“Another invention?” I said. “What a prolific creature you are! No sooner have you perfected a cash register than you start——”
“Oh, I’ve been at this for some time, for years. I believe I’ve hit on a dodge—— I say, do you know anything about Movies?”
The word, though common on our side of the Atlantic now, was at that time peculiar to the American language.
“Cinematographs?” I said. “I’ve seen them of course. You have them in your circus, haven’t you, as part of the show?”
“Yes. That’s what set me thinking about them. I’ve always felt that the next step in perfecting the cinematograph would be doing away with the screen, putting the figures on the stage, that is to say reflections of them, so that they would actually move about backwards and forwards instead of on a flat surface. You understand?”
When I was a boy there was a popular entertainment known as “Pepper’s Ghost.” What appeared to be a real figure moved about before the eyes of the audience, was pierced by swords and otherwise ill-treated without suffering any inconvenience. The thing was worked by some arrangement of mirrors. Tim evidently had a plan for combining this illusion with the cinematograph.
“Don’t you think,” he said, “that it would be a great thing?”
“It would be a perfectly beastly thing,” I said. “The cinematograph is bad enough already. If you add a grosser realism to it——”
Tim looked at me. I am nearly sure that there were tears in his eyes.
“That’s just what Mrs. Ascher thinks,” he said.