Talking Picture Magazine (Dec 1930-Oct 1932)

Page 36 TALKING PICTURE MAGAZINE March, 1932 with her in all things. She explains that his love with her, is a business proposition, and is to be carried on as such. "If either of us meets someone else, we will turn in our cards!" she adds, by way of expanding the idea. While she inakes him promise to work toward bettering their environment, Elsie herself attempts to fill her time with hard work because the only possible associates she can have are the ignorant miners. At night, Elsie is always alone because Wayne's work necessitates his being away evenings. He tells her, often, that he has been to other camps, but she often discovers him sitting about the houses of their own camp, and especially at the home of Elsie's sister who has also become a member of the camp. One day, Elsie discovers Wayne kissing her sister passionately. Although she evmces httle interest and no surprise, the sister begs her forgiveness but explains the affair has been going on for quite a while. Elsie handles the matter dispassionately, announcing that inasmuch as she bears Wayne no love, the other woman is welcome to his kisses, but from this time on, Elsie finds her love for Wayne ebbing, gradually. It is about this time, too. that a young relative of Elsie's comes to stay with the Laswells. Wayne is drawn toward the girl who is eighteen, and pretty, but Elsie appears less concerned than ever when she surprises them, now and again, kissing, and finally, as participants in a scene wherein the girl is perched on Wayne's lap clad only in a thin nightgown! This time, however, Wayne himself realizes that trouble is on the way and requests Elsie to send the girl away. Elsie does so, calmly enough, but the girl returns to point an accusing finger at Elsie, demanding she be allowed to remain, inasmuch as she feels it is Elsie and not Wayne who desires her departure. Elsie tells the girl to remain, then, until Wayne should decide it time for her to go. This makes the girl bolder and she tells Elsie that Wayne has, in fact, begged her to run off with him to be married. Elsie decides to bring things to a head, that night, so when Wayne returns at the close of the day she confronts him with the girl's story. Wayne vehemently denies the girl's claim and persists in accusing both women of attempting to frame him. Elsie realizes that the girl is telling the truth when she goes to him, before Elsie, and tells him of all he has promised her. Realizing that she is to have a child, Elsie begs Wayne to get out, inasmuch as she has nothing but contempt for him, but he will not go. Immediately prior to Elsie's confinement, however, he moves to a nearby town with her sister and will do nothing to help his wife. When her time comes, Elsie realizes she is alone and in danger, so, near exhaustion, she cries for help. An old neighbor woman brings a physician and the physician, in turn, is amazed to learn that his patient is none other than the supposedly fine young Doctor Laswell's wife. He is shocked to learn that Wayne has sworn to prevent the child from living. From the time of her son's birth, however, Elsie turns the tide of things in general by rearing her boy to hate his father, and when he grows older, she explains her reasons for doing as she has done. Still, with all this, Wayne continues with his intrigues and affairs with other women, and somehow, Elsie manages to hear about them all from other women. When the boy is thirteen, Elsie realizes that all her attempts to spite Wayne have merely ended in her own martyrdom. Hence, she sallies forth into town and purchases a flashy car and some styHsh clothes, the like of which she has never worn before. Elsie, who is really quite pretty in her own way. creates somewhat of a splash and Wayne begins to see his wife in a new light. He makes several attempts at reconciliation but the girl merely laughs them off. To carry her game further, Elsie turns to Wayne's friend, Harold Shelly, who has been living in their house for years, and not only confides in him but asks him to accompany her on many jaunts and sallies into the gayer life which is so new to her. Soon Elsie realizes that she is madly in love with Shelly, and this love becomes the absorbing passion of her life. Harold, however, is cautious, so to try to forget this passion, and also to make him jealous, Elsie throws herself into the gay life. It is at this time that Wayne makes another fruitless attempt to regain his wife. He uses the boy as part of his campaign, but even this does not work. One day, Elsie becomes seriously ill. The specialist confines her to her bed and prophesies that her life will not last much longer inasmuch as she has overtaxed her brain and heart, but she seeks out Harold and tells him the real reason for all this— of her love, in other words — and of how she had used htm, at first, for spite, but soon grew to love him more than life itself! Pressing her to him, to signify his own devotion and forgiveness, Harold realizes that Elsie has gone limp in his arms. She is dead! Facing Wayne with the dead body of Elsie in his arms, Harold says: "Wayne, all you ever possessed of her was her body and that is still yours." Seeing Harold go, sadly, Wayne turns to his boy. "Son," he says, "I guess your mother died happy — she died away from home and from us." Suddenly, all of Elsie's training shouts forth and tingles in the boy's inner consciousness. "Who drove her to it?" he cries, "you, YOU, I tell you. You killed every good thing about her— even to her soul. I hate you! Yes, I hate you of my own accord, now, because I can see it all clearly!" In a moment, the boy is gone, and Wayne knows it forever! CLEVER TOO LATE Zoe Lynn File No. 6861 SEATING herself at the breakfast table with a cheery good morning to her mother, who is preparing breakfast, Joyce Dean arouses a brusque response from her parent when she announces that she contemplates having her voice trained. Undaunted by the coolness that her manifesto receii'es, she explains that while she was alone in her office, singing to herself, her boss came in. Mrs. Dean interrupts, grimly supposing that she was immediately fired and. therefore, contemplates taking vocal lessons to keep herself occupied, but Joyce, with an amused expression, assures the older woman that she still has her position. Then blithely continuing her recital, she x^eports that her employer, expressing surprise at the quality of her voice, told her that she sings like a nightingale. At this point, her unsympathetic audience cynically breaks in with the explanation that he undoubtedly meant, like a nightingale being choked. However, as Joyce is about to make a reply to the uncoinplimentary statement, she gets side-tracked in a protest against the big helping of potatoes, which Mrs. Dean is putting on her plate. Her mother's scathing rebuke to her for protesting against getting fat is that she is now so thin that if she had a pain midway between, she wouldn't know whether it was in her stomach or in her back. Moreover, when Joyce petulantly complains that her mother feeds her as if she were a little pig, the other replies with scorn, that if she had a pig as skinny as Joyce is, she would put it in an incubator. The young girl seems to have conceded the victory to her mother, but while Mrs. Dean's broad back is turned, she mischievously forms a sort of barricade of the sugar bowl and large milk pitcher, and talking rapidly meanwhile, she transfers the offending potatoes from her plate to an empty one, and breakfasts triumphantly on toast and coffee. Returning to the story of her employer's discovery that she has a voice, Joyce avers that although he might not have gone so far as to say she sings like a nightingale, he did remark that he had some knowledge of music, having studied himself, and that he readily recognizes that her voice has quality. With this encouragement, Joyce has discovered that Lola Norton, a girl whom, incidentally, Mrs. Dean approves of because she has some meat on her bones, is singing on the concert stage, now, and as long as a person like her employer can discern her talent she is firmly convinced that she can do as well as Lola. While Joyce is talking, noting that the toast is too well buttered in the center, she scoops out the buttered portion, and leaves most of the toast behind with the potatoes. Appealing to her with promises of the change to a better neighborhood should she achieve success, she is able to secure her support only after rendering a selection; and seizing the psychological moment when Mrs. Dean's resistance rs lowered by pride in the performance and another far-off glow, which hearkens back to the time she gave up her own musical ambitions to marry Joyce's promising father, who spoiled everything by taking to drink, she clinches her victory over her mother by telling her that in her daughter's success, she can get all the glory she was deprived of by marriage. Joyce, having won, leaves, and Mrs. Dean starts humming reminiscently, until catching sight of the potatoes, she glares at the door, then smiles indulgently. IMPATIENCE Frederic G. Gadbois FUe No. 6855 STRUGGLING through long years of hardship as a landscape painter, James Buchanan, inspired by an ineffable appreciation of the beauties of nature, captures on canvas the glory of what he has seen. His picture is exhibited, gaining public recognition immediately, and with his election to the Royal Academy, while still in his early thirties, a brilliant future is predicted for him. However, just as the realization of all his ambitions seems at hand, he is visited by a terrible catastrophe — an accident leaves him with a double cataract, and he is threatened with total blindness. For two years he is forced to wait in an idleness more torturous than death, while his surgeon waits for the proper time to operate. Meanwhile, he finds himself with nothing else that he can do except watch the implacable approach of the complete darkening of his vision, his work forced to be abandoned at the very moment when success seems most certain. Only the hope that the surgeon extends to him, keeps him from suicide, again and again. At length, just as he feels that he can endure this no more, the doctor tells him that he will proceed immediately, holding out to him the certainty that there is but one chance in a thousand of failure. The operation is performed, and to the restless, feverish, questioning of the patient, the answer comes that there is no way of determining until the bandages are removed, whether or not the treatment has been effective. For days, James Buchanan, his head swathed in surgical gauze, torments his doctor and nurse with his impatience. He resolutely refuses to see anyone whom he knows, until he can meet them without the conviction that their feelings for him are but inspired by pity. He has received flowers and messages from many of the people he has known in the day,s of his poverty, including touching pleas from Anne Trescott, whom he has tried to put from his mind in the last two years with scant success, but to her as to others, he sends brief notes, declining to be visited. Now his nurse. Miss Morrow, worn out by her long vigil at his side, tells him that it is thirty -five minutes past eight, and at nine o'clock, according to the surgeon's orders, she is to remove the bandages and sight will be his again. Unnerved, he reminds her that there is a possibility that he may be totally bUnd, but reassuring him she leaves him for a few moments. He recalls the doctor's instructions that, as he will be out of town, the nurse is to remove the dressings, a performance so simple that the patient himself could do it. The electric clock chimes nine o'clock, and desperate because Miss Morrow has not returned, his fingers cautiously steal to his head and he l^egins loosening the gauze, with unsteady fingers. There is an electric light on the table near his elbow, he knows, and catching a glimmer of diffused light through the few remaining he closes his eyes as he peels off the last layer. Opening them slowly and painfully, he stares into the blackness, and cries out in anguish. Trusting in the one chance, that the light is extinguished, he reaches for the socket only to encounter a hot bulb. Switching on the light, he realizes to his intense dismay, that no bit of light pierces the dread blackness, and revolting against the prospect of a life of continual physical dependence, he reaches for the revolver he has kept handy, and puts a bullet through his brain. Miss Morrow, returning a few seconds later, pulls the drapes aside and calling through the darkness, explains that the janitor is bringing up candles,— the power failed in the house a few minutes ago. THIS SIDE OF THE LAW Harris G. Nu File No. 6834 doomed, and not a soul THE accus. packed courtroom would have denied this. The aged and widowed Mrs. Bernshaw, a benevolent and respected soul of sixty-seven had been murdered — a dagger having been found in her heart. Why ? Firstly, because she had been trustingly foolish enough to keep, with her solitary self, a metal safe containing precious jewels and bonds; and secondly, because some fiend had been heartless enough to desire these and place them before the most important thing in the world — human life! Now Jensen Plolmes, lame, a simple grocer's clerk was on trial for his life. After all, the community's contention held, Holmes had been definitely placed as the murderer by the county and Philip Mervin, a brilliant young detective who had come to town from the city, for a rest, yet had worked tirelessly on the case, along with David Langley, the prosecutor, and incidentally Mrs. Bernshaw's protegee and heir. But Holmes' trial was a cut and dried affair despite its thrilling and breathless moments when justice hung by hairs. The man, no doubt, could not disprove the evidence, circumstantial though it was. On the eve of the trial's close, Langley called Mervin to the stand for the tenth time, at least. The detective's testimony caused much tongue -clacking and righteous headperking throughout the woman's contingent of courtroom visitors. What a fine fellow, he is, they thought, and said. Mervin stated his findings. The hilt of the knife which killed the old lady was handled by Holmes ! The fountain pen of the prisoner was discovered in the room wherein she was murdered! The soft clay outside the window indicated that a lame man wearing Holmes' size shoe had been there! Holmes, indeed, appeared to be a horrible person! When the meek man was brought to the stand, however, a messanger arrived with red roses. The card was inscribed with a sympathetic paragraph, ending: "May you find cheer in these roses that are so symbolic of our life ; we bud ; we bloom ; and then we wither and die!" Jensen swore he had seen the knife handle, but not on the knife! An old woman, not Mrs. Bernshaw, however, had brought a cane with such a handle into the grocery, and he, Holmes, had held it in his hand to admire it, at her request! After Langley's summing up, he called Mervin to the stand once more to identify the knife. Mervin, bland and smiling, advanced, but Langley gave him no chance to move. In a moment, the prosecutor had him dragged to the bar and his own prisoner freed. Langley, discovering that the imprints supposed to be made by the lame man, in the soft clay, were not uniform in pressure, suggesting that they had been faked, had had Mervin, who wore the same size shoe, shadowed and traced. He \yas a man of many aliases and diabolically clever disguises. Someone always took the rap, as it were, for him, and he always sent this someone the red roses with the maudlin card! The crowd swarmed about the now-heroic Holmes as Langley now proved his point conclusively. On the eve of Mervin's conviction, a huge bouquet with the time-worn inscription arrived in court for him— from this side of the law! THE CALL OF THE PINES Gladys M. Pruden File No. 6831 FOLLOWING closely the old saying that opposites attract, Rose Crowthers and Irene Middleton found a great deal in common. Rose, a sweet -faced country girl whose father, the old colonel, had raised her from the time her mother had died in childbirth, was vastly different from Irene, city bred and sophisticated, yet the two were inseparable! It was shortly after their graduation from college that Irene decided to go out to Cody to visit her school chum. Before she went, however, a slight sraashup of her car brought her face to face with a handsome bronzed individual who appealed to her as no man before him. But the stranger was decidedly disinterested in the vivacious Irene, Telling her kind parents about him that night, however, Irene made a significant remark. "I'll find out who he is and make him travel my way if it takes all summer!" she said. Mr. Middleton laughed. "That was Donald Storrs, the young architect, my dear," he said, "and he was telling me about the smashup today, at the club. I hear he's going out to the Pines in the region where your young friend Rose lives!" Irene's visit became a glowing reality, but she did not leave for several days because of the fact that the accumulation of a suitable wardrobe was paramount in her campaign. Rose, however, following her usual peaceful existence with her dearly beloved father, was spending her days painting in the pine woods, and was thus occupied when Don Storrs came into her life. Beginning by admiring her painting, he soon became a steady caller at her home, a good friend of the colonel's, and an adored slave of the lovely girl's. By the time Irene