Early he was up to bathe and shave. He shaved close to make it last longer, until his tender face reddened under the scraping. Probably he would not find another cabin in which a miner would part with his beard for an Eastern trip. Probably he would have to go to the barber the next time. He also succeeded, with soap and water, in removing a stain from his collar. It was still a decent collar; not immaculate, perhaps, but entirely possible.
This day he took eggs with his breakfast, intending to wheedle his appetite with a lighter second meal than it had demanded the day before. He must see if this would not average better on the day’s overhead.
After breakfast he was irresistibly drawn to view the moving picture of his old home being dismantled. He knew now that he might stand brazenly there without possible criticism. He found Jimmy and a companion property-boy already busy. Much of the furniture was outside to be carted away. Jimmy, as Merton lolled idly in the doorway, emptied the blackened coffee pot into the ashes of the fireplace and then proceeded to spoon into the same refuse heap half a kettle of beans upon which the honest miners had once feasted. The watcher deplored that he had not done more than taste the beans when he had taken his final survey of the place this morning. They had been good beans, but to do more than taste them would have been stealing. Now he saw them thrown away and regretted that he could not have known what their fate was to be. There had been enough of them to save him a day’s expenses.
He stood aside as the two boys brought out the cooking utensils, the rifle, the miners’ tools, to stow them in a waiting handcart. When they had loaded this vehicle they trundled it on up the narrow street of the Western town. Yet they went only a little way, halting before one of the street’s largest buildings. A sign above its wooden porch flaunted the name Crystal Palace Hotel. They unlocked its front door and took the things from the cart inside.
From the street the watcher could see them stowing these away. The room appeared to contain a miscellaneous collection of articles needed in the ruder sort of photodrama. Emptying their cart, they returned with it to the cabin for another load. Merton Gill stepped to the doorway and peered in from apparently idle curiosity. He could see a row of saddles on wooden supports; there were kitchen stoves, lamps, painted chairs, and heavy earthenware dishes on shelves. His eyes wandered over these articles until they came to rest upon a pile of blankets at one side of the room. They were neatly folded, and they were many.
Down before the cabin he could see the handcart being reloaded by Jimmie and his helper. Otherwise the street was empty. The young man at the doorway stepped lightly in and regarded the windows on either side of the door. He sauntered to the street and appeared to be wondering what he would examine next in this curious world. He passed Jimmie and the other boy returning with the last load from the cabin. He noted at the top of the load the mattress on which he had lain for three nights and the blankets that had warmed him. But he was proved not to be so helpless as he had thought. Again he knew where a good night’s rest might be had by one using ordinary discretion.
Again that day, the fourth of his double life, he went the mad pace, a well-fed, carefree youth, sauntering idly from stage to stage, regarding nonchalantly the joys and griefs, the twistings of human destiny there variously unfolded. Not only was he this to the casual public notice; to himself he was this, at least consciously. True, in those nether regions of the mind so lately discovered and now being so expertly probed by Science, in the mind’s dark basement, so to say, a certain unlovely fronted dragon of reality would issue from the gloom where it seemed to have been lurking and force itself upon his notice.
This would be at oddly contented moments when he least feared the future, when he was most successfully being to himself all that he must seem to others. At such times when he leisurely walked a world of plenty and fruition, the dragon would half-emerge from its subconscious lair to chill him with its head composed entirely of repellent facts. Then a stout effort would be required to send the thing back where it belonged, to those lower, decently hidden levels of the mind—life.
And the dragon was cunning. From hour to hour, growing more restive, it employed devices of craft and subtlety. As when Merton Gill, carefree to the best of his knowledge, strolling lightly to another point of interest, graciously receptive to the pleasant life about him, would suddenly discover that a part of his mind without superintendence had for some moments been composing a letter, something that ran in effect:
“Mr. Gashwiler, dear sir, I have made certain changes in my plans since I first came to sunny California and getting quite a little homesick for good old Simsbury and I thought I would write you about taking back my old job in the emporium, and now about the money for the ticket back to Simsbury, the railroad fare is—”
He was truly amazed when he found this sort of thing going on in that part of his mind he didn’t watch. It was scandalous. He would indignantly snatch the half-finished letter and tear it up each time he found it unaccountably under way.
It was surely funny the way your mind would keep doing things you didn’t want it to do. As, again, this very morning when, with his silver coin out in his hand, he had merely wished to regard it as a great deal of silver coin, a store of plenty against famine, which indeed it looked to be under a not-too-minute scrutiny. It looked like as much as two dollars and fifty cents, and he would have preferred to pocket it again with this impression. Yet that rebellious other part of his mind had basely counted the coin even while he eyed it approvingly, and it had persisted in shouting aloud that it was not two dollars and fifty cents but one dollar and eighty—five cents.
The counting part of the mind made no comment on this discrepancy; it did not say that this discovery put things in a very different light. It merely counted, registered the result, and ceased to function, with an air of saying that it would ascertain the facts without prejudice and you could do what you liked about them. It didn’t care.
That night a solitary guest enjoyed the quiet hospitality of the Crystal Palace Hotel. He might have been seen—but was not—to effect a late evening entrance to this snug inn by means of a front window which had, it would seem, at some earlier hour of the day, been unfastened from within. Here a not-too-luxurious but sufficing bed was contrived on the floor of the lobby from a pile of neatly folded blankets at hand, and a second night’s repose was enjoyed by the lonely patron, who again at an early hour of the morning, after thoughtfully refolding the blankets that had protected him, was at some pains to leave the place as he had entered it without attracting public notice, perchance of unpleasant character.
On this day it would not have been possible for any part of the mind whatsoever to misvalue the remaining treasure of silver coin. It had become inconsiderable, and even if kept from view could be, and was, counted again and again by mere blind fingertips. They contracted, indeed, a senseless habit of confining themselves in a trouser’s pocket to count the half-dollar, the quarter, and the two dimes long after the total was too well known to its owner.
Nor did this total, unimpressive at best, long retain even these poor dimensions. A visit to the cafeteria, in response to the imperious demands of a familiar organic process, resulted in less labour, by two dimes, for the stubbornly reiterative fingertips.
An ensuing visit to the Holden lot barber, in obedience to social demands construed to be equally imperious with the physical, reduced all subsequent counting, whether by fingertips or a glance of the eye, to barest mechanical routine. A single half-dollar is easy to count. Still, on the following morning there were two coins to count. True, both were dimes.
A diligent search among the miscellany of the Crystal Palace Hotel had failed to reveal a single razor. The razor used by the miner should in all reason have been found, but there was neither that nor any other. The baffled seeker believed there must have been crooked work somewhere. Without hesitation he found either Jimmie or his companion to be guilty of malfeasance in office. But at least one item of more or less worried debate was eliminated. He need no longer weigh mere surface gentility against the stern demands of an active metabolism. A shave cost a quarter. Twenty cents would not buy a shave, but it would buy at the cafeteria something more needful to any one but a fop.
He saw himself in the days to come—if there were very many days to come, of which he was now not too certain—descending to the unwholesome artistic level of the elder Montague. He would, in short, be compelled to peddle the brush. And of course as yet it was nothing like a brush—nothing to kindle the eye of a director needing genuine brushes. In the early morning light he fingered a somewhat gaunt chin and wondered how long “they” would require to grow. Not yet could he be taken for one of those actors compelled by the rigorous exactions of creative screen art to let Nature have its course with his beard. At present he merely needed a shave.
And the collar had not improved with usage. Also, as the day wore on, coffee with one egg proved to have been not long-enduring fare for this private in the army of the unemployed. Still, his morale was but slightly impaired. There were always ways, it seemed. And the later hours of the hungry afternoon were rather pleasantly occupied in dwelling upon one of them.
The sole guest of the Crystal Palace Hotel entered the hostelry that night somewhat earlier than was usual; indeed at the very earliest moment that foot traffic through the narrow street seemed to have diminished to a point where the entry could be effected without incurring the public notice which he at these moments so sincerely shunned. After a brief interval inside the lobby he issued from his window with certain objects in hand, one of which dropped as he clambered out. The resulting clamour seemed to rouse far echoes along the dead street, and he hastily withdrew, with a smothered exclamation of dismay, about the nearest corner of the building until it could be ascertained that echoes alone had been aroused.
After a little breathless waiting he slunk down the street, keeping well within friendly shadows, stepping softly, until he reached the humble cabin where so lately the honest miners had enacted their heart-tragedy. He jerked the latch-string of the door and was swiftly inside, groping a way to the fireplace. Here he lighted matches, thoughtfully appropriated that morning from the cafeteria counter. He shielded the blaze with one hand while with the other he put to use the articles he had brought from his hotel.
Into a tin cooking pot with a long handle he now hastily ladled well-cooked beans from the discarded heap in the fireplace, by means of an iron spoon. He was not too careful. More or less ashes accompanied the nutritious vegetables as the pot grew to be half full. That was a thing to be corrected later, and at leisure. When the last bean had been salvaged the flame of another match revealed an unsuspected item—a half-loaf of bread nestled in the ashes at the far corner of the fireplace. It lacked freshness; was, in truth, withered and firm to the touch, but doubtless more wholesome than bread freshly baked.
He was again on his humble cot in the seclusion of the Crystal Palace Hotel. Half-reclining, he ate at leisure. It being inadvisable to light matches here he ate chiefly by the touch system. There was a marked alkaline flavour to the repast, not unpleasantly counteracted by a growth of vegetable mould of delicate lavender tints which Nature had been decently spreading over the final reduction of this provender to its basic elements. But the time was not one in which to cavil about minor infelicities. Ashes wouldn’t hurt any one if taken in moderation; you couldn’t see the mould in a perfectly dark hotel; and the bread was good.
The feast was prolonged until a late hour, but the finger—tips that had accurately counted money in a dark pocket could ascertain in a dark hotel that a store of food still remained. He pulled the blankets about him and sank comfortably to rest. There was always some way.
Breakfast the next morning began with the promise of only moderate enjoyment. Somehow in the gray light sifting through the windows the beans did not look as good as they had tasted the night before, and the early mouthfuls were less blithesome on the palate than the remembered ones of yesterday. He thought perhaps he was not so hungry as he had been at his first encounter with them. He delicately removed a pocket of ashes from the centre, and tried again. They tasted better now. The mould of tender tints was again visible but he made no effort to avoid it. For his appetite had reawakened. He was truly hungry, and ate with an entire singleness of purpose.
Toward the last of the meal his conscious self feebly prompted him to quit, to save against the inevitable hunger of the night. But the voice was ignored. He was now clay to the moulding of the subconscious. He could have saved a few of the beans when reason was again enthroned, but they were so very few that he fatuously thought them not worth saving. Might as well make a clean job of it. He restored the stewpan and spoon to their places and left his hotel. He was fed. To-day something else would have to happen.
The plush hat cocked at a rakish angle, he walked abroad with something of the old confident swagger. Once he doubtfully fingered the sprouting beard, but resolutely dismissed a half-formed notion of finding out how the Holden lot barber would regard a proposition from a new patron to open a charge account. If nothing worse than remaining unshaven was going to happen to him, what cared he? The collar was still pretty good. Why let his beard be an incubus? He forgot it presently in noticing that the people arriving on the Holden lot all looked so extremely well fed. He thought it singular that he should never before have noticed how many well-fed people one saw in a day.
Late in the afternoon his explorations took him beyond the lower end of his little home street, and he was attracted by sounds of the picture drama from a rude board structure labelled the High Gear Dance Hall. He approached and entered with that calm ease of manner which his days on the lot had brought to a perfect bloom. No one now would ever suppose that he was a mere sightseer or chained to the Holden lot by circumstances over which he had ceased to exert the slightest control.
The interior of the High Gear Dance Hall presented nothing new to his seasoned eye. It was the dance-hall made familiar by many a smashing five-reel Western. The picture was, quite normally, waiting. Electricians were shoving about the big light standards, cameras were being moved, and bored actors were loafing informally at the round tables or chatting in groups about the set.
One actor alone was keeping in his part. A ragged, bearded, unkempt elderly man in red shirt and frayed overalls, a repellent felt hat pulled low over his brow, reclined on the floor at the end of the bar, his back against a barrel. Apparently he slept. A flash of remembrance from the Montague girl’s talk identified this wretched creature. This was what happened to an actor who had to peddle the brush. Perhaps for days he had been compelled to sleep there in the interests of dance-hall atmosphere.
He again scanned the group, for he remembered, too, that the Montague girl would also be working here in God’s Great Outdoors. His eyes presently found her. She was indeed a blonde hussy, short-skirted, low-necked, pitifully rouged, depraved beyond redemption. She stood at the end of the piano, and in company with another of the dance-hall girls who played the accompaniment, she was singing a ballad the refrain of which he caught as “God calls them Angels in Heaven, we call them Mothers here.”
The song ended, the Montague girl stepped to the centre of the room, looked aimlessly about her, then seized an innocent bystander, one of the rough characters frequenting this unsavoury resort, and did a dance with him among the tables. Tiring of this, she flitted across the room and addressed the bored director who impatiently awaited the changing of lights. She affected to consider him a reporter who had sought an interview with her. She stood erect, facing him with one hand on a hip, the other patting and readjusting her blonde coiffure.
“Really,” she began in a voice of pained dignity, “I am at a loss to understand why the public should be so interested in me. What can I say to your readers—I who am so wholly absorbed in my art that I can’t think of hardly anything else? Why will not the world let us alone? Hold on—don’t go!”
She had here pretended that the reporter was taking her at her word. She seized him by a lapel to which she clung while with her other arm she encircled a post, thus anchoring the supposed intruder into her private affairs. “As I was saying,” she resumed, “all this publicity is highly distasteful to the artist, and yet since you have forced yourself in here I may as well say a few little things about how good I am and how I got that way. Yes, I have nine motor cars, and I just bought a lace tablecloth for twelve hundred bones—”
She broke off inconsequently, poor victim of her constitutional frivolity. The director grinned after her as she danced away, though Merton Gill had considered her levity in the worst of taste. Then her eye caught him as he stood modestly back of the working electricians and she danced forward again in his direction. He would have liked to evade her but saw that he could not do this gracefully.
She greeted him with an impudent grin. “Why, hello, trouper! As I live, the actin’ Kid!” She held out a hand to him and he could not well refuse it. He would have preferred to “up-stage” her once more, as she had phrased it in her low jargon, but he was cornered. Her grip of his hand quite astonished him with its vigour.
“Well, how’s everything with you? Everything jake?” He tried for a show of easy confidence. “Oh, yes, yes, indeed, everything is.”
“Well, that’s good, Kid.” But she was now without the grin, and was running a practised eye over what might have been called his production. The hat was jaunty enough, truly a hat of the successful, but all below that, the not-too-fresh collar, the somewhat rumpled coat, the trousers crying for an iron despite their nightly compression beneath their slumbering owner, the shoes not too recently polished, and, more than all, a certain hunted though still-defiant look in the young man’s eyes, seemed to speak eloquently under the shrewd glance she bent on him.
“Say, listen here, Old-timer, remember I been trouping man and boy for over forty year and it’s hard to fool me—you working?”
He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the very apparent real kindness in her tone. “Well,” he looked about the set vaguely in his discomfort, “you see, right now I’m between pictures—you know how it is.”
Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: “Well, all right—but you needn’t blush about it, Kid.” The blush she detected became more flagrant.
“Well, I—you see—” he began again, but he was saved from being explicit by the call of an assistant director.
“Miss Montague. Miss Montague—where’s that Flips girl—on the set, please.” She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little later to look for him he had gone.
He went to bed that night when darkness had made this practicable, and under his blankets whiled away a couple of wakeful hours by running tensely dramatic films of breakfast, dinner, and supper at the Gashwiler home. It seemed that you didn’t fall asleep so quickly when you had eaten nothing since early morning. Never had he achieved such perfect photography as now of the Gashwiler corned-beef hash and light biscuits, the Gashwiler hot cakes and sausage, and never had Gashwiler so impressively carved the Saturday night four-rib roast of tender beef. Gashwiler achieved a sensational triumph in the scene, being accorded all the close—ups that the most exacting of screen actors could wish. His knife-work was perfect. He held his audience enthralled by his technique.
Mrs. Gashwiler, too, had a small but telling part in the drama to-night; only a character bit, but one of those poignant bits that stand out in the memory. The subtitle was, “Merton, won’t you let me give you another piece of the mince pie?” That was all, and yet, as screen artists say, it got over. There came very near to being not a dry eye in the house when the simple words were flashed beside an insert of thick, flaky-topped mince pies with quarters cut from them to reveal their noble interiors
Sleep came at last while he was regretting that lawless orgy of the morning. He needn’t have cleaned up those beans in that silly way. He could have left a good half of them. He ran what might have been considered a split-reel comedy of the stew-pan’s bottom still covered with perfectly edible beans lightly protected with Nature’s own pastel-tinted shroud for perishing vegetable matter and diversified here and there with casual small deposits of ashes.
In the morning something good really did happen. As he folded his blankets in the gray light a hard object rattled along the floor from them. He picked this up before he recognized it as a mutilated fragment from the stale half—loaf of bread he had salvaged. He wondered how he could have forgotten it, even in the plenitude of his banquet. There it was, a mere nubbin of crust and so hard it might almost have been taken for a petrified specimen of prehistoric bread. Yet it proved to be rarely palatable. It’s flavour was exquisite. It melted in the mouth.
Somewhat refreshed by this modest cheer, he climbed from the window of the Crystal Palace with his mind busy on two tracks. While the letter to Gashwiler composed itself, with especially clear directions about where the return money should be sent, he was also warning himself to remain throughout the day at a safe distance from the door of the cafeteria. He had proved the wisdom of this even the day before that had started with a bounteous breakfast. To-day the aroma of cooked food occasionally wafted from the cafeteria door would prove, he was sure, to be more than he could bear.
He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself. The collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye, what a successful screen-actor’s collar should be. The sprouting beard might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director sanctified to realism—every day it was getting to look more like that—but no director would have commanded the wearing of such a collar except in actual work where it might have been a striking detail in the apparel of an underworldling, one of those creatures who became the tools of rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent upon the moral destruction of beautiful young screen heroines. He knew it was now that sort of collar. No use now in pretending that it had been worn yesterday for the first time.
The next morning he sat a long time in the genial sunlight watching carpenters finish a scaffolding beside the pool that had once floated logs to a sawmill. The scaffolding was a stout affair supporting an immense tank that would, evidently for some occult reason important to screen art, hold a great deal of water. The sawmill was gone; at one end of the pool rode a small sail-boat with one mast, its canvas flapping idly in a gentle breeze. Its deck was littered with rigging upon which two men worked. They seemed to be getting things shipshape for a cruise.
When he had tired of this he started off toward the High Gear Dance Hall. Something all day had been drawing him there against his will. He hesitated to believe it was the Montague girl’s kindly manner toward him the day before, yet he could identify no other influence. Probably it was that. Yet he didn’t want to face her again, even if for a moment she had quit trying to be funny, even if for a moment her eyes had searched his quite earnestly, her broad, amiable face glowing with that sudden friendly concern. It had been hard to withstand this yesterday; he had been in actual danger of confiding to her that engagements of late were not plentiful—something like that. And it would be harder to-day. Even the collar would make it harder to resist the confidence that he was not at this time overwhelmed with offers for his art.
He had for what seemed like an interminable stretch of time been solitary and an outlaw. It was something to have been spoken to by a human being who expressed ever so fleeting an interest in his affairs, even by someone as inconsequent, as negligible in the world of screen artistry as this lightsome minx who, because of certain mental infirmities, could never hope for the least enviable eminence in a profession demanding seriousness of purpose. Still it would be foolish to go again to the set where she was. She might think he was encouraging her.
So he passed the High Gear, where a four-horse stage, watched by two cameras, was now releasing its passengers who all appeared to be direct from New York, and walked on to an outdoor set that promised entertainment. This was the narrow street of some quaint European village, Scotch he soon saw from the dress of its people. A large automobile was invading this remote hamlet to the dismay of its inhabitants. Rehearsed through a megaphone they scurried within doors at its approach, ancient men hobbling on sticks and frantic mothers grabbing their little ones from the path of the monster. Two trial trips he saw the car make the length of the little street.
At its lower end, brooding placidly, was an ancient horse rather recalling Dexter in his generously exposed bones and the jaded droop of his head above a low stone wall. Twice the car sped by him, arousing no sign of apprehension nor even of interest. He paid it not so much as the tribute of a raised eyelid.
The car went back to the head of the street where its entrance would be made. “All right—ready!” came the megaphoned order. Again the peaceful street was thrown into panic by this snorting dragon from the outer world. The old men hobbled affrightedly within doors, the mothers saved their children. And this time, to the stupefaction of Merton Gill, even the old horse proved to be an actor of rare merits. As the car approached he seemed to suffer a painful shock. He tossed his aged head, kicked viciously with his rear feet, stood absurdly aloft on them, then turned and fled from the monster. As Merton mused upon the genius of the trainer who had taught his horse not only to betray fright at a motor car but to distinguish between rehearsals and the actual taking of a scene, he observed a man who emerged from a clump of near-by shrubbery. He carried a shotgun. This was broken at the breech and the man was blowing smoke from the barrels as he came on.
So that was it. The panic of the old horse had been but a simple reaction to a couple of charges of—perhaps rock—salt. Merton Gill hoped it had been nothing sterner. For the first time in his screen career he became cynical about his art. A thing of shame, of machinery, of subterfuge. Nothing would be real, perhaps not even the art.
It is probable that lack of food conduced to this disparaging outlook; and he recovered presently, for he had been smitten with a quick vision of Beulah Baxter in one of her most daring exploits. She, at least, was real. Deaf to entreaty, she honestly braved her hazards. It was a comforting thought after this late exposure of a sham.
In this slightly combative mood he retraced his steps and found himself outside the High Gear Dance Hall, fortified for another possible encounter with the inquiring and obviously sympathetic Montague girl. He entered and saw that she was not on the set. The bar-room dance-hall was for the moment deserted of its ribald crew while an honest inhabitant of the open spaces on a balcony was holding a large revolver to the shrinking back of one of the New York men who had lately arrived by the stage. He forced this man, who was plainly not honest, to descend the stairs and to sign, at a table, a certain paper. Then, with weapon still in hand, the honest Westerner forced the cowardly New Yorker in the direction of the front door until they had passed out of the picture.
On this the bored director of the day before called loudly, “Now, boys, in your places. You’ve heard a shot—you’re running outside to see what’s the matter. On your toes, now—try it once.” From rear doors came the motley frequenters of the place, led by the elder Montague.
They trooped to the front in two lines and passed from the picture. Here they milled about, waiting for further orders.
“Rotten!” called the director. “Rotten and then some. Listen. You came like a lot of children marching out of a public school. Don’t come in lines, break it up, push each other, fight to get ahead, and you’re noisy, too. You’re shouting. You’re saying, ‘What’s this? What’s it all about? What’s the matter? Which way did he go?’ Say anything you want to, but keep shouting—anything at all. Say ‘Thar’s gold in them hills!’ if you can’t think of anything else. Go on, now, boys, do it again and pep it, see. Turn the juice on, open up the old mufflers.”
The men went back through the rear doors. The late caller would here have left, being fed up with this sort of stuff, but at that moment he descried the Montague girl back behind a light-standard. She had not noted him, but was in close talk with a man he recognized as Jeff Baird, arch perpetrator of the infamous Buckeye comedies. They came toward him, still talking, as he looked.
“We’ll finish here to-morrow afternoon, anyway,” the girl was saying.
“Fine,” said Baird. “That makes everything jake. Get over on the set whenever you’re through. Come over tonight if they don’t shoot here, just to give us a look-in.”
“Can’t,” said the girl. “Soon as I get out o’ this dump I got to eat on the lot and everything and be over to Baxter’s layout—she’ll be doing tank stuff till all hours—shipwreck and murder and all like that. Gosh, I hope it ain’t cold. I don’t mind the water, but I certainly hate to get out and wait in wet clothes while Sig Rosenblatt is thinking about a retake.”
“Well”—Baird turned to go—“take care of yourself—don’t dive and forget to come up. Come over when you’re ready.”
“Sure! S’long!” Here the girl, turning from Baird, noted Merton Gill beside her. “Well, well, as I live, the actin’ kid once more! Say, you’re getting to be a regular studio hound, ain’t you?”
For the moment he had forgotten his troubles. He was burning to ask her if Beulah Baxter would really work in a shipwreck scene that night at the place where he had watched the carpenters and the men on the sailboat; but as he tried to word this he saw that the girl was again scanning him with keen eyes. He knew she would read the collar, the beard, perhaps even a look of mere hunger that he thought must now be showing.
“Say, see here, Trouper, what’s the shootin’ all about, anyway? You up against it—yes.” There was again in her eye the look of warm concern, and she was no longer trying to be funny. He might now have admitted a few little things about his screen career, but again the director interrupted.
“Miss Montague—where are you? Oh! Well, remember you’re behind the piano during that gun play just now, and you stay hid till after the boys get out. We’ll shoot this time, so get set.”
She sped off, with a last backward glance of questioning. He waited but a moment before leaving. He was almost forgetting his hunger in the pretty certain knowledge that in a few hours he would actually behold his wonder-woman in at least one of her daring exploits. Shipwreck! Perhaps she would be all but drowned. He hastened back to the pool that had now acquired this high significance. The carpenters were still puttering about on the scaffold. He saw that platforms for the cameras had been built out from its side.
He noted, too, and was puzzled by an aeroplane propeller that had been stationed close to one corner of the pool, just beyond the stern of the little sailing-craft. Perhaps there would be an aeroplane wreck in addition to a shipwreck. Now he had something besides food to think of. And he wondered what the Montague girl could be doing in the company of a really serious artist like Beulah Baxter. From her own story she was going to get wet, but from what he knew of her she would be some character not greatly missed from the cast if she should, as Baird had suggested, dive and forget to come up. He supposed that Baird had meant this to be humorous, the humour typical of a man who could profane a great art with the atrocious Buckeye comedies, so called.
He put in the hours until nightfall in aimless wandering and idle gazing, and was early at the pool-side where his heroine would do her sensational acting. It was now a scene of thrilling activity. Immense lights, both from the scaffolding and from a tower back of the sailing-craft, flooded its deck and rigging from time to time as adjustments were made. The rigging was slack and the deck was still littered, intentionally so, he now perceived. The gallant little boat had been cruelly buffeted by a gale. Two sailors in piratical dress could be seen to emerge at intervals from the cabin.
Suddenly the gale was on with terrific force, the sea rose in great waves, and the tiny ship rocked in a perilous manner. Great billows of water swept its decks. Merton Gill stared in amazement at these phenomena so dissonant with the quiet starlit night. Then he traced them without difficulty to their various sources. The gale issued from the swift revolutions of that aeroplane propeller he had noticed a while ago. The flooding billows were spilled from the big tank at the top of the scaffold and the boat rocked in obedience to the tugging of a rope—tugged from the shore by a crew of helpers—that ran to the top of its mast. Thus had the storm been produced.
A spidery, youngish man from one of the platforms built out from the scaffold, now became sharply vocal through a megaphone to assistants who were bending the elements to the need of this particular hazard of Hortense. He called directions to the men who tugged the rope, to the men in control of the lights, and to another who seemed to create the billows. Among other items he wished more action for the boat and more water for the billows. “See that your tank gets full-up this time,” he called, whereupon an engine under the scaffold, by means of a large rubber hose reaching into the pool, began to suck water into the tank above.
The speaker must be Miss Baxter’s director, the enviable personage who saw her safely through her perils. When one of the turning reflectors illumined him Merton saw his face of a keen Semitic type. He seemed to possess not the most engaging personality; his manner was aggressive, he spoke rudely to his doubtless conscientious employees, he danced in little rages of temper, and altogether he was not one with whom the watcher would have cared to come in contact. He wondered, indeed, that so puissant a star as Beulah Baxter should not be able to choose her own director, for surely the presence of this unlovely, waspishly tempered being could be nothing but an irritant in the daily life of the wonder-woman. Perhaps she had tolerated him merely for one picture. Perhaps he was especially good in shipwrecks.
If Merton Gill were in this company he would surely have words with this person, director or no director. He hastily wrote a one-reel scenario in which the man so far forgot himself as to speak sharply to the star, and in which a certain young actor, a new member of the company, resented the ungentlemanly words by pitching the offender into a convenient pool and earned even more than gratitude from the starry-eyed wonder-woman.
The objectionable man continued active, profuse of gesture and loud through the megaphone. Once more the storm. The boat rocked threateningly, the wind roared through its slack rigging, and giant billows swept the frail craft. Light as from a half-clouded moon broke through the mist that issued from a steam pipe. There was another lull, and the Semitic type on the platform became increasingly offensive. Merton saw himself saying, “Allow me, Miss Baxter, to relieve you of the presence of this bounder.” The man was impossible. Constantly he had searched the scene for his heroine. She would probably not appear until they were ready to shoot, and this seemed not to be at once if the rising temper of the director could be thought an indication.
The big hose again drew water from the pool to the tank, whence, at a sudden release, it would issue in billows. The big lights at last seemed to be adjusted to the director’s whim. The aeroplane propeller whirred and the gale was found acceptable. The men at the rope tugged the boat into grave danger. The moon lighted the mist that overhung the scene.
Then at last Merton started, peering eagerly forward across the length of the pool. At the far end, half illumined by the big lights, stood the familiar figure of his wonder—woman, the slim little girl with the wistful eyes. Plainly he could see her now as the mist lifted. She was chatting with one of the pirates who had stepped ashore from the boat. The wonderful golden hair shone resplendent under the glancing rays of the arcs. A cloak was about her shoulders, but at a word of command from the director she threw it off and stepped to the boat’s deck. She was dressed in a short skirt, her trim feet and ankles lightly shod and silken clad. The sole maritime touch in her garb was a figured kerchief at her throat similar to those worn by the piratical crew.
“All ready, Hortense—all ready Jose and Gaston, get your places.”
Miss Baxter acknowledged the command with that characteristic little wave of a hand that he recalled from so many of her pictures, a half-humorous, half-mocking little defiance. She used it often when escaping her pursuers, as if to say that she would see them in the next installment.
The star and the two men were now in the cabin, hidden from view. Merton Gill was no seaman, but it occurred to him that at least one of the crew would be at the wheel in this emergency. Probably the director knew no better. Indeed the boat, so far as could be discerned, had no wheel. Apparently when a storm came up all hands went down into the cabin to get away from it.
The storm did come up at this moment, with no one on deck. It struck with the full force of a tropic hurricane. The boat rocked, the wind blew, and billows swept the deck. At the height of the tempest Beulah Baxter sprang from the cabin to the deck, clutching wildly at a stanchion. Buffeted by the billows she groped a painful way along the side, at risk of being swept off to her death.
She was followed by one of the crew who held a murderous knife in his hand, then by the other sailor who also held a knife. They, too, were swept by the billows, but seemed grimly determined upon the death of the heroine. Then, when she reached midships and the foremost fiend was almost upon her, the mightiest of all the billows descended and swept her off into the cruel waters. Her pursuers, saving themselves only by great effort, held to the rigging and stared after the girl. They leaned far over the ship’s rocking side and each looked from under a spread hand.
For a distressing interval the heroine battled with the waves, but her frail strength availed her little. She raised a despairing face for an instant to the camera and its agony was illumined. Then the dread waters closed above her. The director’s whistle blew, the waves were stilled, the tumult ceased. The head of Beulah Baxter appeared halfway down the tank. She was swimming toward the end where Merton stood.
He had been thrilled beyond words at this actual sight of his heroine in action, but now it seemed that a new emotion might overcome him. He felt faint. Beulah Baxter would issue from the pool there at his feet. He might speak to her, might even help her to climb out. At least no one else had appeared to do this. Seemingly no one now cared where Miss Baxter swam to or whether she were offered any assistance in landing. She swam with an admirable crawl stroke, reached the wall, and put up a hand to it. He stepped forward, but she was out before he reached her side. His awe had delayed him. He drew back then, for the star, after vigorously shaking herself, went to a tall brazier in which glowed a charcoal fire.
Here he now noticed for the first time the prop-boy Jimmie, he who had almost certainly defaulted with an excellent razor. Jimmie threw a blanket about the star’s shoulders as she hovered above the glowing coals. Merton had waited for her voice. He might still venture to speak to her—to tell her of his long and profound admiration for her art. Her voice came as she shivered over the fire:
“Murder! That water’s cold. Rosenblatt swore he’d have it warmed but I’m here to say it wouldn’t boil an egg in four minutes.”
He could not at first identify this voice with the remembered tones of Beulah Baxter. But of course she was now hoarse with the cold. Under the circumstances he could hardly expect his heroine’s own musical clearness. Then as the girl spoke again something stirred among his more recent memories. The voice was still hoarse, but he placed it now. He approached the brazier. It was undoubtedly the Montague girl. She recognized him, even as she squeezed water from the hair of wondrous gold.
“Hello, again, Kid. You’re everywhere, ain’t you? Say, wha’d you think of that Rosenblatt man? Swore he’d put the steam into that water and take off the chill. And he never.” She threw aside the blanket and squeezed water from her garments, then began to slap her legs, arms, and chest.
“Well, I’m getting a gentle glow, anyhow. Wha’d you think of the scene?”
“It was good—very well done, indeed.” He hoped it didn’t sound patronizing, though that was how he felt. He believed now that Miss Baxter would have done it much better. He ventured a question. “But how about Miss Baxter—when does she do something? Is she going to be swept off the boat, too?”
“Baxter? Into that water? Quit your kidding!”
“But isn’t she here at all—won’t she do anything here?”
“Listen here, Kid; why should she loaf around on the set when she’s paying me good money to double for her?”
“You—double for Beulah Baxter?” It was some more of the girl’s nonsense, and a blasphemy for which he could not easily forgive her.
“Why not? Ain’t I a good stunt actress? I’ll tell the lot she hasn’t found any one yet that can get away with her stuff better than what I do.”
“But she—I heard her say herself she never allowed any one to double for her—she wouldn’t do such a thing.”
Here sounded a scornful laugh from Jimmie, the prop—boy. “Bunk!” said he at the laugh’s end. “How long you been doublin’ for her, Miss Montague? Two years, ain’t it?—I know it was before I come here, and I been on the lot a year and a half. Say, he ought to see some the stuff you done for her out on location, like jumpin’ into the locomotive engine from your auto and catchin’ the brake beams when the train’s movin’, and goin’ across that quarry on the cable, and ridin’ down that lumber flume sixty miles per hour and ridin’ some them outlaw buckjumpers—he’d ought to seen some that stuff, hey, Miss Montague?”
“That’s right, Jimmie, you tell him all about me. I hate to talk of myself.” Very wonderfully Merton Gill divined that this was said with a humorous intention. Jimmy was less sensitive to values. He began to obey.
“Well, I dunno—there’s that motorcycle stuff. Purty good, I’ll say. I wouldn’t try that, no, sir, not for a cool million dollars. And that chase stuff on the roofs down town where you jumped across that court that wasn’t any too darned narrow, an’ say, I wisht I could skin up a tree the way you can. An’ there was that time—”
“All right, all right, Jimmie. I can tell him the rest sometime. I don’t really hate to talk about myself—that’s on the level. And say, listen here, Jimmie, you’re my favourite sweetheart, ain’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” assented Jimmie, warmly. “All right. Beat it up and get me about two quarts of that hot coffee and about four ham sandwiches, two for you and two for me. That’s a good kid.”
“Sure!” exclaimed Jimmie, and was off.
Merton Gill had been dazed by these revelations, by the swift and utter destruction of his loftiest ideal. He hardly cared to know, now, if Beulah Baxter were married. It was the Montague girl who had most thrilled him for two years. Yet, almost as if from habit, he heard himself asking, “Is—do you happen to know if Beulah Baxter is married?”
“Baxter married? Sure! I should think you’d know it from the way that Sig Rosenblatt bawls everybody out.”
“Who is he?”
“Who is he? Why, he’s her husband, of course—he’s Mr. Beulah Baxter.”
“That little director up on the platform that yells so?” This unspeakable person to be actually the husband of the wonder-woman, the man he had supposed she must find intolerable even as a director. It was unthinkable, more horrible, somehow, than her employment of a double. In time he might have forgiven that—but this!
“Sure, that’s her honest-to-God husband. And he’s the best one out of three that I know she’s had. Sig’s a good scout even if he don’t look like Buffalo Bill. In fact, he’s all right in spite of his rough ways. He’d go farther for you than most of the men on this lot. If I wanted a favour I’d go to Sig before a lot of Christians I happen to know. And he’s a bully director if he is noisy. Baxter’s crazy about him, too. Don’t make any mistake there.”
“I won’t,” he answered, not knowing what he said.
She shot him a new look. “Say, Kid, as long as we’re talking, you seem kind of up against it. Where’s your overcoat a night like this, and when did you last—”
“Miss Montague! Miss Montague!” The director was calling.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I got to go entertain the white folks again.” She tucked up the folds of her blanket and sped around the pool to disappear in the mazes of the scaffolding. He remained a moment staring dully into the now quiet water. Then he walked swiftly away.
Beulah Baxter, his wonder-woman, had deceived her public in Peoria, Illinois, by word of mouth. She employed a double at critical junctures. “She’d be a fool not to,” the Montague girl had said. And in private life, having been unhappily wed twice before, she was Mrs. Sigmund Rosenblatt. And crazy about her husband!
A little while ago he had felt glad he was not to die of starvation before seeing his wonder-woman. Reeling under the first shock of his discoveries he was now sorry. Beulah Baxter was no longer his wonder-woman. She was Mr. Rosenblatt’s. He would have preferred death, he thought, before this heart-withering revelation.