“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
