“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 assure 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 assured. 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 sparsely set with new bungalows.