On which Mr. Uptown Brown and his heavy friend, Mr. Thomas Bung, rise with a deliberation appropriate to their dignity and weight, and Mr. Brown says:

  “Come on down if you like and we’ll have a turn at the radio ourselves.”

  His heavy friend, Mr. Bung, says:

  “Well, I don’t mind if I do.”

  Mrs. Uptown Brown glances across at her husband with a look that means, “Now what are you up to?” But she says nothing. She’s too happy about Flossie. Let him for once if he likes, she thinks — only don’t let him think that she’s deceived. But she can straighten that out afterwards, so she merely says, quite invitingly:

  “Come along, then, and we’ll start a new rubber,” and makes a place beside her for Mr. Overflow. There he is to sit for the rest of his life.

  II

  So after Miss Flossie Fitzclippet Brown and Mr. Edwin Overflow had come back upstairs, engaged, from the mute vicinity of the radio, Mr. Uptown Brown and Mr. Thomas Bung, his heavy friend, went down to the dining-room.

  Mr. Brown: It’s over here in the corner. Sit down, Tommie, in one of these big chairs while I turn on this damn thing. Have a cigar?

  Mr. Bung: Well, I don’t mind. Had it long?

  Mr. Brown: No, just got it. The children like it. Try one of these.

  Mr. Bung: Thanks.

  Mr. Brown: Now I don’t know how you found it upstairs, Tommie. It certainly seemed to me pretty dry.

  Mr. Bung: It certainly did!

  (They both chuckle. They know what’s coming.)

  Mr. Brown: Well, what about a little Scotch, eh, Tommie, my boy? Wait till I turn on this machine, or, no, I’ll get the Scotch first.

  (Mr. Uptown Brown takes a key out of his pocket and goes and opens up a little cupboard in the corner angle of the wall.)

  Mr. Brown: I always keep it locked up over here. No use ringing for the servants. Bess can hear the bell from up there, you know, and she might get a little fussed up — say when, Tommie ——

  Mr. Bung (speaking in a low gurgling voice such as is produced from the larynx by Scotch and soda): Oh, no, no sense in making a fuss over these things. I’m always the same way at home, too. That’s damn good Scotch, Ed.

  Mr. Brown: Yes, have some more. Or wait till I turn on this durn radio, otherwise Bess might —— Here, I think this is the dial you twist ——

  The Radio: Squa-ark ——

  Mr. Brown: No, that’s not it. I’ll get it in a minute. Now this is a Scotch, Tommie, that I can guarantee ——

  (And ten minutes later Mr. Edward Uptown Brown is still saying): Now this Scotch, Tommie, is a Scotch, that you won’t get a better Scotch — Scotch — Scotch.

  And after a while — after a long while — with a sigh, Mr. Uptown Brown rises from his chair and he says:

  “Well, Tommie, old horse, I’ll guess we’ll have to get back to the drawing-room, or Bess will be wondering where we are. Wait till I give this a whirl again.”

  (He turns a dial.)

  The Radio: Squa-ark ——

  Mr. Brown (turning it off instantly): Come along, Tommie, or say, what about another?

  Mr. Bung: Yes, certainly, I’ll join you. A wonderful thing this radio, isn’t it?

  And so when they do get up to the drawing-room, it is quite late and the cards are just about over. Eddie Brown Junior is adding up the score and he says without moving his face from his cigarette:

  “What did you get, Dad?”

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “Didn’t get Yomsk in Siberia?”

  “No, I don’t think so, did we, Tommie?”

  “I guess not. But what we got wasn’t so bad, either.”

  “Was there much interference, Dad?”

  Mr. Brown, drawn fatally on and still chuckling to his friend:

  “Not a damn bit.”

  Ominous words. Mrs. Brown gives one look at her husband. There will be plenty of interference later. He will get all the radio activity he wants a little later on.

  Meantime the guests leave. Ed. Brown, Jr., radio expert, has risen from his chair and says to his friend, a fellow expert:

  “Come on, Harry. It’s late enough now to be worth while. There won’t be much interference now. We’ll see if we can get Yomsk.”

  Ted Brown and his friend, the two radio experts, go down to the dining-room. The house is quiet now. It is getting late.

  Ted says:

  “Now sit down here while I tune her up. I guess Dad’s been monkeying with it. Funny he can’t learn, isn’t it? (He begins twisting and turning the dials.)

  “What I want to do is to try to get Yomsk, Siberia. The other night I was nearly sure I had Yomsk. There’s a sending station there now, but they’re not catalogued and it’s hard to tell. Ever try to get them?”

  “No. Nearly got Teheran in Persia the other night. At least I think it was Teheran. I couldn’t be sure. It would be in Persia, I suppose.”

  “Yes — now wait — I believe. I’ve got it.”

  The Radio: Squa-ark ——

  Ted (shutting it off): Gosh, no — that’s only President Coolidge. Let’s try it this way.

  The Radio: Squa-ark ——

  “Drat it, that’s a sacred concert. I thought they all quit at eleven. I’m sure that’s the number I used for Yomsk. Wait a minute.”

  Ted turns at the dials. He and his friend sit in front of the machine in deep absorption. Ten minutes later Ted is still saying:

  “No, cuss it — that’s only the Beethoven Sonata being played in the opera house in Chicago — try this.”

  And the Radio Says: Squa-ark ——

  And Ted says:

  “Darn it. That’s only Madame Galli Curci singing in St. Louis. I’ll just try once more for Yomsk and if we can’t get it, we’ll shut off for the night. There’s no sense bothering with these things near by.”

  He tries once more.

  And the Radio Says: Squa-ark ——

  And then he quits.

  But far away in Yomsk, amid the snow, a grimy Bolshevik in a grimy café is singing an imitation American coon song. That’s what he wants to hear.

  And as Ted reluctantly turns off the machine, he says:

  “It’s a great thing, the radio, isn’t it?”

  So Ted’s expert friend goes home, and Ted Brown himself goes to bed. The radio is silent and the house is still. The mystic currents move through the air, and Atlanta is whispering to Vancouver, and Helsingfors in Finland murmurs to the Hebrides. But not a sound of it comes to the darkened room. The house is still and the people are asleep and the radio machine is silent. Its programs and its announcements lie beside it on a little table, but from it there comes not a sound. The radio, hushed by the whispering currents, is asleep.

  And the hours pass — till it is late, late — and then softly, oh, very softly, one of the dining-room windows pushes up — surely no one lifted it, it just moved up — and into the dark room there steps such a soft man, with a black cap on his head and he moves with a little spot of light in front of him that comes from such a soft little lamp that he holds in his hand, and in that half-light, you can see that he wears a dirty mask on a dirty face with two holes in it where his shadowed eyes are.

  This man — do you guess it, perhaps? — is not a scientist come to fix the radio, but he is a burglar and he has come to unfix some of the property of Mr. Uptown Brown.

  The burglar turns his light here and there about the room — and he turns it presently upon the radio. There is no surprise in his face when he looks at it. Oh, no. This man has already spent some time in Ossining, New York State, and he knows all about radio and how to work a radio magazine.

  “Radio!” he murmurs.

  Then he looks at the printed sheets that lie beside it with the announcements for the night. President Coolidge speaks in New York on the World Court. That must be over. The man sighs, with relief or otherwise. And then he looks — what is this that he sees? Madame Pallavicini is to sing at midnight in the cathedral in the City of Mexico — midnight, that would be now — and she is to sing — and as the man in the mask turns the spotlight on the print he sees that she is to sing the aria:

  “Enter Thou Not Into Temptation.”

  The burglar stands in front of the radio and there is stillness in the house. The man murmurs the title to himself.

  Far away Madame Pallavicini in the midnight cathedral in the City of Mexico is singing, and the mystic currents are murmuring around the house, “Enter thou not into temptation.”

  The burglar murmurs to himself, “Ah, shucks, I’ll chance it,” and puts his hand out towards the dials. Why? Well, perhaps he had taken music classes when he was at Ossining in New York State; perhaps he had an ear for music, or perhaps, if you like, some of the things they say in the story books about the burglar are true. Perhaps the sound of “Enter thou not into Temptation,” intoned in a cathedral at midnight, hits him harder than it does you or me.

  At any rate, the man looked all about him, listened a moment, and then, with the hand of an expert, turned rapidly the dials of the radio. And with that, all the mystic waves of the night that had gathered in the great cathedral of the City of Mexico came rushing over the wires.

  AND THE RADIO SAID: SQUA-ARK ——

  The sound of it rattled in the still house, the burglar heard a rattle at the lock of the front door and he knew what it meant. The Uptown Browns, like all sensible people of their class, pay part of the fee of a night watchman. As the night watchman entered the front door, the burglar, noiselessly as the mystic wave itself, moved out from the window. Madame Pallavicini and the whispering currents have done their work. He will not sin to-night.

  One Crowded Quarter Second HOW THEY MAKE LIFE MOVE IN THE MOVIES

  IN REAL LIFE, the process of turning tragedy into happiness, of alleviating a broken heart, of starting a new life, is the work of years and the slow effect of time. Even in a novel it can hardly be done under fifty pages. But in the movies they do it in exactly one quarter of a second.

  The most beautiful thing about the movies is this rapid way in which, with a couple of flicks of the film, what looked like interminable sorrow destined to extend over years is changed into a “new life.”

  No matter what awful things may happen to the people in the movies, the spectator need never despair. The movie man can fix them up all right at any moment in one turn of the machine.

  The hero, for example, gets sent to the penitentiary for ten years. You see him arrested, you watch the trial (four seconds), the fruitless appeal to the governor (two seconds), and then you see him put behind the kind of prison bars, the toast-rack pattern, that they use in the movie for the penitentiary.

  A turnkey with a sad face and slow mournful steps (he takes over five seconds) has locked the hero in. Great Heavens! ten years! to think that his young life — he is still only twenty-eight — is to waste away for ten years behind those stone walls; and then, just as you have hardly had time to finish thinking it — he’s out!

  And quite simple the way they do it! Just a legend or title, or whatever they call it, thrown on the screen:

  AND SO THIS TRIED SOUL LEARNS IN SORROW A NEW PEACE

  Yes, learns it and is out! Clear out of the penitentiary in a quarter of a second. Just by learning peace! I must say if I ever go in, I’ll learn pretty quickly.

  Yes, there he is out again, and, what is luckier still, not a day older: still only twenty-eight. And he’s had time to shave in the quarter second while he was in there and looks pretty neat and handsome.

  There he is in the same apartment and on the sofa beside him his wife — the very one that he sandbagged in a misunderstanding ten years ago is sitting and saying:

  PERHAPS WE DIDN’T FULLY UNDERSTAND ONE

  ANOTHER, DESPARD

  and after that they fade out into one another’s faces and the screen remarks in conclusion:

  NEXT WEEK GERALD FLOYD AND THE HOURCHI HOUTCHI GIRLS. DON’T MISS ONE OF THEM. THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF YORK BOARDING THE RENOWN ——

  and that is a sign that these broken lives are now mended.

  In any case, the mending of a broken life is a very simple matter in the movies. It’s a specialty that has been reduced to an art. If a movie character loses a husband or a wife, the loss is repaired in one-quarter of a second.

  For example, here is a disconsolate movie widow — and how charming they look anyway: I’d like to buy a bag of them — you see her beside the grave, a saintly clergyman bending over to console her; the end of the long story of perhaps 4,000 feet of tragedy has come to this — this dull hopeless grief that finds no consolation.

  No consolation! Just wait a minute and let that title writer get in his work. There you are:

  AND SO THIS POOR SOUL FINDS IN LOVE A NEW BALM

  THAT HEALS THE WOUNDS OF THE PAST,

  and you see her walking in a springtime garden (the season has changed in a quarter-second) and bending over her is a lover, evidently a husband, — in fact, he must be, because there is a little wee child romping in the grass at their feet.

  And the lover? Don’t you see it? That means then that you never go to the movies. Why, the lover is the saintly clergyman, the one who was in the graveyard. He fell in love with her, time passed, they had this child — there you are. And all in a quarter of a second.

  But perhaps still more wonderful are the complete changes of character, mostly very favourable, that are packed into the quarter-second. A bad man turns into a good one; a depraved villain into a gentle soul; a she-hyena into a chastened woman.

  The other day, for example, in a moving picture I saw a villain — a real villain — he was rich and he ground down the poor, he terrorized a little town with the brute power of money. When that power failed, he hired bandits to murder people because they were too virtuous to help him.

  Then fate intervened. A dam broke. The Colorado River rolled right over the villain and drowned him. Forty thousand cubic feet of water fell on him. Then they picked him out, plastered with mud six inches deep. That, apparently was a pretty serious situation.

  But, no, the fatal quarter-second got in its work. The title maker speaks:

  AND SO THIS HARD HEART AT LAST SOFTENS ——

  Presumably with the mud. At any rate, there he is, sitting on a sofa, NOT drowned — that was an error — with the heroine beside him and the mud all wiped off, and he is saying:

  I SEE IT NOW. I HAVE BEEN A BAD MAN

  Personally, I had seen it quite a little time before. But at any rate his redemption, I am certain, was complete and final because the next thing said in the picture was:

  OTTAWA ONTARIO LORD WILLINGDON THE GOVERNOR GENERAL

  LOOKS ON AT SKIING CONTEST GATHERING THE RUBBER

  ON THE CONGO

  Oh, yes, he’s redeemed finally; the picture is over.

  And I have wondered, too, whether something might not be done to apply this wonderful and happy system of transformations to some of the old masterpieces of the stage and literature. They are too sad. The tragedy is all right and very interesting, but it ought to be redeemed at the end by putting in a quarter-second of first-class movie work.

  Take, for example, Hamlet. All the world knows how the sorrow accumulates. Hamlet’s father murdered, even before the play begins; his mother married to his uncle; Polonius stabbed; Ophelia drowned; Hamlet himself half crazy; his uncle killed; Yorick’s skull mislaid; Laertes about to kill Hamlet — in short, a quite serious situation.

  But that wonderful quarter-second of the movies would straighten it all out. Try this, for example:

  YET EVEN HERE LOVE SNATCHES THIS WAYWARD

  SOUL FROM FATE ——

  And what do you see? Hamlet sitting beside Ophelia — she was not drowned, only got muddy and since has had time to wash — in the gardens of the Palace; and in another moment we find, smiling at them, his uncle, the King, no longer wicked; in fact, he says himself:

  WE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ONE ANOTHER, HAM,

  and near them, playing on the grass, the inevitable child, only this time it is Hamlet’s and Ophelia’s. And you realize that the murder and the poisoning was only a DREAM of one of the characters, and that since then a quarter-second has passed and life has moved on and everything is all right. And

  NEXT WEEK BUGGS AND JUGGS AN ALL-SCREEN COMEDY

  AUTHORIZED BY THE BOARD OF CENSORS OF

  THE PROVINCE OF QUEBEC,

  and that wipes out all vestige of Hamlet.

  But after all, if we call them moving pictures, it’s their business to move.

  Done into Movies BUT CAN YOU RECOGNIZE THE GOOD OLD STORIES WHEN THEY GET THEM DONE?

  THE OTHER DAY I went to see a moving picture of “Treasure Island,” the late Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous story. It was really an excellent thing, absolutely thrilling all the way through.

  But in putting the story into the movies they had had to make a few necessary adaptations and alterations. It seems that the public demands this. Moving picture producers have often explained to me that the public is very sensitive. There are subjects it doesn’t like and topics which it prefers to avoid. And there are other things it insists on having in every first-class moving picture.

  So I found that “Treasure Island” had had to be changed a little. In the first place the scene was not laid on an island. If you put a thing on an island that cuts out motor cars and limits the scope of the plot. So the scene was laid in California. And there was no treasure, because treasure has been worked to death. Instead of treasure the plot was shifted to holding up a bank, which is more up to date. That of course cut out the pirates and the ship, but put in bandits and a motor car. Incidentally, all the stuff about “Yo Ho! and a Bottle of Rum!” had to go. Any references of this sort antagonize a great number of spectators and have the appearance of criticizing the existing institutions of the United States — which is madness.

  There were certain changes also in the persons of the story. John Silver instead of having one leg has two, so as to be able to hop in and out of a motor car. Jim Hawkins, the boy narrator of Stevenson’s story, is changed into a girl. No moving picture is held to be complete unless a girl is brought into it. And Squire Trelawney, who is a middle-aged man in the written story, is made a young man. This allows for a proper ending by having the Squire marry Jim Hawkins.

 

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