The Regent eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 328 pages of information about The Regent.

The Regent eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 328 pages of information about The Regent.

It was the sudden flash of the photographer’s magnesium light, plainly felt by him through his closed lids, that somehow instantly inspired Edward Henry to a definite and ruthless line of action.  He opened his eyes and beheld the triumphant group, and the photographer himself, victorious over even the triumphant, in a superb pose that suggested that all distinguished mankind in his presence was naught but food for the conquering camera.  The photographer smiled indulgently, and his smile said:  “Having been photographed by me, you have each of you reached the summit of your career.  Be content.  Retire!  Die!  Destiny is accomplished.”

“Mr. Machin,” said Rose Euclid, “I do believe your eyes were shut!”

“So do I!” Edward Henry curtly agreed.

“But you’ll spoil the group!”

“Not a bit of it!” said Edward Henry.  “I always shut my eyes when I’m being photographed by flash-light.  I open my mouth instead.  So long as something’s open, what does it matter?”

The truth was that only in the nick of time had he, by a happy miracle of ingenuity, invented a way of ruining the photograph.  The absolute necessity for its ruin had presented itself to him rather late in the proceedings, when the photographer had already finished arranging the hands and shoulders of everybody in an artistic pattern.  The photograph had to be spoilt for the imperative reason that his mother, though she never read a newspaper, did as a fact look at a picture-newspaper, The Daily Film, which from pride she insisted on paying for out of her own purse, at the rate of one halfpenny a day.  Now The Daily Film specialized in theatrical photographs, on which it said it spent large sums of money:  and Edward Henry in a vision had seen the historic group in a future issue of the Film.  He had also, in the same vision, seen his mother conning the said issue, and the sardonic curve of her lips as she recognized her son therein, and he had even heard her dry, cynical, contemptuous exclamation:  “Bless us!” He could never have looked squarely in his mother’s face again if that group had appeared in her chosen organ!  Her silent and grim scorn would have crushed his self-conceit to a miserable, hopeless pulp.  Hence his resolve to render the photograph impossible.

“Perhaps I’d better take another one?” the photographer suggested, “though I think Mr.—­er—­Machin was all right.”  At the supreme crisis the man had been too busy with his fireworks to keep a watch on every separate eye and mouth of the assemblage.

“Of course I was all right!” said Edward Henry, almost with brutality.  “Please take that thing away, as quickly as you can.  We have business to attend to.”

“Yes, sir,” agreed the photographer, no longer victorious.

Edward Henry rang his bell, and two gentlemen-in-waiting arrived.

“Clear this table immediately!”

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Project Gutenberg
The Regent from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.