The policeman, Malone, had known nothing. Two dames, and he had hustled ’em, you betcha. One of them was sore. Which one? One of them. They had a car, a Chevy – he thought of taking the license. Was it – the good-looker who was sore? It was one of them.
Not which one – he had noticed nothing. Even on the lot here Minna was forgotten. In three years. So much for that, then.
Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it – finally emerging as what it was: a smile of kindness – sometimes a little hurried and tired, but always there – toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult, aggressive and outright.
Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged, though no one apparently had a hand on him[50]. He stood in front of a chair, and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation, one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.
Stahr looked at him courteously.
“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”
The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.
“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal, but with a faint two-edged deference.
“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent, but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say, but they spoil it – they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”
“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.
“I have. I sent you some.”
“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”
Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said:
“I don’t think you people read things. The men are duelling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.”
He barked again and subsided.
“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”
“What? Naturally not.”
“You’d consider it too cheap.”
“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley, hedging.
“Do you ever go to them?”
“No – almost never.”
“Isn’t it because people are always duelling and falling down wells?”
“Yes – and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.”
“Skip the dialogue for a minute,” said Stahr. “Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write – that’s why we brought you out here. But let’s imagine something that isn’t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?”
“I think it has,” said Boxley stiffly, “ – but I never use it.”
“Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting duels or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring – dull, like we all get sometimes[51]. A pretty scenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her – idly. She doesn’t see you, though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table —”
Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.
“She has two dimes and a nickel – and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickel on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window – but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello – listens – and says deliberately into the phone, ‘I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.’ She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match, you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes —”
Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.
“Go on,” said Boxley smiling. “What happens?”
“I don’t know,” said Stahr. “I was just making pictures.”
Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong[52].
“It’s just melodrama,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” said Stahr. “In any case, nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested.”
“What was the nickel for?” asked Boxley evasively.
“I don’t know,” said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed. “Oh, yes – the nickel was for the movies.”
The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“What in hell do you pay me for?” he demanded. “I don’t understand the damn stuff.”
“You will,” said Stahr grinning, “or you wouldn’t have asked about the nickel.”
A dark saucer-eyed man was waiting in the outer office as they came out.
“Mr. Boxley, this is Mr. Mike Van Dyke,” Stahr said. “What is it, Mike?”
“Nothing,” Mike said. “I just came up to see if you were real.”
“Why don’t you go to work?” Stahr said. “I haven’t had a laugh in the rushes for days.[53]”
“I’m afraid of a nervous breakdown.”
“You ought to keep in form,” Stahr said. “Let’s see you peddle your stuff .” He turned to Boxley: “Mike’s a gag-man[54] – he was out here when I was in the cradle. Mike, show Mr. Boxley a double wing, clutch, kick and scram.”
“Here?” asked Mike.
“Here.”
“There isn’t much room. I wanted to ask you about —”
“There’s lot of room.”
“Well,” he looked around tentatively. “You shoot the gun.”
Miss Doolan’s assistant, Katy, took a paper bag, blew it open.
“It was a routine,” Mike said to Boxley, “ – back in the Keystone days.” He turned to Stahr: “Does he know what a routine is?”
“It means an act,” Stahr explained. “Georgie Jessel talks about ‘Lincoln’s Gettysburg routine’[55].”
Katy poised the neck of the blown-up bag in her mouth. Mike stood with his back to her.
“Ready?” Katy asked. She brought her hands down on the side. Immediately Mike grabbed his bottom with both hands, jumped in the air, slid his feet out on the floor one after the other, remaining in place and flapping his arms twice like a bird —
“Double wing,” said Stahr.
– and then ran out the screen door which the office boy held open for him and disappeared past the window of the balcony.
“Mr. Stahr,” said Miss Doolan, “Mr. Hanson is on the phone from New York.”
Ten minutes later he clicked his dictograph, and Miss Doolan came in. There was a male star waiting to see him in the outer office, Miss Doolan said.
“Tell him I went out by the balcony,” Stahr advised her.
“All right. He’s been in four times this week. He seems very anxious.”
“Did he give you any hint[56] of what he wanted? Isn’t it something he can see Mr. Brady about?”
“He didn’t say. You have a conference coming up.
53
I haven’t had a laugh in the rushes for days. – (
55
Lincoln’s Gettysburg routine – имеется в виду знаменитая речь Абрахама Линкольна в 1863 г. в Геттисберге, Пенсильвания, в которой он говорил о солдатах Гражданской войны, погибших за правое дело