“But I don’t want to save time,” Franklin said irritably, although as he spoke he realized it wasn’t entirely the truth. The mechanical retracing of every drawing was utterly exhausting, and if he could draw each stationary background only once, placing over it a transparent sheet of celluloid on which only the moving portions were drawn, then he had no objection to the new technique. But the cartoons he occasionally went to see did not inspire confidence. It seemed to Franklin that the new studio-produced cartoons were all too intent on saving time; the cel system didn’t seem to encourage the kinds of detailed background one might have expected, but instead produced simple backgrounds consisting of a few boring props: a horizon line, a rock, a bushy tree. Besides, his own backgrounds were themselves continually changing in small ways — his dime museum was alive in all its parts, and in the climactic sequence an entire hall, with its pillars and archways, was going to come alive. Besides, the cel process was patented and required a license, and the public nature of applying for a license violated his desire for absolute secrecy. Besides, though Max was trying to be helpful, Franklin didn’t want to be helped. Besides, he had a splitting headache.
“You own a telephone,” Max was saying. “You insist on drawing with a Gillott 290 pen point. To be consistent you ought to bang out messages on a drum and draw cartoons with the sharpened tip of a goose feather. No, don’t bother to defend yourself, I don’t have time. The Troll’s been riding me again. He called me in for a little chat the other day. ‘Good work,’ says he. ‘But look here, Horn — in this corner — is it a dog, or is it a cat?’ I look at the corner. It’s a cat, with whiskers. I ponder. Scratch my head. Try to see a dog. It’s still a cat. Always was a cat. It’s pure essence of cat. I look old Alfred straight in the eye. ‘I believe it’s an elephant, sir.’ Really, sometimes I think old puddingface fails to appreciate my sense of humor. If he wants me to draw his damn cats for him then let him pay me a living wage. I’d rather fix drains in Flatbush. Tell your daughter I’m madly in love with her.”
Toward the end of the summer Franklin again invited Max to Mount Hebron, this time with a new misgiving: he feared that the second visit could never equal the freshness and surprise of the first. Cora, too, seemed to anticipate disaster. She was restless and fretful, wondered what she could possibly serve for dinner, changed her dress twice before lunch, asked Mrs. Henneman, the housekeeper, to clean the mirrors and polish the silver, and scolded Stella for always being underfoot. Franklin, who had been staying up till midnight to work on his newspaper strips, now saw the weekend as a lost stretch of time for his animated drawings and cursed his bad luck, and Max, and life in general, and above all his exasperating shirt collar, which kept riding up on his neck — and then, as if he had arrived unexpectedly, Max was there, sweeping them all into his gust of talk, rescuing them, it seemed, from a ruined afternoon. Cora had planned a picnic at the top of the wooded slope above Mount Hebron. Sitting in the sun-speckled shade of the picnic table, biting into his cold chicken leg with eyes closed in pleasure, raising his glass of red wine into the brightness of the sun, Max looked down at the town, at the sunny brown river, at the wooded hills of the far shore, and said that his idea of bliss would be to own a piece of land on those hills, across from Mount Hebron. “Matter of fact,” Franklin said, stretching out one arm in a long, slow yawn, “there’s land for sale. People buy, sometimes build.” Cora said there was a real estate agent on River Street and two more in the next township. Max asked if they would accept an IOU, and wondered if a real estate agent could supply him with a wife. After lunch, Max proposed a hike in the woods; and as he led them along leaf-strewn paths he stopped from time to time to point at something and say to Stella, “Is that a lion?” or “Those are very peculiar-looking telephone poles.”
That evening, when Cora came down to the front porch after getting Stella ready for bed, Franklin went up to tell her the next installment of a continuing bedtime story about a little girl who discovered in her dark attic a bright country of dolls. When he returned to the porch he sat for a while jiggling an ankle and then rose and said he’d be back in two minutes. Two hours later he returned guiltily from his study and was relieved to find Max talking easily with Cora; and throwing himself down on the cushion of a wicker chair Franklin felt a burst of gratitude to Max for getting on so well with Cora, for being such an easy and undemanding guest.
One afternoon toward the end of September, Franklin was working in his office at the World Citizen when Max entered and announced that he had found a distributor. “A what?” Franklin asked, looking up from a page covered with sketches of noses. He was pleased with his latest strip, which in certain ways was the best thing he had ever done, but Kroll had not been enthusiastic. “We’ve got to have a more appealing hero,” he had written in a long memo, “someone the public can take to their hearts,” and although Franklin understood exactly what Kroll meant, he was disappointed and even shocked — couldn’t Kroll see that what he was doing had an appeal of its own? Kroll liked domestic strips with strongly developed gags, as well as the working-girl strips that had recently come into vogue; he had never really cared for “Figaro’s Follies,” which he had tolerated solely for the sake of the more popular “Phantom of the City.” For that matter the Phantom strip had begun to edge its way toward the fantastic, as Franklin sought out increasingly unlikely though carefully researched and scrupulously rendered settings — the insides of vast sewer pipes, abandoned subway excavations deep under city streets, the hollow caissons buried beneath the bed of the East River under the piers of the Brooklyn Bridge — and as Franklin studied wood engravings in old newspapers that showed the ingenious structure of the caissons, with their limelit shadowy chambers, their air locks and supply shafts, he could tell that Kroll was hoping for a really popular strip of a more familiar kind. The new strip, called “Harvey” and already cast in doubt by Kroll’s memo, showed a boy with a pen who drew his own world, which he then entered; the world turned more and more threatening until, at the climactic moment, Harvey took out his pen and devised his own escape.
“A distributor,” Max said. “You can have the photography done at Vivograph in that arcade building up on Fifty-third Street and they’ll pass it on to their distributor, National Pictures — all very reasonable, very legit. Vivograph will charge you ten percent of whatever they can get from National. They distribute all over the States and in what our sainted editor calls ‘Yurp.’”
“I think I know what you’re talking about,” Franklin said.
Max widened his eyes in feigned astonishment and, looking about at an imaginary audience, said: “You heard what he said, folks. I think it’s a remarkable development.” He dialed an imaginary telephone. “Hello. Horn here. Listen, he thinks he knows what I — what I — hell. Lousy connection.” He hung up.
Franklin, who liked Max’s enthusiasm but was also wary of it, began to explain that despite a good recent bout of work he had been forced to spend the last week doing editorial cartoons for Kroll, who was disappointed in the latest strip and seemed to take pleasure in loading him with plebeian work, but in the middle of his explanation he had an idea for a brand-new strip, which might be just the sort of thing Kroll had in mind. He began sketching rapidly in a blank corner of the page, and when he looked up he stared in confusion at the pendulum swinging in the glass case, the wallpaper with its faded haystacks where drowsy reapers lay with their hats over their eyes.