Nephew. "Well, you've beat me; it's only my first."
RAW SOUL STUFF.
I don't think I have ever read a short story about a film, so I have made one up myself.
Viviana Smith was born in Battersea. At twelve years old she ran about the streets with holes in her stockings and played a complicated game with chalk squares and a stone. She had the accent of London streets, which is the only accent that can pierce through the noise of London traffic. But she had hair the colour of marsh-marigolds, a Vorticist mouth and patent enlargeable eyes. In the street she made eyes at errand-boys, and at school she made eyes so large that there was no room to dot them.
At the age of seventeen she went in for the Purple Pomegranate film competition, and was selected from five hundred thousand candidates to be a motion-picture star. She starred some. At the beginning she played in romantic comedy films with woodland scenery and rustic bridges and pools where she tickled for trout. She tickled so well that one could almost hear the trout laugh. Later she played in "crook" melodrama, where somebody was always peeping through the door when the secret patent was being taken out of the office safe, and where men always kept arriving in motor-cars and going up flights of steps with their faces turned to the audience and going down flights of steps with their faces turned to the audience and getting into motor-cars again. They never missed a step. There is something about this feat which holds a cinema audience spellbound.
Later she rode on untamed mustangs and fell over cliffs gagged and bound, and sometimes she was even promoted to slide or twirl into a bakehouse and tumble with a talented cast of actors and actresses into a large trough of dough. When they had wiped the dough off they all came back into the bakehouse one after another and tumbled into the dough-trough again. Repetition is the soul of wit.
One day Viviana met Ignatius Vavasour, the poet. For two years he had worshipped her afar on the screen. He had seen her in so many reels that she made him giddy. He had seen her in Youth's Yodelling May-tide Hour, length five reels, and in Hate's Hideous Hand of Crime, length six reels, and in Gertie Flips the Flap-jack over, length seven reels and a half. He had never heard her speak, but he had seen her beautiful lips ripple into a thousand artless expressions of grief and joy. He did not know whether he loved her most when she was tripping through a silvan glade, with meadow-sweet in her hand, or when she was gliding gracefully over Niagara Falls in a tar-barrel; when she was cracking the door of a strong room with a jemmy or when she was getting the dough out of her hair with a rake. But as soon as he had seen her out of the pictures he knew that he loved her best as she was. He knew that he could not live without her. He told her so.
"But, Mr. Vavasour," she protested.