Jean of the Lazy A
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B. M. Bower >> Jean of the Lazy A
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The machine slowed, swung to the curb, and crept
forward and stopped in front of the Victoria. Dewitt
looked at Burns and Pete Lowry, who was on the front
seat.
"I thought you'd like to take a glance at the lobby
display the Victoria is making," he said casually.
"They are running the Lazy A series, you know,--to
capacity houses, too, they tell me. Shall we get
out?"
The chauffeur reached back with that gesture of
toleration and infinite boredom common to his kind and
swung open the door.
Robert Grant Burns started up. "Come on, Jean,"
he said eagerly. "I don't suppose that eternal calm of
yours will ever show a wrinkle on the surface, but let's
have a look, anyway."
Pete Lowry was already out and half way across the
pavement. Pete had lain awake in his bed, many's the
night, planning the posing of "stills" that would show
Jean at her best; he had visioned them on display in
theater lobbies, and now he collided with a hurrying
shopper in his haste to see the actual fulfillment of those
plans.
Jean herself was not so eager. She went with the
others, and she saw herself pictured on Pard; on her
two feet; and sitting upon a rock with her old Stetson
tilted over one eye and her hair tousled with the wind.
She was loading her six-shooter, and talking to Lite,
who was sitting on his heels with a cigarette in his
fingers, looking at her with that bottled-up look in his
eyes. She did not remember when the picture was
taken, but she liked that best of all. She saw herself
leaning out of the window of her room at the Lazy A.
She remembered that time. She was talking to Gil
outside, and Pete had come up and planted his tripod
directly in front of her, and had commanded her to
hold her pose. She did not count them, but she
had curious impressions of dozens of pictures of
herself scattered here and there along the walls of
the long, cool-looking lobby. Every single one of
them was marked: "Jean, of the Lazy A." Just
that.
On a bulletin board in the middle of the entrance, just
before the marble box-office, it was lettered again in
dignified black type: "JEAN OF THE LAZY A." Below
was one word: "To-day."
"It looks awfully queer," said Jean to Mr. Dewitt,
who wanted to know what she thought of it all; "they
don't explain what it's all about, or anything."
"No, they don't." Dewitt pulled his mustache and
piloted her back to the machine. "They don't have
to."
"No," echoed Robert Grant Burns, with the fat
chuckle of utter content in the knowledge of having
achieved something. "From the looks of things, they
don't have to." He looked at Jean so intently that she
stared back at him, wondering what was the matter;
and when he saw that she was wondering, he gave a
snort.
"Good Lord!" he said to himself, just above a
whisper, and looked away, despairing of ever reading the
riddle of Jean's unshakable composure. Was it pose
Was the girl phlegmatic,--with that face which was so
alive with the thoughts that shuttled back and forth
behind those steady, talking eyes of hers? She was not
stupid; Robert Grant Burns knew to his own discomfiture
that she was not stupid. Nor was she one to
pose; the absolute sincerity of her terrific frankness was
what had worried Robert Grant Burns most. She must
know that she had jumped into the front rank of popular
actresses, and stood out before them all,--for the time
being, at least. And,--he stole a measuring sidelong
glance at her, just as he had done thousands of times in
the past four months,--here she was in the private
machine of the President of the Great Western Film
Company, with that great man himself talking to her
as to his honored guest. She had seen herself featured
alone at one of the biggest motion-picture theaters in
Los Angeles; so well known that "Jean, of the Lazy
A" was deemed all-sufficient as information and
advertisement. She had reached what seemed to Robert
Grant Burns the final heights. And the girl sat there,
calm, abstracted, actually not listening to Dewitt when
he talked! She was not even thinking about him!
Robert Grant Burns gave her another quick, resentful
glance, and wondered what under heaven the girl WAS
thinking about.
As a matter of fact, having accepted the fact that she
seemed to have made a success of her pictures, her
thoughts had drifted to what seemed to her more vital.
Had she done wrong to come away out here, away from
her problem? The distance worried her. She had not
even found out who was the mysterious night-prowler,
or what he wanted. He had never come again, after
that night when Hepsy had scared him away. From
long thinking about it, she had come to a vague, general
belief that his visits were somehow connected with the
murder; but in what manner, she could not even form a
theory. That worried her. She wished now that she
had told Lite about it. She was foolish not to have
done something, instead of sticking her head under the
bedclothes and just shivering till he left. Lite would
have found out who the man was, and what he wanted.
Lite would never have let him come and go like that.
But the visits had seemed so absolutely without reason.
There was nothing to steal, and nothing to find. Still,
she wished she had told Lite, and let him find out who
it was.
Then her talk with the great lawyer had been
disquieting. He had not wanted to name his fee for
defending her dad; but when he had named it, it did not
seem so enormous as she had imagined it to be. He
had asked a great many questions, and most of them
puzzled Jean. He had said that he would take up the
matter,--by which she believed he meant an investigation
of her uncle's title to the Lazy A. He said that he
would see her father, and he told her that he had
already been retained to investigate the whole thing, so
that she need not worry about having to pay him a fee.
That, he said, had already been arranged, though he did
not feel at liberty to name his client. But he wanted
to assure her that everything was being done that could
be done.
She herself had seen her father. She shrank within
herself and tried not to think of that horrible meeting.
Her soul writhed under the tormenting memory of how
she had seen him. She had not been able to talk to him
at all, scarcely. The words would not come. She had
said that she and Lite were on their way to Los Angeles,
and would be there all winter. He had patted her
shoulder with a tragic apathy in his manner, and had
said that the change would do her good. And that was
all she could remember that they had talked about.
And then the guard came, and--
That is what she was thinking about while the big,
purple machine slid smoothly through the tunnel, negotiated
a rough stretch where the street-pavers were at
work, and sped purring out upon the boulevard that
stretched away to Hollywood and the hills. That was
what she kept hidden behind the "eternal calm" that
so irritated Robert Grant Burns and so delighted Dewitt
and so interested Jim Gates, who studied her for
what "copy" there was in her personality.
It was the same when, the next day, Dewitt himself
took her over to the big plant which he spoke of as the
studio. It was immense, and yet Jean seemed
unimpressed. She was gladder to see Pard and Lite again
than she was to meet the six-hundred-a-week star whose
popularity she seemed in a fair way to outrival. Men
and women who were "in stock," and therefore within
the social pale, were introduced to her and said nice,
hackneyed things about how they admired her work and
were glad to welcome her. She felt the warm air of
good-fellowship that followed her everywhere. All of
these people seemed to accept her at once as one of
themselves. When she noticed it, she was amused at the
way the "extras" stood back and looked at her and
whispered together. More than once she overheard
what seemed almost to have become a catch-phrase out
here; "Jean of the lazy A" was the phrase.
Jean was not made of wood, understand. In a manner
she recognized all these little tributes, and to a certain
degree she appreciated them. She was glad that
she had made such a success of it, but she was glad
because it would help her to take her dad away from that
horrible, ghastly place and that horrible, ghastly death-
in-life under which he lived. In three years he had
grown old and stooped--her dad!
And Burns twitted her ironically because she could
not simper and lose her head over the attentions these
people were loading upon her! Save for the fact that
in this way she could earn a good deal of money, and
could pay that lawyer Rossman, and trace Art Osgood,
she would not have stayed; she could not have endured
the staying. For the easier they made life for her, the
greater contrast did they make between her and her
dad.
Gil brought her a great bunch of roses, unbelievably
beautiful and fragrant, and laughed and told her they
didn't look much like those snowdrifts she waded
through the last day they worked on the Lazy A serial.
For just a minute he thought Jean was going to throw
them at him, and he worried himself into sleeplessness,
poor boy, wondering how he had offended her, and how
he could make amends. Could he have looked into
Jean's soul, he would have seen that it was seared with
the fresh memory of iron bars and high walls and her
dad who never saw any roses; and that the contrast
between their beauty and the terrible barrenness that
surrounded him was like a blow in her face.
Dewitt himself sensed that something was wrong with
her. She was not her natural self, and he knew it,
though his acquaintance with her was a matter of hours
only. Part of his business it was to study people, to
read them; he read Jean now, in a general way. Not
being a clairvoyant, he of course had no inkling of the
very real troubles that filled her mind, though the
effect of those troubles he saw quite plainly. He
watched her quietly for a day, and then he applied the
best remedy he knew.
"You've just finished a long, hard piece of work,"
he said in his crisp, matter-of-fact way, on the second
morning after her arrival. "There is going to be a
delay here while we shape things up for the winter, and
it is my custom to keep my people in the very best condition
to work right up to the standard. So you are all
going to have a two-weeks vacation, Jean-of-the-Lazy-
A. At full salary, of course; and to put you yourself
into the true holiday spirit, I'm going to raise your
salary to a hundred and seventy-five a week. I consider
you worth it," he added, with a quieting gesture
of uplifted hand, "or you may be sure I wouldn't pay
it.
"Get some nice old lady to chaperone you, and go and
play. The ocean is good; get somewhere on the beach.
Or go to Catalina and play there. Or stay here, and go
to the movies. Go and see `Jean, of the Lazy A,' and
watch how the audience lives with her on the screen.
Go up and talk to the wife. She told me to bring you
up for dinner. You go climb into my machine, and
tell Bob to take you to the house now. Run along, Jean
of the Lazy A! This is an order from your chief."
Jean wanted to cry. She held the roses, that she
almost hated for their very beauty and fragrance, close
pressed in her arms, while she went away toward the
machine. Dewitt looked after her, thought she meant to
obey him, and turned to greet a great man of the town
who had been waiting for five minutes to speak to him.
Jean did not climb into the purple car and tell Bob
to drive her to "the house." She walked past it
without even noticing that it stood there, an aristocrat
among the other machines parked behind the great
studio that looked like a long, low warehouse. She
knew the straightest, shortest trail to the corrals, you
may be sure of that. She took that trail.
Pard was standing in a far corner under a shed,
switching his tail methodically at the October crop of
flies. His head lay over the neck of a scrawny little
buckskin, for which he had formed a sudden and violent
attachment, and his eyes were half closed while he
drowsed in lazy content. Pard was not worrying about
anything. He looked so luxuriously happy that Jean
had not the heart to disturb him, even with her comfort-
seeking caresses. She leaned her elbows on the
corral gate and watched him awhile. She asked a bashful,
gum-chewing youth if he could tell her where to
find Lite Avery. But the youth seemed never to have
heard of Lite Avery, and Jean was too miserable to
explain and describe Lite, and insist upon seeing him.
She walked over to the nearest car-line and caught the
next street car for the city. Part of her chief's orders
at least she would obey. She would go down to the
Victoria and see "Jean, of the Lazy A," but she was
not going because of any impulse of vanity, or to soothe
her soul with the applause of strangers. She wanted
to see the ranch again. She wanted to see the dear,
familiar line of the old bluff that framed the coulee, and
ride again with Lite through those wild places they had
chosen for the pictures. She wanted to lose herself for
a little while among the hills that were home.
CHAPTER XX
CHANCE TAKES A HAND
A huge pipe organ was filling the theater with a
vast undertone that was like the whispering surge
of a great wind. Jean went into the soft twilight and
sat down, feeling that she had shut herself away from
the harsh, horrible world that held so much of suffering.
She sighed and leaned her head back against the curtained
enclosure of the loges, and closed her eyes and
listened to the big, sweeping harmonies that were yet so
subdued.
Down next the river, in a sheltered little coulee, there
was a group of great bull pines. Sometimes she had
gone there and leaned against a tree trunk, and had shut
her eyes and listened to the vast symphony which the
wind and the water played together. She forgot that
she had come to see a picture which she had helped to
create. She held her eyes shut and listened; and that
horror of high walls and iron bars that had haunted her
for days, and the aged, broken man who was her father,
dimmed and faded and was temporarily erased; the
lightness of her lips eased a little; the tenseness relaxed
from her face, as it does from one who sleeps.
But the music changed, and her mood changed with
it. She did not know that this was because the story
pictured upon the screen had changed, but she sat up
straight and opened her eyes, and felt almost as though
she had just awakened from a vivid dream.
A Mexican series of educational pictures were
being shown. Jean looked, and leaned forward with a
little gasp. But even as she fixed her eyes and startled
attention upon it, that scene was gone, and she was
reading mechanically of refugees fleeing to the border
line.
She must have been asleep, she told herself, and had
gotten things mixed up in her dreams. She shook herself
mentally and remembered that she ought to take
off her hat; and she tried to fix her mind upon the
pictures. Perhaps she had been mistaken; perhaps she
had not seen what she believed she had seen. But--
what if it were true? What if she had really seen and
not imagined it? It couldn't be true, she kept telling
herself; of course, it couldn't be true! Still, her mind
clung to that instant when she had first opened her eyes,
and very little of what she saw afterwards reached her
brain at all.
Then she had, for the first time in her life, the strange
experience of seeing herself as others saw her. The
screen announcement and expectant stir that greeted it
caught her attention, and pulled her back from the whirl
of conjecture into which she had been plunged. She
watched, and she saw herself ride up to the foreground
on Pard. She saw herself look straight out at the
audience with that peculiar little easing of the lips and
the lightening of the eyes which was just the infectious
beginning of a smile. Involuntarily she smiled back
at her pictured self, just as every one else was smiling
back. For that, you must know, was what had first
endeared her so to the public; the human quality that
compelled instinctive response from those who looked at
her. So Jean in the loge smiled at Jean on the screen.
Then Lite--dear, silent, long-legged Lite!--came
loping up, and pushed back his hat with the gesture that
she knew so well, and spoke to her and smiled; and a
lump filled the throat of Jean in the loge, though she
could not have told why. Then Jean on the screen
turned and went riding with Lite back down the trail,
with her hat tilted over one eye because of the sun, and
with one foot swinging free of the stirrup in that
absolute unconsciousness of pose that had first caught the
attention of Robert Grant Burns and his camera man.
Jean in the loge heard the ripple of applause among the
audience and responded to it with a perfectly human
thrill.
Presently she was back at the Lazy A, living again the
scenes which she herself had created. This was the
fourth or fifth picture,--she did not at the moment
remember just which. At any rate, it had in it that
incident when she had first met the picture-people in the
hills and mistaken Gil Huntley and the other boys for
real rustlers stealing her uncle's cattle. You will
remember that Robert Grant Burns had told Pete to
take all of that encounter, and he had later told Jean to
write her scenario so as to include that incident.
Jean blushed when she saw herself ride up to those
three and "throw down on them" with her gun. She
had been terribly chagrined over that performance!
But now it looked awfully real, she told herself with a
little glow of pride. Poor old Gil! They hadn't
caught her roping him, anyway, and she was glad of
that. He would have looked absurd, and those people
would have laughed at him. She watched how she had
driven the cattle back up the coulee, with little rushes
up the bank to head off an unruly cow that had ideas of
her own about the direction in which she would travel.
She loved Pard, for the way he tossed his head and
whirled the cricket in his bit with his tongue, and
obeyed the slightest touch on the rein. The audience
applauded that cattle drive; and Jean was almost
betrayed into applauding it herself.
Later there was a scene where she had helped Lite
Avery and Lee Milligan round up a bunch of cattle and
cut out three or four, which were to be sold to a butcher
for money to take her mother to the doctor. Lite rode
close to the camera and looked straight at her, and Jean
bit her lips sharply as tears stung her lashes for some
inexplicable reason. Dear old Lite! Every line in his
face she knew, every varying, vagrant expression, every
little twitch of his lips and eyelids that meant so much
to those who knew him well enough to read his face.
Jean's eyes softened, cleared, and while she looked, her
lips parted a little, and she did not know that she was
smiling.
She was thinking of the day, not long ago, when she
had seen a bird fly into the loft over the store-house,
and she had climbed in a spirit of idle curiosity to see
what the bird wanted there. She had found Lite's bed
neatly smoothed for the day, the pillow placed so that,
lying there, he could look out through the opening and
see the house and the path that led to it. There was
the faint aroma of tobacco about the place. Jean had
known at once just why that bed was there, and almost
she knew how long it had been there. She had never
once hinted that she knew; and Lite would never tell
her, by look or word, that he was watching her welfare.
Here came Gil, dashing up to the brow of the hill,
dismounting and creeping behind a rock, that he might
watch them working with the cattle in the valley below.
Jean met his pictured approach with a little smile of
welcome. That was the scene where she told him he got
off the horse like a sack of oats, and had shown him how
to swing down lightly and with a perfect balance,
instead of coming to the earth with a thud of his feet.
Gil had taken it all in good faith; the camera proved now
how well he had followed her instructions. And
afterwards, while the assistant camera-man (with whom Jean
never had felt acquainted) shouldered the camera and
tripod, and they all tramped down the hill to another
location, there had been a little scene in the shade
of that rock, between Jean and the star villain. She
blushed a little and wondered if Gil remembered that
tentative love-making scene which Burns had unconsciously
cut short with a bellowing order to rehearse the
next scene.
It was wonderful, it was fascinating to sit there and
see those days of hard, absorbing work relived in the
story she had created. Jean lost herself in watching
how Jean of the Lazy A came and went and lived her
life bravely in the midst of so much that was hard.
Jean in the loge remembered how Burns had yelled,
"Smile when you come up; look light-hearted! And
then let your face change gradually, while you listen to
your mother crying in there. There'll be a cut-back to
show her down on her knees crying before Bob's chair.
Let that tired, worried look come into your face,--the
load's dropping on to your shoulders again,--that kind
of dope. Get me?" Jean in the loge remembered
how she had been told to do this deliberately, just out of
her imagination. And then she saw how Jean on the
screen came whistling up to the house, swinging her
quirt by its loop and with a spring in her walk, and
making you feel that it was a beautiful day and that
all the meadow larks were singing, and that she had
just had a gallop on Pard that made her forget that
she ever looked trouble in the face.
Then Jean in the loge looked and saw screen--Jean's
mother kneeling before Bob's chair and sobbing so
that her shoulders shook. She looked and saw screen
Jean stop whistling and swinging her quirt; saw her
stand still in the path and listen; saw the smile fade out
of her eyes. Jean in the loge thought suddenly of that
moment when she had looked at dad coming in where
she waited, and swallowed a lump in her throat. A
woman near her gave a little stifled sob of sympathy
when screen-Jean turned and went softly around the
corner of the house with all the light gone from her face
and all the spring gone out of her walk.
Jean in the loge gave a sigh of relaxed tension and
looked around her. The seats were nearly all full, and
every one was gazing fixedly forward, lost in the pictured
story of Jean on the screen. So that was what all
those made-to-order smiles and frowns meant! Jean
had done them at Burns' command, because she had seen
that the others simulated different emotions whenever
he told them to. She knew, furthermore, that she had
done them remarkably well; so well that people
responded to every emotion she presented to them. She
was surprised at the vividness of every one of those cut-
and-dried scenes. They imposed upon her, even, after
all the work and fussing she had gone through to get
them to Burns' liking. And there, in the cool gloom of
the Victoria, Jean for the first time realized to the full
the true ability of Robert Grant Burns. For the first
time she really appreciated him and respected him, and
was grateful to him for what he had taught her to do.
Her mood changed abruptly when the Jean picture
ended. The music changed to the strain that had filled
the great place when she entered, nearly an hour
before. Jean sat up straight again and waited, alert,
impatient, anxious to miss no smallest part of that picture
which had startled her so when she had first looked at
the screen. If the thing was true which she half
believed--if it were true! So she stared with narrowed
lids, intent, watchful, her whole mind concentrated upon
what she should presently see.
"Warring Mexico!" That was the name of it; a
Lubin special release, of the kind technically called
"educational." Jean held her breath, waiting for the
scene that might mean so much to her. There: this
must be it, she thought with a flush of inner excitement.
This surely must be the one:
"NOGALES, MEXICO. FEDERAL TROOPS OF GENERAL
KOSTERLISKY, WITH AMERICAN SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE
SERVING ON STAFF OF NOTED GENERAL."
Jean had it stamped indelibly upon her brain. She
waited, with a quick intake of breath when the picture
stood out with a sudden clarity before her eyes.
A "close-up" group of officers and men,--and some
of the men Americans in face, dress, and manner. But
it was one man, and one only, at whom she looked. Tall
he was, and square-shouldered and lean; with his hat
set far back on his head and a half smile curling his lips,
and his eyes looking straight into the camera. Standing
there with his weight all on one foot, in that attitude
which cowboys call "hipshot." Art Osgood! She was
sure of it! Her hands clenched in her lap. Art
Osgood, at Nogales, Mexico. Serving on the staff of
General Kosterlisky. Was the man mad, to stand there
publicly before the merciless, revealing eye of a
motion-picture camera? Or did his vanity blind him to
the risk he was taking?
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