Poor Caroline

by Winifred Holtby

  '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 everything 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 laboratory 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 goodbye 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 assistant. 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 Kensington-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 wrestling 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 swinging 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 burden 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 during 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 exaltation carried him through the ordeals of medical examination and adult baptism, confirmation and army latrines. He took his first communion three days before his draft left the training-camp for France.

  He was 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 between the objective world in which all these things happened, 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 extraordinary fragility. It hung like a transparent curtain between 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. Behind 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, learning, 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 rapturous 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, suddenly 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.

  He was absent that night from roll-call, and next morning was found, crouched on a fallen tree, his head in his hands, incapable of speech or effort.

  The war was over; discipline was not what it had been; the army doctor liked young Mortimer, wh
o had struck him as intelligent, alert and keen. Brain-storms were not unknown among young soldiers, and it certainly caused less inconvenience to have them after the Armistice instead of before it. Mortimer was sent to hospital in Abbeville for a fortnight to be treated for influenza, a convenient disease which indeed opportunely attacked him. He apparently recovered from both of his disorders simultaneously and was able to report for demobilization on the appointed day.

  But the result of his revulsion was his determination to take Holy Orders. Because he had no right to live, he would renounce the world. He played for some time with the thought of becoming a missionary to the lepers; but he discarded that idea as a piece of sentiment which he must not permit himself. His work lay in England.

  He went up to New College with his government grant for the shortened course in Greats; then passed on to Lichfield Theological College.

  Since he left Lichfield, he had lived in slum parishes, fasted and prayed and spurred himself forward to new efforts of endurance and toleration. The endurance was mental as well as physical. He compelled his complex and subtle mind to produce Simple Talks for Working Mothers and Manly Addresses for Young Lads. He schooled his lively and inconvenient sense of humour to docility in the face of care committees and church workers. His speculative habits were smothered beneath an avalanche of drudgery. Thus he was able to flog himself into a state of chilly happiness, sensitively alive to small pleasures. An unexpected leisure hour in the London Library, an exhilarating spurt on his bicycle between two rushing streams of traffic down the Edgware Road, or a rare holiday, swimming and walking in Cornwall, sufficed to make him in love with this world as well as with the next.

  But his trouble lay in his intellectual uncertainty. The Catholic ideal of unity, of discipline and organization appealed to him, but his temperament was fundamentally Protestant. He found himself compelled to refer questions of faith to his individual conviction instead of to authority. The spectacle of his friends who collapsed into Catholicism on attaining middle age revolted him. The Anglo-Catholic position failed to satisfy him. It was engaged in a battle which he thought unimportant. Though he loved and admired Father Lasseter, he was fatigued by the older man's pre-occupation with sectarian controversy.

  But he despised himself for vacillations. When on Septuagesima Sunday he preached at Saint Augustine's instead of Father Lasseter who had laryngitis, he condemned compromise in order to elucidate his own position. He thought that by preaching to suit himself, he might meet the needs of at least one member of the congregation. Quite unaware of Eleanor's presence or of the Christian Cinema Company's distress, he pronounced sentence upon his own half-hearted-ness. Two days later a funny little woman called Miss Denton-Smyth lay in wait for him outside the vestry door, and asked him to find a bishop for her. He murmured something about Father Lasseter, and left her, promptly forgetting all about the incident.

  But if he forgot the Christian Cinema Company once, he was not allowed to forget it again. Almost every time he took a service in Saint Augustine's, he was haunted by the small bright figure of Miss Denton-Smyth. It was impossible to ignore her, for she was vivid as a parrakeet in her unsuitable green and crimson dresses. On the coldest mornings she appeared at Early Mass among the faithful. She lay in wait for Roger at the door; she hunted him down on his way to Parish Meetings with inexorable, gentle, unhurrying pursuit.

  Roger spoke about her to Father Lasseter.

  'Poor old thing. She's desperately poor and inclined to be a nuisance. I'm really glad she's found a hobby at last. Be thankful it isn't parish visiting or Church work. You'd better humour her.'

  Roger humoured her. He listened to her story, walked back to her room in Lucretia Road with her, accepted bundles of circulars, which he promptly threw into an overfilled waste-paper basket in the Clergy House, and promised to attend the At Home to Clergy and Social Workers which the Christian Cinema Company had arranged.

  He went in a mood of detached and melancholy amusement. He had been reading the Summa Theologia and the terrific power and knowledge behind the dry sentences goaded him. He felt that Aquinas would have had nothing but contempt for his fluctuating impulse. He knew that he was working himself up for another nervous and spiritual crisis. References to Catholicism stung him. He found the Communion Service a fierce ordeal, every word and movement challenging him to justify his Protestantism in the face of that huge claim upon Christian unity. If he was to face his problems calmly he must, he felt, divert his attention from these larger problems and amuse himself by trivial encounters.

  He knew one or two people at the party, but his habitual shyness isolated him, and though he busied himself handling cups of tea and rearranging chairs, he had opportunity to observe the people round about him, and especially one girl sitting eating sandwiches beside a radiator across the hall.

  The things he noticed about her were odd things. She wore very trim country shoes, with low heels and boyish worsted stockings. She had removed her hat, and her brown fringe overhung her straight sullen brows. She was talking with grave attention to a lean gawky youth whom Roger knew to be Macafee, the inventor. She listened to him as though what he was saying were interesting and important, but there was no coquetry in her clear, critical glance and abrupt questions. Roger knew far too well the earnest and unintelligent response of womanly women who hung upon a man's words, inhaling through open mouths with indiscriminating favour his most commonplace remarks. This girl was listening as an equal listens, nodding her head from time to time, so that her brown, heavy, silken, lustreless straight hair swung back and forth. Then her face broke suddenly into a charming smile, and he noticed the band of freckles across her nose, and the clear line of her well-moulded chin. Of all the people in the room, he felt that he would like to know her, and laughed at himself for acting so well the curate, threading his way through impenetrable forests of chairs, carrying tea, and sustained by the prospects of conversation with an unknown girl.

  'I don't suppose I shall ever see her again,' he thought. 'This meeting's rather a frost. I imagine that this Cinema Company will go the way of many other companies. And I?' He did not know where he would go.

  'Father Mortimer,' - Miss Denton-Smyth was at his elbow -' I want you so much to meet my cousin, Eleanor de la Roux; you know we owe her the continuance of the company and everything.'

  She led him across the room to the girl whom he had noticed talking to the young men and introduced them. 'Do you remember coming with me to hear Father Mortimer preach, Eleanor?'

  To Roger's surprise the girl greeted him with a remarkable phrase. 'I'm not likely to forget,' she said, 'and I don't know yet whether I'm likely to forgive.'

  Forgive? Forgive? He could not even remember what he had preached about that night at St. Augustine's. But the incident excited his imagination. He had noticed the girl. He had wanted to make her acquaintance. And already he had unconsciously affected her life. It was amusing; it symbolized the curious diversity of experience which went to make the pattern of life. 'We are so oddly interrelated,' he thought. 'We are members of one another. An inescapable communion. We cannot avoid incurring responsibility for our brethren.' With half-comical dismay he contemplated the glib complacency with which good Churchmen referred to this intricacy of mutual relationship as though it were not one of the most alarming qualities of the universe. He committed himself to go down to Annerley on the following Friday to visit Macafee's laboratory.

  He wanted to see Eleanor de la Roux again. He wanted to find out exactly how his sermon had affected her. He felt as though he might use this brief diversion to dam the rising tide of his own intellectual disturbance. Was he withheld from Rome by loyalty or indolence? Throughout half that night he knelt in his cold cell-like room, wrestling with the angel of his honour, and calling in vain upon his sense of humour to save him from the madness of apostasy.

  §2

  His first visit to Macafee's laboratory remained in Roger's memory as the occasion when he first becam
e aware of the reality behind St. Paul's laconic injunction that it is better to marry than to burn. When he saw Eleanor de la Roux at the Christian Cinema Company's At Home he had been amused and intrigued by a situation in which an unknown young woman had acknowledged his influence upon her life; but when he joined Miss Denton-Smyth and her young cousin to motor down to Annerley, he immediately knew that Eleanor de la Roux meant more to him than a casual acquaintance.

  Standing in the laboratory, listening to Miss Denton-Smyth's hurrying monologue, he followed the girl's pilgrimage from desk to table, watching with novel excitement her assured and unselfconscious movements. Driving back in the car he suddenly knew that he could not bear the expedition to end like this. She would just drop out of his life like the hundreds of other men and women whom he met by chance and parted from without regret.

  When they had set down Miss Denton-Smyth at Lucretia Road he turned to Eleanor. 'Must you go straight home?' he asked, 'or will you come and have coffee or something with me?'

  'I don't really mind,' she said indifferently. 'Isn't it pretty late?'

  'There's a place in the Earl's Court Road quite near your club,' he insisted. 'It won't, take you out of your way.' 'Oh, very well.'

  They drove almost in silence back to the Earl's Court Road. It was a clear cold evening, and the polished roads gleamed as though they were transparent and lit from within. The lighted city seemed like an alabaster globe in which electric lights are veiled, a lovely and fragile bubble that one blow could shatter. Roger felt that his new mood of happiness was as brittle. He sat very still, hardly daring to move or speak lest he should break its magic. He was content to watch the houses fall away from him, and Eleanor's firm gauntleted hand upon the wheel.