I
The pleasant, ostentatious boulevard was lined at prosperous intervals with New England Colonial houses—without ship models in the hall. When the inhabitants moved out here the ship models had at last been given to the children. The next street was a complete exhibit of the Spanish-bungalow phase of West Coast architecture; while two streets over, the cylindrical windows and round towers of 1897—melancholy antiques which sheltered swamis, yogis, fortune tellers, dressmakers, dancing teachers, art academies and chiropractors—looked down now upon brisk buses and trolley cars. A little walk around the block could, if you were feeling old that day, be a discouraging affair.
On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their knees marked by the red stains of the mercurochrome era, played with toys with a purpose—beams that taught engineering, soldiers that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood. When the dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for them. Everything in the vicinity—even the March sunlight—was new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.
Among the very few domestics in sight that morning was a handsome young maid sweeping the steps of the biggest house on the street. She was a large, simple Mexican girl with the large, simple ambitions of the time and the locality, and she was already conscious of being a luxury—she received one hundred dollars a month in return for her personal liberty. Sweeping, Dolores kept an eye on the stairs inside, for Mr. Hannaford’s car was waiting and he would soon be coming down to breakfast. The problem came first this morning, however—the problem as to whether it was a duty or a favour when she helped the English nurse down the steps with the perambulator. The English nurse always said “Please,” and “Thanks very much,” but Dolores hated her and would have liked, without any special excitement, to beat her insensible. Like most Latins under the stimulus of American life, she had irresistible impulses towards violence.
The nurse escaped, however. Her blue cape faded haughtily into the distance just as Mr. Hannaford, who had come quietly downstairs, stepped into the space of the front door.
“Good morning.” He smiled at Dolores; he was young and extraordinarily handsome. Dolores tripped on the broom and fell off the stoop. George Hannaford hurried down the steps, reached her as she was getting to her feet cursing volubly in Mexican, just touched her arm with a helpful gesture and said, “I hope you didn’t hurt yourself.”
“Oh, no.”
“I’m afraid it was my fault; I’m afraid I startled you, coming out like that.”
His voice had real regret in it; his brow was knit with solicitude.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Aw, sure.”
“Didn’t turn your ankle?”
“Aw, no.”
“I’m terribly sorry about it.”
“Aw, it wasn’t your fault.”
He was still frowning as she went inside, and Dolores, who was not hurt and thought quickly, suddenly contemplated having a love affair with him. She looked at herself several times in the pantry mirror and stood close to him as she poured his coffee, but he read the paper and she saw that that was all for the morning.
Hannaford entered his car and drove to Jules Rennard’s house. Jules was a French Canadian by birth, and George Hannaford’s best friend; they were fond of each other and spent much time together. Both of them were simple and dignified in their tastes and in their way of thinking, instinctively gentle, and in a world of the volatile and the bizarre found in each other a certain quiet solidity.
He found Jules at breakfast.
“I want to fish for barracuda,” said George abruptly. “When will you be free? I want to take the boat and go down to Lower California.”
Jules had dark circles under his eyes. Yesterday he had closed out the greatest problem of his life by settling with his ex-wife for two hundred thousand dollars. He had married too young, and the former slavey from the Quebec slums had taken to drugs upon her failure to rise with him. Yesterday, in the presence of lawyers, her final gesture had been to smash his finger with the base of a telephone. He was tired of women for a while and welcomed the suggestion of a fishing trip.
“How’s the baby?” he asked.
“The baby’s fine.”
“And Kay?”
“Kay’s not herself, but I don’t pay any attention. What did you do to your hand?”
“I’ll tell you another time. What’s the matter with Kay, George?”
“Jealous.”
“Of who?”
“Helen Avery. It’s nothing. She’s not herself, that’s all.” He got up. “I’m late,” he said. “Let me know as soon as you’re free. Any time after Monday will suit me.”
George left and drove out by an interminable boulevard which narrowed into a long, winding concrete road and rose into the hilly country behind. Somewhere in the vast emptiness a group of buildings appeared, a barnlike structure, a row of offices, a large but quick restaurant and half a dozen small bungalows. The chauffeur dropped Hannaford at the main entrance. He went in and passed through various enclosures, each marked off by swinging gates and inhabited by a stenographer.
“Is anybody with Mr. Schroeder?” he asked, in front of a door lettered with that name.
“No, Mr. Hannaford.”
Simultaneously his eye fell on a young lady who was writing at a desk aside, and he lingered a moment.
“Hello, Margaret,” he said. “How are you, darling?”
A delicate, pale beauty looked up, frowning a little, still abstracted in her work. It was Miss Donovan, the script girl, a friend of many years.
“Hello. Oh, George, I didn’t see you come in. Mr. Douglas wants to work on the book sequence this afternoon.”
“All right.”
“These are the changes we decided on Thursday night.” She smiled up at him and George wondered for the thousandth time why she had never gone into pictures.
“All right,” he said. “Will initials do?”
“Your initials look like George Harris’s.”
“Very well, darling.”
As he finished, Pete Schroeder opened his door and beckoned him. “George, come here!” he said with an air of excitement. “I want you to listen to someone on the phone.”
Hannaford went in.
“Pick up the phone and say ‘Hello,’ ” directed Schroeder. “Don’t say who you are.”
“Hello,” said Hannaford obediently.
“Who is this?” asked a girl’s voice.
Hannaford put his hand over the mouthpiece. “What am I supposed to do?”
Schroeder snickered and Hannaford hesitated, smiling and suspicious.
“Who do you want to speak to?” he temporized into the phone.
“To George Hannaford, I want to speak to. Is this him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, George; it’s me.”
“Who?”
“Me—Gwen. I had an awful time finding you. They told me—”
“Gwen who?”
“Gwen—can’t you hear? From San Francisco—last Thursday night.”
“I’m sorry,” objected George. “Must be some mistake.”
“Is this George Hannaford?”
“Yes.”
The voice grew slightly tart: “Well, this is Gwen Becker you spent last Thursday evening with in San Francisco. There’s no use pretending you don’t know who I am, because you do.”
Schroeder took the apparatus from George and hung up the receiver.
“Somebody has been doubling for me up in Frisco,” said Hannaford.
“So that’s where you were Thursday night!”
“Those things aren’t funny to me—not since that crazy Zeller girl. You can never convince them they’ve been sold because the man always looks something like you. What’s new, Pete?”
“Let’s go over to the stage and see.”
Together they walked out a back entrance, along a muddy walk, and opening a little door in the big blank wall of the studio building entered into its half darkness.
Here and there figures spotted the dim twilight, figures that turned up white faces to George Hannaford, like souls in purgatory watching the passage of a half-god through. Here and there were whispers and soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ. Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow of a stage with two people motionless upon it.
An actor in evening clothes, his shirt front, collar and cuffs tinted a brilliant pink, made as though to get chairs for them, but they shook their heads and stood watching. For a long while nothing happened on the stage—no one moved. A row of lights went off with a savage hiss, went on again. The plaintive tap of a hammer begged admission to nowhere in the distance; a blue face appeared among the blinding lights above and called something unintelligible into the upper blackness. Then the silence was broken by a low clear voice from the stage:
“If you want to know why I haven’t got stockings on, look in my dressing-room. I spoiled four pairs yesterday and two already this morning … This dress weighs six pounds.”
A man stepped out of the group of observers and regarded the girl’s brown legs; their lack of covering was scarcely distinguishable, but, in any event, her expression implied that she would do nothing about it. The lady was annoyed, and so intense was her personality that it had taken only a fractional flexing of her eyes to indicate the fact. She was a dark, pretty girl with a figure that would be full-blown sooner than she wished. She was just eighteen.
Had this been the week before, George Hannaford’s heart would have stood still. Their relationship had been in just that stage. He hadn’t said a word to Helen Avery that Kay could have objected to, but something had begun between them on the second day of this picture that Kay had felt in the air. Perhaps it had begun even earlier, for he had determined, when he saw Helen Avery’s first release, that she should play opposite him. Helen Avery’s voice and the dropping of her eyes when she finished speaking, like a sort of exercise in control, fascinated him. He had felt that they both tolerated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and life, and that if they rushed towards each other there would be a romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity. It was this element of promise and possibility that had haunted him for a fortnight and was now dying away.
Hannaford was thirty, and he was a moving-picture actor only through a series of accidents. After a year in a small technical college he had taken a summer job with an electric company, and his first appearance in a studio was in the role of repairing a bank of Klieg lights. In an emergency he played a small part and made good, but for fully a year after that he thought of it as a purely transitory episode in his life. At first much of it had offended him—the almost hysterical egotism and excitability hidden under an extremely thin veil of elaborate good-fellowship. It was only recently, with the advent of such men as Jules Rennard into pictures, that he began to see the possibilities of a decent and secure private life, much as his would have been as a successful engineer. At last his success felt solid beneath his feet.
He met Kay Tomkins at the old Griffith Studios at Mamaroneck and their marriage was a fresh, personal affair, removed from most stage marriages. Afterwards they had possessed each other completely, had been pointed to: “Look, there’s one couple in pictures who manage to stay together.” It would have taken something out of many people’s lives—people who enjoyed a vicarious security in the contemplation of their marriage—if they hadn’t stayed together, and their love was fortified by a certain effort to live up to that.
He held women off by a polite simplicity that underneath was hard and watchful; when he felt a certain current being turned on he became emotionally stupid. Kay expected and took much more from men, but she, too, had a careful thermometer against her heart. Until the other night, when she reproached him for being interested in Helen Avery, there had been an absolute minimum of jealousy between them.
George Hannaford was still absorbed in the thought of Helen Avery as he left the studio and walked towards his bungalow over the way. There was in his mind, first, a horror that anyone should come between him and Kay, and second, a regret that he no longer carried that possibility in the forefront of his mind. It had given him a tremendous pleasure, like the things that had happened to him during his first big success, before he was so “made” that there was scarcely anything better ahead; it was something to take out and look at—a new and still mysterious joy. It hadn’t been love, for he was critical of Helen Avery as he had never been critical of Kay. But his feeling of last week had been sharply significant and memorable, and he was restless, now that it had passed.
Working that afternoon, they were seldom together, but he was conscious of her and he knew that she was conscious of him.
She stood a long time with her back to him at one point, and when she turned at length, their eyes swept past each other’s, brushing like bird wings. Simultaneously he saw they had gone far, in their way; it was well that he had drawn back. He was glad that someone came for her when the work was almost over.
Dressed, he returned to the office wing, stopping in for a moment to see Schroeder. No one answered his knock, and, turning the knob, he went in. Helen Avery was there alone.
Hannaford shut the door and they stared at each other. Her face was young, frightened. In a moment in which neither of them spoke, it was decided that they would have some of this out now. Almost thankfully he felt the warm sap of emotion flow out of his heart and course through his body.
“Helen!”
She murmured “What?” in an awed voice.
“I feel terribly about this.” His voice was shaking.
Suddenly she began to cry; painful, audible sobs shook her. “Have you got a handkerchief?” she said.
He gave her a handkerchief. At that moment there were steps outside. George opened the door halfway just in time to keep Schroeder from entering on the spectacle of her tears.
“Nobody’s in,” he said facetiously. For a moment longer he kept his shoulder against the door. Then he let it open slowly.
Outside in his limousine, he wondered how soon Jules would be ready to go fishing.