Merton of the Movies

by Harry Leon Wilson

He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the very apparent real kindness in her tone. “Well,” he looked about the set vaguely in his discomfort, “you see, right now I’m between pictures—you know how it is.”

Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: “Well, all right—but you needn’t blush about it, Kid.” The blush she detected became more flagrant.

“Well, I—you see—” he began again, but he was saved from being explicit by the call of an assistant director.

“Miss Montague. Miss Montague—where’s that Flips girl—on the set, please.” She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little later to look for him he had gone.

He went to bed that night when darkness had made this practicable, and under his blankets whiled away a couple of wakeful hours by running tensely dramatic films of breakfast, dinner, and supper at the Gashwiler home. It seemed that you didn’t fall asleep so quickly when you had eaten nothing since early morning. Never had he achieved such perfect photography as now of the Gashwiler corned-beef hash and light biscuits, the Gashwiler hot cakes and sausage, and never had Gashwiler so impressively carved the Saturday night four-rib roast of tender beef. Gashwiler achieved a sensational triumph in the scene, being accorded all the close—ups that the most exacting of screen actors could wish. His knife-work was perfect. He held his audience enthralled by his technique.

Mrs. Gashwiler, too, had a small but telling part in the drama to-night; only a character bit, but one of those poignant bits that stand out in the memory. The subtitle was, “Merton, won’t you let me give you another piece of the mince pie?” That was all, and yet, as screen artists say, it got over. There came very near to being not a dry eye in the house when the simple words were flashed beside an insert of thick, flaky-topped mince pies with quarters cut from them to reveal their noble interiors

Sleep came at last while he was regretting that lawless orgy of the morning. He needn’t have cleaned up those beans in that silly way. He could have left a good half of them. He ran what might have been considered a split-reel comedy of the stew-pan’s bottom still covered with perfectly edible beans lightly protected with Nature’s own pastel-tinted shroud for perishing vegetable matter and diversified here and there with casual small deposits of ashes.

In the morning something good really did happen. As he folded his blankets in the gray light a hard object rattled along the floor from them. He picked this up before he recognized it as a mutilated fragment from the stale half—loaf of bread he had salvaged. He wondered how he could have forgotten it, even in the plenitude of his banquet. There it was, a mere nubbin of crust and so hard it might almost have been taken for a petrified specimen of prehistoric bread. Yet it proved to be rarely palatable. It’s flavour was exquisite. It melted in the mouth.

Somewhat refreshed by this modest cheer, he climbed from the window of the Crystal Palace with his mind busy on two tracks. While the letter to Gashwiler composed itself, with especially clear directions about where the return money should be sent, he was also warning himself to remain throughout the day at a safe distance from the door of the cafeteria. He had proved the wisdom of this even the day before that had started with a bounteous breakfast. To-day the aroma of cooked food occasionally wafted from the cafeteria door would prove, he was sure, to be more than he could bear.

He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself. The collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye, what a successful screen-actor’s collar should be. The sprouting beard might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director sanctified to realism—every day it was getting to look more like that—but no director would have commanded the wearing of such a collar except in actual work where it might have been a striking detail in the apparel of an underworldling, one of those creatures who became the tools of rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent upon the moral destruction of beautiful young screen heroines. He knew it was now that sort of collar. No use now in pretending that it had been worn yesterday for the first time.