Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/299

 "Ah, I knew you would relish it. I fancy I could amaze you if I told you how recently it was made. Now here"—He grasped another bottle purposely—"is something a full ten days older. It has developed quite a bouquet. Just a drop"

The guest graciously yet firmly waved a negation.

"Thanks," he said, "but I want to enjoy the last—it—it has so much flavour."

"It has; it has, indeed. I'll not urge you, of course. Later you must see the simple mechanism by which I work these wonders. Alone, then, I drink to you."

Mr. Montague alone drank of two other fruits of his loom before the ladies appeared with dinner. He was clean-shaven now and his fine face glowed with hospitality as he carved roast chickens. The talk was of the shop: of what Mr. Montague scornfully called "grind shows" when his daughter led it, and of the legitimate hall-show when he gained the leadership. He believed that moving pictures had sounded the knell of true dramatic art and said so in many ways.

He tried to imagine the sensations of Lawrence Barrett or Louis James could they behold Sylvester Montague, whom both these gentlemen had proclaimed to be no mean artist, enacting the rôle of a bar-room rowdy five days on end by reclining upon a sawdust floor with his back supported by a spirits barrel. The supposititious comments of the two placed upon the motion picture industry the black guilt of having degraded a sterling artist to the level of a peep-show mountebank. They were frankly disgusted at the spectacle, and their present spokesman thought it as well that they had not actually lived to witness it—even the happier phases of this so-called art in which a mere chit of a girl might earn a living wage by falling downstairs for a so-called star, or the he-doll whippersnapper—Merton Gill flinched in spite of himself—could name his own salary for merely possessing a dimpled chin.

Further, an artist in the so-called art received his pay-