PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 March 1939, Page 10

PEGGY IN HOLLYWOOD

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT. COPYRIGHT.

BY

MRS PATRICK MACGILL.

CHAPTER IX

(Continued)

“I won’t let you give yourself up, David! You would get three to seven years for manslaughter, and tlje boy is dead, anyway! To spend the best years of your life in an American gaol! Finky,” she turned to the pallid, tearstained director, who was sitting with his head in his hands, the picture of abject misery. “Can you do nothing to husn this up? Jerry had no home or friends who mattered, and he was going to Mexico straight after the party; his bags are still on the luggage rack of the car. If money can do anything . . David darling,” the low, attractive voice was ineffably tender, “I do beg of you, for all our sakes, to let Finky see what can. be done. He has such a tremendous pull in Hollywood—and, as you say, it was not anything worse than an accident. In France, they would certainly let you off So your conscience need not be troubled. Dear, come on deck for a few minutes. A breath of fresh air will do you good.” It was the mention of fresh air that made David suddenly long to get out of the overheated, emotion-charged atmosphere of the captain’s cabin. It was as though a set of fiends were leagured against him, all tempting him to take the line of least resistance which, easy at the time, would eventually destroy. But for a few moments to breathe fresh, untainted air just as it came from God was like opening the gates of a physical and mental paradise. It was five o’clock. Dawn was just shivering into day. Nobody was about. Opal snuggled into the warmth of her mink coat and slipped her hand confidently through David’s arm. “I’m so sorry, darling —but I’m certain it can be fixed . . ”

“Don’t talk about it, please, Opal. I want to try and sort things out in my own mind. I’m sort of all mixed up. Would you mind if I took a turn or two by myself?” “Of course not, David. I’ll go and sit in that corner.” Opal pointed to a coil of rope in a sheltered spot, “and if you want me, just come across.” “All right. Thanks,” David mumbled Opal might have stayed in her corner for good so far as the worried, haggard young man was concerned. She passed completely out of his mind; every faculty was concentrated on the solution of the immediate problem confronting him. His father, a much beloved and respected pastor of a Baptist church, his mother, who adored her youngest son as only youngest sons are adored; his two sisters, one a high school teacher, and the other studying for a missionary; his brother, a rising young architect recently married. He was the reactionary, the rebel, the only one who could not be moulded into a strictly conventional pattern. Without definitely voicing it, his father expressed his disapproval of his youngest son’s stage interests by a passive policy of non-co-operation which allowed David to work as clerk in a tourist agency in order that he might be tree to attend the latest plays and work on his own plays during the week-ends and evenings. They had met. Peggy and liked her, but deplored her ambition to become a good actress. It would break them all up if he got a term of imprisonment for being the cause of a man’s death on a gambling ship in a Hollywood film actress s party. They had known of his sudden, impulsive decision to follow Peggy to Hollywood, but he had felt too embarrassed to tell them anything about Opal Orth; he disliked the job he had obtained too much .to want to boast about it. The shudder that suddenly shook David from head to foot was less from the raw cold of the early morning than from the horror that was onlyjust beginning to exert a real stranglehold upon him, to menace with its double-edged fangs. The doctor came up. the ladder. David hurried forward to meet him, searching his stern face with eyes in which a piteous question lurked; a question that his tongue refused to ask. The doctor divined the look. “Still, in the saloon,” he said, referring to the dead body. David suddenly felt a return of the nausea that had almost overcome him in the captain’s cabin. “Come downstairs with me. 111 give you something,” said the doctor, taking hold of David’s arm. with the touch of one having authority. David allowed himself to be led downstairs again, and the force of something he had learned long ago, at school, he supposed, darted suddenly into his tired, overwrought brain further to torment and worry him. 11 ’twere done, ’twere well done quickly. When it came to confessing that one had taken the life of a fellow creature, it was certainly true, the half-distract-ed boy told himself, bitterly. Finklesteen was still, at the table and the captain was sitting facing him. The captain got up at David entered. “I think Mr Finklesteen has something to tell you in private,” he told David, as he passed out of the cabin, closing the door quietly behind him. David sat down in the chair vacated by Captain Newell, and stared somewhat vaguely at Finklesteen who bent forward to whisper, although there was nobody else in the cabin. “I believe I can’fix it all for 5000 dollars; the captain, crew, the doctor, and everybody. Nobody will ever know. Let me do it, my boy. it will be bettei all round. You did not mean to kill him; we all know that. . In that moment of temporising. David was lost. , , , , “I haven’t 5000 cents, much less dollars,” he told Finklesteen, in the toneless manner of one so weary that weai - iness itself had ceased to count Finklesteen was for the actm“Miss Orth is a girl of great feelll_lg as well as great charm,” he told the miserable boy hunched in the captains chair. “She is willing to pay this sum for you, provided you sign a papertia_ you killed Jerry Jackson in case ol any complications afterwards.” Finklesteen pushed a sheet of paper towards the unnerved boy, and glancing at it, David saw that it set out no more than the bald truth, that, at the time and on the 'date and in the place named he had killed Jerry J acks °"’ The “bracer” given him in lull ment of the doctor’s promise had contained more than the bracing com pound. From feeling utterly wretched

but only too acutely conscious of his plight, David had to fight with a sense of drowsiness that dwarfed all else but the immediate, imperative need of sleep. His eyes were actually closing, and he was scarcely conscious as he signed his name in the place indicated by Finklesteen, and as soon as the last letter was formed, he dropped his head on his arm, and passed straight into a deep sleep which lasted even while he was being helped into the rowing boat, which was to take him ashore. Finklesteen and the captain half pushde and half lifted him into Opal’s big car, in which was waiting the Filipino chauffeur, covered with a rug, and reading the morning paper. When he was told to drive his mistress and her sleeping companion straight home to her apartment, he nodded and touched his cap as if it were the most natural thing in the world. So it was. Were they not in Hollywood. CHAPTER X. Peggy lay rigid as a marble statue in bed, her eyes wide open and dry. The sleep of utter weariness stole again and again into her brain, but it. could not stifle the pain she felt, the dull foreboding of imminent trouble that distorted her thoughts until they were like evil shapes on the mirror of her consciousness. Hollywood! Its natural beauties were such as to send an artist rushing for paint and brush to perpetuate those beauties on canvas; its possibilities as the greatest, finest means of entertainment thift this civilisation would in all probability know —why, then, must it behave like a colossal octopus with poison in every tentacle for the individual who strove but to serve, whose only wish was to bring one’s talent and lay it at the feet of the newest and in ’some respects greatest of the arts? Peggy felt she had slept; but now life was thundering imperiously at all her doors, challenging, daring, mocking, enticing; should she show the white feather and creep back home to the shelter and safety of things known and beloved, and forget Hollywood, with its thorn bestrewn path and glittering promise? David would go with her; at least she thought that he would; but the Movie Kingdom seemed to be claiming him for its own. She was bitterly hurt —more hurt than she would admit even to herself—that he consented to go to the barbecue without her, as the guest of a woman he knew she disliked. The little travelling clock by the side of her bed warned her that it was 15 minutes to eight o’clock, and she had to report at the studio at nine, all ready to go on the set. The company did not provide costumes for the extras and “bit” players in “The Flame of Life,” therefore Peggy had to allow herself sufficient time to select the things for her part from the various trunks of clothes which she had brought with her. Ironically enough, she was to play an engenue a young college graduate who knew little except how to have a good_time. “I look a thousand years old, Peggy assured herself with solemn exaggeraUon, preparing to take a cold shower as a preliminary to dressing. (To be Continued).