A boy in
the likeness of a midshipman took halves of the curving tickets and
dropped them into a tin box, and then next Rachel was in a sudden
black darkness, studded here and there with minute glowing rubies that
revealed the legend: "Exit. Exit. Exit."
Row after row of dim, pale, intent faces became gradually visible,
stretching far back-into complete obscurity; thousands, tens
of thousands of faces, it seemed--for the Imperial de Luxe was
demonstrating that Saturday night its claim to be "the fashionable
rage of Bursley." Then mysterious laughter rippled in the gloom, and
loud guffaws shot up out of the rippling. Rachel saw nothing whatever
to originate this mirth until an attendant in black with a tiny
white apron loomed upon them out of the darkness, and, beckoning them
forward, bent down, and indicated two empty places at the end of a
row, and the great white scintillating screen of the cinema came into
view. Instead of being at the extremity it was at the beginning of the
auditorium. And as Rachel took her seat she saw on the screen--which
was scarcely a dozen feet away--a man kneeling at the end of a
canal-lock, and sucking up the water of the canal through a hose-pipe;
and this astoundingly thirsty man drank with such rapidity that the
water, with huge boats floating on it, subsided at the rate of about a
foot a second, and the drinker waxed enormously in girth.
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