The violinist, stretched out with ankles crossed, occupied a common kitchen chair which his body touched at two places only, with the end of his spine and the nape of his neck. His eyes were half-shut, his bowing suggested the performance of a somnambulist.
The 'cellist, too, seemed to be saved from falling forward from his chair solely by the instrument which his knees embraced. His head drowsily nodding to the time, the fingers of his left hand automatically stopped the strings at which his right arm sawed methodically. An honest soul, a journeyman who for a set wage had contracted to saw so many chords of music before the whistle blew and was honestly bent on doing his stint....
Mr. Lane, having excused himself for a moment, returned from consulting some member of the group round the tripod.
"'Sall right," he announced with a happy smile. "They won't begin shooting a while yet. You can come closer if you want, I'll show you where to stay so's you won't be in the way."
Guided by him, the exotics gingerly picked their way across the banks, coils, loops and strands of electric cable that ran in snaky confusion all over the floor, like exposed viscera of the cinema; and Lucinda presently found herself on the side lines of the living-room, between it and the dogged orchestra, and well out of range of the camera.
She could now see three people on the set, two men with a girl whom, thanks to the wide circulation of the lady's photographs, she had no difficulty in identifying as Alma Daley herself—a prepossessing young person with bobbed hair, a boldly featured face, comely in the flesh rather than pretty, and a slight little body whose emaciation told a tale of too-rigorous dieting and which she used not unpleasingly but with a rather fetching effect of youthful gaucherie. Her make-up for the camera was much lighter and more deftly applied than seemed to be the rule. Gowned effectively if elaborately in a street dress hall-marked by the rue de la Paix, she was leaning against a table and lending close if fatigued attention to the quiet conversation of the two men.
Of these one was tall and dark, with a thick mane of wavy black hair, a wide and mobile mouth, and great, melancholy eyes. His well-tailored morning-coat displayed to admiration a splendid torso. The other was a smaller, indeed an undersized man, who wore a braided smoking-jacket but no paint on his pinched, weather-worn face of an actor. His manner was intense and all his observations (and he was doing most of the talking) were illustrated by gesticulation almost Latin in its freedom and vividness.
"King Laughlin," Mr. Culp's secretary informed Lucinda—"man in the smoking-jacket, he always wears one when he's working—greatest emotional director in the business, nobody can touch him. Why, alongside him, Griffith's a joke in a back number of Judge. You wouldn't guess what he gets: thirty-five hundred."
"That's almost a thousand a week, isn't it?"
"Thousand a week!" Mr. Lane suspiciously inspected Lucinda's profile. Could it be possible that this well-born lady was trying to kid him? But no; he could see she was quite guileless. In accents of some compassion he corrected: "Three-thousand five-hundred every week's what King Laughlin drags down in the little old pay envelope. But that's Mr. Culp all over; expense's no object when he's making an Alma Daley picture, nothing's too good."