The Statement of Stella Maberly, and An Evil Spirit
Page 20
Fade out and into
[142]
Close up Evelyn lies dead on the sofa, her face contorted & her expression evil. Stella stands gazing down on her with sombre satisfaction. A shadowy female form with the same beautiful wicked face as in (39) detaches itself from Evelyn’s body, makes a wild gesture of despair & baffled malice, & disappears.
As it does so, Evelyn’s face becomes innocent & calm, the lips relaxing into a gentle smile. Stella bends over her & kisses her forehead, then she crosses Evelyn’s hands over her breast, takes flowers from a bowl, & lays them on the body.
Open to full screen.
Stella goes to the door, unlocks it, & passes slowly out.
Fade out and into
Scene, as in (1).
Action Stella, exhausted, has sunk back on her pillows, while the Medical Superintendent watches her with an expression of deep compassion & anxiety. She goes on speaking, but with an evident effort.
Fade into
Leader “That all happened years ago. Hugh has long been dead. But every night now I dream that he and the Evelyn I loved are alive; we are back in the old garden together, all is understood & forgiven, & the past as though it had never been. And when I fall asleep I pray that I may never awake, so that my dream will go on for ever.”
Fade out and into
Scene as in (1) continued.
Stella’s eyes close.
Background fades into
(69)
Scene The Garden.
Action Hugh & Stella are seated under the cedar tree. Her head is on his shoulder, his arm is round her waist. Evelyn (as she was) comes on, with the collie [143] leaping round her. Hugh & Stella greet her without changing their attitude. She puts one hand on his shoulder in a sisterly fashion as she stoops and kisses Stella.
Fade out
The End
20 : Feb : 1916
NOTES
1 In __ Parts: Anstey leaves a space here, presumably to be filled in once the division into parts was determined. (He in fact decided on four parts, but never added that detail to the title-page.)
2 Miss Lillah McCarthy: Lillah McCarthy, by now in her early forties, was a well-known actress who in 1906 had married the playwright and Shakespeare scholar Hartley Granville-Barker.
3 Miss Lydia Bilbrooke: Anstey’s casting again has regard more to facial features than to age. Nina Severing had passed thirty, and Lydia Bilbrook (who added the ‘e’ to her surname for professional purposes) was in her late twenties.
4 Leader: A “leader” is an explanatory intertitle, or insert into a silent film. So these lines of text would be flashed up on the screen for audiences to read.
5 butterfly kiss: A butterfly kiss is given with the eyelashes, not the lips.
6 (58): The second ‘Scene 58’ is Anstey’s mistake. If it were corrected, the total number of scenes would of course rise from 69 to 70.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
F. Anstey was the penname of Thomas Anstey Guthrie, born in 1856. The son of a London tailor, Anstey studied to be a lawyer (though he never practised). Instead he started publishing stories in the late 1870s. He had an early ‘hit’ with the comic—and subsequently much-filmed—novel Vice Versâ (1882) in which a father and son magically change bodies for a week. (The name ‘F. Anstey’ is sometimes thought to be a play on the word ‘fantasy’.) On the basis of this Anstey was invited to become a contributor for Punch by its editor F. C. Burnand and this became the centre of his literary work. Burglar Bill (1882) and Mr. Punch’s Model Music Hall (1892) both appeared in the magazine. Anstey found his niche with a series of humorous novels: The Tinted Venus (1885), A Fallen Idol (1886) and The Brass Bottle(1900). Anstey also wrote some serious fiction: The Pariah (1889), about a well-off but low-born young man who tries to enter high society but encounters only disdain, and The Statement of Stella Maberly (1896), a psychological thriller about schizophrenia and hallucination. In later life, Anstey spent a good deal of time overseeing dramatizations of his works, and later film adaptations. Anstey had no pretensions to being seen as a ‘great’ author. In A Long Retrospect he wrote: ‘my life has had no adventures, and no vicissitudes; such incidents as have happened in it have been the experiences of any author who has been fairly popular in his day and has enjoyed his work’. He died of pneumonia in 1934.