Motion Picture Classic (Jan-Dec 1916)

MOTION PICTURE “Of course! I'd love to visit Unde Harry,” Elsie exclaimed, after Percy had painted the great city in glowing colors. "Father's told me that he has a big, splendid house, and dozens of servants, and everything. I’ll miss father and — and Ward, but I’d like to come for a little while.” Between them they arranged it, and the next week old Torn and young Ward watched the blithesome departure with aching eyes. “I dont like the atmosphere,” sighed Tom, “but she's as innocent as a daisy, and it isn't fair that she shouldn't see anything of the world before she settles down. She must learn to choose between the false and the true.” “Yes, she must learn,” echoed Ward, but his big, loyal heart sank to his clumsy boots. It was a new world to Elsie. It seemed much as tho Grace Dalton, with the help of Percy Morleigh and the unwitting help of Uncle Harry, took the old world in her ringed hands and turned it firmly and smilingly upside down, spilling out all the old beliefs, old ideas, old clothes, old love, old desires in the process. When it righted itself again, a different Elsie smiled at herself in the mirror of her satin-walled boudoir — an Elsie with unreal-looking eyes ; with startling “Duff-Gordon” clothes ; with still more startling coiffure, and a set of manners snipped at random from the most extreme of the extreme set in which her uncle moved — an Elsie who had begun to look upon Percy Morleigh with a sense of approbation, and to look back on ungroomed Ward with a feeling of mixed pity and contempt. “Our protegee is coming along,” observed Grace, one evening, as they waited for Elsie in the foyer of her uncle's home. “She has arrived,” agreed Percy, feeling of his scented tresses with a long-nailed, inutile hand. “The country Jane has quite went.” Elsie learnt her Manhattan well from Grace and Percy. Uncle Henry, a bit ashamed of his laughable friendship for Grace Dalton, dropped out of things and watched the transformation of his niece with a growing distaste. It was like seeing a fresh and lovely flower made over into a waxed, artificial one by a clever, unscrupulous hand. The three of them “did” the town ; they orgied in every orgying direction. They did nothing by halves and everything by extremes — from dress to fads ; from Madison Avenue to the slums, and from Washington Square to Chinatown. They consorted with the mondaine — ladies of society with newspaper names and sub-rosa scandals; men with young faces and ancient eyes; men with idle prattle and brutish hands and hearts. They “played about'' with weird, pimpled “geniuses,” who recited columns of indistinguishable poetry and talked the latest topics perfervidly ; spindly girls with bone-rimmed goggles, limp cigarets between anemic lips, and Futurist clothes — strange, abortive creatures with “souls” which were occasionally, and always righteously, obscured by the flesh. They did the dance craze ; they panted thru the skating craze ; they drank tea unwholesomely, and other things secretively. They got to be known about — knew at least four head waiters intimately ; had the right to demand, and pay for, their favorite music at the Claridge or Delmonico’s, and were altogether in the swim. During a pause in the activities, Elsie took time to have herself photographed. “It's the best picture you ever had taken,” declared Percy, indelicately, “because yon are all there is in it. Your — er — apparel is — lacking.” Elsie had had some of the bloom — the delicate, pollen bloom of the flowers— rubbed off, but somehow she did not realize what the photograph would mean to Ward and to her father. Four days later she received the word of her father's death, and the same day she motored home. Can it be that in all of us there is a streak that harks back to our aboriginal ancestry — a strain that demands the stimulus of wild things — wild ways? However it may be, Elsie, after her father had been laid to rest, turned back, with a longing heart, to the lure of the city. Somehow, the flowers had lost their charm ; the old music of the tree-tops flatted to her ear ; the love of Ward Roberts seemed a bovine thing, not to be compared to the wine-delirious vaporings of Percy Morleigh. “Are you going back, Elsie?” Ward asked her one evening as they sat on the steps and watched the moon ride slenderly high in the black sea of the sky. “I think I will, Ward. I — I dont know ” “I do!” Ward broke out heatedly. “They’ve got you — with their painted words, their glitter of sham, their excitement that will never satisfy — never give you peace. You are moving in a world of coxcombs, Elsie — of people with heads of sawdust and prattling mouths. You have torn yourself from the real things — the things your father loved, and I loved, too. Soon you will be, not a flower, but a noxious weed — like your friends out there. They have heads of straw, I tell you, and hearts of brass.” Elsie rose, excitedly. “I will not listen to you, Ward !” she said shrilly ; “you are doing your best to cajole me and frighten me, but you are not going to succeed. You are jealous of my life, and this ends everything. Here is your ring. I am returning to my uncle’s house in the morning.” Ward flushed, painfully, and held the diamond between nerveless fingers. Then he looked after the proudly erect figure and his eyes flashed. “Read ‘Feathertop’ !” he called after her — “both your father and I read the copy you sent to me.” Three months later Henry Green died of apoplexy, and his entire estate was left to his brother Dick, in the South Seas, with the proviso that he take up his residence in the Fifth Avenue mansion. To his niece, Elsie, he bequeathed only a copy of the book, “Feathertop.” With startling celerity, Elsie’s city friends abandoned her — and with varying degrees of politeness. For the first time in her well-beloved life she came to know what it feels like to be loved for what you have and not for what you are. Ward did not make an advance, and the girl suffered in silence until the arrival of seamanly Uncle Dick and alarmingly clad Aunt Sarah. It then penetrated the witless heads of Elsie’s city friends that she would be the heiress of Uncle Dick, if not of his brother, since she was now the nearest of kin. They, therefore, besieged her once more, and she was able to show Aunt Sarah a most amazing time. For many years Aunt Sarah had borne the South Seas in silence and gorged her soul upon novels treating largely of millions, cities and society. Therefore she was in her element now — the one thorn in her flesh being Uncle Dick, who persistently refused to see God or gain in the metropolis, and who dwelt at length on the peaceful beauties of the home they had abandoned. “I reckon I can stand a short cruise among all these millions here,” he confided to her, “but I tell you it’s awful rough navigatin’. Aunt Sarah sighed gustily, and flew off to. “tea” with Elsie and Percy. Upon his brother’s daughter Uncle Dick looked with some awe and considerable pain. “She’s a face like a wild rose, with the soul of a Easter lily,” he mused ; “but, doggone me if her actions aint a piece of work !” After dinner that night he laid the copy of “Feathertop” in his niece’s lap. “Elsie,” he said, “strikes me that your legacy may do you a darn sight more good than mine does me. Try it, anyway.” That night Elsie read “Feathertop” — protestingly at first — then fascinated by a weird similarity. The witch with (Forty)