MR. LOBEL'S APOPLEXY
The real purpose of this is to tell about Mr. Lobel's attack of
apoplexy. What comes before must necessarily be in its nature
preliminary and preparatory, leading up to the climactic stroke which
leaves the distinguished victim stretched upon the bed of affliction.
First let us introduce our principal. Reader, meet Mr. Max Lobel,
president of Lobel Masterfilms, Inc., also its founder, its chief
stockholder and its general manager. He is a short, broad, thick,
globular man and a bald one, wearing gold-rimmed spectacles, carrying a
gold-headed cane and using a private gold-mounted toothpick after meals.
His collars are of that old-fashioned open-faced kind such as our
fathers and Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Sr., used to wear; collars rearing
at the back but shorn widely away in front to show two things--namely,
the Adam's apple and that Mr. Lobel is conservative. But for his
neckwear he patronizes those shops where ties are exclusively referred
to as _scarves_ and cost from five dollars apiece up, which proves also
he is progressive and keeps abreast of the times. When he walks he
favors his feet. Mostly, though, he rides in as good a car as domestic
currency can buy in foreign marts.
Aside from his consuming desire to turn out those surpassing
achievements of the cellular-cinema art known as Lobel's Masterfilms, he
has in life two great passions, one personal in its character, the other
national in its scope--the first a craving for fancy waistcoats, the
second a yearning to see the name of Max Lobel in print as often as
possible and in as large letters as likewise is possible; and for either
of these is a plausible explanation. Mr. Lobel has a figure excellently
shaped for presenting the patternings of a fanciful stomacher to the
world and up until a few years ago there were few occasions when he
might hope to see the name Lobel in print. For, know you, Mr. Lobel has
not always been in the moving-picture business. Nobody in the
moving-picture business has always been in the moving-picture
business--excepting some of the child wonders under ten years of age.
And ten years ago our hero was the M. Lobel Company, cloak and suit
jobbers in rather an inconspicuous Eastern town.
What was true of him as regards his comparatively recent advent into the
producing and distributing fields was true of his major associates.
Back in 1911 the vice president and second in command, Mr. F. X.
Quinlan, moved upward into a struggling infantile industry via the
stepping-stone of what in the vernacular of his former calling is known
as a mitt joint--summers at Coney, winters in store pitches--where he
guided the professional destinies of Madame Zaharat, the Egyptian
seeress, in private, then as now, Mrs. F. X. Quinlan nee Clardy.
The treasurer and secretary, Mr. Simeon Geltfin, had once upon a time
been proprietor of the Ne Plus Ultra Misfit Clothing Parlors at Utica,
New York, a place where secondhand habiliments, scoured and ironed,
dangled luringly in show windows bearing such enticing labels as
"Tailor's Sample--Nobby--$9.80," "Bargain--Take Me Home For $5.60," and
"These Trousers Were Uncalled For--$2.75."
The premier director, Mr. Bertram Colfax, numbered not one but two
chrysalis changes in his career. In the grub stage, as it were, he had
begun life as Lemuel Sims, a very grubby grub indeed, becoming Colfax at
the same time he became property man for a repertoire troupe playing
county-fair weeks in the Middle West.
As for the scenario editor and continuity writer, he in a prior
condition of life had solicited advertisements for a trade journal. So
it went right down the line.
At the time of the beginning of this narrative Lobel Masterfilms, Inc.,
had attained an eminence of what might be called fair-to-medium
prominence in the moving-picture field. In other words, it now was able
to pay its stars salaries running up into the multiples of tens of
thousands of dollars a year and the bank which carried its paper had not
yet felt justified in installing a chartered accountant in the home
offices to check the finances and collect the interest on the loans
outstanding. Before reaching this position the concern had passed
through nearly all the customary intervening stages. Nearly a decade
rearward, back in the dark ages of the filmic cosmos, the Jurassic
Period of pictures, so to speak, this little group of pathfinders
tracking under the chieftainship of Mr. Lobel into almost uncharted
wilds of artistic endeavor had dabbled in slap-stick one reelers
featuring the plastic pie and the treacherous seltzer siphon, also the
trick staircase, the educated mustache and the performing doormat.
Next--following along the line of least resistance--the adventurers went
in more or less extensively for wild-western dramas replete with
stagecoach robberies and abounding in hair pants. If the head bad
man--not the secondary bad man who stayed bad all through, or the
tertiary bad man who was fatally extinguished with gun-fire in Reel Two,
but the chief, or primary, bad man who reformed and married Little Nell,
the unspoiled child of Death Valley--wore the smartest frontier get-up
of current year's vintage that the Chicago mail-order houses could turn
out; if Little Nell's father, appearing contemporaneously, dressed
according to the mode laid down for Forty-niners by such indubitable
authorities as Bret Harte; if the sheriff stalked in and out of lens
range attired as a Mississippi River gambler was popularly supposed to
have been attired in the period 1860 to 1875; and if finally the cavalry
troopers from the near-by army post sported the wide hats and khaki
shirts which came into governmental vogue about the time of the Spanish
War, all very well and good. The action was everything; the sartorial
accessories were as they might be and were and frequently still are.
Along here there intruded a season when the Lobel shop tentatively
experimented with costume dramas--the Prisoner of Chillon wearing the
conventional black and white in alternating stripes of a Georgia chain
gang and doing the old Sing Sing lock step and retiring for the night to
his donjon cell with a set of shiny and rather modern-looking leg irons
on his ankles; Mary Queen of Scots and Catharine de' Medici in costumes
strikingly similar; Oliver Goldsmith in Sir Walter Raleigh's neck ruff
and Captain Kidd's jack boots.
But this season endured not for long. Costume stuff was nix. It was not
what the public wanted. It was over their heads. Mr. Lobel himself said
so. Wake him up in the middle of the night and he could tell you exactly
what the public did and did not want. Divining the popular will amounted
with him to a gift; it approximated an exact art; really it formed the
corner stone of his success. Likewise he knew--but this knowledge
perhaps had come to him partly by experience rather than altogether by
intuition--that historical ten reelers dealing with epochal events in
the life of our own people were entirely unsuited for general
consumption.
When this particular topic untactfully was broached in his presence Mr.
Lobel, recalling the fate of the elaborate feature entitled Let Freedom
Ring, had been known to sputter violently and vehemently. Upon this
production--now abiding as a memory only, yet a memory bitter as
aloes--he had spared neither expense nor pains, even going so far as
personally to direct the filming of all the principal scenes. And to
what ends? Captious critics, including those who wrote for the daily
press and those who merely sent in offensive letters--college professors
and such like cheap high-brows--had raised yawping voices to point out
that Paul Revere galloping along the pre-Revolutionary turnpike to
spread the alarm passed en route two garages and one electric power
house; that Washington crossing the Delaware stood in the bow of his
skiff half shrouded in an American flag bearing forty-eight stars upon
its field of blue; that Andrew Jackson's riflemen filing out from New
Orleans to take station behind their cotton-bale breastworks marched for
some distance beneath a network of trolley wires; that Abraham Lincoln
signing the Emancipation Proclamation did so while seated at a desk in a
room which contained in addition to Lincoln and the desk and the
Proclamation a typewriter and a Persian rug; that at Manila Bay Admiral
Dewey wore spats and a wrist watch.
But these primitive adventurings, these earlier pioneering quests into
the realm of the speculative were all in limbo behind them, all wiped
off the slate, in part forgiven, in a measure forgotten. Since that
primitive beginning and those formulative middle periods Lobel
Masterfilms had found their field, and having found it, now plowed and
tilled it. To those familiar with the rise and the ever-forward movement
of this, now the fourth largest industry in the civilized globe--or is
it the third?--it sufficiently will fix the stage of evolutionary
development attained by this component unit of that industry when I
state that Lobel Masterfilms now dealt preponderantly with vampires. To
be sure, it continued to handle such side lines as taffy-haired ingenues
from the country, set adrift among the wiles and pitfalls of a cruel
city; such incidentals as soft-pie comickers and chin-whiskered
by-Hectors; such necessary by-products as rarely beautiful he-juveniles
with plush eyelashes and the hair combed slickly back off the forehead
in the approved Hudson seal effect--splendid, manly youths these, who
might have dodged a draft or two but never yet had flinched from before
the camera's aiming muzzle. But even though it had to be conceded that
Goldilockses and Prince Charmings endure and that while drolls and
jesters may come and go, pies are permanent and stale not, neither do
they wither; still, and with all that, such like as these were, in the
Lobel scheme of things, merely so many side lines and incidentals and
by-products devised and designed to fatten out a program.
Where Mr. Lobel excelled was in the vamp stuff. Even his competitors
admitted it the while they vainly strove to rival him. In this, his own
chosen realm of exploration and conquest he stood supremely alone; a
monarch anointed with the holy oils of superiority, coroneted with
success's glittering diadem. Look at his Woman of a Million Sins! Look
at his Satan's Stepchild, or How Human Souls are Dragged Down to Hell,
in six reels! Look at A Daughter of Darkness! Look at The Wrecker of
Lives! Look at The Spider Lady, or The Net Where Men Were the Flies!
Look at Fair of Face Yet Black of Heart! All of them his, all box-office
best bets and all still going strong!
Moreover by now Lobel Masterfilms had progressed to that milestone on
the path of progress and enterprise where genuine live authors--guys
that wrote regular books--frequently furnished vehicles for stardom's
regal usages. By purchase, upon the basis of so much cash or--as the
case might be--so little cash down on the signing of the contract and
the promise of so much more--often very very much more--to be paid in
royalties out of accrued net profits, the rights to a published work
would be acquired. Its name, say, was A Commonplace Person, which
promptly would be changed in executive conclave to The Cataract of
Destiny, or perhaps Fate's Plaything, or in any event some good catchy
title which would look well in electrics and on three sheets.
This important point having been decided on, Mr. Ab Connors, the
scenario editor, would take the script in hand to labor and bring forth
the screen adaptation. If the principal character in the work, as
originally evolved by her creator, was the daughter of a storekeeper in
a small town in Indiana who ran away from home and went to Chicago to
learn the millinery business, he, wielding a ruthless but gifted blue
pencil, would speedily transform her into the ebon-hearted heiress of a
Klondyke millionaire, an angel without but a harpy within, and after
opening up Reel One with scenes in a Yukon dance hall speedily would
move all the important characters to New York, where the plot thickened
so fast that only a succession of fade-outs and fade-ins, close-ups and
cut-backs saved it from clabbering right on Mr. Connors' hands.
The rest would be largely a matter of continuity and after that there
was nothing to worry about except picking out the cast and the locations
and building the sets and starting to shoot and mayhap detailing a head
office boy to stall off the author in case that poor boob came butting
in kicking about changes in his story or squawking about overdue royalty
statements or something. Anyhow, what did he know--what could he be
expected to know--about continuity or what the public wanted or what the
limitations and the possibilities of the screen were? He merely was the
poor fish who'd wrote the book and he should ought to be grateful that a
fellow with a real noodle had took his stuff and cut all that dull
descriptive junk out of it and stuck some pep and action and punch and
zip into the thing and wrote some live snappy subtitles, instead of
coming round every little while, like he was, horning in and beefing all
over the place.
And besides, wasn't he going to have his name printed in all the
advertising matter and flashed on the screen, too, in letters nearly a
fifth as tall as the letters of Mr. Lobel's name and nearly one-third as
tall as the name of the star and nearly one-half as tall as the name of
the director and nearly--if not quite--as tall as the name of the camera
man, and so get a lot of absolutely free advertising that would be
worth thousands of dollars to him and start people all over the country
to hearing about him? Certainly he was! And yet, with all that, was
there any satisfying some of these cheap ginks? The answer was that
there was not.
There was never any trouble, though, about casting the principal role.
That was easy--a matter of natural selection. If it could be played
vampishly from the ground up, and it usually could--trust Mr. Connors
for that--it went without question to Vida Monte, greatest of all the
luminaries in the Lobel constellation and by universal acknowledgment
the best vampire in the business. In vampiring Vida Monte it was who
led; others imitatively followed. Compared with her these envying lady
copy cats were as pale paprikas are to the real tabasco. Five pictures
she had done for Lobel Masterfilms since placing herself under Lobel's
management and a Lobel contract, all of them overpowering knock-outs,
sensations, sure-fire hits. On the sixth she now was at work and her
proud employer in conversation and in announcements to the trade stood
sponsor for the pledge that in its filming Monte literally would
out-Monte Monte.
Making his word good, he took over volunteer supervision of the main
scenes. His high-domed forehead glistening with sweat, his spectacles
aflame like twin burning glasses, his coat off, his collar off, his
waistcoat off, he snorted and churned, a ninety-horse dynamo of a
little fat man, through the hot glary studio, demanding this
improvement, detecting that defect, calling for this, that or the other
perfect thing in a voice which would have detained the admiring ear of
an experienced bull whacker. Before him Josephson, the little camera
man, quailed. From his path extra people departed, fleeing headlong; and
in his presence property men were as though they were not and never had
been. Out of the hands of Bertram Colfax, born Sims, he wrenched a
megaphone and through it he bellowed:
"Put more punch in it, Monte--that's what I'm asking you for--the punch!
Choke her, Harcourt! Choke him right back, Monte! Now-w-w then, clinch!
Clinch and hang on! Good! And now the kiss! You know, Monte, the long
kiss--the genuwine Monte kiss! Oh, if you love me, Monte, give me
footage on that kiss! That's it--hold it! Hold it! Keep on holding it!"
"But, Mr. Lobel, now," protested Colfax, born a Sims but living it down
and feeling that never more than at this minute, when rudely the
steersman's helm had been snatched from his grasp, was there greater
need that he should be a Colfax through and through----"but, Mr. Lobel,
it was my idea that up to this point anyway the action should be played
with restraint to sort of prepare the way for----"
"What do you mean restraint?"
"Well, I thought to emphasize what comes later--for a sort of
comparative value--that if we were just a little subtle at the
beginning--"
"Sufficient, Colfax! Listen! Don't come talking to me about no subtles!
When you're working the supporting members of the cast you maybe could
stick in some subtles once in a while to salve them censors, but so far
as Monte is concerned you leave 'em out!"
"But--but--"
"Don't but me any buts! Listen! Ain't I taken my paralyzed oath that
this here picture should make all the other vamp pictures which ever
were taken look like pikers? I have! Listen! For Monte, the way I feel,
I shouldn't care if she don't do a single subtle in the whole damn
picture."
He had taken his paralyzed oath and he kept it. It was a wonderful
story. The queen of the apaches, ruling the Parisian underworld by her
fire, her beauty, her courage, accepts German gold to betray her
country, and attempts by siren wiles to seduce from the path of duty
Capt. Stuyvesant Schuyler of the U. S. A. general staff; almost succeeds
too because of his blind passion for this glorious, sinful creature. At
the crucial moment, when about to surrender to his Delilah secrets which
would destroy the entire Allied cause and open the gates of Paris to the
conquering foe, he is saved by a vision of his sainted,
fade-in-and-fade-out mother's face. Overcome with remorse, he resigns
his commission, and fleeing from temptation returns to America, a
broken-hearted man; proves heart is broken by constantly pressing
clenched hand to left breast as though to prevent pieces from slipping
down into the abdominal cavity. Distress of the apache queen on finding
her intended victim gone. Suddenly a real love, not the love of the
wanton, but a purer, deeper emotion wakens in her breast. Close-up
showing muscular reflexes produced upon the human face by wakening
processes in the heart.
Quitting the gay life, she follows him to Land of Free. Finds him about
to marry his sweetheart of childhood, a New York society girl worth
uncounted millions but just middling looking. Prompt bust-up of
childhood sweetheart's romance. Abandonment of social position, wealth,
everything by Schuyler, who declares he will make the stranger his
bride--accompanying subtitle, "What should we care what the world may
say? For after all, love is all!" Discovery on day before marriage of
papers proving that Lolita--that's the lady apache's name--is really
Schuyler's half sister, due to carryings-on of Schuyler's late father as
a young art student in Paris with Lolita's mother, a famous gypsy model.
Renunciation by Lolita of Schuyler. Her suicide by imbibing poison from
secret receptacle in ring. Schuyler, after registering copious grief,
reenters American Army under assumed name as a private in the ranks.
Returns to battlefield in time to take part in decisive action of the
war. All the officers in his brigade above the rank of corporal having
apparently been killed by one devastating blast of high explosive, he
assumes command and leads dauntless charge of the heavy artillery
through the Hindenburg Line. Is made a colonel on the spot. Rides up
Fifth Avenue alongside of Pershing in grand triumphant parade of
home-coming First Division, carrying a large flag and occasionally
chatting pleasantly with Pershing. On eve of marriage to childhood's
sweetheart, who remains faithful, he goes to lonely spot where Lolita
lies buried and places upon the silent mound her favorite flower, a
single long-stemmed tiger lily. Fade out--finish!
Artistically, picturesquely, from the standpoint of timeliness, from the
standpoint of vampirishness, from any standpoint at all, it satisfied
fully every demand. It was one succession of thrilling, gripping,
heart-lifting scenes set amid vividly contrasting surroundings--the
lowest dive in all Paris; the citadel at Verdun; grand ballroom of the
Schuyler mansion at Newport; the Place Vendome on a day when it was
entirely unoccupied except by moving-picture actors; Fifth Avenue on its
most gala occasion--these were but a few samples. The subtitles fairly
hissed to the sibilant swishing of such words as traitress, temptress,
tigress and sorceress. And the name of it--you'd never guess--the name
of it was The She-Demon's Doom! When Mr. Lobel spoke those words
inspired he literally took them up in his arms and fondled them and
kissed them on the temples. And why not? They were his own brain
children.
He had kept his paralyzed word and he could prove it. For because this
Vida Monte was one of those mimetic pieces of flesh which, without any
special mental cooperation, may alter the body, the face, the muscles,
the expression, the very look out of the eyes, to suit the demands of
prompters and teachers; because of the plan of direction so powerfully
engineered by the master mind of Lobel and, under Lobel, the lesser mind
of Colfax, born Sims; because of the very nature of the role of Lolita
the abandoned, this picture was more daring, more sensual, more filled
up with voluptuous suggestion, with coiling, clinging, writhing
snakiness, with rampant, naked sexuality--in short and in fine was more
vampirishly vampiratious than this, the greatest of all modern mediums
for the education, the moral uplift and the entertainment of the masses,
had ever known.
And then one week to the day after Mr. Lobel shot the last scene she up
and died on him.
That is to say, a woman named Glassman, a Hungarian by birth, in age
thirty-two years, widowed and without children or known next of kin,
died in a small bungalow in a small town up in the coast range north of
Los Angeles. When the picture was done and Vida Monte took off the
barbaric trappings and the heavy paste jewels and the clinging reptilian
half gowns of the role she played, with them she took off and laid aside
the animal emotionalism, the theatricalistic fever and fervor, the
passion and the lure that professionally made up Vida Monte, movie star.
She took off even the very aspect of herself as the show shop and as
patrons of the cinemas knew her; and she put on a simple traveling gown
and she tucked her black hair up in coils beneath a severely plain hat
and she became what really she was and always had been--a quiet,
self-contained, frugal and--except for her splendid eyes, her fine
figure and her full mobile mouth--a not particularly striking-looking
woman, by name Sarah Glassman, which was, in fact, her name; and quite
alone she got on a train and she went up into the foothills to a tiny
bungalow which she had rented there for a month or so to live alone, to
do her own simple housekeeping, to sew and to read and to rest.
It was the day after the taking of the last segment of the picture that
she went away. It was four days later that she sickened of the Spanish
influenza, so called. It was not Spanish and not influenza, though by
any other name it would have been as deadly in its devastating sweep
across this country. And it was within forty-eight hours after that, on
a November afternoon, that word came to the Lobel plant that she was
dead. Down there they had not known even that she was sick.
"The doctor in that there little jay town up there by the name
Hamletsburg is the one which just gets me on the long-distance telephone
and tells me that she died maybe half an hour ago."
Mr. Lobel in his private office was telling it to Vice President Quinlan
and Secretary-Treasurer Geltfin, the only two among his associates that
his messenger had been able to find about the executive department at
the moment. He continued:
"Coming like a complete shock, you could 'a' knocked me down with a
feather, I assure you. For a minute I couldn't believe it. This doctor
he has to say it to me twice before I get it into my head.
Shocking--huh? Sudden--huh? Awful--what? You bet you! That poor girl,
for her my heart is bleeding. Dead and gone like that, with absolutely
practically no warning! It don't seem possible! Taken down day before
yesterday, the doctor says, and commenced getting from bad to worse
right away. And this morning she goes out of her head and at
two-forty-five this afternoon all of a sudden her heart gives out on her
and she is dead before anybody knows it. Awful, awful!"
Mr. Lobel wagged a mournful poll.
"More than awful--actually it is horrifying!" quoth Mr. Geltfin. Visibly
at least his distress seemed greater than the distress of either of the
others. "All off alone up there by herself in some little rube town it
must come to her! Maybe if she had been down here with specialists and
surgeons and nurses and all she would 'a' been saved. Too bad, too bad!
People got no business going away from a big town! Me, I get nervous
even on a motor trip in the country and--"
"Everything possible which could be done was done," resumed Mr. Lobel.
"So you don't need you should worry there, Geltfin. The doctor tells me
he can't get no regular trained nurse on account there is so much
sickness from this flu and no regular nurses there anyway, but he tells
me he brings in his wife which she understands nursing and he says the
wife sticks right there day and night and gives every attention. There
ain't nothing we should reproach ourselves about, and besides we didn't
know even she was sick--nobody knew.
"Dead and gone, poor girl, and not one week ago--six days, if I got to
be exact--she is sitting right there in that same seat where you're
sitting now, Geltfin, looking just as natural and healthy as what you
look, Geltfin; looking just as if nothing is ever going to happen to
her."
Mr. Geltfin had hastily risen and moved nearer the outer door.
"An awful thing--that flu!" he declared. "Lobel, do you think maybe she
could 'a' had the germs of it on her then?"
"Don't be a coward, Geltfin!" rebuked his senior severely. "Look at me
how I am not frightened, and yet it was me she seen last, not you!
Besides, only to-day I am reading where that big doctor in Cincinnati,
Ohio--Silverwater--says it is not a disease which you could catch from
somebody else until after they have actually got down sick with it. Yes,
sir, she sits right there telling me good-by. 'Mr. Lobel,' she says to
me--I had just handed her her check--'Mr. Lobel,' she says, 'always to
you,' she says, 'I should be grateful. Always to you,' she says, 'I
should give thanks that two years ago when I am practically
comparatively unknown you should 'a' given me my big chance.' In them
very words she says it, and me setting here at this desk listening at
her while she said so!
"Well, I ain't lost no time, boys. Before even I sent to find you I
already got busy. I've got Appel starting for up there in half an hour
in my car to take charge of everything and with orders to spare no
expense. The funeral what I am going to give that girl! Well, she
deserves it. Always a hard worker, always on the job, always she minds
her own business, always she saves her money, always a perfect lady,
never throwing any of these here temperamentals, never going off in any
of these here highsterics, never making a kick if something goes wrong
because it happens I ain't on the lot to run things, never----"
It threatened to become a soliloquy. This time it was Quinlan who
interrupted:
"You said it all, Lobel, and it's no need that you should go on saying
it any more. The main points, I take it, are that we're all sorry and
that we've lost one swell big asset by her dying--only it's lucky for us
she didn't take ill before we got through shooting The She-Demon."
"Lucky? Huh! Actually, lucky ain't the right word for it!" said the
president. "When I think of the fix we should 'a' been in if she hadn't
finished up the picture first, I assure you, boys, it gives me the
shivers. Right here and now in the middle of being sorry it gives me the
shivers!"
"It does, does it?" There was something so ominous in Mr. Geltfin's
sadly ironic remark--something in tone and accent so lugubriously
foreboding that his hearers swung about to stare at him. "It does, does
it? Well, all what I've got to say is, Lobel, you've got some shivers
coming to you! We've all got some shivers coming to us! Having this girl
die on us is bad business!"
"Sure it is," agreed the head, "but it might be worse. There's one
awful big salary cut off the pay roll and if we can't have her with
us no longer there's nobody else can have her. And the profits
from that last picture should ought to be something positively
enormous--stupendous--sensational. Listen! I bet you that from the hour
we release----"
"You ain't going to release!" broke in Geltfin, his wizen features
sharpening into a peaky mask of grief.
"Don't talk foolishness!" snapped Mr. Lobel. "For why shouldn't we be
going to release?"
"That's it--why?" Mr. Quinlan seconded the demand.
"Because you wouldn't dare do it!" In his desire to make clear his point
Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them
forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. "Because the
public wouldn't stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what
the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a
good, decent, straight girl that's dead and will soon be in her grave is
for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you
yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead
woman names like she-demon? They would not--not in a thousand years--and
you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some
pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never
get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when
that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!"
Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they
looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel's head drooped forward as though
an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his
eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.
On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had
followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a
reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but
receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries
which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded--and
got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There
was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom
Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting
memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer.
This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle
of it.
The pall of silence lasted no longer than it has here taken to describe
how it fell and enveloped them. Mr. Geltfin broke the silence without
lifting the prevalent gloom. Indeed his words but depressingly served to
darken it to a very hue of midnight.
"Besides," he added, "there is anyhow another reason. We know what a
nice clean girl she was in private life. We know that all them wild
romance stories about her was cooked up in the press department to make
the suckers believe that both on and off the screen she was the same.
But she wasn't, and so I for one should be afraid that if we put that
fillum out she'd come back from the dead to stop it!"
He sank his voice, glancing apprehensively over his shoulder.
"Lobel, you wouldn't dare do it!"
"Lobel," said Quinlan, "he's right! We wouldn't dare do it!"
"Quinlan," admitted Lobel, "it's right--I wouldn't dare do it."
In that same instant of his confession, though, Mr. Lobel bounded out of
his chair, magically changing from a dumpy static figure of woe into the
dynamo of energy and resourcefulness the glassed-in studios and the
out-of-door locations knew.
"I got it!" he whooped. "I got it!" He threw himself at an inner door of
the executive suite and jerked it open. "Appel," he shouted, "don't
start yet! I got more instructions still for you. And say, Appel, you
ain't seen nobody but only Quinlan and Geltfin--eh? You ain't told
nobody only just them? Good! Well, don't! Don't telephone nobody! Don't
speak a word to nobody! Don't move from where you are!"
He closed the door and stood against it as though to hold his private
secretary a close prisoner within, and faced his amazed partners.
"It's a cinch!" he proclaimed to them. "I just this minute thought it up
myself. If I must say it myself, always in a big emergency I can think
fast. Listen! Nobody ain't going to know Monte is dead; not for a year,
not maybe for two years; not until this last big picture is old and worn
out; not until we get good and ready they should know. Vida Monte, she
goes right on living till we say the word."
"But--but--"
"Wait, wait, can't you? If I must do all the quick thinking for this
shop shouldn't I sometimes get a word in sideways? What I'm telling you,
if you'll please let me, is this: The girl is dead all right! But nobody
knows it only me and you, Quinlan, and you, Geltfin, and Appel in this
next room here. Even the doctor up there at Hamletsburg he don't know it
and his wife she don't know it and nobody in all that town knows it. And
why don't they know? Because they think only it is a woman named Sarah
Glassman that is dead. Actually that sickness no doubt changed her so
that even if them rubes ever go to see high-class feature fillums there
didn't nobody recognize her. If they didn't suspect nothing when she was
alive, for why should they suspect something now she is dead? They
shouldn't and they won't and they can't!
"What give me the idea was, I just remembered that when the doctor
called me up he spoke only the name Glassman, not the name Monte. He
tells me he calls up here because he finds in her room where she died a
card with the name Lobel Masterfilms on it. And likewise also I just
remembered that in the excitement of getting such a sad news over the
telephone I don't tell him who really she is neither."
"Holy St. Patrick!" blurted Quinlan, up now on his feet. "You mean,
Lobel----"
"Wait, wait, I ain't done--I ain't hardly started!" With flapperlike
motions of his hands Mr. Lobel waved him down. "It's easy--a pipe.
Listen! To date her salary is paid. The day she went away I gave her a
check in full, and if she done what always before she does, it's in the
bank drawing interest. Let it go on staying in the bank drawing
interest. So far as we know, she ain't got no people in this country at
all. In the old country, in Hungary? Maybe, yes. But Hungary is yet all
torn up by this war--no regular government there, no regular mails, no
American consuls there, no nothing. Time for them foreigners that they
should get their hands on her property one year from now or two years or
three. They couldn't come to claim it even if we should notify them,
which we can't. They don't lose nothing by waiting. Instead they
gain--the interest it piles up.
"Should people ask questions, why then through the papers we give it out
that Miss Vida Monte is gone far off away somewhere for a long rest;
that maybe she don't take no more pictures for a long time. That should
make The She-Demon go all the better. And to-morrow up there in that
little rube town very quietly we bury Sarah Glassman, deceased, with
the burial certificate made out in her own name." He paused a moment to
enjoy his triumph. "Boys, when I myself think out something, am I right
or am I wrong?"
He answered his own question.
"I'm right!"
By the look on Quinlan's face he read conviction, consent, full and
hearty approval. But Geltfin wavered. Inside Geltfin superstition
wrestled with opposing thoughts. Upon him then Lobel, the master mind,
advanced, dominating the scene and the situation and determined also to
dominate the lesser personality.
"But--but say--but look here now, Lobel," stammered Geltfin, hesitating
on the verge of a decision, "she might come back."
"Geltfin," commanded Lobel, "you should please shut up. Do you want that
we should make a lot of money or do you want that we should lose a lot
of money? I ask you. Listen! The dead they don't come back. When just
now you made your spiel, that part of it which you said about the dead
coming back didn't worry me. It was the part which you said about the
public not standing for it that got me, because for once, anyhow, in
your life you were right and I give you right. But what the public don't
know don't hurt 'em. And the public won't know. You leave it to me!"
It was as though this argument had been a mighty arm outstretched to
shove him over the edge. Geltfin ceased to teeter on the brim--he fell
in. He nodded in surrender and Lobel quit patting him on the back to
wave the vice president into activity.
"Quinlan," he ordered as he might order an office boy, "get busy! Tell
'em to rush The She-Demon! Tell 'em to rush the subtitles and all! Tell
'em to rush out an announcement that the big fillum is going to be
released two months before expected--on account the demand of the public
is so strong to see sooner the greatest vampire feature ever fillumed."
Quinlan was no office boy, but he obeyed as smartly as might any newly
hired office boy.
If it was Mr. Lobel's genius which guided the course of action,
energizing and speeding it, neither could it be denied that circumstance
and yet again circumstance and on top of that more circumstance matched
in with hue and shade to give protective coloration to his plan.
Continued success for it as time should pass seemed assured and
guaranteed, seeing that Vida Monte, beyond the studios and off the
locations, had all her life walked a way so secluded, so inconspicuous
and so utterly commonplace that no human being, whether an attache of
the company or an outsider, would be likely to miss her, or missing her,
to pry deeply into the causes for her absence. So much for the
contingencies of the future as those in the secret foresaw it. As for
the present, that was simplicity.
As quietly as she had moved in those earlier professional days of hers,
when she played small roles in provincial stock companies; as quietly as
she had gone on living after film fame and film money came her way; as
quietly as she had laid her down and died, so--very quietly--was her
body put away in the little cemetery at Hamletsburg. To the physician
who had ministered to her, to his good-hearted wife, to the official who
issued the burial certificate, to the imported clergyman who held the
service, to the few villagers who gathered for the funeral, drawn by the
morbid lure which in isolated communities brings folk to any funeral--to
all of these the dead woman merely was a stranger with a strange name
who, temporarily abiding here, had fallen victim to the plague which
filled the land.
Of those who had a hand in the last mortal role she would ever play only
Lobel's private secretary, young Appel, who came to pay the bills and
take over the private effects of this Sarah Glassman and after some
fashion to play the roles of next friend and chief mourner, kenned the
truth. The clergyman having done his duty by a deceased coreligionist,
to him unknown, went back to the city where he belonged. The physician
hurried away from the cemetery to minister to more patients than he
properly could care for. The townspeople scattered, intent upon their
own affairs. Appel returned to headquarters, reporting all well.
At headquarters all likewise went well--so briskly well in fact that
under the urge for haste things essential were accomplished in less time
by fewer craftsmen than had been the case since those primitive
beginnings when Lobel's, then a struggling short-handed concern,
frequently had doubled up its studio staffs for operative service in the
makeshift laboratory. Reporting progress to the president, Mr. Quinlan
expanded with self-satisfaction.
"I'm fixing to show you something in the way of a speed record," he
proudly proclaimed. "The way I looked at it, the fewer people I had
rushing this thing through the factory the less chance there was for
loose talk round the plant and the less loose talk there was going on
round the plant the less chance there was for maybe more loose talk
outside. Yes, I know we'd figured we'd got everything caulked up
air-tight, but I says to myself, 'What's the use in taking a chance on a
leak if you don't have to?'
"So I practically turned the big part of the job--developing and all the
rest of it--over to Josephson, same as we used to do back yonder when we
was starting out in this game and didn't have a regular film cutter and
the camera man had to jump in and develop and cut and assemble and print
and everything. Josephson shot all the scenes for The She-Demon--he
knows the run of it better even than the director does. Besides,
Josephson is naturally close-mouthed. He minds his own business and
never butts in anywhere. To look at him you can't never tell what he's
thinking about. But even if he suspected anything--and, of course, he
don't--he's the kind that'd know enough to keep his trap shut. So I've
had him working like a nailer and he's pretty near done.
"Soon as he had the negative ready, which was late yesterday afternoon
after you'd went home, I had it run off with nobody there but me and
Josephson, and I took a flash at it--and, Lobel, it's a bear! No need
for you to worry about the negative--it was a heap too long, of course,
in the shape it was yesterday, but it had everything in it we hoped
would be in it--and more besides.
"So then without losing a minute I stuck Josephson on the printing
machine himself. I'd already gave the girl on the machine a couple of
days off to get her out of the way. Josephson stayed on the job alone
pretty near all last night, I guess. He had things to himself without
anybody to bother him and I tell you he shoved it along.
"Connors ain't lost no time neither. He's got the subtitles pretty near
done, and believe it or not, as you're a mind to, but, Lobel, I'm
telling you that this time to-morrow morning and not a minute later I'll
have the first sample print all cut and assembled and ready for you to
give it a look! Then it'll just be a job of matching up the negative and
sticking in the subtitles and starting to turn out the positives faster
than the shipping-room gang can handle 'em. I guess that ain't moving,
heh?"
"Quinlan," said Mr. Lobel, "I give you right."
By making his word good to the minute the gratified Mr. Quinlan derived
additional gratification. At the time appointed they sat in darkness in
the body of the projection room--Lobel, Quinlan, Geltfin and Appel,
these four and none other--behind a door locked and barred. Promptly on
Quinlan's order the operator in the box behind them started his machine
and the accomplished rough draft of the great masterpiece leaped into
being and actuality upon the lit square toward which they faced.
The beginning was merely a beginning--graphic enough and offering
abundant proof that in this epochal undertaking the Lobel shop had
spared no expense to make the production sumptuous, but after all only
preliminary stuff to sauce the palate of the patron for a greater feast
to come and suitably to lead up to the introduction of the star. Soon
the star was projected upon the screen, a purring, graceful panther of a
woman, to change at once into a sinuous python of a woman and then to
merge the feline and the ophidian into a sinister, splendid, menacing
composite bespeaking the dramatic conception and the dramatic
presentment of all feminine evil, typifying in every move of the lithe,
half-clad body, in every shift of the big eyes, wickedness unleashed and
unashamed.
Mr. Lobel sitting unseen in the velvet blackness uttered grunts of
approbation. The greatest of all film vampires certainly had delivered
the goods in this her valedictory. Never before had she so well
delivered them. The grunting became a happy rumble.
But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory--a foretaste of more
vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the
full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men,
would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well
simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was
semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish.
The first of these bigger scenes started--the scene where the queen of
the apaches set herself to win the price of her hire from the Germans by
seducing the young army officer into a betrayal of the Allied cause; the
same scene wherein at the time of filming it Mr. Lobel himself had taken
over direction from Colfax's hands.
The scene was launched, acquired headway, then was halted as a bellow
from Mr. Lobel warned the operator behind him to cut off the power.
"What the hell!" sputtered the master. "There's a blur on the picture
here, a sort of a kind of smokiness. Did you see it, Geltfin? Right
almost directly in front of Monte it all of a sudden comes! Did you,
Quinlan?"
"Sure I seen it," agreed Geltfin. "Like a spot--sort of."
"It wasn't on the negative when I seen it day before yesterday," stated
Quinlan. "I can swear to that. A little defect from faulty printing, I
guess."
"All right then," said Mr. Lobel. "Only where you got efficiency like I
got it in this plant such things should have no business occurring.
"Go on, operator--let's see how goes it from now on."
Out again two shadow figures--the vampire and the vampire's
prey--flashed in motion. Yes, the cloudy spot was there, a bit of murky
shadow drifting between the pair of figures and the audience. It
thickened and broadened--and then from the suddenly constricted throats
of the four watchers, almost as though all in the same moment an
invisible hand had laid gripping hold on each of their several
windpipes, came a chorused gasp.
For they saw how out of the drifting patch of spumy wrack there emerged
a shape vague and indistinct and ghostly, but taking on instantly the
sharpened outlines of one they recognized. It was the shape, not of Vida
Monte, the fabled wrecker of lives, but the shape of her other self,
Sarah Glassman, and the face it wore was not the face of the stage
vampire, aflame with the counterfeited evil which the actor woman had so
well known how to simulate but the real face of the real woman, who lay
dead and buried under a mound of fresh-cut sods seventy miles away--her
own face, melancholy and sadly placid, as God had fashioned it for her.
Out from the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its
half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and
clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white--fit
grave clothes for one lately entombed--with great masses of loosened
black hair falling like a pall about the passionless brooding face; and
now lifting reproachful eyes, it looked out across the intervening void
of blackness into their staring eyes, and from the folds of the cerement
robes raised a bare arm high as though to forbid a lying sacrilege. And
stood there then as a wraith newly freed from the burying mold, filling
and dominating the picture so that one looking saw nothing else save the
shrouded figure and the head and the face and those eyes and that upheld
white arm.
Cowering low in his seat with a sleeve across his eyes to shut out the
accusing apparition, Mr. Geltfin whispered between chattering teeth: "I
told him! I told him the dead could maybe come back!"
Mr. Quinlan, a bolder nature but even so terribly shaken, was muttering
to himself: "But it wasn't in the negative! I swear to God it wasn't in
the negative!"
It is probable that Mr. Lobel heard neither of them, or if he heard he
gave no heed. He had a feeling that the darkness was smothering him.
"Shut off the machine!" he roared as he wrenched his body free of the
snug opera chair in which he sat. "And turn on the lights in this
room--quick! And let me out of here--quick!"
Lunging into the darkness he stumbled over Appel's legs and tumbled
headlong out into the narrow aisle. On all fours as the lights flashed
on, he gave in a choking bellow his commands.
"Burn that print--you hear me, burn it now! And then burn the negative
too! Quick you burn it, like I am telling you!"
"But, Lobel, I'll swear to the negative!" protested Quinlan, jealous
even in his fright for his own vindication. "If you'll look at the
neg--"
"I wouldn't touch it for a million dollars!" roared Lobel. "Burn it up,
I tell you! And bury the ashes!"
Still choking, still bellowing, he scrambled to his feet, an ungainly
embodiment of mortal agitation, and ran for the door. But Mr. Geltfin
beat him to it and through it, Quinlan and Appel following in the order
named.
Outside their chief fell up against a wall, panting and wheezing for
breath, his face swollen and all congested with purple spots. They
thought he was about to have a stroke or a seizure of some sort. But
they were wrong. This merely was Nature's warning to a man with a size
seventeen neckband and a forty-six-inch girth measurement. The stroke he
was to have on the following day.
Probably Quinlan and Geltfin as experienced business men should have
known better than to come bursting together into the office of a stout
middle-aged man who so lately had suffered a considerable nervous shock
and still was unstrung; and having after such unseemly fashion burst in,
then to blurt out their tidings in concert without first by soft and
soothing words preparing their hearer's system to receive the tidings
they bore. But themselves, they were upset by what they just had learned
and so perhaps may be pardoned for a seeming unthoughtfulness. Both
speaking at once, both made red of face and vehement by mingled emotions
of rage and chagrin, each nourishing a perfectly natural and human
desire to place the blame for a catastrophe on shoulders other than
their own two pairs, they sought to impart the tale they brought. Ensued
for an exciting moment a baffling confusion of tongues.
"It was that Josephson done it--the mousy little sneak!"
These words became intelligible as Quinlan, exerting his superior vocal
powers, dinned out the sputtering inarticulate accents of Geltfin.
"He fixed it so that you'd spill the beans, Lobel! He fixed The
She-Demon--Josephson. And me trusting him!
"How should I be knowing that all this time him and that girl was
secretly engaged to be married? How should I be knowing that he would
find out for himself the day after the funeral that she was dead and yet
never say a word about it? How should I be knowing that he would have
all tucked away somewhere a roll of film showing her dressed up like a
madonna or a saint or a martyr or a ghost or something which he took
privately one time when they was out together on location--slipping away
with her and taking 'em without nobody knowing about it? How should I be
knowing that without tipping his hand he would cook up the idea to work
a slick fake on you, Lobel, and scare you into killing off the whole
thing? How should I be knowing that while he was on the printing machine
all by himself the other night that he would work the old double
exposure stunt and throw such a scare into you in the projecting room
yesterday?"
By reason of his valvular resources Mr. Quinlan might shout louder than
Geltfin. But he could not shout louder than Mr. Lobel. Nobody in that
section of Southern California could. Mr. Lobel outblared him:
"How should you be knowing? You come now and ask me that when all along
it was you that had the swell idee to stick him into the laboratory all
by himself where he could play some funny business? You!"
"But it was you, Lobel, that wouldn't listen to me when I begged you to
wait and not burn up the negative. I tried to tell you that the negative
was O. K. when I'd seen it run off."
"You told me? It's a lie!"
"Sure I told you! Geltfin remembers my telling you, don't you, Geltfin?
You're an old bird, Lobel--you ought to know by now about retouching and
doctoring and all. You know how easy it is to slip over a double
exposure. But it was only the sample print that was doctored. The
negative was all right, but you wouldn't listen."
"That's right too, Lobel!" shrilled Geltfin. "I heard him when he yelled
out to you that you should wait!"
Quinlan amplified the indictment.
"Sure he heard me--and so did you! But no, you had to lose your nerve
and lose your head just because you'd had a scare throwed into you."
"I never lose my head! I never lose my nerve!" denied Mr. Lobel. He
turned the counter tide of recriminations on Geltfin.
"Anyhow,--it was you started it, Geltfin--you in the first place, right
here in this room, with your craziness about the dead coming back. Only
for your fool talk I would never have had the idee of a ghost at all.
And now--now when the cow is all spilt milk you two come and--"
"Oh, but Lobel," countered Geltfin, "remember you was the one that made
'em burn up the negative without giving it a look at all!"
"He said it, Lobel!" reenforced Quinlan. "You was the one that just
would have the negative burned up whether or no. And now it's burned
up!"
Mr. Lobel was not used to being bullied in his own office or elsewhere.
If there was bullying to be done by anyone, he was his own candidate
always. Surcharged with distracting regrets as he was, he had an
inspiration. He would turn the flood of accusation away from himself.
"Where is that Josephson?" he whooped. "He is the one actually to blame,
not us. Let me get my hands on that Josephson once!"
"You can't!" jeered Quinlan. "He's quit--he's gone--he's beat it! He
wrote me a note, though, and mailed it back to me when he was beating it
out of town, telling me to tell you how slick he'd worked it on you." He
felt in his pockets. "I got that note here somewhere--here it is. I'll
read it to you, Lobel--he calls you an old scoundrel in one place and an
old sucker in another."
"Look out--catch him, Quinlan!" cried Mr. Geltfin. "Look at his
face--he's fixing to faint or something."
The prime intent of this recital, as set forth at the beginning, was to
tell why Mr. Max Lobel had an attack of apoplexy. That original purpose
having been now carried out, there remains nothing more to be added and
the chapter ends.