Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/183

 her own story she was going to get wet, but from what he knew of her she would be some character not greatly missed from the cast if she should, as Baird had suggested, dive and forget to come up. He supposed that Baird had meant this to be humorous, the humour typical of a man who could profane a great art with the atrocious Buckeye comedies, so called.

He put in the hours until nightfall in aimless wandering and idle gazing, and was early at the pool-side where his heroine would do her sensational acting. It was now a scene of thrilling activity. Immense lights, both from the scaffolding and from a tower back of the sailing-craft, flooded its deck and rigging from time to time as adjustments were made. The rigging was slack and the deck was still littered, intentionally so, he now perceived. The gallant little boat had been cruelly buffeted by a gale. Two sailors in piratical dress could be seen to emerge at intervals from the cabin.

Suddenly the gale was on with terrific force, the sea rose in great waves, and the tiny ship rocked in a perilous manner. Great billows of water swept its decks. Merton Gill stared in amazement at these phenomena so dissonant with the quiet starlit night. Then he traced them without difficulty to their various sources. The gale issued from the swift revolutions of that aëroplane propeller he had noticed a while ago. The flooding billows were spilled from the big tank at the top of the scaffold and the boat rocked in obedience to the tugging of a rope—tugged from the shore by a crew of helpers—that ran to the top of its mast. Thus had the storm been produced.

A spidery, youngish man from one of the platforms built out from the scaffold, now became sharply vocal through a megaphone to assistants who were bending the elements to the need of this particular hazard of Hortense. He called directions to the men who tugged the rope, to the men in control of the lights, and to another who seemed to create the billows. Among other items he wished more action for the boat and more water for the billows. "See that