Chapter 11

"Roody, that scene it took such a fortune to build into the shape of the letter A?"

"It looks like what is it. Fake! The way it reads in that _French Revolution_ by that fellow Carlyle they gave me to read and the way it looks in the picture is the difference of black from white. For fifty thousand dollars more or less on a four-hundred-thousand-dollar picture I don't have a fake Waterloo."

"I should say not, Roody, when you're famous for your water scenes in all your big pictures! In 'The Lure of Silk' it's the scenes on the water they went craziest over."

"I've already got the passage engaged for next week to shoot the company over to France. That windmill scene on Long Island looks as much like the windmill north of Fleuris, where Napoleon could see the Blucher troops from, as I look like a windmill scene. 'Sol,' I says, 'it looks just like what it is--a piece of pasteboard out of the storehouse set up on a rock. Eat those feet of film, Sol,' I says to him, 'plant 'em, drown 'em--anything you like with 'em. That kind of fake stuff won't make 'Saint Elba' the greatest picture ever released, and every picture turned out from these studios has got to be just that.' I wish you could have heard, Rosie, in the projection-room, quiet like a pin after I came out with it."

"Fifty thousand dollars, Roody?"

"Yes. 'Fifty thousand dollars,' begins Sol with me, too. 'Fifty thousand--one hundred thousand--two!' I said. 'It would make no difference. If we can't fake the kind of battle-plain that wouldn't make Napoleon turn over in his grave, we cross the ocean for the real thing.' 'Fifty thousand dollars,' Sol keeps saying--you know how he cries with his voice. 'Fifty thousand dollars your grandmother!' I hollered. 'For a few dollars more or less I should make a Rudolph Pelz picture something I'm ashamed of.' Am I right, Rosie? Am I right?"

"I should say so, Roody, for a few dollars you should not belittle yourself."

"Not if your old man knows it, by golly! and I think he does."

"Hurry now, Roody; you know how Bleema likes it you should be dressed."

"Believe me, if Feist had his choice he wouldn't be dressed, neither. Full dress for grandma and all of us to look at each other in! When there's company, it's bad enough, but for Feist and a few servants, hanged if I see it!"

"Does it hurt, Roody, to give the child a little pleasure? Anyway, she's right--people like us should get dressed up for sup--dinner. I wouldn't be surprised if she didn't bring Lester Spencer back for dinner from automobiling."

"He leaves to-night at ten with the company for Pennsylvania and the Horseshoe Bend picture. Anyways, I don't see where it comes in that for a fellow who draws his salary off of me I have to dress. I got to say it for him, though, give the devil his due, he does a good piece of work where Sol succeeds in getting him off center-stage in his scene with Wellington."

"Lester is a good actor. Madame Coutilly, to-day, when I had my manicure, just raved over him and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure of Silk.'"

"He'll be a screen proposition some day if we can chain down some of his conceit. Only, where such friendships with him and Bleema comes in, I don't see. I don't like it."

"Say, the child likes to run around with celebrities. Why shouldn't it give her pleasure over the other girls from Miss Samuels's school to be seen out once in a while with Lester Spencer, their favorite, or Norma Beautiful? 'America's Darlings,' I see this week's _Screen Magazine_ calls 'em. It's natural the child should enjoy it."'

"Let her enjoy; only, where it comes in I should have to sit across from him at supper three times this week, I don't see. Out of the studio, me and Spencer don't talk the same language. To-night, him and Feist would mix like oil and water."

"Does Feist know yet, Roody, you closed the deal on the Grismer estate?"

"Sure! I says to him to-day: 'Feist, with us for next-door neighbors of your country estate, together we own nearly half of Long Island.' Am I right?"

"Like I says last night in mamma's room to Etta and Sol, 'I was used to thirty-four rooms and nineteen baths from home yet!' Poor mamma--how she laughed! Just like before her stroke."

"Nothing, Rosie, not one hundred rooms and fifty baths--nothing I can ever do for you is one-tenth that you deserve."

"And nothing, Roody, that I can do for you is one-hundredth what you deserve."

"I sometimes wonder, Rosie, if, with all we got, there isn't maybe some little happiness I've overlooked for you."

She lifted herself by his coat lapels, kissing him. "Such a question!"

"So many times it comes up in the scenarios and the picture-plots, Rosie, how money don't always bring happiness."

"It wouldn't, Roody--not a penny's worth to me without you and Bleema. But with you, Roody, no matter how happy I feel, it seems to me I can't ever feel happy enough for what we have got. Why, a woman just couldn't--why, I--I always say about you, Roody, only yesterday to my own sister-in-law, 'Etta,' I says, 'it's hard for me to think of anything new to wish for.' Just take last week, for instance, I wished it that, right after the big check you gave for the Armenian sufferers, you should give that extra ten thousand in mamma's name to the Belgian sufferers. Done! Thursday, when I seen that gray roadster I liked so much for Bleema, this afternoon she's out riding in it. It is a wonder I got a wish for anything left in me."

"To have you talk like this, Rosie, is the highest of all my successes."

"If--if there's one real wish I got now, Roody, it is only for our Bleema. We got a young lady, honey; we got to put on our thinking-cap."

"'Young lady'--all of a sudden she decides we've got! Young baby, you better say."

"A graduate this month from Miss Samuels's Central Park School he calls a baby!"

"Let me see--how old is--"

"He don't know his own child's age! Well, how many years back is it since we were in rainy-day skirts?"

"My God! Ten--fourteen--eighteen! Eighteen years! Our little Bleema! It seems yesterday, Rosie, I was learning her to walk along Grand Street."

"You haven't noticed, Roody, David Feist?"

"'Noticed'?"

"Say, you may be a smart man, Rudolph Pelz--everybody tells me you are--but they should know once on the Picture Rialto how dumb as a father you are. 'Noticed?' he asks. All right then--if you need a brick house--noticed that David Feist hates your daughter and 'ain't got eyes for her and don't try every excuse to get invited here for sup--dinner."

"You mean, Rosie--"

"Of course I mean! It's pitiful how he follows her everywhere with his eyes. In the box last night at the opera you was too asleep to see it, but all evening Etta was nudging me how he nearly ate up our Bleema just with looks."

"You women with your nonsense!"

"I guess, Rudolph, it would be a bad thing. Our daughter and a young man smart enough to make himself from a celluloid collar-cutter to a millionaire five times over on a little thing like inventing a newfangled film-substance should tie up with the only child of Rudolph Pelz, the picture king."

"I give you my word, Rosie, such talk makes me sick."

"You'd hate it, wouldn't you? A prince like David Feist."

"People don't talk such things till they happen. If our daughter could have the King of England and didn't want him, I'd say she should not marry the King of England. I want my girl home by me yet, anyway, for many a long day. She should be playing with her dolls instead of her mother and aunt Etta filling her up with ideas. Don't think I'm so stuck, neither, on how she runs around with my film stars."

"Honest, Roody, the way you're so strict with that child it's a shame! The girl has got to have her pleasure."

"Well, if she's got to have her pleasure, she should have it with young men like Feist and not with--"

"There! Didn't I tell you so? Didn't I?"

"Say, I don't deny if I got some day to have a son-in-law, my first choice for him would be Feist."

"Roody, the two estates together in one!"

"I'm surprised at you, Rosie--honest, I'm surprised. Such talk!"

Mrs. Pelz took a pinch of his each cheek, tiptoeing to kiss him squarely on the lips.

"Go get dressed," she said, "and I'll wait for you."

"Rosie Posy," he said, clucking into his cheek with his tongue and moving away through the pink-shaded twilight.

At the door to the whitely glittering bathroom she called to him again, softly; he turning.

"What'll you bet, Roody, that I get my biggest wish as soon as I got the gray roadster and the Belgian check?"

"Women's nonsense!" said Mr. Pelz, his voice suddenly lost in the violent plunge of water into porcelain.

In a drawing-room faithful to Dunlap Brothers' exorbitant interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, a veritable forest of wrought-iron candle-trees burned dimly into a scene of Pinturicchio table, tapestry-surmounted wedding-chest, brave and hideous with _pastiglia_ work, the inevitable camp-chair of Savonarola, an Umbrian-walnut chair with lyre-shaped front, bust of Dante Alighieri in Florentine cap and ear-muffs, a Sienese mirror of the soul, sixteenth-century suit of cap-a-pie armor on gold-and-black plinth, Venetian credence with wrought-iron locks. The voiceless and invoiced immobility of the museum here, as if only the red-plush railing, the cords from across chairs, and the "Do Not Sit" warnings to the footsore had been removed.

Against a chair cruel to the back with a carved coat of arms of the Lombardi family Mr. David Feist leaned lightly and wisely. If his correct-enough patent pumps ever so slightly escaped the floor, his span of shoulders left hardly an inch to be desired. There was a peninsula of rather too closely shaved but thick black hair jutted well down Mr. Feist's brow, forming what might have been bald but were merely hairless inlets on either side. Behind _pince-nez_ his eyes sparkled in points not unlike the lenses themselves. Honed to a swift, aquiline boniness of profile which cut into the shadows, there was something swiftly vigorous about even his repose.

Incongruous enough on the Pinturicchio table, and as if she had dared to walk where mere moderns feared to tread, a polychrome framed picture of Miss Bleema Pelz, tulle-clouded, piquant profile flung charmingly to the northwest, and one bare shoulder prettily defiled with a long screw-curl, lit, as it were, into the careful gloom.

Deliberately in range of that photograph, and so beatific of gaze that it was as if his sense were soaked in its loveliness, Mr. Feist smiled, and, smiling, reddened. Enter then Mrs. Pelz, hitting softly into white taffetas beneath the black lace; Mr. Pelz, wide, white and boiled of shirt-front.

"Good evening, Mr. Feist! It's a shame the way we kept you waiting."

"Not at all, Mrs. Pelz--a pleasure. Hello! how's my friend, the picture king?"

"Rotten," said Mr. Pelz, amiably, shaking hands with a great riding-up of cuff, and seating himself astride a Florentine bench and the leather-embossed arms of the Strozzi family.

"Roody, what a way to sit!"

"'What a way to sit,' she tells me. I'd like to see a fellow sit any way in this room without making a monkey of himself. Am I right, Feist? The Eyetalians maybe didn't know no better, but I should have to suffer, too, when for four-seventy-nine I can buy myself at Tracy's the finest kind of a rocking-chair that fits me."

"Roody!"

"Say, Feist agrees with me; only, he don't know you well enough yet to let on. I notice that with all his Louis-this and Louis-that rooms in his own house, up in his own room it is a good old Uncle Sam's cot and a patent rocker."

"You've got a gorgeous room here just the same, Pelz."

"Gorgeous for a funeral."

"Every collector in the country knows that table. I had my eye on it for my music-room once myself when it was shown at Dunlap's."

"Dunlap's are a grand firm of decorators, Mr. Feist. I'm having them do Grismer, too."

"Well, Feist, how does it feel to have us for neighbors?"

"Immense, Pelz!"

"Like I said to my husband, between us the way the estates adjoin, we got a monopoly on Long Island--ain't it so?"

"And believe me, Mrs. Pelz, you'll never regret the buy. The finest pleasure my money brought me yet is that view of my little bedroom I took you up to, Pelz."

"Wonderful!"

"I've got an outlook there, Mrs. Pelz, is a paradise to see. You can have all my forty-two rooms and two garages if you'll leave me my little top room with its miles of beautiful greenness, and--and so--so much beauty that--that it gets you by the throat. I--don't express it the way I see it, but--"

"I should say so, Mr. Feist! Out of every one of our thirty-four rooms and eighteen baths you can see a regular oil-painting."

Mr. Pelz leaned over, tongue in cheek and, at the screwing noise again, poking Mr. Feist in the region of the fifth rib.

"She said to me up-stairs just now, Feist, 'Like we was used to it from home?' Eh? C-c-c-cluck! Eighteen baths a day! I know the time when one every Saturday night was stuck up."

"Roody, honest, you're awful!"

"Say, me and Feist speak the same language. We ain't entertaining a lot of motion-picture stars to-night."

"I want Mr. Feist to come over some night to sup--dinner when we have a few of them over. We're great friends, Mr. Feist, with Norma Beautiful and Allan Hunt and Lester Spencer and all that crowd. We entertain them a good deal. My daughter is quite chums with them all. Elsie Love sleeps here some nights. Honest, Mr. Feist, you never saw a more unassuming girl for her salary."

"Yes, especially is she unassuming when she spoils ninety feet of film yesterday in a row with Spencer over who should have one-half inch nearer to the center of the picture."

"My husband, Mr. Feist, has got no patience with temperament."

"Honey, a little supper wouldn't hurt."

"I'll send and see if Bleema is ready yet. She's been out, taking Lester Spencer in her new runabout her papa bought her. I wish you could see, Mr. Feist, the way the traffic policemen smile after that girl the way she handles a car. If I do say it, she's a picture."

"If you ask me, Mrs. Pelz, the finest of the objects in this room of fine things, it won't take me long to tell you," said Mr. Feist, leaning forward to lift for closer gaze the framed photograph.

"Now you're shouting, Feist!"

"That picture don't half do her justice. If I do say it, Mr. Feist--if that child had to make her living, she'd be a fortune in pictures. 'No, mamma,' she always says; 'God forbid if I have to make my living some day, I want to be a famous writer.' I want you to read sometime, Mr. Feist, some of that girl's poetry. I cry like a baby over the sad ones. And stories! There's one about a poor little girl who could look out of her window into the house of a rich girl and--"

"Feist, her mother just hates that child!"

"Say, old man, I don't see any medals on you for hating her."

"He's worse than I am, Mr. Feist; only, he hides it behind making fun of me. I always say if Bleema Pelz wanted the moon, her father would see to it that his property-man got the real one for her."

"You--you've got a beautiful, sweet little girl there, Pelz. I don't blame you."

"Feist, if I didn't know it, I'd be an ungrateful dog."

"Her papa can't realize, Mr. Feist, we haven't got a baby any more."

"I--realize it, Mrs. Pelz."

"You--you see, Roody?"

"I--I--guess I'm the old-fashioned kind of a fellow, Pelz, when it comes to girls. I--I guess I do it the way they used to do it--the parents first--but--but--now that we--we're on the subject--I--I like your daughter, Pelz--my God! Pelz, but--but I like your little daughter!"

An Augsburg clock ticked into a suddenly shaped silence, Mr. Pelz rising, Mr. Feist already risen.

"I haven't got much besides a clean record and all that love or money can buy her, Pelz, but--well--you know me for what I am, and--"

"Indeed we do, Mr. Feist! I always say to my husband my favorite of all the young men who come here is--"

"You know what my standing--well, with men and in business is, Pelz, and as far as taking care of her goes, I can make her from a little princess into a little queen--"

"The young man that is lucky enough to get Bleema, Mr. Feist--"

"Not that the money part is everything, but if what I am suits you and Mrs. Pelz, I want to enter the ring for her. I might as well come out with it. I wouldn't for anything on earth have her know that I've spoken to you--yet--not till after I've spoken with her--but--well, there's my cards on the table, Pelz."

Mr. Pelz held out a slow and rigid arm, one hand gripping, the other cupping Mr. Feist at the elbow.

"It's the finest compliment I could pay to any man on God's earth to say it, Feist, but if it's got to be that my little baby girl has grown up to an age where she--"

"She's already a year older than me when I married you, Roody."

"If it's got to be, then there's one man on earth I can give her up to with happiness. That man is you, Feist."

Into this atmosphere so surcharged that it had almost the singing quality of a current through it entered Miss Bleema Pelz, on slim silver heels that twinkled, the same diaphanous tulle of the photograph enveloping her like summer, her hair richer, but blending with the peach-bloom of her frock, the odor of youth her perfume.

"Bleema darling, you're just in time!"

"Hello, moms!"--in the little lifted voice trained to modulation, and kissing Mrs. Pelz in light consideration of powdered areas. "Hello, dads!"--tiptoeing and pursing her mouth into a bud. "Good evening, Mr. Feist."

"Looks like I'm the left-over in this party," said Mr. Feist, slow to release her hand and wanting not to redden.

"Naughty-naughty!" said Miss Pelz, with a flash of eyes to their corners, a flouncing of tulle, and then landing ever so lightly on her father's knee and at the immediate business of jerking open his tie. "Bad, bad dad! Didn't let Sato dress him to-night."

"You little red head, you!"

"Stop it! Hold up your chin."

"Honey, we're all starvationed."

"Lester'll be here any minute now."

"Lester Spencer coming for dinner, Bleema?"

"Surely. I dropped him just now at the Lions' Club to change his clothes. Now, don't get excited, dads; he's leaving right after dinner to catch his train for Horseshoe Bend."

"I must tell Williams to lay another--"

"I've already told him, mamma. Here he is now! Come on in, Lester; you're holding up the family. You've never met Mr. Feist, have you, the film king? You two ought to get acquainted--one makes the films and the other makes them famous."

There was a round of greetings, Mr. Spencer passing a hand that had emerged white and slim through the ordeal of thousands of feet of heroics.

"How do you do, Mrs. Pelz? Boss! Mr. Feist, glad to know you!"

What hundreds of thousands of men, seeming to despise, had secretly, in the organ-reverberating darkness of the motion-picture theater, yearned over Mr. Lester Spencer's chest expansion, hair pomade, and bulgeless front and shirt-front! When Lester Spencer, in a very slow fade-out, drew the exceedingly large-of-eye and heaving-of-bosom one unto his own immaculate bosom, whole rows of ladies, with the slightly open-mouthed, adenoidal expression of vicarious romance, sat forward in their chairs. Men appraised silently the pliant lay of shirt, the uncrawling coat-back, and the absence of that fatal divorce of trousers and waistcoat.

"I was telling my husband, Lester, my manicurist just raved to-day about you and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure of Silk.'"

"Isn't that just the sweetest picture, moms?"

"It certainly is! Mr. Pelz took me down to the projection-room to see its first showing, and I give you my word I said to him and Sol--didn't I, Roody?--'That picture is a fortune.' And never in my life did I fail to pick a winner--did I, Roody? I got a knack for it. Mr. Feist, have you seen 'The Lure of Silk'?"

"Sorry to say I have not."

"If you think that is a riot, Mrs. Pelz, you wait until you see the way they're going to eat me up in the court scene in 'Saint Elba.' I had the whole studio crying down there to-day--didn't I, Mr. Pelz? Crying like babies over the scene where I stand like this--so--overlooking--"

"Say, Rosie, that's twice already Williams announced dinner is served."

"Overlooking the--"

"I hear Friedman & Kaplan made an assignment, Feist."

"Come, Lester; you take me in to dinner. Rudolph, you go and get mamma. Bleema, you and Mr. Feist be escorts."

In a dining-room so unswervingly Jacobean that its high-back chairs formed an actual enclosure about the glittering, not to say noble, oval of table, the dinner-hour moved through the stately procession of its courses. At its head, Mrs. Miriam Sopinsky, dim with years and the kind of weariness of the flesh that Rembrandt knew so well, her face even yellower beneath the black wig with the bold row of machine-stitching down its center, the hands veiny and often uncertain among the dishes.

"Roody, cut up mamma's chicken for her. She trembles so."

"Moms, let Williams."

"No; she likes it when your father does it."

Mr. Pelz leaned over, transferring his own knife and fork. In Yiddish:

"Grandmother, I hear you've been flirting with Doctor Isadore Aarons. Now, don't you let me hear any more such nonsense. The young girls in this house got to walk the straight line."

The old face broke still more furiously into wrinkle, the hand reaching out to top his.

"Don't tease her, Roody; she likes to be let alone in public."

MR. FEIST: The old lady certainly holds her own, don't she? Honest, I'd give anything if I knew how to talk to her a little.

"No, Mr. Feist, mamma's breaking. Every day since her stroke I can see it more. It nearly kills me, too. It's pretty lonesome for her, up here away from all her old friends. Outside of my husband and Bleema, not a soul in the house talks her language except Sol and Etta when they come over."

"She's my nice darling grandma," said Miss Pelz, suddenly pirouetting up from her chair around the table, kissing the old lips lightly and then back again, all in a butterfly jiffy.

MRS. PELZ (_sotto to Mr. Feist_). Ain't she the sweetest thing with her grandmother?

"Umh!" said Mr. Spencer, draining his wine-glass to the depth of its stem. "Mr. Pelz, believe me if the Atlantic Ocean was made out of this stuff, you wouldn't have to engage passage for me; I'd swim across."

"You better learn how first," said Mr. Pelz. "You've cost me a fortune already in dummies for the water scenes."

"It's a riot, Mr. Pelz, the way they go mad over me in that Pelham Bay scene in 'The Marines Are Coming.' I dropped into the Buckingham to see it last night, and before I knew it the house had it that I was present and was going wild over me. They had to throw the spotlight on the box."

"I love that scene, too, Lester! Honest, I just squeeze up with excitement where you stand there at the edge of the deck and take the plunge into the water to rescue Norma Beautiful."

"You mean a super for five a day takes the plunge."

"Tell you another scene where I simply raise the roof off the house in--"

MR. PELZ: Williams, pass Mr. Feist some more of them little cabbages.

"Brussels sprouts, dad."

MRS. PELZ: I guess you miss Norma Beautiful not playing with you in "Saint Elba," don't you, Lester? You and her are so used to playing with each other.

"I was the one first suggested she wouldn't be the type to play Josephine, Mrs. Pelz. Too thin. I've got to be contrasted right or it kills me--"

"Williams, a little more of that chicken stuffing. It's almost good enough to remind me how you and grandma used to make it, Rosie."

"Speaking of 'Saint Elba,' Mr. Pelz, somebody must speak to Mabel Lovely about the way she keeps hogging center-stage in that scene with me on--"

"There's no center-stage left to hog with you in the picture, Spencer."