Chapter 6

"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 noble 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 fashionable dog, a Jap 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 noble 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 nobler 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 ashore, 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.

She's a queer one. Darned if she don't make a person think sometimes--listening to her chatter--that there must be something kind of decent about human nature after all!

III

RED GAP AND THE BIG-LEAGUE STUFF

I waited beside Ma Pettengill at the open door of the Arrowhead ranch house. It was a moment of tranquil expectancy; presently we would be summoned to the evening meal. Down by the barn a tired janizary pumped water into a trough for two tired mules still in harness. Halfway down the lane, before a mirror tacked to the wall beside the bunk-house door, two men hurriedly combed their damp hair. Blackbirds were still noisy in the poplars. In the field at our left a lazy lot of white-faced cattle, large and placid, lolled or grazed on the new spring grass.

Surveying these cattle with a fond eye--had she not that day refused all of three hundred and twenty-five dollars a head for a score of these pure-bred cows?--my hostess read me a brief lecture on the superior fleshing disposition of the Hereford. No better rustler under range conditions, said she, accumulating flesh at all ages, storing it in seasons of plenty to draw on in seasons of want. Hadn't I noticed how common cows got paunchy and how well the fat was distributed on the pure-breds?

I had not noticed, cows being more or less cows to me, but I was prepared to look with deep respect upon any cow for which three hundred and twenty-five dollars could be sanely refused, and I now did so. I was told that I forgot their calves, which would be worth a hundred and sixty dollars the day they were weaned. This made it all more impressive. I looked respectfully again at the bulky creatures, though listening, too, for the stealthy-stepping Lew Wee; a day in the thin spring air along a rocky trout stream had made even cattle on the hoof suggestive.

Ma Pettengill, with a last proud look at her jewels, swept the panoramic camera of her eye round to the blacksmith shop on our right. Before it were strewn the mutilated remains of four wood wagons. I had lately heard the lady have words with Abner, the blacksmith, concerning repairs to these. Abner himself had few of the words. They were almost entirely his employer's. They were acutely to the effect that these here wagons would be running again before the week was out or she would know the reason why. The aggrieved Abner had tried to suggest that this reason she would know would not be the right reason at all, because wasn't he already working like a beaver? Possibly, said the lady. And beavers might be all right in their place. What she needed at this precise time was someone working like a blacksmith--someone!

Over her shoulder she had flung the word at him, blackened with emphasis.

"Any one hurt in the runaway?" I asked, observing her glance to linger upon this snarl of wagon parts.

"Four wagons was mortally hurt," said the lady, "but of course not a mule skinner touched. Talk about charmed lives! Besides, they wasn't accidents; they was just incidents. It was part of our winter sports."

"I didn't know you had winter sports up here."

"I didn't either till I got down to Red Gap last winter and found out that was what we had been having. Here I been gritting along winter after winter, calling it work, and come to find out it's what parties go a long distance to indulge in and have to wear careful clothes for it. Yes, sir; society is mad about it. Red Gap itself was mad about it last winter, when it got a taste of the big-league stuff. Next winter I'll try to get the real sporting spirit into this gang of sedentaries up here; buy 'em uniforms and start a winter-sports club. Their ideal winter sport so far is to calk up every chink in the bunk house, fill the air-tight stove full of pitch pine and set down with a good book by Elinor Glyn. They never been at all mad about romping out in the keen frosty air that sets the blood tingling and brings back the roses to their wan cheeks.

"Take last winter. Not knowing it was sport it seemed at times like toil. First it snowed early and caught a lot of my cows and calves in the mountains. While we sported round with these, working 'em down into the valley, the weather changed. It snowed harder. Just oodles of the most perfectly darling snow. Then distemper broke out among the saddle horses. Then being already shorthanded, what does the fool vaquero boss do but pick a splinter out of his thumb with a pin and get blood poison enough to lay him off? Too much trouble for cussing. I tried that out scientifically. So I had to get out and make a hand. If I heard someone say I did as much as any three of these mollycoddles up here I'd just simper in silence and look down. Only I wish I'd known it was a fashionable winter sport. I'd of been more carefree.

"Then come the best of our winter sports--wood hauling through the drifts over a rocky road down the mountains. My lands, but it was jolly! On a quiet day there'd be only one runaway, one wagon fetched to the shop in sections, like a puzzle. Then another day all hands would seem to be quite mad about the sport, and nothing but the skinners and the mules would get back to camp that night--with the new outfit of harness and the hoodlum wagon going back next morning to see what could be salvaged.

"Finally we got the cows and calves home, got our wood in and started a general rodeo for the dry stock--Nature's fleecy mantle getting thicker every minute. And none of us ever suspecting that it was a sport only the wealthy have a right to. If I'd suggested building an ice palace as a sporty wind-up I'll bet the help wouldn't of took it right. Anyway, I didn't. With everything under shelter or fence at last I fled down to Red Gap, where I could lead a quiet life suitable to one of my years--where I thought I could."

From the doorway Lew Wee softly called, "You come now!" We both heard him. Inside my hostess stealthily closed the door upon the gentle spring night; closed and locked it. Furtively she next drew curtains over the two windows. Then, candle in hand, she went lightly across the big living room to a stern and businesslike safe that stands against the farther wall. Kneeling before this she rapidly twirled the lock to a series of mystic numbers and opened the formidable doors.

"Leave us keep the home fires burning," said she impressively, and withdrew from an exposed cavern a bottle of Scotch whisky. Standing before the safe we drank chattily. We agreed that prohibition was a good thing for the state of Washington. We said we were glad to deny ourselves for the sake of those weaker natures lacking self-control, including Mr. Bryan, whom the lady characterized as "just a water-spout."

The bottle restored to security my hostess shut the thick doors upon it and twirled the lock. Then she raised the curtains and reopened the door to the innocent spring night, after which we sat to our meatless and wheatless repast. In place of meat we sternly contented ourselves with stewed chicken, certain of the Arrowhead fowls having refused to do their bit in eggs and now paying the penalty in a crisis when something is expected from everyone. In place of wheat we merely had corn muffins of a very coaxing perfection. Even under these hardships I would patriotically practice the gospel of the clean plate.

As her exploring spoon wandered over the platter of half-submerged chicken Ma Pettengill casually remarked that carefree Bohemians was always the first to suffer under prohibition, and that you couldn't have a really good Latin Quarter in a dry town. I let it go. I must always permit her certain speeches of seeming irrelevance before she will consent to tell me all. Thus a moment later as she lavished valuable butter fat upon one of the spirituelle muffins she communicated the further item that Cousin Egbert Floud still believed Bohemians was glass blowers, he having seen a troupe of such at the World's Fair. He had, it is true, known some section hands down on the narrow gauge that was also Bohemians, but Bohemians of any class at all was glass blowers, and that was an end of it. No use telling him different, once he gets an idea into his poor old head.

This, too, I let pass, overcome for the moment by the infatuating qualities of the chicken stew. But when appetites, needlessly inflamed by the lawless tippling, had at last been appeased and the lady had built her first cigarette I betrayed a willingness to hear more of the hinted connection between winter sports and Latin Quarters peopled by Bohemians, glass-blowing or otherwise. The woman chuckled privately through the first cigarette, adeptly fashioned another, removed to a rocking-chair before the open fire and in a businesslike fervour seized a half-knitted woollen sock, upon which she fell to work.

She now remarked that there must be along the Front millions of sweaters and wristlets and mufflers and dewdads that it looked well to knit in public, so it seemed to be up to her to supply a few pairs of socks. She said you naturally couldn't expect these here society dames that knitted in theatres and hotel corridors to be knitting anything so ugly as socks, even if they would know how to handle four needles, which they mostly wouldn't; but someone had to do it. Without the slightest change of key she added that it was a long story and painful in spots, but had a happy ending, and she didn't know as she minded telling me.

So I come down to Red Gap about December first hoping to hole up for the winter and get thoroughly warmed through before spring. Little did I know our growing metropolis was to be torn by dissension until you didn't know who was speaking to who. And all because of a lady Bohemian from Washington Square, New York City, who had crept into our midst and started a Latin Quarter overnight. The first day I was downtown I overheard two ladies saying something about the new Latin Quarter. That mystified me, because I knew the town had been lidded tight since Lon Price went out of office as mayor. Then I meet Mrs. Judge Ballard in the Boston Cash Store and she says have I met a Miss Smith from New York who is visiting here. I said I had not. It didn't sound exciting. Some way "a Miss Smith" don't excite you overly, no matter where she hails from. So I dismissed that and went on with my shopping. Next I meet Egbert Floud, who is also down for the winter to rest beside a good coal stove, and we ask each other what's the good word and is anything new. Cousin Egbert says nothing is new in Red Gap except a Bohemian glass blower from Grinitch Village, New York. He says he ain't seen her blow glass yet, but he's going some night, because them Bohemian glass blowers down to the fair was right fascinating, and don't I think Grinitch is a bum name for a town? He says when I see this glass blower I'll feel like asking animal, vegetable, or mineral, because he has seen her in the post office with Metta Bigler and she looks like a nut.

I tell the poor old zany he sounds simple-minded himself and I can't make a lick of sense out of what he's said, except I know this village ain't spelled that way. He's telling me that's the way it's spoken anyway, and about how he brought home a glass watch chain that these Bohemians blowed at the fair, when along come Metta Bigler herself and stops to shake hands, so Cousin Egbert slinks off.

I got to tell you about Metta. She's our artist; gives lessons in oil painting and burnt wood and other refinements. People can take six lessons off Metta and go home and burn all the Indian heads on leather sofa pillows that you'd ever want to see. Also she can paint a pink fish and a copper skillet and a watermelon with one slice cut out as good as any one between here and Spokane. She's a perfectly good girl, falling on thirty, refers to herself without a pang as a bachelor girl, and dresses as quiet as even a school-teacher has to in a small town.

Well, Metta rushes up to me now, all glowing and girlish, and says I must come to her studio that very afternoon and meet her dear old chum, Vernabelle Smith, that is visiting her from Washington Square, New York. She and Vernabelle met when they were completing their art education in the Latin Quarter of Chicago, and Vernabelle had gone down to New York and got into all the new movements and among people who was doing things, and was now very, very advanced being what you might call an intellectual; but I would be sure to like her because she was so delightfully Bohemian, not standing on ceremony but darting straight to the heart of life, which is so complex to most of us who live within convention's shell and never get in touch with the great throbbing centre of things. She didn't say what things. It was a new line of chatter from Metta. Usually she'd have been telling me her troubles with Chinese help, or what a robber the Square Deal meat market was, or, at the most, how her fruit-and-fish piece had carried off the first prize of twenty dollars at the Kulanche County Fair.