“Doctors! They take your money, that’s all. I’ve got no money. Don’t talk about me!” Again he took up a sheet of manuscript; and chuckled.
“Last night—at that place—they had—good God!—a race between a train and a motor-car. Well, I’ve got one between a train, a motor-car, a flying machine, and a horse.”
I sat up.
“May I have a look at your skit,” I said, “when you’ve finished it?”
“It is finished. Wrote it straight off. D’you think I could stop and then go on again with a thing like that?” He gathered the sheets and held them out to me. “Take the thing—it’s amused me to do it. The heroine’s secret is that she isn’t an Octoroon at all; she’s a De La Casse—purest Creole blood of the South; and her villainous brother isn’t her brother; and the bad millionaire isn’t a millionaire; and her penniless lover is. It’s rich, I tell you!”
“Thanks,” I said dryly, and took the sheets.
I went away concerned about my friend, his illness and his poverty, especially his poverty, for I saw no end to it.
After dinner that evening I began languidly to read his skit. I had not read two pages of the thirty-five before I started up, sat down again, and feverishly read on. Skit! By George! He had written a perfect scenario—or, rather, that which wanted the merest professional touching-up to be perfect. I was excited. It was a little gold-mine if properly handled. Any good film company, I felt convinced, would catch at it. Yes! But how to handle it? Bruce was such an unaccountable creature, such a wild old bird! Imagine his having only just realised the cinema! If I told him his skit was a serious film, he would say: “Good God!” and put it in the fire, priceless though it was. And yet, how could I market it without carte blanche, and how get carte blanche without giving my discovery away? I was deathly keen on getting some money for him; and this thing, properly worked, might almost make him independent. I felt as if I had a priceless museum piece which a single stumble might shatter to fragments. The tone of his voice when he spoke of the cinema—“What a thing!”—kept coming back to me. He was prickly proud, too—very difficult about money. Could I work it without telling him anything? I knew he never looked at a newspaper. But should I be justified in taking advantage of that—in getting the thing accepted and produced without his knowing? I revolved the question for hours, and went to see him again next day.
He was reading.