“All ready, you people. Do like I said, now. Lights, camera!”
Merton Gill drew upon his cigarette with the utmost disrelish, raised the cold eyes of a disillusioned man to the face of the leering Montague girl, turned aside from her with every sign of apathy, and wearily exhaled the smoke. There seemed to be but this one pleasure left to him.
“Cut!” said Henshaw, and somewhere lights jarred off. “Just stick there a bit, Miss Montague. We’ll have a couple more shots when the dancing begins.”
Merton resented this change. He preferred the other girl. She lured him but not in so pronounced, so flagrant a manner. The blight of Broadway became more apparent than ever upon his face. The girl’s hand still fluttered upon his sleeve as the music came and dancers shuffled by them.
“Say, you’re the actin’ kid, all right.” She was tapping the floor with the heel of a satin slipper. He wished above all things that she wouldn’t call him “Kid.” He meditated putting a little of Broadway’s blight upon her by saying in a dignified way that his real name was Clifford Armytage. Still, this might not blight her—you couldn’t tell about the girl.
“You certainly are the actin’est kid on this set, I’ll tell the lot that. Of course these close-ups won’t mean much, just about one second, or half that maybe. Or some hick in the cuttin’ room may kill ‘em dead. Come on, give me the fish-eye again. That’s it. Say, I’m glad I didn’t have to smoke cigarettes in this scene. They wouldn’t do for my type, standin’ where the brook and river meet up. I hate a cigarette worse’n anything. You—I bet you’d give up food first.”
“I hate ‘em, too,” he muttered grudgingly, glad to be able to say this, even though only to one whose attentions he meant to discourage. “If I have to smoke one more it’ll finish me.”
“Now, ain’t that the limit? Too bad, Kid!”
“I didn’t even have any of my own. That Spanish girl gave me these.”
The Montague girl glanced over his shoulder at the young woman whose place she had usurped. “Spanish, eh? If she’s Spanish I’m a Swede right out of Switzerland. Any-way, I never could like to smoke. I started to learn one summer when I was eight. Pa and Ma and I was out with a tent Tom-show, me doing Little Eva, and between acts I had to put on pants and come out and do a smoking song, all about a kid learning to smoke his first cigar and not doin’ well with it, see? But they had to cut it out. Gosh, what us artists suffer at times! Pa had me try it a couple of years later when I was doin’ Louise the blind girl in the Two Orphans, playin’ thirty cents top. It was a good song, all right, with lots of funny gags. I’d ‘a’ been the laughing hit of the bill if I could ‘a’ learned not to swallow. We had to cut it out again after the second night. Talk about entering into your part. Me? I was too good.”