kedzie sat in a marble expectancy, Galatea watching Pygmalion create
her and prepare to bring her to life. She had never lived. She realized
that. All her previous existence had been but blind gropings in the womb
of time.
The backers came to remind Ferriday that there was waiting a costly mob
of actors, wooed from the speaking drama by trebled salaries. Ferriday
howled to them to get out. They did not respect his inspirations; they
suspected his motives toward Kedzie.
But Ferriday was deep in love with his art; he was panting with the
afflation of Apollo. Old motives, old scenes, old characters that had
served as “sure-fire stuff” since the earliest Hindu drama now fell into
their ancient places and he thought them new. Kedzie was sure she had
never heard such original ideas. Her gratitude to Ferriday was absolute.
And he was clever enough, or crazy enough, to say that he was grateful
to her. He had been looking for just Her, and she had come to him just
in time. He made her promises that Solomon could not have made to Sheba,
or Shakespeare to the dark lady.
Solomon could offer to his visitor Ophirian wealth, and Shakespeare
could guarantee with some show of success (up to date) that his words
of praise would outlive all other monuments. But Ferriday did not offer
Kedzie minerals or adjectives. He cried:
“Little girl, I'll put you on a girdle of films that will encircle the
world. Your smile will run round the globe like the sun, and light
up dark places in Africa. Your tears will shower the earth. People in
thousands of towns will watch your least gesture with anxiety. Queens
will have you brought to their palaces to make them laugh and cry. The
soldiers of the world will call you their mascot and write love-letters
to you from the trenches. I will have a billion pictures made of you,
and you shall breathe and move in all of them. You shall live a million
lives at once. I will have your other self placed in museums so that
centuries from now they can take you out and bring you to life again.”
It was a mighty good speech. It would be hard to find a serenade to beat
it. And he read it superbly. He had sung it to every one of his only
girls in the world, his eternal (pro tem.) passions. He had had about
nineteen muses already.
Kedzie did not know this, of course. And it would not have mattered
much. Better the nine-and-ninetieth muse to such a man than the first
and final gas-stove slave of a Tommie Gilfoyle.
Kedzie sat in the state of nerves of a little girl alone on a
mountain-top with lightning shimmering and striking all round her.
She was so happy, so full of electrical sparks, that she was fairly
incandescent. As she said afterward, she felt “all lit up.”
Ferriday spun out the plot of his new five-reel scenario until he
was like an unreeled spider. He was all out. The mechanical details
interested and refreshed him now. He must order the studio scenery and
select the outdoor “locations.” He must pick the supporting cast and
devise one or two blood-curdling moments of great peril.
Kedzie was too excited to note the ghoulish joy with which he planned to
put her into the most perilous plights that had ever threatened even a
movie star with death or crippledom.
“Do they scare you, my dear?” he asked.
“Scare me?” said Kedzie. “Why, Mr. Ferriday, if you told me to, I'd go
out to the Bronx Zoo-ological Gardens and bite the ear off the biggest
lion they got in the lion-house.”
Ferriday reached out, put his arm about her farther shoulder, and
squeezed her to him after the manner of dosing an accordeon. Kedzie
emitted the same kind of squeak. But she was not unhappy, and she did
not even say, “Sir!”
The plot of The Kedziad was to be based on the From-Rags-to-Riches
_leitmotiv_, Kedzie was to be a cruelly treated waif brought up as a
boy by a demoniac Italian padrone who made her steal. She was to be sent
into a rich man's home to rob it. She would find the rich man about to
commit suicide all over his sumptuous library. She would save him, and
he would save her from the padrone's revenge, on condition that she
should dress as a girl (he had not, of course, suspected that she really
was one at the time--had always been one, in fact). She would dress as
a girl and conduct a very delicate diplomatic mission with a foreign
ambassador, involving a submarine wrecked (in the studio tank) and a
terrific ride across one of the deadliest battle-fields of Verdun (New
Jersey) with a vast army of three hundred supers.
When Kedzie had saved two or three nations and kept the United States
from war the millionaire would regret that she was, after all, only a
boy and be overcome with rapture when she told him the truth. The three
hundred supers would then serve as wedding-guests in the biggest church
wedding ever pulled off.
Kedzie liked this last touch immensely. It would make up for that
disgusting guestless ceremony in the Municipal Building.
Ferriday got rid of her exquisitely by writing a note and saying to her:
“Now you run down and hop into my car and take this note to Lady
Powell-Carewe--don't fail to call her 'Pole Cary.' She is to design your
wealthy wardrobe, and I want her to study you and do something unheard
of in novelty and beauty. Tell her that the more she spends the better
I'll like it.”
Kedzie was really a heroine. She did not swoon even at that.
When Ferriday dismissed her he enfolded her to his beautiful waistcoat,
and then held her off by her two arms and said:
“Little girl, you've made me so happy! So happy! Ah! We'll do great
things together! This is a red-letter day for the movie art.”
Kedzie never feared that it might have a scarlet-letter significance.
She forgot that she was anything but a newborn, full-fledged angel
without a past--only a future with the sky for its limit. Alas! we
always have our pasts. Even the unborn babe has already centuries of a
past.
It was Ferriday who brought Kedzie home to hers.
“What about dinner to-night, my dear? I feel like having a wonderful
dinner to-night! Are partridge in season now? What is your favorite
sherry? Let me call for you at, say, seven. Where shall I call?”
Kedzie flopped back from the empyrean to her flat. Gilfoyle again
blockaded her.
She nearly swooned then. Her soul rummaged frantically through a brain
like her own work-basket. She finally dug up an excuse.
“I'd rather meet you at the restaurant.”
Ferriday smiled. He understood. The poor thing was ashamed of her
boarding-house.
“Well, Cinderella, let me send my pumpkin for you, at least. I won't
come. Where shall my chauffeur find you?”
Kedzie whimpered the shabby number of the shabby street.
“Shall he ask for Miss Adair, or--”
Kedzie was inspired: “I live in Mrs. Gilfoyle's flat-partment.”
“I see,” said Ferriday. “Miss Anita Adair--ring Mrs. Gilfoyle's bell.
All right, my angel, at seven. Run along.”
He kissed her, and she was ice-cold. But then women were often like that
before Ferriday's genius.