“But I got the pathos all right, and you can’t name one great comedian that don’t need pathos more’n he needs anything else. He just has to have it—and I got it. I got acting-plus; that’s what, I got. I knew it all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it last night. You could hear fifty of ‘em talking about it when I came out of the theatre, saying I was an artist and all like that, and a certain Los Angeles society woman that you can bet never says things she don’t mean, she told me she saw lots of places in this piece that I was funnier than any cross-eyed man that ever lived. And what happens this morning?” Hands in pockets he swaggered to and fro past the couch.
“Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to sign me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of ‘em said not an hour ago—he’s a big producer, too—that Baird ought to be paying me seven hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of course I didn’t want to say anything the other day, with you pretending to know so much about contracts and all that—I just thought I’d let you go on, seeing you were so smart—and I signed what you told me to. But I know I should have held off—with this Bamberger coming over from the Bigart when I was hardly out of bed, and says will three hundred and fifty a week interest me and promising he’ll give me a chance to do that spur act again that was the hit of the piece—”
He broke off, conscious suddenly that the girl had for some time been holding a most peculiar stare rigidly upon him. She had at first narrowed her right eye at a calculating angle as she listened; but for a long time now the eyes had been widened to this inexplicable stare eloquent of many hidden things.
As he stopped his speech, made ill at ease by the incessant pressing of the look, he was caught and held by it to a longer silence than he had meant to permit. He could now read meanings. That unflinching look incurred by his smooth bluster was a telling blend of pity and of wonder.
“So you know, do you,” she demanded, “that you look just enough too much like Harold Parmalee so that you’re funny? I mean.” she amended, seeing him wince, “that you look the way Parmalee would look if he had brains?”
He faltered but made a desperate effort to recover his balance.
“And besides, what difference does it make? If we did good pictures we’d have to sell ‘em to a mob. And what’s a mob? It’s fifteen years old and nothing but admirers, or something like that, like Muriel Mercer that wouldn’t know how much are two times two if the neighbours didn’t get it to her—”
Again he had run down under her level look. As he stopped, the girl on the couch who had lain with the blankets to her neck suddenly threw them aside and sat up. Surprisingly she was not garbed in sick-bed apparel. She seemed to be fully dressed.
A long moment she sat thus, regarding him still with that slow look, unbelieving yet cherishing. His eyes fell at last.
“Merton!” he heard her say. He looked up but she did not speak. She merely gave a little knowing nod of the head and opened her arms to him. Quickly he knelt beside her while the mothering arms enfolded him. A hand pulled his head to her breast and held it there. Thus she rocked gently, the hand gliding up to smooth his hair. Without words she cherished him thus a long time. The gentle rocking back and forth continued.