We Can't Have Everything: A Novel

by Rupert Hughes

In the motion-picture world Kedzie had found herself. Her very limitations were to her advantage. She would have failed dismally in the spoken drama, but the flowing photograma was just to her measure.

The actor must not only know how to read his lines and express emotions, but must keep up the same spontaneity night after night, sometimes for a thousand performances or more. The movie actor is expected to respond to a situation once or twice for rehearsal, and once or twice for the camera. There is no audience to struggle against and listen for—and to. The director is always there at the side calling, reminding, pleading, encouraging, threatening, suggesting the thoughts, the lines, and the expression, doing all the work except the pantomime.

That was Kedzie's salvation. Tell her a story and make her the heroine of it, and her excitable heart would thrill to the emotional crisis. Take a snapshot of her, and the picture was caught.

Ferriday soon learned this and protected her from her own helpless vice of discontent. She lapsed always from her enthusiasm after it was once cold. As an actress she would have been one of those frequent flashers who give a splendid rehearsal or two and then sink back into a torpor. She might have risen to an appealing first-night performance. Thereafter, she would have become dismal. The second week would have found the audiences disgusted and the third would have found her breaking her contract and running away with somebody. A horse that has run away once is likely to run away again. Kedzie had run away twice.

But the movie life was just the thing for her. She did not play always the same set scenes in the same scene sets. She was not required even to follow the logic of the story. For a while she would play a bit in a tiny angle representing a drawing-room. When that was taken she would play, not the next moment of the story, but the next scene in that scene. It might be a year further along in the story. It was exciting.

Her second picture had great success. She played the girl brought up as a boy by a cruel Italian padrone who made her steal. Her third picture was as nearly the same as possible.

Now she was a ragged waif, a girl, who dressed as a boy and sold newspapers so as to keep her old father in liquor. The garret was a rickety table, a rusty stove, a broken chair, and a V of painted canvas walls with a broken window and a paper snowstorm falling back of it. There Kedzie was found in very becoming ragged breeches, pouting with starvation. Her father drove her out for gin.

She walked out of the set, picked up a bottle, and brought it back. The scene in the saloon would be taken later: also the street scenes to and from.

An officer of the “Cruelty” came and took her from the garret. That was the beginning of a series of adventures culminating in a marriage with a multimillionaire. While the garret was set, the finish of the story was taken.

She ran and changed her costume to one of wealth with ermine. She came in with the handsome young millionaire. It was the next winter. Her father was dying. He asked her forgiveness and gave her his blessing. Then Kedzie changed back to her first costume and went in the motor to a dismal street where she was shown coming out of the tenement, and going back to it gin-laden, and again with the officer of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.