Poor Caroline

by Winifred Holtby

  How was it, thought Roger, that ability to laugh at oneself proved so poor an armour against pain? He could see perfectly well the comic element in his distress. He saw how neatly he had conspired with fate to serve his rival. He had taken all this trouble to impress Eleanor, and had only succeeded in helping the detestable Macafee. Yet his appreciation of the comedy could not ease the torment of his mind.

  His experiment, however, was succeeding. Mr. Brooks was accustomed to touchy and difficult young inventors, and apart from his financial ability, he really understood the technical possibilities of the cinema. Macafee discovered at once his capacity, and respected it. It was a relief to him to talk to a man who spoke his own language. He unbent and grew almost eloquent and obliging, explaining diagrams and chemical formulae. When Brooks suggested a brief demonstration, he lifted his voice and called to his temporary assistant.

  'Eleanor. Hi, Eleanor!'

  Roger started. So it had gone as far as this. He called her Eleanor as though she were his maid, his chattel, his mistress. 'Absurd, absurd,'he told his raging temper. 'They are working together. He is an uncouth mannerless creature. He calls her by the name that comes quickest and easiest to him.'

  He watched her adjusting the lights and setting up the apparatus. She was nimble, intelligent and quiet, intent on her job.

  'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass,! thought Roger. But the commandment does not forbid one to covet that which is not yet one's neighbour's. It leaves the way open for free competition,

  Eleanor turned down the lights. Roger found himself standing beside D'Aynecourt and Brooks, facing a softly luminous screen, tinted with pale ochre. Macafee's voice spoke from the shadows. 'In order to make a test film I made use of the Western Syndicate's studios in Hertfordshire, and simply took on the Tona Perfecta one of the settings of a talkie, simultaneously with theirs. This is the ordinary Western Syndicate Film.'

  Roger had never been to the talkies, and he was astounded by the volume of brazen noise which emerged from the loudspeaker below the quivering screen. He was amused to see that Macafee, with his concentration upon technical problems and his contempt for artistic values, had been lured by an impish providence to choose for his test film a comedy scene of triumphant vulgarity. For the blaring syncopation of the music was followed by a vision of Bathing Beauties, splashing through synthetic shallows towards a rocking, if deceptive, fisherman's cobble. Their squeals of ecstatic discomfort, as they dashed into the cold water, broke like the notes of a high-powered saxophone through the orchestral accompaniment; but the music slowly died away to allow the dialogue to sound above the soft whirring of the apparatus.

  'You will notice that there is no sense of inevitability about the relationship between the sound and the picture,' said Macafee. 'The speech might perfectly well not be speech by the people you see on the screen.'

  The Scotchman was quite sure of himself here, thought Roger, and not at all ridiculous. Supposing that he had really done a good piece of work, was not Eleanor justified in admiring him? Was she not right to place herself on the side of technical progress? Was it not just in this control by man over his material environment that the triumph of the twentieth century lay? And was she not a woman of her age?

  'She wants to master one kind of technical achievement,* Roger told himself, 'and to force herself into the competitive business world. She believes in power, money and efficiency. She believes that women and Socialists both suffer from lack of these things. They enjoy being victims instead of masters. and she disapproves of the enjoyment.'

  The film danced and cackled in front of him. Suddenly Macafee switched it off and turned on the lights.

  'I'm going to put on the Tona Perfecta. I shall use the same sound producers. I want you to notice the difference in synchronization,'

  'Quite,' said Mr. Brooks. 'I get you. May we smoke?'

  Eleanor came quietly forward with a saucer for an ashtray, returning immediately to her place beside the instrument. Mr. Brooks watched her quiet movements.

  'That's a smart girl you've got.'

  'She will be when I've done with her. I've only had her a month and that for half-time. She's all right.'

  From Macafee that was glowing praise, but Roger loathed the possessive patronage of his voice.

  The lights went down again, and Roger found himself watching the same girls splashing and screeching through the same water. But this time, it was true, there was a difference. The photography was clearer and softer, The sunlight on the water gave an astonishing impression of vivacity. The sounds came with perfect accuracy as part of the picture. It seemed as though the girls really uttered their futile words, and the water really splashed about their feet.

  'This is good work,' he thought, 'The man's clever., damn him; the man's clever.' He contrasted Macafee's mastery of his technique with his own halting incompetence as a preacher, and the sick weight of depression settled upon his body till it became an aching physical discomfort.

  But the demonstration ended, the lights went up, and Macafee talked again to the great man, while D'Aynecourt, supercilious and amused, wandered about the laboratory. Roger found Eleanor at his side. Her smooth hair was a little rumpled, and a smudge of oil had found its way on to her hot cheek.

  'What do you think? Do you think it's good? Do you think he'll do anything?'

  'I don't know. I'm no expert in these things. I don't know how good the Western Syndicate Film is supposed to be. Macafee's is certainly better. Do you want Brooks to like it?'

  'Frightfully,' said Eleanor. 'When I talked to you the other day, in that restaurant at Earl's Court, you remember, alter we met here for the first time, I told you I didn't much care. But since I came to work here, I feel enormously interested in the whole business and the Tona Perfecta's nothing to the new colour film we're making.'

  She was a new creature, Roger thought. The self-interested Macafee had given her something that he, Roger, for all his love and anguish and solicitude, could never give.

  'I believe that this is the thing I've been wanting,' she continued. 'Of course, I want to go in on the business, not the technical side of the film industry, but I must know something about processes first. I've got schemes for wholesale manufacture of our improvement of the Van Dorn Kelley Pryzma films at astonishingly low rates. I do wish I'd learned more about optics. Oh- look - there's Hugh got on to his colour work. I do believe, I do believe your Mr. Brooks is interested. You know, the colour film is going to be the thing. It is indeed. I wish it were ready to show. How long is Brooks staying in England?5

  'For another ten days, I think.'

  'Oh, he must. Wouldn't it be gorgeous, gorgeous, if he really took up Hugh and gave him a free hand, and I got in sideways somehow? Wouldn't it be great?'

  Roger looked down at her flushed happy face. He could not do less than wish that her own wishes might be fulfilled.

  'Yes,' he said, trying to believe he meant it. 'It would be great.'

  §5

  Eleanor was right. Brooks was far more impressed by the possibilities of the colour film than by the Tona Perfecta, and Roger gradually realized that the outcome of this visit might be very different from his intention. Brooks might refuse to take any interest in the Tona Perfecta, and the Christian Cinema Company would still be left with that doubtful and unrealizable asset; but he might very easily make some sort of offer for the uncompleted colour film. He might persuade Macafee to return to California with him, and Eleanor, who was clearly doing her best to persuade the great man to accept her as an indispensable part of Macafee's equipment, might be snatched away by Brooks to another continent.

  'The best thing that can happen, of course,' Roger told himself. But his heart and his nerves refused to respond to the dictation of his reason. He stood just outside the group, feeling ridiculously alien and unwanted. Nobody seemed to remember that it was due to his ini
tiative that Brooks had ever heard of Macafee.

  But at last D'Aynecourt and Brooks began to move.

  It was arranged that Macafee should give Brooks a chance to see the colour film directly it was ready for demonstration.

  'Can we give you a lift, Miss . . . er . . .?' murmured D'Aynecourt dutifully. He really disliked young women of Eleanor's type, who became so much interested in light-refractions and complementary colour-values that they forgot the obligation of their sex to charm. 'Chemistry is an unwholesome pursuit for a woman,' he murmured to Roger.

  'I've got to stay and help clear up and do one or two odd chores, thanks,' said Eleanor. 'I'm all right. I always get myself home.'

  'May we have the pleasure of your company again, sir?' Brooks asked Roger.

  'Thanks. I'm seeing Miss de la Roux home.' Yes, by God, Roger told himself. Nobody shall deprive me of that half-hour's sweet torment.

  The storm seemed fiercer than ever when Brooks and D'Aynecourt left the laboratory. While Roger waited for Macafee and Eleanor to put away the apparatus, he heard the wind whistling round the room. Once or twice there was a splintering clatter as slates fell, or as the broken fragments of glass still left in the gaping windows of the main building rattled down. He felt angry and depressed, resenting their indifference to his presence.

  But Eleanor was ready at last, buttoning herself into her tweed overcoat.

  'You've got a smudge on your nose,' observed Macafee.

  'Thanks, Where? Here?'

  'No. Here.' He took her handkerchief from her and rubbed her face with the rough familiarity of a brother.

  'Damn him. Damn him. Well, in any case, I've got her now. For half an hour,' reflected Roger.

  'Are you ready. Miss de la Roux?' he said aloud.

  It took all his strength to push the door open. The wind howling through the factory slammed it behind them, and they stood in the darkness of the ruin. Blinking until he grew accustomed to this plunge from vivid light, Roger saw the jagged angles of masonry reared against the sky. Tattered wisps of cloud-like shreds of smoke blew across the stars. The crazy flapping of an old poster, partly torn away from the brickwork, made the wind visible. The whole bare building groaned and whined in travail. Slates clattered down. Gusts shook the straining walls. Right over the laboratory behind them swung the black menace of the tallest wall. Five stories high, with the supporting floors removed, it overhung the squat solidity of the one habitable room.

  Dragging Eleanor away from this wall Roger turned and faced it. Even now it seemed to totter in the wind that blew its towering mass towards the laboratory.

  'That doesn't look very safe,' he shouted. 'I think if you'll go out to the road, I'll speak to Macafee.'

  He started back towards the laboratory. The wind buffeted the high wall in front of him, each successive gust striking on it like waves over a ship. It seemed probable to Roger that at any moment the whole mass might go down, crashing through the laboratory roof, on top of Macafee and all his cameras, perforators, projectors and loud-speakers.

  The door stuck. Roger tugged at it desperately, but when he opened it he saw the young Scotsman standing in front of a large chest, rolling up papers covered with coloured diagrams.

  'Hullo. You back?' remarked Macafee quite genially. 'Come and look at these - you didn't see them, did you? These are my improvements on the Pryzma film. Now, you see, in Van Dorn Kelley's work the negative film consists of successive pairs of identical images. ..."

  'Look here, Macafee,' gasped Roger, 'I think you'll have to get out of here. That old wall seems a bit shaky.'

  'Oh, that's been shaky for a long time. You see, what I've done is to replace the "flash" exposure of the positive film'

  'Yes, but you'd better just come and have a look.' Roger was acutely conscious of their danger. The laboratory gaped in front of him like a huge white trap. He felt the egg-shell fragility of the roof and the merciless mass of brickwork overhanging it. 'The wind's terrific.'

  Accumulating exasperation maddened him. He saw himself shut into that trap with Macafee. He saw the inevitable buckling in of the laths, the crumbling avalanche of plaster, the final overwhelming ruin. So vivid was his consciousness of their danger that he involuntarily ducked his head. Yet he knew that while Macafee stood there, he could not save himself.

  'Damn you, man,' he cried suddenly. 'Don't be a blasted fool. Do you want to be killed?'

  Macafee looked up at him with supercilious amusement.

  'Tut-tut-tut and you a clergyman. You'd better run away if you're frightened.'

  But at that moment the driving hurricane detached an already-loosened brick from the masonry above. It crashed through the laboratory roof, falling on to the sink where recently Eleanor had been working.

  'You see —' cried Roger, so anxious to prove his point to Macafee that he would almost have welcomed a complete catastrophe, if only the inventor would acknowledge himself in the wrong.

  'Eh, well,' said Macafee, and maddeningly cool strolled across the room. They could hardly push the door open between them, but once it was open, it stuck against some obstruction outside, and through the open doorway, Eleanor was blown into the room.

  'Hullo,' she cried. 'Are you two coming out? I really don't think it's safe in here, Hugh.'

  'Go away. Get out of here at once, please,' cried Roger, beside himself with anxiety for her and fear and anger.

  But Hugh calmly pushed his way through the door, looked at the threatening wall, and returned shrugging his shoulders.

  'I'm afraid it does look a bit groggy. I know what we shall have to do. We'd better take out that chest with the reels and diagrams. We three ought to be able to move it.'

  'Oh, but you can't.' Roger was about to protest, but Eleanor was already tugging at the bulky wooden cupboard into which Macafee had been thrusting his papers and specimen reels.

  It was monstrous. It was inhuman. It was a nightmare of wanton horror, that Macafee should let her run that risk, when at any minute the wall might fall in on her.

  The sweat started on Roger's forehead; he hurled himself at the cupboard, meaning at first to seize Eleanor in his arms and carry her off out of danger; but he realized that this was impossible. She would struggle and fight, and in the end more time would be wasted. He could do nothing but snatch at one corner of the cupboard and take his share in, pushing the heavy thing towards the door.

  Every second seemed like an hour. The chest stuck against the corner of a sink. Macafee, smaller and less muscular than Roger, stumbled once, and once caught his leg between the cupboard and a fixed table. They knocked over a tripod, and the crash made Roger start so violently that he almost let go his hold. He was conscious of Eleanor, pushing and tugging like a small pony, completely unafraid.

  The more they pushed, the farther the door seemed to recede from them. Roger found himself starting to pray instinctively that they might reach the door — only the door - alive. But his disdain for instinctive prayers of panic checked him. He would not, even for Eleanor's sake, fall into that abasement of spirit. He bent down and caught the weight of the cupboard more securely in his straining arms and stepped forward. With almost the entire burden of it leaning against his chest, he lifted the thing across the threshold and they went through.

  They had still to cross the dark uneven floor of the factory, to stumble over fallen masonry, old wheels and bricks, but once outside the laboratory itself, the nightmare ended. On the waste land beyond the factory walls, they set their burden down in the mud and stretched their aching arms.

  'Now which next?' asked Eleanor. 'Hadn't we better get the cameras?'

  'You're not going back,' Roger stated.

  'Why not? Come on, while the lull lasts. We'll all go and grab something,' she answered, darting off towards the building.

  'Stop! Eleanor! Eleanor' Stop,' cried Roger, stumbling after her through the darkness and calling frantically as he ran. There is in the act of calling a sort of desperate pathos, which in it
self augments desire. In his childhood, lying alone at night, Roger had sometimes started, out of a cold-blooded devilry, to summon his nurse or mother up to the nursery. But as he called the sound of his own voice, impotent and wild in the darkness, filled him with panic, until he was driven to real hysteria by the fears he feigned. So now, calling for Eleanor through the black wind, he found himself stricken by agonized and childish terror. The broken walls crouched like monsters waiting to pounce upon her. The wind buffeted him; a pile of rubbish tripped him and drove him on to his knees, scraping his skin through his thin clerical trousers.