She stepped through a door. From a narrow anteroom she saw the set-scene in a ghastly light, where men in soiled shirt-sleeves dragged batteries of electric lights about, each underbred face as livid as the visage of a corpse too long unburied.
There were women there, too, looking a little more human in their makeups under the horrible bluish glare. Camera men were busy; a cadaverous and profane director, with his shabby coat-collar turned up, was talking loudly in a Broadway voice and jargon to a bewildered girl wearing a ball gown.
As Puma led Palla through the corridor from partition 184 to partition, disclosing each set with its own scene and people––the whole studio full of blatant noise and ghastly faces or painted ones, Palla thought she had never before beheld such a concentration of every type of commonness in her entire existence. Faces, shapes, voices, language, all were essentially the properties of congenital vulgarity. The language, too, had to be sharply rebuked by Puma once or twice amid the wrangling of director, camera man and petty subordinates.
“So intense are the emotions evoked by a fanatic devotion to art,” he explained to Palla, “that, at moments, the old, direct and vigorous Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard here, unashamed. What will you? It is art! It is the fervour that forgets itself in blind devotion––in rapturous self-dedication to the god of Truth and Beauty!”
As she turned away, she heard from a neighbouring partition the hoarse expostulations of one of Art’s blind acolytes: “Say, f’r Christ’s sake, Delmour, what the hell’s loose in your bean! Yeh done it wrong an’ yeh know damn well yeh done it wrong–––”
Puma opened another door: “One of our projection rooms, Miss Dumont. If it is your pleasure to see a few reels run off–––”
“Thank you, but I really must go–––”
The office door stood open and she went out that way. Mr. Puma confronted her, moistly brilliant of eye:
“For me, Miss Dumont, I am frank like there never was a child in arms! Yes. I am all art; all heart. For me, beauty is God!––” he kissed his fat fingers and wafted the caress toward the dirty ceiling.
“Please excuse,” he said with his powerful smile, 185 “but have you ever, perhaps, thought, Miss Dumont, of the screen as a career?”