A TANTALIZING GLIMPSE
Helen, being close at Ruth’s side, was the only one to hear the
latter’s startled, half-whispered exclamation.
By the time Tom and Chess had noticed the defection of the two girls
and had started back toward them, Ruth had recovered her composure.
“What’s the idea of holding up the parade?” Chess demanded jovially.
“Is there anything you want? If so I’ll get it for you,” Tom added.
“Oh, millions of things, Tommy-boy,” Helen cried before Ruth could
speak and so betray her agitation. “That really was a very rash
promise, but we won’t take you up on it. What we want most right now
is rest and privacy and perchance a bite of refreshment. Lead on,
lead on!”
Ruth was grateful to her chum for so disguising her own agitation and
dismay. Helen’s continuous chatter as they were carried up in the
elevator prevented either Tom or Chess from noticing or commenting
upon her rather tight-lipped silence.
The elevator stopped and they followed the porter down a rather dark
and gloomy corridor richly carpeted so as to muffle the heaviest
footfall.
They went first to the girls’ rooms. A key was slipped into a lock
and they entered the regulation hotel room, rather stuffy and gloomy,
though comfortably furnished, with a bath attached and a door leading
off into a smaller room. In the larger of the two rooms the bed wore
the disguise of a cretonne-covered couch, thus transforming the
bedroom into a rather attractive sitting room during the daytime.
“Here’s your reception room, Ruth,” said Tom, “where you can meet
your actors and confab to your heart’s content. Like it?”
“All perfectly lovely, Tom dear, although we really didn’t need the
extra room. Still it will be lovely, having the two,” she added
quickly, unwilling to spoil Tom’s satisfaction. “It gives one space
to move about in.”
“And now,” said Helen, making a face at the boys, “clear out of here,
both of you! I know Ruthie wants to rest for a while before she has
all that crowd of actors and cameramen and what not coming down on
her!”
“I suppose,” said Chess, looking doleful, “that business must spoil
our pleasure some time. Why not now!”
Ruth laughed.
“It will be pretty nearly all business with Tom and me from now on,”
she said. “But that needn’t prevent you and Helen from having all the
good times you like.”
“Maybe not,” sighed Helen. “But Chess’s business will stand horribly
in the way of pleasure. I presume for a while I’m doomed to play all
by myself. Hustle your old man, will you, Chess?”
“If he’s to be hustled, yes. But his kind are sometimes annoyingly
deliberate.”
“Oh, well, go to it, you busy bees, and I will laze gloriously while
I look on with pity for all of you. Me for a show this afternoon.”
When the boys had gone to their rooms, only a door or two further
down the corridor, Helen asked Ruth if she had really seen Charlie
Reid in the hotel lobby.
“I can’t be sure,” Ruth answered, her voice low and troubled. “I
just caught a glimpse of a man that looked like him, but as I turned
around he dodged into the door of the writing room.”
“That would seem to show that it was really Charlie Reid you saw,”
Helen pointed out. “For Charlie would surely be careful about letting
you know he was following you just yet.”
“That’s what I thought,” agreed Ruth, a little wearily. “Anyway,
I wouldn’t say anything about it to the boys for a while, Helen.
We’ll wait until Charlie really does something before we complain.
Besides, I can’t even be sure it was Charlie I saw. It may be that
I’m thinking of him so much that I just naturally see him about me
wherever I go.”
“Let’s hope that’s the answer, Ruth dear,” said Helen, going over
to her chum and giving her a warm kiss. “In the meantime don’t go
worrying your head about it. The two of us together are more than a
match for Charlie Reid!”
Ruth was rather glad that Helen had planned to go to a matinée, for
that left her perfectly free to attend to the very important business
at hand—that of meeting and becoming acquainted with the actors,
cameramen and assistant directors with whom she was to be so closely
associated during the next few months.
They began to gather in her room shortly after two o’clock.
Edith Lang came first, accompanied by Layton Boardman, and these two
both Ruth and Tom met with enthusiasm. They had been associated with
the two actors in the making of Ruth’s last picture at Golden Pass
and had liked and admired them immensely.
Boardman, who had taken the lead in Ruth’s picture, was a splendid
actor of Western parts and a fine fellow as well. Edith Lang was the
crippled actress who had given Ruth valuable pointers in an art in
which she herself was very proficient.
Crippled as she had been while engaged in Red Cross work during the
World War, and so more or less exiled from a profession that had been
the breath of life to her, Edith Lang had once more come into her own.
Her part as the cripple in “The Girl of Gold” was a heavy emotional
one, calling for exactly the type of acting which had made Edith Lang
famous.
“I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see you again,” she told
Ruth, grasping the latter’s hands in both her own. “And under such
very happy circumstances! My dear Miss Fielding, can you imagine
slowly starving to death and then having presented to you a feast
sumptuous beyond your wildest imaginings? That is what this rôle
means to me!”
There were others gathering in the doorway, and Ruth went to meet
them eagerly.
There were the two assistant directors, Gerard Bolton and Maurice
Brandt. The former was a stockily built man with extremely broad
shoulders and a forehead that jutted heavily over deep-set gray eyes.
It was the forehead, Ruth decided after a second look, that made him
look so pugnacious, as if, having once got hold of an idea, he would
be extraordinarily slow to relinquish it.
However, he was pleasant enough, and his companion, Maurice Brandt,
was extremely talkative and cordial.
Ruth decided that Maurice Brandt might prove a trifle too
self-assertive upon further acquaintance, and then and there prepared
to resist him with some self-assertiveness of her own.
The leading lady was Alice Lytelly, a fluffy little blonde who ought
to do well in the rather unexacting title rôle. Despite the gushing
greeting of the latter, Ruth read temperament in the stormy blue
eyes of the star and the pouting, too-full, red lips. Ruth had had
experience before with temperamental stars, and she knew just how to
catalogue Miss Lytelly.
There were others in rôles of varying importance, from the tall,
distinguished-looking “father” of the heroine and the pitiful,
humpbacked dwarf who played the villain of the piece to the lad of
eleven, freckle-faced and elfish, who took the part of the star’s
younger brother and who by his astuteness and precocity managed to
discover the designs of the villain and lead the hero to his hiding
place.
This youngster, by name Eben Howe, was to become, as Tom teasingly
said, his rival in Ruth’s affections. However much that may be
an overstatement of fact, it certainly is true that Ruth liked
the mischievous, freckled boy at sight and that Eben developed an
adoration for the young director of the company that was like the
devotion of a good-natured, tail-wagging collie dog.
Such was the general personnel of the company of actors Ruth was to
direct in a moving picture of the first magnitude, “The Girl of Gold.”
The three cameramen, Traymore, Schultz and Atwater, were all pleasant
and competent men, and Ruth felt instinctively that there would be
little friction in her association with them.
Artists, every one of them in their line—in this day of the
“super-film,” there is a great deal more importance to the work of
the cameramen than is generally suspected—they all had heard of her
and respected her ability and had decided to give their best in
service to their youthful “chief.”
Ruth felt this and was grateful for it. But about the actors and the
two directors, she was not so sure. She seemed to sense a slight
undercurrent of resentment toward her—partly, perhaps, because of her
youth, partly because of her sex.
But it was in the person of the dwarf that this resentment seemed to
crystallize. Ruth shuddered merely to look at the deformed, twisted
body of Joe Rumph. Once she caught his deep-set black eyes gazing
intently at her from under beetling brows and beneath that somewhat
sinister look her flesh actually crawled as though some slimy
creature had trailed its length across her.
When it was over and they had all gone off, informed of Ruth’s plans
for the morrow’s start, Ruth flung herself into a chair and pressed a
hand over her eyes as though to shut out some unwelcome vision.
Tom, who had been thoroughly enjoying himself and who had found a
kindred spirit in one of the jovial cameramen, Bert Traymore, looked
surprised at Ruth’s strange gesture. He came over to her anxiously
and rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Buck up, Ruth,” he said. “What’s wrong?”
“That horrid Joe Rumph,” cried Ruth, in a muffled voice, hands still
pressed close before her eyes. “Did you notice how he looked at me?
I don’t like him, Tom! Why, I’d just as soon take a venomous snake
along with the company as that man!”