CHAPTER XXIV
THE FREIGHTER
THE sea grew bluer.
Day by day the Kiro Shiwo increased its splendour as the Wear Jack, at a steady ten knot clip, left the latitude of Guadeloupe behind, raising Eugenio Point and the heat-hazy coast that stretches to Cape San Pablo.
The threatened difference between Hank and George had died out. The reason of this release was not far to seek. Tommie, at that moment of her life, was as destitute of all the infernal sex wiles of womanhood as a melon. She had no idea of men as anything else than companions; that was why the pocket Artemis failed a bit in love scenes. A year ago she had signed a contract with the Wallack and Jackson Company by which she received forty thousand dollars a year for five years, and Wallack had reason sometimes to grumble. Tommie had no idea of how to fling herself into the arms of movie heroes, or to do the face-work in a close-up when the heroine is exhibiting to the audience the grin and glad eye, or the “Abandon,” or the “Passionate Appeal” so dear to the movie fan.
“Good God, that ain’t the way to make love,” would cry Scudder, her first producer. “Nuzzle him—stop. Now then, make ready and get abandon into it. He’s not the plumber come to mend the bath, nor your long-lost brother you wished had remained in ’Urope and you’re hugging for the sake of appearance. He’s the guy you’re in love with. Now then, put some heart, punch and pep into it—now then! Camera!”
No good.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord!” the perspiring Scudder would cry, “looks as if you were nursing a teddy bear. Strain him to your heart. Stop flapping your hands on his back. Now, look up in his face—so—astonished yet almost fearful. Can’t you understand the wonder of love just born in the human heart, the soul’s awakening? Lord! you’re not lookin’ at an eclipse of the sun! That’s better, hang on so, count ten and then nuzzle him.”
But despite all directions Tommie was somewhat a failure in passion.
Wallack summed the position up when he declared that it would be worth paying ten thousand dollars a year to some man that would do the soul’s awakening business with Tommie. She could laugh, weep, fly into a temper, ride a mustang bare-backed, drive a motor car over a precipice, be as funny in her diminutive way as Charlie Chaplin, but she couldn’t make love worth a cent.
That was what Hank Fisher & Co. sensed, when the girl illusion vanished, disclosing a jolly companion and nothing more; sensed, without in the least sensing the fact that owing maybe to her small size, she had a power almost as strong as the power that wakens the wonder of love in the human heart.