THE BABY BLIMP
Ever since last spring I have felt that a certain explanation is due to the public regarding Tish’s great picture, The Sky Pirate, especially as to the alteration at the end of that now celebrated picture. I have also felt that a full explanation of what happened to us on that final tragic night is due to our dear Tish herself. She has never yet made a statement of any case of hers, believing that her deeds must speak for her.
But perhaps, more than anything, I am influenced by the desire to present the facts to Charlie Sands, Tish’s nephew, for, owing to his attitude the day he met us at the train, Tish has never deigned to make a full explanation.
We were on the platform, and I was taking a cinder out of Aggie’s eye, when we perceived him, standing close by and surveying us gloomily.
“My life,” he said, “has resolved itself into meeting you three when you have come back from doing something you shouldn’t.” He then pickedup a bag or two and observed: “Even the chap in the Bible only had one prodigal.”
He said nothing more until we were waiting for a taxi, when he observed that his nerves were not what they had been, and who was to secure bail for us when he was gone? We could only meet this with silence, but the fact is that he has never yet lost his money in that way, and never will.
“Some day,” he said, “I shall drop over of heart failure on receiving one of your wires, and then where will you be?”
“The circumstances were unusual,” Tish said with dignity.
“I’ll tell the world they were!” he said. “Unusual as h—l.”
He then lapsed into silence, and so remained until we were in the taxicab, on our way to Tish’s apartment. Then he leaned forward and stared fixedly at his Aunt Letitia.
“Now!” he said. “We’re going to have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. What about that elephant?”
Tish raised her eyebrows.
“Elephant?” she said.
“‘Elephant’ is the word I used. Look me square in the eye, last surviving female relative of mine, and deny you had anything to do with it!The moment the Associated Press wires began to come in, I knew.”
“Very well,” Tish said acidly. “If you know, there is no need to explain.”
And from that moment to this, she never has.
In order to bring the elephant incident in its proper sequence it is necessary to return to the autumn of last year, and to tell of the various incidents which led up to that awful night, and the roof of the First National Bank of Los Angeles.
During all of last winter Tish had been making a survey of what she called the art, the educational value and the business of moving pictures. She was, in a word, studying them. And she came to certain conclusions. Thus, she believed that the public had wearied of sentiment and was ready for adventure without sex. Also, that the overemphasis on love in the pictures was weakening the moral fiber of the nations.
“It was when sex replaced war,” she observed to Aggie and myself, “that Rome fell and Babylon crumbled to the dust.”
I agreed with her, but Aggie had certain reservations. When, as frequently happened, Tish left the theater just before the final embrace, thus registering her disapproval, Aggie sometimesloitered, to put on her overshoes or to find her glasses. Indeed, once trying to take her departure while looking back over her shoulder, she had a really bad fall in the theater aisle.
But our dear Tish showed Aggie considerable indulgence, as Aggie’s life had at one time held a romance of its own, she having been engaged to a Mr. Wiggins, who had not survived the engagement.
I have mentioned Mr. Wiggins because, although it is thirty years since he passed over, it was Aggie’s getting into touch with him in the spirit world which brought Mr. Stein into our lives. And it was Stein who brought about all our troubles. We were both very happy to find our dear Tish occupied with a new interest, as since the war, when she had captured the town of X—— single handed—for Aggie was at the time on the church steeple and I had gone back for reënforcements—she had become rather listless.
“I find it difficult,” she had once acknowledged, “to substitute the daily dozen for my activities in France, and the sight of four women quarreling madly over a bridge table for a back scratcher with a pink bow on it simply makes me homesick for the war.”
Judge of our disappointment, therefore, when with the first of March, Tish’s interest in the picturesapparently lagged. From spending night after night watching them, she suddenly became invisible to us for long periods, and Hannah reported that at these times she would lock herself in her room, burning innumerable papers at the end of the period of seclusion. Also that, listening at the door, she could hear our dear Tish walking up and down the floor muttering to herself; and she reported that these active periods were followed by quiescent ones, when she could hear the rapid scratching of a pen.
Our first anxiety was that Tish had got herself into some sort of difficulty with her affairs, and this was not lessened by Hannah’s bringing to us one evening a scrap of charred paper on which were the words: “I will kill myself first.”
Had Charlie Sands not been out of town we would have gone to him, but he was in Europe, and did not return until four months later, when we were able to call on him for bail, as I have said. We had, therefore, no inkling of what was happening when, finding Tish in an approachable mood one evening, Aggie suggested that she try automatic writing.
Aggie had at last got into touch with Mr. Wiggins through a medium, and learned that he was very happy. But, although I have seen her sit for hours with a pencil poised over a sheet ofpaper, she had secured no written message from him. She therefore suggested that Tish try it.
“I’ve always felt that you are psychic, Tish,” she said. “Every now and then when I touch you I get a spark, like electricity. And I have frequently heard knocks on the furniture when you are in a dark room.”
“I’ve got bruises to show for them too,” Tish said grimly.
Well, though Tish at first demurred, she finally agreed, and after Aggie had placed a red petticoat over the lamp to secure what she called the psychic light, Tish made the attempt.
“I have no faith in it,” she said, “but I shall entirely retire my personality, and if there is a current from beyond, it shall flow through me unimpeded.”
Very soon we heard the pencil moving, and on turning on the light later we were electrified to see the rough outline of an animal, which Aggie has since contended might have been intended for Katie, the elephant, but which closely resembled those attempts frequently made to draw a pig with the eyes closed. Underneath was the word “stein.”
In view of later developments we know now that the word “stein” was not from Mr. Wiggins—although Aggie remembered that he had onceor twice referred, when thirsty, to a stein of something or other—but that it was a proper name.
That at least a part of the message had a meaning for our dear Tish is shown by a cryptic remark she made to the room.
“Thanks,” she said, to whatever spirit hovered about us. “I’ll do it. It was what I intended, anyhow.”
Just a month later Tish telephoned one morning for Aggie and myself to go there that afternoon. There was a touch of sharpness in her manner, which with Tish usually means nervous tension.
“And put on something decent, for once,” she said. “There’s no need to look as though you were taking your old clothes for an airing, to keep out the moths.”
Tish was alone when we arrived. I could smell sponge cakes baking, and Tish had put on her mother’s onyx set and was sitting with her back to the light. She looked slightly feverish, and I commented on it, but she only said that she had been near the stove.
When she was called out, however, Aggie leaned over to me.
“Stove, nothing!” she said. “She’s painted herface! And she’s got a new transformation!”
Had Charlie Sands himself appeared wearing a toupee we could not have been more astounded. And our amazement continued when Hannah brought in a tea tray with the Carberry silver on it, silver which had been in a safe-deposit vault for twenty years.
“Hannah,” I demanded, “what is the matter?”
“She’s going to be married! That’s what,” said Hannah, putting down the tray with a slam. “No fool like an old fool!” Then she burst into tears. “She spent the whole morning in a beauty parlor,” she wailed. “Look at her finger nails! And callin’ me in to draw up her corset on her!”
Neither Aggie nor I could speak for a moment. As I have said, our dear Tish had never shown any interest in the other sex. Indeed, I think I may say that Tish’s virginity of outlook regarding herself is her strongest characteristic. It is her proud boast that no man has ever offered her the most chaste of salutes, and her simple statement as to what would happen if one did has always been a model of firmness.
I have heard her remark that when the late Henry Clay observed “Give me liberty or give me death,” he was referring to marriage.
But Aggie had been correct. There was a bloom on dear Tish’s face never placed there bythe benign hand of Nature. Had I seen Mr. Ostermaier, our minister, preaching a sermon in a silk hat I should not have felt more horrified. And our anxiety was not lessened by Tish’s first remark when she returned.
“I shall want you two as witnesses,” she said. “And I shall make just one remark now. I know your attitude on certain subjects, so I ask you simply to remember this: I believe we owe a duty to the nation, especially with regard to children.”
“Good heavens, Tish!” Aggie said, and turned a sort of greenish white. “A woman of your age——”
“What’s my age got to do with it?” Tish snapped. “I simply say——”
But just then the doorbell rang, and Hannah announced a gentleman.
It was a Mr. Stein.
Aggie has told me since that the thought of Tish marrying was as nothing to her then, compared with the belief that she was marrying out of the Presbyterian Church. And she knew the moment she saw him that Mr. Stein was not a Presbyterian. But as it developed and as all the world knows now, it was not a matter of marriage at all.
Mr. Stein was the well-known moving-picture producer.
While Aggie and I were endeavoring to readjust our ideas he sat down, and looked at Tish while rubbing his hands together.
“Well, Miss Carberry,” he said, “I’ve brought the contracts.”
“And the advance?” Tish inquired calmly.
“And the advance. Certified check, as you requested.”
“You approve of my idea?”
“Well,” he said, “you’re right in one way. Sex has been overdone in pictures. The censors have killed it. When you’re limited to a five-foot kiss—well, you know. You can’t get it over, that’s all. We’ve had to fall back on adventure. Not even crime, at that. Would you believe it, we’ve had to change a murder scene just lately to the corpse taking an overdose of sleeping medicine by mistake. And we can’t have a woman show her figure on a chaise longue in a tea gown, while the bathing-suit people get by without any trouble. It’s criminal, that’s all. Criminal!”
“You have missed my idea,” Tish said coldly. “I wrote that picture to prove that a love interest, any love interest, is not essential to a picture.”
He agreed with what we now realize was suspicious alacrity.
“Certainly,” he said. “Certainly! After all, who pays the profits on pictures? The women,Miss Carberry. The women! Do up the dishes in a hurry—get me?—and beat it for the theater. Like to sit there and imagine themselves the heroine. And up to now we’ve never given them a heroine over seventeen years of age!”
He reflected on this, almost tearfully.
“Well,” he said, “that’s over now. There are twenty-nine million women over forty in America to-day, and every one will see this picture. That is, if we do it.”
“If you do it?” Tish inquired, gazing at him through her spectacles.
“When I told the casting director to find me a woman for the part he went out and got drunk. He’s hardly been sober since.”
“You haven’t found anyone?”
“Not yet.”
Tish had picked up her knitting, and Mr. Stein sat back and surveyed her for a few moments in silence. Then he leaned forward.
“Excuse me for asking, Miss Carberry,” he said, “but have you ever driven a car?”
“I drove an ambulance in France.”
“Really?” He seemed interested and slightly excited. “Then the sound of a gun wouldn’t scare you, I dare say?”
“I would hardly say that. I shoot very well.I’m considered rather good with a machine gun, I believe.”
He sat forward on the edge of his chair, and stared at her.
“Ever ride a horse?” he inquired. “Not hard, you know, with a Western saddle. You just sit in it and the horse does the rest.”
Tish looked at him through her spectacles.
“There is no argument for the Western saddle as against the English,” she said firmly. “I have used them both, Mr. Stein. One rides properly by balance, not adherence.”
Mr. Stein suddenly got out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead.
“Would you believe it!” he muttered. “And me just happening to be in town on a little matter of alimony! Does everything! By heaven, I believe she could fill a tooth!”
He then stared again at Tish and said, “You’re not by any chance related to the Miss Carberry who captured the town of X—— from the Germans, I suppose?”
“My friends here, and I, did that; yes.”
He stared at us all without saying anything for a moment. Then he moistened his lips.
“Well, well!” he said. “Well, well! Why, we ran a shot of you, Miss Carberry, in our news feature, when you were decorated and kissedby that French general, What’s-His-Name.”
“I prefer not to recall that.”
“Surely, surely,” he agreed. He then got up and bowed to Tish. “Miss Carberry,” he said, “I apologize, and I salute you. I came here to offer you a fixed price for your story. A moment ago I decided to offer you the part of the woman of—er—maturity in your picture, with two hundred dollars a week and a double for the stunts. I now remove the double, and offered you a thousand a week for your first picture. If that goes, we’ll talk business.”
If Tish reads this I will ask her at this moment to pause and think. Did I or did I not enter a protest? Did Aggie warn her or did she not? And was it not Tish herself who silenced us with a gesture, and completed her arrangements while Aggie softly wept?
She cannot deny it.
One final word of Tish’s I must record, in fairness to her.
“If I do this, Mr. Stein,” she said, “there must be a clear understanding. This is purely a picture of adventure and is to teach a real moral lesson.”
“Absolutely,” Mr. Stein said heartily. “Virtue is always triumphant on the screen. It is ourgreatest commercial asset. Without it, ladies, we would be nowhere.”
“And there must be no love element introduced.”
“Certainly not,” said Mr. Stein. “Certainly not!”
Those were almost his final words. We then had tea, and Tish gave him some of our homemade blackberry cordial. He seemed very pleased with it, and on departing remarked, “My admiration for you grows steadily, Miss Carberry. I did not fully estimate your powers when I said you could fill a tooth. You could, with that cordial, make a ouija board hiccup.”
Things were quiet for a month or two after that, and we understood that the production was being got ready. But Tish was very busy, having thrown herself into her preparations with her usual thoroughness.
She had found a teacher who taught how to register with the face the various emotions on the screen, and twice a week Aggie or myself held her book, illustrated with cuts, while Tish registered in alphabetical order: Amusement, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, devotion, envy, fatigue, generosity, hate, interest, jealousy, keenness, laughter,love, merriment, nobility, objection, pity, quarrelsomeness, ridicule, satisfaction, terror, uneasiness, vanity, wrath, and so on.
I must confess that the subtle changes of expression were often lost on me, and that I suffered extremely at those times, when discarding the book, she asked us to name her emotion from her expression. She would stand before her mirror and arrange her features carefully, and then quickly turn. But I am no physiognomist.
Her physical preparations, however, she made alone. That she was practicing again with her revolver Hannah felt sure, but we had no idea where and how. As has been previously recorded, the janitor of her apartment had refused to allow her to shoot in the basement after a bullet had embedded itself in the dining table of A flat while the family was at luncheon. We surmised that she was doing it somewhere outside of town.
Later on we had proof of this. Aggie and I were taking a constitutional one day in the country beyond the car line when, greatly to our surprise, we heard two shots beyond a hedge, followed by a man’s angry shouts, and on looking over the hedge, who should we behold but our splendid Tish, revolver in hand, and confronted by an angry farm laborer.
“Right through my hat!” he was bellowing. “Ifa man can’t do an honest day’s work without being fired at——”
“Work?” Tish said coldly. “You were so still I took you for a scarecrow.”
“Scarecrow yourself! When I yelled, you shot again!” he howled. “Deliberate attempt at murder. That’s what it was.”
“It went off by itself the second time,” Tish explained. “I’m rehearsing a certain scene, and——”
“Rehearsing?” said the man. “What for?”
“For the moving pictures.”
He looked at her, and then he bowed very politely.
“Well, well!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Pickford. And how’s Doug?”
We did not tell Tish that we had witnessed this encounter. She might have been sensitive about mistaking a farmer for a scarecrow.
It was a day or so after, in our presence, that Tish informed Hannah she would take her along as her maid. And Hannah, who in twenty odd years had never been known to show enthusiasm, was plainly delighted with the prospect.
“D’you mean I can see them acting?” she inquired.
“I imagine so,” Tish said with a tolerant smile.
“Love scenes too?” Hannah asked, with an indelicacy that startled us.
“There will be no love scenes in this picture, Hannah,” Tish reproved her. “I am surprised at you. And even in the ones you see every evening, when you ought to be doing something better, it is as well to remember that the persons are not really lovers. Indeed, that often they are barely friends.”
She then told Hannah to go downtown and buy a book on moving-picture make-up and the various articles required, as, since she was to be a personal maid, she must know about such things.
I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think, feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.
“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”
I must confess to the same uneasiness.
We went to bed early that night, sorely troubled, and I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that Tish was trying to leap from an automobile to a moving train, and that everytime she did it the train jumped to another track, when the telephone bell rang, and it was Hannah. She said that Tish wanted me, and to go over right away, but not to waken Aggie.
I went at once and found all the lights going, and Tish in her bed, bolt upright, with both eyes closed.
“Tish!” I cried. “Your eyes! Can’t you see?”
“Not through my eyelids,” she said witheringly. “Don’t be a fool, Lizzie. Look at this stuff and then tell me what will take it off.”
I then saw that the rims of her eyelids were smeared with a black paste which had hardened like enamel, and that they had become glued together, leaving her, temporarily at least, sightless and helpless. My poor Tish!
“What will take it off?” she demanded. “That idiot Hannah offered to melt it with a burning match.”
“I don’t think anything but a hammer will do any good, Tish.”
I discovered then that Hannah had bought the make-up book, and that it laid particular emphasis on beading the eyelashes. With her impatienttemperament Tish, although the shops were shut by that time, decided to make the experiment, and had concocted a paste of glue and India ink. She had experimented first on her eyebrows, she had thought successfully, although when I saw her they looked like two jet crescents fastened to her forehead; but inadvertently closing her eyes after beading her lashes, she had been unable to open them again.
She and Hannah had tried various expedients, among them lard, the yolk of an egg, cold cream and ammonia, but without result. I was obliged to tell her that it was set like a cement pavement.
In the end I was able, amid exclamations of pain and annoyance from Tish, to cut off her lashes, and later to shave her eyebrows with an old razor which Hannah had for some unknown purpose, and although much of the glue remained Tish was able to see once more. When I left her she was contemplating her image in her mirror, and a little of her fine frenzy of early enthusiasm seemed to have departed.
It is characteristic of Tish that, once embarked on an enterprise, she devotes her entire attention to it and becomes in a way isolated from her kind. Her mental attitude during these periods of what may be termed mind gestation is absent and solitary. Thus I am able to tell little of what preparationsshe made during the following weeks. I do know that she went to church on her last Sunday with her bonnet wrong side before, and that during the sermon she was unconsciously assuming the various facial expressions, one after the other, to the astonishment and confusion of Mr. Ostermaier in the pulpit.
But we also learned that she had again taken up her riding. The papers one evening were full of an incident connected with the local hunt, where an unknown woman rider had followed the hounds in to the death and had then driven them all off and let the fox go free.
My suspicions were at once aroused, and I carried the paper to Tish that night. I found her on her sofa, with the air redolent of arnica and witch hazel, and gave her the paper. She read the article calmly enough.
“I belong to the Humane Society, Lizzie,” she said. “Those dogs would have killed it.”
“But what made you join the hunt?”
“I didn’t join the hunt,” she said wearily. “How did I know that beast was an old hunter? I was riding along quietly when a horn blew somewhere, and the creature just went over the fence and started.” Tish closed her eyes. “We jumped eleven fences and four ditches,” she said in a tired voice, “and I bit my tongue halfway through.I think we went through some hotbeds, too, but I hadn’t time to look.”
“Tish,” I said firmly, “I want you to think, long and hard. Is it worth it? What are they going to pay you a thousand dollars a week to risk? Your beauty, your virtue or your neck? I leave it to you to guess.”
“It’s my neck,” said Tish coldly.
“Well, you’ve lost the head that belongs on it,” I retorted. And I went home.
We were to leave on a Monday, and the Saturday before Tish called me by telephone.
“I’ve been thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “A portion of my picture is laid in the desert. We’d better take some antisnake-bite serum.”
“Where do you get it?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t bother me with detail,” she snapped. “Try the snake house at the Zoo.”
I did so, and I must say the man acted strangely about it.
“For snake bite?” he inquired. “Who’s been bitten?”
“Nobody’s been bitten,” I said with dignity. “I just want a little to have on hand in case of trouble.”
He looked around and lowered his voice. “I get you,” he said. “Well, I haven’t any now,but I will have next week. Eight dollars a quart. Prewar stuff.”
When I told him I couldn’t wait he stared at me strangely, and when I turned at the door he had called another man, and they were both looking after me and shaking their heads.
It had been the desire of Tish’s life to fly in an aëroplane, and we knew by this time that much of her story was laid in the air. But during the trip west I believe she lost some of her fine enthusiasm. This was due, I imagine, to the repeated stories of crashes with which the newspapers were filled, and also to the fact that we passed one airship abandoned in a field, and showing signs of having fallen from a considerable height.
This theory was borne out, I admit, by Tish’s reception of Mr. Stein at the station in Los Angeles.
“We’ve got a small dirigible for the bootleggers, Miss Carberry,” he said cheerfully, “and a fast pursuit plane for you, machine gun and all. Got the plane cheap, after a crash. A dollar saved is a dollar earned, you know!”
Tish, I thought, went a trifle pale.
“You won’t need them, Mr. Stein. I’m going to take the story out of the air.”
“Great Scott! What for?” he exclaimed.
“It is too improbable.”
“Improbable! Of course it is. That’s the point.” Then he leaned forward and patted her reassuringly. “Now, see here, Miss Carberry,” he said, “don’t you worry! We’ve got a good pilot for you, and everything. You’re as safe there as you are in this car.”
Unfortunately the car at that moment failed to make a sharp turn, left the road, leaped a ditch, and brought up in a plowed field. It seemed a bad omen to begin with, and Tish, I think, so considered it.
“My nephew developed jaundice after an air ride, Mr. Stein,” she said as the driver backed the car onto the road, and we pulled Aggie from beneath the three of us. “An attack of jaundice on my part would hold up the picture indefinitely.”
But Mr. Stein was ready for that, as we later found him ready for every emergency.
“We’ve a doctor on the lot, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Specializes in jaundice. Don’t you worry at all.”
Looking back, both Aggie and I realize the significance of the remark he made on leaving us after having settled us at the hotel.
“We’ve made one or two changes in the story, Miss Carberry,” he said. “Nothing you will object to.” He smiled genially. “Have to give the scenario department something to do to earn their salaries!”
Had Tish not been preoccupied this would not have gone unchallenged. But she was staring up just then at the blue California sky, where an aviator was looping the loop, and so forth, and she made no comment.
When we recall our California experience, Aggie and I date our first disappointment from the following day, Tish’s first at the studio.
Though Tish cannot be termed a handsome woman, she has a certain majesty of mien, which has its own charm. Her new transformation, too, had softened certain of her facial angles, and we had felt that she would have real distinction on the screen. But it was to be otherwise, alas!
Aggie and I had been put out, and sat on the dressing-room steps, perspiring freely, while numerous people came and went from Tish’s room. We had heard of the great change effected by the make-up, and our hopes were high. We had not expected her to compete with the various beauties of the silver sheet, but we had expected to find her natural charms emphasized.
But when, some time later, the door opened andTish appeared, what shall I say? It was Tish, of course, but Tish in an old skirt and a blouse, with no transformation, and her own hair slicked into a hard knot on top of her head.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and she can never be utterly plain to us. But I must say she was not ornamental.
She did not speak, nor did we. She simply passed us, stalking across the lot to a large glassed-in building, and I went in to comfort Hannah.
The picture, The Sky Pirate, having made a great success, I need only briefly outline Tish’s story. As an elderly clerk in the secret service, she is appalled by the amount of rum smuggling going on, especially by dirigible from Mexico. She volunteers to stop it, and is refused permission. She then steals an airship from the Army, funds from the Treasury in Washington, an air pilot from the Marines, and starts West, unheralded and unsung, in pursuit of her laudable purpose.
The various incidents, as the great American public will recall, include her fastening a Mexican governor in a cave by exploding dynamite in the hillside above him; dropping from a bridge to amoving train below to search the express car for liquor; trapping the chief smuggler on top of the structural-iron framework of a building, and so on. In the end, by holding up the smugglers’ dirigible with her own aëroplane and a machine gun, Tish forces them to hand over the valise containing their ill-gotten gains, and with it descends by a parachute to the ground and safety. Later on, as you will recall, she finds the smugglers at an orgy, and with two revolvers arrests them all.
This simple outline only barely reveals the plan of the story. It says nothing of the pursuits on horseback, the shipwreck, the fire, and so on. But it shows clearly that the original story contained no love interest.
I lay stress on this at this point in the narration, because it was very early in the picture that we began to notice Mr. Macmanus.
Mr. Macmanus was a tall gentleman with a gray mustache, and with a vague resemblance to Mr. Ostermaier, but lacking the latter’s saintliness of expression. We paid little attention to him at first, but he was always around when Tish was being photographed—or shot, as the technical term is—and in his make-up.
Aggie rather admired him, and spoke to him one day while he was feeding peanuts to Katie, the tame studio elephant—of whom more anon.
“Are you being shot to-day?” she inquired.
“No madam. Not to-day, nor even at sunrise!” he replied in a bitter tone. “From what I can discover, I am being paid my salary to prevent my appearance on any screen.”
He then gloomily fed the empty bag to Katie, and went away.
We had no solution for the mystery of Mr. Macmanus at that period, and indeed temporarily forgot him. For the time had come for Tish to take the air, and both Aggie and I were very nervous.
Even Tish herself toyed with her breakfast the morning of that day, and spoke touchingly of Charlie Sands, observing that she was his only surviving relative, and that perhaps it was wrong and selfish of her to take certain risks. To add to our anxiety, the morning paper chronicled the story of a fatal crash the day before, and she went, I think, a trifle pale. Later on, however, she rallied superbly.
“After all,” she said, “the percentage of accident is only one in five hundred. I am sorry for the poor wretch, but it saves the lives of four hundred and ninety-nine others. Figures do not lie.”
From that time on she was quite buoyant, and ate a lamb chop with appetite.
During the flight Aggie, Hannah and I remained in the open, looking up, and I must admit that it was a nervous time for us, seeing our dear Tish head down above the earth, and engaged in other life-imperiling exploits. But she came down smiling and, when the aëroplane stopped, spoke cheerfully.
“A marvelous experience,” she observed. “One feels akin to the birds. One soars, and loses memory of earth.”
She was then helped out, but owing to the recent altitude her knees refused to support her, and she sank to the ground.
There were, of course, occasional misadventures. There was that terrible day, for instance, when Tish hung from a bridge by her hands, ready to drop to a train beneath, when through some mistake the train was switched to another track and our dear Letitia was left hanging, like Mohammed’s coffin, between heaven and earth. And that other day, of wretched memory, when on exploding the hillside to imprison the governor, a large stone flew up and struck Aggie violently in the mouth, dislodging her upper plate and almost strangling her.
There was, again, the time when the smugglers set fire to the building Tish was in, and the fire department did not receive its signal and failed to arrive until almost too late.
But in the main, things went very well. There were peaceful days when Aggie and I fed peanuts to the little studio elephant, Katie, and indeed became quite friendly with Katie, who dragged certain heavy articles about the lot and often roamed at will, her harness chains dangling. And there were hot days when we sought the shelter of the cool hangar which housed the smugglers’ dirigible, or baby blimp as it was called, and where we had concealed several bottles of blackberry cordial against emergency.
At such times we frequently discussed what Aggie now termed the Macmanus mystery. For such it had become.
“He’s not hanging around for any good purpose, Lizzie,” Aggie frequently observed. “He’s in Tish’s picture somehow, and—I think he is a lover!”
We had not mentioned him to Tish, but on the next day after she took her parachute leap we learned that she had her own suspicions about him.
I may say here, before continuing with my narrative, that Tish’s parachute experience was without accident, although not without incident. Shewas to leap with the bag of stage money she had captured in the air from the smugglers, and this she did. But a gust of wind caught her, and it was our painful experience to see her lifted on the gale and blown out of sight toward the mountains.
Several automobiles and the dirigible immediately started after her, but dusk fell and she had not returned to us. Even now I cannot picture those waiting hours without emotion. At one moment we visualized her sitting on some lonely mountain crag, and at another still floating on, perhaps indefinitely, a lonely bit of flotsam at the mercy of the elements.
At nine o’clock that night, however, she returned, slightly irritable but unhurt.
“For heaven’s sake, Aggie,” she said briskly, “stop sneezing and crying, and order me some supper. I’ve been sitting in a ranch house, with a nervous woman pointing a gun at me, for three hours.”
It developed that she had landed in the country, and had untied the parachute and started with her valise full of stage money back toward the studio, but that she had stopped to ask for supper at a ranch, and the woman there had looked in the bag while Tish was washing, and had taken her for a bank robber.
“If she had ever looked away,” Tish said, “Icould have grabbed the gun. But she was cross-eyed, and I don’t know yet which eye she watched with.”
As I have said, it was the next day that we learned that Tish herself had grown suspicious about Mr. Macmanus.
She sent for us to come to her dressing room, and when we appeared she said, “I want you both here for a few minutes. Light a cigarette, Hannah. Mr. Stein’s coming.”
To our horror Hannah produced a box of cigarettes and lighted one by holding it in the flame of a match. But we were relieved to find that Tish did not intend to smoke it. Hannah placed it in an ash tray on the table and left it there.
“Local color,” Tish said laconically. “They think a woman’s queer here if she doesn’t smoke. Come in, Mr. Stein.”
When Mr. Stein entered he was uneasy, we thought, but he wore his usual smile.
“Going like a breeze, Miss Carberry,” he said.
“Yes,” said Tish grimly. “And so am I!”
“What do you mean, going?” said Mr. Stein, slightly changing color. “You can’t quit on us, Miss Carberry. We’ve spent a quarter of a million dollars already.”
“And I’ve risked a million-dollar life.”
“We’ve been carrying insurance on you.”
“Oh, you have!” said Tish, and eyed him coldly. “I hope you’ve got Mr. Macmanus insured too.”
“Just why Mr. Macmanus, Miss Carberry?”
“Because,” Tish said with her usual candor, “I propose physical assault, and possibly murder, if he’s brought on the set with me.”
“Now see here,” he said soothingly, “you’re just tired, Miss Carberry. Ladies, how about a glass of that homemade TNT for Miss Tish? And a little all round?”
But when none of us moved he was forced to state his case, as he called it.
“You see, Miss Carberry,” he said, “we’ve made the old girl pretty hardboiled, so far. Now the public’s going to want to see her softer side.”
“As, for instance?”
“Well, something like this: The rancher who’s been the secret head of the smugglers, he’s a decent fellow at heart, see? Only got into it to pay the mortgage on the old home. Well, now, why not a bit of sentiment between you and him at the end? Nothing splashy, just a nice refined church and a kiss.” When he saw Tish’s face he went on, speaking very fast. “Not more than a four-foot kiss, if that. We’ve got to do it, Miss Carberry. I’ve been wiring our houses all over the country, and they’re unanimous.”
At Tish’s firm refusal he grew almost tearful, saying he dared not fly in the face of tradition, and that he couldn’t even book the picture if he did. But Tish merely rose majestically and opened the door.
“I warned you, Mr. Stein, I would have no sex stuff in this picture.”
“Sex stuff!” he cried. “Good Lord, you don’t call that sex stuff, do you?”
“I dare say you call it platonic friendship here,” Tish said in her coldest tone. “But my agreement stands. Good afternoon.”
He went out, muttering.
Just what happened within a day or two to determine Tish’s later course, I cannot say. We know that she had a long talk with Mr. Macmanus himself, and that he maintained that his intentions were of the most honorable—namely, to earn a small salary—and that his idea was that the final embrace could be limited to his kissing her hand.
“I have ventured so to suggest, madam,” Hannah reported him as saying, “but they care nothing for art here. Nothing. They reduce everything to its physical plane, absolutely.”
That our dear Tish was in a trap evidently became increasingly clear to her as the next few days passed. Nothing else would have forced her to the immediate course she pursued, and which resulted in such ignominious failure.
It was, I believe, a week after the interview with Mr. Stein, and with the picture drawing rapidly to a close, that Tish retired early one night and was inaccessible to us.
We were entirely unsuspicious, as the day had been a hard one, Tish having been washed from her horse while crossing a stream and having sunk twice before they stopped shooting the picture to rescue her.
Aggie, I remember, was remarking that after all Macmanus was a handsome man, and that some people wouldn’t object to being embraced by him at a thousand dollars a week, when Hannah came bolting in.
“She’s gone!” she cried.
“Gone? Who’s gone?”
“Miss Tish. Her room’s empty and I can’t find her valise.”
Only partially attired we rushed along the corridor. Hannah had been only too right. Our dear Tish had flown.
I did not then, nor do I now, admit that this flight, and the other which followed it, indicateany weakness in Letitia Carberry. The strongest characters must now and then face situations too strong for them and depart, as the poet says, “to fight another day.”
I do, however, question the wisdom of her course, for it put her enemies on guard and involved us finally in most unhappy circumstances.
Be that as it may, we had closed Tish’s door on its emptiness and were about to depart, when on turning she herself stood before us!
She said nothing. She simply passed on and into the room, traveling bag in hand, and closed and locked the door between us.
We believe now that her flight was not unexpected, and that her door and windows had been under surveillance. Certainly she was met at the station by Mr. Stein and his attorney and was forced to turn back, under threat of such legal penalties as we know not of. Certainly, too, she had closed that avenue of escape to further attempts, and knew it.
But from Tish herself we have until now had no confidences.
Some slight revenge she had, we know, the following day. As this portion of the picture has received very good notices, it may interest the reader to know under what circumstances it was taken.
I have mentioned the scene in the studio where the smugglers were banqueting, and Tish, followed by revenue officers, was to appear and, after a shot or two, force them to subjection. Aggie and I had been permitted to watch this, the crowning scene of the picture, and stood behind the camera. The musicians were playing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow, and the rum runners were drinking cold tea in champagne glasses and getting very drunk over it, when Tish entered.
Aggie took one look at her and clutched my arm.
“I don’t like her expression, Lizzie,” she whispered. “She——”
At that moment Tish fired, and the bandit who’d been standing gave a loud bellow. She had shot his wine glass out of his hand.
“Stop the camera!” the chief smuggler called in a loud voice. “She’s crazy! She’s got that gun loaded!”
The director, however, seemed delighted, and called to the camera men to keep on grinding.
“Great stuff, Miss Carberry!” he yelled. “I didn’t think anybody could put life in these wooden soldiers, but you have. Keep it up, only don’t kill anyone. Hold it, everybody! Camera! Camera! Now shoot out the lights, Miss Carberry, and I’ll think up something to follow while you’re doing it.”
I believe now that he referred to the candles on the table, but Tish either did not or would not understand. A second later there were two crashes of broken glass, and wild howls from the men with the arc lamps above, which lighted the scene. The stage was in semidarkness, and pieces of glass and metal and the most frightful language continued to drop from above. In the confusion all I could hear was the director muttering something about five hundred dollars gone to perdition, and the rush of the entire company from the stage.
It has been no surprise to me that this scene has made the great hit of the picture, the critics describing it as a classical study in fear. It was, indeed.
This small explosion of indignation had one good effect, however. Tish was almost her own self that night, recalling with a certain humor that a piece of one arc lamp had fallen down and had hit Mr. Macmanus on the head.
Tish is the most open and candid of women, and nothing so rouses her indignation as trickery. Had Mr. Stein not resorted to stratagem to compel her consent to the final scenes, I believe a compromise might have been effected.
It was his deliberate attempt to imprison Tish on the lot the night before those final shots which brought about the catastrophe. To pretend, as he does now, that he thought we had left at midnight does not absolve him.
The fact remains that after the final night shots, when Tish had her make-up off and we started to leave, we found that the gates were locked and the gatekeeper gone. What is more, there was a man across the street behind a tree box, watching the exit.
Tish called to him in an angry voice, but he pretended not to be there, and we finally turned away.
From the beginning Tish had recognized it as a trick, and she lost but little time in organizing herself for escape. A trial of the high fence which surrounded the lot, with Aggie on Tish’s shoulders while Tish stood on a box, revealed three strands of heavy barbed wire. But, more than that, Aggie declared that there were guards here and there all around.
On receiving this information Tish stood for a moment in deep thought. She then instructed Aggie to go on to the balloon hangar and open the doors, while she and I gathered up her personal possessions and followed.
It is not our method to question Tish at suchtimes; ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die. But I confess to a certain uneasiness. If she proposed to escape by means of the baby blimp, well and good. At the same time, it required a dozen men to haul the balloon out of its shed, and we were but three weak women. I believed that she had overlooked this, but, as usual, I underestimated her.
On reaching the hangar I found the door open, and I could see in the darkness the large balloon, with what appeared to be a smaller one beside it, a matter of surprise to me, as I knew of no other. But I could not see Aggie.
I entered as quietly as possible and advanced into the hangar.
“Aggie!” I called in a low tone. “Aggie! Where are you?”
There was a silence, then from somewhere above came a sneeze, followed by Aggie’s voice, broken and trembling.
“On—on a r-r-rafter, Lizzie,” she said.
I could not believe my ears and advanced towards the sound. Suddenly Aggie yelled, and at the same moment the smaller balloon lurched and came toward me.
“Run!” Aggie yelled. “Run. She’s after you!”
Unfortunately, the warning came too late. Something reached out from the running balloonand caught me around the body, and the next moment, to my horror, I was lifted off the ground and thrust up into the timbers which supported the roof of the building. I am a heavy woman, and only by a desperate effort did I catch a rafter as the thing let go of me, and drew myself to safety. Aggie was somewhere close at hand, sobbing in the darkness.
It was a moment before I could speak. Then I managed to ask what had happened to me.
“It’s Katie, Lizzie,” Aggie said between sobs. “I think she must have found the blackberry cordial we left here, and it’s gone to her head!”
Our position was very unfortunate, especially as time was important. Katie was merely playful, but on any attempt to move on our part she would trumpet loudly and reach up for us. Most annoying of all, she had taken a fancy to one of my shoes and kept reaching up and pulling at it.
“Let her have it, if it keeps her quiet,” Aggie said tartly when I told her. “Give her anything she wants. Give her your bonnet. I never liked it, anyhow.”
It was then after midnight, but fortunately it was very soon after that that we saw an electric flash and heard our dear Tish’s voice.
“Aggie! Lizzie!” she called. And then she saw the elephant and advanced toward her.
“Katie!” she said. “What are you doing here? I’ve been looking for you all over the lot!” She then turned the flash on Katie and beheld her swaying. “Shame on you,” she said. “I believe you’ve been drinking.”
“Don’t reprove her; kill her”; Aggie said suddenly from overhead, and Tish looked up.
“I thought so,” she said rather sharply. “I cannot count on the faintest coöperation. I need two courageous hearts, and I find you roosting like frightened chickens on a beam. That elephant’s harmless. She’s only playing.”
“I don’t like the way she plays, then,” I protested angrily. “If you do, play with her yourself.”
But Tish had no time for irony. She simply picked up a piece of wood from the ground and hit Katie on the trunk with it.
“Now!” she said. “Bring them down, you shame to your sex. And be gentle. Remember you are not quite yourself.”
Thanks to Tish’s dominance over all types of inferior minds, Katie at once obeyed, and brought us down without difficulty.
Then she ambled unsteadily to a corner, and proceeded to empty another bottle of cordial we had concealed there.
I have always considered, in spite of its dénouement,that Tish’s idea of using Katie to drag the blimp out of the shed was a brilliant one. Katie herself made no demur. She stood swaying gently while we harnessed her to the balloon and at the word she bent to her work. Tish was in the car, examining the controls at the time, and turning up what I believe are called the flippers, which direct its course away from Mother Earth.
But I have blamed her for her impatience in starting the engine before we had unfastened Katie’s harness. Tish has a tendency now and then toward hasty action, which she always regrets later. There is this excuse for her, however: She had apparently no idea that the balloon would rise the moment the propeller reached a certain number of revolutions. But it did.
It seemed only a moment after we heard the engine start that I felt the car lifting from the earth, and in desperation flung myself into it, as Aggie did the same thing from the other side.
The next instant we were well above the ground, and from below there was coming a terrible trumpeting and squealing. We all looked over the side, and there beneath us was Katie, fastened to us by her harness and rising with us!
I shall never forget that moment. One and all, we are members of the Humane Society. And if Katie’s ropes and straps gave way, she wouldcertainly fall to a terrible death. Even Tish lost her sang-froid and, frantically starting the engine, endeavored to maneuver the thing to earth again. But anybody who has traveled in a blimp knows that it cannot be brought to earth again without outside aid.
Moreover, we were already outside the studio grounds, and traveling over roofs which Katie barely escaped. Indeed, from certain sounds, we had reason to believe that she was striking numerous chimneys, and I think now that this may account for the stories of a mysterious electric storm that night, which destroyed a half dozen chimneys in one block.
It was a fortunate thing that Tish remembered in time to elevate the flippers still further, thus giving us a certain amount of leeway. But a strong breeze from the sea had sprung up and was carrying us toward the city, and it became increasingly evident that, even if we cleared the highest buildings, Katie would not.
It was a tragic moment. Aggie proposed lightening the craft by throwing out the bottles of liquor, which had been a part of the smugglers’ cargo in the picture, but Tish restrained her.
“Better to kill an elephant,” she said, “than to brain some harmless wretch below.”
Katie meanwhile had lapsed into the silence ofdespair, or possibly had fainted. I do not know, nor is it now pertinent, for in a few moments the situation solved itself. We had barely missed the roof of the First National Bank Building when the blimp gave a terrific jar, and momentarily stopped.
On looking over the side the cause of this was explained. Katie had landed squarely on the flat roof of the building, and had immediately thrown her trunk around a chimney and braced herself. Even as we looked, her harness parted and left her free of us.
Katie was saved.
Glancing again over the side as we quickly rose, we could see her in the moonlight still hugging her chimney and gazing after us. What thoughts were hers we cannot know.
I am glad to solve in this manner a problem which caused much perplexity throughout the country—namely, how an elephant could have reached the roof of the First National Bank Building, to which the only possible entrance was through a trapdoor two feet six inches each way. As will be seen, the explanation, like that of many mysteries, is entirely simple.
It is necessary to touch but lightly on the unfortunate incident which concluded our escape. That the apparently friendly villagers who, thenext morning, ran out from their peaceful businesses to haul on our ropes and bring us to a landing, should so change in attitude in a few moments has ever since been a warning to us of the innate suspicion of human nature.
How could they look at Tish’s firm and noble face, and so misread it? Why did they not at once open the smugglers’ rum cargo which had remained in the car, and discover that the liquid in the bottles was only cold tea?
Can it be possible that Charlie Sands’ explanation is correct, and that the fact that many of them purchased the stuff from the sheriff and later threatened to lynch him, can account for his peculiar malignity to us?
One thing is certain—they held us in the local jail for days, until Charlie Sands was able to rescue us.
We never saw Mr. Stein again. Nor, frankly, did we ever expect to see Tish’s picture, since she had not finished it. But, as all the world now knows, it opened in June of this current year, and made a great success.
But our surprise at this was as nothing compared with the fact that Tish’s name did not appear in connection with it, and that the announcements read: “Featuring Miss Betty Carlisle.”
There had been no Miss Carlisle in Tish’s cast.
On the opening night we went to see it, accompanied by Charlie Sands. He said very little while watching Tish perform her various exploits, but when, after the shooting scene, Tish prepared to depart he protested.
“I’ve stood it up to this point,” he said grimly. “I propose to see it through.”
“There will be no more, Charles,” Tish explained in an indulgent manner. “I quit at the end of this scene. Be glad of one picture which does not end with an embrace.”
But she had spoken too soon!
Judge of our amazement when we saw our Tish, on the screen, disappear through a doorway, and return a moment later, a young and beautiful girl, who was at once clasped in Mr. Macmanus’ arms.
The title was: Her Elderly Disguise at Last Removed!