Penetrating the Holden lot he was relieved to find that he created no
immediate sensation. People did not halt to point derisive fingers at
him; he had half feared they would. As he approached the office building
he was almost certain he saw Baird turn in ahead of him. Yet when he
entered the outer room of the Buckeye offices a young woman looked up
from her typewriter to tell him that Mr. Baird was not in.
She was a serious-eyed young woman of a sincere manner; she spoke with
certainty of tone. Mr. Baird was not only out, but he would not be in
for several days. His physician had ordered him to a sanitarium.
The young woman resumed her typing; she did not again, glance up.
The caller seemed to consider waiting on a chance that she had been
misinformed. He was now sure he had seen Baird enter the building, and
the door of his private office was closed. The caller idled outside the
railing, absently regarding stills of past Buckeye atrocities that had
been hung upon the walls of the office by someone with primitive tastes
in decoration. He was debating a direct challenge of the young woman’s
veracity.
What would she say if told that the caller meant to wait right
there until Mr. Baird should convalesce? He managed some appraising
side-glances at her as she bent over her machine. She seemed to believe
he had already gone.
Then he did go. No good talking that way to a girl. If it had been a
man, now--“You tell Mr. Baird that Mr. Gill’s got to see him as soon as
possible about something important,” he directed from the open door.
The young woman raised her serious eyes to his and nodded. She resumed
her work. The door closed. Upon its closing the door of Baird’s private
office opened noiselessly to a crack that sufficed for the speaking
voice at very moderate pitch to issue.
“Get Miss Montague on the ‘phone,” directed the voice. The door closed
noiselessly. Beyond it Mr. Baird was presently speaking in low, sweet
tones.
“‘Lo, Sister! Listen; that squirrel just boiled in here, and I ducked
him. I told the girl I wasn’t to be in unless he was laughing all over,
and he wasn’t doing the least little thing that was anywheres near
laughing. See what I mean? It’s up to you now. You started it; you got
to finish it. I’ve irised out. Get me?”
On the steps outside the rebuffed Merton Gill glanced at his own natty
wrist-watch, bought with some of the later wages of his shame. It was
the luncheon hour; mechanically he made his way to the cafeteria. He
had ceased to rehearse the speech a doughtier Baird would now have been
hearing.
Instead he roughly drafted one that Sarah Nevada Montague could not
long evade. Even on her dying bed she would be compelled to listen. The
practising orator with bent head mumbled as he walked. He still mumbled
as he indicated a choice of foods at the cafeteria counter; he continued
to be thus absorbed as he found a table near the centre of the room.
He arranged his assortment of viands. “You led me on, that’s what
you did,” he continued to the absent culprit. “Led me on to make a
laughing-stock of myself, that’s what you did. Made a fool of me, that’s
what you did.”
“All the same, I can’t help thinking he’s a harm to the industry,”
came the crisp tones of Henshaw from an adjoining table. The rehearsing
orator glanced up to discover that the director and the sunny-faced
brown and gray man he called Governor were smoking above the plates of
their finished luncheon.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” suggested the cheerful governor.
“But see what he does: he takes the good old reliable, sure-fire stuff
and makes fun of it. I admit it’s funny to start with, but what’ll
happen to us if the picture public ever finds that out? What’ll we do
then for drama--after they’ve learned to laugh at the old stuff?”
“Tush, tush, my boy!” The Governor waved a half--consumed cigarette
until its ash fell. “Never fear. Do you think a thousand Jeff Bairds
could make the picture public laugh at the old stuff when it’s played
straight? They laughed last night, yes; but not so much at the really
fine burlesque; they guffawed at the slap-stick stuff that went with it.
Baird’s shrewd. He knows if he played straight burlesque he’d never make
a dollar, so notice how he’ll give a bit of straight that is genuine
art, then a bit of slap-stick that any one can get. The slap-stick is
what carries the show. Real burlesque is criticism, my boy; sometimes
the very high-browest sort. It demands sophistication, a pretty high
intelligence in the man that gets it.
“All right. Now take your picture public. Twenty million people every
day; not the same ones every day, but with same average cranial index,
which is low for all but about seven out of every hundred. That’s
natural because there aren’t twenty million people in the world with
taste or real intelligence--probably not five million. Well, you take
this twenty million bunch that we sell to every day, and suppose they
saw that lovely thing last night--don’t you know they’d all be back
to-night to see a real mopping mother with a real son falsely accused of
crime--sure they’d be back, their heads bloody but unbowed. Don’t worry;
that reliable field marshal, old General Hokum, leads an unbeatable
army.”
Merton Gill had listened to the beginning of this harangue, but now he
savagely devoured food. He thought this so--called Governor was too much
like Baird.
“Well, Governor, I hope you’re right. But that was pretty keen stuff
last night. That first bit won’t do Parmalee any good, and that Buck
Benson stuff--you can’t tell me a little more of that wouldn’t make
Benson look around for a new play.”
“But I do tell you just that. It won’t hurt Parmalee a bit; and
Benson can go on Bensoning to the end of time--to big money. You keep
forgetting this twenty-million audience. Go out and buy a picture
magazine and read it through, just to remind you. They want hokum, and
pay for it. Even this thing of Baird’s, with all the saving slapstick,
is over the heads of a good half of them. I’ll make a bet with you now,
anything you name, that it won’t gross two thirds as much as Benson’s
next Western, and in that they’ll cry their eyes out when he kisses his
horse good-bye. See if they don’t. Or see if they don’t bawl at the next
old gray-haired mother with a mop and a son that gets in bad.
“Why, if you give ‘em hokum they don’t even demand acting. Look at our
own star, Mercer. You know as well as I do that she not only can’t act,
but she’s merely a beautiful moron. In a world where right prevailed
she’d be crowned queen of the morons without question. She may have an
idea that two and two make four, but if she has it’s only because she
believes everything she hears. And look at the mail she gets. Every last
one of the twenty million has written to tell her what a noble actress
she is. She even believes that.
“Baird can keep on with the burlesque stuff, but his little old
two-reelers’ll probably have to pay for it, especially if he keeps those
high-priced people. I’ll bet that one new man of his sets him back seven
hundred and fifty a week. The Lord knows he’s worth every cent of it. My
boy, tell me, did you ever in all your life see a lovelier imitation of
a perfectly rotten actor? There’s an artist for you. Who is he, anyway?
Where’d he come from?” Merton Gill again listened; he was merely
affecting to busy himself with a fork. It was good acting.
“I don’t know,” replied Henshaw. “Some of the crowd last night said he
was just an extra that Baird dug up on the lot here. And, on the subject
of burlesque, they also said Baird was having him do some Edgar Wayne
stuff in a new one.”
“Fine!” The Governor beamed. “Can’t you see him as the honest, likable
country boy? I bet he’ll be good to his old mother in this one, too, and
get the best of the city slickers in the end. For heaven’s sake don’t
let me miss it! This kid last night handed me laughs that were better
than a month’s vacation for this old carcass of mine. You say he was
just an extra?”
“That’s what I heard last night. Anyway, he’s all you say he is as an
artist. Where do you suppose he got it? Do you suppose he’s just the
casual genius that comes along from time to time? And why didn’t he stay
‘straight’ instead of playing horse with the sacred traditions of
our art? That’s what troubled me as I watched him. Even in that wild
business with the spurs he was the artist every second. He must have
tricked those falls but I couldn’t catch him at it. Why should such a
man tie up with Baird?”
“Ask me something hard. I’d say this bird had been tried out in serious
stuff and couldn’t make the grade. That’s the way he struck me. Probably
he once thought he could play Hamlet--one of those boys. Didn’t you get
the real pathos he’d turn on now and then? He actually had me kind of
teary a couple of times. But I could see he’d also make me laugh my head
off any time he showed in a straight piece.
“To begin with, look at that low-comedy face of his. And then--something
peculiar--even while he’s imitating a bad actor you feel somehow that it
isn’t all imitation. It’s art, I grant you, but you feel he’d still be
a bad actor if he’d try to imitate a good one. Somehow he found out his
limits and decided to be what God meant him to be. Does that answer you?
It gives you acting-plus, and if that isn’t the plus in this case I miss
my guess.”
“I suppose you’re right--something like that. And of course the real
pathos is there. It has to be. There never was a great comedian without
it, and this one is great. I admit that, and I admit all you say about
our audience. I suppose we can’t ever sell to twenty million people
a day pictures that make any demand on the human intelligence. But
couldn’t we sell something better to one million--or a few thousand?”
The Governor dropped his cigarette end into the dregs of his coffee. “We
might,” he said, “if we were endowed. As it is, to make pictures we must
make money. To make money we must sell to the mob. And the mob reaches
full mental bloom at the age of fifteen. It won’t buy pictures the
average child can’t get.”
“Of course the art is in its infancy,” remarked Henshaw, discarding his
own cigarette.
“Ours is the Peter Pan of the arts,” announced the Governor, as he rose.
“The Peter Pan of the arts--”
“Yes. I trust you recall the outstanding biological freakishness of
Peter.”
“Oh!” replied Henshaw.
When Merton Gill dared to glance up a moment later the men were matching
coins at the counter. When they went out he left a half-eaten meal and
presently might have been observed on a swift-rolling street-car. He
mumbled as he blankly surveyed palm-bordered building sites along the
way. He was again rehearsing a tense scene with the Montague girl. In
actor parlance he was giving himself all the best of it. But they were
new lines he mumbled over and over. And he was no longer eluded by
the title of that book he remembered on the library shelf at Simsbury.
Sitting in the cafeteria listening to strange talk, lashed by cruel
memories, it had flashed upon his vision with the stark definition of
a screened subtitle. He rang the Montague bell twice before he heard
a faint summons to enter. Upon the parlour couch, under blankets that
reached her pillowed head, lay Sarah. She was pale and seemed to suffer.
She greeted him in a feeble voice, lids fluttering over the fires of
that mysterious fever burning far back in her eyes.
“Hullo, Kid,” he began brightly. “Here’s your watch.” Her doubting
glance hovered over him as he smiled down at her. “You giving it to me
again, Merton?” She seemed unable to conquer a stubborn incredulity.
“Of course I’m giving it to you again. What’d you think I was going to
do?”
She still surveyed him with little veiled glances. “You look so bright
you give me Kleig eyes,” she said. She managed a wan smile at this.
“Take it,” he insisted, extending the package. “Of course it won’t keep
Western Union time, but it’ll look good on you.”
She appeared to be gaining on her incredulity, but a vestige of it
remained. “I won’t touch it,” she declared with more spirit than could
have been expected from the perishing, “I won’t touch it till you give
me a good big kiss.”
“Sure,” he said, and leaned down to brush her pale cheek with his lips.
He was cheerfully businesslike in this ceremony.
“Not till you do it right,” she persisted. He knelt beside the couch and
did it right. He lingered with a hand upon her pale brow.
“What you afraid of?” he demanded.
“You,” she said, but now she again brought the watch to view, holding
it away from her, studying its glitter from various angles. At last she
turned her eyes up to his. They were alive but unrevealing. “Well?”
“Well?” he repeated coolly.
“Oh, stop it!” Again there was more energy than the moribund are wont to
manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone as she went
on, “You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you know well enough
what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can’t you?”
He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could
conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.
“Well, it’ll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your
thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s’pose you and Baird had it
between you all the time, right down to the very last, that I thought
he was doin’ a serious play. Ho, ho!” He laughed gibingly. It was a
masterful laugh. “A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff
all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!” Again the
dry, scornful laugh of superiority. “Didn’t you people know that I
knew what I could do and what I couldn’t do? I should have thought that
little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn’t you s’pose I
knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn’t ever
make the grade in a serious piece?
“Of course I know I got real pathos--look how I turned it on a couple o’
times in that piece last night--but even when I’m imitating a bad actor
you can see it ain’t all acting. You’d see soon enough I was a bad actor
if I tried to imitate a good one. I guess you’d see that pretty quick.
Didn’t you and Baird even s’pose I’d found out my limits and decided to
be what God meant me to be?
“But I got the pathos all right, and you can’t name one great comedian
that don’t need pathos more’n he needs anything else. He just has to
have it--and I got it. I got acting-plus; that’s what, I got. I knew it
all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it last night. You
could hear fifty of ‘em talking about it when I came out of the theatre,
saying I was an artist and all like that, and a certain Los Angeles
society woman that you can bet never says things she don’t mean, she
told me she saw lots of places in this piece that I was funnier than any
cross-eyed man that ever lived. And what happens this morning?” Hands
in pockets he swaggered to and fro past the couch.
“Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to sign
me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of ‘em said not an hour
ago--he’s a big producer, too--that Baird ought to be paying me seven
hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of course I didn’t
want to say anything the other day, with you pretending to know so much
about contracts and all that--I just thought I’d let you go on, seeing
you were so smart--and I signed what you told me to. But I know I should
have held off--with this Bamberger coming over from the Bigart when
I was hardly out of bed, and says will three hundred and fifty a week
interest me and promising he’ll give me a chance to do that spur act
again that was the hit of the piece--”
He broke off, conscious suddenly that the girl had for some time
been holding a most peculiar stare rigidly upon him. She had at first
narrowed her right eye at a calculating angle as she listened; but for
a long time now the eyes had been widened to this inexplicable stare
eloquent of many hidden things.
As he stopped his speech, made ill at ease by the incessant pressing of
the look, he was caught and held by it to a longer silence than he
had meant to permit. He could now read meanings. That unflinching
look incurred by his smooth bluster was a telling blend of pity and of
wonder.
“So you know, do you,” she demanded, “that you look just enough too much
like Harold Parmalee so that you’re funny? I mean.” she amended, seeing
him wince, “that you look the way Parmalee would look if he had brains?”
He faltered but made a desperate effort to recover his balance.
“And besides, what difference does it make? If we did good pictures we’d
have to sell ‘em to a mob. And what’s a mob? It’s fifteen years old and
nothing but admirers, or something like that, like Muriel Mercer that
wouldn’t know how much are two times two if the neighbours didn’t get it
to her--”
Again he had run down under her level look. As he stopped, the girl on
the couch who had lain with the blankets to her neck suddenly threw them
aside and sat up. Surprisingly she was not garbed in sick-bed apparel.
She seemed to be fully dressed.
A long moment she sat thus, regarding him still with that slow look,
unbelieving yet cherishing. His eyes fell at last.
“Merton!” he heard her say. He looked up but she did not speak. She
merely gave a little knowing nod of the head and opened her arms to him.
Quickly he knelt beside her while the mothering arms enfolded him. A
hand pulled his head to her breast and held it there. Thus she rocked
gently, the hand gliding up to smooth his hair. Without words she
cherished him thus a long time. The gentle rocking back and forth
continued.
“It’s--it’s like that other time you found me--” His bluster had gone.
He was not sure of his voice. Even these few words had been hard. He did
not try more.
“There, there, there!” she whispered. “It’s all right, everything’s all
right. Your mother’s got you right here and she ain’t ever going to let
you go--never going to let you go.”
She was patting his head in rhythm with her rocking as she snuggled and
soothed him. There was silence for another interval. Then she began to
croon a song above him as she rocked, though the lyric was plainly an
improvisation.
“Did he have his poor old mother going for a minute? Yes, he did. He had
her going for a minute, for a minute. Yes, he had her going good for a
minute.
“But oh, he won’t ever fool her very long, very long, not very long,
because he can’t fool his dear old mother very long, very long; and he
can bet on that, bet on that, so he can, bet a lot of money on that,
that, that!” Her charge had grown still again, but she did not relax her
tightened arms.
“Say,” he said at last.
“Well, honey.”
“You know those benches where we wait for the cars?”
“Do I know them?” The imperative inference was that she did.
“I looked at the store yesterday. The sign down there says ‘Himebaugh’s
dignified system of deferred payments.’”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“Well, I saw another good place--it says ‘The house of lucky rings’--you
know--rings!”
“Sure, I know. That’s all right.”
“Well,” he threw off the arms and got to his feet. She stood up then.
“Well, all right!”
They were both constrained now. Both affected an ease that neither felt.
It seemed to be conceded without words that they must very lightly skirt
the edges of Merton Gill’s screen art. They talked a long tune volubly
of other things: of the girl’s illness from which she now seemed
most happily to have recovered, of whether she was afraid of him--she
professed still to be--of the new watch whose beauties were newly
admired when it had been adjusted to its owner’s wrist; of finances they
talked, and even, quite simply, of accessible homes where two could live
as cheaply as one.
It was not until he was about to go, when he stood at the door while the
girl readjusted his cravat, smoothed his hair, and administered a final
series of pats where they seemed most needed, that he broke ever so
slightly through the reserve which both had felt congealing about a
certain topic.
“You know,” he said, “I happened to remember the title of a book this
morning; a book I used to see back in the public library at home. It
wasn’t one I ever read. Maybe Tessie Kearns read it. Anyway, she had a
poem she likes a lot written by the same man. She used to read me good
parts of it. But I never read the book because the title sounded kind of
wild, like there couldn’t be any such thing. The poem had just a plain
name; it was called ‘Lucile,’ but the book by the same man was called
‘The Tragic Comedians.’ You wouldn’t think there could be a tragic
comedian would you?--well, look at me.”
She looked at him, with that elusive, remote flickering back in her
eyes, but she only said, “Be sure and come take me out to dinner.
To-night I can eat. And don’t forget your overcoat. And listen--don’t
you dare go into Himebaugh’s till I can go with you.”
One minute after he had gone the Montague girl was at the telephone.
“Hello! Mr. Baird, please. Is this Mr. Baird? Well, Jeff, everything’s
jake. Yeah. The poor thing was pretty wild when he got here. First he
began to bluff. He’d got an earful from someone, probably over on the
lot. And he put it over on me for a minute, too. But he didn’t last
good. He was awful broke up when the end came. Bless his heart. But you
bet I kissed the hurt place and made it well. How about him now? Jeff,
I’m darned if I can tell except he’s right again. When he got here he
was some heart-broke and some mad and some set up on account of things
he hears about himself. I guess he’s that way still, except I mended
the heart-break. I can’t quite make him out--he’s like a book where you
can’t guess what’s coming in the next chapter, so you keep on reading.
I can see we ain’t ever going to talk much about it--not if we live
together twenty years. What’s that? Yeah. Didn’t I tell you he was
always getting me, somehow? Well, now I’m got. Yeah. We’re gonna do an
altar walk. What? Oh, right away. Say, honest, Jeff, I’ll never have
an easy minute again while he’s out of my sight. Helpless! You said it.
Thanks, Jeff. I know that, old man. Good-by!”