Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/142

 down to the last scene. Don't artists get the razz, though. And that Hugo, he'd spend a week in the hot place to save a thin dime. Let me tell you, Countess, don't you ever get your lemon in his squeezer."

There were audible murmurs of sympathy from the Countess.

"And so the old trouper had to start out Monday morning to peddle the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then it's nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In here now he is—something the Acme people are doing. He's had three days, just lying down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He's not to wake up even when the fight starts, but sleep right on through it, which they say will be a good gag. Well, maybe. But it's tough on his home. He gets all his rest daytimes and keeps us restless all night making a new kind of beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he's through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day he was born. Pa's so temperamental—like that time he was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I'm having a bit of my own in this Acme piece—God's Great Outdoors, I think it is—anyway, I'm to be a little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting on the miners' knees and all like that, so they'll order more drinks. It certainly takes all kinds of art to make an artist. And next week I got some shipwreck stuff for Baxter, and me with bronchial pneumonia right this minute, and hating tank stuff, anyway. Well, Countess, don't take any counterfeit money. S'long!"

She danced through a doorway and was gone—she was one who seldom descended to plain walking. She would manage a dance step even in the short distance from the casting-office door to the window. It was not of such material, Merton Gill was sure, that creative artists were moulded.

And there was no question now of his own utter seriousness. The situation hourly grew more desperate. For a