King Kong Read online

  “I mean it.”

  “You do, eh! Well, then I’ll get one without you.”

  For so stocky and solid a man, Denham jerked an overcoat from one hook, a hat from another, with amazing speed.

  “If you think I’m going to quit, just because you won’t find me a girl with backbone…”

  He thrust Weston’s plump bulk aside and jerked open the door.

  “…I’m going to make the greatest picture in the world. Something that’s never been seen; never even dreamed of. They’ll have to invent new adjectives when I come back. You wait!”

  The door jerked shut.

  “Where are you going?” Englehorn cried.

  Denham’s indomitable voice floated back as the sound of his footsteps moved steadily down the ladder and to the gangway.

  “I’m going out to find a girl for my picture. I’m going to bring one back…if I have to kidnap her.”

  Inside the cabin Weston buttoned up his own overcoat, staring the while at Driscoll and Englehorn. He was more glad than ever that he had kept clear of the whole crazy mess. Crazy, he decided, was exactly the right word. The old watchman had been a lot more than half right.

  Driscoll began to laugh.

  “Bet you,” he offered Englehorn, “that Denham gets his girl.”

  “I don’t take the bet,” said Englehorn, chewing calmly.

  Driscoll turned to Weston, still laughing, white teeth flashing in his tanned face.

  “He’d have the nerve to tell me to marry her if he decided the scenario called for it,” he said. “Can I light you down to your cab?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Denham was searching for a face. Jostling through the Broadway theater-hour crowds he waited, watched, and every once in a while swore impatiently under his breath because some especially promising countenance proved commonplace upon a second glance.

  He concentrated upon faces, excluding all other details. With eyes closed to slits, like camera lenses, he caught, and poised for inspection, and discarded countless faces among the drifting hosts. Bold faces, frightened faces, sullen faces, inviting faces, pouting faces, expectant faces, painted faces, sordid faces, hard faces, indifferent faces. But nowhere did he discover a face which cried out: “Here I am. The one you are seeking.”

  Even Denham’s resolute will was not proof against such unfailing failure. In the end, with a headshake which was close to despair and was certainly the very peak of bitter disappointment, he turned downtown. Tramping with gloomy determination he left the bright incandescence of Times Square and hunted through the canyon of the lower avenue. Faces in murky doorways. Faces on street corners. Faces on park benches. Faces in bread lines. Faces in automobiles. Faces in street cars. Neat faces. Soiled faces. Sad faces. Gay faces. But never a face which would gleam, like a candle flame, in the picture he was so sure would be the greatest picture in the world.

  Denham found he had circled back. Madison Square’s benches, and the faint but persisting eternal light above them, were behind him. He had combed Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, swagger, intimate Fifty-seventh Street. Now, in the dreary upper west Forties, he was drifting down again toward the Broadway crowds beginning to boil out of a hundred theaters and motion-picture palaces.

  Reluctant to face the certainty of renewed failure among these, he decided to loiter over a cigarette. He found his case empty, so he stopped at a little sidewalk shop; and in the ensuing weeks he was moved every once in a while gravely to shake hands with himself over the good luck which had caused him to do this. It was a very little shop, hardly even a full grown booth. It was scarcely large enough for the swarthy unshaved proprietor and the more perishable part of his stock in trade. It was so small that a durable exhibit of apples had to be displayed on a stand alongside.

  Upon the apples the swarthy proprietor kept a suspicious eye even while he sold Denham the cigarettes. The apples were within Denham’s vision too. And, actually, it was he who first saw what happened.

  A girl came softly up to the apple stand and reaching out a slim white hand began to close it slowly and hungrily about the red fruit.

  Denham saw it first: the swarthy proprietor, however, was only the briefest glance behind, and as his customer tore open a fresh pack of cigarettes, he went through the booth’s door roaring.

  “Ah-ha! So I catch you. You stealer! Ho! Ho!” He seized the girl’s wrist. “No, no, you don’t run. Hey! Where is-a da cop?”

  “No!” The girl cried and pulled weakly away. “Please let me go. I didn’t take anything. I wanted to but I didn’t.”

  “Every hour somebody steal. Me! I’ve had enough. Hey! Mister Cop!”

  “Shut up!” Denham ordered. “The girl’s telling the truth. She’d got her hand off your rotten apple before ever you started out. She wasn’t going to steal anything.”

  “I wasn’t. Truly, I wasn’t.”

  “Here, Socrates,” Denham commanded with finality, “take this dollar and forget it.”

  The dollar completely reversed the swarthy proprietor’s point of view. He seized it, dropped the girl’s wrist and trotted back into his booth streaming thanks behind him.

  So unexpectedly freed, the girl would have collapsed had not Denham flung an arm about her shoulders. Her head fell back. The booth’s single electric bulb streamed light full upon it and for the first time a clear view of her face was possible. Denham looked. He looked again, and the eyes that had been so long half closed, opened wide. Still again he looked; then he laughed and squaring his shoulders triumphantly threw up a signalling hand.

  “Taxi,” he called. And when one pulled up to the curb with screeching brakes he ordered, “The nearest restaurant. And snap into it.”

  Half an hour later, in a white tiled lunch room around the corner, he still wore his air of triumph. In the chair opposite him, the girl sat behind a white barricade of empty plates and cups. She had not spoken while she ate, and Denham had not spoken either. Leaning forward on folded arms, he had stared in thankful contentment at her face.

  It was more than a beautiful face, although it was beautiful, with the well moulded clearly defined features in which his cameraman’s eye had immediately rejoiced. Large eyes of incredible blueness looked out at him from shadowing lashes; the ripe mouth had passion and humor; the lifted chin had courage. Her skin was transparently white; and not, Denham decided, because she was so plainly under-nourished. That marvelous kind of skin belongs with the kind of hair which foamed up beneath her shabby hat. This was of pure gold. If Denham had been poetical, which he was not, he might have pictured it spun out of sunlight.

  Facing his intent, gratified stare, she smiled.

  “I’m a different Ann Darrow now,” she said.

  “Feeling better, eh?”

  “Yes, thank you. You’ve been wonderfully kind.”

  “Don’t give me too much credit,” Denham said bluntly. “I’m not spending my time and money on you just out of kindness.”

  All the humor and most of the smile faded out of Ann’s face. She shivered a little. Denham ignored her reaction.

  “How come you’re in this fix?”

  “Bad luck, I guess. There are lots of girls just like me.”

  “Not such a lot who’ve got your looks.”

  “Oh, I can get by in good clothes, perhaps.” Fear was still in Ann’s smile. “But when a girl gets too shabby…”

  “Any family?”

  “I’m supposed to have an uncle…somewhere.”

  “Ever do any acting?”

  “A few extra jobs in the moving picture studio over at Fort Lee. Once I got a real part. The studio is closed down now.”

  He hazarded one more question.

  “Are you the sort of city gal who screams at a mouse and faints at a snake?”

  “I’m a country gal…Er, I wouldn’t exactly choose to pet a mouse.
But I killed a snake…once.”

  Denham squared his shoulders again in an even plainer triumph, and stood up.

  “Listen, sister. I’ve got a job for you.”

  Ann stood up too, and meeting Denham’s gaze returned it steadily and waited.

  “When you’re fed up, and rested, and all rigged out, you’ll be just the type I want.”

  “When…when does the job start?”

  “Now. This minute. And the first thing you do is get some new clothes. Come on. We ought to find the Broadway shops still open.”

  “But…but what is the job?”

  “It’s money, and adventure, and fame. It’s the thrill of a lifetime. And a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock come morning.”

  Ann sat down again and soberly shook her head. There was no fear in her face now. Instead there was a good-humored tolerance which she seemed able to call up easily from long practice.

  “No! I’m sorry…But I can’t…I do want a job so…I was starving…But I can’t…”

  “What?” cried Denham, and stared at her in amazement; then he laughed and reached for the cigarette he hadn’t remembered to smoke since leaving the swarthy one’s booth. “Oh, I see! Nope, sister. Nope. You’ve got me wrong. This is strictly business.”

  “Well,” said Ann apologetically. “I didn’t want any…”

  “Any misunderstanding. Sure. Sure you didn’t. It’s all my fault, for getting excited and not explaining. So here’s your explanation. I’m Denham. Ever hear of me?”

  “Y-yes. Yes. You make moving pictures. In jungles and places.”

  “That’s me. And I’ve picked you for the lead in my next picture. We sail at six.”

  “Where to?”

  “I daren’t tell you that for a while, Ann. It’s a long way from here. And before we reach it, there’ll be a long voyage, easy living, the warm blue sea, soft moonlight on the water. Think, Ann! No matter what comes at the finish, isn’t that better than tramping New York? Afraid every night that the next morning will find you in the gutter?”

  “No matter what comes at the finish,” Ann whispered. “It’s better.”

  “I’m square, Ann,” Denham added. “And I’ll be square with you. No funny business.”

  “You can’t tell me yet what I’m to do?”

  “Keep your chin up and trust me,” Denham told her and held out his hand.

  Ann looked at him for a long direct moment. Denham looked back at her. He was always lucky, he reminded himself, his grateful gaze sliding again over her bright hair, her perfect face, her graceful well proportioned figure.

  When his eyes came back to hers, Ann put her hand into his with a grave smile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ann came wide awake in the narrow berth and for a little could not remember how she had got there. All she could think of was that this was the first morning in weeks that she had not awakened to hunger. Wondering what had happened to hunger, she recalled last night’s amazing encounter and sat up. She laughed aloud when she spied beside her berth the bowl of apples.

  Denham had bought them at the last moment, adding their bulk to a pile of dress boxes, shoe boxes and hat boxes that overflowed the taxi.

  “And here’s a bowl to put ’em in,” he had said. This last when they came aboard, long after midnight, past the Wanderer’s solitary watchman and a plainly suspicious old fellow with a cold red nose, who stood on the pier.

  Bowl of apples in hand, she had tiptoed after Denham down a dim brief alley.

  “This will be your cabin,” he had said. “You’ll find a key inside. Got it? Fine! Good night, sleep tight! And make it a long one. If I see you around before late afternoon I’ll have the Skipper put you into irons.”

  Ann brushed her foaming bright hair back from bright eyes and looked at the tiny clock which was an item in her cabin’s equipment. It was a little short of eight. She had been in bed, then, some five or six hours. But except for this last little cat-nap she hadn’t slept at all. She yawned and laughed again. A girl only half as excited as she was could scarcely have slept. And since there was no likelihood that she would be any less excited for hours she decided to go on deck, defying the irons of Mr. Denham’s skipper.

  He, she recalled from Denham’s brief account of his assistants, would be Captain Englehorn. He was old and gruff, but nice. Driscoll, the mate, was young and gruff, Denham said, but a good sort, too.

  She swung slim legs over the edge of the berth, stood up and went to the open porthole. Denham’s promised departure had unquestionably been made at the scheduled six o’clock. New York had vanished. Land was visible low down on the horizon to the stern. But off-ship and forward there was only water. Calm water, beneath a soft, placid sky. The snow of the night before had vanished and along with it the threat of stormy weather. The temperature was up so much that standing there, in no more than her thin night-gown, Ann was not very cold.

  Turning away from the porthole, Ann fingered the night-gown with delight.

  “Buy whatever you like, sister,” Denham had said. “You’ll still come cheap, compared to what I’d have had to pay anybody off Broadway or out of Hollywood. Shoot the works.”

  So, bearing in mind that she would be away from shops for months, Ann had taken him at his word. Night-gowns. Underthings. Stockings. Even lounging pajamas. And coats and dresses and hats. And finally enough oddments to stock a beauty specialist. And here they all were, in a tottery mountain of boxes that the Wanderer’s earnestly throbbing engines threatened to bring down about her knees at any moment.

  She decided to open just one; and as a consequence of that surrender to pleasure it was nine o’clock and past before she closed the door of her cabin and stepped out into a deserted passageway.

  Under a new coat she wore her own old dress because she did not want Denham to think her too eager to seize her newly found luxury. But under the dress was a fresh, an immaculate silken smoothness which caressed her from shoulders to toes.

  “Really,” she thought as she emerged onto the deck, “it’s a downright pity they don’t have automobiles on a ship. This is exactly the time for one to give me a little bump and turn me into an accident victim. I’ve never been in such a beautiful state of preparedness.”

  The deck was almost as deserted as the passageway had been. Even a lady land-lubber did not need long to conclude that the officers and crew, having cleared away the business of departure, had gone about their various concerns below. Only one person was visible. Over in a sheltered corner, full in the warm rays of the climbing sun, sprawled a veritable Methuselah of a sailor, a brown, stringy, bald, old codger who hummed as he tied knots for the benefit of a chattering monkey.

  Softly, Ann drew close. And because the old sailor had such a friendly face, and because she herself was feeling so happy, she dropped suddenly down beside the monkey morsel and cried, “Teach me, too.”

  “Yessum!” said the old sailor calmly. From the twinkle in his eye Ann felt sure he had heard her very first, sly step. And from his calm tone she realized that news of her coming had been spread by the Wanderer’s midnight watchman. “Of course!” said the old sailor. “But first and foremost, introductions. Me, I’m Lumpy. This, she’s Ignatz….”

  “And I, I’m Ann Darrow.”

  “Kerrect as kin be,” declared Lumpy. “And this,” he went on, doing bewildering and deft things with his rope, “is a runnin’ bowline. Up. Over. And through. Here, you try it.”

  Ann took the rope, but instead of beginning her lesson she gazed out to the green, gently tumbling sea.

  “Oh, Lumpy,” she breathed, “isn’t it wonderful to be here?”

  “Ruther be blowing foam off a tall one in Curly’s place any day,” Lumpy said frankly, “and I’ll betcha Ignatz here’d think the top of a cocoanut tree nineteen times wonder-fuller. But everybody to their own taste.”
>
  “Oh, of course,” Ann conceded, “it won’t always be as lovely. I suppose when the sea is rough it’s pretty bad.”

  “It’s better,” Lumpy admitted dryly, “when you can order the weather. And working hours,” he added, rising hastily as a whistle blew.

  Warmed to laziness by the sun, Ann kept to her sheltered nook with Ignatz as Lumpy ran off. On the whistle’s dying note several other sailors nipped briskly forward while from quarters aft, not far from the companionway by which Ann had got to the deck, came the whistle’s owner. This was a young man so intent upon his work that he failed to detect his partly hidden audience of one.

  At sight of this young man, Ann’s interest in the situation quickened considerably. His long, well muscled body, his strong dark face, his general air of being master and knowing it, challenged her, but in a fashion which she found not at all unpleasant. This, she decided, would be Driscoll, and as he took a position which presented to her a broad, rakish back, she stood up to secure a better view.

  He wore, this Driscoll, an officer’s cap and a magnificent black woolen shirt he never could have bought out of a sailor’s wage. Otherwise he was dressed not very differently from the men he proceeded to put nimbly to work.

  What this work might be was not wholly clear to Ann, except that it had to do with an open hatch, an enormous box some distance away, and what seemed to be a completely baffling tangle of ropes. It was such a complete tangle that Ann moved out a bit in order to watch more easily.

  Meanwhile Driscoll continued to issue rapid orders. One sailor let a rope-end fall, and showed no intention of picking it up.

  “No! No!” Driscoll shouted. “Carry that line aft!” Backing up to gesture in the proper direction he drew so close to Ann that almost she could have reached out and touched his shoulder. “Aft, aft, you farmer! Back there.”

  His arm swung back with a full furious sweep, and its finger tips struck stingingly across Ann’s face. She staggered to her sun-warmed nook and almost fell. Ignatz broke into a mad chatter.

  “Who the…” As he wheeled about and sighted Ann, Driscoll checked himself and started over more mildly. “What are you doing up here? You’re supposed to be sleeping.”