Jack and Susan in 1913 (9 page)

“Wouldn't it have been easier simply to ask for one?” Jack asked when they were out of earshot.

“They might not have given it to me,” replied Susan, surprised at herself. For in one lightning-bolt moment she had suddenly understood how she could get money, despite a broken leg, despite vagaries of the theater and despite theatrical producers' prejudices against ingenues with decided limps. She would write a scenario for the Cosmic Film Company. And to do that, she needed only to see how such things were done, and toward that end she had purloined the typewritten scenario—an act less of desperation than inescapable logic.

“Is there anything else you'd like to steal before we have lunch?” Jack asked with mild amusement as they stood waiting for the elevator.

Susan sighed. “A typewriting machine would be a great blessing, I suppose, but—”

“But your bag is too small,” said Jack, pulling open the door of the elevator. “I happen to own a typewriting machine. I took one apart once to see how the thing worked, and then put it back together again. We need only to steal you a manual of instruction.”

“I insist,” said Jack. “I allowed you—against my better judgment—to pay for the taxicab, so you must allow me to buy lunch.”

“Just a dairy bar, please,” said Susan, thinking not of her appetite, which was large, but rather of Jack Beaumont's budget, which was obviously not.

Around the corner from the Cosmic Film Company's offices they found a tiny restaurant catering to the meager stomachs and purses of secretaries and typewriters in this quarter of New York. Since Jack and Susan hadn't even such regular employment as
that
, such a place seemed not beneath their dignity. Susan seated herself at a little round marble-topped table at the front window, and in a few minutes Jack brought her a sandwich and a cup of coffee and sat down beside her. He'd taken the same for himself, and Susan had the satisfaction of knowing that, even if they decided to have dessert pie, Jack would not have spent more than thirty cents altogether.

“Tell me what else Hosmer told you,” said Susan eagerly, as soon as Jack had sat down. He appeared tall and awkward in this place that seemed to be frequented exclusively by bustling working girls.

“What about?” he asked, mystified by her question.

“Scenarios, of course.” She had already taken the folded pages from her bag, spread them out on the table, and was reading them through with great concentration. As she read, she had less and less doubt that she would be able to produce something at least as good—and possibly a great deal better.

Jack took a bite of his sandwich thoughtfully, and after a moment recalled, “Hosmer said that Mr. Fane produces about three two-reel pictures a week as well as a couple of one-reelers for theaters that still want to show them. He says Fane can't get enough good scenarios to suit him, and sometimes he just makes them up as he goes along.”

“And he actually pays—” prompted Susan.

“I think he said twenty dollars for a two-reeler. I might have got that wrong,” Jack warned, “but—”

“But even if it were only ten—”

Jack glanced away, blushed, and said hesitantly, “Am I right in assuming that you are not exactly—”

“‘Replete with pecuniary emoluments'?” Susan said with a laugh. “You might say that, Mr. Beaumont. You might even say, as Miss Conquest undoubtedly would, that I am just about ‘stone broke.' Even if Mr. Fane paid only ten dollars, that is more money than I am likely to make on the legitimate stage with a broken leg.”

“But once your leg is mended—” Jack protested.

“Once my leg is mended, I am likely to be walking the rialto with most of the other actors in the city.”

“Walking the rialto?”

“Unemployed.”

“Oh,” said Jack, taking another bite of his sandwich. Even his neck turned red when he blushed, Susan noticed. Looking at him this closely she saw also that his eyes were not the blue she'd first thought them, but rather a startling gray.

“So you see,” she said, “I will consider ten dollars to be a perfectly adequate recompense.”

Jack opened his mouth to speak, but evidently then thought better of it. He took a sip of coffee instead, but choked on it. Susan slapped him hard on the back a number of times and he finally recovered himself.

“I know what you were going to say,” said Susan. “That I shouldn't get my hopes up. I know that. I've had a lifetime of disappointments, because nine times out of ten, my hopes were ‘dashed against the stony walls of circumstance.' That's the problem with actors, you know—they're always quoting lines from bad plays they were in. I quote terrible speeches and I still get my hopes up. I'm afraid my hopes are up now, and it doesn't do a bit of good in the world for you to tell me they ought not to be. Wasn't that what you were going to say?”

“Yes,” Jack admitted quickly, fearing his choking attack would return if he said more.

Susan smiled, and then asked—with a tentativeness that was rare with her—“Would you really like to be of some help to me?”

Jack nodded, not trusting himself to more speech.

“Then you can spend a few hours with me this afternoon—in the nickelodeon?”

It was by no means difficult to find a theater exhibiting moving pictures, even in this neighborhood that was mostly devoted to business. Three doors down from the little restaurant where they'd eaten was Parker's nickelodeon, and though Jack suggested that they might find a much more up-to-date and grander place on Broadway or Sixth Avenue, Susan said, “I don't want to see the best, I'm interested in seeing the ordinary.” So she paid her nickel entrance fee, and insisted on paying Jack's as well.

Parker's was an old-fashioned place, having been in business at this location for almost a decade. It was just one long narrow room with a stained canvas sheet secured to the wall at the end; on this the moving pictures were projected. Rows of cane-seated chairs were arranged on either side of a narrow aisle, and a dejected looking man with a wracking cough played music on a spavined piano directly below the screen. There weren't more than a dozen patrons in the place when Susan and Jack entered, and all of them were bunched down front on the right—more interested in the warmth of a stove in the corner than in what was being projected onto the canvas.

What was showing was a jittery travelogue that purported to be authentic scenes of the Casbah in Fez, though the faces of the natives looked as if they'd been dyed with berry juice rather than burned by the Moroccan sun. Jack and Susan sat in the back with their coats drawn tightly about them. It was colder inside the theater than it had been on the street.

After the phony-looking travelogue came several equally inauthentic-looking newsreels, then two dismal vaudeville skits, and then at last an installment—somewhere in the middle of the story—of the serial, “The Adventures of Kathlyn.” Kathlyn was a singularly naive young woman who got herself into one scrape after another, and seemed to have a penchant—strange for such a wide-eyed innocent from the country—of falling into the clutches of the most dangerous criminals on the North American continent. Susan entertained a little fantasy of Ida Conquest playing the part of Kathlyn as she watched Kathlyn get tossed off the edge of a precipice, locked in a bank safe with a bomb suspended from her neck, hypnotized into the desire for assassinating the governor of Illinois.

Parker's being a Patents Trust theater, there was no feature at all, only a couple of two-reelers, no longer than the one serial. The first was a bit of melodramatic nonsense called
The Siren's Serenade
in which a husband with a fake mustache was tempted to leave his wife for a woman he met on board an ocean liner, but true love conquered in the end when the wife, employing a
nom de stateroom
, somehow appeared on the boat and won her husband's love anew. The siren drowned when she washed overboard during a storm. The second feature,
Boarding House Barney
, was purportedly a comedy, though no one in it was funny, and its portrayal of so universally known a situation as a paying boarder bore no remote relation to reality.

“Let's find an independent theater,” Susan suggested as they emerged into the February sunlight. “And one showing Cosmic films, if we can.”

“Your cast and crutches,” Jack protested gently, but Susan waved away this concern for her discomfort.

With purpose and hope in her breast, Susan felt better than she had for weeks—better, in fact, since the night when that idiot Jay Austin had thrown himself on top of her in the snow. It was true that her feet were sore, her arms ached with the unaccustomed exercise of the crutches, and some sort of grit had got into her cast and was making her mending leg itch madly, but Susan had no intention of going home
yet
.

Jack went into a druggist's shop, entered a phone booth, and called the Cosmic studio to find out at what nickelodeons they might see Mr. Mixon's latest essay in comedy. He was told that this could be seen at an establishment called the Paragon, which was located at Sixth Avenue and Forty-third Street. This saved them a deal of trouble and walking about, and they were able to take the Sixth Avenue elevated straight up to Forty-second Street.

The Paragon's presentation, from the independent film companies, was a much more enjoyable bill than the first they'd seen. It began with a travelogue of the splendors of California, then was followed—in considerable contrast—by a newsreel of local disasters, including a fire in a Brooklyn factory. Next came a comedy short involving a man in blackface and wedding clothes being chased through City Hall Park by a large group of women in blackface and wedding gowns. Then Jack and Susan were mystified by an episode of
The Purple Mask
, which climaxed with the detective-hero locked in a steamer trunk which was then hurled off the Brooklyn Bridge. And, at the last, came
Nobbin's Nuptials
, the Cosmic two-reeler featuring Manfred Mixon playing the owner of a livery stable intent on wedding the mayor's widow. There were comic wooing scenes, a comic costume ball, a comic horse race, and, at the end, a comic wedding.

Susan and Jack laughed, and laughed heartily, for Manfred Mixon was indeed an accomplished comedian. When it was over, Susan placed a hand on Jack's arm and said, “May I ask you one more favor?”

“Of course,” said Jack.

“Could we sit through it once more?”

The second time through, Susan watched with a sharp critical eye, and took notes on some scraps of paper that Jack found in his jacket pocket.

When Jack Beaumont knocked on Susan's door that evening, Tripod seemed to know who it was, and began hurling himself at the door with a ferocious barking. Susan dragged the dog into the bedroom and shut the door.

Jack brought in a Densmore typewriting machine and placed it on Susan's table.

“It looks quite new!” she exclaimed.