Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/134



HE savings had been opportunely replenished. In two days he had accumulated a sum for which, back in Simsbury, he would have had to toil a week. Yet there was to be said in favour of the Simsbury position that it steadily endured. Each week brought its fifteen dollars, pittance though it might be, while the art of the silver screen was capricious in its rewards, not to say jumpy. Never, for weeks at a stretch, had Gashwiler said with a tired smile, "Nothing to-day—sorry!" He might have been a grouch and given to unreasonable nagging, but with him there was always a very definite something to-day which he would specify, in short words if the occasion seemed to demand. There was not only a definite something every day but a definite if not considerable sum of money to be paid over every Saturday night, and in the meantime three very definite and quite satisfying meals to be freely partaken of at stated hours each day.

The leisure enforced by truly creative screen art was often occupied now with really moving pictures of Metta Judson placing practicable food upon the Gashwiler table. This had been no table in a gilded Broadway resort, holding empty coffee cups and half empty wine glasses, passed and repassed by apparently busy waiters with laden trays who never left anything of a practicable nature. Doubtless the set would not have appealed to Henshaw. He would never have been moved to take close-ups, even for mere flashes, of those who ate this food. And yet, more and more as the days went by, this old-time film would unreel itself before the