"Now," said Rentoul Smiles, in a deep voice that was like a rich
unguent. "We’ll try again. We’ll just play around that spot. Look into
my eyes. Not _at_ my eyes, my dear woman, _into_ them! Just a little
more challenge--a little more! That’s it. Don’t wink, for the land’s
sake! Now!"
He seized a bulb at the end of a tube and slowly squeezed--squeezed it
tragically and remorselessly, twisting himself as if suffering in
sympathy with the bulb, and then in a wide sweeping gesture he flung the
bulb on to the top of the camera, and ejaculated:
"Ha!"
Edward Henry thought:
"I would give ten pounds to see Rentoul Smiles photograph Sir John
Pilgrim." But the next instant the forgotten sensation of hurry was
upon him once more. Quick, quick, Rentoul Smiles! Edward Henry’s
scorching desire was to get done and leave New York.
"Now, Miss Isabel," Mr. Smiles proceeded, exasperatingly deliberate,
"d’you know, I feel kind of guilty? I have got a little farm out in
Westchester County and I’m making a little English pathway up the garden
with a gate at the end. I woke up this morning and began to think about
the quaint English form of that gate, and just how I would have it." He
raised a finger. "But I ought to have been thinking about you. I ought
to have been saying to myself, ’To-day I have to photograph Isabel Joy,’
and trying to understand in meditation the secrets of your personality.
I’m sorry! Now, don’t talk. Keep like that. Move your head round. Go
on! Go on! Move it! Don’t be afraid. This place belongs to you.
It’s yours. Whatever you do, we’ve got people here who’ll straighten up
after you.... D’you know why I’ve made money? I’ve made money so that
I can take _you_ this afternoon, and tell a two-hundred-dollar client to
go to the deuce. That’s why I’ve made money. Put your back against the
chair, like an Englishwoman. That’s it. No, don’t _talk_, I tell you.
Now look joyful, hang it! Look joyful.... No, no! Joy isn’t a
contortion. It’s something right deep down. There, there!"
The lubricant voice rolled on while Rentoul Smiles manipulated the
camera. He clasped the bulb again, and again threw it dramatically
away.
"I’m through!" he said. "Don’t expect anything very grand, Miss Isabel.
What I’ve been trying to do this afternoon is my interpretation of you
as I’ve studied your personality in your speeches. If I believed wholly
in your cause, or if I wholly disbelieved in it, my work would not have
been good. Any value that it has will be due to the sympathetic
impartiality of my spiritual attitude. Although"--he menaced her with
the licenced familiarity of a philosopher--"Although, lady, I must say
that I felt you were working against me all the time.... This way!"
(Edward Henry, recalling the comparative simplicity of the London
photographer at Wilkins’s, thought: "How profoundly they understand
photography in America!")
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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