Jack and Susan in 1913 (17 page)

Actor Jack kicked the spaniel away.

It was a pity, thought Susan, that moving-picture studios did not have trapdoors the way stage theaters did. She would have been very pleased at that moment to simply drop out of sight. She dared not look at Jack. How could she have come up with a plan so stupid? Jack, she had thought, had merely been unsure of her feelings toward him. He wouldn't ask her to marry him simply because he didn't understand the nature of her feelings for him. Susan thought she had figured out a way to tell him she loved him without appearing to throw herself at him. Jack was to have seen the photoplay in the theater and been so convinced of Susan's love for him that he'd return to the Fenwick and immediately drop to his knee before her chair, and beg her to marry him.

A witless, charmless idea altogether. It would have failed in any case. What must he be thinking standing there beside her, beneath these bright lights, with workmen hammering in the background, and an accordion playing over across the room, and a dog barking crazily.

She looked up at him.

He was not blushing. In fact, all the blood seemed to have drained from his face.

“Does it have a title?” he asked, looking straight forward.

“I called it
Susan's Serial
.”

J
ACK AND SUSAN
walking hand in hand in Central Park.

Jack stealing a kiss from Susan.

Jack fending off an unleashed Tripod.

Jack falling off a borrowed bicycle and ripping the knee of his trousers.

These were the images moving across a stretched sheet tacked to the wall of a windowless room in the laboratory of the Cosmic Film Company.

Jack sat next to Mr. Fane, and Susan sat farther back near Hosmer Collamore at the projector. The day's filming had ended only a quarter-hour before.

It was the first time Susan had seen herself on celluloid, and the experience was unsettling. She looked thinner than she had imagined herself to be, and her skin looked pale and her hair intensely black. She cringed to see the hitch in her right leg, though she knew it had improved since that day in the park. But most of all, she was embarrassed to see herself and Jack together, cavorting in playful innocence—an innocence that had now been spoiled by the revelation in that dreadful scenario,
Susan's Serial
, that she loved him. Women simply did not declare their love. Women were like puppies in a shop window. They could frolic in their cages; they could gaze moonily at passersby; they could be adorable and irresistible. But they weren't allowed to choose with whom they'd go home. Like puppies in a shop window, women were chosen.

An altogether disgusting state of affairs. She was also angry that Jack was displeased with her gesture—he'd not even spoken to her. Angry with herself that she had made it. Angry with life, and fate, and damned Hosmer Collamore now running a moving picture that mocked her misery. She and Jack and Tripod would never be as happy as on that innocent Sunday in Central Park.

Mr. Fane rose from his chair and went up close to the sheet on the wall. Susan's laughing face was displayed across the back of his jacket, like some maniacal harpy. He stood aside and peered at the images.

He moved to the back of the room, near Susan, and conferred in a low voice with Hosmer. He peered at the projector and sat down near Susan and watched the rest of the reel.

“Now run it again,” he said. The film ran free of the spool and flapped against the metal projector as Hosmer turned it off. “Use a different machine.”

In the few minutes it took Hosmer to set up the new machine, Mr. Fane occupied himself with a little notebook and a stub of a pencil. Jack, a few feet in front of Susan, did not turn around. Susan's leg began to itch, and it felt as if she still had the cast on it.

The lights were turned out again, and Hosmer began the film once more. Susan could scarcely bear to watch. She turned halfway in her chair and only glanced at the images out of the corner of her eye.

The door at the back of the room opened softly, and an ample figure rustled in. It was Ida Conquest. In the dim light Susan could see she had not yet removed her powder, and her face had a ghostly glow.

“That's enough,” said Mr. Fane, standing up as the reel once again came to an end. Hosmer turned on the overhead light in the room.

Jack turned around at last and looked at Junius Fane.

“Mr. Beaumont,” the owner of the company said, “I must say I was dubious about your idea. I didn't expect it to work, and I wasn't even certain that I wanted it to. But you've convinced me. I could see no jiggle. Not when I stood at the back of the room, not when I looked up close. It makes our present pictures look as if they'd been shot out of the back of a moving taxicab. Congratulations.”

Jack grinned. Susan saw beads of sweat forming on his forehead at the hairline.

“Hosmer,” Mr. Fane asked, “you assure me that you shot these scenes in the normal way?”

“Yes, sir, just as I shoot them here—just as I shoot them for you.”

Fane nodded thoughtfully, then sat down and took out a fountain pen and a sheaf of bank checks. “Mr. Beaumont, I'm going to write you a check for five hundred dollars. I'd like you to install your device in every camera owned by the Cosmic Film Company.” Jack beamed. “I would also advise you, sir, to patent this device as quickly as possible. If you can retain control of this thing, you will be a very rich man.”

Hosmer winked his congratulations, and Ida threw an actress's warm smile. Mr. Fane said no more, but his five-hundred dollar check had spoken eloquently enough.

Having turned down an invitation to dine with Junius Fane and Ida, Susan and Jack were left alone in the small, windowless room. Jack turned backward on his narrow straight-backed chair. A single Edison bulb burned in a lonely socket in the ceiling.

“I'm very happy for you,” said Susan in a strained voice. She was, too.

Jack nodded. “
Susan's Serial
—is that what you called it?”

She wanted to turn away from his gaze, but she couldn't.

“You didn't even change the names,” he said flatly.

She didn't reply.

“Hosmer has figured out that you're the Young Lady in High Society, you know,” said Jack. “I saw it in his eyes. I don't think Mr. Fane knows—yet.”

“What about Ida?” Susan asked.

“If she hasn't pieced it together, I'm sure Hosmer will tell her.”

“No more secrets,” said Susan, with the sour taste of irony in her mouth.

“I have to confess something to you,” said Jack.

“Confess?”

“Yes. Remember when you gave me that scenario to bring to Mr. Fane you asked me not to read it?”

“Yes,” Susan said a bit uncertainly.

“Well, I read it anyway.”

“
What?
You mean…you mean to say you knew…that you've known…that you've been…”

He nodded. “Not only that,” he continued, his face blank, his voice a monotone, “I knew that they were shooting the last scene today—the one where Jack asks Susan to marry him.”

She threw her purse at him.

He ducked to dodge it, lost his balance, and tumbled off the chair to the floor, breaking a leg of the chair in the process.

“You knew!” Susan screamed, paying no attention to his fall.

“I knew,” he admitted, an amused glitter in his eyes.

“You…you deceived me!” Then she felt silly for having said that. It was just the sort of thing young women in magazine serials always said midway through the installment. “But why didn't you—”

“I was just following the scenario,” said Jack. “I had to wait till my invention was sold before I could ask you to marry me.”

Susan stood rooted to the spot with anger and frustration. Jack was still struggling, not very successfully, to get up from the floor.

“I am so
angry
,” said Susan.

“Why? You were the one who wrote the scenario. I was only playing my part.” He hadn't gotten all the way up from the floor; he remained on one knee. “I have a splinter,” he said, picking at the cloth of his trousers. “So do you know yours?”

“My what?”

“Your part,” Jack said. “Let me refresh your memory. I'm on my knee—just as I am now. I ask you to marry me. For a moment you register confusion. Then you register love for me. And then the title card is cut in, and it reads—”

“The title card reads:
Oh yes, Jack, gladly
.”

Sitting in the small windowless room with the single harsh Edison bulb in the ceiling they held hands and talked on and on. Jack described the moment when he first dared hope that she cared more for him than she did for Hosmer Collamore. Susan expressed disbelief that Jack would ever have regarded the cameraman as a rival. Misunderstandings were untangled. Small arguments were laid to rest. Happy insights were revived and shared.

“It's late,” Jack said at last, as if he were afraid that their happiness would not persist beyond the confines of this narrow chamber.

Susan glanced down at the watch that was pinned upside down to her shirtfront. “Half-past ten.”

“They've probably forgotten about us,” said Jack. “We didn't come in here till nearly seven, and by then most everyone had already gone.”

“Could we be locked in?”

“No,” said Jack, “there must be someone about. Hosmer said there's now a watchman.”

Jack went to the door of the room and opened it. The laboratory floor of the Cosmic Film Company was completely dark. The windows had been blacked over, and not even light from the street entered the building. Weak yellow light spilled out of the projection room behind Jack and Susan, but this served to illumine not much more than a strip of black wall ahead of them. Worktables and cabinets were nothing more than bulky black outlines arrayed across the wide expanse.

“I feel foolish,” said Susan.

“A simple mistake,” said Jack. “I don't imagine the night watchman is going to mistake us for Trust hoodlums—if we can find him.”

“The elevator's over there somewhere,” Susan said, pointing off toward her right. “Should I switch off this light? It's not doing us much good anyway.”

Jack nodded, but it was so dark Susan couldn't see the nod, so he said, “Yes, switch it off.”

She switched it off and pulled shut the door of the projection room. Then, hand in hand, they groped their way carefully in the direction of the elevator. Jack succeeded in kicking over a wastebasket, knocking a stack of files off a desk, and jamming his thigh against a corner of a table. Susan progressed without mishap until they got nearly to the elevator.

Then Susan tripped over something and pitched headlong to the floor.

“Are you all right?” Jack cried out.

“Yes,” said Susan softly, “something broke my fall.”

“What?” asked Jack, helping her to her feet.

“A body.”

“He's breathing,” said Jack, having found the man's face and applied his ear close against it.

“Do you think it's the watchman?”

“It must be,” said Jack in a low whisper, shaking the man's shoulders. “But he's got a bad lump on the back of his head which means that maybe we're not alone here.”

Susan swallowed audibly, then whispered, “Maybe we should try to call the police. I'll see if I can find a phone.”

Jack shook the unconscious form again. The man groaned, but he didn't come to.

Susan found a desk, but there was no telephone on it; she fumbled her way over to another. Just then there came a shrieking, grinding, metallic noise. “What is that?” said Susan, no longer whispering.

“The elevator,” said Jack. “It's going down.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know,” said Jack. “Maybe someone's leaving the building—or maybe someone's on the ground floor and is on the way up.”