"Thanks," he said, "but I want to enjoy the last--it--it has so much flavour.""It has; it has, indeed. I'll not urge you, of course. Later you must see the simple mechanism by which I work these wonders. Alone, then, I drink to you."Mr. Montague alone drank of two other fruits of his loom before the ladies appeared with dinner. He was clean--shaven now and his fine face glowed with hospitality as he carved roast chickens. The talk was of the shop: of what Mr. Montague scornfully called "grind shows" when his daughter led it, and of the legitimate hall-show when he gained the leadership. He believed that moving pictures had sounded the knell of true dramatic art and said so in many ways.
He tried to imagine the sensations of Lawrence Barrett or Louis James could they behold Sylvester Montague, whom both these gentlemen had proclaimed to be no mean artist, enacting the role of a bar-room rowdy five days on end by reclining upon a sawdust floor with his back supported by a spirits barrel. The supposititious comments of the two placed upon the motion-picture industry the black guilt of having degraded a sterling artist to the level of a peep-show mountebank. They were frankly disgusted at the spectacle, and their present spokesman thought it as well that they had not actually lived to witness it--even the happier phases of this so-called art in which a mere chit of a girl might earn a living wage by falling downstairs for a so-called star, or the he-doll whippersnapper--Merton Gill flinched in spite of himself--could name his own salary for merely possessing a dimpled chin.
Further, an artist in the so-called art received his payment as if he had delivered groceries at one's back door. "You, I believe--"--The speaker addressed his guest--"are at present upon a pay-roll;but there are others, your elders-possibly your betters, though I do not say that--""You better not," remarked his daughter, only to be ignored.
"--others who must work a day and at the close of it receive a slip of paper emblazoned 'Talent Pay Check.' How more effectively could they cheapen the good word 'talent'? And at the foot of this slip you are made to sign, before receiving the pittance you have earned, a consent to the public exhibition for the purpose of trade or advertising, of the pictures for which you may have posed. Could tradesmen descend to a lower level, I ask you?""I'll have one for twelve fifty to-morrow night," said Mrs.
Montague, not too dismally. "I got to do a duchess at a reception, and I certainly hope my feet don't hurt me again.""Cheer up, old dears! Pretty soon you can both pick your parts,"chirped their daughter. "Jeff's going to give me a contract, and then you can loaf forever for all I care. Only I know you won't, and you know you won't. Both of you'd act for nothing if you couldn't do it for money. What's the use of pretending?""The chit may be right, she may be right," conceded Mr. Montague sadly.
Later, while the ladies were again in the kitchen, Mr. Montague, after suggesting, "Something in the nature of an after-dinner cordial," quaffed one for himself and followed it with the one he had poured out for a declining guest who still treasured the flavour of his one aperitif.
He then led the way to the small parlour where he placed in action on the phonograph a record said to contain the ravings of John McCullough in his last hours. He listened to this emotionally.
"That's the sort of technique," he said, "that the so--called silver screen has made but a memory." He lighted his pipe, and identified various framed photographs that enlivened the walls of the little room. Many of them were of himself at an earlier age.
"My dear mother-in-law," he said, pointing to another. "A sterling artist, and in her time an ornament of the speaking stage. I was on tour when her last days came. She idolized me, and passed away with my name on her lips. Her last request was that a photograph of me should be placed in her casket before it went to its final resting place."He paused, his emotion threatening to overcome him. Presently he brushed a hand across his eyes and continued, "I discovered later that they had picked out the most wretched of all my photographs--an atrocious thing I had supposed was destroyed. Can you imagine it?"Apparently it was but the entrance of his daughter that saved him from an affecting collapse. His daughter removed the record of John McCullough's ravings, sniffed at it, and put a fox-trot in its place.
"He's got to learn to dance," she explained, laying hands upon the guest.
"Dancing--dancing!" murmured Mr. Montague, as if the very word recalled bitter memories.
With brimming eyes he sat beating time to the fox-trot measure while Merton Gill proved to all observers that his mastery of this dance would, if ever at all achieved, be only after long and discouraging effort.
"You forget all about your feet," remarked the girl as they paused, swaying to the rhythm. "Remember the feet--they're important in a dance. Now!--" But it was hard to remember his feet or, when he did recall them, to relate their movements even distantly to the music.
When this had died despairingly, the girl surveyed her pupil with friendly but doubting eyes.
"Say, Pa, don't he remind you of someone? Remember the squirrel that joined out with us one time in the rep show and left 'East Lynne'
