|AT that time no moving picture had been given the setting that Jacob
Zanin devised for the Nature film. Zanin had altered the interior of the
building to make it as little as possible like the conventional theater.
Only the walls, galleries and boxes and stage remained as they had
been. The new decorations were in the pale greens and pinks of spring
and were simple. Between foyer and auditorium were palms, with orchids
and other tropical flowers. The orchestra was not in sight. The ushers
were calm girls from the Village--students of painting, designing,
writing, sculpture--dressed modestly enough in a completer drapery of
the sort worn by Sue in the pictures, such a material as Philippine
women weave from grasses and pineapple strands, softly buff and cream
and brown in color, embroidered with exquisite skill in exotic designs.
The stage before the screen (Zanin used no drop curtain) represented
a native village on some imaginary South Sea Island. The natives
themselves were there, quietly moving about the routine of their lives
or sitting by a low fire before the group of huts at one side of the
stage.
Very likely you saw it. If so, you will understand the difficulty I am
confronted with in describing the place. It made a small sensation, the
theater itself, apart from the Nature film. But a penned description
could not convey the freshness, the quiet charm, the dignity of that
interior.
The dignity was what first touched Sue. The Worm watched her sidelong as
her eyes roved from the flat surfaces of pure bold color on the walls
to the quietly idyllic scene on the stage that managed to look as if it
were not a stage. She exhibited little emotion at first. Her brow was
slightly furrowed, the eyes thoughtful, the mouth set--that was all. She
had gone through the difficult months of enacting the film at first with
enthusiasm, later doggedly. She had early lost her vision of the thing
as a whole; her recollections now were of doing over and over this bit
and that, of a certain youthful actor who had taken it for granted
that a girl who would dress as she had to dress the character could
be casually made love to, of interminable train rides to the outdoor
“locations,” of clashes of will between Zanin and the Interstellar
people--of work, quarrels, dust, money and the lack of it and a
cumulative disillusionment. It came to her now that she had lost that
early vision. More, she had forgotten the sincerity and the purpose of
Jacob Zanin, that beneath his cold Jewish detachment he believed this
thing--that the individual must be freed from conformity and (as he saw
it) its attendant hypocrisy by breaking the yoke of the home. It must
be the individual--first, last, always---the glad, free individual--the
will to live, to feel, to express.
It was the Village jargon, done into something near a masterpiece. Sue
began to see as the film unrolled before her eyes, reel by reel, that
Zanin had never for a moment lost his dream. Even now, merely sitting
in that steep crowded gallery waiting for the first reel of the ten, Sue
knew that he had never lost it. Nor had Peter. The thought was exciting.
It brought the color back to her cheeks. Her lips parted slightly. She
was feeling again the enthusiasm Peter's scenario had roused in her at
the start, but with a new intensity. The Worm, at her side, watching
every slight subtle change of that young face, forgot his own stirring
news of the morning, forgot that he was Alexander H. Bates, and the
expression of a man who had bcen long hungry crept into his eyes.
The Nature film, you recall, pictured an imaginary people, simple, even
primitive, untouched by what men call civilisation. To their secluded
island comes the ship of an explorer, suggesting by its outlines and
rigging and the costumes of officers and crew, the brave days of Captain
Cook, or perhaps a period half a century earlier. The indefiniteness of
it was baffling and fascinating. At no point did it date! And the island
was not one of those that dot the South Seas, at least the inhabitants
were not savages. They were intelligent, industrious, gentle. But the
women hunted and fished with the men. Love--or passion, at least--was
recognized for the impermanent gust it so often is--and, as such, was
respected. No woman dreamed of tying herself for life to a lover she no
longer loved. Neither want nor respectability could lower her pride to
that point. Fatherhood, apparently, was not fixed, a hint being conveyed
that the men as a group were bound to contribute to the welfare of young
mothers. Thus the men were perhaps less glad and free than the women;
indeed there was more than a suggestion of matriarchy.... To this
community, thrown by an accident on its shores, the hundred odd men from
the ship brought a habit of discipline, a holy book (that was and was
not the Bible), a rigid marriage law, a complete hard theory of morality
with attached penalties, plenty of firearms, hogshead upon hogshead
of strong liquor, and underlying everything else an aggressive
acquisitiveness that showed itself in the beginning as the trading
instinct and later, of course, became politics and control.
In some measure it was the old obvious outcry against the conquest
of weak and simple peoples. Or the situation at the start indicated
something of the sort. But the story that grew out of the situation was
less obvious. Indeed, developed by Peter, with his theatrical skill, out
of Zanin's raw anarchism, it was a drama of quality and power. Zanin
had been able to make nothing more out of it than a clash of social
theories. Peter had made it a clash of persons; and through the
deliberate development of this clash ran, steadily increasing in
poignancy and tragic force straight to the climax of assassination, the
story of a girl. Peter himself did not know how good it was. Not
until he read about it in the papers (after which he became rather
irritatingly complacent regarding it). For you will remember, Peter was
crazily pursuing that girl when he wrote it. And the girl was boldly,
wonderfully Sue--a level-eyed, outspoken young woman, confronting life;
ashamed of nothing, not her body, not her soul; dreaming beautifully of
freedom, of expressing herself, of living her life, vibrant with health,
courage, joy.
The girl, you know, fell in love with a young sailor and gave herself
proudly and freely. The sailor could not comprehend her, became furtive
and jealous. They quarreled. To quiet her he was driven to brutality.
For he was a respectable man and held his reputation high. The affair
became known. The men of the ship, muttering strange words about a
custom called marriage, held her as bad, fell on the age-old decision
that she must continue to be, bad, at their call, though furtively. For
they were all respectable men.
Then we saw the girl as an outcast, fed, for a time, secretly by the
cowed bewildered tribe. We saw her as a dishonored mother, fighting the
sea, the forest, the very air for sustenance. We caught glimpses of the
new community, growing into a settlement of some stability, the native
men forced into the less wholesome labor, then wives and daughters taken
and poisoned with this strange philosophy of life. Then we saw our girl,
her child toddling at her heels, creeping back into the society where
trade and politics, hard liquor (distilled now from the native grain),
that holy book of mysterious spell, the firearms and an impenetrable
respectability reigned in apparent security over smoldering fires. And
finally we saw the girl, not at all a penitent, but a proud inspired
creature of instinct, fan those fires until they purged the taint of
sophistication from each slumbering native soul and drove a half-mad
people at the desperate job of extermination and of reasserting
itself as a people on the old lawlessly happy footing. They burned the
hogsheads of liquor, the firearms, the heap of holy books, on one great
bonfire.
I am not doing it justice. But this much will serve to recall the story.
As for Zanin's propaganda, I doubt if it cut in very deeply. Critics and
public alike appeared to take it simply as a novelty, a fresh sensation
as they had taken Reinhardt and the Russian Ballet. The primitiveness
of it reached them no more clearly than the primitiveness of Wagner's
operas reached them. The clergy stormed a bit, of course; but not
because they comprehended the deeply implied anarchistic motive. They
were concerned over Zanin's rather unbending attitude toward a certain
book. And Zanin; delighted, fed columns of controversy to the afternoon
papers, wrote open letters to eminent divines, and in other ways turned
the protest into a huge success of publicity. Then a professional
objector, apparently ignorant of the existence of an enticing and
corrupting “Revue” across the street, haled Zanin, Silverstone and two
of the Interstellar people into court on the ground that the costuming
was improper. This matter Zanin, after the newspapers had done it full
justice, compromised by cutting out twenty-two feet of pictures and one
printed explanation which seemed to the professional objector to justify
child-birth out of wedlock.
No, beyond these brief attacks of virtue, I have never been able to see
that the great city did not pulse along about as before. Broadway and
Forty-second Street held their usual evening throngs. The saloons and
hotel bars took in fortunes from the flushed, sometimes furtive men that
poured out between the acts of that “Revue.” Gamblers gambled, robbers
robbed; the glittering hotels thrived; men bought and sold and centered
on the ugly business of politics and bargained with the nameless girls
that lurked in shadowy doorways--but furtively, of course, with an eye
to respectability. And in parsonages on side streets clergymen studied
the precise attitude of Paul toward the doctrine of Free Will or wrote
(for Sunday evening) of the beautiful day that was close at hand
when all men should sing in harmony and not discord, with harp
accompaniment.... No, I think, despite Zanin's purpose, despite Sue's
blazing faith, what really triumphed was Peter Mann's instinct for a
good story. It was the story that held them, and the real beauty of the
pictures, and the acting and personal charm and sincerity of Sue Wilde.
All this, or something, held Sue herself. For it did catch her. She
had thought she knew everything about the Nature film; whereas she
knew everything about it but the Nature film. At first, naturally, her
self-consciousness clung a little; then it fell away. She sat with an
elbow on the arm of the seat, chin on hand, never once taking her eyes
from the screen, hardly aware of the dense audience about her, no more
than barely hearing the skilfully selected Russian music of the hidden,
very competent orchestra.
There were two intermissions. During the first she tried to chat and
failed. In the second, when the Worm suggested a turn in the open air
she merely shook her head, without looking up. And that hungry look
deepened in the Worm's eyes.
Toward the end, when the buffeted but unbowed young woman was fighting
with the strength of inspired despair for the one decent hope left to
her, the hope of personal freedom, Peter's story reached its highest
point. As did Sue's acting. The girl herself, sitting up there in the
gallery, head bowed, shading with a slim hand her wet eyes, leaned more
and more closely against the dear whimsical friend at her side. When his
groping hand found hers she clung to it as honestly as the girl on the
screen would have done.
It was over. For a moment the house was in darkness and silence. This
was another of Zanin's effects. Then the lights came on dimly; the
concealed orchestra struck softly into another of those Russian things;
the primitive people on the stage, you suddenly saw, were quietly going
on about the simple business of their village. A girl like Sue walked
on, skilfully picked out by the lighting. The audience caught the
suggestion and turned where they stood in seat-rows, aisles and
entrances to applaud wildly. Still another Zaninesque touch!