Things were quiet for a month or two after that, and we understood that
the production was being got ready. But Tish was very busy, having
thrown herself into her preparations with her usual thoroughness.
She had found a teacher who taught how to register with the face the
various emotions on the screen, and twice a week Aggie or myself held
her book, illustrated with cuts, while Tish registered in alphabetical
order: Amusement, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, devotion, envy, fatigue,
generosity, hate, interest, jealousy, keenness, laughter, love,
merriment, nobility, objection, pity, quarrelsomeness, ridicule,
satisfaction, terror, uneasiness, vanity, wrath, and so on.
I must confess that the subtle changes of expression were often lost on
me, and that I suffered extremely at those times, when discarding the
book, she asked us to name her emotion from her expression. She would
stand before her mirror and arrange her features carefully, and then
quickly turn. But I am no physiognomist.
Her physical preparations, however, she made alone. That she was
practicing again with her revolver Hannah felt sure, but we had no
idea where and how. As has been previously recorded, the janitor of
her apartment had refused to allow her to shoot in the basement after
a bullet had embedded itself in the dining table of A flat while the
family was at luncheon. We surmised that she was doing it somewhere
outside of town.
Later on we had proof of this. Aggie and I were taking a constitutional
one day in the country beyond the car line when, greatly to our
surprise, we heard two shots beyond a hedge, followed by a man’s
angry shouts, and on looking over the hedge, who should we behold but
our splendid Tish, revolver in hand, and confronted by an angry farm
laborer.
“Right through my hat!” he was bellowing. “If a man can’t do an honest
day’s work without being fired at----”
“Work?” Tish said coldly. “You were so still I took you for a
scarecrow.”
“Scarecrow yourself! When I yelled, you shot again!” he howled.
“Deliberate attempt at murder. That’s what it was.”
“It went off by itself the second time,” Tish explained. “I’m
rehearsing a certain scene, and----”
“Rehearsing?” said the man. “What for?”
“For the moving pictures.”
He looked at her, and then he bowed very politely.
“Well, well!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Pickford.
And how’s Doug?”
We did not tell Tish that we had witnessed this encounter. She might
have been sensitive about mistaking a farmer for a scarecrow.
It was a day or so after, in our presence, that Tish informed Hannah
she would take her along as her maid. And Hannah, who in twenty odd
years had never been known to show enthusiasm, was plainly delighted
with the prospect.
“D’you mean I can see them acting?” she inquired.
“I imagine so,” Tish said with a tolerant smile.
“Love scenes too?” Hannah asked, with an indelicacy that startled us.
“There will be no love scenes in this picture, Hannah,” Tish reproved
her. “I am surprised at you. And even in the ones you see every
evening, when you ought to be doing something better, it is as well to
remember that the persons are not really lovers. Indeed, that often
they are barely friends.”
She then told Hannah to go downtown and buy a book on moving-picture
make-up and the various articles required, as, since she was to be a
personal maid, she must know about such things.
I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when
we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the
face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think,
feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too
often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts
with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The
well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.
“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so
on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love
story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”