Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1919)

MARTY MACKENZIE . . . _ I started to write s it down very formal because it's all so very important, and I want to remember it all when I am very old and maybe out of the way of remembering, but somehow that "I, Marty Mackenzie," sounds sort of like a will or some other musty, fusty thing, and I am not writing anything at all like that — oh, not at all. I am writing a beginning. A beautiful beginning of . . . of . . . well, just everything I It all happened ever so long ago, before I had begun remembering. That's why I want to write down what I do in between the not-having-begun time and the sort of out-of-the-way part. It began when my pretty, very young mother brought me up here to Uncle Ebau on the Green Mountain farm. Of course, she didn't know she was bringing me to him. She didn't know we'd love each other so. She just came because he had put it in the paper that he wanted some one to keep his house for him, and she read the paper and hoped that that some one was her. It was. It was her. Her and me. I may not always be grammatical in this, but hearts do talk so fast and skippy over themselves, not stopping at all for commas and tenses. Mine doesn't. We hadn't been with Uncle Ebau very long before my mother caught a cold in her bronchial tubes and died. Aunt Fanny, who came right after to help take care of me, told me later on that she hadn't really died of the tubes at all, but of a lonely heart. "Your mother was the flower kind," she said, "that had to have love to live. She didn't have enough of love, she didn't." I just grew up with the field-flowers and the sheep and cows and chickens. Somehow I've always been happy. I was glad every morning when the sun threw off his pink blankets and got up, and I was glad when the moon, like a very lovely lady, distant and cold, rode in her chains of stars. Of course, there were other things. I've read things and I knew, even before . . . there were other worlds, other .ways of living, other sorts of peoples. I knew and I wanted to see them. I wanted to know all about them. I wanted to love them and I wanted them to love me. But of course we hadn't much money, Uncle Ebau, Aunt Fanny and I. It worried Uncle Ebau. "The old farm's 'most worked It began when my pretty young mother brought me up here to Uncle Ebau on the Green Mountain farm You Never Saw Such a Girl Fictionized from the Paramount Photoplay By ALEXANDER LOWELL out, Fan," he used to say to Aunt Fanny; "like its owner — 'most worked out." And Aunt Fanny would say, in her sort of fried voice, so crispy and pleasant, "Now, now, Ebau, I wouldn't say that if I were you!" And then I'd peek at her, and there'd be tears as big as eggs dropping on my old brown stockings. I guess, tho, that all along Aunt Fanny suspected that Uncle Ebau was right, because the day . . . the d — . . . the . . . oh, I cant say it even now, when I am so heaven-happy . . . but anyway, when he was — was going she, Aunt Fanny, didn't seem the least surprised. After he had gone and after I had cried all over his darling hairy old hand, Aunt Fanny pulled me into the other room. "W-why d-didn't you t-tell me?" I was blubbering, forgetting, like a selfish little brute of a thing, that Uncle Ebau was her own brother and that she must have a heart even more full of sorrowfulness than mine. "You were so young," Aunt Fanny said ; "youth has a right to just a little bit of living . . . the other things crowd in so soon . . . death . . . and fear . . . and . . . love." I am sure she said "and love," altho now I cant imagine what she can have meant by hitching love up with fear and death. Dear me, I hope I never do ! After Uncle Ebau was laid to rest beside my mother we were very poor and very sad. The farm didn't seem to go at all without his hand at the plow, and we had very little money. "In the spring," I told Aunt Fanny, "we'll take in some boarders." "Yes," said Aunt Fanny, but she sighed. It was in the summer that the crammedfull day came. It seemed just like the stockings I used to find when I woke up before daybreak Xmas mornings in the days before Uncle Ebau and the farm were worked out . . . just bursting with goodies. I felt happy when I went down to breakfast. The honey tasted good, and Aunt Fanny had squandered some of the last of the white flour on some flaky biscuit, and there was bacon. "It's awful good to be alive, Aunt Fanny," I said, and sang a little hymn. 55 B PAiSLi