RAW SOUL STUFF.
I don't think I have ever read a short story about a film, so I have made one up myself.
Viviana Smith was born in Battersea. At twelve years old she ran about the streets with holes in her stockings and played a complicated game with chalk squares and a stone. She had the accent of London streets, which is the only accent that can pierce through the noise of London traffic. But she had hair the colour of marsh-marigolds, a Vorticist mouth and patent enlargeable eyes. In the street she made eyes at errand-boys, and at school she made eyes so large that there was no room to dot them.
At the age of seventeen she went in for the Purple Pomegranate film competition, and was selected from five hundred thousand candidates to be a motion-picture star. She starred some. At the beginning she played in romantic comedy films with woodland scenery and rustic bridges and pools where she tickled for trout. She tickled so well that one could almost hear the trout laugh. Later she played in "crook" melodrama, where somebody was always peeping through the door when the secret patent was being taken out of the office safe, and where men always kept arriving in motor-cars and going up flights of steps with their faces turned to the audience and going down flights of steps with their faces turned to the audience and getting into motor-cars again. They never missed a step. There is something about this feat which holds a cinema audience spellbound.
Later she rode on untamed mustangs and fell over cliffs gagged and bound, and sometimes she was even promoted to slide or twirl into a bakehouse and tumble with a talented cast of actors and actresses into a large trough of dough. When they had wiped the dough off they all came back into the bakehouse one after another and tumbled into the dough-trough again. Repetition is the soul of wit.
One day Viviana met Ignatius Vavasour, the poet. For two years he had worshipped her afar on the screen. He had seen her in so many reels that she made him giddy. He had seen her in Youth's Yodelling May-tide Hour, length five reels, and in Hate's Hideous Hand of Crime, length six reels, and in Gertie Flips the Flap-jack over, length seven reels and a half. He had never heard her speak, but he had seen her beautiful lips ripple into a thousand artless expressions of grief and joy. He did not know whether he loved her most when she was tripping through a silvan glade, with meadow-sweet in her hand, or when she was gliding gracefully over Niagara Falls in a tar-barrel; when she was cracking the door of a strong room with a jemmy or when she was getting the dough out of her hair with a rake. But as soon as he had seen her out of the pictures he knew that he loved her best as she was. He knew that he could not live without her. He told her so.
"But, Mr. Vavasour," she protested.
"Call me Iggie," he cried.
"But you have only known me such a short time," she said. "You have seen me, you say, a hundred times on the films, and I daresay you admired me immensely, but tell me this, Iggie, Is it my real character that you love?"
"No, no! A thousand times no!" he exclaimed.
"Then I cannot marry you," she answered coldly, turning away.
Crushed with disappointment Ignatius staggered from the room. He had no thought for poetry now, but wandered feverishly about the streets, searching for some mad excitement to stifle his despair. He played billiards and vingt-et-un. He took to drugs and to drink. He even had thoughts of standing for Parliament. But he soon found that the sorrow, gnawing at his heart was one that politics could never assuage nor alcohol drown, not at least at the present price of green Chartreuse.
One day as he slouched miserably along the pavement he saw the advertisement of a lecture outside the door of an institute. "The Ideal in Philosophy and Art," said the placard; and, scarcely knowing what he did, Ignatius went in. But the lecturer had barely begun to expound his theme, which he did in the following forcible words: "The categorical subjectivity of all intuitive apperceptions of the ideal"—when a wild light flashed in the poet's eyes and he started from his seat and rushed madly from the room. The lecturer wondered mildly what had happened, but blinked and went on. What had happened was that Ignatius Vavasour was pounding like a prize American trotter to the nearest telephone box.
"Viviana," he cried an hour later, when he had got through, "you remember what you said the day we met? Is it your real character that I love? And I said 'No.'"
"Yes, Iggie," she said with a catch in her voice.
"Did you mean Rabbits, Eggs, Eggs, Lloyd, or Babbits, Eggs, Albatross, Lloyd?"
"Albatross," she moaned.
"Well, it is. I mean, I do," he cried.
"Viviana, will you marry me?"
"Sure, Iggie," she answered softly. "Good-bye."
And now that I have written this story I am going to get it filmed.
Evoe.
"Oh, yuss, they're very grand now. They dine late and low."
"Could we gather grapes from thorns or pigs from thistles?"—Report of Lecture delivered by the Astronomer-Royal of Scotland.
As far as English thistles are concerned (we cannot speak for Scotland) the answer is in the negative.