"Soon as he had the negative ready, which was late yesterday afternoon after you'd went home, I had it run off with nobody there but me and Josephson, and I took a flash at it—and, Lobel, it's a bear! No need for you to worry about the negative—it was a heap too long, of course, in the shape it was yesterday, but it had everything in it we hoped would be in it—and more besides.
"So then without losing a minute I stuck Josephson on the printing machine himself. I'd already gave the girl on the machine a couple of days off to get her out of the way. Josephson stayed on the job alone pretty near all last night, I guess. He had things to himself without anybody to bother him and I tell you he shoved it along.
"Connors ain't lost no time neither. He's got the subtitles pretty near done, and believe it or not, as you're a mind to, but, Lobel, I'm telling you that this time to-morrow morning and not a minute later I'll have the first sample print all cut and assembled and ready for you to give it a look! Then it'll just be a job of matching up the negative and sticking in the subtitles and starting to turn out the positives faster than the shipping-room gang can handle 'em. I guess that ain't moving, heh?"
"Quinlan," said Mr. Lobel, "I give you right."
By making his word good to the minute the gratified Mr. Quinlan derived additional gratification. At the time appointed they sat in darkness in the body of the projection room—Lobel, Quinlan, Geltfin and Appel, these four and none other—behind a door locked and barred. Promptly on Quinlan's order the operator in the box behind them started his machine and the accomplished rough draft of the great masterpiece leaped into being and actuality upon the lit square toward which they faced.
The beginning was merely a beginning—graphic enough and offering abundant proof that in this epochal undertaking the Lobel shop had spared no expense to make the production sumptuous, but after all only preliminary stuff to sauce the palate of the patron for a greater feast to come and suitably to lead up to the introduction of the star. Soon the star was projected upon the screen, a purring, graceful panther of a woman, to change at once into a sinuous python of a woman and then to merge the feline and the ophidian into a sinister, splendid, menacing composite bespeaking the dramatic conception and the dramatic presentment of all feminine evil, typifying in every move of the lithe, half-clad body, in every shift of the big eyes, wickedness unleashed and unashamed.
Mr. Lobel sitting unseen in the velvet blackness uttered grunts of approbation. The greatest of all film vampires certainly had delivered the goods in this her valedictory. Never before had she so well delivered them. The grunting became a happy rumble.
But all this, too, was in a measure dedicatory—a foretaste of more vivid episodes to follow, when the glorious siren, displaying to the full her powers of fascination over the souls and the bodies of men, would rise to heights yet greater and the primitive passion she so well simulated would shine forth like a malignant jewel in a setting that was semibarbaric and semicivilized, too, and altogether prodigal and lavish. The first of these bigger scenes started—the scene where the queen of the apaches set herself to win the price of her hire from the Germans by seducing the young army officer into a betrayal of the Allied cause; the same scene wherein at the time of filming it Mr. Lobel himself had taken over direction from Colfax's hands.
The scene was launched, acquired headway, then was halted as a bellow from Mr. Lobel warned the operator behind him to cut off the power.
"What the hell!" sputtered the master. "There's a blur on the picture here, a sort of a kind of smokiness. Did you see it, Geltfin? Right almost directly in front of Monte it all of a sudden comes! Did you, Quinlan?"