"He got on fine till the big scene in the third act. Then he went b.l.o.o.d.y because that was as far as he'd learned, so he just left the scene cold and walked down to the foots and bowed and said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for your attendance here this evening and to-morrow night we shall have the honour of presenting Lady Audley's Secret.'

"With that he gave a cold look to the actors back of him that were gasping like fish, and walked off. And he was like you in another way because his real name was Eddie Duffy, and the lovely stage name he'd picked out was Clyde Maltravers."

"Well, Clifford Armytage is out, then," Merton announced, feeling that he had now buried a part of his dead self in a grave where Beulah Baxter, the wonder-woman, already lay interred. Still, he was conscious of a certain relief. The stage name had been bothersome.

"It ain't as if you had a name like mine," the girl went on. "I simply had to have help."

He wondered what her own name was. He had never heard her called anything but the absurd and undignified "Flips." She caught the question he had looked.

"Well, my honest-to-G.o.d name is Sarah Nevada Montague; Sarah for Ma and Nevada for Reno where Ma had to stop off for me--she was out of the company two weeks--and if you ever tell a soul I'll have the law on you.

That was a fine way to abuse a helpless baby, wasn't it?"

"But Sarah is all right. I like Sarah."

"Do you, Kid?" She patted his hand. "All right, then, but it's only for your personal use."

"Of course the Nevada--" he hesitated. "It does sound kind of like a geography lesson or something. But I think I'll call you Sarah, I mean when we're alone." "Well, that's more than Ma ever does, and you bet it'll never get into my press notices. But go ahead if you want to."

"I will, Sarah. It sounds more like a true woman than 'Flips.'"

"Bless the child's heart," she murmured, and reached across the lunch box to pat his hand again.

"You're a great little patter, Sarah," he observed with one of his infrequent attempts at humour.

On still another day, while they idled between scenes, she talked to him about salaries and contracts, again with her important air of mothering him.

"After this picture," she told him, "Jeff was going to sew you up with a long-time contract, probably at a hundred and fifty per. But I've told him plain I won't stand for it. No five-year contract, and not any contract at that figure. Maybe three years at two hundred and fifty, I haven't decided yet. I'll wait and see--" she broke off to regard him with that old puzzling light far back in her eyes--"wait and see how you get over in these two pieces."

"But I know you'll go big, and so does Jeff. We've caught you in the rushes enough to know that. And Jeff's a good fellow, but naturally he'll get you for as little as he can. He knows all about money even if he don't keep Yom Kippur. So I'm watching over you, son--I'm your manager, see? And I've told him so, plain. He knows he'll have to give you just what you're worth. Of course he's ent.i.tled to consideration for digging you up and developing you, but a three-year contract will pay him out for that. Trust mother."

"I do," he told her. "I'd be helpless without you. It kind of scares me to think of getting all that money. I won't know what to do with it."

"I will; you always listen to me, and you won't be camping on the lot any more. And don't shoot dice with these rough-necks on the lot." "I won't," he a.s.sured her. "I don't believe in gambling." He wondered about Sarah's own salary, and was surprised to learn that it was now double his own. It was surprising, because her acting seemed not so important to the piece as his. "It seems like a lot of money for what you have to do," he said.

"There," she smiled warmly, "didn't I always say you were a natural-born trouper? Well, it is a lot of money for me, but you see I've helped Jeff dope out both of these pieces. I'm not so bad at gags--I mean the kind of stuff he needs in these serious dramas. This big scene of yours, where you go off to the city and come back a wreck on Christmas night--that's mine. I doped it out after the piece was started--after I'd had a good look at the truck driver that plays opposite you."

Truck driver? It appeared that Miss Montague was actually applying this term to the New York society girl who in private life was burdened with an ailing family. He explained now that Mr. Baird had not considered her ideal for the part, but had chosen her out of kindness.

Again there flickered far back in her eyes those lights that baffled him. There was incredulity in her look, but she seemed to master it.

"But I think it was wonderful of you," he continued, "to write that beautiful scene. It's a strong scene, Sarah. I didn't know you could write, too. It's as good as anything Tessie Kearns ever did, and she's written a lot of strong scenes."

Miss Montague seemed to struggle with some unidentified emotion. After a long, puzzling gaze she suddenly said: "Merton Gill, you come right here with all that make-up on and give mother a good big kiss!"

Astonishingly to himself, he did so in the full light of day and under the eyes of one of the New York villains who had been pretending that he walked a tight-rope across the yard. After he had kissed the girl, she seized him by both arms and shook him. "I'd ought to have been using my own face in that scene," she said. Then she patted his shoulder and told him that he was a good boy.

The pretending tight-rope walker had paused to applaud. "Your act's flopping, Bo," said Miss Montague. "Work fast." Then she again addressed the good boy: "Wait till you've watched that scene before you thank me,"

she said shortly.

"But it's a strong scene," he insisted.

"Yes," she agreed. "It's strong."

He told her of the other instance of Baird's kindness of heart.

"You know I was a little afraid of playing scenes with the cross-eyed man, but Mr. Baird said he was trying so hard to do serious work, so I wouldn't have him discharged. But shouldn't you think he'd save up and have his eyes straightened? Does he get a very small salary?"

The girl seemed again to be hara.s.sed by conflicting emotions, but mastered them to say, "I don't know exactly what it is, but I guess he draws down about twelve fifty a week."

"Only twelve dollars and fifty cents a week!"

"Twelve hundred and fifty," said the girl firmly.

"Twelve hundred and fifty dollars a week!" This was monstrous, incredible. "But then why doesn't he have his eyes--"

Miss Montague drew him to her with both her capable arms. "My boy, my boy!" she murmured, and upon his painted forehead she now imprinted a kiss of deep reverence. "Run along and play," she ordered. "You're getting me all nervous." Forthwith she moved to the centre of the yard where the tight-rope walker still endangered his life above the heads of a vast audience.

She joined him. She became a performer on the slack wire. With a parasol to balance her, she ran to the centre of an imaginary wire that swayed perilously, and she swung there, cunningly maintaining a precarious balance. Then she sped back to safety at the wire's end, threw down her parasol, caught the handkerchief thrown to her by the first performer, and daintily touched her face with it, breathing deeply the while and bowing.

He thought Sarah was a strange child--"One minute one thing and the next minute something else."

CHAPTER XVII. MISS MONTAGUE USES HER OWN FACE

Work on the piece dragged slowly to an end. In these latter days the earnest young leading man suffered spells of concern for his employer.

He was afraid that Mr. Baird in his effort to struggle out of the slough of low comedy was not going to be wholly successful. He had begun to note that the actors employed for this purpose were not invariably serious even when the cameras turned. Or, if serious, they seemed perhaps from the earnestness of their striving for the worth-while drama, to be a shade too serious. They were often, he felt, over-emphatic in their methods. Still, they were, he was certain, good actors. One could always tell what they meant.

It was at these times that he especially wished he might be allowed to view the "rushes." He not only wished to a.s.sure himself for Baird's sake that the piece would be acceptably serious, but he wished, with a quite seemly curiosity, to view his own acting on the screen. It occurred to him that he had been acting a long time without a glimpse of himself.

But Baird had been singularly firm in this matter, and the Montague girl had sided with him. It was best, they said, for a beginning actor not to see himself at first. It might affect his method before this had crystallized; make them self-conscious, artificial.

He was obliged to believe that these well-wishers of his knew best. He must not, then, trifle with a screen success that seemed a.s.sured. He tried to be content with this decision. But always the misgivings would return. He would not be really content until he had watched his own triumph. Soon this would be so securely his privilege that not even Baird could deny it, for the first piece in which he had worked was about to be shown. He looked forward to that.

It was toward the end of the picture that his intimacy with the Montague girl grew to a point where, returning from location to the studio late, they would dine together. "Hurry and get ungreased, Son," she would say, "and you can take an actress out to dinner." Sometimes they would patronize the cafeteria on the lot, but oftener, in a spirit of adventure, they would search out exotic restaurants. A picture might follow, after which by street-car he would escort her to the Montague home in a remote, flat region of palm-lined avenues spa.r.s.ely set with new bungalows.

She would disquiet him at these times by insisting that she pay her share of the expense, and she proved to have no mean talent for petty finance, for she remembered every item down to the street-car fares.

Even to Merton Gill she seemed very much a child once she stepped from the domain of her trade. She would stare into shop windows wonderingly, and never failed to evince the most childish delight when they ventured to dine at an establishment other than a cafeteria.

At times when they waited for a car after these dissipations he suffered a not unpleasant alarm at sight of a large-worded advertis.e.m.e.nt along the back of a bench on which they would sit. "You furnish the Girl, We furnish the House," screamed the bench to him above the name of an enterprising tradesman that came in time to bite itself deeply into his memory.

Of course it would be absurd, but stranger things, he thought, had happened. He wondered if the girl was as afraid of him as of other men.

She seemed not to be, but you couldn't tell much about her. She had kissed him one day with a strange warmth of manner, but it had been quite publicly in the presence of other people. When he left her at her door now it was after the least sentimental of partings, perhaps a shake of her hard little hand, or perhaps only a "S'long--see you at the show-shop!"

It was on one of these nights that she first invited him to dine with the Montague family. "I tried last night to get you on the telephone,"

she explained, "but they kept giving me someone else, or maybe I called wrong. Ain't these six-figured Los Angeles telephone numbers the limit?

When you call 208972 or something, it sounds like paging a box-car. I was going to ask you over. Ma had cooked a lovely mess of corned beef and cabbage. Anyway, you come eat with us to-morrow night, will you?

She'll have something else cooked up that will stick to the merry old slats. You can come home with me when we get in from work."