"Hullo, Kid," he began brightly. "Here's your watch." Her doubting glance hovered over him as he smiled down at her. "You giving it to me again, Merton?" She seemed unable to conquer a stubborn incredulity.
"Of course I'm giving it to you again. What'd you think I was going to do?"She still surveyed him with little veiled glances. "You look so bright you give me Kleig eyes," she said. She managed a wan smile at this.
"Take it," he insisted, extending the package. "Of course it won't keep Western Union time, but it'll look good on you."She appeared to be gaining on her incredulity, but a vestige of it remained. "I won't touch it," she declared with more spirit than could have been expected from the perishing, "I won't touch it till you give me a good big kiss.""Sure," he said, and leaned down to brush her pale cheek with his lips. He was cheerfully businesslike in this ceremony.
"Not till you do it right," she persisted. He knelt beside the couch and did it right. He lingered with a hand upon her pale brow.
"What you afraid of?" he demanded.
"You," she said, but now she again brought the watch to view, holding it away from her, studying its glitter from various angles.
At last she turned her eyes up to his. They Were alive but unrevealing. "Well?""Well?" he repeated coolly.
"Oh, stop it!" Again there was more energy than the moribund are wont to manifest. There was even a vigorous impatience in her tone as she went on, "You know well enough what I was afraid of. And you know well enough what I want to hear right now. Shoot, can't you?"He shot. He stood up, backed away from the couch to where he could conveniently regard its stricken occupant, and shot gaily.
"Well, it'll be a good lesson to you about me, this thing of your thinking I was fooled over that piece. I s'pose you and Baird had it between you all the time, right down to the very last, that Ithought he was doin' a serious play. Ho, ho!" He laughed gibingly.
It was a masterful laugh. "A serious play with a cross-eyed man doing funny stuff all through. I thought it was serious, did I? Yes, I did!" Again the dry, scornful laugh of superiority. "Didn't you people know that I knew what I could do and what I couldn't do? Ishould have thought that little thing would of occurred to you all the time. Didn't you s'pose I knew as well as any one that I got a low-comedy face and couldn't ever make the grade in a serious piece?
"Of course I know I got real pathos--look how I turned it on a couple o' times in that piece last night--but even when I'm imitating a bad actor you can see it ain't all acting. You'd see soon enough I was a bad actor if I tried to imitate a good one. Iguess you'd see that pretty quick. Didn't you and Baird even s'pose I'd found out my limits and decided to be what God meant me to be?
"But I got the pathos all right, and you can't name one great comedian that don't need pathos more'n he needs anything else. He just has to have it--and I got it. I got acting-plus; that's what, Igot. I knew it all the time; and a whole lot of other people knew it last night. You could hear fifty of 'em talking about it when I came out of the theatre, saying I was an artist and all like that, and a certain Los Angeles society woman that you can bet never says things she don't mean, she told me she saw lots of places in this piece that I was funnier than any cross-eyed man that ever lived. "And what happens this morning?" Hands in pockets he swaggered to and fro past the couch.
"Well, nothing happens this morning except people coming around to sign me up for three hundred and fifty a week. One of 'em said not an hour ago--he's a big producer, too--that Baird ought to be paying me seven hundred and fifty because I earned every cent of it. Of course I didn't want to say anything the other day, with you pretending to know so much about contracts and all that--I just thought I'd let you go on, seeing you were so smart--and I signed what you told me to. But I know I should have held off--with this Bamberger coming over from the Bigart when I was hardly out of bed, and says will three hundred and fifty a week interest me and promising he'll give me a chance to do that spur act again that was the hit of the piece--"He broke off, conscious suddenly that the girl had for some time been holding a most peculiar stare rigidly upon him. She had at first narrowed her right eye at a calculating angle as she listened;but for a long time now the eyes had been widened to this inexplicable stare eloquent of many hidden things.
As he stopped his speech, made ill at ease by the incessant pressing of the look, he was caught and held by it to a longer silence than he had meant to permit. He could now read meanings. That unflinching look incurred by his smooth bluster was a telling blend of pity and of wonder.
"So you know, do you," she demanded, "that you look just enough too much like Harold Parmalee so that you're funny? I mean." she amended, seeing him wince, "that you look the way Parmalee would look if he had brains?"He faltered but made a desperate effort to recover his balance.
