At luncheon in the cafeteria he waited a long time in the hope of encountering Henshaw, who would perhaps command his further services in the cause of creative screen art. He meant to be animated at this meeting, to show the director that he could be something more than an actor who had probed the shams of Broadway. But he lingered in vain. He thought Henshaw would perhaps be doing without food in order to work on the scenario for Robinson Crusoe, Junior.
He again stopped to thank his friend, the casting director, for securing him his first chance. She accepted his thanks smilingly, and asked him to drop around often. “Mind, you don’t forget our number,” she said.
He was on the point of making her understand once for all that he would not forget the number, that he would never forget Gashwiler’s address, that he had been coming to this studio too often to forget its location. But someone engaged her at the window, so he was obliged to go on without enlightening the woman. She seemed to be curiously dense.
CHAPTER VII. “NOTHING TO-DAY, DEAR!”
The savings had been opportunely replenished. In two days he had accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, “Nothing to-day—sorry!” He might have been a grouch and given to unreasonable nagging, but with him there was always a very definite something to-day which he would specify, in short words if the occasion seemed to demand. There was not only a definite something every day but a definite if not considerable sum of money to be paid over every Saturday night, and in the meantime three very definite and quite satisfying meals to be freely partaken of at stated hours each day.
The leisure enforced by truly creative screen art was often occupied now with really moving pictures of Metta Judson placing practicable food upon the Gashwiler table. This had been no table in a gilded Broadway resort, holding empty coffee cups and half empty wine glasses, passed and repassed by apparently busy waiters with laden trays who never left anything of a practicable nature. Doubtless the set would not have appealed to Henshaw. He would never have been moved to take close-ups, even for mere flashes, of those who ate this food. And yet, more and more as the days went by, this old-time film would unreel itself before the eager eyes of Merton Gill. Often now it thrilled him as might have an installment of The Hazards of Hortense, for the food of his favourite pharmacy was beginning to pall and Metta Judson, though giving her shallow mind to base village gossip, was a good cook. She became the adored heroine of an apparently endless serial to be entitled The Hazards of Clifford Armytage, in which the hero had tragically little to do but sit upon a bench and wait while tempting repasts were served.
Sometimes on the little bench around the eucalyptus tree he would run an entire five-thousand-foot program feature, beginning with the Sunday midday dinner of roast chicken, and abounding in tense dramatic moments such as corned-beef and cabbage on Tuesday night, and corned-beef hash on Wednesday morning. He would pause to take superb closeups of these, the corned beef on its spreading platter hemmed about with boiled potatoes and turnips and cabbage, and the corned beef hash with its richly browned surface. The thrilling climax would be the roast of beef on Saturday night, with close-ups taken in the very eye of the camera, of the mashed potatoes and the apple pie drenched with cream. And there were close-ups of Metta Judson, who had never seriously contemplated a screen career, placing upon the table a tower of steaming hot cakes, while a platter of small sausages loomed eloquently in the foreground.
With eyes closed he would run this film again and again, cutting here, rearranging sequences, adding trims from suddenly remembered meals of the dead past, devising more intimate close-ups, such as the one of Metta withdrawing pies from the oven or smoothing hot chocolate caressingly over the top of a giant cake, or broiling chops, or saying in a large-lettered subtitle—artistically decorated with cooked foods—“How about some hot coffee, Merton?”
He became an able producer of this drama. He devised a hundred sympathetic little touches that Henshaw would probably never have thought of. He used footage on a mere platter of steak that another director might have ignored utterly. He made it gripping—the supreme heart-interest drama of his season a big thing done in a big way, and yet censor-proof. Not even the white-souled censors of the great state of Pennsylvania could have outlawed its realism, brutal though this was in such great moments as when Gashwiler carved the roast beef. So able was his artistry that Merton’s nostrils would sometimes betray him—he could swear they caught rich aromas from that distant board.