“I want a ticket for the reopening of the Public Baths,” she said.
“Apply at the Baths, or to the Hon. Sec., S. B. Brownlow, Esq., 22, The Woodland, Bordars Road. It’s flats,” said her acquaintance behind the ground-floor counter. He regarded her with a certain amount of favour.
“Ring up the Baths for me, please.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes. Ask them how their prize fund has gone this year. I’d rather like to contribute if it isn’t too late.”
“Needn’t ask about the prize fund. It’s early closing day, so you better buck up across the road if you want to buy a silver cup or anything. What do you want to give?”
“A silver cup would be very nice, I think.”
“How much do you want to spend? A couple of quid, say? Do you a good-size one for that, if you mention the name of the paper and say I sent you.”
Mrs. Bradley believed this to be a pleasantry, but was duly undeceived when, five minutes later, she put it to the test.
“The Record? Oh, yes, thank you very much, madam. We have a good cup here…” It was Mrs. Bradley’s first encounter with Councillor Zacharias.
The cup she chose was marked down ten per cent by the magic, it appeared, of the Record’s name and connections. Ten years previously, before he had had his accident, its editor had been the champion, five times running, of the local swimming club, and had played international water-polo. All this was related by Councillor Zacharias as he tied up the parcel and made out the bill.
“And even now,” he said, wrapping up a brooch which Mrs. Bradley proposed to give to her niece Sally Lestrange, “he could give most of the present Club team five seconds in the hundred, and beat them. He was a wonderful swimmer. We shan’t get another one like him.”
“And did he learn to swim in the canal?” Mrs. Bradley demanded.
“Ah, so he did. Do you know the Lily Loop where the canal goes straight on and the river loops round by Bewer’s Field. It’s a pretty spot. Often I have walked Momma there on a pleasant Sunday afternoons.”
“Is that near the island?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.
“Ah, near enough. There was lots of swimming there, especially on Sunday afternoons until the Council wouldn’t have it. So now it must be before eight o’clock in the morning, like bathing from the beach at some of the seaside places. Mrs. Commy-Platt decided that. She said the boys were bathing without their costumes, and that was disgusting.”
“Dear, dear!” said Mrs. Bradley, much impressed.
• CHAPTER 13 •
The Tower of the Blue Horses.
Title of a painting by Franz Marc.
The gathering at the formal reopening of the Public Baths was remarkable chiefly for the great diversity of people present. Downstairs, on the bath level, sat all those who had not paid for their seats (except, in some cases, expensively and indirectly, by offerings to the Prize Fund) but had had to be invited. With them, but further from the prize table and the arm-chairs reserved for members of the Baths Committee, were the parents and more affluent or consequential friends of the competitors. The Press was represented by Pat (for a conversational and appreciative description of the proceedings), a snubby youth of seventeen (for a report of the programme and a list of the winners), and a spectacled young man with a Press camera (for smirking photographs of competitors, and more formal portraits of town notables, the Baths Committee, the Prize Table, and Lady Selina, who had, of course, consented to preside at it).
Leaning (offensive of breath from hasty lunching on fried fish and chips) over the edge of the dressing boxes and on the stout gallery rail, were the lesser lights of the town. These, as one of them pointed out in the course of a debate with a steward, had, at least, paid for admission, and what enthusiasm was shown was chiefly displayed by them, largely in a partisan spirit which added considerably, Mrs. Bradley thought, to the interest of the proceedings, which might otherwise, to the uninitiated like herself, have seemed a little dull.
These were opened by a large piece of orange peel which alighted in the middle of the deep end and was retrieved spectacularly by a young man in bathing slips who was vociferously cheered by the gallery but admonished by an extremely nervous Baths superintendent, who said that, really, he didn’t ought to, not where there was ladies. A second piece of orange peel, which fell in the middle of Mrs. Bradley’s cerise and magenta hat, was disregarded by the audience (which was cat-calling the first muster of competitors), and therefore had no news value.
The first item on the programme was a sixty yards Club handicap, and, to Mrs. Bradley’s illogical but very great surprise, one of the competitors who started from scratch was the young police inspector. She looked for Sally, but her niece was not among those present.
The race was over two lengths of the bath, and was close enough to be interesting. The inspector won by a touch from the other scratch man, hauled himself out of the water by the handrail instead of climbing up the steps, and went straight to Lady Selina for his prize. He saw Mrs. Bradley and grinned at her. She beckoned him, and, under cover of admiring his prize, a case of spoons, said to him:
“Child, take care of yourself. How many of you are together out there in the dressing-rooms?”
“We’ve got the Slipper Baths. I’ve got one to myself. Most of the men are in threes.”
“Who is with Mr. Burt?”
“Our Ted? Oh, Broom and Cowie.”
“Go and make a fourth with them, child.”
“But…Lord, I’d better go! I’m in the event after this.”
Mrs. Bradley gripped his navy-blue costume where he had rolled it down to the waist.
“Promise me, child,” she said. The unfortunate young man, who did not dare to attempt to escape for fear of tearing his costume, groaned hollowly and Mrs. Bradley, recognising the sound for agreement, let him go.
The young inspector darted through the opening between the prize table and the chairs on the rostrum, and disappeared from her sight. Content, she consulted her programme to discover that the next item was an exhibition of various swimming styles by the Baths superintendent.
He demonstrated with vigour and with surprising grace—for he was a middle-aged, thick-set, apparently muscle-bound, grizzled sort of man—two rhythms of crawl stroke, the back crawl, the breast-stroke, the butterfly breast-stroke, sculling, swimming without using his arms and then without using his legs, surface diving—the soles of his small, brown feet coming neatly together out of the water each time in a manner which, for some reason, seemed to the audience funny—canoe-swimming, plunging, and, finally, using his plump wife as partner, the four methods of life-saving.
Mrs. Bradley watched the audience. The reporters were only vaguely occupied. The photographer was fiddling with his camera, but whether in boredom, or because it needed attention, Mrs. Bradley did not know.
Pat, who seemed interested in the display, scribbled intermittently during the demonstration, and was also making marginal sketches. She was half a dozen places away from where Mrs. Bradley was seated. The little programme reporter, his mouth slightly open, was watching the movements of the swimmer and making spasmodic notes on his scribbling pad and on his programme.
The audience, as a whole, was interested in the demonstration, and applauded each completed item with more than the ordinary amount of polite hand-clapping. The superintendent was popular, Mrs. Bradley deduced and a good deal of the applause was personal encouragement and appreciation.
He walked away modestly enough at the conclusion of the display, and Mrs. Bradley was interested to see on her programme that the next item was the Club high-diving championship, that Mr. Burt’s name came first upon the list, and that Tom Talby’s name had been deleted hastily but quite tidily in ink.
Burt was a neat and skilful diver. It gave pleasure to see his long thin body falling, like a star or an angel, from the high board into the lapping, green, translucent water, and with no more splash, it seemed, than a plummet or a div
ing seal.
His diving gave no clue, except to the initiated, to the muscular control and the beautiful, compensated balance which were necessarily brought into play by the management of such length and thinness. The other divers were short and chunky men whose thick legs naturally followed the line of shoulder to the water, and whose feet seemed as much a part of the curved-back body as the tail of a gliding fish. Theirs was all the natural advantage, but against it Mr. Burt could set the beauty of his height and natural stance, and his take-off (thought Mrs. Bradley, following the line of his hard and graceful body) was like Lucifer falling from heaven.
For his last dive (when it was certain that he had won the competition), he climbed to the highest board. Suddenly, as he stood poised and full of breath, Mrs. Bradley sensed that something was wrong. Pat seemed to sense it, too, for she stopped writing, looked up at the diving boards, half rose from her chair, dropped her pencil, and then dived after it to prevent it from rolling into the bath. At the same instant that her fingers gripped it, Burt took off in a faultless two and a half forward somersault, amid great applause from the audience.
His long thin body, graceful as an eel, curved through the quiet water, and his black head rose to the surface. Easily and lazily he paddled to the steps and climbed out, unharmed and even triumphant: for the next moment the announcement was made of his victory.
“Top board again!” yelled someone.
“Go on, Eddie!” said somebody else, from the gallery.
“Come back!” cried Pat. She even got up and waved her programme. It was too late. Climbing like a large spider, Mr. Burt got to the top board again, and began to walk out to the end.
“Come back!” cried Pat again, but in the vociferous acclamation of the proposed spectacle, her voice was utterly lost. The next second Mr. Burt and the board came away, as it were, together. There were shrieks, oaths, and screams, but the diver, disregarding the risk, altered his downwards fall (to the amazement of all the watchers) to another spectacular two and a half forward somersault, finishing up with a sudden header which took him, miraculously, out of the way of the board, and landed him neatly and safely clear of all encumbrances. The board fell straighter, and cracked on the edge of the bath.
Burt paddled to the steps, climbed out, surveyed the floating board, and, artistically certain of his audience, dived cleanly under it, came up on the farther side, turned, and began to tow it to the steps. The audience shrieked, cat-called and cheered in violent appreciation of this impressive demonstration of sang-froid.
Suddenly Mrs. Bradley saw her niece Sally. She was standing in the doorway at the shallow end of the bath, and was wearing a white blouse which showed up strongly against the dark green wall behind her.
Mrs. Bradley picked up the piece of orange peel which she had shaken off her hat at the beginning of the gala, and flung it into the bath. Burt, who had climbed up the steps and was standing, legs apart, hands on knees and trunk bent forward, to get his breath again, shot upright, breathed deeply, and, once again, dived in. At the same instant there was an explosion from behind the partition wall formed by the dressing-boxes on Mrs. Bradley’s side of the bath, and out came the superintendent’s assistant and commenced to say “Ladies and gentlemen…”
Cat-calls, whooping, whistles, and some genuine panic-stricken cries, immediately greeted this effort. At this inopportune moment of fright and commotion the air raid siren commenced its banshee wailing. Mrs. Bradley prudently moved to the side of her petrified sister-in-law, who was still ensconced behind the prize table, and at once a further pandemonium of overturned chairs and people climbing out of the dressing-boxes, or rushing and shoving on the gallery stairs, added to the terrifying din.
“Where’s Sally?” yelled Lady Selina, clutching her sister-in-law in an authoritative, admonitory grip.
“Out of this by now,” yelled Mrs. Bradley. “Thank goodness it’s daylight!” she added, under her breath. “This at night would have been quite tiresome.”
“Where’s Sally?” yelled Lady Selina again. A deafening uproar from that part of the gallery immediately above her head completely drowned the major portion of Mrs. Bradley’s reply, so Mrs. Bradley put beaked lips to Lady Selina’s ear and replied with all her strength.
“Outside. She went outside.”
The galleryites above them continued to stamp, shout, and scramble. Stewards yelled and pleaded. The Baths superintendent in his dressing-gown of purple Turkey towelling was on the second board of the diving stands—bravely, Mrs. Bradley thought, considering what had happened to the top board—and was directing operations as well as he could. The Town Councillors, shepherded by the assistants, were gathering out by the Slipper Baths’ door of the building, and in their wake Mrs. Bradley followed, clutched by Lady Selina, who had been making some attempt to stand on the prize table and assert herself in her capacity of air raid warden.
“But really, Adela,” she protested, as her indomitable little sister-in-law dragged her along like a terrier pulling a heifer, or a tug assisting a liner out of dock, “you will be very much safer inside.”
“There’s another murder in the wind,” said Mrs. Bradley. The passage was rapidly emptying. She raised her voice at the first door they came to, and shouted:
“Ronald! Ronald! Are you there?”
“Come in,” replied the young, strong voice of the inspector. “Come in here! I want to see you!”
She went in, Lady Selina still in tow. The room happened to be the Baths’ laundry, and contained several mangles, some galvanised iron gas coppers, and a large ironing table. On this table was laid the half-naked body of a youth. The inspector, in his bath gown, and several Club members, their naked bodies girt about with towels or clothed in bath gowns with towels round their necks like scarves, were gathered round it.
“It’s Eddie Burt,” said the inspector. “Cut off, now, you chaps. Mrs. Bradley’s a doctor. Get some clothes on, all of you, in case that noise means the goods.” The air raid warning, depressingly insistent, was still being keened by the sirens.
Mrs. Bradley inspected the unfortunate Burt, and then observed:
“Poor child; I’m going to hurt him.”
Apparently she did so, for, under her ministrations, the pallid, long, thin youth regained full consciousness, and jerked himself upright, with a flood, first of very bad language, and then of vomiting.
Lady Selina averted her gaze, and then removed her person, from the offensive sounds, sights, and smells thus thoughtlessly produced by the invalid, and went off to her post of duty, contriving, in some miraculous manner, to produce in transit her steel helmet and also a large handbell, its clapper muffled in a handkerchief.
“He’ll be weak after this,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Go and find his clothes. We must keep him warm.”
The inspector went off at once, and Mrs. Bradley was left with the sick boy. She took off her coat and scarf, and wrapped them round him, and then despatched a lingering youth for some of the coffee which had been prepared for the Town Councillors, and which they should have drunk during the interval in the programme of events, whilst Lady Selina was addressing the competitors and the audience. A cleaner, who appeared in the doorway with the horror-stricken countenance of melodrama, she sent in search of the wherewithal to clean up the laundry ironing table and floor.
• CHAPTER 14 •
A Portrait of a Divine.
Title of a picture by C. van Oostsanen.
At the Baths, Mrs. Bradley had been introduced by her sister-in-law to two or three of the Councillors. They varied in type from the asthmatically earnest, in the person of Councillor Commy (a distant relative, Mrs. Bradley assumed—to his beaming delight—of Mrs. Commy-Platt, the owner of the town), to the pugnaciously Nonconformist, in the person of Councillor Grant, who contrived to sandwich the question, “Are you saved, sister?” between an enquiry in respect to her bodily health and another, over the top of her head, to the chairman of the Baths Committee, respecting th
e effect of alcohol on deep-sea divers.
He was a bald-headed, bull-voiced man with the characteristic Adam’s apple of the extempore speaker, and the remains of the Scots tongue of his boyhood. He had once sung bass in the choir of Saint Saviour’s, the big church in the Broadway (Councillor Commy confided hoarsely to Mrs. Bradley when his pugnacious contemporary and colleague had gone behind the scenes with the Baths superintendent, at the very beginning of the proceedings, “to have one on the house,” concluded Councillor Commy, beaming, but not, apparently envious); but now, it appeared, Councillor Grant was the hot gospeller of a first-floor mission called the Sons of God Macedonian.
“And not teetotal they ain’t,” said Councillor Commy.
Mrs. Bradley, pertinently enquiring into the nature of a first-floor mission, learned that the adjective referred not to the mission as such, but merely to the fact that its meeting-place was a flat above a shop.
“In Eastdale Avenue, just off the station,” Councillor Commy observed, to complete his explanation. “And convenient for the ‘Rat and Cow-catcher,’” he added darkly.
After the sudden ending of the swimming gala, Mrs. Bradley, driving pensively homeward on the last of the petrol, reflected upon the conversation she had had with Councillor Commy and the monologue she had been privileged to hear from Councillor Grant, and thought that it might be interesting to further her acquaintanceship with the former, and attend a gospel meeting conducted by the latter.
Lady Selina was not at home when Mrs. Bradley arrived, but Sally was there, in the drawing-room, watching a maid who was drawing the black-out curtains.
“Early, aren’t you, Mary?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.
“It’s my evening out, madam,” the girl replied, “and her ladyship doesn’t like the curtains forgotten.”
She finished drawing them, switched on the light, and closed the door quietly behind her.
“Mother’s rabid about the black-out,” Sally morosely observed, “ever since the village policeman knocked us up about a light which some lunatic had switched on in, of all places, the conservatory, where, of course, we’re not blacked out at all.”
Brazen Tongue (Mrs. Bradley) Page 12
