Ma Pettengill Part 5

I'd watched this actress the second time her tears was spoiled and her expression didn't fit a loving mother's face one bit. Her breath come as in scenes of tense emotion, but she hotly muttered something that made me think I must of misunderstood her, because no lady actress would say it, let alone a kind old mother. However, she backs off and for the third time has this medicine dropper worked on her smarting eyes. Once more she comes forward with streaming eyes of motherly love, and I'm darned if this grouch don't hold things up again.

This time he's barking about a leather sofa against the far wall of the humble home. He says it's an office sofa and where in something is the red plush one that belongs to the set? He's barking dangerously at everyone round him when all at once he's choked off something grand by the weeping mother that has lost her third set of tears. She was wiping glycerine off her face and saying things to the grouch that must of give him a cold chill for a minute. I'm sometimes accused of doing things with language myself, but never in my life have I talked so interestingly--at least not before ladies. Not that I blamed her.

Everyone kept still with horror till she run down; it seems it's a fierce crime in that art to give a director what's coming to him. The policeman and the erring son was so scared they just stood there acting their parts and the grouch was frozen with his mouth half open. Probably he hadn't believed it at first. Then all at once he smiled the loveliest smile you ever seen on a human face and says in chilled tones: "That will be all, Miss St. Clair! We will trouble you no further in this production." His words sounded like cracking up a hunk of ice for the c.o.c.ktail shaker. Miss St. Clair then throws up her arms and rushes off, shrieking to the limit of a bully voice.

It was an exciting introduction for me to what they call the silent drama.

Then I looked at Vida and she was crying her eyes out. I guessed it was from sympathy with the mother actress, but the grouch also stares at her with his gimlet eyes and says:

"Here, don't you waste any tears on her. That's all in the day's work."

"I--wasn't thinking of her," sobs Vida.

"Then what you crying for?" says he.

"For that poor dear boy that's being dragged from his mother to prison for some childish prank," she blubbers.

Me, I laughed right out at the little fool, but the director didn't laugh.

"Well, I'll be d.a.m.ned!" says he in low, reverent tones.

Then he begins to look into her face like he'd lost something there. Then he backed off and looked into it a minute more. Then he went crazy all over the place.

"Here," he barks at another actress, "get this woman into your dressing room and get the number five on her quick. Make her up for this part, understand? You there, Eddie, run get that calico skirt and black-satin waist off Miss St. Clair and hustle 'em over to Miss Harcourt's room, where this lady will be making up. Come on now! Move! Work quick! We can't be on this scene all day."

Then, when everybody run off, he set down on the red plush sofa that was now in place, relighted a cigar that smelled like it had gone out three days before, and grinned at me in an excited manner.

"Your little friend is a find," he says. "Mark my words, Mrs. Pettijohn, she's got a future or I don't know faces. She'll screen well, and she's one of the few that can turn on the tears when she wants to. I always did hate glycerine in this art. Now if only I can get her camera wise--and I'll bet I can! Lucky we'd just started on this piece when St.

Clair blew up. Only one little retake, where she's happy over her boy's promotion in the factory. She's bound to get away with that; then if she can get the water again for this scene it will be all over but signing her contract."

I was some excited myself by this time, you'd better believe. Nervous as a cat I found myself when Vida was led out in the sad mother's costume by this other actress that had made her up. But Vida wasn't nervous the least bit. She was gayly babbling that she'd always wanted to act, and once she had played a real part in a piece they put on at Odd Fellows'

Hall in Fredonia, and she had done so well that even the Methodist minister said she was as good as the actress he saw in Lawrence Barrett's company before he was saved; and he had hoped she wouldn't be led away by her success and go on the real stage, because he could not regard it as a safe pursuit for young persons of her s.e.x, owing to there being so little home life--and now what did she do first?

This director had got very cold and businesslike once more.

"Stop talking first," says he. "Don't let me hear another word from you.

And listen hard. You're sitting in your humble home sewing a b.u.t.ton on your boy's coat. He's your only joy in life. There's the coat and the b.u.t.ton half sewed on with the needle and thread sticking in it. Sit down and sew that b.u.t.ton on as if you were doing it for your own son. No pretending, mind you. Sew it on as if--"

He hesitated a minute and got a first-cla.s.s inspiration.

"Sew it on as if it was a b.u.t.ton on your husband's coat that you told me about. Every two or three st.i.tches look up to show us how happy you are.

When you get it sewed, take the coat up this way and hug it. You look still happier at that. Then you walk over to the mantel, pick up the photograph of your boy that's there by that china dog and kiss it. I won't tell you how to do that. Remember who he is and do it your own way, only let us see your face. Then put back the picture slowly, go get the coat, and start to the left as if you were going to hang it up in his room; but you hear steps on the stair outside and you know your boy has come home from work. We see that because your face lights up. Stand happy there till he comes in.

"You expect him to rush over to you as usual, but he's cast down; something has happened. You get a shock of fright. Walk over to him--slow; you're scared. Get your arms round him. He stiffens at first, then leans on you. He's crying himself now, but you ain't--not yet. You're brave because you don't know about this fight he's had with the foreman that's after your boy's sweetheart for no good purpose.

"Now go through it that far and see if you remember everything I told you. When we get down to the crying scene after the officer comes on, I'll rehea.r.s.e you in that too, only for G.o.d's sake don't cry in the rehearsal! You'll go dry. Now then! Coat--b.u.t.ton--sewing. Goon!"

Well, sir, I stood there trembling like a leaf while she went through what he'd told her like she'd been at it all her life--or rather like it was her dear Clyde's coat and her dear Clyde's photo and her dear Clyde that come in the door. Then he rehea.r.s.ed her in the end of the scene where the cop comes on, and she got that, too, though alarming him because she couldn't even rehea.r.s.e it without crying. I could see this director was nervous himself by this time, thinking she was too good to be true. But he got her into the chair sewing again, all ready for the real work.

"Remember only three things," he says: "Don't look at this machine, move slowly when you move at all, and don't try to act. Now then! Camera!"

It was a historic occasion, all right. The lad at the camera begun to turn a crank and Vida begun to act like she wasn't acting at all. The director just give her a low word when she had to move. He didn't bark now. And say, that crying scene! Darned if I didn't near cry myself looking at her, and I heard this stonefaced director breathing mighty short when she had to stand there with her hands clenched and watch her boy go out the door with this cop.

Vida was too excited to sleep that night. She said the director had advised her privately not to make a contract just yet, because she would get better terms when she'd showed 'em what she could really do. For this picture she would get paid seventy-five dollars a week. A week, mind you, to a girl that had been thinking herself lucky to get twelve in New York.

She was very let down and happy, and cried a little bit out of working hours for me because it was all so wonderful, and her drowned boy might be resting on some river bottom at that very moment. I said it was a safe bet he was resting, wherever he was; but she didn't get it and I didn't say it twice.

And such was the beginning of Vida Sommers' glittering sob career in the movies. She's never had but one failure and they turned that into a success. It seems they tried her in one of these "Should a Wife Forgive?"

pieces in which the wife did not forgive, for a wonder, and she made a horrible mess of it. She was fine in the suffering part, of course, only when it come to not forgiving at the end--well, she just didn't know how to not forgive. They worked with her one whole day, then had to change the ending. She's said to be very n.o.ble and womanly in it.

I went home next day, leaving her in pursuit of her art. But I got glowing letters from her about every week, she doing new pictures and her salary jumping because other film parties was naturally after so good a weeper. And the next year I run down to see her. She was a changed woman all right. She had a home or bungalow, a car, a fas.h.i.+onable dog, a j.a.p cook, a maid and real gowns for the first time in her life. But the changes was all outside. She was still the same Vida that wanted to mother every male human on earth. She never seemed to worry about girls and women; her idea is that they're able to look out for themselves, but that men are babies needing a mother's protection as long as they live.

And of course one of these men she had mothered down there had took a base advantage of her--this same ugly old grouch of a director. She locked the bedroom door and told me about it in horrified whispers the first night I got there. She said it might of been her fault, that he might of misunderstood something she had said about Clyde. And anyway she'd ought to of remembered that some men are beasts at heart.

Anyway, this infamous brute had come to the house one night and insulted her in the grossest manner, and it was all true about moving-picture directors having designs on unprotected females that work for 'em.

Yielding to his lowest brute instincts he had thrown decency to the winds and made her such an evil proposition that she could hardly bear to put it in words. But she did. It seems that the scoundrel had listened to some studio gossip to the effect that she had divorced the husband who deserted her, and so he come right out and said he had been deeply in love with her ever since that first day on the train, and now that she was free, would she marry him?

Of course she was insulted to the limit and told him so in what would probably of made a gripping scene of a good woman spurning the advances of a moral leper. She overwhelmed him with scorn and horror for his foul words. How dared he say her Clyde had deserted her, or think she would ever divorce him! That showed, what a vile mind he must have. She said he got awful meek and apologetic when he learned that she still clung to the memory of Clyde, who would one day fight his way back to her if he hadn't ended it all. She told him fully what a perfect man Clyde was, and she said at last the ugly old wretch just grinned weakly at her in a very painful way, like it hurt him, and said: "Oh, my dearest, you must try to forgive me. I didn't know--I didn't know half the truth." Then he patted her hand and patted her cheek and choked up and swallowed a couple of times, and says he:

"I was an old man dreaming and dreams make fools of old men!"

Then he swallowed again and stumbled out through her garden where the orange blossoms had just come. She said he'd never been offensive since that time, barking as nasty to her as to any of the others when she was acting, so that no one would dream what a foul heart he had, except that he always kept a bunch of white roses in her dressing room. But she hadn't cared to make him trouble about that because maybe he was honestly trying to lead a better life.

Some entertainment Vida give me, telling this, setting on her bed under a light that showed up more lines than ever in her face. She was looking close to forty now--I guess them crying scenes had told on her, and her yearning for the lost Clyde--anyway she was the last woman on earth could of got herself insulted even if she had tried her prettiest, only she didn't know that. And she'd had her little thrill. We've all dreamed of how we'd some day turn down some impossible party who was overcome by our mere beauty.

I said I'd always known this director was an unspeakable scoundrel, because he insisted on calling me Mrs. Pettijohn.

Then we had a nice talk about Clyde. She'd had no word for a year now, the last being a picture card saying he would spend the winter in Egypt with some well-known capitalists that wouldn't take no for an answer.

And did I believe he might now be wandering over the face of the earth, sick and worn, and trying to get back to her; didn't I think some day he would drag himself to her door, a mere wreck of his former self, to be soothed at last on her breast? That was why she kept a light burning in the front window of this here bungalow. He would know she had waited.

Well, I'd never said a word against Clyde except in conversation with myself, and I wasn't going to break out now. I did go so far as to hint that an article that had come out about her in this same magazine might draw Clyde back a little quicker than the light in the window. The article said her salary was enormous. I thought its rays might carry.

So I come home again and near a year later I get a telegram from Vida: "Happy at last--my own has come home to me." I threw up my hands and swore when I read this. The article had said her salary was seven hundred and fifty dollars a week.

The next winter I run down to see the happy couple. Vida was now looking a good forty, but Clyde was actually looking younger than ever; not a line nor a wrinkle to show how he had grieved for her, and not a sign of writer's cramp from these three picture cards he had sent her in five years. She'd been afraid he'd come back worn to the bone.

But listen! By the time I got there Clyde was also drawing money. He'd felt a little hurt at first to find his wife a common actress, and asked to see her contract because you couldn't believe what you see in these magazines. Then he'd gone round the lot and got to be an actor himself.

I gathered that he hadn't been well liked by the men at first, and two or three other directors, when Vida insisted he should have a chance to act, had put him into rough-house funny plays where he got thrown downstairs or had bricks fall on him, or got beat up by a willing ex-prize fighter, or a basket of eggs over his head, or custard pies in his perfect features, with bruises and sprains and broken bones and so forth--I believe the first week they broke everything but his contract.

Anyway, when he begun to think he wasn't meant for this art, who steps in but this same director that had made such a beast of himself with Vida?

He puts Clyde into a play in which Vida is the mother and Clyde is the n.o.ble son that takes the crime on his shoulders to screen the brother of the girl he loves, and it was an awful hit. Naturally Vida was never so good before and Clyde proved to be another find. He can straighten up and look n.o.bler when he's wrongfully accused of a crime than any still actor I ever see. He's got now to where they have to handle him with gloves or he'd leave 'em flat and go with another company. Vida wrote me only last week that they had a play for him where he's cast off on a desert island with a beautiful but haughty heiress, and they have to live there three months subsisting on edible foods which are found on all desert islands. But Clyde had refused the part because he would have to grow whiskers in this three months. He said he had to think of his public, which would resent this hideous desecration. He thought up a bully way to get out of it. He said he'd let the whiskers grow for a few scenes and then find a case of safety razors washed ash.o.r.e, so he could shave himself just before the haughty millionaire's daughter confessed that she had loved him from the first and the excursion steamer come up to rescue 'em. I believe he now admits frankly that he wrote most of the play, or at least wrote the punch into it. A very happy couple they are, Clyde having only one vice, which is candy that threatens his waistline. Vida keeps a sharp watch on him, but he bribes people to sneak chocolate creams into his dressing room. The last night I was there he sung "Good-night, Good-night, Beloved!" so well that I choked up myself.

Of course women are crazy about him; but that don't bother Vida a little bit. She never wanted a husband anyway--only a son. And Clyde must have had something wake up in his brain them years he was away. He had a queer look in his eyes one night when he said to me--where Vida couldn't hear: "Yes, other women have loved me, but she--she knows me and loves me!"

It's the only thing I ever heard him utter that would show he might be above a pet kitten in intellect.

And, of course, these letters he gets don't mean anything in his life but advertising--Oh, yes! I forgot to tell you that his stage name is J.

Harold Armytage. He thought it up himself. And the letters coming in by the bushel really make Vida proud. In her heart she's sorry for the poor fools because they can't have as much of dear Clyde as she has. She says she's never deserved her present happiness. I never know whether I agree with her or not.