Free Brilliance by Rosalind Laker Page B

to ring for the arrival of the fire engine interspersed with the speedy clop of two coconut halves for horses’ hooves. Two wooden mushrooms, which she had only ever seen kept in a sewing-basket for darning holes in socks, were covered in padding and could be used to convey the sound of heavy footsteps. A tin whistle as well as another for police slides lay with a rattle, a pair of castanets, a motor car horn, a reed pipe and a small drum. Lastly he demonstrated how a metal sheet could be shaken to convey thunder. She tried out everything before he gave a nod.
    ‘Now I’ll run through some slides,’ he said, ‘keeping to the programme that you’ve already seen, and we’ll see how you manage.’ He went to pull curtains above the two windows to darken the hall before taking his place behind the lantern.
    The glow of the slides through the screen gave her plenty of light to see everything laid out before her. She soon realized that speed was essential. At first she made mistakes and was sometimes too slow, but he was patient and did not shout out in exasperation as she had feared. As the rehearsal went on she became more proficient, but it was a relief when he called a halt.
    ‘You’ve done well,’ he said approvingly. ‘Normally I have to interview several people before I find one alert enough to cope with what I want. Sometimes I have to make do with very few sound effects on the first night. We’ll go into the cafe now and have a meal. Then we’ll rehearse again.’
    She ate well, being hungry, and over the meal she asked him how he had learned to speak her language as if he were French born. He explained, adding that the holidays he had spent with his grandparents during school holidays had given him a love of France as great as that he felt for the country of his birth.
    ‘I suppose that explains why you’re touring here?’ she questioned.
    He shook his head. ‘No, it’s out of consideration for my one and only employer, an English photographer named Friese-Green. I grew up fascinated by photography and I went to work for him as an apprentice. I knew he was conducting experiments in some advanced work and I wanted to learn everything he had to teach me.’
    ‘Did you?’
    ‘Well, first of all in taking and developing photographs of babies, family groups, wedding couples and so forth.’ He refilled her wineglass and then his own. ‘But best of all for me, he was working on his invention for a camera that would take moving pictures and he allowed me to work with him.’
    ‘Moving pictures!’ she repeated incredulously. ‘Could that ever be?’
    ‘They are on the way.’
    ‘But how is it possible?’ she persisted.
    ‘It’s simply that photographs are taken consecutively on long strips, which are being made of celluloid now, and when projected at speed through a lens on to a screen there is an illusion of movement.’
    ‘That’s fantastic!’ she exclaimed admiringly.
    He shrugged. ‘There are still many problems to overcome, such as jerking, blurring and so forth. There are various prototypes appearing all the time, but none of them has been successful yet, although I read that an American named Edison has been making considerable progress with his invention, which he is calling his kinetoscope. But it is yet to be seen and tried. I have a small apartment in Paris where I’ve made one room into my workshop. That’s where I’ve been working on my own moving picture camera all winter. My summer tours finance me through the winter months.’
    ‘So you came to France because you didn’t want to compete with your former employer?’
    ‘That’s right. It would not have been fair to remain on his ground. In any case, my ideas differed from his and I wanted to go my own way with my invention. We parted on good terms. He’s a brilliant man and I’m sure that eventually he will reach his ultimate aim of gaining colour too.’
    ‘Do you mean hand-tinted moving pictures like the