The Mad Busman, and Other Stories/Greatness and Jamey Pobjoy

by I. A. R. Wylie

 

V

Greatness and Jamey Pobjoy

I

DID Jamey Pobjoy himself realise that he had come to the turning-point of his life? He smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He cannot or will not remember. Mrs. Pobjoy, Sr., whose imaginative powers have developed since her advent among the idle rich, will tell you that she always knew there was something queer-like about the boy that evening. Actually he sat very quietly in the place of honour between his parents. The twins, Ethel and Mabel, expressed their mingled alarm and delight at the trouncing of a policeman on the screen with a vociferousness which elected caustic comment from the audience, but young Jamey watched in alert silence. He had waited for this. He knew all about it. He had studied the pictures of the hero and heroines outside the "movies" till his midget nose had turned blue. Now he was to see them face to face. A new world was to open out before him. But it was not even then his way to betray emotion. His heart pounded in his chest. His grubby hands were clenched between his grubby knees, but in the dusk his small, white face had a look of almost professorial intentness.

"Who makes them pickshures, Pa?"

Mr. Pobjoy fidgeted impatiently. "'Ow should I know? Them Yankees, most likely."

"What's Yankees, Pa?"

"Sort of people. Shut up."

"I'd like to make pickshures, Pa."

"I'll make a pickshure of you if you don't 'old your noise. Look at every one starin ' at you! Cawn't yer be'ive? The way your ma brings you up fair makes me sick."

Young Pobjoy relapsed unquenched into silence. It was the very early days of the film. Amid frantic jumps and flickerings, a Wild West story unwound itself with its inevitable saloons and sheriffs and cow boys and sweetly efficient heroines with bobbing curls and six-shooters bristling at their waists. But to Jamey they were not inevitable. He merely wondered at them. He could not have explained how it happened, but gradually his heart grew quiet, and something like a chill of disappointment crept into his blood. His tilted nose wrinkled. People didn't behave like that—nowhere. They didn't roll their eyes about that way, and when girls came out of the water they looked like drowned rats and not like curly-headed dolls in a shop-window. Young Jamey knew. Hadn't he pushed Ethel, whose curls were notorious, into a local horse trough? They weren't real, these people. He didn't care a sniff what became of them.

And then suddenly it happened. The photographer must have run amuck. He had forgotten his business, forgotten the heroine racing hideous Death neck and neck, and had made a picture to please himself—a picture of endless space, of incredible empty distance with the ghosts of mountains shad owing the horizon. He seemed to linger over it, careless of all consequences, to rejoice in it, and all at once young Pobjoy, who had never seen a horizon other than that of chimney-pots, choked, and his small hands grew wet and tense, and his chin thrust itself out. His narrow chest rose and fell in a storm of unfamiliar, nameless emotion. It was as though something had lifted him by the scruff of his scraggy neck thousands of miles high, frightening him and filling him with a fierce, terrible happiness.

"Pa, what's that?"

"It says 'The Great Desert lay before 'er.' What's the good of all this 'ere bloomin 'eddication if yer cawn't read?"

"What's a desert, Pa?"

"Oh, shut up, cawn't yer?"

"Pa——"

The scene had vanished. Instead you saw a bonfire and strange black people who danced about it lugubriously. A close-up showed a tattooed and painted savage who glowered at the audience, and then you were jerked off to a rough hillside down which minute figures rolled and slithered pell-mell towards the valley. Then another hair-raising glimpse of that great distance. A cloud of dust came rolling across it like a ball. It swept on—almost on top of you—and then just as the twins let off an irrepressible yell of anguish, it swerved aside, breaking up into particles of racing horsemen with the tattooed and painted savage at their head. He rode bareback, and as he passed, he twirled his rifle. The audience heard his war-whoop, smelled blood.

But young Pobjoy sniffed incredulously. "What's him, Pa?"

"Cawn't yer see? 'Eagle Face,' 'e calls 'imself. 'E's a Red Injun."

"'E ain't," young Pobjoy declared.

The elder Pobjoy felt justifiably annoyed. "'E is. It says so."

"'E ain't a real Red Injun."

"Of course 'e is. Ever seen an Englishman with a mug like that?"

"'E ain't real," young Pobjoy persisted. "Not inside, 'e ain't. 'E ain't going to scalp nobody. 'E's just puttin' it on. 'E's a dud Injun. Yus, 'e is. When I makes a pickshure, it'll be a real pickshure."

Mr. and Mrs. Pobjoy cuffed him soundly and simultaneously from both sides.

II

About six thousand miles away from Whitechapel, Son-of-His-Father rolled out from beneath a dirty blanket and, squatting tailor fashion, scratched himself drowsily. From where he sat he could see an uneven square of daylight, hazy as yet, so that the familiar mountains, which at evening crept nearer and nearer till he could have stretched out his hand and touched them, were now rosy clouds upon the distance. But in the immediate foreground the tumbled rocks had already begun to smoulder. A wretched goat, dragging its rope, limped up from the patch of alfalfa which marked the course of a parched and dying stream, and stood dejectedly under their shadow. Over their heads, for the hogan itself had been built well out of reach of the stream when it became a torrent, Son-of-His-Father could see the shimmering lines of the great Santa Fé railway racing each other hotly across the desert. Whither they went he neither knew nor cared. He did not think clearly about them. Indeed he did not think much about anything except his food and the goat, both of which he loved. But he hated those iron snakes. He was always glad when night came and swallowed them. The night hated them, too. It sprang up from behind the eastern rim of the world and swooped down, taking great mouthfuls of them as it came. But it left the hogan and Narbona and Yunosi and Son-of-His-Father and the mountains.

Though he did not think much, there were certain things that he knew. He knew that the mountains were there always—even on the darkest nights, in the midst of snow and blinding sandstorms. When Those Above quarrelled among themselves or were angry with Son-of-His-Father because he had lost one of Narbona's dwindling flock of sheep, they threw terrible bright spears across the sky, and by their light he could see the mountains, knife-sharp and glowing terribly, almost on top of him. But the iron snakes had disappeared. They were strangers and enemies, and every one was against them. They disappeared under the snow and under the sand, and once the great waters had come and a washed them away with a laugh.

Narbona, when he was not drunk, could tell stories of a time when they had not been at all. Those had been good days for the Navajos and their brothers. Then the fat, rich lands had been theirs, and they had lived happily, fighting the Utes, and stealing sheep and horses from the Mexicans, and raiding peaceful Hopi pueblos. But the Americans had come and had toiled and sweated and died, and though the iron snakes might disappear, they came again and again. They were strangers and enemies, but they were very strong.

They were "bad medicine." Son-of-His-Father knew that, too. The rain came no more as it had done in the old days; the spring was dying, and the Navajos wandered over the face of the desert, seeking pasture. Only Narbona remained with his dwindling flock of sheep and his one goat. It was as though some evil shamon had thrown a spell over him, bewitching him.

Every day, when the sun had climbed to the top of the sky, an iron beast snorting fire and smoke toiled up the desert valley and stopped, panting, at the wooden depot not a thousand yards from Narbona's hogan. Always at that hour Narbona and Yunosi and Son-of-His-Father were in their places in the shade of the white walls, Narbona with his beaten silver rings and bracelets, and Yunosi with her blankets, and Son-of-His-Father with his small hand outstretched wailing:

"Five cents! Five cents!"

The white men and women climbed out of the iron beast, groaning with the heat and stretching themselves. They stared at Narbona and Yunosi, handled their wares, and grumbled and haggled. They said all Indians were liars and thieves and that the thing wasn't worth half that. But Son-of-His-Father made them laugh, and they threw him cents for the fun of seeing him tumble over himself trying to catch them. They seemed sorry when the great iron bell clanged and the conductors stood with their steps ready for them to get back into the iron beast.

But Son-of-His-Father hated them.

In the evening Narbona would slink to the village store, and some one would give him fire-water in exchange for a piece of beaten silver, and he would drink himself mad. Last night he had rushed out on the desert chanting a wild, old song and had danced solemnly in the starlight.

From under his blanket, pressed against the earth wall of the hogan, Son-of-His-Father had heard him and shivered with fearful joy. It was as though the coyotes had learned to sing Navajo words. The stark rhythm of Narbona's song was like the beat of a drum. It had called to little Son-of-His-Father strangely to come out on the desert, and he had not slept until the voice had died away, throbbing against the black distance.

Towards morning Yunosi had found her husband lying across the threshold of the hogan and had dragged him in by the long, black hair of his head and flung him down at Son-of-His-Father's side on the dirty blanket.

Son-of-His-Father could hear him snoring now. He paid no heed to him. While he scratched himself, he thought of his breakfast. It was growing brighter in the hogan, and he could see the dim shape of the water ollas and the frame of his mother's loom standing like a tired, gaunt horse waiting for the day's work to begin. Yunosi herself sat bowed over a bowl of meal which was to be their breakfast. The bold profile of her face, cut against the light of the open doorway, looked grim and stolid, and when she moved, the lank, black hair fell forward in inky streaks. Though she was Son-of-His-Father's mother, she was quite old. The lines on her face might have been carved by a knife out of redwood, and her mouth had sunken in over the empty gums. But her eyes were bright and steady and were always fixed on a far distance.

Son-of-His- Father himself was a little brown animal, lean-limbed and pot-bellied and round-faced. He had the beginnings of Yunosi's hawk's nose, but at present it was only comic. His eyes, which would one day sink back under deep brows, were wide open and pensive, and sorrowfully questioning. Would there be enough meal this time? Was it true what Narbona and Yunosi had said yesterday, that the pasture was giving out and that the sheep were dying and that the goat must go because she was old and useless and eating more than any of them? Why didn't the rains come as they had done in the time of Barboncita, the great chief? It was because of the White Men and the great iron beast. They were bad medicine—bad medicine. Yunosi said so, and what Yunosi said was true.

Son-of-His-Father stopped scratching himself. He groped under the blanket and drew out cautiously the old, rusty hunting knife which Narbona carried in his belt. Then he crawled out, stark naked as he was, into the sunlight.

It was getting hotter every moment. The sun glared over the top of the eastern mountains. The sand burned under Son-of-His-Father's hard little feet. He ran down to the sluggish stream that crawled amid the withering alfalfa, and heaped handfuls of mud together on the parched bank. He worked hard, snorting and puffing just as the iron beast snorted and puffed when it came up the valley. And presently, when he had done, he sat back on his haunches and looked at his handiwork. No one but Son-of-His-Father could have told that the long, rapidly drying trail of mud was the great trans-continental express now lumbering its way out of the east towards destruction. But Son-of-His-Father knew. And suddenly he drove his knife into the heart of the beast, cutting and slashing, and shouting out in a childish fury.

He grew tired at last. He heard his mother calling, and a faint, familiar stir as though the world had been asleep and now at a signal shook itself and rubbed its eyes. Far away in the distance a bell clanged dolefully, warningly.. Son-of-His-Father looked up. He tried not to believe what he saw. But there it was. It came up over the horizon, winding its way amid the rocks that lay tumbled over the desert valley like a giant's forgotten playthings, its iron voice chanting a passionless, relentless triumph.

Yunosi limped down the trail and caught her son by the scruff of the neck and shook him. But Son-of-His-Father did not care. He was crying bitterly for the dead gods.

He was thrust into his trousers and wound about in his blanket, and his face was wiped because for unknown reasons the White People seemed to like him better clean. Narbona sat up from his frowsy, drunken sleep and yawned and grunted, and then all three set off across the scorching stretch of sand that lay between the hogan and the station, Narbona leading and Son-of-His-Father and the goat trotting in the rear.

But they were late. The iron beast stood panting and exultant at its drinking trough, and the White People were already clustered round a rival Hopi family with their basket wares, and no one took much notice of Narbona's rings or of the blankets which Yunosi spread out before her. She did not appeal to them, but sat patiently, as though it were all of no matter, looking over to the mountains which were growing dim again behind the brazen sheet of sunlight. But Son-of-His-Father pushed his way fretfully among the big White People. His heart was heavy as a stone in his breast. His voice was a plaintive, hopeless wail:

"Five cents! Five cents!"

Two large White Men who stood apart from the rest saw him and nudged each other. One of them caught hold of the tail of his blanket and offered him a nickel if he would tell them his name. But he stared at them stolidly, hating them. Two nickels, then. The man's big red face was so close to his own that he could see nothing else. And suddenly his rage flamed up again, and he struck out with his small, clenched fist on his captor's chin and mouth.

The man laughed so that he nearly lost his balance, but he had to let go his hold, and Son-of-His-Father turned and ran helter-skelter, tripping over the edge of his blanket and crying with shame and fury.

The two men stood together and talked gravely.

"He's it—absolutely it. The whole three of them, for that matter. Look at them now. The perfect type."

"You won't get 'em. You know their superstitions."

"Not in these parts. They've got over all that. They're civilised."

"Civilised or degenerate?"

The other grinned cynically.

"Both," he said.

When Son-of-His-Father came back to Yunosi's side, the two White Men were talking to Narbona, who sat stolid and expressionless, saying nothing. They were serious now, and when they saw Son-of-His-Father, they looked at him curiously, and his hatred became a strange, new terror. He could not understand much of what was being said, but he caught the words "sun-pictures," and Narbona asked how much, and the taller of the White Men counted on his fingers. Then the bell clanged, and all the people began to stream back on the iron beast. But before he went, the tall White Man wrote something on a slip of paper and gave it to Narbona.

Yunosi, who had not spoken once, drew away from them, muttering to herself: "Bad medicine! Bad medicine!"

III

From the ends of the earth Lucy May and Jamey Pobjoy and Son-of-His-Father came together in the yard of the Constellation Moving Picture Company, Hollywood, California. To assert that their meeting came by chance or as the result of the intricate workings of destiny would be to answer the riddle of the Sphinx. Jamey Pobjoy would say that he knew about Lucy May from the beginning and worked towards her deliberately, which statement is saved from complete absurdity by the fact that Jamey Pobjoy always knew just where he wanted to get to, and the very best and shortest way of getting there.

He had grown up, as Cockneys will grow up, in defiance of the laws of heredity and hygiene, slender and delicate-looking and tough as leather. His fair head still seemed a trifle too large for him and added to the professorial gravity of his blue eyes, which gazed out from behind a pair of spectacles with an engaging innocency. His mouth was feminine and his chin mulish, and he was by a long way the most shabby, odd-looking person in a very odd-looking crowd. Though it was Jamey's first morning in the "yard," he knew all about most of his companions, whose life he had consorted with for years in the pages of movie magazines. What the movie papers had not prepared him for was Lucy May and Son-of-His-Father. Lucy May sat beside him on the wooden bench, and anybody could see with half an eye that she would never be any use as anything but a very sweet and lovable little woman. Son-of-His-Father sat opposite him, cross-legged on the ground, and looked what he was, a lazy, drink-sodden, gone-to-seed, Indian good-for-nothing. Except that he was bare-footed, he wore ordinary clothes, extraordinarily dirty long trousers, a grey sweater and a golfing cap from under which his long, greasy, black hair hung grotesquely. He spoke to no one. As far as Jamey Pobjoy could see, he never moved. He had an air of stupid, almost animal, indifference.

"Make a fine picture, wouldn't he?" Jamey said to his neighbour, as though he had known her all his life. "I'd like to make a picture of him myself. Look at that nose."

She shook her head. She was quite unaware that they had never spoken to each other before. "He's no use, they say. He came here when he was a boy with his father, and they've tried him in odd jobs on and off ever since. But he's too stupid—too lazy. He gets horribly drunk, too—nobody knows how—and then he's dangerous. But he knows a lot of other stray Indians and can bring a whole tribe together when they're wanted. So he's useful. He just wanders about from one studio to another, waiting."

"He looks as though he could do that all right. What's his name?"

"Son-of-His-Father, I think."

"I'll make a note of it. What's yours?"

"Lucy May."

"That's pretty, anyhow. Mine's Jamey—Jamey Pobjoy."

She laughed irrepressibly. "What a funny name! You'll have to change it if you're going to do anything on the film. People would laugh."

"No, they won't. I shan't change it. My Pa and Ma are Pobjoys, and they're going to get all the credit that's coming to them."

"You're English, aren't you?"

"I've just come over."

"I thought so. That funny accent." She looked at him rather as one looks at a curio with tender associations, and Jamey Pobjoy became fully aware of her eyes and the transparent goodness which shone out of them. "My grandfather was English, too. He came round the Cape in '49. His people had an estate—somewhere in Bow. Do you know that part?"

He smiled back at her.

"Don't I! That's my part, too."

"Say, isn't that wonderful. I'll have to tell mother. She'll be so interested."

"I'd like to meet your mother," Jamey said.

She changed her ground hastily. "And you've come all that way to play in the movies?"

"For a time. Till I know all the ropes."

"You'll find it hard waiting for a chance." She sighed. "Sometimes it never comes. They take me on in the crowd scenes, but that's nothing. Of course, I'm not much good. I wouldn't try, but I'm not strong enough—not for office work."

He smiled at her again. "You'll be all right," he said.

But she had suddenly forgotten him. A wave of animation had passed over the crowd. The ingénues began to smile tensely; the mothers arranged their infants' curls into new and more engaging assortments; the habitués uncurled themselves from their slumbers. A large, good-natured looking man with a red-hot face and a sheet of paper stood among them waving them back.

"Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, not much doing to-day. No Wild West stuff. No kids. Soup and fish for the next week. Any gentlemen owning dress suits dated not earlier than 1066 step forward, please. Thank you. Sorry, Miss Lucy, we've got all the nice girls we want for this show. Hello, you're new, aren't you?"

Jamey stood up. He lifted his soft hat. "My name's Pobjoy," he said. "James Pobjoy."

"Pobjoy! Gee, some name for the funny business. What are you figurin' to be?"

"A director."

Lucy May blushed for him. But she hated them all for their ribald laughter. It was too bad, guying him like that. He was a stranger, an Englishman. Englishmen never saw jokes. He wouldn't see how funny it was. Even now he stood there, grave and unmoved, as though waiting for something inevitable to happen.

The director came back a moment later. "We want a harmless lunatic," he said. "Five dollars a day. Come inside."

"Thanks."

James Pobjoy turned and bowed to Lucy May. "I'm coming to have supper at that queer place at the corner where you grab food for yourself on tin trays," he said. "You know. Six o'clock. Meet me there."

He did not wait for her to answer. She had no idea that he had made up his mind to marry her. She did not know that till three years later. He passed on at the director's heels, amid the ironical cheers of his competitors.

Slowly, reluctantly, the yard emptied. Son-of-His-Father was the last to go. Even now it was only the sun, rising above the wooden roofs of the property sheds and striking hotly down into the shadow where he squatted, that raised him from his torpor. He looked up, straight into the sun's face, then rose slowly, effortlessly, and passed out of the yard gates, shuffling the dust to clouds under his dragging feet.

IV

Jamey Pobjoy loved Lucy May as he did everything in life, with a white-hot, concentrated, deliberate fury which nothing could betray into imprudence and nothing could turn aside. As for her, she was at first very sorry for him.

Her pity did not disconcert him at all. When he had made his first picture, it would all come right. Meantime he worked with the crowd. At the end of three months he had unobtrusively wormed his way into the laboratories, from which he emerged after a short interval as about tenth-assistant to the second camera-man, whose grandfather also came from England and who showed him therefore a tolerant goodwill. For a year Jamey Pobjoy waited. Then on location, one grilling summer's day, miles from the studio, with four hundred expensive supers waiting to begin the battle of Waterloo, his chief fainted, and young Pobjoy stepped into his place. It was the opportunity which comes to every man who deserves it. As it turned out afterwards, his stuff was excellent, and it seemed unfortunate that at the last moment the artistic temperament from which the Pobjoy family had already suffered sufficiently should have slipped its leash.

"It's а a dud picture," Jamey told the director with an apparent calm which was really white-hot indignation. "It's rotten. Humans don't fight like that. Even as missing links they didn't stand about making faces at one another. It's not real."

The director said nothing, because such a thing had never happened to him before, and his everyday vocabulary was obviously inadequate. But the next morning young Pobjoy received an envelope with the pay due him and the intimation that the Constellation Film Company required his services no more.

Lucy May wept for him. But Jamey Pobjoy merely took a wad of manuscript from his desk and went over to the scenario director of the Magnum Opus Players and laid his case before him. Now the scenario director knew Jamey. For that matter every one in Hollywood knew him. He had become a joke. Though he was more restrained about it than in his early youth, his conviction that he would become a great man was well known, and to hail him as Director Pobjoy was to be sure of a responsive titter from the mob. But he was "different," and because he was different he might be anything—a genius or a lunatic—and the scenario director had the wit to take him seriously.

"Wild West stuff?" he said.

Pobjoy nodded.

"We're stacked up to the ceiling with it."

"Read it."

The scenario director read. "It's all right. It's good. What d'you want for it?"

"I don't want anything."

"Eh?"

"I want to make it myself."

"Say! And what then?"

"If it's good, you sign me up."

The scenario director mopped his brow.

"Gee—of all the darned cheek!"

"It'll be all right," Jamey Pobjoy said looking at him steadily through his glasses. "It'll be the real thing."

The scenario director thought for five minutes. "I'll put it to the boss," he said. "I don't promise."

"It'll be all right," Jamey Pobjoy said again.

And no one could have told from his calm, cast iron countenance that he was sending up prayers to Heaven.

V

Son-of-His-Father's childish habit of not thinking much about anything had developed so that in an ordinary way he was a mere instinct seeking food. But when he had drunk of the fire-water which Narbona had taught him to make, his mind became a monstrous panorama of dreams. He saw then things that he had never seen, and heard sounds that he had never heard—the rush of horsemen across limitless space, the thunder of hoofs, and the long, far-off throb of the drum. He remembered, too, things long since forgotten—the hogan above the rocks, and Yunosi, and the mountains that at mornings were clouds upon the horizon and at night towered over him; the twin serpents racing across the desert and the iron beast.

And while his red-hot brain was busy with these dreams, he himself raged over the Santa Monica hills, screaming like a coyote, until at morning he sank down in the shadow of the deserted ranch-house where he lived, twitching with delirium.

Jamey Pobjoy, who had studied Son-of-His-Father and knew his habits, brought his camera and made a grimly successful picture. It erred perhaps on the side of realism, but it was convincing. In young Pobjoy's pet phraseology, it was real. He waited patiently until Son-of-His-Father had struggled, moaning, back to consciousness, made a final exposure, and then sat down.

"You know me, eh?" he asked. "We see each other plenty times. Me come to make Son-of-His-Father visit. Come to give him big money."

Son-of-His-Father did not answer. He lay back against the walls of his cabin, moving his head, with its covering of black and matted hair, rhythmically from side to side like an animal trying to free itself from a relentless pressure. His mouth hung open; his eyes were half-closed and filmed with wretchedness. His hands sprawled on their knuckles in the dust.

"Me make 'em great sun-picture," Jamey Pobjoy went on. "Son-of-His-Father plenty big fellow. Gone to the dogs. Fire-water and all. Then White Man like me come along—tell 'em stories of old days when Son-of-His-Father mighty chief and fight White Man and knock spots off him. White Man want to make 'em sun-pictures of great chief, and Son-of-His-Father remember and come back and sing 'em old songs and go out on the war-path. And all time White Man make 'em pictures—real pictures."

Son-of-His-Father tried to lift himself to his feet and failed. "Me—me no sabe——"

"No—not yet," Jamey agreed. "But you will."

Son-of-His-Father rolled over, snoring, with his face in the dust.

VI

The faint stirring of ants in an ant-heap—the first tentative swing of inter-related wheels in a machine—the coming to life of something dead——

Son-of-His-Father sat limp in a corner of his seat. His empty eyes were fixed on the landscape sliding past him, on the orange-groves, miles upon miles of them, with their golden fruit shining like little balls of fire amid the green. But he saw nothing. He did not answer when Jamey Pobjoy, lurching down the aisle of the car, spoke to him, but shrank back into himself as though from some painful contact. He had not been drunk for three weeks, and his parched nerves burned and twitched with suffering.

They had not given him a chance to get drunk. They had kept him in the studio, together with a band of fifty other gone-to-seed Indians who habitually hung about the employment yards waiting for easily earned money. They had not had to work much, but had lounged about the lot, gambling or sleeping. Sometimes Jamey had made sun-pictures of them, just as they were in their frowzy, white man's dress, but more often he had sat among them and smoked and talked strange talk, of old Navajo days. He had taught them to sing old Navajo songs, singing himself from a book, painfully, seriously, beating time with his hand. And once he had danced, making them dance after him, slow, rhythmic steps that fired the blood like drink. He had beaten the dust up under his feet like a horse pawing the ground before a charge.

Son-of-His-Father had felt then the stirring of a latent sense of humour—a desire to stand still and laugh at this white man in spectacles who was so eager—so comically in earnest—so terribly in ear nest. But he was frightened. He was afraid of this young man. It was he who had begun the trouble inside Son-of-His-Father's brain.

The train shook and jarred him. His companions, huddled on the unfamiliar, cushioned seats, swayed monotonously as though hypnotised. Their eyes sought him with a restless uneasy questioning. They seemed to appeal to him. But, he was busy within himself. The shadows were growing stronger, more definite. He could almost make out their shapes—Yunosi and the hogan and the iron beast. It was like the beginning of one of his drunken dreams. But he was not drunk.

The cool Pacific winds had begun to fail. The orange groves thinned and became wastes of sage brush, empty sand-hills rolling away into obscurity. The air withered. It tasted of burning dust. One by one the Magnum Opus Players slipped from the platform of the observation car back to their reservations, where they lounged, sick and stunned with the heat. But Jamey and Lucy May remained. He had given her a little part in his cast—a very little part, for he never pretended to himself that she could act—so that she should be with him. More than anything else he wanted her to see him make his first picture, to believe in him. He knew that up to now she had only liked him and been sorry.

"It's my chance," he said, "and I'm going to pull it off. I've worked hard enough. I've had this stunt in my mind for months, and when I saw that chap I knew I'd found what I'd been looking for—a dirty, down-and-out Indian with a face like—like a sick eagle. You see the idea? It's a sort of comeback—a resurrection. I've got him as a regular drunken outcast—my word, you should see the stuff I shot; it was the real thing—and now I'm going to get him as the big chief come back into his own. He'll do it. I've kept him off the drink, and I've drilled him till I'm half a Navajo myself. I've yarned to him about his ancestors till I think he sort of believes in them—p'r'aps he had ancestors, Lord knows—and I've taught him a couple of war-dances and a good, rousing war-whoop. You see, it's got to be real. You've got to believe in things yourself."

"You're wonderful, Jamey."

"You're laughing. You wait, though."

"And is there a love-story?"

"A topping love-story."

She crept a little closer to him. "It's getting dark. How the sand stings one's face! And that a queer tree—a cactus, isn't it?—like a ghost. A sentinel. Is this the desert?"

"We're getting out now. You can feel it."

"It's—it's frightening, isn't it?"

"It frightened me all right the last time. Hiding in a lot of freight. It nearly killed me."

"People used to die—of thirst—and all that. But it's different now. We're safe."

He wondered. They were rolling out into a silence so absolute that the rumble of their train was like the insolent, noisy tread of vandals in an ancient, crumbling temple. The earth lay about them, white as leprosy. And suddenly an old fear had him by the throat. He was a grubby urchin again, sitting in a dark, hot room, staring at the picture of an undreamed of loneliness. He wanted it and feared it. He had the unforgotten sense of being lifted by the scruff of the neck to a horrific height. He had thrust himself into the hands of an inimical power that struck the heart dead with desire and terror. He hadn't been able to help himself. He had come from the other end of the earth to face it. But safe? They didn't belong here. It was like white men to build their noisy, dirty railways where they wanted to—pushing and thrusting and elbowing their way. But they had to pay for it. They butted into secrets that were too big for them. They challenged things they didn't understand, which any moment might arouse themselves. They were as safe as that.

They were not alone now. Son-of-His-Father had come out noiselessly and stood beside them. He did not speak to them or seem to see them. He was standing straight, with his lean hands clasping the rails. The wind blew the long, black hair about his face. His head was thrown back, and they could see his nostrils quivering, scenting the desert night.

Lucy May drew back, shivering.

"It frightens me," she said,—"frightens me."

VII

They trekked out from a sleepy little depot into the desert. There were two hundred of them altogether, white men and women and Indians, and they rode on burros or in the ramshackle wagons, or trailed behind on foot. Two truck-loads of properties were to follow, and a ranch ten miles distant was sending over a hundred horses. The Magnum Opus Company flattered itself that when it did things, it did them in style.

"You've got carte blanche," the chief director had said to James Pobjoy. "You've got a good story. If you make a mess of it, we're through with you."

But he was sure that Jamey Pobjoy would not make a mess of it. He scented in him the genuine artist, the man who believes in himself and in his job.

Overnight the company had become pioneers. As people of many parts they wore their slouch hats and blank-charged revolvers gracefully, without self-consciousness. The heat and dusty wretchedness of the train were left behind. Being on location had its bright side, after all—a sort of happy-go-lucky picnic spirit. They laughed and chattered noisily. The men gave mock displays of horsemanship on their indignant mules.

It was early yet. The purple shadows still lingered at the foot of the mountains, and in the deep cañons and crevices which from the distance had a rounded, softened look. The mountains themselves were amethyst and melted into the fading rose of the morning. There was no menace yet in the cool immensity, but rather a hint of faërie, of unearthly dreams.

They passed an arroya and an Indian working on his field of corn. He looked up, and Jamey Pobjoy nodded to him. He was a little intoxicated with himself and with his power. He wanted to make a big thing bigger.

"You come along, too," he said. "We make 'em big sun-pictures. Plenty big money—plenty other Indians."

He pointed, and the man's eyes followed his gesture. They rested for a moment on Son-of-His-Father and his scarecrow companions in their motley white-man's clothes. They did not lose their inscrutability.

"Sun-pictures not for good Indian," he said. "Bad medicine."

He went on working, and Jamey Pobjoy kicked his mule into a trot. But for the pommel of his Mexican saddle he would assuredly have rolled off, for he could not ride at all. His long legs almost touched the ground, and his spectacles bobbed up and down on his blunt, aggressive nose. Though they rather loved him, the Magnum Opus Company winked at one another, and Lucy May, seated beside the driver in a caravan, felt tender towards him, as a mother feels towards a queer, ungainly child.

But a shadow had fallen on Jamey Pobjoy's happiness—a sort of contrition, of regret, he did not know what. He rode beside Son-of-His-Father trudging through the dust.

"You big fellow now," he said, and he tried to make his voice jolly and consoling. "You other Indians do as Big Chief Son-of-His-Father tell you. Sabe?"

They grunted answer. They hung their heads dejectedly. And he could feel their shame like a bruise.

The sun came up. Its brazen eye stared down from above the giant sandstone barriers to the east and burned up the last lingering colours of the morning. Its heat drank the veins dry; its universal glare bludgeoned the brain into a torpid consciousness of suffering. It was as though a furnace door were being slowly opened letting through a blasting, withering breath.

The Magnum Opus Players wilted and stumbled into silence. At midday they pitched camp, setting their wagons in a defensive circle for the great battle picture. Son-of-His-Father and his hundred Indians camped alone.

Jamey Pobjoy surveyed his terrain. He set up flags where his camera-men were to stand, and platforms where the flagmen could wig-wag his orders. The sweat ran into his eyes, and his brain reeled in a sick mist, but he could not rest. He had, indeed, a queer conviction that he dared not, that he must hurry on lest something happen, lest he himself dwindled and lost power. For the desert was awake now and aware of them, the intruders.

"We must get in the small acts before dark," he said, "if we all die for it."

In their spare moments he drove his camera-men to make stills of the desert itself. He was autocratic and pitiless, and from their point of view a laughable and rather likeable upstart. They grumbled disgustedly.

"What's bitten him? Does he think the Lizzies want all this high-brow scenery stuff? As though the place wouldn't be there to-morrow!"

But that was what he was not certain of—where anything would be to-morrow. It was queer, this trouble that had begun to uncoil itself at the bottom of his heart—not so much fear as the certainty that somehow things were slipping out of his hands, rolling downhill of their own momentum, faster and faster. He could only try desperately to keep up with them. The white members of his cast fell silent, jaded and nerve-racked with the heat. They obeyed him, their teeth set. And the Indians, too, had changed. They wore their ancient native dress now, provided from the company's wardrobe, and to Jamey's excited fancy they were like men long dead, who had thrown off their burial clothes and stood up in flesh and blood. They had a dazed, half-awakened look.

They made their last scene for the day. In an hour the light would begin to fail, and they had rehearsed the thing a dozen times already against a burning background of rock and wilderness. It had not gone well, and Jamey Pobjoy, his script crumpled in his hand, his voice harsh with dust and weariness, cursed and pleaded.

"It's got to go—got to. Throw yourselves into it. Believe in yourselves. You—there! You son of big Navajo chief. This white man drive your father off your land—he steal 'em cattle—he kill 'em people. Now you come. You ask justice Sabe? You big man. All your fathers great warriors. Look it. And you—Richards"—he swung fiercely round on his leading man—"put pep into it. You've got a bad conscience. You're afraid and uneasy. Feel it. Believe in yourself."

Richards mopped himself desperately. He had never been asked to believe in himself before. He was a movie-actor—straightforward, painstaking, with a collection of labelled, stereotyped gestures. Now they were of no use, not out here, not in this desolation. The crowd of watchers, the heat, the silent, passive figure opposite him, lamed him. It was absurdly true—this fear, his gathering uneasiness. But he couldn't act it.

"Darned if I'll rehearse again. Get on with it."

"All right. Ready—action—camera—go——"

Richards strode into range. He came within a couple of feet of Son-of-His-Father, who, with his blanket about his shoulder, his arms folded, awaited him. He was genuinely angry now—with himself, but chiefly with Jamey Pobjoy and his idiotic demand for reality. Well, he'd let him have it this time. He broke, blustering, into his words:

"You infernal Indian dog! Get out of here or I'll make you!"

Jamey nodded eagerly.

"Better. Carry on, both of you."

But Richards had ceased to hear even the familiar click of the camera. He was looking straight into Son-of-His-Father's face, and what he saw there he did not like. The fellow was playing up now—almost too well. The dawning look of comprehension, the twitching nostrils, the haughty gathering together of the long, lean body, stirred to life some latent antagonism in the white man's blood. This dirty good-for-nothing! This drunken studio loafer! A star part, too. It made one mad. Jamey Pobjoy must be dippy himself.

"Clear out! It's your last chance."

Son-of-His-Father sneered as he had been told to sneer. And then it exploded—the convulsive, insane irritability that gathers in men who have borne the desert sun too long. Richards, the best-loved villian of the movies, a mild and genial-tempered father of a family, lashed out, his fist crashing against the Indian's teeth.

"Cut—that's enough, for heaven's sake—cut——"

Jamey Pobjoy sprang between them. Suddenly, it seemed to him, night had peered over the black mesa opposite them. He had felt the Indian watchers stir. He had heard them murmur, faintly, indistinctly, like the sifting of the sand in a gust of wind. They sank back into frozen immobility. But Richards stared about him blankly, stupidly, as though a demoniac force outside himself had been responsible.

"Sorry—guess I hit too hard. Well, you asked for it."

He swung on his heel and lurched back to camp.

Son-of-His-Father lifted himself slowly from the dust. He did not hear what Jamey was saying to him. There was blood on his face, and he wiped it on his hand and stared at it, as though now, at last, something definite had been remembered.

VIII

"And so power went out of the Navajo people. They made peace, and the White Man came and took their land. Where the pasture was rich, they came. They sent my people into barren places where there was no water, and when my people had grown corn out of stones, they came again and drove them out. You have heard of the Bosco Redendo. The desert is white with the bones of my people who died there.

"My father Narbona built his hogan by the side of the iron serpents which travel from east to west. He was poor, and the white men cast evil spells over him, so that he forsook the ways of his people. But he remembered, and at night he sang of these things. And I remember them—I, Son-of-His-Father. I wear the sacred Bizha which Barboncita wore, great chief of the Navajos."

He held out the coyote's tooth which Yunosi had hung about his neck.

Faces crowded into the firelight, peering at him and at the amulet.. An undertone, hot and fierce as the breathing of wolves, ran like an accompaniment to his chanting unmodulated voice. But he himself stared into the flames. They rushed up out of the earth, throwing handfuls of red stars to the moon that hung white as a bleached skull overhead. He saw there the pictures of his dreams. They were clear now. The wheels of the machine were racing faster and stronger in his brain. It was he, Son-of-His-Father, who rode at the head of the horsemen across the desert. It was for his coming again that Yunosi had waited at the door of the old hogan, looking into the far distance. As he rode, he felt the burning wind in his face. He sent his horse up the secret trail that led from the black cañon up to the mesa heights, and from the outposts of rock looked out over the great spaces that were his people's. He watched the white men come like a cloud of dust rolling on the horizon, until the night swallowed them. The night hated them—the strangers and enemies. The desert hated them. It fought them with cloudburst and sand-storm and treacherous mirage. But there were too many of them. They came again and again like men driven by a desire stronger than the fear of death.

"The Navajo people sinned. Those Above turned their faces from them, so that when the white men came, there was no power in them. The white men have taken our land. They have cast spells over us so that we have become outcasts for them to mock at. Let us live again as men."

The goat trailed past him in the firelight, dragging its rope; the goat, his playfellow, was dead. There had not been enough to eat—never enough. The white man with the big red face offered him a stick of candy, laughing at him. A grief, ancient and tragic as the earth, was in Son-of-His-Father's heart. He did not know that he had spoken the words that Jamey Pobjoy, day after day, had drilled into his drink-stupefied brain, or that his gestures were those of a dangling marionette. They came to him on a flood of obscure anger. He stood up straight and black as an arrow against the flames, and the Navajos stood up with him with a sound like the rustle of weapons. He sent a long, strange cry into the silence.

The white men drowsing exhaustedly by their camp-fire heard it and glanced at one another. Jamey could see Lucy May's little white hands clench themselves. He knew by the sudden, shaking clutch at his own throat how afraid she was. He hated her to be afraid. He thought how good it would be when he was on the high road to success to tell her how much he loved her. But just now she was as remote as the figure of a dream. He had almost finished his first picture, and he knew that it was big—even the camera-man said so. But a dead weight lay on his heart, an inexplicable sorrow. Perhaps it was sheer physical weakness. His limbs ached. The skin of his face was raw, and the rims of his eyes burned like fire.

Jamey, lying outside the range of firelight, lifted his head from his arms. The great mesa jutted out blackly like a frowning cliff into a still, white sea. The moon threw shadows beneath the mountains. It was all dead—dead as some lost valley in an old, life-forsaken earth, save for the red eye of fire and these stark, strangely-moving shadows. They, too, were not of this life nor of to-day, but of things forgotten and buried under the sand. Their song, exultant and melancholy, was the call of ghosts on their lost hunting-grounds.

"What is it? For the land's sake, what do those scallyways think they're up to now?"

"Oh, doing some moon dance or other. The Director taught it to 'em—didn't you, Pobjoy? They're rehearsing. Sounds as though they enjoyed it."

The camera-man groaned. "Well, I shan't cry when they stop. Say, I'll be glad to be tucked up again in my own downy little bed."

But Jamey Pobjoy lay still with his face between his hands. "They're real," he thought. "And we're play-acting humbugs—guying them."

And suddenly the certainty that he was to be a great man and would marry Lucy May did not matter any more. Out here it was all little and meaningless.

 

Son-of-His-Father on his borrowed mustang waited for the morning. The studio artist had painted his face, and they had given him a scalping knife and a tomahawk, and his eagle's feathers swept back in a fierce crest to his saddle-bow. Behind him the hundred Indian braves, clad and armed with the best that the Magnum Opus Property Department could supply, watched him patiently.

In the cool twilight the camp had laughed and chattered as they made their final preparations. Now, as the sun rose brazenly from behind the mountains, they fell silent. The champ of a horse's bit, the thud of a hoof, sounded ominous. Even Jamey's assistant gave his orders by gestures, troubled by his own voice.

Jamey himself waded painfully through the sand. He felt ludicrous and unhappy. He wasn't even an equal come to parley, but an upstart fellow who had butted into a stranger's house and was ashamed. He stood at Son-of-His-Father's side, fumbling awkwardly with his script.

"Well, you've got the idea. You ride with your men as far as that rock, and then, when I drop the flag, you charge—full gallop—as far as that white line. Then swing off. If you don't there'll be a smash."

"I sabe." Son-of-His-Father's eyes, which had rested on the horizon, dropped for an instant to the other's face, and they were bright and wild as a hawk's. "You make 'em great sun-picture of Navajo chief. To-night all finished. White man and red man go back just same all time. Son-of-His-Father great chief no more."

Jamey faltered miserably. "I'm sorry, but you've been fine. You look it—every inch! I wish I could do something."

A kind of smile passed over the Indian's lips. He swung his mustang round. In silence the hundred followed him, and the dust curled up in a long, low cloud from under their horses' hoofs.

Jamey Pobjoy plodded back to his station beside his chief camera-man. Other operators were ambushed at the starting point of the attack and to the right of the caravan with the huddled crowd of white men and women. It was part of Jamey's scheme that the whole scene should be taken together—that it should be as real as he could make it.

"Heaven grant it clicks the first time," Jamey's companion muttered," and that I never see this darned wilderness again!"

"It'll click all right," Jamey said.

 

The cavalcade had wheeled at the flag-post. Through his glasses Jamey could see Son-of-His-Father twenty yards ahead of his followers. He himself had begun to tremble with an almost unbearable excitement.

"Ready?"

"Yep."

"Got these mountains focused?"

"Sure—I got them."

Jamey dropped the flag he held. The signal was repeated rapidly from post to post. It reached the Indians. He saw Son-of-His-Father lift his hand. It was as though the whole desert watched them, breathless. Then, on that quivering hush there fell the distant beat of a drum, at first slow and steady, and then faster like the throbbing of some wild heart.

"Gosh—what's that?"

"Their war-chant. Got it out of a book."

The camera-man licked his dry lips. "What's the good of it? It don't take. It gives me the shivers. Gee, they're coming all right now."

He cranked methodically with a hand that was not quite so firm as usual. The click of the machine mingled with the crack of empty cartridges behind them. Jamey's assistant yelled through his megaphone, and the pioneers registered fear and despair. In front of them the long, low line had become a rising cloud of dust, rolling swiftly towards them, and out of it sounded the thunder of hoofs, the beating drum, the tragic, exultant war-cry. Jamey had to set his teeth against an hysterical impulse to scream out some answering defiance. It got into the blood. It shook the foundations of the heart. He watched steadily through his glasses. Son-of-His-Father had begun to outdistance his companions. He rode alone, upright, swinging his axe in glittering circles.

"Going well, eh?"

"Too fast. There's no need—what the——" Suddenly the camera-man turned a white face over his shoulder. "Say—what's bitten them? They've crossed the line—they're coming straight on! Good God—they've run amuck—they mean mischief——"

He turned with a gasp and ran, stumbling and blundering, through the sand back to the caravan.

But Jamey Pobjoy, swearing between his teeth, leaped to the camera. The sweat of icy terror ran down his limbs, but in his heart was a delirious joy—a ruthless triumph. The artist in him surged on top, trampling underfoot Lucy May and love and fear of death and common sense. It was real—real! A frightful disaster was rushing down upon them. They had no chance against these madmen. But if only he could make the picture—and what a picture! If only he could save the camera—throw his body over it——

Click—click—sweeter than the singing of a machine-gun.

And Son-of-His-Father, great chief of the Navajos, rode at the head of his people. His horse moved under him like an incoming wave. The desert wind was hot in his face. His blood burned with an old anger, with an older joy. There, before him, lay the enemy—the white men who had devastated his land—who had struck him in the teeth—whom he would scatter like sheep—as Barboncita, his grandsire, had scattered them. The dreams were not dreams now. To-night they would ride into the dark cañons with the bloody scalps of their enemies at their sides. They would sit by camp-fire and sing songs of victory——

He threw back his head, chanting into the wind. He heard the war-cry of his people—the feeble crack of the empty rifles—a fainter sound——

The black box. The black box on the long legs. Sun-pictures. He heard Yunosi's voice calling in his ear:

"Bad medicine—bad medicine——"

He felt his flesh grow cold, and his breath check in his throat, and a leaden powerlessness creep into his limbs. A hand, paralysing as the hand of death, laid itself on his breaking heart. Who should stand against the White Man and his spells? Had not the goat died—and the spring gone back to the underworld? Had not his father Narbona known the truth when he sat listless and indifferent, staring into the distance?

"Bad medicine—bad medicine——"

The black box never wavered. It glared at him with its evil eye. Its mocking voice chattered at him. He groaned, faltering in his saddle, and his horse, half-turning in panic from the thing in front of it, pitched him heavily—frightfully.

After all, Son-of-His-Father was a poor horseman—a drunken Indian outcast decked in gauds not belonging to him. He lay stretched out quietly in the sand, and the men who had followed him in that frantic charge broke and scattered wildly over the desert. The brief illusion had vanished like a mirage. The power had gone out of them for ever.

 

A stir as of men coming slowly back to life sounded behind him. The camera-man came stumbling back, white-faced, incoherent.

"Gosh—you've got nerve all right! What happened? What stopped 'em? Evans didn't know—went on shooting the whole time—our party acted up all right—you bet—poor devils—scared stiff. Say, that was the giddiest thing ever happened. What's the matter with him? Looks like, he'd broken his neck. But you got the pictures—that's the main thing—better make a 'close-up.' Say, boy, when the director sees this stuff, he'll kiss you."

But Jamey Pobjoy was looking down at Son-of-His-Father. In death the marks of shame and ruin had been wiped out. Under the poor flesh was a skeleton of a man. He lay there with his eagle's feathers spread about his head and his hand frozen upon his weapon. Somehow he had raised himself above them all. With their cameras and their play-acting they had made game of him and his tragedy. He could not fight against them and so he had died—resisting and helpless—as all wild things of the great places die before the oncoming of the white man's civilisation.

"Say—what's the idea?"

Jamey Pobjoy had unfastened the container. He flung it far out over the sand, with its precious length of film uncoiling behind it like a twisted serpent. "It's not decent"—he said chokingly—"not decent!"

 

Periodicals which specialise in such stories love to linger over Jamey Pobjoy's extraordinary career, But they never mention the fiasco of his first picture. They pass it over. It is beyond them. They will tell their readers that such and such a drama—with forty thousand performers—is the biggest thing he ever did.

But Lucy Pobjoy, remembering the hour she first began to love him, knows better.