'If I ever catch that son of a . . .' Johnson exclaimed aloud, but the shrill insistence of the telephone cut short his threat. Hitching his dressing-gown round him, he went into the dark stuffy hall.
'Hullo. Hullo. Hullo, blast you. Hullo.'
'Hullo. Good morning. You do sound bright and merry,' cried a rich lazy voice.
'Gloria. My dear. An angel told you I was gonna pass right away unless something nice happened. You've rung up to tell me I can take you outa lunch.'
'Have I? I didn't know it. I really rang you up to ask you to help me.'
'Help you? Ask? Don't think of asking; just say-"Clifton Roderick Johnson, come right over here," an' I'm there.'
'Oh no, you're not. At least not at the moment. Now listen. You know Basil hasn't been a bit well lately. What? No he hasn't. And I think the only thing for him is a spell in the South of France. But he's all worried up about this Cinema Company, and Caroline's been bothering him a lot because it seems that the wind blew in that old factory roof right on top of Macafee's laboratory two nights ago. and just at this very moment a man you'll know - Brooks, his name is -'
'Brooks - not Simon L. Brooks?'
'That's the creature - well, apparently he'd just been down to the studio and taken a fancy to the Tona Perfecta or something. Anyway, life being what it is, everything seems to have happened at once, and what I wondered is whether you, being a dear, wouldn't just trot round and find what has happened and come up to-morrow night and tell us all about it, because I want Basil to keep quiet until he sails -yes - yes, he's going by boat. It's more restful. No, I'm not sure which day. I'm at Hanover Square where I work, so you can't come and see me. I'm supposed at this moment to be receiving particulars of a very exclusive order from a duchess.'
'Am I a duchess?'
'You're a duchess, and you'll be a duke too if you'll hop along and see what's doing.'
She had gone, The telephone clicked and crackled, and the air was robbed of the richness of her voice. Delia? Pshaw! Mollie? Hell! There was only one woman in the world, and she could turn a wet London morning into a golden day. She was regal and human and splendid. She was colour and warmth and light. She was worth even the discomfort of turning out into that rain to discover what had happened to the Christian Cinema Company.
Johnson made no attempt to go to the School in Essex Street. Newspapers commonly demanded cash in advance for advertisements and recently he had been able to afford no insertions. Without advertisements, his clientèle declined immediately. He was in debt for the rent. His letter-box would be full of bills, Life simply was not worth living if one went to an empty office to read bills on a wet March day.
Instead he shaved and dressed and made himself a cup of coffee, and went round to the garage for his car. Halfway round he remembered, with a queer shock of relief, that the car was his no longer. There comes a time when even a long suffering dealer takes action if his instalments are not paid.
'After all I was always scared of the darn thing,' philosophized Johnson, and caught a bus for Annerley. He was in a less desolate mood, because Gloria had rung him up, and because he was going to see her to-morrow night. In the bus he noticed a young girl with dark bright laughing eyes and a scarlet beret pulled down over her black curling hair, a young Jewess, ardently and charmingly alive. He contrived to share her seat, and the contact with her warm firm young body cheered him. After all, there were compensations in the world. Even the chill of the rain on his face was quite agreeable when at last he jumped down from his bus and strode along the pavement to the place where Macafee's hoarding sagged below the weight of its damp flapping posters. A policeman stood outside the hole where Macafee usually entered.
'Greetings, Pyramus,' roared Johnson. 'Where's Thisbe?'
The policeman eyed him with the tolerant impartiality of the law. So early in the morning to be merry, thought he, and an American too. What price prohibition now?
'Can't I go in?' asked Johnson. 'I want to see Mr. Macafee.'
'What paper do you represent?' asked the policeman.
Taper? I'm a friend.'
'Ho - well - I don't know there's any harm in going in. But you mustn't go beyond the ropes. It's not safe. Might all come down any minute.'
'Righto. I know. Sign along the dotted line, eh? Pass, friend, all's well.' And Johnson squeezed his huge bulk through the hole in the hoarding.
He saw an odd sight. The factory itself looked merely more ruinous than ever, but round its debris a rope had been drawn, with large boards marked 'Danger' hung along it at intervals. Inside the rope were housebreakers, working cautiously at the task of removing Macafee's precious apparatus from under the fallen masonry. Beyond the rope small boys, with their strange gift of ubiquity, scuffled in the mud, watching a little knot of people grouped round one diminutive gesticulating figure.
It was Caroline, and she had at length achieved one of her life's ambitions; she had captured the ear of the London Press. When Johnson came up to her, he heard her hurrying excited voice.
'And so he worked just in the old laboratory. Yes, on the Tona Perfecta, which belongs to the Christian Cinema Company - Cinema with the C hard as in the Greek K. Yes -yes, that's most important- to reform the moral and aesthetic standard of the British cinema.'
The rain poured down upon her feathered hat. It dripped on to her nose, her draggled fur, the large embroidered bag in which she carried papers, keys, smelling salts, lozenges and writing-blocks. She did not notice the rain. She did not notice the mud into which her small, ill-shod feet sank slowly, until it began to trickle over the tops of her battered shoes. She did not notice the covert smile of the reporters, who had rarely in all their experience come upon so odd a figure.
She was touching glory. She had told her tale to four different young men, and 'saw the fame of the Christian Cinema Company spreading from pole to pole. Glory burned in her eyes. Glory loosened her tongue. Glory lent lyrical rapture to her words.
'The Church? Yes, of course the Church is interested. Wouldn't you be interested if you saw a movement for reviving the Golden Age of Athens, the Diamond Age of the Renaissance, empurpled with the solemn pall of Christianity?'
The young men were growing bored. It was cold, and they had heard all this before. They were polite, but the old lady was obviously a little cracked and the person whom they really wanted to see was the inventor himself.
'Now this Mr. Macafee?' asked one.
The flood-gates of another stream were loosened.
'Oh, he's a most interesting young man with such a romantic career, a crofter's son from Scotland where I always think they have such wonderful educational opportunities.'
She was muddling it, of course. Johnson, who thought in headlines and spoke in captions, grieved over her amateurish workmanship. She had not recognized him. Her short-sighted eyes saw only one more figure augment the group before her. Johnson knew as well as she did that there are few more exhilarating experiences than that of opening one's heart to the Press. The secrecy of the Confessional contains no comfort like the publicity of the Sunday paper. Caroline was visualizing front page after front page, blazoned with the sensational story of the Christian Cinema Company. She saw herself photographed impressively against the ruins. She saw her beloved Father Mortimer hailed as the hero of an exciting rescue. She saw the faces of the Marshington Smiths, blanching with disappointment as they realized that their interest in the Company had come too late. By the time they wrote from Yorkshire asking for shares, the capital of three hundred thousand - Caroline's present estimate -would have been over-subscribed. The days of hunger and fatigue and disillusionment no longer mattered. Nothing mattered except the opportunity to convert these young men and send them forth into the world as missionaries for the Christian Cinema Company.
She spoke of Father Mortimer and of how he had been injured trying to rescue Mr. Macafee's work. She spoke of Eleanor, and the part which she had played. In her excitement she flew from point to point of her
story, growing less and less coherent, until the four young men began to close their note-books and shift their cameras, and hope for a moment favourable to polite departure.
Then Johnson could bear it no longer. He stepped forward into the circle and raised his broad-brimmed hat.
'Good morning, gentlemen. Good morning, Miss Denton-Smyth. My name's Johnson. Clifton Roderick Johnson -proprietor of the Anglo-American School of Scenario writing, and one of the directors of the Christian Cinema Company. Now if there are any other questions you would like to ask, without keeping this lady standing here in the rain much longer, I am at your service. I'm prepared to answer any question, any question at all, about the company, or ourselves, or the Tona Perfecta Film.'
'Well, thank you very much, sir. But I think really Miss Den ton-Smyth has told us everything.' The young man from the Penge and Annerley Observer was due at a local wedding in twenty minutes and wanted to catch his bus. The others were glad enough to follow his example. Indignant, with the chagrin of an outraged craftsman, Johnson watched the Ear of the Press vanish from before him.
But Caroline was in no mood for sorrow. She turned to him with a radiant face.
'Oh, Mr. Johnson, wasn't it too wonderful? I always knew an opportunity would come. But to come just now, when we so much needed something to uplift us. I can't tell you what I felt like yesterday, when I heard that the factory had fallen in, and the laboratory was ruined and not insured, and poor Father Mortimer in hospital. It just seemed as though everything were at an end. And then this morning suddenly everything begins to move. Mr. Brooks has sent for Mr. Macafee. The Press wants the whole story. Brooks will finance us I know and the Press will give us all the advertisement we could possibly want, and I am going back to the office now to get out some new circulars and deal with the correspondence.'
'Have you seen St. Denis?'
'No. Didn't you know? He's ill again, poor man, at least not so very seriously I hope, but he has to go abroad, that's why I'm so very glad you've come because what I feel is that we must all get to work, and then about the signing of the cheques, that's another thing I wanted to say. You know that Mr. St. Denis and I had to sign everything that we paid out, but may I ask if while he is away you would do it, because Mr. Guerdon is very good, but he does rather fuss, you know, I don't think he's really accustomed to business methods and doing things quickly on a big scale.'
Johnson's quick brain was investigating possibilities. The signing of cheques for other people's money always offers opportunities for private enterprise. Things, as Caroline said, were certainly moving. At any moment aid might come from some unexpected source.
'Now you just leave everything to me,' he said. 'I can handle Macafee. I'll deal with the Press. I'll just see to everything. You get right back home an' get your wet things off, for we can't let you catch cold just now.'
'Well, that is kind. I knew you'd help me. Really it is a comfort, because single handed the responsibility really is rather great, and I've been so worried about Father Mortimer - you know he might so easily have been killed, I lay awake all last night shuddering to think of those dreadful walls. I can't bear to look at them.'
They were walking towards the buses. The rain still danced vindictively upon the shining street and pavement, but Caroline did not care.
'How soon do you think the Press will get out our story? Will it be in the lunch-hour edition? I can hardly bear to wait to see what they say. Oh, it's too marvellous.'
'Well, that depends on what papers you saw. I was gonna ask. What did those young men represent?'
'Oh - how stupid of me. Of course, I ought to have asked. I took for granted. Dear me, that just shows one ought never to get excited - well, agencies I suppose. I really don't know. I thought the Press -I mean, one does tell the others, don't they?'
'Well, I expect you'd like me just to see about that for you, wouldn't you? You leave it to me. I'll see what I can do. Can't expect the ladies to do everything, bear all our burdens, you know?'
He put her on to her bus, and waited until she pushed her way up to a front seat and waved at him through the window. The bus carried off her small, draggled, jubilant person, and Johnson pulled out his watch. It was twelve o'clock. He had half an hour to spare before meeting Macafee. He looked hopefully along the road for a hospitable pub, feeling that what he wanted was a drop of whisky to keep the rain out. Signing cheques. Miss Weller's twenty pounds. St. Denis going abroad. Seeing Gloria to-morrow night.
He felt that he had done a good morning's work.
S3
Johnson walked along Elgin Avenue in the clear March night. From Maida Vale tube station the road stretched in polished darkness between its budding plane trees. Though it was only half-past eight, the pavements were almost empty. The straight tapering road, in day-time so commonplace, was disciplined by night to cool austerity. 'Elgin Avenue,' thought Johnson, and the word Elgin brought to him the thought of the Elgin Marbles. 'Greece,' he thought, and saw himself in a cool moonlit gymnasium, watching the pallid greenish light of the moon on naked figures. The glory that was Greece. He straightened his broad back, correcting the stoop which insidiously curved his rounding shoulders. The perfect development of mind and body -freedom both physical and intellectual. He could feel the muscles in his own thighs and stomach responding involuntarily to the fine tension of his mind.
The thought of Greece brought him a strong excitement. His vision of the age of Pericles was oddly compounded from pictures by Alma Tadema, the drop-curtain at the Regina Music Hall, an illustrated edition of Kingsley's Heroes, Isadora Duncan's autobiography, a lantern lecture on the Elgin Marbles, and the film version of The Private Life of Helen of Troy. But from these ingredients he had built up so vivid and detailed a dream country that he could smell the crisp thymy scent of herbs in the sunburned turf. He could feel its warm prickling surface against his body as he threw himself down after the hot sweaty bout of wrestling. In the cool pillared hall behind him, Gloria reclined beside a low semi-circular table, on which stood goblets of wine, and bowls of goats' milk, cheese, and honey, and fruit piled in ample dishes. Three Nubian slaves fanned Gloria. Johnson borrowed the slaves from the bath scene in 'Kismet,' but that did not matter. Gloria's tunic slipped from one soft milky shoulder as she held out her hand with a parsley wreath to crown him victor in the games. Oh Greece! That was the time when men could live like men, unafraid in mind or body.
The soft padding of feet behind him echoed into his dream. He turned and saw, moving in and out of the long line of plane trees, now in gold lamplight, now in faint blue moonlight, the figure of a runner. It was a figure sprung to life from the Elgin Marbles, a young man's figure, white and lithe, loping with long free strides between the plane trees. His head was up, his chest wide, his hands clenched, his lean long legs cut the darkness with a beautiful easy rhythm. He ran as a youth had run from Athens to Sparta (or was it Sparta to Athens?) bringing news of War. He ran as boys run round the wide gymnasium. He was a miracle, a sudden unforgettable beauty, an uncovenanted gift from the gods, the old Greek gods. He was a clerk from Paddington Athletic Association, hurrying home after a late training, in his running-kit.
Johnson forgot his growing paunch, his lumbering weight, his slack muscles and unhealthy skin. He forgot his muddled shiftless way of living, and his doubtful honesty. Tears stung his eyelids, as he stared along the empty road, from which the fleeting vision slowly faded.
By God, that was a sight to see. That was a man's life. That was what the body should be like. Strong, dignified, sane, alive. They knew how to live, those Greeks.
Gloria lived. By God, that was what she was like. She was a Greek. Mollie was a savage, Delia a Cockney; but Gloria was a Greek. She was large and splendid and unafraid. And Basil St. Denis was leaving England.
Johnson felt extraordinarily happy and hopeful.
During the past twenty-four hours, ever since he had watched Caroline interview the reporters, he had sought the key to his ne
w mood. And now Elgin Avenue had supplied it. His happiness lay in the Greek view of life. He must tell that to Gloria. He had so much to tell Gloria. They must go away together. They must go to Greece. Why had he never seen the Acropolis? Why had he never raced knee-deep in asphodel? Why had he never stood, like Isadora Duncan, at the door of the Panthenon? Or was it the Pantheon? - well, anyway, they must go to Greece.
He had small doubt of his success. What could a fine woman like Gloria see in a little affected rabbit like St. Denis, a weedy delicate nincompoop? Fine women needed fine men. Yes, and they got them too, by Gad.
In a high exalted humour he climbed the stairs up to the St. Denis's flat. The steps were dark, except where the worn brass edging made a faint bar of light across them. Unworthy stairs, thought Johnson. Smelling of tom-cats and perambulators. Why doesn't she live in a grander place? St. Denis is probably mean. And she earns the money too. Well, soon she could live in a worthier home. Johnson was in an opulent mood. Nothing would be too good for her if she could come to Greece.
He rang the bell. Gloria herself came to the door.
Poor Caroline Page 21
