hair, and she barely thirty. I made up my mind to do something harsh,
but couldn't just tell how to start. She'd had a picture card from her
boy the first year, showing the Bay of Naples and telling how he longed
for her; but six months later had come a despondent letter from Japan
speaking again of the river and saying he often felt like ending it
all. Only, he might drag out his existence a bit longer because another
wealthy old chum was in port and begging him to switch over to his yacht
and liven up the party, which was also going round the world--and maybe
he would, because "after all, does anything in life really matter?"
That was the last line. I read it myself while Vida watched me, setting
on her little iron bed after work one night. She had a plain little room
with no windows but one in the roof, though very tastefully furnished
with photos of Clyde on every wall. The only other luxury she'd indulged
in was a three-dollar revolver because she was deathly afraid of
burglars. She'd also bought a hammer to shoot the revolver off with,
keeping 'em both on the stand at the head of her bed. Yes; she said that
was the way the man was firing it off in the advertisement--hitting it on
a certain spot with a hammer. She was a reckless little scoundrel. She
told me all about how to shoot a revolver while I was thinking up what
to say about Clyde.
I finally said if he had ended it all she must cheer up, because it
might be for the best. She considered this sadly and said she didn't
believe dear Clyde had been prepared to die. I could see she was
remembering old things that had been taught her in Sabbath school about
God and wickedness and the bad place, so I cheered her on that point. I
told her they hadn't been burning people for about thirty years now, the
same not being considered smart any longer in the best religious circles.
I also tried in a delicate manner to convince her that her boy would
never end it all by any free act of his. I offered to bet her a large sum
of money on this at any odds she wanted--she could write her own ticket.
I said I knew men well enough to be certain that with this one it would
be a long life but a merry one. Gee! The idea of this four-carder hurting
himself!
And I had to cheer her up on another point. This was that she didn't
have about three babies, all the image of their father. Yes, sir; she
was grieving sorely about that. It give me a new line on her. I saw
all at once she was mostly mother--a born one. Couldn't ever be anything
else and hadn't ever really felt anything but mothersome to this here
wandering treasure of hers. It give me kind of a shock. It made me
feel so queer I wanted to swear.
Well, I wrastled with that mulish female seven straight days to make
her leave that twelve-hour job of hers and come out here with me. I tried
everything. I even told her what with long hours and bum food she was
making herself so old that her boy wouldn't give her a second look when
he got back. That rattled her. She took hold of her face and said that
massage cream would take all those silly lines out when she got time
to rub it in properly; and as for the gray in her hair, she could never
bring herself to use a dye, but if Clyde come back she might apply a
little of the magic remedy that restores the natural colour. She also
said in plain words that to come out here with me would look like
deserting her boy. Do you get that?
"Dear Clyde is so sensitive," she says. "I couldn't bear the thought of
his coming back and finding that I had left our home."
My work was cut for me, all right. I guess I'd failed if I hadn't been
helped by her getting a sick spell from worry over what the good God
would do to Clyde if he should end it all in some nasty old river, and
from the grocery being sold to a party that had his own cashier. But I
won, she being too sick to hunt another job just then. A least I got a
fair compromise.
She wouldn't come here to live with me, but she remembered that Clyde had
often talked of Southern California, where he had once gone with genial
friends in a private car. He had said that some day when he had acquired
the means he would keep a home there. So she was willing to go there
herself and start a home for him. I saw it was the best I could get from
her, so I applauded.
I says: "That's fine. You take this three hundred and eighty dollars you
got saved and I'll put a few dollars more with it and get you a little
country place down there where you can be out of doors all day and raise
oranges and chickens, and enough hogs for table use, and when the dear
boy comes back he'll be awful proud of you."
"Oh, he always was that," says Vida. "But I'll go--and I'll always keep
a light in the window for him."
And a lot of folks say women ought to vote!
So we start for Los Angeles, deserting Clyde just as mean as dirt. Sure,
I went with her! I didn't trust her to finish the trip. As it was, she
wanted to get off the train twice before we got to Chicago--thinking
of the shock to her boy's tender heart if he should come back and find
himself deserted.
But then, right after we left Chicago, she got interested. In the section
across from us was a fifty-five-year-old male grouch with a few gray
bristles on his head who had been snarling at everyone that come near
him ever since the train left New York. The porters and conductors had
got so they'd rush by him like they was afraid of getting bit on the arm.
He had a gray face that seemed like it had been gouged out of stone. It
was like one of these gargles you see on rare old churches in Europe. He
was just hating everyone in the world, not even playing himself a
favourite. And Vida had stood his growling as long as she could. Having
at last give up the notion of tracking back to New York, she plumped
herself down in the seat with this raging wild beast and begged for his
troubles. I looked to see her tore limb from limb, instead of which in
three minutes he was cooing to her in a rocky bass voice. His trouble
was lumbago or pleurisy or some misery that kept him every minute in
this pernickety state.
That was all old mother Vida needed to know. She rustled a couple
hot-water bags and kept 'em on the ribs of this grouch for about two
thousand miles, to say nothing of doping him with asperin and quinine
and camphor and menthol and hot tea and soothing words. He was the only
son in sight, so he got it good. She simply has to mother something.
The grouch got a little human himself the last day out and begun to
ask Vida questions about herself. Being one that will tell any person
anything at all, she told him her life history and how her plans was now
unsettled, but she hoped to make a home out on this coast. The grouch
come right out and asked her how big her roll was, saying he lived out
here and it cost something to make a home. Vida told him she had her two
years' savings of three hundred and eighty good dollars and that I had
promised to loan her a few dollars to piece out with. At this the old boy
looked me over carefully and could see no signs of vast wealth because I
never wear such in Pullman cars, so he warns her that I'll have to piece
out her savings with a few thousand instead of a few dollars if she's to
start anything worth keeping, because what they do to you in taxes down
there is a-plenty.
After which he goes to sleep.
Vida moves over and asks what I meant by saying I'd only have to put in a
few dollars when I must of known it would take a few thousand, and didn't
I realize that Clyde would be hurt to the quick if he come back and found
she hadn't been independent? She indignantly said she'd have to give up
the country place and work till she had enough to start another home for
paying guests.
I was so mad at this truthful grouch for butting in on my game that
I up and told her flat she could never run a boarding house and make
it pay; that no woman could who hadn't learned to say "No!" and she was
too much of a mush-head for that. She was quite offended by this and says
firmness has always been considered a strong point in her personality. A
first-class palmist had told her this only two weeks before. While we are
squabbling back and forth the grouch wakes up again and says that he's in
the moving-picture business and will give her a good job in the wardrobe
department of the company he's with, so she must show up there at eight
o'clock the next morning. Just like that! He didn't ask her. He told her.
Vida is kind of took off her feet, but mumbles "Yes, sir!" and puts his
card in her bag. Me? I was too mad to talk, seeing the girl get into the
mill again when I'd tried so hard to get her out. But I swore to myself
I'd stick round and try to get some sense into the cup-custard she called
her brain.
So the next morning I took her out to this moving-picture joint that they
call a studio--not a bit like Metta Bigler's studio in Red Gap--and sure
enough here's the grouch ready to put Vida on a job. The job is in a room
about ninety feet long filled with boxes and sewing machines and shelves
full of costumes, and Vida is to be assistant wardrobe mistress. Yes,
sir; a regular title for the job. And the pay is twenty-five a week,
which is thirteen more than she'd ever dreamed of making before. The
grouch is very decent to her and tells everybody she's a friend of his,
and they all pay polite attention to him because he's someone important
in the works. It seems he's a director. He stands round and yells at the
actors how to act, which I had always supposed they knew already but it
seems not. Anyway, I left Vida there to get on to her new duties.
She was full of good reports that night about how well she'd got along,
and how interesting the work was, and how she'd helped doctor up another
boy. She said he was one of the world's greatest actors, because if they
give him four or five stiff drinks first he would fall off a forty-foot
cliff backwards into the ocean. She'd helped bandage a sprained wrist for
him that he got by jumping out of a second-story window in a gripping
drama replete with punch and not landing quite right.
I said to myself it must be a crazy joint and she'd soon give up and
let me get her a nice little place on the edge of town that I'd already
looked over. So I let her go three days more, but still she stuck
there with great enthusiasm. Then I had to be leaving for home, so the
afternoon of the fourth day I went out to see for myself how things
looked.
Vida is tickled to see me and takes me right in where they're beginning
to act a gripping feature production. Old Bill Grouch is there in front
of a three-legged camera barking at the actors that are waiting round
in their disguises--with more paint on 'em than even a young girl will
use if her mother don't watch her. The grouch is very polite to Vida and
me and shows us where to stand so we won't get knocked over by other
actors that are carrying round furniture and electric light stands and
things.
They got a parlour in a humble home where the first scene is to be.
There's a mother and a fair-haired boy of twenty and a cop that's come
to pinch him for a crime. The play at this point is that the mother has
to plead with the cop not to drag her boy off to a prison cell, and she
has to do it with streaming eyes. It was darned interesting. The boy is
standing with bowed head and the cop is looking sympathetic but firm, and
mother is putting something into her eyes out of a medicine dropper. I
whisper to Vida and she says it's glycerine for the tears. She holds her
head back when she puts 'em in and they run down her cheeks very lifelike
when she straightens up.
So mother comes forward with her streaming face and they're all ready
to act when the grouch halts things and barks at the boy that he ain't
standing right. He goes up and shows him how to stand more shamefully.
But the tears on mother's face have dripped away and have to be renewed.
She was a nice, kind-appearing mother all right, but I noticed she looked
peeved when this delay happened. Vida explains that glycerine don't
damage the eyes really, but it makes 'em smart a lot, and this actress,
Miss St. Clair, has a right to feel mad over having to put in some more.
But she does it, though with low muttering when the grouch calls "All
right, Miss St. Clair!" and is coming forward to act with this here
second batch of tears when the grouch stops it with another barking fit.
He barks at the policeman this time. He says the policeman must do more
acting.
"You know you have a boy of your own," says he, "and how you'd hate to
have him arrested for this crime, but you're also remembering that law
is law and you're sworn to uphold it. Try to get that now. All ready,
Miss St. Clair--we're waiting for you, Miss St. Clair!"
I'd watched this actress the second time her tears was spoiled and her
expression didn't fit a loving mother's face one bit. Her breath come as
in scenes of tense emotion, but she hotly muttered something that made
me think I must of misunderstood her, because no lady actress would say
it, let alone a kind old mother. However, she backs off and for the third
time has this medicine dropper worked on her smarting eyes. Once more
she comes forward with streaming eyes of motherly love, and I'm darned
if this grouch don't hold things up again.
This time he's barking about a leather sofa against the far wall of the
humble home. He says it's an office sofa and where in something is the
red plush one that belongs to the set? He's barking dangerously at
everyone round him when all at once he's choked off something grand by
the weeping mother that has lost her third set of tears. She was wiping
glycerine off her face and saying things to the grouch that must of give
him a cold chill for a minute. I'm sometimes accused of doing things with
language myself, but never in my life have I talked so interestingly--at
least not before ladies. Not that I blamed her.
Everyone kept still with horror till she run down; it seems it's a fierce
crime in that art to give a director what's coming to him. The policeman
and the erring son was so scared they just stood there acting their
parts and the grouch was frozen with his mouth half open. Probably he
hadn't believed it at first. Then all at once he smiled the loveliest
smile you ever seen on a human face and says in chilled tones: "That
will be all, Miss St. Clair! We will trouble you no further in this
production." His words sounded like cracking up a hunk of ice for the
cocktail shaker. Miss St. Clair then throws up her arms and rushes off,
shrieking to the limit of a bully voice.
It was an exciting introduction for me to what they call the silent
drama.
Then I looked at Vida and she was crying her eyes out. I guessed it was
from sympathy with the mother actress, but the grouch also stares at her
with his gimlet eyes and says:
"Here, don't you waste any tears on her. That's all in the day's work."
"I--wasn't thinking of her," sobs Vida.
"Then what you crying for?" says he.
"For that poor dear boy that's being dragged from his mother to prison
for some childish prank," she blubbers.
Me, I laughed right out at the little fool, but the director didn't
laugh.
"Well, I'll be damned!" says he in low, reverent tones.
Then he begins to look into her face like he'd lost something there. Then
he backed off and looked into it a minute more. Then he went crazy all
over the place.
"Here," he barks at another actress, "get this woman into your dressing
room and get the number five on her quick. Make her up for this part,
understand? You there, Eddie, run get that calico skirt and black-satin
waist off Miss St. Clair and hustle 'em over to Miss Harcourt's room,
where this lady will be making up. Come on now! Move! Work quick! We
can't be on this scene all day."
Then, when everybody run off, he set down on the red plush sofa that was
now in place, relighted a cigar that smelled like it had gone out three
days before, and grinned at me in an excited manner.
"Your little friend is a find," he says. "Mark my words, Mrs. Pettijohn,
she's got a future or I don't know faces. She'll screen well, and she's
one of the few that can turn on the tears when she wants to. I always
did hate glycerine in this art. Now if only I can get her camera
wise--and I'll bet I can! Lucky we'd just started on this piece when St.
Clair blew up. Only one little retake, where she's happy over her boy's
promotion in the factory. She's bound to get away with that; then if she
can get the water again for this scene it will be all over but signing
her contract."
I was some excited myself by this time, you'd better believe. Nervous as
a cat I found myself when Vida was led out in the sad mother's costume by
this other actress that had made her up. But Vida wasn't nervous the
least bit. She was gayly babbling that she'd always wanted to act, and
once she had played a real part in a piece they put on at Odd Fellows'
Hall in Fredonia, and she had done so well that even the Methodist
minister said she was as good as the actress he saw in Lawrence Barrett's
company before he was saved; and he had hoped she wouldn't be led away by
her success and go on the real stage, because he could not regard it as a
safe pursuit for young persons of her sex, owing to there being so little
home life--and now what did she do first?
This director had got very cold and businesslike once more.
"Stop talking first," says he. "Don't let me hear another word from you.
And listen hard. You're sitting in your humble home sewing a button on
your boy's coat. He's your only joy in life. There's the coat and the
button half sewed on with the needle and thread sticking in it. Sit down
and sew that button on as if you were doing it for your own son. No
pretending, mind you. Sew it on as if--"
He hesitated a minute and got a first-class inspiration.
"Sew it on as if it was a button on your husband's coat that you told me
about. Every two or three stitches look up to show us how happy you are.
When you get it sewed, take the coat up this way and hug it. You look
still happier at that. Then you walk over to the mantel, pick up the
photograph of your boy that's there by that china dog and kiss it. I
won't tell you how to do that. Remember who he is and do it your own
way, only let us see your face. Then put back the picture slowly, go get
the coat, and start to the left as if you were going to hang it up in his
room; but you hear steps on the stair outside and you know your boy has
come home from work. We see that because your face lights up. Stand happy
there till he comes in.
"You expect him to rush over to you as usual, but he's cast down;
something has happened. You get a shock of fright. Walk over to
him--slow; you're scared. Get your arms round him. He stiffens at
first, then leans on you. He's crying himself now, but you ain't--not
yet. You're brave because you don't know about this fight he's had with
the foreman that's after your boy's sweetheart for no good purpose.
"Now go through it that far and see if you remember everything I told
you. When we get down to the crying scene after the officer comes on,
I'll rehearse you in that too, only for God's sake don't cry in the
rehearsal! You'll go dry. Now then! Coat--button--sewing. Goon!"
Well, sir, I stood there trembling like a leaf while she went through
what he'd told her like she'd been at it all her life--or rather like it
was her dear Clyde's coat and her dear Clyde's photo and her dear Clyde
that come in the door. Then he rehearsed her in the end of the scene
where the cop comes on, and she got that, too, though alarming him
because she couldn't even rehearse it without crying. I could see this
director was nervous himself by this time, thinking she was too good to
be true. But he got her into the chair sewing again, all ready for the
real work.
"Remember only three things," he says: "Don't look at this machine, move
slowly when you move at all, and don't try to act. Now then! Camera!"
It was a historic occasion, all right. The lad at the camera begun to
turn a crank and Vida begun to act like she wasn't acting at all. The
director just give her a low word when she had to move. He didn't bark
now. And say, that crying scene! Darned if I didn't near cry myself
looking at her, and I heard this stonefaced director breathing mighty
short when she had to stand there with her hands clenched and watch
her boy go out the door with this cop.
Vida was too excited to sleep that night. She said the director had
advised her privately not to make a contract just yet, because she would
get better terms when she'd showed 'em what she could really do. For
this picture she would get paid seventy-five dollars a week. A week, mind
you, to a girl that had been thinking herself lucky to get twelve in New
York.
She was very let down and happy, and cried a little bit out of working
hours for me because it was all so wonderful, and her drowned boy might
be resting on some river bottom at that very moment. I said it was a safe
bet he was resting, wherever he was; but she didn't get it and I didn't
say it twice.
And such was the beginning of Vida Sommers' glittering sob career in
the movies. She's never had but one failure and they turned that into a
success. It seems they tried her in one of these "Should a Wife Forgive?"
pieces in which the wife did not forgive, for a wonder, and she made a
horrible mess of it. She was fine in the suffering part, of course, only
when it come to not forgiving at the end--well, she just didn't know how
to not forgive. They worked with her one whole day, then had to change
the ending. She's said to be very noble and womanly in it.
I went home next day, leaving her in pursuit of her art. But I got
glowing letters from her about every week, she doing new pictures and her
salary jumping because other film parties was naturally after so good
a weeper. And the next year I run down to see her. She was a changed
woman all right. She had a home or bungalow, a car, a fashionable dog, a
Jap cook, a maid and real gowns for the first time in her life. But the
changes was all outside. She was still the same Vida that wanted to
mother every male human on earth. She never seemed to worry about girls
and women; her idea is that they're able to look out for themselves, but
that men are babies needing a mother's protection as long as they live.
And of course one of these men she had mothered down there had took a
base advantage of her--this same ugly old grouch of a director. She
locked the bedroom door and told me about it in horrified whispers the
first night I got there. She said it might of been her fault, that he
might of misunderstood something she had said about Clyde. And anyway
she'd ought to of remembered that some men are beasts at heart.
Anyway, this infamous brute had come to the house one night and insulted
her in the grossest manner, and it was all true about moving-picture
directors having designs on unprotected females that work for 'em.
Yielding to his lowest brute instincts he had thrown decency to the winds
and made her such an evil proposition that she could hardly bear to put
it in words. But she did. It seems that the scoundrel had listened to
some studio gossip to the effect that she had divorced the husband who
deserted her, and so he come right out and said he had been deeply in
love with her ever since that first day on the train, and now that she
was free, would she marry him?
Of course she was insulted to the limit and told him so in what would
probably of made a gripping scene of a good woman spurning the advances
of a moral leper. She overwhelmed him with scorn and horror for his foul
words. How dared he say her Clyde had deserted her, or think she would
ever divorce him! That showed, what a vile mind he must have. She said he
got awful meek and apologetic when he learned that she still clung to the
memory of Clyde, who would one day fight his way back to her if he hadn't
ended it all. She told him fully what a perfect man Clyde was, and she
said at last the ugly old wretch just grinned weakly at her in a very
painful way, like it hurt him, and said: "Oh, my dearest, you must try to
forgive me. I didn't know--I didn't know half the truth." Then he patted
her hand and patted her cheek and choked up and swallowed a couple of
times, and says he:
"I was an old man dreaming and dreams make fools of old men!"
Then he swallowed again and stumbled out through her garden where the
orange blossoms had just come. She said he'd never been offensive since
that time, barking as nasty to her as to any of the others when she was
acting, so that no one would dream what a foul heart he had, except that
he always kept a bunch of white roses in her dressing room. But she
hadn't cared to make him trouble about that because maybe he was
honestly trying to lead a better life.