“Well, yes, dear, but isn’t it a little hard on him?”
“Oh, rubbish, it won’t hurt him, he’ll go off and put it into sonnets—he’s doing it already, and maybe he’ll get to be famous, and it’d be great publicity! Don’t you bother about him, Bunny, and don’t bother about me; there’s nobody in the world for me but my Bunny-rabbit—all the rest is just a joke.” And she put her arms about him. “I know what it is to be jealous, dear, and I wouldn’t cause you that unhappiness for anything in the world. If you really mind, you can send old Applesauce packing, and I won’t be cross.”
Bunny laughed. “I can’t do that, I’ve got to be tutored.”
Vee told Dad about it, too—lest he should be having any vicarious pangs. When Dad heard about the falling on the knees and the tears, he chuckled. Bunny would get the contents of the tutor’s mind, and Vee would get the contents of his heart, and they would send him home like a squeezed orange. It appealed to Dad as good business. Back in Paradise, you remember, he was hiring a chemical wizard, paying him six thousand a year, and making millions out of him!
XI
There came another development, to protect Vee from the possibility of boredom. Schmolsky sent her up the “continuity” of the new picture upon which she was to start work in the fall. And then suddenly it was revealed that the world’s darling knew how to read! For a whole hour she sat buried in it, and then she leaped up, ready to start rehearsing—and all the hurricanes that ever swept the province of Ontario were as nothing to the one that came now. Clear the way for The Princess of Patchouli!
It was a popular musical comedy which was to be made into a moving picture. “Patchouli” was one of the little Balkan kingdoms, though it looked and acted very much like Vienna of the Strauss waltzes. A young American engineer came in to build a railroad, and found himself mistaken for a conspirator, and presently he was rescuing the lovely princess from a revolutionary band—no Bolsheviks, these were aristocratic array conspirators, so Bunny wouldn’t have his feelings hurt, would he? Of course the hero carried her off, married her for love only, and then got the kingdom thrown in—the bankers who were financing the railroad bought it for him.
So here was Vee, being a princess all over the place. It was amazing to watch her work—Bunny suddenly came to realize that her success hadn’t been all money and sex, after all. She pounced onto the role like a tiger-cat, and when she got going the rest of the world ceased to exist—except to the extent that she needed it for a foil. “Now, Dad, you’re the king; you walk in here—no, no, for God’s sake, kings don’t walk so fast! And I have to fall at your feet, and plead for his life, ‘Oh, mercy sire, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so!’ ”
It is one of the peculiarities of motion picture acting that it doesn’t matter what you say, so long as you are saying something; so Vee would weep, “And so-and-so,” and she would croon “And so-and-so” in passionate love-accents to either Bunny or Apple, and she would shriek “And so-and-so” in deadly terror to an executioner with uplifted axe. And if in the course of the scene the other person didn’t do it right, then scolding and commands would serve equally well for a love-song, “Hold it, now, you idiot, I adore you, darling”—or maybe it might be, “Take your hands off me, foul beast—don’t let go, you goose, grab! That’s better, you don’t have to be polite when you’re a murderer.”
If Bunny had wanted to rehearse tempestouous emotions, and shriek and scream and tear his hair, he would have sought refuge in the woods, where only the chipmunks could have heard him. But Vee was utterly indifferent to the existence of other humans. That is something one learns on “the lot”; for there will be cameramen and scene-shifters, and property-boys, and carpenters working on the next set, and some visitors that have managed to break in despite the strictest regulations—and you just go on with your work. The first time the executioner lifted his axe and Vee started screaming, the Indian guides came running in alarm; but she hardly stopped even for a laugh, she went on with the scene, while they stood staring with mouths wide open. She and her two lovers would come in from swimming, and suddenly she would call for a rehearsal of some royal pageantry—she could be a princess just as well in a scanty bathing suit, with a carpet of pine-needles under her bare feet.
Mr. Appleton Laurence had never met any princesses, but he had read a great deal of history and poetry, and so he was an authority, and must criticise her way of walking, her gestures, her attitudes, her reaction to the love-advances of a handsome young American engineer. “Just imagine you’re in love with me yourself, Appie,” she would say—and so his emotions became sublimated into art, and he could pour out his soul to her, right before Bunny and Dad and Dad’s secretary and the Indians! “You’re much better at it than Bunny,” she would declare. “I believe he’s got used to me, it’s as bad as if we were married.”
So the time passed pleasantly. Until at last Vee had got to feel perfectly at home in her Appie’s conception of royalty; she no longer had to ask questions, nor to stop and think, but knew instantly what to do—and forever after, in all her entrances to and exits from Hollywood society, she would be a little of a Harvard instructor’s Princess of Patchouli. She was impatient now, wanting to
