Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer

by Gibson, Miles

  ‘And yourself?’

  ‘The Vitascope business never stops growing,’ grinned Marsh, ‘despite the shortages caused by the war.’

  The next day Valentine Crane, the distinguished painter of nudes, who had collected much of Swann’s early work and copied the photographs into his paintings, travelled from Cromer to visit the library. He was a heavy, bearded man with hands that had cruelly withered to claws. He showed no remorse for his lifetime of shameless plagiarism and it amused Kingdom Swann to think that his photographs, many of which had been copies of popular paintings, should be forged again as canvases.

  Crane’s great passion, since he’d grown too old and arthritic to paint, was the modern cinema. At dinner he engaged Cromwell Marsh in long discussions on the merits of motion pictures. He loved Keystone comedies, adventure serials and anything featuring Bronco Billy. He had only recently seen a startling Pathe production in colour.

  ‘A costume drama set in ancient Greece. The flesh tints so natural you’d swear they were living actors performing their parts behind a glass screen,’ he told Marsh, who was looking most impressed.

  ‘It’s damn clever, eh, Mr Swann?’ said Prattle, draining a glass of claret.

  Swann was asleep but another of the dinner guests, a famous old sculptor called Spinks, was quite overwhelmed by the news. ‘The spectacle!’ he cried in excitement. ‘Living beauties, lovely in every particular, larking about as bold as brass and into all manner of mischief!’ He was a ghost of a man in a baggy suit and a pair of gleaming spectacles. He jumped up, sat down and stuffed his mouth with cheese.

  ‘Little rascals, some of ’em,’ grinned Cromwell Marsh.

  ‘Mabel Normand the Diving Venus,’ sighed Crane.

  ‘Florence Lawrence the Biograph Girl,’ chuckled Marsh.

  ‘The ladies was always a weakness of mine,’ said Prattle, wiping his hands on his knees. The table was heaped with holly, apples, nuts and cheeses; bottles of wine, crusts of pies and skeletons of turkeys. He poured himself another glass of claret and belched peacefully.

  ‘It’s a miracle of electric light,’ declared Cromwell Marsh, turning to smile at Kingdom Swann. ‘The wonder of the age.’

  ‘What does he think of Mabel Normand the Keystone Water Nymph?’ enquired Crane.

  ‘I don’t believe he’s had the pleasure,’ said Marsh. ‘He doesn’t hold with the cinema.’

  ‘Wake him up and ask him,’ insisted Spinks.

  ‘We was wondering what you thought of the modern bioscope beauty, Mr Swann!’ shouted Marsh, shaking the old man awake.

  ‘What?’ shouted Swann. ‘What?’

  ‘The modern bioscope, Mr Swann,’ said Crane. ‘We was asking for your opinion.’

  Swann, half-buried in a tangle of holly, growled and stuck out his beard. ‘It’s a cheap trick!’ he roared, banging the table with his fist. ‘A cheap trick designed to bamboozle half-wits!’

  The company fell silent. Prattle set down his glass. Spinks stopped molesting the Stilton.

  ‘I’m surprised to hear you speak so strong, Mr Swann,’ ventured Crane, alarmed by the mutiny.

  ‘I’ve no time for it,’ said Swann, wagging his head.

  ‘Did you never see little Mary Pickford?’ said Spinks.

  ‘A prodigious beauty,’ Prattle confessed. ‘She’d melt the marrow in your bones.’

  ‘It strains the eyes,’ muttered Swann. ‘The eye can’t hold the speed of the pictures. Mark my words, it will drive men mad and blind a generation of children.’

  ‘Now that’s very queer,’ said Crane, pondering a polony. ‘Very queer. I should have thought that a man like yourself would have wasted no time in setting his mind to such an invention.’

  ‘How’s that?’ growled Swann.

  ‘Well, a photograph is a splendid deceit …’ said Crane.

  ‘Especially when its subject is a ripe young woman exposing her nether regions,’ said Prattle.

  ‘But when that photograph gets up and walks around and stretches and smiles and beckons you forward …’ continued Crane.

  ‘That’s art!’ shouted Spinks.

  ‘It’s something to contemplate,’ agreed Cromwell Marsh.

  ‘A rare sight,’ said Prattle, smacking his lips. He looked very flushed and his eyes were shining.

  ‘The film is dreams brought to life,’ said Crane, leaning back in his chair. ‘What do you say Mr Spinks.’

  ‘I must confess that I’ve never actually seen one,’ said the sculptor, feeling very foolish. ‘But I’ve heard enough to form that opinion.’

  ‘What?’ gasped Crane in astonishment.

  ‘I can hardly believe my ears!’ said Marsh.

  ‘A man of your experience,’ said Crane.

  ‘It can’t be helped,’ said the sculptor, looking aggrieved. ‘I never had the opportunities.’

  ‘I’ll soon put a stop to that, sir!’ exclaimed Prattle, grinding his teeth with excitement. ‘It’s an education. No time to waste.’ Marsh had brought him the latest All-Star Vitascope production and now he saw his chance to introduce the novelty as part of the evening’s entertainments.

  ‘A film show?’ said Crane. ‘A film show here in the house?’

  ‘Yes, sir! Marsh brings ’em down from London.’

  ‘I has the honour to provide his lordship with certain choice requisites,’ toadied Marsh.

  ‘Do you have, by chance, the latest adventures of Bronco Billy?’ said Valentine Crane.

  ‘Bugger Bronco Billy!’ cried Spinks. ‘Bring on the dancing girls!’

  47

  THE GERMAN SURRENDER!

  Lady Wagtail waits for his Lordship

  A woman stands at her bedroom window and stares across fields to a view of the sea. The woman is young and beautiful and her gown is so grand, and her arms so plump, that she must be the mistress of the house. She presses a letter to her heart and rolls her lovely eyes to heaven.

  Down in the Kitchen

  The maids are small and pretty. They are working at a scrubbed table. The first maid washes a rolling pin in a basin of soapy water. Bracelets of bubbles hang from her wrists. The second maid sets out to polish a set of silver candlesticks. She is laughing and showing her teeth. The third maid tries to unravel a string of pantomime sausages. She frowns and looks perplexed, the sausages looped on her neck. A fourth maid enters the kitchen with an open newspaper in her hands. She is shouting. Her mouth keeps yawning and snapping shut. The other maids stop work and wipe their hands on their aprons. They swarm around the newspaper, stagger, swoon, cling to each other for support, their faces white with horror.

  The German Invasion!

  He stands in the shade of the shrubbery. He wears a cavalry uniform and a coal scuttle with a spike. His face is a skull in a fancy moustache. The Emperor of Germany! He draws a cape around himself and scowls through the bushes towards the house. Now he has shrunk to a shadow. The shadow flickers down the garden path and peeps through the kitchen window. A door opens and the shadow enters, creeps through a narrow corridor. No one suspects! The shadow tiptoes up the stairs, sweeping forward, plunging the walls into darkness.

  Lady Wagtail’s Bedroom

  The Kaiser enters the room and glances quickly around him. The room is richly furnished with carpets and curtains and potted palms. But where is Lady Wagtail? Here on a table are bottles and brushes. There on the bed are silk gloves and slippers. The Kaiser wipes his moustache. His eyes have turned into small, black slits. He slinks forward, climbs inside a wardrobe and closes the door behind him.

  Lady Wagtail retires for the night

  Lady Wagtail enters the room and gently closes the door. She unbuttons her gown to reveal a chemise and a pair of short, black stockings. Now she unpins her hair and lets it fall to her waist. She bends to the bed, folds down the sheet and slaps around the pillows. When she stretches and bends across the bed the chemise lifts away to reveal her legs, the swell of her thighs, the shine of her fat, white buttocks. The room grows dar
k and frames the quivering arse in a perfect keyhole of light.

  Look out behind you!

  The Kaiser leaps from the wardrobe and falls upon Lady Wagtail. One hand pulls back her head while the other claws at the silk chemise. Her breasts spill out. Her mouth pops open in surprise. He squeezes her breasts and laughs. The teats jump about in his hands like India-rubber balls. Lady Wagtail rears up in fright, jerks out her arms and throws off the demon assailant. The Kaiser takes a tumble, falls from the bed, collides with a chair and somersaults across a table.

  Help! Help!

  Lady Wagtail is screaming. Her little chemise has disappeared. Her fine black stockings have vanished. The Kaiser is creeping over the carpet, his hands stretched out to her throat. For a moment she cannot move, frozen with fright, her face contorted with terror. The Kaiser strikes. She turns around and throws herself at the window. She wriggles. She kicks. But she cannot escape. He tosses her down on the ruined bed, grabs her legs and gazes, hungrily, at her feet. He might be planning to eat her alive. Where to begin? He surveys this bountiful feast of flesh, from the tangled hair on her lovely head to the soles of her dainty feet. Yes! He bares his teeth at a row of toes and pulls them into his mouth.

  The Household Cavalry!

  The bedroom door bursts open and the maids crowd into the room. The Kaiser snarls and jumps from the bed. He turns to the window and bangs his fists on the glass. But the maids pull him down in a storm of pigtails, ribbons and nightgowns. They stick him with pokers and poke him with sticks until he is beaten as flat as the carpet.

  The punishment fits the crime

  The Kaiser is stripped of his uniform and tied securely to a chair. The fight is already knocked out of him. He looks old and small and sad. One eye is black. A chamber pot sits on his head. The maids march around him in triumph. They open their nightgowns, bare plump breasts and taunt the helpless prisoner. Lady Wagtail comes on parade, wearing the Kaiser’s boots and helmet. Now she stands before the chair, turns her back on the Emperor, bends at the waist and waggles her backside in his face. The Kaiser struggles against his ropes, moaning and shaking his head. Lady Wagtail sticks out her tongue, slips a hand between her legs and briskly fingers her beard. And so, with the maids marching, the Kaiser cursing and Lady Wagtail wagging, a Union jack unrolls from above and falls to the stage like a curtain.

  48

  ‘I never saw anything like it,’ the sculptor called Spinks confessed. ‘I’d heard about it many times but, bless my soul, I never saw it!’ He shivered and blew jets of steam through his teeth.

  It was ten o’clock on a bitter morning, the puddles frozen and the lawns still white with frost. Fortified by a large breakfast, the company, led by Lord Hugo Prattle, was stamping along the shores of the lake. Prattle carried a shotgun in his arms and paused, now and then, to stare at the sky. Spinks walked beside Valentine Crane and Marsh had been set to work, pushing Swann around the grounds in a basket contraption on wheels. Despite all his protests, Kingdom Swann’s legs had been examined and declared unfit to balance his bulk in the frost.

  ‘She was a fine figure of a woman,’ said Crane, slapping his hands, ‘and she wasn’t afraid to show it.’

  ‘That was nothing,’ said Prattle proudly. ‘You should see some of them picture shows. Pansy Waters is my favourite. Pansy Waters in Bath Time Bubbles. By thunder, but she boils the blood!’

  ‘A proper parade of beauty,’ laughed Marsh, driving the chair through a flowerbed. ‘What do you say Mr Swann?’

  ‘What?’ roared Swann, through a bandage of woollen muffler.

  ‘The picture show!’ shouted Marsh.

  ‘I couldn’t watch it. The light hurt my eyes,’ wheezed Swann. ‘Tomfoolery!’ He sniffed and swung out his arms. He’d been given a pair of bright orange pigskin gloves that stuck from the sleeves of his coat like a pair of artificial hands.

  ‘You can’t have missed that posterior,’ shouted the sculptor Spinks. ‘I do declare it was a posterior of Old Testament proportions.’

  ‘I couldn’t make head nor tail of it,’ snapped Swann, scowling at the leather sausages protruding from the ends of his sleeves. ‘It was all so much confusion.’ But he had seen everything. Living pictures on the wall! The whole of creation shrunk very small and chased down a shaft of light. If art was a search for beauty and beauty the celebration of life, then here were machines with the power to manufacture it by the yard. The photograph was dead. Cinema had walked away with it. He was shocked and dismayed by the knowledge. Last night’s little exhibition had been no more than a tuppenny peepshow. But it had been enough of a demonstration to convince him of its power in the world.

  ‘I thought the effect was most comical,’ said Valentine Crane. ‘There’s nothing more amusing than watching nude women cavorting. Whenever I have the money I like my studio full of them. I put on some music and set ’em dancing. I’m too old to paint ’em. So I just sit and look at ’em. And I don’t know which I like better!’ He honked with laughter, caught a bad cough and began to choke in the freezing air.

  ‘Patriotic!’ barked Prattle. ‘It was very patriotic!’

  ‘That’s the stuff to serve the troops,’ said Marsh, who was hoping to make a fortune by building a small, canvas cinema, robust enough to be used by the army.

  ‘Poor buggers!’ said Spinks. ‘They need something out there to raise their spirits.’

  ‘I blame the Germans,’ said Prattle. ‘It’s disgraceful the way they conduct themselves. They ought to wage war like gentlemen.’

  ‘They sank a hospital ship! Did you hear that? Thousands of sick and injured men, helpless as rabbits, and the murderers laughed as they watched ’em drown!’ shouted Spinks.

  ‘It’s not a war,’ said Crane, spitting an oyster into the grass. ‘It’s more like a deadly disease. A terrible plague sent down from heaven and made to lay waste the earth.’

  ‘And it’s spreading,’ said Prattle. ‘The whole damn world is marching to war.’

  ‘The world is always going to war!’ wheezed Swann. ‘I can remember the Crimea and that was a nasty business.’

  ‘But that was sixty years ago,’ said Prattle.

  ‘It never stops!’ shouted Swann. ‘After the Crimea the Indian Mutiny, the first Ashanti war, the Afghan war, the Zulu war, the first Boer war, the war in Egypt, the third Burmese war, the second Ashanti war, the last Boer war, we nearly went back to war with the Russians and now we’re fighting the Kaiser …’

  ‘A man is born to fight,’ argued Marsh, pausing to wipe his nose on his sleeve. ‘He’s a predator. It’s in his nature to want to engage in trials of strength. If it’s worth four farthings it’s always been worth a fight. Remember the Children of Israel,’ he shouted down at Swann. ‘They never did anything else but fight.’

  ‘But the Germans are devils!’ cried Spinks. ‘They’ll stop at nothing. They’re killing innocent women and children.’

  ‘The Zulu were killing women and children,’ said Swann, banging his fists against his knees.

  ‘That was only to be expected,’ said Crane. ‘You’ve got to make allowances when you’re dealing with the heathen.’

  ‘That’s understood,’ said Prattle. ‘But your German is a white man. Good God, he’s very nearly an Englishman!’

  ‘That don’t stop him sticking babies on the end of his bayonet,’ said Valentine Crane as they tottered through the rhododendrons and back towards the safety of the house.

  ‘And it don’t stop his spraying our lads with poisonous gas,’ agreed Prattle bitterly.

  ‘The heathen might be a savage,’ said Spinks, ‘and he might want to cut out and eat your liver, but you know where you stand with your Zulu and your Fuzzy-Wuzzy. He stands his ground with his shield and his spear and when you shoot him he dies like a man.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ growled Prattle, slapping his gun as he watched the sky. ‘It’s turned very ugly. They’ve already killed my butler, two coachmen and a groom. They’ll have to be stopped or
we’ll have no staff left to manage the house. It’s time we taught them a lesson.’

  ‘You’d think, with all the progress we’ve made, we could put a quick end to a dirty, little war,’ grumbled Marsh. ‘We should build machines to fight our battles. That’s the answer. These days machines can do everything. Why, they even have machines that are built to build more machines. Imagine the power of an army riding to war in a fleet of flying dreadnoughts or guns that could sniff out the enemy, take aim and fire themselves.’ He fell silent, dreaming of beautiful engines of war, armour-plated fortresses, mounted on wheels, belching fire and farting smoke, uncoiling into the enemy camp like glittering Chinese dragons.

  ‘And who drives your infernal machines?’ snorted Prattle. ‘Who looks after ’em when their works break down or their wheels fall off and they blow themselves apart? You’ll be asking next for an army made up of motor mechanics.’

  ‘It will all be done by electricity,’ said Marsh mildly.

  ‘You can’t find a better fighting machine than a regiment of cavalry,’ said Prattle, shaking his head.

  ‘I heard that some American is already building a death ray machine,’ ventured Valentine Crane.

  ‘That should put an end to ’em,’ chuckled Spinks.

  ‘How does it work?’ shouted Prattle.

  ‘Electrocution,’ said Crane.

  ‘That’s what I told you,’ said Marsh triumphantly. ‘When you understand electricity you’ve the power to conquer the world.’

  ‘I saw a picture in a magazine,’ continued Crane. ‘It’s a huge copper cannon that fires a deadly electric beam strong enough to knock down an army. They say, when it’s built, it will finish the war in a week. There’s no defence against this machine. It can burn a hole through the side of a mountain.’