Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/334

 Does that answer you? It gives you acting-plus, and if that isn't the plus in this case I miss my guess."

"I suppose you're right—something like that. And of course the real pathos is there. It has to be. There never was a great comedian without it, and this one is great. I admit that, and I admit all you say about our audience. I suppose we can't ever sell to twenty million people a day pictures that make any demand on the human intelligence. But couldn't we sell something better to one million—or a few thousand?"

The Governor dropped his cigarette end into the dregs of his coffee. "We might," he said, "if we were endowed. As it is, to make pictures we must make money. To make money we must sell to the mob. And the mob reaches full mental bloom at the age of fifteen. It won't buy pictures the average child can't get."

"Of course the art is in its infancy," remarked Henshaw, discarding his own cigarette.

"Ours is the Peter Pan of the arts," announced the Governor, as he rose.

"The Peter Pan of the arts"

"Yes. I trust you recall the outstanding biological freakishness of Peter."

"Oh!" replied Henshaw.

When Merton Gill dared to glance up a moment later the men were matching coins at the counter. When they went out he left a half-eaten meal and presently might have been observed on a swift-rolling street-car. He mumbled as he blankly surveyed palm-bordered building sites along the way. He was again rehearsing a tense scene with the Montague girl. In actor parlance he was giving himself all the best of it. But they were new lines he mumbled over and over. And he was no longer eluded by the title of that book he remembered on the library shelf at Simsbury. Sitting in the cafeteria listening to strange talk, lashed by cruel memories, it had flashed upon his vision with the stark definition of a screened subtitle.