He leaves the lot. He has work to do, but it can wait.
The Chaplin jibe has hit its mark.
Chaplin releases Modern Times. It is a marvel. He sees it twice, because he cannot catch all its beauty in a single viewing. Chaplin is making art in Modern Times, while he dresses up as an idiot in one picture and spends a week trying to cut a dead woman from another. Hal Roach believes that he has delusions about his place in the firmament, but he does not.
He knows that these pictures on which he lavishes such attention and imagination are fillers.
He knows that they are forgotten almost as soon as they are seen.
He knows Hal Roach is right, that the days of short pictures have passed, and the only way to keep making them is to do as Harry Cohn does with the Stooges and produce throwaways as quickly and cheaply as possible, recycling an endless cacophony of rage and violence.
But he knows, too, that these pictures are his art. They are all that he can fashion, and he cannot regard them as Hal Roach does. He cannot dismiss them as inconsequential. He cannot say that they do not matter, and therefore to lavish on their creation more money, more time, more care, more sweat, more pain, more joy than is necessary is to engage in foolishness.
To do so is to negate the reason for his existence.
And what of Ruth?
Ruth wants a life he cannot give her. He is not the man whom she believed herself to be marrying. He is a fellow of whims and vagaries. He thrives on dissatisfaction.
Ruth, in turn, is not Lois, or whatever image of Lois he has now conjured in his mind, a being as unreal as a mermaid or dryad. A child might have brought him closer to Ruth—Ruth is fond of his daughter, and his daughter, in turn, is fond of Ruth—but the fact of his daughter’s existence did not save his first marriage, and only in recent months has he learned of Ruth’s previous miscarriages.
Ruth asks if he hates her for not being able to give him a child. He tells her that he does not.
—So why do you hate me?
—I don’t hate you.
—Then why do you humiliate me?
—I don’t understand what you mean.
But he does.
Because there are nights when he comes home smelling of Alyce Ardell.