Merton of the Movies Part 11

Merton Gill turned decisively away. Such coa.r.s.e foolery as this was too remote from Beulah Baxter who, somewhere on that lot, was doing something really, as her interview had put it, distinctive and worth while.

He lingered only to hear the last of Baird's instructions to Rollo and the absurd guests, finding some sinister fascination in the man's talk.

Baird then turned to the girl, who had also started off.

"Hang around, Flips. Why the rush?"

"Got to beat it over to Number Pour."

"Got anything good there?"

"Nothing that will get me any billing. Been waiting two hours now just to look frenzied in a mob."

"Well, say, come around and see me some time."

"All right, Jeff. Of course I'm pretty busy. When I ain't working I've got to think about my art."

"No, this is on the level. Listen, now, sister, I got another two reeler to pull off after this one, then I'm goin' to do something new, see? Got a big idea. Probably something for you in it. Drop in t' the office and talk it over. Come in some time next week. 'F I ain't there I'll be on the lot some place. Don't forget, now."

Merton Gill, some distance from the Buckeye set, waited to note what direction the Montague girl would take. She broke away presently, glanced brazenly in his direction, and tripped lightly out the nearest exit. He went swiftly to one at the far end of the building, and was again in the exciting street. But the afternoon was drawing in and the street had lost much of its vivacity. It would surely be too late for any glimpse of his heroine. And his mind was already cluttered with impressions from his day's adventure. He went out through the office, meaning to thank the casting director for the great favour she had shown him, but she was gone. He hoped the headache had not driven her home.

If she were to suffer again he hoped it would be some morning. He would have the Eezo wafers in one pocket and a menthol pencil in the other.

And she would again extend to him the freedom of that wonderful city.

In his room that night he tried to smooth out the jumble in his dazed mind. Those people seemed to say so many things they considered funny but that were not really funny to any one else. And moving-picture plays were always waiting for something, with the bored actors lounging about in idle apathy. Still in his ears sounded the drone of the sawmill and the deep purr of the lights when they were put on. That was a funny thing. When they wanted the lights on they said "Kick it," and when they wanted the lights off they said "Save it!" And why did a boy come out after every scene and hold up a placard with numbers on it before the camera? That placard had never shown in any picture he had seen. And that queer Montague girl, always turning up when you thought you had got rid of her. Still, she had thrown that knife pretty well. You had to give her credit for that. But she couldn't be much of an actress, even if she had spoken of acting with Miss Baxter, of climbing down cables with her and falling off cliffs. Probably she was boasting, because he had never seen any one but Miss Baxter do these things in her pictures.

Probably she had some very minor part. Anyway, it was certain she couldn't be much of an actress because she had almost promised to act in those terrible Buckeye comedies. And of course no one with any real ambition or capacity could consider such a thing--descending to rough horse-play for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the coa.r.s.er element among screen patrons.

But there was one impression from the day's whirl that remained clear and radiant: He had looked at the veritable face of his heroine. He began his letter to Tessie Kearns. "At last I have seen Miss Baxter face to face. There was no doubt about its being her. You would have known her at once. And how beautiful she is! She was looking up and seemed inspired, probably thinking about her part. She reminded me of that beautiful picture of St. Cecelia playing on the piano...."

CHAPTER VI. UNDER THE GLa.s.s TOPS

He approached the office of the Holden studios the following morning with a new air of a.s.surance. Formerly the mere approach had been an adventure; the look through the gate, the quick glimpse of the privileged ones who entered, the mingling, later, with the hopeful and the near-hopeless ones who waited. But now his feeling was that he had, somehow, become a part of that higher life beyond the gate. He might linger outside at odd moments, but rightfully he belonged inside. His novitiate had pa.s.sed. He was one of those who threw knives or battled at the sawmill with the persecuter of golden-haired innocence, or lured beautiful women from their homes. He might be taken, he thought, for an actor resting between pictures.

At the gate he suffered a momentary regret at an error of tactics committed the evening before. Instead of leaving the lot by the office he should have left by the gate. He should have strolled to this exit in a leisurely manner and stopped, just inside the barrier, for a chat with the watchman; a chat, beginning with the gift of a cigar, which should have impressed his appearance upon that person. He should have remarked casually that he had had a hard day on Stage Number Four, and must now be off to a good night's rest because of the equally hard day to-morrow.

Thus he could now have approached the gate with confidence and pa.s.sed freely in, with a few more pleasant words to the watchman who would have no difficulty in recalling him.

But it was vain to wish this. For all the watchman knew this young man had never been beyond the walls of the forbidden city, nor would he know any reason why the besieger should not forever be kept outside. He would fix that next time.

He approached the window of the casting office with mingled emotions. He did not hope to find his friend again stricken with headache, but if it chanced that she did suffer he hoped to be the first to learn of it. Was he not fortified with the potent Eezo wafers, and a new menthol pencil, even with an additional remedy of tablets that the druggist had strongly recommended? It was, therefore, not with any actual, crude disappointment that he learned of his friend's perfect well-being. She smiled pleasantly at him, the telephone receiver at one ear. "Nothing to-day, dear," she said and put down the instrument.

Yes, the headache was gone, vanquished by his remedies. She was fine, thank you. No, the headaches didn't come often. It might be weeks before she had another attack. No, of course she couldn't be certain of this.

And indeed she would be sure to let him know at the very first sign of their recurrence.

He looked over his patient with real anxiety, a solicitude from the bottom of which he was somehow unable to expel the last trace of a lingering hope that would have dismayed the little woman--not hope, exactly, but something almost like it which he would only translate to himself as an earnest desire that he might be at hand when the dread indisposition did attack her. Just now there could be no doubt that she was free from pain.

He thanked her profusely for her courtesy of the day before. He had seen wonderful things. He had learned a lot. And he wanted to ask her something, a.s.suring himself that he was alone in the waiting room. It was this: did she happen to know--was Miss Beulah Baxter married?

The little woman sighed in a tired manner. "Baxter married? Let me see."

She tapped her teeth with the end of a pencil, frowning into her vast knowledge of the people beyond the gate. "Now, let me think." But this appeared to be without result. "Oh, I really don't know; I forget. I suppose so. Why not? She often is."

He would have asked more questions, but the telephone rang and she listened a long time, contributing a "yes, yes," of understanding at brief intervals. This talk ended, she briskly demanded a number and began to talk in her turn. Merton Gill saw that for the time he had pa.s.sed from her life. She was calling an agency. She wanted people for a diplomatic reception in Was.h.i.+ngton. She must have a Bulgarian general, a Serbian diplomat, two French colonels, and a Belgian captain, all in uniform and all good types. She didn't want just anybody, but types that would stand out. Holden studios on Stage Number Two. Before noon, if possible. All right, then. Another bell rang, almost before she had hung up. "h.e.l.lo, Grace. Nothing to-day, dear. They're out on location, down toward Venice, getting some desert stuff. Yes, I'll let you know."

Merton Gill had now to make way at the window for a youngish, weary-looking woman who had once been prettier, who led an elaborately dressed little girl of five. She lifted the child to the window. "Say good-morning to the beautiful lady, Toots. Good-morning, Countess.

I'm sure you got something for Toots and me to-day because it's our birthday--both born on the same day--what do you think of that? Any little thing will help us out a lot--how about it?"

He went outside before the end of this colloquy, but presently saw the woman and her child emerge and walk on disconsolately toward the next studio. Thus began another period of waiting from which much of the glamour had gone. It was not so easy now to be excited by those glimpses of the street beyond the gate. A certain haze had vanished, leaving all too apparent the circ.u.mstance that others were working beyond the gate while Merton Gill loitered outside, his talent, his training, ignored.

His early air of careless confidence had changed to one not at all careless or confident. He was looking rather desperate and rather unbelieving. And it daily grew easier to count his savings. He made no mistakes now. His h.o.a.rd no longer enjoyed the addition of fifteen dollars a week. Only subtractions were made.

There came a morning when but one bill remained. It was a ten-dollar bill, bearing at its centre a steel-engraved portrait of Andrew Jackson.

He studied it in consternation, though still permitting himself to notice that Jackson would have made a good motion-picture type--the long, narrow, severe face, the stiff uncomprising mane of gray hair; probably they would have cast him for a feuding mountaineer, deadly with his rifle, or perhaps as an inventor whose device was stolen on his death-bed by his wicked Wall Street partner, thus leaving his motherless daughter at the mercy of Society's wolves.

But this was not the part that Jackson played in the gripping drama of Merton Gill. His face merely stared from the last money brought from Simsbury, Illinois, and the stare was not rea.s.suring. It seemed to say that there was no other money in all the world. Decidedly things must take a turn. Merton Gill had a quite definite feeling that he had already struggled and sacrificed enough to give the public something better and finer. It was time the public realized this.

Still he waited, not even again reaching the heart of things, for his friend beyond the window had suffered no relapse. He came to resent a certain inconsequence in the woman. She might have had those headaches oftener. He had been led to suppose that she would, and now she continued to be weary but entirely well.

More waiting and the ten-dollar bill went for a five and some silver. He was illogically not sorry to be rid of Andrew Jackson, who had looked so tragically skeptical. The five-dollar bill was much more cheerful. It bore the portrait of Benjamin Harrison, a smooth, cheerful face adorned with whiskers that radiated success. They were little short of smug with success. He would almost rather have had Benjamin Harrison on five dollars than the grim-faced Jackson on ten. Still, facts were facts. You couldn't wait as long on five dollars as you could on ten.

Then on the afternoon of a day that promised to end as other days had ended, a wave of animation swept through the waiting room and the casting office. "Swell cabaret stuff" was the phrase that brought the applicants to a lively swarm about the little window. Evening clothes, glad wraps, cigarette cases, vanity-boxes--the Victor people doing The Blight of Broadway with Muriel Mercer--Stage Number Four at 8:30 to-morrow morning. There seemed no limit to the people desired. Merton Gill joined the throng about the window. Engagements were rapidly made, both through the window and over the telephone that was now ringing those people who had so long been told that there was nothing to-day.

He did not push ahead of the women as some of the other men did. He even stood out of the line for the Montague girl who had suddenly appeared and who from the rear had been exclaiming: "Women and children first!"

"Thanks, old dear," she acknowledged the courtesy and beamed through the window. "Hullo, Countess!" The woman nodded briefly. "All right, Flips; I was just going to telephone you. Henshaw wants you for some baby-vamp stuff in the cabaret scene and in the gambling h.e.l.l. Better wear that salmon-pink chiffon and the yellow curls. Eight-thirty, Stage Four.

Goo'-by."

"Thanks, Countess! Me for the jumping tintypes at the hour named. I'm glad enough to be doing even third business. How about Ma?"

"Sure! Tell her grand-dame stuff, chaperone or something, the gray georgette and all her pearls and the cigarette case."

"I'll tell her. She'll be glad there's something doing once more on the perpendicular stage. Goo'-by."

She stepped aside with "You're next, brother!" Merton Gill acknowledged this with a haughty inclination of the head. He must not encourage this hoyden. He glanced expectantly through the little window. His friend held a telephone receiver at her ear. She smiled wearily. "All right, son. You got evening clothes, haven't you? Of course, I remember now.

Stage Four at 8:30. Goo'-by."

"I want to thank you for this opportunity--" he began, but was pushed aside by an athletic young woman who spoke from under a broad hat.

"Hullo, dearie! How about me and Ella?"

"Hullo, Maizie. All right. Stage Four, at 8:30, in your swellest evening stuff."

At the door the Montague girl called to an approaching group who seemed to have heard by wireless or occult means the report of new activity in the casting office. "Hurry, you troupers. You can eat to-morrow night, maybe!" They hurried. She turned to Merton Gill. "Seems like old times,"

she observed.

"Does it?" he replied coldly. Would this chit never understand that he disapproved of her trifling ways?

He went on, rejoicing that he had not been compelled to part, even temporarily, with a first-cla.s.s full-dress suit, hitherto worn only in the privacy of Lowell Hardy's studio. It would have been awkward, he thought, if the demand for it had been much longer delayed. He would surely have let that go before sacrificing his Buck Benson outfit. He had traversed the eucalyptus avenue in this ecstasy, and was on a busier thoroughfare. Before a motion-picture theatre he paused to study the billing of Muriel Mercer in Hearts Aflame. The beauteous girl, in an alarming gown, was at the mercy of a fiend in evening dress whose h.e.l.lish purpose was all too plainly read in his fevered eyes. The girl writhed in his grasp. Doubtless he was demanding her hand in marriage.

It was a tense bit. And to-morrow he would act with this petted idol of the screen. And under the direction of that Mr. Henshaw who seemed to take screen art with proper seriousness. He wondered if by any chance Mr. Henshaw would call upon him to do a quadruple transition, hate, fear, love, despair. He practised a few transitions as he went on to press his evening clothes in the Patterson kitchen, and to dream, that night, that he rode his good old pal, Pinto, into the gilded cabaret to carry off Muriel Mercer, Broadway's pampered society pet, to the clean life out there in the open s.p.a.ces where men are men.

At eight the following morning he was made up in a large dressing room by a grumbling extra who said that it was a dog's life plastering grease paint over the maps of dubs. He was presently on Stage Four in the prescribed evening regalia for gentlemen. He found the cabaret set, a gilded haunt of pleasure with small tables set about an oblong of dancing floor. Back of these on three sides were raised platforms with other tables, and above these discreet boxes, half masked by drapery, for the seclusion of more retiring merry-makers. The scene was deserted as yet, but presently he was joined by another early comer, a beautiful young woman of Spanish type with a thin face and eager, dark eyes. Her gown was glistening black set low about her polished shoulders, and she carried a red rose. So exotic did she appear he was surprised when she addressed him in the purest English.