Pictures and the Picturegoer (Jan-Dec 1925)

22 come back again one day when the other professors and some of the new pupils should be there, we got under way. Natacha said, " You had a wonderful time, didn't you, Rudy?" And I laughed and said that in such moments as I had lived through one was able to regain and recapture boyhood again. Re-living a thing on the scene of its action is almost as good to the imaginative mind as actually living it. Detter, perhaps, for looking backward casts a tender glow over things that were not, perhaps, as tender at the time. And looking backward is robbed of the fear, the diffidence that one feels when one, perforce, looks forward. The past is known to us. It has no further terrors. It has done its best — or its worst. But whichever it is, it has been done, anyway. But the Future .... ah, there, indeed, is the Bottomless Pit, over which only such a bridge of philosophy as I have so weakly sketched may make it bearable. On our way homeward I suggested, optimistically, as it transpired, that we stop at Lido d'Albaro for a bit of supper. As we drove through, the little town, what should I see but an advertisement of The Conquering Pozver, called here, The Human Comedy. Of course " The Human Comedy " is the name of the series of Balzac's novels, from one of which, " Eugenie Crandet," "The Conquering Power" was adapted. But there is no connection between the two in the public mind, and when I asked people if they had seen " The Conquering Power," they invariably replied that they had not. Pictures an d Pichure puer Then, on the other side, in a less pretentious house, an advertisement of Bill Hart in something he must have made the Lord knows how far back ! I think a Triangle picture. These were first-run houses. And 1 said to myself, silently, but with great inner emphasis, " Ten years from now I will be popular in Italy, perhaps, but they don't know me now." That much was certain. From the chance wayfarer along the road, to the first and second run picture houses, I was as I had been when I left Italy, as unknown to films as films were unknown and unexpected to me. And so we went back to our hotel. Milan, August 28tli. Ah, now I feel that I should sit here ^^ for as many weeks as I shall probably spend hours, in order to get in all that has happened to us. The trip to Milan, with its delays and complications ! The meeting with my sister ! The effusions ! The tears of joy ! The reminiscences, which, I shall later on, in due sequence of events, like a conscientious and technical story-teller. The overwhelmingness of seeing one of my own again . . . after so many years ! I had wired Milan, because my sister had expected me earlier in the JANUARY 1925 My valet, whom I had sent on ahead was already at the hotel with my sister. They had had no word of the delay at the time and they sat themselves down and waited from eleven in the morning until ten at night. Meanwhile, of course, we were on the road from Genoa to Milan. It was raining with a driving, grey persistence, and we couldn't make very good time. When nine-thirty or ten arrived, my poor distracted sister didn't know what on earth to do. She imagined by then, the very worst. She couldn't endure the inertia of s i t t i n there, just sitting hands folded, heart thunderine: with Rudy tries his hand as driver of a peasant's mule team. As further instance of the up-anddoing picture regime in this part of Italy, when we passed the most pretentious picture house in Italy, we saw advertised there as follows : " For the first time in Italy: Joan the Woman." The picture with Geraldine Farrar. week, s a y ing that we would be delayed. B u i telegraph service in Italy i s t h e worst t he world has ever seen, and, I trust, for the sake of all travellers and messages of import, the worst the world ever will see. I sent a telegram to my sister, and then, being aware of conditions along this line, I sent another — and then I sent another . They got the second wire ahead of the first one. impatience and fear, one instant longer. She was so nervous that inactivity finally became insupportable, and she said, " I am going to Genoa to see what has happened !" She found out that a train was leaving in twenty minutes, and on that train she jumped and went to Genoa. She arrived there two hours later, still frantic with apprehensions. By that time we were in Milan. I eventually got her on the long distance telephone and told her where we were, what had happened to us, how I had wired her and that, in short, we were safe and sound and quite all right, and only suffering from the disappointment of not seeing her at once. The poor girl took a six o'clock tram the next morning, arriving at ten. We just embraced, and then embraced again. We were crying, and everyone else was crying. It resembled somewhat the day I crossed the frontier. It savoured of the same type of emotion. (Continued an page 76.)