Ma Pettengill Part 3

II

A LOVE STORY

I had for some time been noting a slight theatrical tinge to the periodical literature supported by the big table in the Arrowhead living room. Chiefly the table's burden is composed of trade journals of the sober quality of the _Stockbreeder's Gazette_ or _Mine, Quarry & Derrick_ or the "Farmer's Almanac." But if, for example, one really tired of a vivacious column headed "Chats on Fertilizers" one could, by shuffling the litter, come upon a less sordid magazine frankly abandoned to the interests of the screen drama.

The one I best recall has limned upon its cover in acceptable flesh tints a fair young face of flawless beauty framed in a ma.s.s of curling golden ringlets. The dewy eyes, shaded to mystery by lashes of uncommon length, flash a wistful appeal that is faintly belied by the half-smiling lips and the dimpling chin. The contours are delicate yet firm; a face of haunting appeal--a face in which tears can be seldom but the sprightly rain of April, and the smile, when it melts the sensitive lips, will yet warn that hearts are made to ache and here is one not all too merry in its gladness. It is the face of one of our famous screen beauties, and we know, even from this tinted half-tone, that the fame has been deserved.

On one of those tired Arrowhead nights, inwardly debating the possible discourtesy of an early bedding after ten wet miles of trout stream, I came again and again to this compelling face of the sad smile and the glad tears. It recalled an ideal feminine head much looked at in my nonage. It was lithographed mostly in pink and was labeled "Tempest and Suns.h.i.+ne." So I loitered by the big table, dreaming upon the poignant perfections of this idol of a strange new art. I dreamed until awakened by the bustling return of my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill, who paused beside me to build an after-dinner cigarette, herself glancing meantime at the flawless face on the magazine cover. I perceived instantly that she also had been caught by its not too elusive charm.

"A beautiful face," I said.

Ma Pettengill took the magazine from me and studied the dainty thing.

"Yes, he's certainly beautiful," she a.s.sented. "He's as handsome as a Greek G.o.ddess." Thus did the woman ambiguously praise that famous screen star, J. Harold Armytage. "And the money he makes! His salary is one of them you see compared with the President's so as to make the latter seem a mere trifle. That's a funny thing. I bet at least eighteen million grown people in this country never did know how much they was paying their president till they saw it quoted beside some movie star's salary in a piece that tells how he's getting about four times what we pay the man in the White House. Ain't it a great business, though! Here's this horrible male beauty that would have to be mighty careful to escape extermination if he was anything but an actor. Being that, however, he not only eludes the vengeance of a sickened populace, but he can come out and be raw about it. Here, let me show you."

She turned to the page where J. Harold Armytage began to print a choice few of the letters he daily received from admirers of the reputedly frailer s.e.x. She now read me one of these with lamentable efforts of voice to satirize its wooing note: "My darling! I saw that dear face of yours again to-night in All For Love! So n.o.ble and manly you were in the sawmill scene where first you turn upon the scoundrelly millionaire father of the girl you love, then save him from the dynamite bomb of the strikers at the risk of your own. Oh, my dearest! Something tells me your heart is as pure and sweet as your acting, that your dear face could not mask an evil thought. Oh, my man of all the world! If only you and I together might--"

It seemed enough. Ma Pettengill thought so too. The others were not unlike it. The woman then read me a few of the replies of J. Harold Armytage to his unknown wors.h.i.+ppers. The famous star was invariably modest and dignified in these. Tactfully, as a gentleman must in any magazine of wide circulation, he deprecated the wors.h.i.+p of these adoring ones and kindly sought to persuade them that he was but a man--not a G.o.d, even if he did chance to receive one of the largest salaries in the business. The rogue! No G.o.d--with the glorious lines of his face there on the cover to controvert this awkward disclaimer! His beauty flaunted to famished hearts, what avail to protest weakly that they should put away his image or even to hint, as now and again he was stern enough to do, that their frankness bordered on the unmaidenly?

I called Ma Pettengill's attention to this engaging modesty. I said it must be an affair of some delicacy to rebuff ardent and not too reticent fair ones in a public print, and that I considered J. Harold Armytage to have come out of it with a display of taste that could be called unusual.

The woman replied, with her occasional irrelevance, that if the parties that hired him should read this stuff they probably wouldn't even then take him out on the lot and have him bitterly kicked by a succession of ten large labouring men who would take kindly to the task. She then once more said that the movies was sure one great business, and turned in the magazine to pleasanter pages on which one Vida Sommers, also a screen idol, it seemed, gave warning and advice to young girls who contemplated a moving-picture career.

Portraits of Vida Sommers in her best-known roles embellished these pages. In all of the portraits she wept. In some the tears were visible; in others they had to be guessed, the face being drawn by anguish. Her feminine correspondents wished particularly to be told of the snares and temptations besetting the path of the young girl who enters this perilous career. Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point.

They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them, and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions unbearably cramping to their aspirations?

And Vida Sommers told every one of them not to consider the pictures but as a final refuge from penury. She warned them that they would find the life one of hard work and full of disappointments. It seemed that even the snares and temptations were disappointing, being more easily evaded than many of her correspondents appeared to suspect. She advised them all to marry some good, true man and make a home for him. And surely none of them could have believed the life to be a joyous one after studying these sorrowful portraits of Vida Sommers.

"That's my little actress friend," said Ma Pettengill. "Doesn't she cry something grand!"

"You've been cheating me," I answered. "I never knew you had a little actress friend. How did you get her? And doesn't she ever play anything cheerful?"

"Of course not! She only plays mothers, and you know what that means in moving pictures. Ever see a moving-picture mother that had a chance to be happy for more than the first ten feet of film? You certainly got to cry to hold down that job. Ain't she always jolted quick in the first reel by the husband getting all ruined up in Wall Street, or the child getting stole, or the daughter that's just budding into womanhood running off with a polished shoe-drummer with city ways, or the only son robbing a bank, or husband taking up with a lady adventuress that lives across the hall in the same flat and outdresses mother?

"Then it's one jolt after another for her till the last ten feet of the last reel, when everything comes right somewhere on a ranch out in the great clean West where husband or son has got to be a man again by mingling with the honest-hearted drunken cowboys in their barroom frolics, or where daughter has won back her womanhood and made a name for herself by dancing the Nature dance in the Red Eye Saloon for rough but tender-hearted miners that shower their gold on her when stewed. Only, in this glad time of the last ten feet she still has to cry a-plenty because the clouds have pa.s.sed and she's Oh, so happy at last! Yes, sir; they get mother going and coming. And when she ain't weeping she has to be scared or mad or something that keeps her face busy. Here--I got some programmes of new pieces Vida just sent me. You can see she's a great actress; look at that one: 'Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?' And these other two."

I looked and believed. The dramas were variously and pithily described as The Picture with the Punch Powerful--The Smas.h.i.+ng Five-Reel Masterpiece--A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations--Six Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the tiny golden-haired girl is reproaching her father in evening dress. I read the opening lines of the synopsis: "A young business man, who has been made successful through his wife's money, is led to neglect her through pressure of affairs, falls into the toils of a dancer in a public place and becomes a victim of her habit, that of drinking perfume in her tea--"

But I had not the heart to follow this tragedy. In another, "The Woman Pays--Powerful and Picturesque, a Virile Masterpiece of Red-Blooded Hearts," Vida Sommers is powerfully hating her husband whom she has confronted in the den of a sneering and superbly gowned adventuress who declares that the husband must choose between them. Of course there can be no doubt about the husband's choice. No sane movie actor would hesitate a second. The caption says of Vida Sommers: "Her Love Has Turned to Hate." It may be good acting, but it would never get her chosen by the male of her species--the adventuress being what is known in some circles as a pippin.

I studied still another of these doc.u.ments--"Hearts Asunder." Vida Sommers has sent her beautiful daughter to the spring for a pail of water, though everyone in the audience must know that Gordon Balch, the detestable villain, is lurking outside for precisely this to occur. The synopsis beautiful says: "The mother now goes in search of her darling, only to find her struggling in the grasp of Gordon Balch, who is trying to force his attentions on her." This is where Vida Sommers has to look frightened, though in a later picture one sees that her fright changed to "A Mother's Honest Rage." The result is that Gordon Balch gets his, and gets it good. The line under his last appearance is "The End of a Misspent Life." Vida Sommers here registers pity. As Ma Pettengill had said, her face seemed never to have a moment's rest.

While I studied these exhibits my hostess had not been silent upon the merits of her little actress friend. Slowly she made me curious as to the origin and inner life of this valued member of an exalted profession.

"Yes, sir; there she is at the top, drawing down big money, with a nice vine-clad home in this film town, furnished from a page in a woman's magazine, with a big black limousine like a hea.r.s.e--all but the plumes--and a husband that she wors.h.i.+ps the ground he walks on.

Everything the heart can desire, even to being mother to some of the very saddest persons ever seen on a screen. It shows what genius will do for a woman when she finds out what kind of genius she's got and is further goaded by the necessity of supporting a husband in the style to which he has been accustomed by a doting father. She's some person now, let me tell you.

"She spent a week with me in Red Gap last fall, and you'd ought to seen how certain parties kowtowed to me so they'd get to meet her. I found that about every woman under fifty in our town is sure she was born for this here picture work, from Henrietta Templeton Price to Beryl Mae Macomber, who's expecting any day to be snapped up by some shrewd manager that her type is bound to appeal to, she being a fair young thing with big eyes and lots of teeth, like all film actresses. Metta Bigler, that teaches oil painting and burnt wood, give Vida a reception in her Bohemian studio in Red Gap's Latin Quarter--the studio having a chain of Chianti bottles on the wall and an ash tray with five burnt cigarette ends on a taboret to make it look Bohemian--and that was sure the biggest thrill our town has had since the Gus Levy All Star Shamrock Vaudeville Company stranded there five years ago. It just shows how important my little actress friend is--and look what she come up from!"

I said I wouldn't mind looking what she come up from if she had started low enough to make it exciting.

Ma Pettengill said she had that! She had come up from the gutter. She said that Vida Sommers, the idol of thousands, had been "a mere daughter of the people." Her eyes crinkled as she uttered this phrase. So I chose a chair in the shadow while she built a second cigarette.

Ten years ago I'm taking a vacation down in New York City. Along comes a letter from Aunt Esther Colborn, of Fredonia, who is a kind of a third cousin of mine about twice removed. Says her niece, Vida, has had a good city job as cas.h.i.+er of a dairy lunch in Boston, which is across the river from some college, but has thrown this job to the winds to marry the only college son of a rich New York magnate or Wall Street crook who has cast the boy off for contracting this low alliance with a daughter of the people. Aunt Esther is now afraid Vida isn't right happy and wants I should look her up and find out. It didn't sound too good, but I obliged.

I go to the address in Sixty-seventh Street on the West Side and find that Vida is keeping a boarding house. But I was ready to cheer Aunt Esther with a telegram one second after she opened the door on me--in a big blue ap.r.o.n and a dustcap on her hair. She was the happiest young woman I ever did see--s.h.i.+ning it out every which way. A very attractive girl about twenty-five, with a slim figure and one of these faces that ain't exactly of howling beauty in any one feature, but that sure get you when they're sunned up with joy like this one was.

She was pleased to death when I told her my name, and of course I must come in and stay for dinner so I could see all her boarders that was like one big family and, above all, meet her darling husband Clyde when he got home from business. The cheeriest thing she was, and I adore to meet people that are cheery, so I said nothing would please me better. She took me up to her little bedroom to lay my things off and then down to the parlour where she said I must rest and excuse her because she still had a few little things to supervise. She did have too. In the next hour and a half she run up and down two flights of stairs at least ten times.

I could hear her sweeping overhead and jamming things round on the stove when she raced down to the kitchen. Yes, she had several little things to supervise and one girl to help her. I peeked into the kitchen once while I was wandering through the lower rooms, and she seemed to be showing this girl how to boil potatoes. I wondered if she never run down and if her happy look was really chronic or mebbe put on for my benefit. Still, I could hear her singing to herself and she moved like a happy person.

In looking round the parlour I was greeted on every wall by pictures of a charming youth I guessed was darling Clyde. A fine young face he had, and looked as happy as Vida herself. There was pictures of him with a tennis racket and on a sailboat and with a mandolin and standing up with his college glee club and setting on a high-powered horse and so forth, all showing he must be a great social favourite and one born to have a good time. I wondered how he'd come to confer himself on the cas.h.i.+er of a quick-lunch place. I thought it must be one of these romances. Then--I'm always remembering the foolishest things--I recalled a funny little absent look in Vida's eyes when she spoke of her darling coming home from business. I thought now it must of been pride; that he was performing some low job in a factory or store while she run the boarding house, and she didn't want me to know it. I thought he must be a pretty fine rich man's son to stand the gaff this way when cast off by his father for mixing up with a daughter of the people.

It come dinnertime; about a dozen boarders straggling in, with Vida in a pretty frock anxious because darling Clyde was ten minutes late and of course something fatal must of happened to him in crossing a crowded street. But nothing had. He showed up safe and sound and whistling in another ten minutes, and became the life of the party. He looked near as happy as Vida did when she embraced him out in the hall, a fine handsome young fellow, the best-natured in the world, jollying the boarders and jollying me and jollying Vida that he called Baby Girl, or Babe. I saw, too, that I must of been mistaken about the job he was holding down. He was dressed in a very expensive manner, with neat little gold trinkets half concealed about him, the s.h.i.+rt and collar exactly right and the silk socks carefully matching the lavender tie.

He kept the table lively all through dinner with jokes and quips from the latest musical comedies and anecdotes of his dear old college days, and how that very afternoon he had won a silver cup and the pool champions.h.i.+p of his college club--and against a lot of corking good players, too, he didn't mind saying. Also I noticed we was eating a mighty good dinner; so darned good you didn't see how Vida could set it up at the price boarders usually pay.

After dinner Clyde sat down to the piano in the parlour and entertained one and all with songs of a comic or sentimental character. He knew a piano intimately, and his voice was one of these here melting tenors that get right inside of you and nestle. He was about the most ingratiating young man I'd ever met, and I didn't wonder any more about Vida's look of joy being permanent. She'd look in on the party every once in a while from the kitchen or the dining room where she was helping her Swede do the dishes for fifteen people and set the table for breakfast.

She was about an hour at this, and when at last she'd slipped out of her big ap.r.o.n and joined us she was looking right tuckered but still joyous.

Clyde patted his Baby Girl's hand when she come in, and she let herself go into an easy-chair near him that one of the boarders got up to give her. I got the swift idea that this was the first time all day she'd set down with any right feeling of rest.

Then Clyde sung to her. You could tell it was a song he meant for her and never sung till she'd got the work done up. A right pretty old song it was, Clyde throwing all the loving warmth of his first-cla.s.s tenor voice into the words:

Good night, good night, beloved!

I come to watch o'er thee, To be near thee, to be near thee.

I forget the rest, but there was happy tears in Vida's eyes when he finished in one climbing tenor burst. Then Clyde gets up and says he has an engagement down to his college club because some of his dear old cla.s.smates has gathered there for a quiet little evening of reminiscence and the jolly old rascals pretend they can't get along without him. Vida beams on him brighter than ever and tells him to be sure and have a good time, which I'd bet money he'd be sure to.

It was a very pretty scene when they said good night. Vida pretended that Clyde's voice was falling off from smoking too many cigarettes at this club. "I wouldn't mind you're going there, but I just know you spend most of the time in the club's horrid old smoking room!" She tells him this with a pout. Smoking room of a club! The knowing little minx! And Clyde chided her right back in a merry fas.h.i.+on. He lifted one of her hands and said his Baby Girl would have to take better care of them because the cunnun' little handies was getting all rough. Then they both laughed and went out for a long embrace in the hall.

Vida come back with a glowing countenance, and the boarders having dropped off to their rooms when the life of the party went to his club we had a nice chat. All about Clyde. She hoped I did like him, and I frankly said he was about the most taking young brat I'd ever been close to. She explained how their union had been a dream; that during their entire married life of a year and a half he had never spoken one cross word to her. She said I couldn't imagine his goodness of heart nor his sunny disposition nor how much everyone admired him. But the tired thing got so sleepy in ten minutes, even talking about her husband, that she couldn't keep back the yawns, so I said I'd had a wonderful evening and would have to go now.

But up in the bedroom, while I'm putting my things on, she gets waked up and goes more into detail about her happiness. I've never been able to figure out why, but women will tell each other things in a bedroom that they wouldn't dream of telling in any other room. Not that Vida went very far. Just a few little points. Like how Clyde's father had cast him off when they married and how she had felt herself that she was nothing but a bad woman taking advantage of this youth, she being a whole year older than he was; but Clyde had acted stunning in the matter, telling his father he had chosen the better part. Also it turned out this father hadn't cast him off from so much after all, because the old man went flat broke in Wall Street a couple of months later, peris.h.i.+ng of heart failure right afterward, and about the only thing Clyde would of drawn from the estate anyway was an old-fas.h.i.+oned watch of his grandfather's with a chain made from his grandmother's hair when she was a bride.

I gathered they had been right up against it at this time, except for the two thousand dollars that had been left Vida by her Uncle Gideon in the savings bank at Fredonia. Clyde, when she drew this out, wanted they should go to Newport with it where they could lead a quiet life for a couple of months while he looked about for a suitable opening for himself. But Vida had been firm, even ugly, she said, on this point.

She'd took the two thousand and started a boarding house that would be more like a home than a boarding house, though Clyde kept saying he'd never be able to endure seeing the woman bearing his name reduced to such ign.o.ble straits.

Still he had swallowed his foolish pride and been really very nice about it after she got the business started. Now he was always telling her to be sure and set a good table. He said if you were going to do a thing, even if it was only keeping a boarding house, to do it well. That was his motto--do it well or don't do it at all! So she was buying the best cuts of meats and all fresh vegetables because of his strict ideas in this matter, and it didn't look as if they'd ever really make a fortune at it--to say nothing of there being more persons than I'd believe that had hard luck and got behind in their payments, and of course one couldn't be stern to the poor unfortunates.

I listened to this chatter till it seemed about time to ask what business Clyde had took up. It seemed that right at the moment he was disengaged.

It further seemed that he had been disengaged at most other moments since he had stooped to this marriage with a daughter of the people. I mustn't think it was the poor boy's fault, though. He was willing at all times to accept a situation and sometimes would get so depressed that he'd actually look for work. Twice he had found it, but it proved to be something confining in an office where the hours were long and conditions far from satisfactory.

That's how she put it, with glowing eyes and flushed cheeks: "It proved to be mere dull routine work not in the least suited to darling Clyde's talents and the conditions were far from satisfactory. I had the hardest time prevailing on him to give the nasty old places up and wait patiently for a suitable opening. He was quite impatient with me when he consented--but, of course, he's only a boy of twenty-four, a whole year younger than I am. I tell him every day a suitable opening is bound to occur very soon. You see, he had so many grand friends, people of the right sort that are wealthy. I insist on his meeting them constantly.

Just think; only last week he spent Sat.u.r.day and Sunday at one of the biggest country houses on Long Island, and had such a good time. He's a prime favourite with a lot of people like that and they're always having him to dine or to the opera or to their b.a.l.l.s and parties. I miss him horribly, of course, and the poor dear misses me, but I tell him it will surely lead to something. His old college chums all love him too--a boy makes so many valuable friends in college, don't you think? A lot of them try to put things in his way. I couldn't bear to have him accept a situation unworthy of him--I know it would kill him. Why, he wilts like a flower under the least depression."

Well, I set and listened to a long string of this--and not a word for me to say. What could any one of said? Wasn't it being told to me by the happiest woman I ever set eyes on? Yes, sir; I'd never believe how gentle natured the boy was. Why, that very morning, being worried about something that went wrong with breakfast, which she had to turn out at five A. M. to get started hadn't she clean forgot to change his studs to a fresh s.h.i.+rt? And, to make it worse, hadn't she laid out a wrong color of socks with his lavender tie? But had he been cross to her, as most men would of been? Not for one second! He'd simply joked her about it when she brought up his breakfast tray, just as he'd joked her to-night about her hands getting rough from the kitchen work. And so forth and so forth!