“He’s the only good negro movie actor in the world!” Rouke informed him. “We employ him in our studio in New Orleans. He’s gone back home now.”
“What bothers me,” Gaitskill said, “is that bride in the wedding ceremony, who takes the lead in the whole picture. That woman is not a nigger!”
“Well, _I guess not_!” Rouke exclaimed. “She’s a Spanish Moor. She’s the highest salaried movie actress in the Gitagraft Company and has acted in our pictures all around the world. In the North she was an Esquimau, in Montana she was an Indian princess, in Tokio she was a Geisha girl, in Hong-kong she was the emperor’s daughter, and in our South Sea Island picture she took a seventy-foot dive off of a mountain crag into the ocean. She can speak every language on earth, or if she can’t she can fake it until a native would not know the diff----”
This dissertation was suddenly interrupted by a rich, sweet-toned, dramatic voice, speaking the technical word which in the moving picture world instructs the camera artist to stop action:
The man whirled around and looked into the smiling face of Lalla Cordona.
She had slipped into the theater unobserved to witness the first try-out of the new picture.
She arose from her seat and advanced toward the men with all the grace and beauty of the Arabian princess that she was, garbed gloriously in the latest creations of Fifth Avenue modistes and milliners, a thing of dainty, exquisite, infatuating beauty and loveliness whose dark skin was as fine as spun silk, as delicate as cobweb, as glowing as polished ebony, and whose whole body flamed with the soul, the magnetism, the life of her.
As Rouke spoke her name introducing Colonel Gaitskill, she said:
“I beg everybody’s pardon for my rude interruption. But it’s deadly boresome to hear your own funeral encomium, don’t you think?”
“I judge from the general tenor of Mr. Rouke’s remarks that anything you do is perfectly all right,” Gaitskill laughed. Then he asked: “Where have you been stopping while in Tickfall, Miss Cordona?”
“I suppose the sheriff will put me under arrest,” she answered with a throaty, chuckling laugh, “but I have been a cook in Mr. Flournoy’s home in the last five days. In the South a black face indicates a nigger, and I knew that my only door of entrance to a white man’s home was through the kitchen.”
