Dewitt H. Parker - "The Principles Of Aesthetics"

John Lothrop Motley - "The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1564 65"

William N. Harben - "The Land of the Changing Sun"

Jean de La Fontaine - "The Tales and Novels, v23: The River Scamander &c."

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: Merton of the Movies

H >> Harry Leon Wilson >> Merton of the Movies




The feast was prolonged until a late hour, but the finger--tips that
had accurately counted money in a dark pocket could ascertain in a
dark hotel that a store of food still remained. He pulled the
blankets about him and sank comfortably to rest. There was always
some way.

Breakfast the next morning began with the promise of only moderate
enjoyment. Somehow in the gray light sifting through the windows the
beans did not look as good as they had tasted the night before, and
the early mouthfuls were less blithesome on the palate than the
remembered ones of yesterday. He thought perhaps he was not so
hungry as he had been at his first encounter with them. He
delicately removed a pocket of ashes from the centre, and tried
again. They tasted better now. The mould of tender tints was again
visible but he made no effort to avoid it. For his appetite had
reawakened. He was truly hungry, and ate with an entire singleness
of purpose.

Toward the last of the meal his conscious self feebly prompted him
to quit, to save against the inevitable hunger of the night. But the
voice was ignored. He was now clay to the moulding of the
subconscious. He could have saved a few of the beans when reason was
again enthroned, but they were so very few that he fatuously thought
them not worth saving. Might as well make a clean job of it. He
restored the stewpan and spoon to their places and left his hotel.
He was fed. To-day something else would have to happen.

The plush hat cocked at a rakish angle, he walked abroad with
something of the old confident swagger. Once he doubtfully fingered
the sprouting beard, but resolutely dismissed a half-formed notion
of finding out how the Holden lot barber would regard a proposition
from a new patron to open a charge account. If nothing worse than
remaining unshaven was going to happen to him, what cared he? The
collar was still pretty good. Why let his beard be an incubus? He
forgot it presently in noticing that the people arriving on the
Holden lot all looked so extremely well fed. He thought it singular
that he should never before have noticed how many well-fed people
one saw in a day.

Late in the afternoon his explorations took him beyond the lower end
of his little home street, and he was attracted by sounds of the
picture drama from a rude board structure labelled the High Gear
Dance Hall. He approached and entered with that calm ease of manner
which his days on the lot had brought to a perfect bloom. No one now
would ever suppose that he was a mere sightseer or chained to the
Holden lot by circumstances over which he had ceased to exert the
slightest control.

The interior of the High Gear Dance Hall presented nothing new to
his seasoned eye. It was the dance-hall made familiar by many a
smashing five-reel Western. The picture was, quite normally,
waiting. Electricians were shoving about the big light standards,
cameras were being moved, and bored actors were loafing informally
at the round tables or chatting in groups about the set.

One actor alone was keeping in his part. A ragged, bearded, unkempt
elderly man in red shirt and frayed overalls, a repellent fell hat
pulled low over his brow, reclined on the floor at the end of the
bar, his back against a barrel. Apparently he slept. A flash of
remembrance from the Montague girl's talk identified this wretched
creature. This was what happened to an actor who had to peddle the
brush. Perhaps for days he had been compelled to sleep there in the
interests of dance-hall atmosphere.

He again scanned the group, for he remembered, too, that the
Montague girl would also be working here in God's Great Outdoors.
His eyes presently found her. She was indeed a blonde hussy, short-
skirted, low-necked, pitifully rouged, depraved beyond redemption.
She stood at the end of the piano, and in company with another of
the dance-hall girls who played the accompaniment, she was singing a
ballad the refrain of which he caught as "God calls them Angels in
Heaven, we call them Mothers here."

The song ended, the Montague girl stepped to the centre of the room,
looked aimlessly about her, then seized an innocent bystander, one
of the rough characters frequenting this unsavoury resort, and did a
dance with him among the tables. Tiring of this, she flitted across
the room and addressed the bored director who impatiently awaited
the changing of lights. She affected to consider him a reporter who
had sought an interview with her. She stood erect, facing him with
one hand on a hip, the other patting and readjusting her blonde
coiffure.

"Really," she began in a voice of pained dignity, "I am at a loss to
understand why the public should be so interested in me. What can I
say to your readers--I who am so wholly absorbed in my art that I
can't think of hardly anything else? Why will not the world let us
alone? Hold on--don't go!"

She had here pretended that the reporter was taking her at her word.
She seized him by a lapel to which she clung while with her other
arm she encircled a post, thus anchoring the supposed intruder into
her private affairs. "As I was saying," she resumed, "all this
publicity is highly distasteful to the artist, and yet since you
have forced yourself in here I may as well say a few little things
about how good I am and how I got that way. Yes, I have nine motor
cars, and I just bought a lace tablecloth for twelve hundred
bones--"

She broke off inconsequently, poor victim of her constitutional
frivolity. The director grinned after her as she danced away, though
Merton Gill had considered her levity in the worst of taste. Then
her eye caught him as he stood modestly back of the working
electricians and she danced forward again in his direction. He would
have liked to evade her but saw that he could not do this
gracefully.

She greeted him with an impudent grin. "Why, hello, trouper! As I
live, the actin' Kid!" She held out a hand to him and he could not
well refuse it. He would have preferred to "up-stage" her once more,
as she had phrased it in her low jargon, but he was cornered. Her
grip of his hand quite astonished him with its vigour.

"Well, how's everything with you? Everything jake?" He tried for a
show of easy confidence. "Oh, yes, yes, indeed, everything is."

"Well, that's good, Kid." But she was now without the grin, and was
running a practised eye over what might have been called his
production. The hat was jaunty enough, truly a hat of the
successful, but all below that, the not-too-fresh collar, the
somewhat rumpled coat, the trousers crying for an iron despite their
nightly compression beneath their slumbering owner, the shoes not
too recently polished, and, more than all, a certain hunted though
still-defiant look in the young man's eyes, seemed to speak
eloquently under the shrewd glance she bent on him.

"Say, listen here, Old-timer, remember I been trouping man and boy
for over forty year and it's hard to fool me--you working?"

He resented the persistent levity of manner, but was coerced by the
very apparent real kindness in her tone. "Well," he looked about the
set vaguely in his discomfort, "you see, right now I'm between
pictures--you know how it is."

Again she searched his eyes and spoke in a lower tone: "Well, all
right--but you needn't blush about it, Kid." The blush she detected
became more flagrant.

"Well, I--you see--" he began again, but he was saved from being
explicit by the call of an assistant director.

"Miss Montague. Miss Montague--where's that Flips girl--on the set,
please." She skipped lightly from him. When she returned a little
later to look for him he had gone.

He went to bed that night when darkness had made this practicable,
and under his blankets whiled away a couple of wakeful hours by
running tensely dramatic films of breakfast, dinner, and supper at
the Gashwiler home. It seemed that you didn't fall asleep so quickly
when you had eaten nothing since early morning. Never had he
achieved such perfect photography as now of the Gashwiler corned-
beef hash and light biscuits, the Gashwiler hot cakes and sausage,
and never had Gashwiler so impressively carved the Saturday night
four-rib roast of tender beef. Gashwiler achieved a sensational
triumph in the scene, being accorded all the close--ups that the
most exacting of screen actors could wish. His knife-work was
perfect. He held his audience enthralled by his technique.

Mrs. Gashwiler, too, had a small but telling part in the drama to-
night; only a character bit, but one of those poignant bits that
stand out in the memory. The subtitle was, "Merton, won't you let me
give you another piece of the mince pie?" That was all, and yet, as
screen artists say, it got over. There came very near to being not a
dry eye in the house when the simple words were flashed beside an
insert of thick, flaky-topped mince pies with quarters cut from them
to reveal their noble interiors

Sleep came at last while he was regretting that lawless orgy of the
morning. He needn't have cleaned up those beans in that silly way.
He could have left a good half of them. He ran what might have been
considered a split-reel comedy of the stew-pan's bottom still
covered with perfectly edible beans lightly protected with Nature's
own pastel-tinted shroud for perishing vegetable matter and
diversified here and there with casual small deposits of ashes.

In the morning something good really did happen. As he folded his
blankets in the gray light a hard object rattled along the floor
from them. He picked this up before he recognized it as a mutilated
fragment from the stale half--loaf of bread he had salvaged. He
wondered how he could have forgotten it, even in the plenitude of
his banquet. There it was, a mere nubbin of crust and so hard it
might almost have been taken for a petrified specimen of prehistoric
bread. Yet it proved to be rarely palatable. It's flavour was
exquisite. It melted in the mouth.

Somewhat refreshed by this modest cheer, he climbed from the window
of the Crystal Palace with his mind busy on two tracks. While the
letter to Gashwiler composed itself, with especially clear
directions about where the return money should be sent, he was also
warning himself to remain throughout the day at a safe distance from
the door of the cafeteria. He had proved the wisdom of this even the
day before that had started with a bounteous breakfast. To-day the
aroma of cooked food occasionally wafted from the cafeteria door
would prove, he was sure, to be more than he could bear.

He rather shunned the stages to-day, keeping more to himself. The
collar, he had to confess, was no longer, even to the casual eye,
what a successful screen-actor's collar should be. The sprouting
beard might still be misconstrued as the whim of a director
sanctified to realism--every day it was getting to look more like
that--but no director would have commanded the wearing of such a
collar except in actual work where it might have been a striking
detail in the apparel of an underworldling, one of those creatures
who became the tools of rich but unscrupulous roues who are bent
upon the moral destruction of beautiful young screen heroines. He
knew it was now that sort of collar. No use now in pretending that
it had been worn yesterday for the first time.




CHAPTER X

OF SHATTERED ILLUSIONS


The next morning he sat a long time in the genial sunlight watching
carpenters finish a scaffolding beside the pool that had once
floated logs to a sawmill. The scaffolding was a stout affair
supporting an immense tank that would, evidently for some occult
reason important to screen art, hold a great deal of water. The
sawmill was gone; at one end of the pool rode a small sail-boat with
one mast, its canvas flapping idly in a gentle breeze. Its deck was
littered with rigging upon which two men worked. They seemed to be
getting things shipshape for a cruise.

When he had tired of this he started off toward the High Gear Dance
Hall. Something all day had been drawing him there against his will.
He hesitated to believe it was the Montague girl's kindly manner
toward him the day before, yet he could identify no other influence.
Probably it was that. Yet he didn't want to face her again, even if
for a moment she had quit trying to be funny, even if for a moment
her eyes had searched his quite earnestly, her broad, amiable face
glowing with that sudden friendly concern. It had been hard to
withstand this yesterday; he had been in actual danger of confiding
to her that engagements of late were not plentiful--something like
that. And it would be harder to-day. Even the collar would make it
harder to resist the confidence that he was not at this time
overwhelmed with offers for his art.

He had for what seemed like an interminable stretch of time been
solitary and an outlaw. It was something to have been spoken to by a
human being who expressed ever so fleeting an interest in his
affairs, even by someone as inconsequent, as negligible in the world
of screen artistry as this lightsome minx who, because of certain
mental infirmities, could never hope for the least enviable eminence
in a profession demanding seriousness of purpose. Still it would be
foolish to go again to the set where she was. She might think he was
encouraging her.

So he passed the High Gear, where a four-horse stage, watched by two
cameras, was now releasing its passengers who all appeared to be
direct from New York, and walked on to an outdoor set that promised
entertainment. This was the narrow street of some quaint European
village, Scotch he soon saw from the dress of its people. A large
automobile was invading this remote hamlet to the dismay of its
inhabitants. Rehearsed through a megaphone they scurried within
doors at its approach, ancient men hobbling on sticks and frantic
mothers grabbing their little ones from the path of the monster. Two
trial trips he saw the car make the length of the little street.

At its lower end, brooding placidly, was an ancient horse rather
recalling Dexter in his generously exposed bones and the jaded droop
of his head above a low stone wall. Twice the car sped by him,
arousing no sign of apprehension nor even of interest. He paid it
not so much as the tribute of a raised eyelid.

The car went back to the head of the street where its entrance would
be made. "All right--ready!" came the megaphoned order. Again the
peaceful street was thrown into panic by this snorting dragon from
the outer world. The old men hobbled affrightedly within doors, the
mothers saved their children. And this time, to the stupefaction of
Merton Gill, even the old horse proved to be an actor of rare
merits. As the car approached he seemed to suffer a painful shock.
He tossed his aged head, kicked viciously with his rear feet, stood
absurdly aloft on them, then turned and fled from the monster. As
Merton mused upon the genius of the trainer who had taught his horse
not only to betray fright at a motor car but to distinguish between
rehearsals and the actual taking of a scene, he observed a man who
emerged from a clump of near-by shrubbery. He carried a shotgun.
This was broken at the breech and the man was blowing smoke from the
barrels as he came on.

So that was it. The panic of the old horse had been but a simple
reaction to a couple of charges of--perhaps rock--salt. Merton Gill
hoped it had been nothing sterner. For the first time in his screen
career he became cynical about his art. A thing of shame, of
machinery, of subterfuge. Nothing would be real, perhaps not even
the art.

It is probable that lack of food conduced to this disparaging
outlook; and he recovered presently, for he had been smitten with a
quick vision of Beulah Baxter in one of her most daring exploits.
She, at least, was real. Deaf to entreaty, she honestly braved her
hazards. It was a comforting thought after this late exposure of a
sham.

In this slightly combative mood he retraced his steps and found
himself outside the High Gear Dance Hall, fortified for another
possible encounter with the inquiring and obviously sympathetic
Montague girl. He entered and saw that she was not on the set. The
bar-room dance-hall was for the moment deserted of its ribald crew
while an honest inhabitant of the open spaces on a balcony was
holding a large revolver to the shrinking back of one of the New
York men who had lately arrived by the stage. He forced this man,
who was plainly not honest, to descend the stairs and to sign, at a
table, a certain paper. Then, with weapon still in hand, the honest
Westerner forced the cowardly New Yorker in the direction of the
front door until they had passed out of the picture.

On this the bored director of the day before called loudly, "Now,
boys, in your places. You've heard a shot--you're running outside to
see what's the matter. On your toes, now--try it once." From rear
doors came the motley frequenters of the place, led by the elder
Montague.

They trooped to the front in two lines and passed from the picture.
Here they milled about, waiting for further orders.

"Rotten!" called the director. "Rotten and then some. Listen. You
came like a lot of children marching out of a public school. Don't
come in lines, break it up, push each other, fight to get ahead, and
you're noisy, too. You're shouting. You're saying, 'What's this?
What's it all about? What's the matter? Which way did he go?' Say
anything you want to, but keep shouting--anything at all. Say
'Thar's gold in them hills!' if you can't think of anything else. Go
on, now, boys, do it again and pep it, see. Turn the juice on, open
up the old mufflers."

The men went back through the rear doors. The late caller would here
have left, being fed up with this sort of stuff, but at that moment
he descried the Montague girl back behind a light-standard. She had
not noted him, but was in close talk with a man he recognized as
Jeff Baird, arch perpetrator of the infamous Buckeye comedies. They
came toward him, still talking, as he looked.

"We'll finish here to-morrow afternoon, anyway," the girl was
saying.

"Fine," said Baird. "That makes everything jake. Get over on the set
whenever you're through. Come over tonight if they don't shoot here,
just to give us a look-in."

"Can't," said the girl. "Soon as I get out o' this dump I got to eat
on the lot and everything and be over to Baxter's layout--she'll be
doing tank stuff till all hours--shipwreck and murder and all like
that. Gosh, I hope it ain't cold. I don't mind the water, but I
certainly hate to get out and wait in wet clothes while Sig
Rosenblatt is thinking about a retake."

"Well"--Baird turned to go--"take care of yourself--don't dive and
forget to come up. Come over when you're ready."

"Sure! S'long!" Here the girl, turning from Baird, noted Merton Gill
beside her. "Well, well, as I live, the actin' kid once more! Say,
you're getting to be a regular studio hound, ain't you?"

For the moment he had forgotten his troubles. He was burning to ask
her if Beulah Baxter would really work in a shipwreck scene that
night at the place where he had watched the carpenters and the men
on the sailboat; but as he tried to word this he saw that the girl
was again scanning him with keen eyes. He knew she would read the
collar, the beard, perhaps even a look of mere hunger that he
thought must now be showing.

"Say, see here, Trouper, what's the shootin' all about, anyway? You
up against it--yes." There was again in her eye the look of warm
concern, and she was no longer trying to be funny. He might now have
admitted a few little things about his screen career, but again the
director interrupted.

"Miss Montague--where are you? Oh! Well, remember you're behind the
piano during that gun play just now, and you stay hid till after the
boys get out. We'll shoot this time, so get set."

She sped off, with a last backward glance of questioning. He waited
but a moment before leaving. He was almost forgetting his hunger in
the pretty certain knowledge that in a few hours he would actually
behold his wonder-woman in at least one of her daring exploits.
Shipwreck! Perhaps she would be all but drowned. He hastened back to
the pool that had now acquired this high significance. The
carpenters were still puttering about on the scaffold. He saw that
platforms for the cameras had been built out from its side.

He noted, too, and was puzzled by an aeroplane propeller that had
been stationed close to one corner of the pool, just beyond the
stern of the little sailing-craft. Perhaps there would be an
aeroplane wreck in addition to a shipwreck. Now he had something
besides food to think of. And he wondered what the Montague girl
could be doing in the company of a really serious artist like Beulah
Baxter. From her own story she was going to get wet, but from what
he knew of her she would be some character not greatly missed from
the cast if she should, as Baird had suggested, dive and forget to
come up. He supposed that Baird had meant this to be humorous, the
humour typical of a man who could profane a great art with the
atrocious Buckeye comedies, so called.

He put in the hours until nightfall in aimless wandering and idle
gazing, and was early at the pool-side where his heroine would do
her sensational acting. It was now a scene of thrilling activity.
Immense lights, both from the scaffolding and from a tower back of
the sailing-craft, flooded its deck and rigging from time to time as
adjustments were made. The rigging was slack and the deck was still
littered, intentionally so, he now perceived. The gallant little
boat had been cruelly buffeted by a gale. Two sailors in piratical
dress could be seen to emerge at intervals from the cabin.

Suddenly the gale was on with terrific force, the sea rose in great
waves, and the tiny ship rocked in a perilous manner. Great billows
of water swept its decks. Merton Gill stared in amazement at these
phenomena so dissonant with the quiet starlit night. Then he traced
them without difficulty to their various sources. The gale issued
from the swift revolutions of that aeroplane propeller he had
noticed a while ago. The flooding billows were spilled from the big
tank at the top of the scaffold and the boat rocked in obedience to
the tugging of a rope--tugged from the shore by a crew of helpers--
that ran to the top of its mast. Thus had the storm been produced.

A spidery, youngish man from one of the platforms built out from the
scaffold, now became sharply vocal through a megaphone to assistants
who were bending the elements to the need of this particular hazard
of Hortense. He called directions to the men who tugged the rope, to
the men in control of the lights, and to another who seemed to
create the billows. Among other items he wished more action for the
boat and more water for the billows. "See that your tank gets full-
up this time," he called, whereupon an engine under the scaffold, by
means of a large rubber hose reaching into the pool, began to suck
water into the tank above.

The speaker must be Miss Baxter's director, the enviable personage
who saw her safely through her perils. When one of the turning
reflectors illumined him Merton saw his face of a keen Semitic type.
He seemed to possess not the most engaging personality; his manner
was aggressive, he spoke rudely to his doubtless conscientious
employees, he danced in little rages of temper, and altogether he
was not one with whom the watcher would have cared to come in
contact. He wondered, indeed, that so puissant a star as Beulah
Baxter should not be able to choose her own director, for surely the
presence of this unlovely, waspishly tempered being could be nothing
but an irritant in the daily life of the wonder-woman. Perhaps she
had tolerated him merely for one picture. Perhaps he was especially
good in shipwrecks.

If Merton Gill were in this company he would surely have words with
this person, director or no director. He hastily wrote a one-reel
scenario in which the man so far forgot himself as to speak sharply
to the star, and in which a certain young actor, a new member of the
company, resented the ungentlemanly words by pitching the offender
into a convenient pool and earned even more than gratitude from the
starry-eyed wonder-woman.

The objectionable man continued active, profuse of gesture and loud
through the megaphone. Once more the storm. The boat rocked
threateningly, the wind roared through its slack rigging, and giant
billows swept the frail craft. Light as from a half-clouded moon
broke through the mist that issued from a steam pipe. There was
another lull, and the Semitic type on the platform became
increasingly offensive. Merton saw himself saying, "Allow me, Miss
Baxter, to relieve you of the presence of this bounder." The man was
impossible. Constantly he had searched the scene for his heroine.
She would probably not appear until they were ready to shoot, and
this seemed not to be at once if the rising temper of the director
could be thought an indication.