Page:The Blind Bow-Boy (IA blindbowboy00vanv).pdf/243

 arms, a huge black cigar between his teeth, sitting before a desk littered with papers and stills, he had not felt encouraged. This ruffian apparently had forgotten that Harold had been announced, and after leaving him standing for half an hour or so while he conversed, in a language of which Harold could only understand one word in ten, with a blonde lady, massive and buxom in the style of 1896, the figure tightly corseted and swelling with curves like a Bartlett pear, he turned suddenly and savagely on the boy and asked him his business. Who are you and what d'ye want? he growled. But when Harold had repeated his name, the man's manner considerably altered. His face became wreathed in equivocal, nay blandiloquent, smiles and, without a single further question, he pushed a long sheet of printed paper over towards Harold, and asked him to sign it. The man never laughed, Harold observed, and even his smile he controlled in a curious and disgusting way with his tongue. There was something about this smile, indeed, that Harold did not quite like. Nevertheless, before he signed the document, which he took to be a contract, his natural honesty compelled him to explain that this was his first job in pictures, that he was wholly inexperienced, that he hoped, etc. But the casting director, alternately biting his cigar brutally and removing it to give vent to one of his enigmatical and unsatisfactory smiles, waved away this attempt at reason with a That's all right. I know. I