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Mr. Lobel’s Apoplexy
by
“Well, I ain’t lost no time, boys. Before even I sent to find you I already got busy. I’ve got Appel starting for up there in half an hour in my car to take charge of everything and with orders to spare no expense. The funeral what I am going to give that girl! Well, she deserves it. Always a hard worker, always on the job, always she minds her own business, always she saves her money, always a perfect lady, never throwing any of these here temperamentals, never going off in any of these here highsterics, never making a kick if something goes wrong because it happens I ain’t on the lot to run things, never—-“
It threatened to become a soliloquy. This time it was Quinlan who interrupted:
“You said it all, Lobel, and it’s no need that you should go on saying it any more. The main points, I take it, are that we’re all sorry and that we’ve lost one swell big asset by her dying–only it’s lucky for us she didn’t take ill before we got through shooting The She-Demon.”
“Lucky? Huh! Actually, lucky ain’t the right word for it!” said the president. “When I think of the fix we should ‘a’ been in if she hadn’t finished up the picture first, I assure you, boys, it gives me the shivers. Right here and now in the middle of being sorry it gives me the shivers!”
“It does, does it?” There was something so ominous in Mr. Geltfin’s sadly ironic remark–something in tone and accent so lugubriously foreboding that his hearers swung about to stare at him. “It does, does it? Well, all what I’ve got to say is, Lobel, you’ve got some shivers coming to you! We’ve all got some shivers coming to us! Having this girl die on us is bad business!”
“Sure it is,” agreed the head, “but it might be worse. There’s one awful big salary cut off the pay roll and if we can’t have her with us no longer there’s nobody else can have her. And the profits from that last picture should ought to be something positively enormous–stupendous–sensational. Listen! I bet you that from the hour we release—-“
“You ain’t going to release!” broke in Geltfin, his wizen features sharpening into a peaky mask of grief.
“Don’t talk foolishness!” snapped Mr. Lobel. “For why shouldn’t we be going to release?”
“That’s it–why?” Mr. Quinlan seconded the demand.
“Because you wouldn’t dare do it!” In his desire to make clear his point Mr. Geltfin fairly shoveled the words out of himself, bringing them forth overlapping one another like shingles on a roof. “Because the public wouldn’t stand for it! Always you brag, Lobel, that you know what the public want! Well then, would the public stand for a picture where a good, decent, straight girl that’s dead and will soon be in her grave is for six reels doing all them suggestive vampire stunts like what you yourself, Lobel, made her do? Would the public stand for calling a dead woman names like she-demon? They would not–not in a thousand years–and you should both know it without I should have to tell you! With some pretty rough things we could get by, but with that thing we could never get by! The public, I tell you, would not stand for it. No, sir; when that girl died the picture died with her. You just think it over once!”
Out of popped eyes he glared at them. They glared at him, then they looked at each other. Slowly Mr. Lobel’s head drooped forward as though an unseen hand pressed against the back of his neck. Quinlan casting his eyes downward traced with one toe the pattern of the rug under his feet.
On top of one sudden blow, heavy and hard to bear, another now had followed. Since Lobel had become one of the topnotchers with a reputation to maintain, expenses had been climbing by high jumps, but receipts had not kept pace with expenses. There were the vast salaries which even the lesser drawing cards among the stars now demanded–and got. There were war taxes, excess profit taxes, amusement taxes. There was to be included in the reckoning the untimely fate of Let Freedom Ring, a vastly costly thing and quickly laughed to death, yet a smarting memory still. Its failure had put a crimp in the edge of the exchequer. This stroke would run a wide fluting of deficit right through the middle of it.