“So this is Mr. Ross!” Her “speakie” was a queer little high treble. “Papa has told me so much about you!” (Papa was Mr. Roscoe.) “I’m so glad to have you here, and do make yourself at home. Do whatever you please, for this is liberty hall.” Bunny recalled the caption—but was it from Hearts of Steel, or from The Maid of the Manor?
“And here is Harve,” the mistress of the manor was saying. “Oh, Harve, come here, this is Bunny Ross; Harvey Manning. It’s the first time Mr. Ross has been here, and please be nice to him so he’ll come back. He’s going to college, and reads a lot and knows everything, and we’re going to seem so ignorant and frivolous!”
Harvey Manning was coming in through one of the French windows which took the place of the stations of the cross in this cathedral. He was walking slowly, and did not increase his pace; he talked slowly also, a dry sort of drawl—having never had to hurry, because he came of one of the old families of the state. He had a queer, ugly face, with a great many wrinkles, and Bunny never was clear whether he was old or young. “Hello, Ross,” he said, “pleased-to-meecher. I got an uncle that’s spending a hundred thousand dollars to put you in jail.”
“Is that so?” said Bunny, a trifle startled.
“Sure thing! He’s nuts on this red-hunting business, and the pinks are worse than the reds, he says. I’ve been worried about you.”
“Never mind,” said Bunny, perceiving that this was a josh, such as helps to make life tolerable for idle men, young and old. “Dad will spend two hundred thousand and get me out again.”
“Come to think of it, I guess Verne would chip in—wouldn’t he, Annabelle?”
“None of my guests ever stay in jail,” replied the star.
“They phone to Papa, and he phones to the chief of police, who lets them out right away.”
She said this without smiling; and Harvey Manning remarked, “You see, Ross, Annabelle has a literal mind.”
IV
Yes, that was the truth about this bright luminary of the screen, as Bunny came to observe it; she had a literal mind. All the poetry and romance the public imagined about her—that was in the public’s eye, so to say. All that Annabelle had to contribute was a youthful figure and a pliable face; the highly paid directors did the rest. She produced pictures as a matter of business, and her talk was of production costs, and percentages on foreign sales, just as if it had been an oil well. That was why she got along with Vernon Roscoe, who also had a literal mind. A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose was to him, and to Annabelle it was a decoration for an “interior,” or a background on “location.”
There was a certain grim honesty about this, as Bunny discovered; it was Annabelle’s desire to be an actress rather than a mistress. “By Jees,” Verne would proclaim to his guests, “it’s cost me eight million dollars to make a movie queen out of this baby.” And the thirty year old baby had the dream that some day she would achieve a masterpiece, that would earn this eight million and vindicate her honor. Meantime, she paid installments by taking care of Verne—so publicly that it was quite touching, and respectable according to the strictest bourgeois standards. If the oil magnate had ever had the idea that in taking to his bosom a movie star he was going to lead a wild and roystering life, he had made a sad mistake, for he was the most henpecked of all “butter and egg men.”
“Now, Papa,” Annabelle would say, “you’ve had enough to drink. Put that down.” She would say it before a company assembled in their gladdest rags for a dinner-party; and Verne would protest, “My God, baby, I ain’t got started yet!”
“Well, you stop before you start tonight. Remember what Doctor Wilkins says about your liver.”
Verne would bluster, “To hell with livers!” and the answer would be, “Now, Papa, you told me to make you obey! Have I got to make you ashamed before all this company?”
“Me ashamed? I’d like to see anybody make me ashamed!”
“Well, Papa, you know you’ll be ashamed if I tell what you said to me the last time you were drunk.”
Verne paused, with his glass halfway in the air, trying to remember; and the company burst into clamor, “Oh, tell us! Tell us!”
“Shall I tell them, Papa?” It was a bluff, for Annabelle was very prim, and never indulged in vulgarity. But the bluff went, and the great man set down his glass. “I surrender! Take the stuff away.” Whereat everybody applauded, and it gave the party a merry start.
Strange as it might seem, Annabelle was a pious Catholic. Just how she managed to fix things up with her priests Bunny never knew, but she gave freely to charity, and you would find her featured at benefits for Catholic orphan asylums and things of that sort. At the same time her little head was as full of superstitions as an old Negro mammy. She would not have started a picture on a Friday for the whole of Vernon’s eight million dollar endowment. When you spilled the salt, she not merely advised you to throw some
