III
Things were quiet for a month or two after that, and we understood that the production was being got ready. But Tish was very busy, having thrown herself into her preparations with her usual thoroughness.
She had found a teacher who taught how to register with the face the various emotions on the screen, and twice a week Aggie or myself held her book, illustrated with cuts, while Tish registered in alphabetical order: Amusement, anxiety, boredom, curiosity, devotion, envy, fatigue, generosity, hate, interest, jealousy, keenness, laughter, love, merriment, nobility, objection, pity, quarrelsomeness, ridicule, satisfaction, terror, uneasiness, vanity, wrath, and so on.
I must confess that the subtle changes of expression were often lost on me, and that I suffered extremely at those times, when discarding the book, she asked us to name her emotion from her expression. She would stand before her mirror and arrange her features carefully, and then quickly turn. But I am no physiognomist.
Her physical preparations, however, she made alone. That she was practicing again with her revolver Hannah felt sure, but we had no idea where and how. As has been previously recorded, the janitor of her apartment had refused to allow her to shoot in the basement after a bullet had embedded itself in the dining table of A flat while the family was at luncheon. We surmised that she was doing it somewhere outside of town.
Later on we had proof of this. Aggie and I were taking a constitutional one day in the country beyond the car line when, greatly to our surprise, we heard two shots beyond a hedge, followed by a man’s angry shouts, and on looking over the hedge, who should we behold but our splendid Tish, revolver in hand, and confronted by an angry farm laborer.
“Right through my hat!” he was bellowing. “If a man can’t do an honest day’s work without being fired at——”
“Work?” Tish said coldly. “You were so still I took you for a scarecrow.”
“Scarecrow yourself! When I yelled, you shot again!” he howled. “Deliberate attempt at murder. That’s what it was.”
“It went off by itself the second time,” Tish explained. “I’m rehearsing a certain scene, and——”
“Rehearsing?” said the man. “What for?”
“For the moving pictures.”
He looked at her, and then he bowed very politely.
“Well, well!” he said. “I didn’t recognize you at first, Miss Pickford. And how’s Doug?”
We did not tell Tish that we had witnessed this encounter. She might have been sensitive about mistaking a farmer for a scarecrow.
It was a day or so after, in our presence, that Tish informed Hannah she would take her along as her maid. And Hannah, who in twenty odd years had never been known to show enthusiasm, was plainly delighted with the prospect.
“D’you mean I can see them acting?” she inquired.
“I imagine so,” Tish said with a tolerant smile.
“Love scenes too?” Hannah asked, with an indelicacy that startled us.
“There will be no love scenes in this picture, Hannah,” Tish reproved her. “I am surprised at you. And even in the ones you see every evening, when you ought to be doing something better, it is as well to remember that the persons are not really lovers. Indeed, that often they are barely friends.”
She then told Hannah to go downtown and buy a book on moving-picture make-up and the various articles required, as, since she was to be a personal maid, she must know about such things.
I confess that Aggie and I were in a state of extreme depression when we left Tish that day. The thought of our dear friend altering the face her Creator gave her was a painful one, and both of us, I think, feared it as an index of a possible general demoralization, as too often happens in the movies. Aggie particularly feared the contacts with men, as mentioned by Hannah, in spite of Tish’s firm attitude. The well-known temptations of Hollywood were in both our minds.
“They aren’t paying her a thousand dollars a week just to ride, and so on,” Aggie said bitterly. “Did you ever see a picture without a love story? It isn’t only her neck she’s risking, Lizzie.”
I must confess to the same uneasiness.
We went to bed early that night, sorely troubled, and I had fallen asleep and was dreaming that Tish was trying to leap from an automobile to a moving train, and that everytime she did it the train jumped to another track, when the telephone bell rang, and it was Hannah. She said that Tish wanted me, and to go over right away, but not to waken Aggie.
I went at once and found all the lights going, and Tish in her bed, bolt upright, with both eyes closed.
“Tish!” I cried. “Your eyes! Can’t you see?”
“Not through my eyelids,” she said witheringly. “Don’t be a fool, Lizzie. Look at this stuff and then tell me what will take it off.”
I then saw that the rims of her eyelids were smeared with a black paste which had hardened like enamel, and that they had become glued together, leaving her, temporarily at least, sightless and helpless. My poor Tish!
“What will take it off?” she demanded. “That idiot Hannah offered to melt it with a burning match.”
“I don’t think anything but a hammer will do any good, Tish.”
I discovered then that Hannah had bought the make-up book, and that it laid particular emphasis on beading the eyelashes. With her impatient temperament Tish, although the shops were shut by that time, decided to make the experiment, and had concocted a paste of glue and India ink. She had experimented first on her eyebrows, she had thought successfully, although when I saw her they looked like two jet crescents fastened to her forehead; but inadvertently closing her eyes after beading her lashes, she had been unable to open them again.
She and Hannah had tried various expedients, among them lard, the yolk of an egg, cold cream and ammonia, but without result. I was obliged to tell her that it was set like a cement pavement.
In the end I was able, amid exclamations of pain and annoyance from Tish, to cut off her lashes, and later to shave her eyebrows with an old razor which Hannah had for some unknown purpose, and although much of the glue remained Tish was able to see once more. When I left her she was contemplating her image in her mirror, and a little of her fine frenzy of early enthusiasm seemed to have departed.
It is characteristic of Tish that, once embarked on an enterprise, she devotes her entire attention to it and becomes in a way isolated from her kind. Her mental attitude during these periods of what may be termed mind gestation is absent and solitary. Thus I am able to tell little of what preparations she made during the following weeks. I do know that she went to church on her last Sunday with her bonnet wrong side before, and that during the sermon she was unconsciously assuming the various facial expressions, one after the other, to the astonishment and confusion of Mr. Ostermaier in the pulpit.
But we also learned that she had again taken up her riding. The papers one evening were full of an incident connected with the local hunt, where an unknown woman rider had followed the hounds in to the death and had then driven them all off and let the fox go free.
My suspicions were at once aroused, and I carried the paper to Tish that night. I found her on her sofa, with the air redolent of arnica and witch hazel, and gave her the paper. She read the article calmly enough.
“I belong to the Humane Society, Lizzie,” she said. “Those dogs would have killed it.”
“But what made you join the hunt?”
“I didn’t join the hunt,” she said wearily. “How did I know that beast was an old hunter? I was riding along quietly when a horn blew somewhere, and the creature just went over the fence and started.” Tish closed her eyes. “We jumped eleven fences and four ditches,” she said in a tired voice, “and I bit my tongue halfway through. I think we went through some hotbeds, too, but I hadn’t time to look.”
“Tish,” I said firmly, “I want you to think, long and hard. Is it worth it? What are they going to pay you a thousand dollars a week to risk? Your beauty, your virtue or your neck? I leave it to you to guess.”
“It’s my neck,” said Tish coldly.
“Well, you’ve lost the head that belongs on it,” I retorted. And I went home.
We were to leave on a Monday, and the Saturday before Tish called me by telephone.
“I’ve been thinking, Lizzie,” she said. “A portion of my picture is laid in the desert. We’d better take some antisnake-bite serum.”
“Where do you get it?”
“For heaven’s sake, don’t bother me with detail,” she snapped. “Try the snake house at the Zoo.”
I did so, and I must say the man acted strangely about it.
“For snake bite?” he inquired. “Who’s been bitten?”
“Nobody’s been bitten,” I said with dignity. “I just want a little to have on hand in case of trouble.”
He looked around and lowered his voice. “I get you,” he said. “Well, I haven’t any now, but I will have next week. Eight dollars a quart. Prewar stuff.”
When I told him I couldn’t wait he stared at me strangely, and when I turned at the door he had called another man, and they were both looking after me and shaking their heads.