Beautiful and Damned (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (51 page)

With the decision came relief. It cheered her that in some manner the illusion of beauty could be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the reality had vanished. Well—to-morrow.

The next day she felt weak and ill. She tried to go out, and saved herself from collapse only by clinging to a mail-box near the front door. The Martinique elevator boy helped her upstairs, and she waited on the bed for Anthony’s return without energy to unhook her brassière.

For five days she was down with influenza, which, just as the month turned the corner into winter, ripened into double pneumonia. In the feverish perambulations of her mind she prowled through a house of bleak unlighted rooms hunting for her mother. All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

One day in the midst of Gloria’s illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss McGovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet. Miss McGovern was standing near the bed mixing some medicine, when Mrs. Patch, who had apparently been sound asleep, sat up and began to speak vehemently:

“Millions of people,” she said, “swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell ... monkeys! Or lice, I suppose. For one really exquisite palace... on Long Island, say—or even in Greenwich... for one palace full of pictures from the Old World and exquisite things—with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea, and lovely people about in slick dresses... I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.” She raised her hand feebly and snapped her fingers. “I care nothing for them—understand me?”

The look she bent upon Miss McGovern at the conclusion of this speech was curiously elfin, curiously intent. Then she gave a short little laugh polished with scorn, and tumbling backward fell off again to sleep.

Miss McGovern was bewildered. She wondered what were the hundred thousand things that Mrs. Patch would sacrifice for her palace. Dollars, she supposed—yet it had not sounded exactly like dollars.

It was February, seven days before her birthday, and the great snow that had filled up the cross streets as dirt fills the cracks in a floor had turned to slush and was being escorted to the gutters by the hoses of the street-cleaning department. The wind, none the less bitter for being casual, whipped in through the open windows of the living-room bearing with it the dismal secrets of the areaway and clearing the Patch apartment of stale smoke in its cheerless circulation.

Gloria, wrapped in a warm kimona, came into the chilly room and taking up the telephone-receiver called Joseph Bloeckman.

“Do you mean Mr. Joseph
Black?”
demanded the telephone girl at “Films Par Excellence.”

“Bloeckman, Joseph Bloeckman. B-1-o—”

“Mr. Joseph Bloeckman has changed his name to Black. Do you want him?”

“Why—yes.” She remembered nervously that she had once called him “Blockhead” to his face.

His office was reached by courtesy of two additional female voices; the last was a secretary who took her name. Only with the flow through the transmitter of his own familiar but faintly impersonal tone did she realize that it had been three years since they had met. And he had changed his name to Black.

“Can you see me?” she suggested lightly. “It’s on a business matter, really. I’m going into the movies at last—if I can.”

“I’m awfully glad. I’ve always thought you’d like it.”

“Do you think you can get me a trial?” she demanded with the arrogance peculiar to all beautiful women, to all women who have ever at any time considered themselves beautiful.

He assured her that it was merely a question of when she wanted the trial. Any time? Well, he’d phone later in the day and let her know a convenient hour. The conversation closed with conventional padding on both sides. Then from three o’clock to five she sat close to the telephone—with no result.

But next morning came a note that contented and excited her:

Gloria had decided that Anthony was to know nothing of this until she had obtained a definite position, and accordingly she was dressed and out of the apartment next morning before he awoke. Her mirror had given her, she thought, much the same account as ever. She wondered if there were any lingering traces of her sickness. She was still slightly under weight, and she had fancied, a few days before, that her cheeks were a trifle thinner—but she felt that those were merely transitory conditions and that on this particular day she looked as fresh as ever. She had bought and charged a new hat, and as the day was warm she had left the leopard-skin coat at home.

At the “Films Par Excellence” studios she was announced over the telephone and told that Mr. Black would be down directly. She looked around her. Two girls were being shown about by a little fat man in a slash-pocket coat, and one of them had indicated a stack of thin parcels, piled breast-high against the wall, and extending along for twenty feet.

“That’s studio mail,” explained the fat man. “Pictures of the stars who are with ‘Films Par Excellence.’”

“Oh.”

“Each one’s autographed by Florence Kelley or Gaston Mears or Mack Dodge—”
^x
He winked confidentially. “At least when Minnie McGlook out in Sauk Center gets the picture she wrote for, she thinks it’s autographed.”

“Just a stamp?”

“Sure. It’d take ‘em a good eight-hour day to autograph half of ’em. They say Mary Pickford’s studio mail costs her fifty thousand a year.”

“Say!”

“Sure. Fifty thousand. But it’s the best kinda advertising there is—”

They drifted out of earshot and almost immediately Bloeckman appeared—Bloeckman, a dark suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory and broken intermittently with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters “Gaston Mears Company,” “Mack Dodge Company,” or simply “Films Par Excellence.”

“Ever been in a studio before?”

“Never have.”

She liked it. There was no heavy closeness of grease-paint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings; the appurtenances seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with Manchu hangings a perfect Chinaman was going through a scene according to megaphone directions as the great glittering machine ground out its ancient moral tale for the edification of the national mind.

A red-headed man approached them and spoke with familiar deference to Bloeckman, who answered:

“Hello, Debris. Want you to meet Mrs. Patch.... Mrs. Patch wants to go into pictures, as I explained to you.... All right, now, where do we go?”

Mr. Debris—the great Percy B. Debris, thought Gloria—showed them to a set which represented the interior of an office. Some chairs were drawn up around the camera, which stood in front of it, and the three of them sat down.

“Ever been in a studio before?” asked Mr. Debris, giving her a glance that was surely the quintessence of keenness. “No? Well, I’ll explain exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to take what we call a test in order to see how your features photograph and whether you’ve got natural stage presence and how you respond to coaching. There’s no need to be nervous over it. I’ll just have the camera-man take a few hundred feet in an episode I’ve got marked here in the scenario. We can tell pretty much what we want to from that.”

He produced a typewritten continuity and explained to her the episode she was to enact. It developed that one Barbara Wainwright had been secretly married to the junior partner of the firm whose office was there represented. Entering the deserted office one day by accident she was naturally interested in seeing where her husband worked. The telephone rang and after some hesitation she answered it. She learned that her husband had been struck by an automobile and instantly killed. She was overcome. At first she was unable to realize the truth, but finally she succeeded in comprehending it, and went into a dead faint on the floor.

“Now that’s all we want,” concluded Mr. Debris. “I’m going to stand here and tell you approximately what to do, and you’re to act as though I wasn’t here, and just go on do it your own way. You needn’t be afraid we’re going to judge this too severely. We simply want to get a general idea of your screen personality.”

“I see.”

“You’ll find make-up in the room in back of the set. Go light on it. Very little red.”

“I see,” repeated Gloria, nodding. She touched her lips nervously with the tip of her tongue.

As she came into the set through the real wooden door and closed it carefully behind her, she found herself inconveniently dissatisfied with her clothes. She should have bought a “misses’” dress for the occasion—she could still wear them, and it might have been a good investment if it had accentuated her airy youth.

Her mind snapped sharply into the momentous present as Mr. Debris’s voice came from the glare of the white lights in front.

“You look around for your husband.... Now—you don’t see him... you’re curious about the office....”

She became conscious of the regular sound of the camera. It worried her. She glanced toward it involuntarily and wondered if she had made up her face correctly. Then, with a definite effort she forced herself to act—and she had never felt that the gestures of her body were so banal, so awkward, so bereft of grace or distinction. She strolled around the office, picking up articles here and there and looking at them inanely. Then she scrutinized the ceiling, the floor, and thoroughly inspected an inconsequential lead-pencil on the desk. Finally, because she could think of nothing else to do, and less than nothing to express, she forced a smile.

“All right. Now the phone rings. Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Hesitate, and then answer it.”

She hesitated—and then, too quickly, she thought, picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

Her voice was hollow and unreal. The words rang in the empty set like the ineffectualities of a ghost. The absurdities of their requirements appalled her—Did they expect that on an instant’s notice she could put herself in the place of this preposterous and unexplained character?

“... No ... no.... Not yet! Now listen: ‘John Sumner has just been knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed!”’

Gloria let her baby mouth drop slowly open. Then:

“Now hang up! With a bang!”

She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length she was feeling slightly encouraged and her confidence increased.

“My God!” she cried. Her voice was good, she thought. “Oh, my God!”

“Now faint.”

She collapsed forward to her knees and throwing her body outward on the ground lay without breathing.

“All right!” called Mr. Debris. “That’s enough, thank you. That’s plenty. Get up—that’s enough.”

Gloria arose, mustering her dignity and brushing off her skirt.

“Awful!” she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was bumping tumultuously. “Terrible, wasn’t it?”

“Did you mind it?” said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly. “Did it seem hard? I can’t tell anything about it until I have it run off.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to his remark—and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have said had he been trying not to encourage her.

A few moments later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether or not she had used enough make-up worried her, and as the part was that of a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had been abominable—in fact not until she reached the phone had she displayed a shred of poise—and then the test had been over. If they had only realized! She wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her, and as suddenly faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask another favor of Bloeckman.

The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting, and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had quarrelled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized and said he was having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still retained membership.