THE WATCHER AT THE GATE
The street leading to the Holden motion-picture studio, considered by itself, lacks beauty. Flanking it for most of the way from the boulevard to the studio gate are vacant lots labelled with their prices and appeals to the passer to buy them. Still their prices are high enough to mark the thoroughfare as one out of the common, and it is further distinguished by two rows of lofty eucalyptus trees.
These have a real feathery beauty, and are perhaps a factor in the seemingly exorbitant prices demanded for the choice bungalow and home sites they shade. Save for a casual pioneer bungalow or two, there are no buildings to attract the notice until one reaches a high fence that marks the beginning of the Holden lot. Back of this fence is secreted a microcosmos, a world in little, where one may encounter strange races of people in their native dress and behold, by walking a block, cities actually apart by league upon league of the earth's surface and separated by centuries of time.
To penetrate this city of many cities, and this actual present of the remote past, one must be of a certain inner elect. Hardly may one enter by assuming the disguise of a native, as daring explorers have sometimes overcome the difficulty of entering other strange cities. Its gate, reached after passing along an impressive expanse of the reticent fence, is watched by a guardian. He is a stoatish man of middle age, not neatly dressed, and of forbidding aspect. His face is ruthless, with a very knowing cynicism. He is there, it would seem, chiefly to keep people out of the delightful city, though from time to time he will bow an assent or wave it with the hand clutching his evening newspaper to one of the favoured lawful inmates, who will then carelessly saunter or drive an expensive motor car through the difficult portal.
Standing across the street, one may peer through this portal into an avenue of the forbidden city. There is an exciting glimpse of greensward, flowering shrubbery, roses, vines, and a vista of the ends of enormous structures painted yellow. And this avenue is sprightly with the passing of enviable persons who are rightly there, some in alien garb, some in the duller uniform of the humble artisan, some in the pressed and garnished trappings of rich overlords.
It is really best to stand across the street for this clandestine view of heart-shaking delights. If you stand close to the gate to peer past the bulky shape of the warder he is likely to turn and give you a cold look. Further, he is averse to light conversation, being always morosely absorbed--yet with an eye ever alert for intrusive outlanders--in his evening paper. He never reads a morning paper, but has some means of obtaining at an early hour each morning a pink or green evening paper that shrieks with crimson headlines.
Such has been his reading through all time, and this may have been an element in shaping his now inveterate hostility toward those who would engage him in meaningless talk. Even in accepting the gift of an excellent cigar he betrays only a bored condescension. There is no relenting of countenance, no genial relaxing of an ingrained suspicion toward all who approach him, no cordiality, in short, such as would lead you to believe that he might be glad to look over a bunch of stills taken by the most artistic photographer in all Simsbury, Illinois. So you let him severely alone after a bit, and go to stand across the street, your neatly wrapped art studies under your arm, and leaning against the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, you stare brazenly past him into the city of wonders.
It is thus we first observe that rising young screen actor, Clifford Armytage, beginning the tenth day of his determined effort to become much more closely identified with screen activities than hitherto.
Ten days of waiting outside the guarded gate had been his, but no other ten days of his life had seemed so eventful or passed so swiftly. For at last he stood before his goal, had actually fastened his eyes upon so much of it as might be seen through its gate. Never had he achieved so much downright actuality.
Back in Simsbury on a Sunday morning he had often strolled over to the depot at early train time for a sight of the two metal containers housing the films shown at the Bijou Palace the day before. They would be on the platform, pasted over with express labels. He would stand by them, even touch them, examine the padlocks, turn them over, heft them; actually hold within his grasp the film wraith of Beulah Baxter in a terrific installment of The Hazards of Hortense. Those metal containers imprisoned so much of beauty, of daring, of young love striving against adverse currents--held the triumphant fruiting of Miss Baxter's toil and struggle and sacrifice to give the public something better and finer. Often he had caressed the crude metal with a reverent hand, as if his wonder woman herself stood there to receive his homage.
That was actuality, in a way. But here it was in full measure, without mental subterfuge or vain imaginings. Had he not beheld from this post--he was pretty sure he had--Miss Baxter herself, swathed in costly furs, drive a robin's-egg-blue roadster through the gate without even a nod to the warder? Indeed, that one glimpse of reality had been worth his ten days of waiting--worth all his watching of the gate and its keeper until he knew every dent in the keeper's derby hat, every bristle in his unkempt mustache, every wrinkle of his inferior raiment, and every pocket from which throughout the day he would vainly draw matches to relight an apparently fireproof cigar. Surely waiting thus rewarded could not be called barren. When he grew tired of standing he could cross the street and rest on a low bench that encircled one of the eucalyptus trees. Here were other waiters without the pale, usually men of strongly marked features, with a tendency to extremes in stature or hair or beards or noses, and not conspicuously neat in attire.
