if he did not succeed in his hellish design to dash Hortense to the cruel rocks below. Merton, of course, had not a moment’s doubt that the miracle would intervene; he had seen other serials. So he made no comment upon the gravity of the situation, but went at once to the heart of his ecstasy.
“The most beautiful woman on the screen,” he murmured.
“Well, I don’t know.”
Miss Kearns appeared about to advance the claims of rival beauties, but desisted when she saw that Merton was firm.
“None of the rest can touch her,” he maintained. “And look at her nerve! Would your others have as much nerve as that?”
“Maybe she has someone to double in those places,” suggested the screen-wise Tessie Kearns.
“Not Beulah Baxter. Didn’t I see her personal appearance that time I went to Peoria last spring on purpose to see it? Didn’t she talk about the risks she took and how the directors were always begging her to use a double and how her artistic convictions wouldn’t let her do any such thing? You can bet the little girl is right there in every scene!”
They passed to the other billboard. This would be the comedy. A painfully cross-eyed man in misfitting clothes was doing something supposed to be funny — pushing a lawn mower over the carpet of a palatial home.
“How disgusting!” exclaimed Miss Kearns.
“Ain’t it?” said Merton. “How they can have one of those terrible things on the same bill with Miss Baxter — I can’t understand it.”
“Those censors ought to suppress this sort of buffoonery instead of scenes of dignified passion like they did in Scarlet Sin,” declared Tessie. “Did you read about that?”
“They sure ought,” agreed Merton. “These comedies make me tired. I never see one if I can help it.”
Walking on, they discussed the wretched public taste and the wretched actors that pandered to it. The slapstick comedy, they held, degraded a fine and beautiful art. Merton was especially severe. He always felt uncomfortable at one of these regrettable exhibitions when people about him who knew no better laughed heartily. He had never seen anything to laugh at, and said as much.
They crossed the street and paused at the door of Miss Kearns’s shop, behind which were her living rooms. She would tonight go over Passion’s Perils once more and send it to another company.
“I wonder,” she said to Merton, “if they keep sending it back because the sets are too expensive. Of course there’s the one where the dissipated English nobleman, Count Blessingham, lures Valerie into Westminster Abbey for his own evil purposes on the night of the old earl’s murder — that’s expensive — but they get a chance to use it again when Valerie is led to the altar by young Lord Stonecliff, the rightful heir. And of course Stonecliff Manor, where Valerie is first seen as governess, would be expensive; but they use that in a lot of scenes, too. Still, maybe I might change the locations around to something they’ve got built.”
“I wouldn’t change a line,” said Merton. “Don’t give in to ‘em. Make ‘em take it as it is. They might ruin your picture with cheap stuff.”
“Well,” the authoress debated, “maybe I’ll leave it. I’d especially hate to give up Westminster Abbey. Of course the scene where she is struggling with Count Blessingham might easily be made offensive — it’s a strong scene — but it all comes right. You remember she wrenches herself loose from his grasp and rushes to throw herself before the altar, which suddenly lights up, and the scoundrel is afraid to pursue her there, because he had a thorough religious training when a boy at Oxford, and he feels it would be sacrilegious to seize her again while the light from the altar shines upon her that way, and so she’s saved for the time being. It seems kind of a shame not to use Westminster Abbey for a really big scene like that, don’t you think?”
“I should say so!” agreed Merton warmly. “They build plenty of sets as big as that. Keep it in!”
“Well, I’ll take your advice. And I shan’t give up trying with my other ones. And I’m writing to another set of people — see here.” She took from her handbag a clipped advertisement which she read to Merton in the fading light, holding it close to her keen little eyes. “Listen! ‘5,000 photoplay ideas needed. Working girl paid $10,000 for ideas she had thought worthless. Yours may be worth more. Experience unnecessary. Information free. Producers’ League 562, Piqua, Ohio.’ Doesn’t that sound encouraging? And it isn’t as if I didn’t have some experience. I’ve been writing scenarios for two years now.”
“We both got to be patient,” he pointed out. “We can’t succeed all at once, just remember that.”
“Oh, I’m patient, and I’m determined; and I know you are, too, Merton. But the way my things keep coming back — well, I guess we’d both get discouraged if it wasn’t for our sense of humor.”
“I bet we would,” agreed Merton. “And good-night!”
He went on to the Gashwiler Emporium and let himself into the dark store. At the moment he was bewailing that the next installment of The Hazards of Hortense would be shown on a Saturday night, for on those nights the store kept open until nine and he could see it but once. On a Tuesday night he would have watched it twice, in spite of the so-called comedy unjustly sharing the bill with it.
Lighting a match, he made his way through the silent store, through the stock room that had so lately been the foul lair of Snake le Vasquez, and into his own personal domain, a square partitioned off from the stockroom in which were his cot, the table at which he studied the art of screen acting, and his other little belongings. He often called this his den. He lighted a lamp on the table and drew the chair up to it.
On the boards of the partition in front of him were pasted many presentments of his favorite screen actress, Beulah Baxter, as she underwent the nerve-racking Hazards of Hortense. The intrepid girl was seen leaping from the seat of her high-powered car to the cab of a passing locomotive, her chagrined pursuers in the distant background. She sprang from a high cliff into the chill waters of a storm-tossed sea. Bound to the back of a spirited horse, she was raced down the steep slope of a rocky ravine in the Far West. Alone in a foul den of the underworld she held at bay a dozen villainous Asiatics. Down the fire escape of a great New York hotel she made a perilous way. From the shrouds of a tossing ship she was about to plunge to a watery release from the persecutor who was almost upon her. Upon the roof of the Fifth Avenue mansion of her scoundrelly guardian in the great city of New York she was gaining the friendly projection of a cornice from which she could leap and again escape death — even a fate worse than death, for the girl was pursued from all sorts of base motives. This time, friendless and alone in profligate New York, she would leap from the cornice to the branches of the great eucalyptus tree that grew hard by. Unnerving performances like these were a constant inspiration to Merton Gill. He knew that he was not yet fit to act in such scenes — to appear opportunely in the last reel of each installment and save Hortense for the next one. But he was confident a day would come.
On the same wall he faced also a series of photographs of himself. These were stills to be one day shown to a director who would thereupon perceive his screen merits. There was Merton in the natty belted coat, with his hair slicked back in the approved mode and a smile upon his face; a happy, careless college youth. There was Merton in tennis flannels, his hair nicely disarranged, jauntily holding a borrowed racquet. Here he was in a trench coat and the cap of a lieutenant, grim of face, the jaw set, holding a revolver upon someone unpictured; there in a wide-collared sport shirt lolling negligently upon a bench after
