Poor Caroline (25 page)

'What do you know about women?' she asked. 'And what
do you know about me?'

'I know you're - you're . . .' He had reached the end of
his resources. He knew, indeed, nothing about her, except
that she was intelligent and self-possessed, and that he
wanted to have her working in his laboratory, concentrating
her grave attention upon him, and not lounging about with
that long slug of a priest.

But he could not say that. He could only glower at her
and snap: 'I hate any waste of time and of ability. Look
here, Eleanor - what's the good of mucking round with
those old women - of both sexes? Miss Denton-Smyth talks
about purifying the cinema - making an honest film, and
all that. She doesn't know the first thing about an honest
film. I can show you honesty. The only sort of honesty you
can get in a
show of this kind is honest workmanship. Cut
all that propaganda. I'll teach you how to do good work.'

She smiled suddenly, a smile of quick friendliness and
liking.

'Well, well,' she said. 'You're very persuasive, though I
don't like the way you talk about my friends. I'll see.' And
she was off, leaving him in a fine flutter of uneasiness.

Miss Denton-Smyth immediately approached him. 'Oh,
Mr. Macafee - I hate to bother you,' she began, 'but there's
just one thing I wanted to ask you.' She hesitated, then went
on boldly. 'I suppose you couldn't let me have a little loan often shillings or a pound? I'm just a little short this week. Of course, I'll pay you back. My embarrassment's only
temporary. We're all going to make our fortunes. I'm just a little short now.'

'But, Miss Denton-Smyth.' Hugh stared at her in amaze
ment. 'Johnson told me you had an independent income
and a lot of rich relations.'

'Well, naturally,' she said with a little toss of her head,
'I'm not going to confide all my domestic affairs in Mr.
Johnson. Between you and me, I am having rather a strug
gle just now, though dear Eleanor has been very good dur
ing the past few months, but of course I don't like to take too
much from her because I know that since she invested her capital in the company she's only got just enough to last till
she finishes her training, and of course until the dividends
come in, which they must do soon, I've got five and four-
pence halfpenny at the moment, but I'll go to dear Father
Mortimer to-morrow. That's what's so wonderful. I always
say it doesn't matter about
money
if only you've got good
friendsl'
She smiled a little fluttering smile.

'You mean you're living on that parson and Miss de la
Roux?'

The smile died, and she gazed at him.

'Why, it's only a loan - until we
all
make our fortunes.
And it's wonderful how little you need when you're my age.
It's only natural they should want to help me when I'm
doing important work, because you know I don't think that
my dear relations in Yorkshire quite understand just
what
the work is. Of course, that's why we've
got
to make the
Christian Cinema Company succeed. Having staked
every
thing
on it, I mean.'

'I see.'

So she was really penniless, and the company was not a
rich old woman's whim, but a desperate gamble against fortune. Hugh felt sick at heart. He did not yet know what
complications might result from this exposure of poverty,
but he knew that all poverty was dangerous. He knew that
it interrupted work, disturbed the mind, and came between
a man and his ideas.

Sullen and disappointed he stumbled across the laborato
ry to a small safe where he kept his plans and papers. Unlocking the door he turned his papers over until he found
a leather case. Counting out four pounds deliberately, he returned four others to the case and locked the door again.

'You'd better take these. And now if you don't mind, I
should be glad if you would all go away. I want to do some
more work to-night.'

'Well, thank you very much. It's only a loan, mind you.
I'll send you an I.O.U. I'm very much glad to have this,
not only for what it is but because it shows that we're all working together and that you really believe we're going to succeed.' She called her party together, and they said good
bye and went away.

It was no use, Hugh decided, trying to do anything with
a woman like that. She was incorrigible. Of course, it was madness to lend her money. He had a strong impulse to run after her into the street and take his four pounds back again. Still, injustice to her he must admit that she had created the
Christian Cinema Company. He was indebted to her for
the sum of £500 and possibly more to come. He might, through her, secure the de la Roux girl as an.unpaid assis
tant. He knew now that the prospect of this arrangement
was very pleasant to him. Well, he ought not to grudge her
a loan of four pounds, he supposed, poor Caroline.

Chapter 5 :
Roger Aintree Mortimer

§1

when
Caroline reported at the Board meeting on January 30th that Father Mortimer had promised to speak to the
Bishop of Kensington-Gore about the company, she was not
strictly accurate. What Mortimer had promised to do was to inquire further about the business for Father Lasseter.

The Reverend Father Mortimer was at that time assistant priest at Saint Augustine's, Fulham, in the diocese of Ken
sington-Gore, a position which he mistakenly believed to lay
upon him the obligation of working for sixteen hours a day
on seven days in the week.

All day he rushed on his bicycle about the streets, taking
services, visiting the sick, arguing on committees, and wrest
ling with the pert, irrepressible, undisciplined and tedious members of the boys' clubs and young men's guilds. The
streets down which he strode, his long black cassock swing
ing to his swift stride, were drab and ugly. The houses he visited were poor, squalid and overcrowded. He knelt in
prayer beside tumbled and dirty beds. He strove in bare,
dilapidated clubrooms to ignite sparks of enthusiasm in the
breasts of unemployed cynical adolescents. It was hard
work, but its rigour was his
consolation. The ugliness of the Clergy House where he lodged had a certain charm for him.
He found it necessary to drug his nerves with work and to stupefy his intellect with fatigue.

His trouble was not the common one
. He found no bur
den in asceticism. The desires of the flesh rarely
vexed his lean young body, hardened by constant exercise, plain food and the perpetual discipline of action. But his wanton mind
distressed him. The child of a cultured, debonair and ironic
Oxford family, he had returned for his school holidays dur
ing the first two years of the war, to find himself exasperated
by its aloof superiority and academic indifference. Responding recklessly to the challenge of 'He who is not with me is
against me,' he flung himself when he was just eighteen at
once into the bosom of the Anglican Church, and the ranks
of an infantry regiment, A mood of chill but exquisite exalta
tion carried him through the ordeals of medical examina
tion and adult baptism, confirmation and army latrines. He
took his first communion three days before his draft left the
training-camp for France.

He w
as not, on the whole, unhappy while in training.
The lack of privacy, the rigour of physical effort, the harsh
discomfort and rough community life resembled his vision
of an unsanctified but adequate monasticism. His spiritual
detachment left him outwardly cheerful, docile and a little
shy. Charmed by Franciscan ideals of brotherhood and
poverty, he refused to let his squeamish nerves shrink from
the ugliness of physical contact with men less fastidious than
himself. He listened with courteous interest to jokes about square pushing, to smutty gossip, and to the brutal violence
of a sergeant who, in giving bayonet instruction, yelled at
him to hate the Germans, to eat 'em, bite 'em, and tear their
bowels out. These were the men whom he had undertaken
to love, and since love was the order of the day, the harder
the task, the more meritorious its fulfilment,

Even when he at last arrived in France and reached the
trenches, his exaltation acted as a general anæsthesia, dulling the perception of horror which might otherwise have
driven him mad. He marched, dug, sweated, ate, slept and
endured the absence of sleep, and crawled on his belly along
reeking mud, and it seemed as though a curtain hung be
tween the objective world in which all these things hap
pened, and the subjective world in which he really lived.
When he went sick with pneumonia in the winter of 1917, he
lay in hospital choking and coughing, but mentally in bliss.
The outward appearance of things became refined to extra
ordinary fragility. It hung like a transparent curtain be
tween him and the real world of the spirit. Under the
influence of fever the curtain sometimes blew aside a little
and he saw straight into the dazzling light of absolute
realities.

He passed his twenty-first birthday in a camp near Abbeville in the spring of 1919, waiting for demobilization. Be
hind the camp stretched woods with long green rides leading
past glades yellow with daffodils. In the mild spring evening
he walked by himself, pushing his way through tangled
thickets of hazel and hawthorn, stopping to watch a squirrel chattering with anger on the low bough of a beech tree, and listening to the liquid whispering of evening birds. He was
radiantly happy, not only with spiritual ecstasy, but with
normal human and egotistic pleasure. The war was over; he
was alive and well: life lay before him, Oxford, liberty, learn
ing, the mellow leisure of academic life, the loveliness of the
English country, Tubeny woods, the Cherwell, Magdalen
tower, the admirable sherry at Wadham, good talk round
well-furnished luncheon tables, women — a vague yet rap
turous adventure, for he was still a virgin - philosophy,
travel.

Down into a hollow glade he strode, knee-deep in daffodils, then struck his boot against something dull yet soft,
hidden below the flowers. The instinct of more than two years made him start back in horror, expecting and almost
smelling the stench of putrifying flesh.

It was not a corpse under the daffodils; only an old log so
rotten that it crumbled at a touch. But horror had pierced
his triumph and brought him face to face with a reality
which was not spiritual. Retching and shivering, he stared
at the log, seeing instead of the damp wood the body of his
friend Arnot, who had slipped when half-drunk with fatigue
from the duckboard into deep mud and been trampled to death by the feet of his own company. He saw Linden,
coughing his life away after a gas attack, and Meer, sud
denly mutilated by an exploding shell. The revulsion of
strained nerves and tortured senses came upon him, and he
cried out in anguish against the fate which had doomed him
to bear the burden of life while they were dead. He saw
with horror his complacency in settling down to enjoy the pleasure of which they had been robbed, and in a sudden
passion strode round the glade, tearing up the daffodils, and
trampling into the earth their broken trumpets.