Lightmark

“ Bullen; "but I fear he is a bad lot."
"Oh, they all are!" said Lightmark, "an abandoned crew."
His eyes wandered off to the bridge over which the road ran, dividing the dry dock from the outer basin and wharf on which they stood. A bevy of factory girls in extensive hats stuck with brilliant Whitechapel feathers were passing; one of them, who was pretty, caught Lightmark's eyes and flung him a saucy compliment, which he returned with light badinage in kind that made the foreman grin.
"They know a fine man when they see one, as well as my lady," he said. ”

“ Lightmark's beauty was already becoming a matter of almost public interest. She was a person to be recognised and recorded by sharp-eyed journalists at the play-houses on "first nights"; her carriage-horses performed extensive nightly pilgrimages in the regions of Kensington and Mayfair; and she had made a reputation for her dressmaker. And already she realized that her efforts to live outside herself were futile ”

“ Oswyn seemed less at his ease; there was an extra dash of nervous brusqueness in the sarcastic welcome which he offered to the new-comer; and although there was a vacant seat in the little circle, of which Copal and Lightmark formed the nucleus, and to which Rainham had joined himself, he shuffled off to his favourite corner, and buried himself in "Gil Blas" and an abnormally thick cloud of tobacco-smoke.
Rainham gazed after him for a moment or two with a puzzled expression.
"Amiable as ever!" said Lightmark, with a laugh. "Poor old beggar! Have a cigarette? You ought to give up pipes. ”

“ Charles Sylvester had been told that Lightmark was a man who would certainly achieve greatness, and he felt that here was an opportunity to add all hitherto missing leaf to his laurels, by constituting himself a patron of art, a position not often attained by young barristers even when, as in Sylvester's case, they have already designs upon a snug constituency. ”

“ Lightmark's vacated chair; and as she sat there, with her big nosegay on her lap, he was struck by her extreme pallor, the lassitude in her fine eyes. He ventured to remark on it, when the other two had left them, and she had not made, as he had feared and half anticipated, any motion to rise.
"Yes, the rooms are hot and dreadfully full. There are too many sweet-smelling flowers about; they make one faint. It's a relief to sit down in comparative quiet and calm for a little." ”

“ The old charm of his boyish carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard assurance, an air of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less the note of an artist than of a successful man of business. And where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Café Grecco days, broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his expenditure. ”

“ Our not being in evening dress won't matter a bit, they'll only think we're critics; and 'Niniche' doesn't begin till nine."
On their speedy arrival at the modest portals of the little theatre, Lightmark instructed his companion, with an air of mystery, to wait, and presently emerged, smiling, from a triumphant encounter with the gentleman presiding at the box-office. ”

“ It was good, no doubt, to be popular, harmless even, to care for popularity—at least, one's traditions declared nothing to the contrary; but to care so exorbitantly as Lightmark appeared to do, to sacrifice so much to one's enthusiasm for pleasing inferior people—people whom, behind their backs, one was quite ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. ”

“ When at last Rainham came into the room, following, with his habitual half-timid air, the shambling figure of the painter Oswyn, it struck Lightmark that he had grown older, and that he had, as it were, assimilated some of the intimate disreputability of the place: it would no longer have been possible to single him out as a foreign unit in the circle, or to detect in his mental attitude any of the curiosity of the casual seeker after new impressions, the Philistine in Bohemia. ”

“ We have an occult vision, immediate and complete, into the obscure manner of life, and crowd an infinity of discovery into a very few seconds. It was so with Philip Rainham now. Lightmark had scarcely closed the door, against which he now stood in a black silence, with the air of a man turned to stone; Rainham's eyes had only fallen once upon the two figures on the sofa—Eve crushed in a corner, a sorrowful, dainty shape in the silk and lace of her pretty tea-gown, with the white drawn face of a scared child ”

“ Lightmark: do you know her?—that I think."
Oswyn shook his head.
"I know her only by sight, as we all do; she is very beautiful."
"I don't mind telling you that I have considered her a great deal—yes, immensely. I should not speak of it—of her—unless I were dying; but, after all, when one is dying, there are things one may say. I have held my peace so long. And since I have been lying here I have had time to ponder it, to have thought it all out. It seems to me that simply for her sake someone should know before—before the occasion passes—just the plain truth. ”

“ When the tide of inspiration failed the speaker, as it soon did, Lightmark continued to look at him askance, with an air of absent consideration turning to uneasiness. There was a general silence, broken only by the occasional striking of a match and the knocking of pipe against boot-heel. Soon the young sculptor discovered that he had missed his last train, and fled incontinently. Oswyn settled himself back in his chair, as one who has no regard for time, and rolled a cigarette, the animation with which he had spoken now only perceptible in the points of colour in either cheek. ”

“ He ran over a list of successful names with an ever-growing rancour—artistic hacks, the crew of them, the journalists of painting—with a side glance at Lightmark, who sat pulling his flaxen moustache, looking stiff and nervous—he would hang the lot of them to-morrow if he had his way, for corrupters of taste, or, better still, condemn them to perpetual incarceration in the company of their own daubs. These people, in fine, the mutual admiration society of incompetents—where was their justification, where would they be in a decade or so? ”

“ The palette which he had been using lay, like a great fantastic leaf, upon the table, amid a chaos of broken crayons, dingy stumps, photographs of sitters, pellets of bread, disreputable colour-tubes, and small bottles of linseed-oil, varnish, and turpentine. A sketch for Mrs. Sylvester's portrait, in crayons, was propped against the foot of an easel (Lightmark hoped that her son might buy it for his chambers) ; the canvas which he had prepared against the much-delayed sitting due from Miss Sylvester exposed its blank surface on another. ”

“ The man he looked for, the friend whom he intended to honour with a somewhat tardy confidence of his happiness, was not there. When he asked for Rainham, he was told that "the dry-docker," as these flippant youngsters familiarly designated the silent man, whom they secretly revered, had gone for an after-dinner stroll, or perchance to the theatre, with Oswyn.
"With Oswyn?" queried Lightmark, with the shadow of a frown.
"Oh, Oswyn and he are getting very thick!" said Copal. "They are almost as inseparable as you two used to be. I'm afraid you will find yourself cut out. ”

“ A camera has a light-tight compartment within which a fresh strip of film passes and stops intermittently back of a lens that is focussed on a subject, a rotating shutter with an open and an opaque section makes the exposure. (When the strip of film is developed it is known as the negative.) (2) A printer pulls the negative, together with a fresh strip of film in contact with it, into place by an intermittent mechanism before a strong light. A rotating shutter flashes the light on and off. (The new piece of film, when it is developed and the pictures are brought out, is known as the positive.) ”

“ Transparencies can be made same size of negative by contact and exposure to artificial light, or enlarged or reduced in the camera by daylight, with equal perfection in result. To make transparencies by contact place one of the Keystone thin crystal glass transparency plates over the negative in printing-frame, lay piece of dark soft material over it, close down the back, and expose to the light of the lantern or to a gas flame or other artificial light, for 10 to 30 seconds, according to density of negative, at a distance of 20 inches from the flame. ”

“ In practice positive printing is done by a machine using for its essential principles the shutter and feeding devices that we have seen in the motion-picture camera. Negative and positive stock are perforated alike, and when superimposed the perforations fall in alignment. The film-feeding device of the printer engages in these perforations just as we saw it do in the camera, only in this case it is moving the negative and positive film along simultaneously. What would be the lens in the camera is here the place where the light is allowed to pass through. ”

“ The pressure from the wire device thins the pulp wherever it is touched, and so when dry the device shows lighter than the rest of the paper.
These marks should be called wire marks rather than watermarks, and the French word for them, “Filigranes,” is more correct than ours. The difference in tint between a watermark and the rest of the paper is so distinct that a photographic negative placed under one will render a capital photograph of it, far better than any drawing, but it needs a long exposure. ”

“ I might explain, briefly, that moving pictures are taken not by pressing a switch, or a rubber bulb, such as that which works a camera shutter, but by the continuous action of a crank, or handle, attached to the camera. Pressing a bulb does well enough for taking a single picture, but when a series, on a long celluloid strip, are needed, as in the case for the "movies," an entirely different arrangement becomes absolutely necessary.
The sensitive celluloid film must move continuously, in a somewhat jerky fashion, inside the dark light-tight camera, and behind the lens. ”

“ If the high light as shown in the ground glass is over the ridge detail on the skin, a poor photograph will result. If the high light cannot be removed by rearranging the lights, then reflected light should be tried.
In order to effect reflected light a large piece of white paper, cardboard, or similar material is used. A hole is cut in the center of the paper or cardboard. This must be big enough for the camera lens to protrude through. The ends of the paper or board are curved toward the skin or finger to be photographed. ”

“ The commonest form of print is on paper, although the most satisfactory print from the photographic standpoint is the transparency on glass or celluloid film.
Transparencies.—Transparencies are made by the regular photographic processes of exposure and development, on glass plates or films placed in contact with the negative, or in the appropriate position in an enlarging camera. The sensitometry and the terms used to describe the qualities of plate or film for this purpose are those already given in connection with the general discussion of plates and films. ”

“ If we take, for the sake of simplicity, not a picture, but a scale with four or five-tone gradations from light to deep black, the light tones will act more or less on the sensitive photographic plate according to their degree of brightness, but as the rays of light have to pass through the cross-lined screen interposed between the lens and sensitive plate, and as the rays can only pass through the transparent parts and not through the opaque, no homogeneous surface is obtained on the negative, but a tone produced by the cross-lines of the screen. ”

“ Every light spot in the camera-picture becomes dark on the sensitive coating of the glass-plate. But where the shadows or dark parts of the camera-picture fall, the sensitive coating is less darkened, or not at all, if the shadows are very deep, and so these shadows of the camera-picture become the lights of the glass-picture, as the lights become the shadows. Again, the picture is reversed, just as in every camera-obscura where the image is received on a screen direct from the lens. ”

“ The light by which the exposure is made is contained in a light-tight box, or may be placed on the outside of the wall of the printing room, an aperture being cut in the partition to admit the light to the printing apparatus, which is screwed to the wall. Between the light and the film there is a revolving shutter, as in the camera, which cuts off the light intermittently, enabling the succeeding negative image and area of positive film to be brought into position before the exposure orifice. ”

“ If with an enlarging lantern the image of this faked picture is thrown on the paper like a lantern slide, and if the right hand side is a little further away than the left, the top further away than the bottom, you can print a fraudulent high speed ahead picture. True, everything else in the picture, even if motionless, is distorted, and the difference between this faking and the distortion of the shutter can be seen by an expert. ”