“If you had ever read them at all,” said Keene dryly, “you’d see they do that, anyhow.”
A few minutes later the president sent for Reever Keene.
“Take a cigar, Reever,” he said genially. “Now, we’ll have to cut out this fussing between you and Bob, see? He’s a damned good director; I’m not paying him twenty-five thousand dollars for nothing.”
“Let him mind his own business, then,” said Keene, a little white around the jaw. “I’ve got a good picture, and he’s not to spoil it.”
“Sure not,” agreed the president affably. “But see here, now. He’s contracted to put out your pictures, ain’t he? All right. And he’s got the say.”
“In other words,” said Keene slowly, “I’ll have to stand for his directing in this picture, eh?”
“Sure. His contract is up in three months. If you want, I’ll put you in charge of your own directing after that.”
“Then stop work on this picture until he’s out of it.”
“Can’t do it; Reeve—we’re a week behind on the next release, and it’s got to be rushed. That’s why I’m putting it up to. you straight to work in with him now, and we’ll work in with you later, see?”
Reever Keene nodded curtly.
“I’ll try,” he said. “But—I won’t promise.”
“The hell he won’t!” laughed the president later, when he was recounting the conversation to the director. “Like the rest of them—throwing a big bluff so he can strut around the Screen Club and tell how he handed it to me! Well, that’s one way of managing these here stars, believe me! This guy’s getting more money than the President of these here United States. Is he going to chuck his job?”
“Not him,” said the director confidently. “Besides, he’s under contract to us, and if he broke the contract—”
“He’d be finished, absolutely!” declared the president. “He’s no fool!”
The president was playing both ends against the middle, which is a wise game—sometimes.
IV
Reever Keene had been too long in the movie game, and was taking too much money out of it, to have any artistic temperament—that is, when he was on the lot. Movie folk have to keep their temperament out of business.
Still, when Keene saw what his director was doing to the abalone-pin story, and realized that he could not prevent its being done, he boiled with inward and suffocating rage. After three days he was so stifled with fury that he was ready for an outbreak.
He had put Jim Bleeker into that story, and when he saw how the director was handling Jim Bleeker, despite all protests, his fury became white-hot.
On the fourth morning he drove to the studio without opening his private mail. Once in his dressing-room, he glanced over the letters while he was making up; but, for him, that mail resolved itself into just one letter. He propped it in front of him and read it over again:
Dear Mr. Larrigan:
Within a few days I am leaving for Europe to take part in reconstruction work. I could not leave without writing you to express anew my very deep appreciation of all your thoughtful kindness to Jim. I know from his letters what your friendship meant to him, and I have learned from other comrades of your great devotion toward the end. Thanks seem but a little thing to offer; yet, believe me, my thanks and appreciation come from the soul.
I know nothing of your financial position or status in civil life, and I do not wish you to think that I am insulting so deep and pure a thing as your friendship with Jim. However, I am enclosing a card from my attorneys, who are fully instructed to honor it in any way. If you should ever be in need of advice or aid, it will give me great happiness to know that you will make use of this card as though it had been handed you by your friend,
Jim Bleeker
“Bless her sweet heart,” muttered Reever Keene, tearing the card across and tossing it into his waste-basket. He smiled a little, as he thought of his twenty thousand dollars in cash, buried where no one would ever detect it; and of the Kansas oil stock, held by a friend, which brought in itself a comfortable income. Everybody in the business thought that Reever Keene blew all he had, like every one else; but Aloysius Larrigan knew better.
He read the letter again, fingering the blister pearl in his scarf, and forgetting his make-up completely. Once more he was standing in that house, half a block off Fifth Avenue; once more he was living through that moment when Mrs. Bleeker had handed him that scarf-pin, with her quiet, steady voice, and her brave, stricken eyes.
The thought of it made him sit very quiet, staring at the letter. In all his life he had never experienced a moment such as that; no not even when Jim had died, beside him! It had been a moment of the spirit; a moment of absolute integrity, of purity, of unsullied sweetness.
That moment had assoiled many long-soiled years. It had grown upon Larrigan ever since, had grown larger, had grown to mean much more than he had dared admit. Now this letter had come to bring it before him again in all its larger aspects.
He made up mechanically and went out on the lot; for an hour he acted mechanically, obeying the director without protest, without thought. Then, during a change in the set, he went to his dressing-room.
Lola was there, standing at his table, reading the letter. Something went cold inside Reever Keene, and he stepped forward as if to take it from her. But she turned upon him, a flood of passion in her face.
“Well,” she observed with a sneer, “I guess I got your number now, Mr. Larrigan! Lady signs herself Jim Bleeker, does she? Maybe we’re goin’ to hear a lot of things that happened—”
“You’re making a mistake, Lola,” said Reever Keene.
“Mistake, am I?” She shook the letter at him with sudden passion. “Maybe I don’t know a chicken’s writing when I see it, huh? Well, if you think I’m a fool, this ends it! You can go along with your Jim Bleeker all you damn please! When you get ready to talk turkey to me—”
Lola drew off the walnut diamond and laid it, very carefully, on the corner of the dressing-table under Reever Keene’s nose. The whole action was very statuesque and very dramatic; at least, was so intended.
An instant later Lola uttered a despairing shriek. Reever Keene had seized the walnut diamond and had hurled it through the open window—hurled it with a swing that sent it glittering through the air to Heaven only knew where!
“Ends it, eh?” snapped Keene. “Then I’m blamed glad of it! So-long!”
Lola fainted as he vanished, and immediately the dressing-corridor was filled with figures answering her final dramatic shriek. Reever Keene went outside and climbed into his plain green-black car and drove down the street to his lodgings.
Once there, he wiped the paint from his face, with a curse, and began to pack up his things. He paid his landlady. He burned Mrs. Bleeker’s letter over the oil-stove. Then he threw his stuff together in the rear of the car, and drove down to the bank, where he drew what money he kept deposited there.
This finished, he went to the central gasoline station and turned over his car to be filled with gas and oil, and to be loaded with sundry extra five-gallon cases of the same.
While he was watching these affairs being brought to conclusion he heard a wild hail and saw the president’s car stopping at the curb, and the president himself descending, red and perspiring of face.
“Hey, Keene!” demanded the magnate heatedly. “What the devil’s struck you? They said you blew out o’ the studio like a wild man and quit work! Get on back there—”
“Go to hell!” snapped the star. “I’ve quit being Keene. I’m Aloysius Larrigan, see? And don’t get fresh, you!”
“What! Where you going?”
“I’m going to Kansas, where I got business,” retorted Larrigan. “Hurry up with them two cans of oil, over there! And blow up the extry tires while you’re about it, partner.”
The president seized him by the arm.
“Look here, you!” he exploded violently. “Are you quittin’ on the job—quittin’?�
�
“I am,” said Larrigan coldly.
“By Heaven, if you bust this contract I’ll see to it that you never get another job in front of any damned camera in the world!” raved the other. “I’ll—”
“You,” said Larrigan, “and your contract, and your seventeen companies, and your directors, and your money, and your whole damn camera battery, and your entire double-dashed motion-picture industry—go to hell! I’m done! Mustered out!”
He shoved a greenback at the gasoline dealer, climbed into his car, and went. The president gazed after him with eyes of dulled, glazed despair.
“Bein’ in the army—that’s what done it for him—ruined the best star in the whole damned works!” he murmured dismally. “Damn the Kaiser!”
IRREGULAR BRETHREN
They called me “consul,” but I was really nothing but a consular agent here at Aru Taping, the new oil-station on the east coast of Borneo. The Dutch Oil Company, one of the largest in the world, was exploiting it at a cost of millions.
Half a mile back from the bay lay the refineries and half-erected buildings of the boom town. Here were gathered all sorts of men—some recruited in Holland at the end of the war, others, drifters from Australasia and the south seas. They were a hard lot, a tough lot, a hard-drinking, godless lot.
To get away from it all, I used to go down to the beautiful, unsullied shore of the bay—a wide strip of white sand below the cliffs. But I had been at Aru Taping five weeks before I went down there for a walk at night; and that night I made an amazing discovery.
I was strolling along the white sand, smoking and watching the stars and the phosphorescent curlings of the waves, when far ahead I made out a strange black blotch against the sand. A few red sparks showed that men were there, smoking. As I stood, a figure uprose ahead of me, and in some alarm I recognized a ruffianly Australian contractor who was doing some of the concrete work on the new tanks and piers.
“Good night to ye,” said he, peering at me. “Oh! It’s the American consul, hey?”
I felt thankful for the automatic in my pocket. “What’s going on down here?” I demanded. “A Bolshevik meeting?”
To my surprise the Australian chuckled. “Ye might call it so,” he responded, and then made a remark which took me all aback.
“Great Scott!” I exclaimed. “Do you mean—”
“Why not?” he said defiantly. “But since ye understood me, will ye join us?”
“Thank you,” I returned, embarrassed, “but it’s three years since I sat in lodge, and I’m afraid I owe some money—”
He let out a burst of laughter. “Oh, as for that, I owe something like ten pounds myself, brother. This is a meetin’ of Irregular Lodge No. 1. Come along!”
* * * *
So I came among the irregular brethren, and was introduced. I saw in the starlight a queer lot of men—one or two Arabs, burly ruffians from the refineries, a pair of murderous-looking Hindus, seamen from the oil-tankers at the docks. A little East Side New Yorker who had established an “American clothing store,” shook my hand delightedly.
“Well, consul,” he beamed, “this is a pleasure now, ain’t it? I’ll tell you vat, now; brother Ben Ali, vill you step aside vith us for examination, hey?”
A tall Arab arose from the circle, and we withdrew for a space. With apologies for his lack of English, Ben Ali conducted the examination in Hollandish, which of course everyone understood.
We returned presently to the brethren, and I was introduced in due form, and assigned to a seat between Ben Ali and a burly oil-man from Kansas who worked at the refineries. We sat there under the stars; to the north of us rose the black cliff; the waves lapped along the shore. Then my little New Yorker rapped with his empty pipe on a stone.
“The brethren,” he began, “will come to order.”
Cigarettes were doused promptly. The big Kansan beside me chuckled, and spoke in a soft whisper like a boy afraid of the teacher.
“This here,” he confided in my ear, “is a lodge of refreshment, mostly! Ain’t a man of us who’s regular, I reckon. But we get around here Sunday nights an’ chin, see? You’d be surprised to hear some of the things that’s said, too.”
“I made those jewels myself,” said Ben Ali in Dutch, speaking at my other ear with obvious pride. “They are of wood, brother, painted with phosphorescent paint. Ah! Brother Ram Dass is to take the Warden’s chair; now we’ll have some fun!”
And we did; but it was fun of a sort that drew queerly at my heartstrings. These irregular brethren went about their work with an evident gravity, an earnestness, a sincerity, which was appalling when you considered what lawless rogues they were. Two were new men like myself; the Scots engineer of a tanker in port, and a Canadian who stated dryly that the Craft might outlaw him for taking part here, but he was outlawed anyway.
The work, I must say, was curious. How otherwise, with an American for Master, a turbaned Hindu for Warden, and in the third chair—of sand—a cockney bookkeeper? And yet, despite the strangeness, the work was done very beautifully.
“They had a hard time at first,” chuckled the Kansan in my ear. “There was a lot of correcting—and still is, for that matter.”
“You don’t initiate, I suppose?”
“We have some decency, brother,” he said gravely. “No, if we didn’t have respect and love for the order, we’d not be here. But we ain’t carrying things too far.”
* * * *
Respect and love for the sacred things of life—yes, that was it. The best that was in these world-wandering men was here brought out again, forgotten embers of fires long dead. Here met, they acknowledged under a mutual bond a respect and love which among the marts of men they would have scorned to admit; here under the stars and among brethren, there was no shame in hushing their rude wills and giving reverence where reverence was due.
But presently the cockney called us to refreshment, and pipes were taken up, cigarette rolled, men relaxed in the sand. The Master shoved back his derby and rapped with his pipe as he felt for his tobacco pouch.
“Brethren,” he said, “we go away and forget, ain’t it, all—”
“Aye,” broke in the Australian from the outer darkness. “Tell them new chums that what’s said ain’t to be spoke of except among the Craft! Remember that, Canuck!”
“Aw, dry up!” spoke up the Canadian, who had been in Flanders trenches. “Think we ain’t got any sense? Slip me the makin’s, Brother Ben Ali!”
The makings were slipped; and the little New Yorker who had lighted his pipe, called upon a certain brother, a Dutchman from Batavia named Hendrick van Loon, for refreshment.
The Dutchman stuffed some Sumatra into a finger-long pipe-bowl, lighted it, and then addressed us in slow, rich Hollandish.
“Worshipful Sir,” he said, puffing, “and brethren—”
* * * *
I was looking for orchids up the Rokan River, over in Sumatra. That river, for a hundred miles, is nothing but a vast meer—a swampy mangrove lake; I was there in the wet season. Duivel! It was nothing but trees and rolling brown mud-water and corpses of natives and animals! But I found some orchids, and kept on. I had a good boat and a dozen Madoera natives, who would stick by me.
And there, one day, I saw the queerest thing that I have ever seen in the world. We found a drowned rhinoceros which had been swept in among some mangrove roots. He was not long dead, and I directed the boat to him with the idea of cutting out his horn. So I got into the bow with my little saw, and presently I was against him. And what do you think I found on that hom of his, eh? Carved into the agglutinated bristle, and well carved, was a beautiful emblem; it showed a square and compasses—well, you understand!
“Duivel!” I said to myself. “There is something queer about this!”
I sawed part way through the horn, then struck something soft and glittering. Think of it! That horn was a brown shell, a real horn; inside, it was solid virgin gold—and the horn was upon a rhinoceros!
Well, I investigated. I found that this horn-shell filled with gold had been set on a peg of the real horn, and cunningly pegged in place with ivory pegs. Thus it was evident that the animal had been a tame beast somewhere up-country. But since that same up-country has never been explored, there was no answer to my questioning!
For three days we went on searching for orchids. It was just after the wet season, as I have said, and the whole country was at flood; we could go far afield from the river itself. Each night I examined that gold-filled horn, but got no answer. The gold was not a fortune in itself, of course; there was nothing to explain the prodigious amount of work that must have been expended upon the affair. Naturally, I took for granted that the whole horn, right down to the point, had been filled with molten gold; it was virgin, soft enough to cut easily with a knife, but I left it just as it was.
I was glad of the find, naturally; I needed the money. We always do, we folk who go up and down the world, from west to east and back again! So, when we ran across Doktor von Traube, I kept the horn out of sight.
* * * *
Von Traube had been up in the mountains for a year, trying to get the little red talking apes for his Hamburg museum. He had got them, too—three pairs of them in cages; and he had four boats with a crew of wild men. He was efficient, that von Traube, like all Germans—when it came to getting things. But he did not know there was any war.
I told him, as we sat together that night and had a bottle of brandewijn with our dinner. Duivel! He was a wild man himself when he heard of it, that big squarehead! No ships to get home in, no way of getting his apes back to Hamburg, and no need of them there, either! He was all gone to smash, that Herr Doktor.
“Never mind!” he said, smashing his fist on the table. “We will show them, we old Germans! Wait until our Kaiser sits in Paris—”
I let him go on puffing out his cheeks about that Kaiser of his, and meantime he drank. Presently he was drunk enough to talk, and he talked of the up-country.
The H. Bedford-Jones Pulp Fiction Megapack Page 80
