He frowned in distress, seeing that things were to be even worse than he had feared. “You don’t mean that. Ever since Britain went to war you’ve been wanting the States to go in on the side of the Allies. You’ve talked of little else at times. You must have realised that when it did happen I would serve my country. I couldn’t stand aside.”
She seemed to be following her own line of thought. “I would have left the tour if I’d known you had joined up. I could have been near the camp. We could have had time together that you have thrown away.” Suddenly she screamed out hysterically in anguish and hurled herself at him with beating fists. “You bastard!”
It took all his strength to subdue her. She was like a wildcat and they struggled until they fell to the floor together. Then she lay sobbing forlornly, a forearm across her eyes, the tears rolling down into the carpet. He spoke soothingly to her.
“The war can’t last long now. Who knows? It may be over before I set foot in France.”
Her voice was choked. “When do you sail?”
“We have seven days and seven nights together, honey. Let’s make sweet memories out of them.” He took hold of her wrist and drew her arm gently away from her face. She ‘glanced up at him with a melting look of love in a frame of lashes aglitter with the still rolling tears.
“Let’s begin then, Risto darling,” she whispered tremulously, her lips soft and moist. “I’ve missed you so much.”
He threw off his uniform and it fell everywhere. When he buried his mouth and his heart and his flesh in her on the discarded negligee and the soft carpet, her response was ecstatic. Later he scooped her up in his arms and carried her through to the bed. Apart from their having the champagne dinner in the suite instead of going out, everything was as she had anticipated and they revelled in each other. Both were of the opinion that no man and woman had ever been more perfectly matched than they. Their loving shut out the whole world for the time that was left to them.
When the troopship sailed out of New York Harbour, bands played on the quayside and flags waved. Risto watched from the rails until Minnie’s courageously smiling face became a pale blur and finally dissolved into the mass of the crowd seeing the ship on its way. Their last moments had been intruded upon by a photographer who had recognised her, and his flashlight had attracted the attention of other people around them. Some had even pushed between them for her autograph. At least no outsider had been able to intrude on the farewell of love they had conveyed in their eyes to each other. That had been theirs alone.
Now he had to look ahead to the job that had to be done. For him it was to be behind an army newsreel camera on the battlefields. He was to film tragedy instead of comedy, courage instead of slapstick, and the landing of shells instead of custard pies.
The skyline was drawing away. As the Statue of Liberty slid past the troopship, Risto was not alone in saluting her. After all, that statue symbolised the reason for his going to war. He wondered how long it would be before he saw the torch of liberty again. Soon there was nothing visible on the horizon; the country of his birth gone beyond the ocean’s rim and the woman he loved with it.
*
Alan was nine weeks in hospital before the full use of his legs returned to him. After that he was given two months’ sick leave and Lisa fetched him home to the apartment. He began to do some work in the office and she did not discourage him, seeing that he needed to occupy his mind and his time.
She was in her own office at the other cinema one afternoon when there came a knock on the door. Writing at her desk, she answered automatically, without looking up: “Come in.”
Somebody entered. “Hi, Lisa. Remember me?”
She sat back in her chair and stared with astonished recognition at the young, good-looking Yankee soldier standing there. “Risto!” she exclaimed in delighted disbelief. “I can’t believe it! How wonderful to see you.” She sprang up to come around her desk where they hugged each other in greeting. “I had no idea you were in the Army or that you were in Europe, but then the last time I heard from Minnie was when she was setting off on a fund-raising tour.”
“That’s when I volunteered for the Army. She didn’t know about it until I met her in New York on my embarkation leave. I guess I should have forewarned her, but parting was going to be hell whichever way I did it. Looking back now, I don’t know how either of us survived saying goodbye.”
“Oh, poor dear Minnie. Where is she now?”
“Back in Hollywood making a new motion picture. Richard Barthelmess is tipped as her leading man. I told her I’d get to London to see you as soon as I could.”
“You’re most welcome now that you’re here. You will stay with us, won’t you?”
“I’d be glad to. Your husband has invited me already. He told me where to find you when I went to the other movie house first.”
She heaved a sigh of pleasure. “It does me good to hear an American voice again. I always wish I could hear Minnie’s voice when she’s on the screen. Alan says that one day sound will be linked to film.”
“Do you miss the States, Lisa?”
She leaned back against the desk and looked down at her hands, absently twisting one of her rings. “I miss it. I miss the people I knew there. But it was right for Alan and me to leave when we did. If we hadn’t, he would have come away to the war in August 1914, and I wouldn’t have been here when he needed me. Sometimes things work out for the best, although we don’t realise it at the time.”
“I hope you’ll come and visit us in California when this war is over.
“I’d love to do that.”
“That’s a date then!”
Risto spent the whole of his furlough with Alan and Lisa. She took time off to show him the sights of London and secured seats for the best musical shows. He bought far too much candy for Harry and Catherine, who found him good company. He was often on his knees helping Harry lay out his train set or mending a particular doll for Catherine, a favourite of hers with a tendency to lose its arms from their sockets. There was lots of motion-picture talk between Alan and him, and when there were reminiscences of the old days at Dekova’s Place, many private memories were stirred poignantly for Lisa. On Risto’s last night in London she and Alan gave a party for him and some of his buddies, who were also in town. She made sure that she invited enough pretty girls of her acquaintance to go around, and there was dancing until the early hours of the morning.
Lisa, Alan, and the children all went to see him off at Victoria Station. He shook hands with Alan and Harry and kissed Lisa and Catherine. “I’ve had a swell time. You folks have been wonderful to me.”
“Come back whenever you can,” Alan said, and Lisa endorsed the invitation with a smiling nod.
“I will. Thanks again! Goodbye!”
The train bore him smiling and waving away from them. They were never to see him again. He was killed some months later in Lorraine and the news came in a letter written by one of his comrades who had been at the party. Lisa gave way to a terrible grief. It was as if something had snapped in her. She wept for the waste of a talented life and for Minnie deprived of the love of a lifetime. By now Alan had been invalided out of the Army as a result of his wounds, and so was able to be with her at a time when she was greatly in need of his presence and comfort.
It was probably due to her run-down state that she, normally so resilient, fell victim to the influenza that had begun to sweep Europe and America like a scourge. With the Germans in full retreat and the war nearing its end, the epidemic took a further terrible toll of lives. In a large hotel across the street from the cinema, coffins were carried out by night in order not to distress the other guests. In the apartment, Lisa lay delirious and had to be nursed night and day. The harassed doctor became increasingly grave when he visited her. He did what little he could before hurrying off to his other patients, many of them dying before he could get there.
Alan sat constantly at Lisa’s bedside and held her hands in her calmer moments, b
ut mostly she tossed about restlessly, her dilated eyes not seeing him, her mind in the throes of fever. She was bathed constantly with cool water to try to reduce her temperature, but nothing appeared to aid her. It seemed as if he was to lose her, and vainly he tried to will some of his own strength into her.
Then one morning she was very quiet and still. The nurse gave Alan a reassuring smile. “She’s sleeping, Mr. Fernley. The worst is over. She’s going to pull through.” Then, seeing him cover his eyes with his hands, she withdrew from the bedroom tactfully, realising he would wish to be alone with his wife in his thankfulness.
There was a murmur from the bed. He leaned forward quickly to catch what was said. “What did you say, darling?” “Those bells. Why are the bells ringing?”
“The war is over. An armistice has been signed.”
She whispered again. He smiled at her simple request, rising from the chair to go to the door and call Harry to tell him what his stepmother wanted. The boy nodded seriously, and when he came back into the bedroom he brought a Union Jack to her bedside.
“Here you are, Mama,” he said, putting it into her hand. “It’s the flag you wanted to wave.”
“Thank you,” she sighed. “Oh, thank you.”
Outside all the bells of London continued their jubilant chimes.
Thirteen
Lisa watched her children grow. And she saw Alan go from strength to strength in the cinema sphere. It was due in no small part to her having had the foresight to acquire the second cinema and to invest shortly afterwards in a couple of plots of land in two other areas that had been going at a low price. Had she not made these purchases at the right time, enabling Alan to start building as business continued to flourish, he would have had to wait several more years to acquire anything similar. Her former assistant, Reginald Hardy, had returned from the war minus his left arm, and Lisa kept her promise by seeing he was duly installed as manager in the original Fernley cinema. Maudie had married a sailor, but as he was in the regular Navy and would continue to be at sea, she was glad to stay on as nursemaid to Catherine, though Harry, long since independent of her, was now in boarding school.
Seven-piece orchestras now accompanied the movies. Vocalists were hired to synchronise their voices to any singing taking place soundlessly on the screen, such as Risto had done occasionally in Mae Remotti’s hall. Sometimes the enthusiastic applause merited a rerun of that particular section of reel as an encore. Lisa supervised the booking of films as she had always done, and the Fernley cinemas could be counted on by patrons for a good programme and full money’s worth. Lisa always included a serial, those with Pearl White still being extremely popular. There was always a regretful shout of “Oh!” from the audiences when the words To Be Continued left the heroine clinging to a cliff top or tied to a railway track or in some other dire predicament.
Although Mary Pickford was everybody’s sweetheart, Minnie began to emerge as a star in her own right. It seemed to Lisa that the loss of Risto had given a new and poignant quality to her acting, her expressive face reflecting light and shade as subtly as when wind-blown clouds let sunshine come and go. Her visage dominated posters and lobby cards, bringing in the patrons to see her star with such leading men as Gilbert and Barrymore and Navarro.
For a long time after Risto’s death, Minnie did not reply to any of Lisa’s letters. When at last she did begin to write again all the exuberance had gone from them. They were never the same again. It was disquieting to Lisa when gradually Minnie’s name began to appear in the gossip columns. When she married a film producer, Lisa had hopes that her friend was finding some happiness again, but before the year was out they were divorced.
Lisa always made sure of booking an exceptional movie for the opening night of a Fernley cinema. It was her hard bargaining that had enabled Alan to open his first specially built cinema with The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. She had previously noticed a striking-looking actor named Rudolph Valentino in minor roles, and was sure that his first important movie was destined to be a big success. It exceeded even her estimation. Return bookings of it had to be made immediately and there followed the extraordinary phenomena of hundreds of women of all ages everywhere queuing for any cinema showing Valentino films. They moaned and sighed and wept and cried out when he danced the tango with a sensuality that almost made the screen burn. When he appeared in The Sheik and the rest of his romantic roles, the sexual excitement he created seemed to permeate the very air of the cinema and affected the most staid matrons. After his death, many women came to see his movies in black with mourning veils. They sobbed openly, and once Lisa had to attend to a woman who had thrown herself prostrate on the floor by the screen.
It was a great day for Lisa when a Fernley cinema opened in Leeds. She arranged that the children of the orphanage should attend a special matinee and afterwards a tea with a gift beside each plate in the cinema’s tearooms. Mrs. Bradlaw, who stubbornly refused to retire as principal, was Lisa’s special guest at the opening performance.
It was while Lisa was in Leeds engaged in sharing Alan’s work that she and Mrs. Bradlaw evolved a fund-raising plan to re-house the children of the orphanage, for the bleak, damp building belonged to a past era that had vanished with the workhouse and was no place for a new, post-war generation. For quite a time now Lisa had had groups of the children for summer holidays in the country air at Maple House which she and Alan had established as their permanent home. With faster motor cars and better roads, communication was far easier, although they still kept an apartment in London to give them the proximity essential to much of their work.
It was shortly after the opening in Leeds that Lisa had her hair bobbed. Although Alan did not care for it at first, he had to admit that the short style suited her and eventually he became accustomed to it. She liked the sensation of freedom it gave her, for it echoed the new clothes that were so easy to wear. Her hips were slim enough to take the dropped waistline that rested there, her slender legs shapely enough to be enhanced by the short skirts. Although she was in her mid-thirties, she looked like a girl in the head-hugging hats and wrap-around coats. Frequently at parties she was approached by much younger men, who thought she was unattached, and had no idea that Alan Fernley was her husband.
She and Alan had come home from one such party to their apartment to find Harry waiting for them. He was seventeen and, in their absence, had arrived home from school at the end of term. They welcomed him and Lisa made the usual maternal inquiries as to whether he had eaten and how he thought his exams had gone.
“I want to talk to you both,” he said very seriously.
Lisa sat down at once to listen, the chiffon points of her skirt floating into place. She thought father and son made a handsome pair, Alan in his dinner jacket, Harry casually dressed after changing from the dark suit made compulsory wear by his somewhat grand public school.
“Go ahead,” Alan said, lighting a cigar. Neither his wife nor his son smoked and it was only the fragrant aroma of his cigar that drifted across the room.
“I want to join the Fernley circuit of cinemas,” Harry stated on an unnecessary fierce note of determination as if immediately refusing to brook any opposition. “I know it’s been your wish that I should go on to university and all the rest of it, but that’s not for me. I was practically raised in a cinema and that’s where my interest lies.”
He stood there, broad-shouldered and tall and healthy with the black curly hair, good features and strong chin that he had inherited from his father. In his sunny disposition he was more like the mother whom he had never known and there was a look of her across his dark eyes. Lisa viewed him with pride. He had always been to her as her own flesh and blood. If she had regrets about other actions in her life, she had never once had second thoughts about the rightness of having kept her promise to Harriet. Although she had not looked for compensation, it had been there in his loving regard for her, the solid relationship they shared, and in all the joy she had had in his chi
ldhood.
Alan was less than pleased by the announcement that had been made. It was his natural wish that his son should enter the family business, but he had wanted the lad to broaden his horizons educationally before going into a career that had no set hours on the executive side and often meant a long working day that excluded much relaxation.
“You’ve thought it out carefully, have you?” he demanded.
“Yes, sir. I’d like to start as assistant to Reginald Hardy. I can learn about the organisation of a small cinema from him before I move ahead to manage one of the bigger places on my own.”
“That’s what you’ve planned, have you?” Alan said sharply. “I can tell you now that it won’t be like that at all. You’ll start at the bottom and you’ll work your way up. There’ll be no favours from your mother or from me. Neither shall there be from anybody else because you happen to have the surname of Fernley. Understand?”
“Whatever you say.” Harry did not look in the least dismayed. It was enough that his father had virtually agreed that he should follow the career he wanted without further delay.
“Very well. You shall start next Monday at The Fernley in Kilburn as a cleaner.” Alan ignored Lisa’s involuntary, half-protesting gasp. “How does that suit you?”
Harry’s eyes twinkled and he grinned widely. “I’ve had plenty of experience in polishing the brass handles of the entrance doors.” It was true. As a boy he had often given a helping hand to Billy Morris who had kept the handles as bright as the buttons on his commissionaire’s uniform. “I think I should do well in my first appointment.”
Alan’s severe expression relaxed into an answering grin and he shook hands with his son. “Then welcome into the Fernley circuit, Harry. Let’s see how quickly you’re able to earn promotion.”
Lisa was happy that everything had been resolved with such amiability. She had no idea then how thankful she was to be a year later that Harry had made his decision to join the business at that particular time, for when she was prevented from giving Alan her constant support his son was able to take her place.
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