ID 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."