MOVING PICTURES
IT often happens that when one is all primed and cocked for trouble,
that trouble flaps its wings and flies away for a time, leaving nothing
to fire at. So Georgina, going home with her prism and her "line to live
by," ready and eager to prove how bravely she could meet
disappointments, found only pleasant surprises awaiting her.
Mrs. Triplett had made a birthday cake in her absence. It was on the
supper table with ten red candles atop. And there was a note from Barby
beside her plate which had come in the last mail. It had been posted at
some way-station. There was a check inside for a dollar which she was to
spend as she pleased. A dear little note it was, which made Georgina's
throat ache even while it brought a glow to her heart. Then Belle, who
had not known it was her birthday in time to make her a present,
announced that she would take her to a moving picture show after supper,
instead.
Georgina had frequently been taken to afternoon performances, but never
at night. It was an adventure in itself just to be down in the part of
town where the shops were, when they were all lighted, and when the
summer people were surging along the board-walk and out into the middle
of the narrow street in such crowds that the automobiles and
"accommodations" had to push their way through slowly, with a great
honking of warning horns.
The Town Hall was lighted for a dance when they passed it. The windows
of the little souvenir shops seemed twice as attractive as when seen by
day, and early as it was in the evening, people were already lined up in
the drug-store, three deep around the soda-water fountain.
Georgina, thankful that Tippy had allowed her to wear her gold locket
for the occasion, walked down the aisle and took her seat near the
stage, feeling as conspicuous and self-conscious as any debutante
entering a box at Grand Opera.
It was a hot night, but on a line with the front seats, there was a
double side door opening out onto a dock. From where Georgina sat she
could look out through the door and see the lights of a hundred boats
twinkling in long wavy lines across the black water, and now and then a
salt breeze with the fishy tang she loved, stole across the room and
touched her cheek like a cool finger.
The play was not one which Barbara would have chosen for Georgina to
see, being one that was advertised as a thriller. It was full of
hair-breadth escapes and tragic scenes. There was a shipwreck in it,
and passengers were brought ashore in the breeches buoy, just as she had
seen sailors brought in on practice days over at the Race Point
Life-saving station. And there was a still form stretched out stark and
dripping under a piece of tarpaulin, and a girl with long fair hair
streaming wildly over her shoulders knelt beside it wringing her hands.
Georgina stole a quick side-glance at Belle. That was the way it had
been in the story of Emmett Potter's drowning, as they told it on the
day of Cousin Mehitable's visit. Belle's hands were locked together in
her lap, and her lips were pressed in a thin line as if she were trying
to keep from saying something. Several times in the semi-darkness of the
house her handkerchief went furtively to her eyes.
Georgina's heart beat faster. Somehow, with the piano pounding out that
deep tum-tum, like waves booming up on the rocks, she began to feel
strangely confused, as if _she_ were the heroine on the films; as if
_she_ were kneeling there on the shore in that tragic moment of parting
from her dead lover. She was sure that she knew exactly how Belle felt
then, how she was feeling now.
When the lights were switched on again and they rose to go out, Georgina
was so deeply under the spell of the play that it gave her a little
shock of surprise when Belle began talking quite cheerfully and in her
ordinary manner to her next neighbor. She even laughed in response to
some joking remark as they edged their way slowly up the aisle to the
door. It seemed to Georgina that if she had lived through a scene like
the one they had just witnessed, she could never smile again. On the way
out she glanced up again at Belle several times, wondering.
Going home the street was even more crowded than it had been coming.
They could barely push their way along, and were bumped into constantly
by people dodging back to escape the jam when the crowd had to part to
let a vehicle through. But after a few blocks of such jostling the going
was easier. The drug-store absorbed part of the throng, and most of the
procession turned up Carver Street to the Gifford House and the cottages
beyond on Bradford Street.
By the time Georgina and Belle came to the last half-mile of the plank
walk, scarcely a footstep sounded behind them. After passing the Green
Stairs there was an unobstructed view of the harbor. A full moon was
high overhead, flooding the water and beach with such a witchery of
light that Georgina moved along as if she were in a dream--in a silver
dream beside a silver sea.
Belle pointed to a little pavilion in sight of the breakwater. "Let's go
over there and sit down a few minutes," she said. "It's a waste of good
material to go indoors on a night like this."
They crossed over, sinking in the sand as they stepped from the road to
the beach, till Georgina had to take off her slippers and shake them
before she could settle down comfortably on the bench in the pavilion.
They sat there a while without speaking, just as they had sat before the
pictures on the films, for never on any film was ever shown a scene of
such entrancing loveliness as the one spread out before them. In the
broad path made by the moon hung ghostly sails, rose great masts,
twinkled myriads of lights. It was so still they could hear the swish of
the tide creeping up below, the dip of near-by oars and the chug of a
motor boat, far away down by the railroad wharf.
Then Belle began to talk. She looked straight out across the shining
path of the moon and spoke as if she were by herself. She did not look
at Georgina, sitting there beside her. Perhaps if she had, she would
have realized that her listener was only a child and would not have said
all she did. Or maybe, something within her felt the influence of the
night, the magical drawing of the moon as the tide feels it, and she
could not hold back the long-repressed speech that rose to her lips.
Maybe it was that the play they had seen, quickened old memories into
painful life again.
It was on a night just like this, she told Georgina, that Emmett first
told her that he cared for her--ten years ago this summer. Ten years!
The whole of Georgina's little lifetime! And now Belle was twenty-seven.
Twenty-seven seemed very old to Georgina. She stole another upward
glance at her companion. Belle did not look old, sitting there in her
white dress, like a white moonflower in that silver radiance, a little
lock of soft blonde hair fluttering across her cheek.
In a rush of broken sentences with long pauses between which somehow
told almost as much as words, Belle recalled some of the scenes of that
summer, and Georgina, who up to this night had only glimpsed the dim
outlines of romance, as a child of ten would glimpse them through old
books, suddenly saw it face to face, and thereafter found it something
to wonder about and dream sweet, vague dreams over.
Suddenly Belle stood up with a complete change of manner.
"My! it must be getting late," she said briskly. "Aunt Maria will scold
if I keep you out any longer."
Going home, she was like the Belle whom Georgina had always known--so
different from the one lifting the veil of memories for the little while
they sat in the pavilion.
Georgina had thought that with no Barby to "button her eyes shut with a
kiss" at the end of her birthday, the going-to-sleep time would be sad.
But she was so busy recalling the events of the day that she never
thought of the omitted ceremony. For a long time she lay awake,
imagining all sorts of beautiful scenes in which she was the heroine.
First, she went back to what Uncle Darcy had told her, and imagined
herself as rescuing an only child who was drowning. The whole town stood
by and cheered when she came up with it, dripping, and the mother took
her in her arms and said, "_You_ are our prism, Georgina Huntingdon! But
for your noble act our lives would be, indeed, desolate. It is you who
have filled them with rainbows."
Then she was in a ship crossing the ocean, and a poor sailor hearing her
speak of Cape Cod would come and ask her to tell him of its people, and
she would find he was Danny. She would be the means of restoring him to
his parents.
And then, she and Richard on some of their treasure-hunting expeditions
which they were still planning every time they met, would unearth a
casket some dark night by the light of a fitful lantern, and inside
would be a confession written by the man who had really stolen the
money, saying that Dan Darcy was innocent. And Uncle Darcy and Aunt
Elspeth would be so heavenly glad----The tears came to Georgina's eyes
as she pictured the scene in the little house in Fishburn Court, it came
to her so vividly.
The clock downstairs struck twelve, but still she went on with the
pleasing pictures moving through her mind as they had moved across the
films earlier in the evening. The last one was a combination of what she
had seen there and what Belle had told her.
She was sitting beside a silver sea across which a silver moon was
making a wonderful shining path of silver ripples, and somebody was
telling her--what Emmett had told Belle ten years ago. And she knew past
all doubting that if that shadowy somebody beside her should die, she
would carry the memory of him to her grave as Belle was doing. It seemed
such a sweet, sad way to live that she thought it would be more
interesting to have her life like that, than to have it go along like
the lives of all the married people of her acquaintance. And if _he_ had
a father like Emmett's father she would cling to him as Belle did, and
go to see him often and take the part of a real daughter to him. But she
wouldn't want him to be like Belle's "Father Potter." He was an old
fisherman, too crippled to follow the sea any longer, so now he was just
a mender of nets, sitting all day knotting twine with dirty
tar-blackened fingers.
The next morning when she went downstairs it was Belle and not Mrs.
Triplett who was stepping about the kitchen in a big gingham apron,
preparing breakfast. Mrs. Triplett was still in bed. Such a thing had
never happened before within Georgina's recollection.
"It's the rheumatism in her back," Belle reported. "It's so bad she
can't lie still with any comfort, and she can't move without groaning.
So she's sort of 'between the de'il and the deep sea.' And touchy is no
name for it. She doesn't like it if you don't and she doesn't like it
if you do; but you can't wonder when the pain's so bad. It's pretty near
lumbago."
Georgina, who had finished her dressing by tying the prism around her
neck, was still burning with the desire which Uncle Darcy's talk had
kindled within her, to be a little comfort to everybody.
"Let me take her toast and tea up to her," she begged. With that toast
and tea she intended to pass along the good word Uncle Darcy had given
her--"the line to live by." But Tippy was in no humor to be adjured by a
chit of a child to bear up and steer right onward. Such advice would
have been coldly received just then even from her minister.
"You don't know what you're talking about," she exclaimed testily. "Bear
up? Of course I'll bear up. There's nothing else _to_ do with
rheumatism, but you needn't come around with any talk of putting
rainbows around it or me either."
She gave her pillow an impatient thump with her hard knuckles.
"Deliver me from people who make it their business in life always to act
cheerful no matter _what_. The Scripture itself says 'There's a time to
laugh and a time to weep, a time to mourn and a time to dance.' When the
weeping time comes I can't abide either people or books that go around
spreading cheerful sayings on everybody like salve!"
Tippy, lying there with her hair screwed into a tight little button on
the top of her head, looked strangely unlike herself. Georgina
descended to the kitchen, much offended. It hurt her feelings to have
her good offices spurned in such a way. She didn't care how bad
anybody's rheumatism was she muttered. "It was no excuse for saying such
nasty things to people who were trying to be kind to them."
Belle suggested presently that the customary piano practice be omitted
that morning for fear it might disturb Aunt Maria, so when the usual
little tasks were done Georgina would have found time dragging, had it
not been for the night letter which a messenger boy brought soon after
breakfast. Grandfather Shirley was better than she had expected to find
him, Barby wired. Particulars would follow soon in a letter. It cheered
Georgina up so much that she took a pencil and tablet of paper up into
the willow tree and wrote a long account to her mother of the birthday
happenings. What with the red-candled cake and the picture show and the
afternoon in the boat it sounded as if she had had a very happy day. But
mostly she wrote about the prism, and what Uncle Darcy had told her
about the magic glass of Hope. When it was done she went in to Belle.
"May I go down to the post-office to mail this and stop on my way back
at the Green Stairs and see if Richard can come and play with me?" she
asked.
Belle considered. "Better stay down at the Milford's to do your
playing," she answered. "It might bother Aunt Maria to have a boy
romping around here."
So Georgina fared forth, after taking off her prism and hanging it in a
safe place. Only Captain Kidd frisked down to meet her when she stood
under the studio window and gave the alley yodel which Richard had
taught her. There was no answer. She repeated it several times, and then
Mr. Moreland appeared at the window, in his artist's smock with a
palette on his thumb and a decidedly impatient expression on his
handsome face. Richard was posing, he told her, and couldn't leave for
half an hour. His tone was impatient, too, for he had just gotten a good
start after many interruptions.
Undecided whether to go back home or sit down on the sand and wait,
Georgina stood looking idly about her. And while she hesitated, Manuel
and Joseph and Rosa came straggling along the beach in search of
adventure.
It came to Georgina like an inspiration that it wasn't Barby who had
forbidden her to play with them, it was Tippy. And with a vague feeling
that she was justified in disobeying her because of her recent
crossness, she rounded them up for a chase over the granite slabs of the
breakwater. If they would be Indians, she proposed, she'd be the
Deer-slayer, like the hero of the Leather-Stocking Tales, and chase 'em
with a gun.
They had never heard of those tales, but they were more than willing to
undertake any game which Georgina might propose. So after a little
coaching in war-whoops, with a battered tin pan for a tom-tom, three
impromptu Indians sped down the beach under the studio windows, pursued
by a swift-footed Deer-slayer with flying curls. The end of a broken oar
was her musket, which she brandished fiercely as she echoed their yells.
Mr. Moreland gave a groan of despair as he looked at his model when
those war-whoops broke loose. Richard, who had succeeded after many
trials in lapsing into the dreamy attitude which his father wanted,
started up at the first whoop, so alert and interested that his nostrils
quivered. He scented excitement of some kind and was so eager to be in
the midst of it that the noise of the tom-tom made him wriggle in his
chair.
He looked at his father appealingly, then made an effort to settle down
into his former attitude. His body assumed the same listless pose as
before, but his eyes were so eager and shining with interest that they
fairly spoke each time the rattly drumming on the tin pan sounded a
challenge.
"It's no use, Dicky," said his father at last. "It's all up with us for
this time. You might as well go on. But I wish that little tom-boy had
stayed at home."
And Richard went, with a yell and a hand-spring, to throw in his lot
with Manuel and Joseph and be chased by the doughty Deer-slayer and her
hound. In the readjustment of parts Rosa was told to answer to the name
of Hector. It was all one to Rosa whether she was hound or redskin, so
long as she was allowed a part in the thrilling new game. Richard had
the promise of being Deer-slayer next time they played it.
[Illustration]