When a young man suddenly goes mad in a cab, grapples the young woman
who has intrusted herself to his protection, pins her arms to her sides,
squeezes her torso till her bones crunch and she has no breath to
squawk with, then kisses her deaf and dumb and blind, it is still a nice
question which of the two is the helpless one and which has overpowered
the other.
Appearances are never more deceitful than in such attacks, and while
eye-witnesses are infrequent, they are also untrustworthy. They cannot
even tell which of the two is victim of the outrage. The motionless
gazelle in the folds of the constrictor may be in full control of the
situation.
It undoubtedly has happened, oftener than it should have, in the
history of the world that young men have made these onsets without just
provocation and have been properly slapped, horsewhipped, or shot for
their unwelcome violence. It has also happened that young men have
failed to make these onsets when they would have been welcome.
But the perfection of the womanly art of self-pretense is when she
subtly wills the young man to overpower her and is so carried away by
her own success that she forgets who started it. She droops, swoons,
shivers before the fury of her own inspiration, and cries out, with
absolute sincerity: “How dare you! How could you! What made you!” or
simply moans, “Why, Oswald!” and resists invitingly.
Kedzie had been hoping and praying that Jim Dyckman would kiss her, and
mutely daring him to. Yet when he obeyed her tacit behest and asked her
permission she was too frightened to refuse. He was stronger than she
expected, and he held her longer. When at last she came out for air she
was shattered with a pleasant horror.
She barely had the strength to gasp, “Why, Mr. Dyckman, aren't you
awful?” and time to straighten her jumbled hat and hair when her
apartment-building drew up alongside the limousine and came to a halt.
Dyckman pleaded, like a half-witted booby, “Let's take a little longer
ride.”
But she remembered her dignity and said, with imperial scorn, “I should
hope not!”
She permitted him to help her out.
He said: “When may I see you again? Soon, please!”
She smiled, with a hurt patience, and answered, “Not for a long while.”
He chuckled: “To-morrow, eh? That's great!”
She wished that he would not say, “That's great.” If he would only say,
“Ripping!” or, “I say, that's ripping!” or, “Awfully good of you,” or,
“No end”--anything swagger. But he would not swagger.
He escorted her to the elevator, where she gave him a queenly hand and
murmured, “Good night!”
He watched her go up like _Medea in machina;_ then he turned away
and stumbled back into his limousine. It was still fragrant from her
presence. The perfume she was using then was a rather aggressive essence
of a lingering tenacity upon the atmosphere. But Dyckman was so excited
that he liked it. The limousine could hardly contain him.
Kedzie felicitated herself on escaping from his thrall just in time to
avoid being stupefied by it. She thanked Heaven that she had not flung
her arms around him and claimed him for her own. She had the cleverness
of elusion that her sex displays in all the species, from Cleopatras
to clams, from butterflies to rhinoceroses. How wisely they practise to
evade what they demand, leaving the stupid male to ponder the mysteries
of womankind!
When Kedzie reached her mirror she told the approving person she found
there that she was doing pretty well for a poor young girl not long in
from the country. She postured joyously as she undressed, and danced
a feminine war-dance in much the same costume that she wore when Jim
Dyckman fished her out of the pool at Newport. She sang:
“I dreamt that I fell in a mar-arble pool
With nobles and swells on all si-i-ides.”
She had slapped her rescuer's hands away then and groaned to learn that
she had driven off a famous plutocrat. But now he was back; indeed he
was in the pool now, and she had him on her hook. He had grievously
disappointed her by turning out to be a commonplace young man with no
gilt on his phrases. But one must be merciful to a million dollars.
The next morning she dreamed of him as a suitor presenting her with
a bag of gold instead of a bouquet. Just as she reached for it the
telephone rang and a hall-boyish voice told her that it was seven
o'clock.
This was the midnight alarm to Cinderella, and she became again a poor
working-girl. She had to abandon her prince and run from the palace of
dreams to the studio of toil.
She was a trifle surly when she confronted Ferriday. He studied her,
smilingly queerly and overplaying indifference:
“Have a nice dinner last night?”
Kedzie fixed him with a skewery glare: “What's your little game? Why did
you turn up missing?”
“I had another engagement. Didn't you get my note?”
“Ah, behave, behave!” said Kedzie, then blushed at the plebeian phrase.
She was beginning to have a quickly remorseful ear. As soon as she
should learn to hear her first thoughts first, and suppress them
unspoken, she would be a made lady.
“Oh, you're a true artist, Anita,” said Ferriday. “Nothing can hinder
your flight into the empyrean.”
“Don't sing it. Explain it,” Kedzie sneered.
Ferriday laughed so delightedly that he must embrace her. She shoved him
back and brushed the imaginary dust of his contact from the shoulders
that had but lately been compressed by a million dollars.
“I see you landed him,” said Ferriday.
“And I see that all your talk about loving me so much was just a fake,”
said Kedzie.
“Why do you say that? I adore you.”
“If you did, would you throw me at the head of another fellow?” asked
Kedzie.
“If it was for the advancement of your career, yes,” Ferriday insisted.
“What's Mr. Dyckman got to do with my career?”
“He can make it, if he doesn't break it.”
“Come again.”
“If you fall in love with that big thug, or if you play him for a
limousine like a chorus-girl on the make, your career is gone. But if
you use him for your future--well, I have a little scheme that might
bounce you up to the sky in a hurry. You could have your millionaire and
your fame as well.”
“What's the little scheme, Ferri darling?”
“I'll tell you later. We've got to go to the projection-room and see
your new film run off. It's assembled, cut, subtitled, ready for the
market. Come along.”
Kedzie went along and sat in the dark room watching the reel go by. Her
other selves came forth in troops to reveal themselves: Kedzie the poor
little shy girl, for she was that at times; Kedzie the petulant, the
revengeful, the forgiving; Kedzie on her knees in prayer--she prayed at
times, as everybody does, the most villainous no less ardently than
the most blameless; Kedzie dancing; Kedzie flirting, in love, tempted,
tipsy; Kedzie seduced, deserted, forgiven, converted, happily married;
Kedzie a mother with a little hired baby at her little breast. There was
even a picture of her in a vision as a sweet old lady with snowy hair
about her face, and she was surrounded by grown men who were her sons,
and young mothers who were her daughters. The unending magic of the
moving pictures had enabled her to see herself as others saw her, and as
she saw herself, and as nobody should ever see her.
Kedzie doted on the picture of herself as a dear old lady leaning on her
old husband among their children. She shed tears over that delightful,
most unusual, privilege of witnessing herself peacefully, blessedly
ancient.
Whether she ever reached old age and had a husband living then and
children grown is beyond the knowledge of this chronicle or its
prophecy, for this book goes only so far as 1917. But just for a
venture, assuming Kedzie to be about twenty in 1916, that would make
Kedzie born four years back in the last century. Now, adding sixty
to 1896 brings one to 1956; and what the world will be like then--and
who'll be in it or what they may be doing, how dressing, if at all, what
riding in, fighting about, agreeing upon--it were folly to guess at.
It is safe to say only that people will then be very much at heart what
they are to-day and were in the days when the Assyrian women and men
felt as we do about most things. Kedzie will be scolding her children or
her grandchildren and telling them that in her day little girls did
not speak disrespectfully to their parents or run away from them or do
immodest, forward things.
That much is certain to be true, as it has always been. The critics of
then will be saying that there are no great novelists in 1956 such as
there were in 1916, when giants wrote, but not for money or for cheap
sensations. They will laud the Wilsonian era when America not only
knew a millennium of golden fiction, poetry, drama, humor, sculpture,
painting, architecture, and engineering, but revealed its greatness
in moving-picture classics, in a lofty conception of the dance as an
eloquence; when the nation acted as a sister of charity to bleeding
Europe, pouring eleemosynary millions from the cornucopia stretched
across the sea, and finally entered the war with reluctant majesty and
unexampled might, her citizens unanimously patriotic. Ye gods! even the
politicians will be statesmen and their debates classics.
Critics of then will be regretting that American fiction, poetry, drama,
art, and journalism are so inferior to foreign work, and foreign critics
will admit it and tell them why. Some military writers will be pointing
out that war is no longer possible, and others will be crying out that
it is inevitable and America unprepared.
Doctors will be complaining that modern restlessness is creating new
nervous diseases, as doctors did in 1916 A.D., B.C., and B.A. (which
is, Before Adam). Doctors will complain that modern mothers do not nurse
their own babies--which has always been both true and untrue--and that
women do not wear enough clothes for health, not to mention modesty.
In fact, Kedzie, if she lives, will find the spirit of the world almost
altogether what grandmothers have always found it. But Kedzie must be
left to find this out for herself.
When, then, Kedzie saw how beautifully she photographed and how well she
looked as an old lady, she wept rapturously and sighed, “I'll never give
up the pictures.”
Ferriday sighed, too, for that meant to his knowing soul that she was
not long for this movie world. But he did not tell her so. He told her:
“You're as wise as you are beautiful. You'll be as famous as you'll be
rich. And this Dyckman lad can hurry things up.”
“How?” asked Kedzie, already foreseeing his game.
“The backers of the Hyperfilm Company are getting writer's cramp in the
spending hand. They call it conservatism, but it's really cowardice.
The moving-picture business has gone from the Golconda to the gambling
stage. A few years ago nearly anybody could get rich in a minute. A
lot of cheap photographers and street-car conductors were caught in a
cloudburst of money and thought they made it. They treated money like
rain, and the wastefulness in this trade has been rivaled by nothing
recent except the European war. Some of the biggest studios are dark;
some of the leaders of yesterday are so bankrupt that their banks don't
dare let 'em drop for fear they'll bust and blow up the whole business.
Most of the actors are not getting half what they're advertised to get,
but they're getting four times what they ought to get.
“There are a few men and women who are earning even more than they are
getting, and that's a million a minute. Now, the one chance for you,
Anita, is to have some tremendous personal backing. You've come into the
game a little late. This firm you're with is tottering. They blame me
for it, but it's not my fault altogether. Anyway, this company is riding
for a fall, and down we may all go in the dust with a dozen other big
companies, any day.”
Kedzie's heart stopped. In the dark she clutched Ferriday's arm so
tightly that he ouched. To have her career smashed at its beginning
would be just her luck. It grew suddenly more dear than ever, because it
was imperiled. The thought of having her pictures fail of their mission
throughout the world was as hideous as was the knowledge to Carlyle that
the only manuscript of his history was but a shovelful of ashes.
Ferriday put his arm about her, and she crept in under his chin for
safety. She felt very cozy to him, there, and he rejoiced that he had
her his at last. Then as before he saw that he was no more to her than
an umbrella or an awning in a shower. He wanted to fling her away; but
she was still to him an invention to patent and promote. So he told her:
“If you can persuade this Dyckman to boost your career, get behind you
with a bunch of kale and whoop up the publicity, we can stampede the
public, and the little theater managers will mob the exchanges for reels
of you. It's only a question of money, Anita. Talk about the Archimedean
lever! Give me the crowbar of advertising, and I'll set the earth
rolling the other way round so the sun will rise in the west and print
no other pictures but yours.
“There isn't room for everybody in the movie business any more. There's
room only for the people who wear lightning-rods and stand on solid gold
pedestals that won't wash away. Go after your young millionaire, Anita,
and put his money to work.”
Kedzie pondered. She brought to bear on the problem all the strategic
intuition of her sex. She saw the importance of getting Dyckman's money
into circulation. She was afraid it might not be easy.
Kedzie sighed: “It's a little early for me to ask a gentleman I've only
met a couple o' times to kindly pass the millions. He must have met
a lot of women by now who've held out their hands to him and said,
'Please,' and not got anything but the cold boiled eye. I don't know
much about millionaires, but I have a feeling that if they started
giving the money out to every girl they met, they'd last just about as
long as a real bargain does in Macy's. The women would trample them to
death and tear one another to pieces.”
“But Dyckman's crazy about you, Anita. I could see it in his eyes. He's
plumb daffy.”
“Maybe so and maybe not. Maybe he's that way with every girl under
forty. I've never seen him work, but I've seen him in the midst of that
Newport bunch and they've got me lashed to the mast for clothes, looks,
language, and everything.”
“You're a novelty to him, Anita. He's tired of those _blasees_
creatures.”
“They didn't look very blah-zay to me. They seemed to be up and doing
every minute. But supposing he was crazy about me, if I said to him,
'You can have two kisses for a million dollars apiece?' can you see him
begin to holler: 'Where am I? Please take me home!'”
Ferriday sighed: “Perhaps you're right. It wouldn't do to give a
mercenary look to your interest in him too soon. Let me talk to him.”
“What's your peculiar charm?”
“I'd put it up to him as a business proposition. I'd say, 'The
moving-picture field is the greatest gold-field in the world.' I'd tell
him how many hundred thousand theaters there are in the world, all of
them eager for your pictures and only needing to be told about them. I'd
tell him that for every dollar he put in he'd take out ten, in addition
to furthering the artistic glory of the most beautiful genius on the
dramatic horizon. I'd show him how he couldn't lose.”
“But you just said--”
“Oh, I know, but we can't put on the screen everything we say in
the projection-room. And it is a fact that there is big money in the
movies.”
“There must be,” said Kedzie, “if as much has been sunk in 'em as you
say.”
“Yes, and it's all there for the right man to dig up if he only goes
about it intelligently. Let me talk to him.”
Kedzie thought hard. Then she said: “No! Not yet! You'd only scare him
away. I'll do my best to get him interested in me, and you do your best
to get him interested in the business; and then when the time is just
right we can talk turkey. But not now, Ferri, not yet.”
“You're as wise as you are beautiful,” said Ferriday, again. “I can't
see your beauty, but your wisdom shines in the dark. We'll do great
things together, Anita.”
His arm tightened around her, reminding her that she was still in his
elbow. Before she was quite alive to his purpose his lips touched her
cheek.
“Don't do that!” she snapped. “How dare you!”
He laughed: “I forgot. The price on your kisses has just skyrocketed to
a million apiece. Don't forget my commission.”
She growled pettishly. He spoke more soberly:
“You need me yet, little lady. Don't quench my enthusiasms too roughly
or I might take up some other pretty little girl as my medium of
expression. There are lots and lots of pretties born every minute, but
it takes years to make a director like me.”
And she knew that this was true.
“I was only fooling,” she said. “Don't be mad at me. You can kiss me if
you want to.”
“I don't want to,” he said, as hurt as an overgrown boy or a prima
donna.
The door opened, and a wave of light swept into the room. A voice
followed it.
“Is Miss Adair in there?”
“Yes,” Kedzie answered, in confusion.
“Gent'man to see you.”
It was Jim Dyckman. He followed closely and entered the room just as
Ferriday found the electric button and switched on the light.
Kedzie and Ferriday were both encouraged when they saw a look of jealous
suspicion cross his face. Ferriday hastened to explain:
“We've been editing Miss Adair's new film. Like to see an advance
edition of it?”
“Love to,” said Dyckman.
“Oh, Simpson, run that last picture through again,” Ferriday called
through a little hole in the wall.
A faint “All right, sir” responded.
Kedzie led Dyckman to a chair and took the next one to it.
Ferriday beamed on them and switched on the dark. Then, as if by a
divine miracle, the screen at the end of the room became a world of life
and light. People were there, and places. Mountains were swung into view
and removed. Palaces were decreed and annulled. Fields blossomed with
flowers; ballrooms swirled; streets seethed.
Anita Adair was created luminous, seraphic, composed of light and
emotion. She came so near and so large that her very thoughts seemed to
be photographed. She drifted away; she smiled, danced, wept, and made
her human appeal with angelic eloquence.
Dyckman groaned with the very affliction of her charm. She pleased him
so fiercely that he swore about it. He cried out in the dark that she
was the blank-blankest little witch in the world. Then he groveled in
apology, as if his profanity had not been the ultimate gallantry.
When the picture was finished he turned to Kedzie and said, “My God,
you're great!” He turned to Ferriday. “Isn't she, Mr.--Fenimore?”
“I think so,” said Ferriday; “and the world will think so soon.”
Kedzie shook her head. “I'm only a beginner. I don't know anything at
all.”
“Why, you're a genius!” Dyckman exploded. “You're simply great. You know
everything; you--”
Ferriday touched him on the arm. “We mustn't spoil her. There is a charm
and meekness about her that we must not lose.”
Dyckman swallowed his other great's and after profound thought said,
“Let's lunch somewhere.”
Ferriday excused himself, but said that the air would be good for Miss
Adair. She was working too hard.
So she took the air.
Dyckman had come to the studio with Charity's business as an excuse. He
had forgotten to give the excuse, and now he had forgotten the business.
He did not know that he was now Kedzie Thropp's business. And she was
minding her own business.