Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1936)

[continued from page 82 Inside another boy came towards her, a nice boy, straight and clean and tall. "I'm very sorry," he said, "but we can't let you have your bike in here. We really can't." "It can do no harm," she said, gentle as she can be sometimes, "standing here against the wall. You see I can't stay if I have to leave it outside. It must be where I can watch it. It's the most wonderful bike in the world." "Why?" he asked. "Why is it?" " It takes me places," she told him softly, confidentially. For she knew somehow this boy could be counted upon to understand. He was one of the student officers in that gymnasium. Her bike remained there against the wall. And Luise and that boy danced together then. Her pleated skirt flared out like a plaid pinwheel and her hair which she had brushed smooth before she started, the way They talked very little. They didn't need words to make a bridge which would help them reach each other. They needed nothing beyond that fundamental friendship which lived between them even in the first minute they looked at each other and each had thought jubilantly in their heart "Hello! I've been looking for you for a long time!" The way a boy and a girl will sometimes. Before he said good-night he asked if on the following Sunday he might come to call and she said she very much hoped he would. And while they stood together on the Rainer steps, talking, she didn't doubt that he would come. But when he was gone and she was in her room undressing, fear settled down over her heart, such fear as lovers always know, feverishly unaware of the fact that the other one is experiencing the same doubts and the same pull in their direction. A group of your old favorites get together. Claire Windsor, Ruth Roland, Lois Wilson and Anita Stewart at the opening of Ben Bard's movie theater. In the back are Harry Green. Ben Bard (Ruth's husband) and Wallace Ford her mother like it, was tousled. That was all right, however, and as it should be to go with her eyes for the happiness in them now was unrestrained and that ageless quality more befitting smooth hair had been crowded right out of them. The other girls preening in their party dresses thought Luise looked a sight in her sweater and skirt and with her untidy hair. They wondered, powdering their noses in the dressing-room, whispering in little groups, what that boy, straight and strong and fair and nineteen years old, could see in her. She danced well, true enough. But still! And Luise watching them wondered, in turn, how they could abide their frilly dresses and their long, tight skirts and she thought they looked silly enough with 1 heir stiff curled hair. When the tower clock chimed ten that boy took Luise home. They walked the long way in the dark pushing her precious bike between them. For she would not leave her bike behind to ride with him in his little car even though he promised solemnly to return for it later. "I was so scared," she says, "that he would think about me and think I was too young for him to be my beau. And suddenly, too, I turned frightened that in that very moment on his way home he would meet one of those other girls with a long tight skirt and stiff waved hair." Luise told her mother and father that she had a young man coming to see her that Sunday. And she remembers feeling cheated because they didn't seem to know how important and exciting it was but said in calm voices, "So! That is very nice indeed!" OX Sunday the dinner seemed endless. To I ,uise. Her younger brother must be served a second time. The serving girl's feet seemed to be made of lead. Her father must peel his pear just so, run the little fruit knife around under the skin in a precise line. And her mother must pause while she poured the to talk about some stupid woman they knew. The boy wasn't due for an hour or two bul any moment Luise felt the bell would ring and he would be standing there. And she wanted dinner to be over and cleared away and the house just so when he came. She wanted time to brush her hair down smooth because it might be boys like it that way and try a new collar on her dress. These things done, she waited at the parlor window. She tried to make the fact that he was coming real by picturing how he would look when he came walking down the street. And almost simultaneously she was sure he never would come, that never would she see him approaching the house, that it was too wonderful ever to be true that he would sit across the room from her and they would talk of this and of that. But a few minutes later she saw him turn the corner and she drew back from the curtain. The blood streamed into her face. And something very gentle came alive in her eyes. When Emy and Heinz Rainer saw how it was between their fourteen year old Luise and this nineteen year old youth they ceased being so calm about this new friendship And perhaps they sighed, realizing that, of course, their Luise wouldn't be like other girls, have a dozen beaus and be casual and simply flirtatious about all of them. She never had been like other girls, after all, and that in itself seemed to give warning she never would be. "My mother and my father," Luise says, "because I was so young, made that boy promise never would he make love to me. And he did not ever do it. I did not tempt him ever, either. For the two years that came afterwards, much of the time we spent together. "But between us, during those two years that came, was a curious innocence." THEN Luise went away. Dear as that boy was to her she had to go. For as she grew older the restlessness that always had been within her grew to be so great she feared it might destroy her. She feared she even might take her own life. With her body and mind her temperament also was approaching maturity and making demands. She could no longer satisfy her deep desire to give back to people the images and feelings which people and things gave her by dancing with a sunbeam. For it had come to be the inner, subconscious things in life that she was obsessed to express. It was almost as if a Thing within her must be released. She would stand for hours on a busy corner and watch people pass. Doing this she was happy, she didn't grow tired. Marking a hurt twist in a certain mouth she would wonder what personal pain had caused it. She speculated about a love that could turn some blue eyes soft as a spring sky. She contrasted the difference between those who walked slowly, some from dejection and <le>p.iir and some because of an inner p( Much of her time at home she spent alone in her room Sometimes for days she would barely speak. That others might think she was acting strangely or avoiding them never occurred to her. she was so absorbed in her own world of fantasy and imagination. "Where is the Black One?" her father would ask night after night when he came home. "Where is the Black One?" [This ; story of the enchanting Luise Rainer will be continued in the August Photoplay, out July 10.\ 84