jump at the offer, only I thought I’d let you in on it first because I
could see you were a smart kid. . . . Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll let
you have it for four hundred. Can’t say fairer than that, can I? And
wouldn’t do it for any one but you.’
‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr Isaacs, but I didn’t come to buy your film. I
came to see Colonel Blount.’
‘Well, I shouldn’t have thought you were the sort of chap to let an
opportunity like that slip through your fingers. Now I’ll give you one
more chance and after that mind, the offer is closed. I’ll sell you it
for three-fifty. Take it or leave it. That’s my last word. Of course,
you’re not in any way obliged to buy,’ said Mr Isaacs rather haughtily,
‘but I assure you that you’ll regret it from the bottom of your heart if
you don’t.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Adam, ‘I think it’s a wonderfully generous offer, but
the truth is I simply don’t want to buy a film at all.’
‘In that case,’ said Mr Isaacs, ‘I shall return to my business.’
Not till sunset did the Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain rest. Adam
watched them from the lawn. He saw the two fencing instructors in long
black coats and white neck bands lunging and parrying manfully until one
of them fell; then the cameras stopped and his place was taken by the
leading actor (who had been obliged through the exigencies of the
wardrobe to lend his own coat). Whitefield took the place (and the wig)
of the victor and fled to the coach. Effie La Touche appeared from the
shrubbery still defiantly carrying her hunting crop. Close-ups followed
of Effie and Wesley and Effie and Wesley together. Then Colonel Blount
and another super appeared as yokels and carried the wounded preacher
back to the house. All this took a long time as the action was
frequently held up by minor mishaps and once when the whole scene had
been triumphantly enacted the chief cameraman found that he had
forgotten to put in a new roll of film (‘Can’t think how I come to make
a mistake like that, Mr Isaacs’). Finally the horses were taken out of
the coach and mounted by grenadiers and a few shots taken of them
plunging despairingly up the main drive.
‘Part of Butcher Cumberland’s army,’ explained Mr Isaacs. ‘It’s always
good to work in a little atmosphere like that. Gives more educational
value. Besides we hire the horses by the day so we might as well get all
we can out of them while they’re here. If we don’t use ’em in Wesley we
can fit ’em in somewhere else. A hundred foot or so of galloping horses
is always useful.’
When everything was over Adam managed to see Colonel Blount, but it was
not a satisfactory interview.
‘I’m afraid I’ve really got very little time to spare,’ he said. ‘To
tell you the truth, I’m at work on a scenario of my own. They tell me
you come from the _Excess_ and want to write about the film. It’s a
glorious film, isn’t it? Of course, you know, I have very little to do
with it really. I have let them the house and have acted one or two
small parts in the crowd. I don’t have to pay for them though.’
‘No, I should think not.’
‘My dear boy, all the others have to. I knocked a little off the rent of
the house, but I don’t actually _pay_. In fact, you might almost say I
was a professional already. You see, Mr Isaacs is the principal of the
National Academy of Cinematographic Art. He’s got a little office in
Edgware Road, just one room, you know, to interview candidates in. Well,
if he thinks that they’re promising enough—he doesn’t take any one,
mind, only a chosen few—he takes them on as pupils. As Mr Isaacs says,
the best kind of training is practical work, so he produces a film
straight away and pays the professionals out of the pupils’ fees. It’s
really a very simple and sensible plan. All the characters in “John
Wesley” are pupils, except Wesley himself and Whitefield and the Bishop
and, of course, Miss La Touche—she’s the wife of the man who looks
after the Edgware Road office when Mr Isaacs is away. Even the cameramen
are only learning. It makes everything so exciting, you know. This is
the third film Mr Isaacs has produced. The first went wrong, through Mr
Isaacs trusting one of the pupils to develop it. Of course, he made him
pay damages—that’s in the contract they all have to sign—but the film
was ruined, and Mr Isaacs said it was disheartening—he nearly gave up
the cinema altogether. But then a lot more pupils came along, so they
produced another, which was _very_ good indeed. Quite a revolution in
Film Art, Mr Isaacs said, but that was boycotted through professional
jealousy. None of the theatres would show it. But that’s been made all
right now. Mr Isaacs has got in with the ring, he says, and this is
going to establish Wonderfilms as the leading company in the country.
What’s more, he’s offered me a half share in it for five thousand
pounds. It’s wonderfully generous, when he might keep it all to himself,
but he says that he must have some one who understands _acting_ from the
practical side of the board of directors. Funnily enough, my bank
manager is very much against my going in for it. In fact, he’s putting
every obstacle in my way. . . . But I dare say Mr Isaacs would sooner
you didn’t put any of this into your paper.’
‘What I really came about was your daughter, Nina.’
‘Oh, she’s not taking any part in the film at all. To tell you the
truth, I very much doubt whether she has any real talent. It’s funny how
these things often skip a generation. My father, now, was a very bad
actor indeed—though he always used to take a leading part when we had
theatricals at Christmas. Upon my soul, he used to make himself look
quite ridiculous sometimes. I remember once he did a skit of Henry
Irving in _The Bells_. . . .’
‘I’m afraid you’ve forgotten me, sir, but I came here last month to see
you about Nina. Well, she wanted me to tell you that I’m Mr Chatterbox
now. . . .’
‘Chatterbox . . . no, my boy, I’m afraid I don’t remember you. My
memory’s not what it was. . . . There’s a Canon Chatterbox at Worcester
I used to know . . . he was up at New College with me . . . unusual
name.’
‘Mr Chatterbox on the _Daily Excess_.’
‘No, no, my dear boy, I assure you not. He was ordained just after I
went down and was chaplain somewhere abroad—Bermuda, I think. Then he
came home and went to Worcester. He was never on the _Daily Excess_ in
his life.’
‘No, no, sir, _I’m_ on the _Daily Excess_.’
‘Well, you ought to know your own staff, certainly. He _may_ have left
Worcester and taken to journalism. A great many parsons do nowadays. I
know. But I must say that he’s the last fellow I should have expected it
of. Awful stupid fellow. Besides, he must be at least seventy. . . .
Well, well . . . who would have thought it. Good-bye, my boy, I’ve
enjoyed our talk.’
‘Oh, sir,’ cried Adam, as Colonel Blount began to walk away. ‘You don’t
understand—I want to marry Nina.’
‘Well, it’s no good coming here,’ said the Colonel crossly. ‘I told you,
she’s somewhere in London. She’s got nothing to do with the film at all.
You’ll have to go and ask her about it. Anyway, I happen to know she’s
engaged already. There was a young ass of a chap down here about it the
other day . . . the Rector said he was off his head. Laughed the whole
time—bad sign that—still, Nina wants to marry him for some reason. So
I’m afraid you’re too late, my boy. I’m sorry . . . and, anyway, the
Rector’s behaved very badly about this film. Wouldn’t lend his car. I
suppose it’s because of the Wesleyanism. Narrow-minded, that. . . .
Well, good-bye. So nice of you to come. Remember me to Canon Chatterbox.
I must look him up next time I come to London and pull his leg about
it. . . . Writing for the papers, indeed, at his age.’
And Colonel Blount retired victorious.
Late that evening Adam and Nina sat in the gallery of the Café de la
Paix eating oysters.
‘Well we won’t bother any more about papa,’ she said. ‘We’ll just get
married at once.’
‘We shall be terribly poor.’
‘Well, we shan’t be any poorer than we are now. . . . I think it will be
divine. . . . Besides, we’ll be terribly economical. Miles says he’s
discovered a place near Tottenham Court Road where you can get oysters
for three and six a dozen.’
‘Wouldn’t they be rather ill-making?’
‘Well, Miles said the only odd thing about them is that they all taste a
little different. . . . I had lunch with Miles to-day. He rang up to
find where you were. He wanted to sell Edward Throbbing’s engagement to
the _Excess_. But Van offered him five guineas for it, so he gave it to
them.’
‘I’m sorry we missed that. The editor will be furious. By the way, how
did the gossip page go? Did you manage to fill it all right?’
‘My dear, I think I did rather well. You see Van and Miles didn’t know I
was in the trade, so they talked about Edward’s engagement a whole lot,
so I went and put it in . . . was that very caddish? . . . and I wrote a
lot about Edward and the girl he’s to marry. I used to know her when I
came out, and that took up half the page. So I just put in a few
imaginary ones like you do, so then it was finished.’
‘What did you say in the imaginary ones?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. I said I saw Count Cincinnati going into Espinosa’s
in a green bowler . . . things like that.’
‘_You said that?_’
‘Yes, wasn’t it a good thing to say. . . . Angel, is anything wrong?’
‘Oh, God.’
Adam dashed to the telephone.
‘Central ten thousand . . . put me through to the night editor. . . .
Look here, I’ve got to make a correction in the Chatterbox page . . .
it’s urgent.’
‘Sorry, Symes. Last edition went to bed half an hour ago. Got everything
made up early to-night.’
So Adam went back to finish his oysters.
‘Bad tabulation there,’ said Lord Monomark next morning, when he saw the
paragraph.
So Miles Malpractice became Mr Chatterbox.
‘Now we can’t be married,’ said Nina.
_Chapter Ten_
Adam and Miss Runcible and Miles and Archie Schwert went up to the motor
races in Archie Schwert’s car. It was a long and cold drive. Miss
Runcible wore trousers and Miles touched up his eyelashes in the
dining-room of the hotel where they stopped for luncheon. So they were
asked to leave. At the next hotel they made Miss Runcible stay outside,
and brought her cold lamb and pickles in the car. Archie thought it
would be nice to have champagne, and worried the wine waiter about dates
(a subject which had always been repugnant to him). They spent a long
time over luncheon because it was warm there, and they drank Kümmel over
the fire until Miss Runcible came in very angrily to fetch them out.
Then Archie said he was too sleepy to drive any more, so Adam changed
places with him and lost the way, and they travelled miles in the wrong
direction down a limitless bye-pass road.
And then it began to be dark and the rain got worse. They stopped for
dinner at another hotel, where every one giggled at Miss Runcible’s
trousers in a dining-room hung with copper warming pans.
Presently they came to the town where the race was to be run. They drove
to the hotel where the dirt-track racer was staying. It was built in the
Gothic style of 1860, large, dark and called the Imperial.
They had wired him to book them rooms, but ‘Bless you,’ said the woman
at the counter marked ‘Reception’, ‘all our rooms have been booked for
the last six months. I couldn’t fit you in anywhere, not if you was the
Speed Kings themselves, I couldn’t. I don’t suppose you’ll find anything
in the town to-night. You might try at the Station Hotel. That’s your
only chance.’
At the Station Hotel they made Miss Runcible wait outside, but with no
better success.
‘I might put one of you on the sofa in the bar parlour, there’s only a
married couple in there at present and two little boys, or if you didn’t
mind sitting up all night, there’s always the palm lounge.’ As for a
bed, that was out of the question. They might try at the ‘Royal George’,
but she doubted very much whether they’d _like_ that even if there was
room, which she was pretty sure there was not.
Then Miss Runcible thought that she remembered that there were some
friends of her father who lived quite near, so she found out their
telephone number and rang them up, but they said no, they were sorry,
but they had a completely full house and practically no servants, and
that as far as they knew they had never heard of Lord Chasm. So that was
no good.
Then they went to several more hotels, sinking through the various
graduations of Old Established Family and Commercial, plain Commercial,
High Class Board Residence pension terms, Working Girls’ Hostel, plain
Pub. and Clean Beds: Gentlemen Only. All were full. At last, by the edge
of a canal, they came to the ‘Royal George’. The landlady stood at the
door and rounded off an argument with an elderly little man in a bowler
hat.
‘First ’e takes off ’is boots in the saloon bar,’ she said, enlisting
the sympathy of her new audience, ‘which is not the action of a
gentleman.’
‘They was wet,’ said the little man, ‘wet as ’ell.’
‘Well, and who wants your wet boots on the counter, I should like to
know. Then, if you please, he calls me a conspiring woman because I
tells him to stop and put them on before he goes ’ome.’
‘Want to go ’ome,’ said the little man. ‘’Ome to my wife and kids.
_Trying to keep a man from ’is wife._’
‘No one wants to keep you from your wife, you old silly. All I says is
for Gawd’s sake put on your boots before you go ’ome. What’ll your wife
think of you coming ’ome without boots.’
‘She won’t mind ’ow I come ’ome. Why, bless you, I ain’t been ’ome at
all for five years. It’s ’ard to be separated from a wife and kids by a
conspiring woman trying to make yer put on yer boots.’
‘My dear, she’s quite right, you know,’ said Miss Runcible. ‘You’d far
better put on your boots.’
‘There, ’ear what the lady says. Lady says you’ve to put on your boots.’
The little man took his boots from the landlady, looked at Miss Runcible
with a searching glance, and threw them into the canal. ‘_Lady_,’ he
said with feeling. ‘_Trousers_,’ and then he paddled off in his socks
into the darkness.
‘There ain’t no ’arm in ’im really,’ said the landlady, ‘only he do get
a bit wild when he’s ’ad the drink. Wasting good boots like that. . . .
I expect he’ll spend the night in the lock-up.’
‘Won’t he get back to his wife, poor sweet?’
‘Lor’ bless you, no. She lives in London.’
At this stage Archie Schwert, whose humanitarian interests were narrower
than Miss Runcible’s, lost interest in the discussion.
‘The thing we want to know is, can you let us have beds for the night?’
The landlady looked at him suspiciously.
‘Bed or beds?’
‘Beds.’
‘Might do.’ She looked from the car to Miss Runcible’s trousers and back
to the car again, weighing them against each other. ‘Cost you a quid
each,’ she said at last.
‘Can you find room for us all?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘which of you’s with the young lady?’
‘I’m afraid I’m all alone,’ said Miss Runcible. ‘Isn’t it too shaming?’
‘Never you mind, dearie, luck’ll turn one day. Well, now, how can we all
fit in? There’s one room empty. I can sleep with our Sarah, and that
leaves a bed for the gentlemen—then if the young lady wouldn’t mind
coming in with me and Sarah . . .’
‘If you don’t think it rude, I think I’d sooner have the empty bed,’
said Miss Runcible, rather faintly. ‘You see,’ she added, with tact, ‘I
snore so terribly.’
‘Bless you, so does our Sarah. _We_ don’t mind . . . still, if you’d
_rather_ . . .’
‘Really, I think I should,’ said Miss Runcible.
‘Well then, I could put Mr Titchcock on the floor, couldn’t I?’
‘Yes,’ said Miles, ‘just you put Mr Titchcock on the floor.’
‘And if the other gentleman don’t mind going on the landing. . . . Well,
we’ll manage somehow, see if we don’t.’
So they all drank some gin together in the back parlour and they woke Mr
Titchcock up and made him help with the luggage and they gave him some
gin, too, and he said it was all the same to him whether he slept on the
floor or in bed, and he was very pleased to be of any service to any one
and didn’t mind if he did have another drop just as a night-cap, as they
might say; and at last they all went to bed, very tired, but fairly
contented, and oh, how they were bitten by bugs all that night.
Adam had secured one of the bedrooms. He awoke early to find rain
beating on the window. He looked out and saw a grey sky, some kind of
factory and the canal from whose shallow waters rose little islands of
scrap-iron and bottles; a derelict perambulator lay partially submerged
under the opposite bank. In his room stood a chest of drawers full of
horrible fragments of stuff, a washhand stand with a highly coloured
basin, an empty jug and an old toothbrush. There was also a rotund
female bust covered in shiny red material, and chopped off short, as in
primitive martyrdoms, at neck, waist and elbows; a thing known as a
dressmaker’s ‘dummy’ (there had been one of these in Adam’s home which
they used to call ‘Jemima’—one day he stabbed ‘Jemima’ with a chisel
and scattered stuffing over the nursery floor and was punished. A more
enlightened age would have seen a complex in this action and worried
accordingly. Anyway he was made to sweep up all the stuffing himself).
Adam was very thirsty, but there was a light green moss in the bottom of
the water bottle that repelled him. He got into bed again and found some
one’s handkerchief (presumably Mr Titchcock’s) under the pillow.
He woke again a little later to find Miss Runcible dressed in pyjamas
and a fur coat sitting on his bed.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘there’s no looking-glass in my room and no bath
anywhere, and I trod on some one cold and soft asleep in the passage,
and I’ve been awake all night killing bugs with drops of face lotion,
and everything smells, and I feel so low I could die.’
‘For heaven’s sake let’s go away,’ said Adam.
So they woke Miles and Archie Schwert, and ten minutes later they all
stole out of the ‘Royal George’ carrying their suitcases.
‘I wonder, do you think we ought to leave some money?’ asked Adam, but
the others all said no.
‘Well, perhaps we ought to pay for the gin,’ said Miss Runcible.
So they left five shillings on the bar and drove away to the ‘Imperial’.
It was still very early, but every one seemed to be awake, running in
and out of the lifts carrying crash-helmets and overalls. Miles’ friend,
they were told, had been out before dawn, presumably at his garage. Adam
met some reporters whom he used to see about the _Excess_ office. They
told him that it was any one’s race, and that the place to see the fun
was Headlong Corner, where there had been three deaths the year before,
and it was worse this year, because they’d been putting down wet tar. It
was nothing more or less than a death trap, the reporters said. Then
they went away to interview some more drivers. All teams were confident
of victory, they said.
Meanwhile Miss Runcible discovered an empty bathroom and came down
half-an-hour later all painted up and wearing a skirt and feeling quite
herself again and ready for anything. So they went in to breakfast.
The dining-room was very full indeed. There were Speed Kings of all
nationalities, unimposing men mostly with small moustaches and
apprehensive eyes; they were reading the forecasts in the morning papers
and eating what might (and in some cases did) prove to be their last
meal on earth. There were a great number of journalists making the best
of an ‘out-of-town’ job; there were a troop of nondescript ‘fans’,
knowledgeable young men with bright jumpers tucked inside their belted
trousers, old public-school ties, check tweeds, loose mouths and
scarcely discernible Cockney accents; there were R.A.C. officials and
A.A. officials, and the representatives of oil firms and tyre
manufacturers. There was one disconsolate family who had come to the
town for the christening of a niece. (No one had warned them that there
was a motor race on; their hotel bill _was_ a shock.)
‘Very better-making,’ said Miss Runcible with approval as she ate her
haddock.
Scraps of highly technical conversation rose on all sides of them.
‘. . . Changed the whole engine over after they’d been scrutineered. Any
one else would have been disqualified . . .’
‘. . . just cruising round at fifty . . .’
‘. . . stung by a bee just as he was taking the corner, missed the tree
by inches and landed up in the Town Hall. There was a Riley coming up
behind, spun round twice, climbed the bank, turned right over and caught
fire . . .’
‘. . . local overheating at the valve-heads. It’s no sense putting a
supercharger in that engine at all . . .’
‘Headlong Corner’s jam. All you want to do is to brake right down to
forty or forty-five at the white cottage, then rev. up opposite the pub.
and get straight away in second on the near side of the road. A child
could do it. It’s the double bend just after the railway bridge where
you’ll get the funny stuff.’
‘. . . kept flagging him down from the pits. I tell you that bunch don’t
want him to win.’
‘. . . She wouldn’t tell me her name, but she said she’d meet me at the
same place to-night and gave me a sprig of white heather for the car. I
lost it, like a fool. She said she’d look out for it too . . .’
‘. . . Only offers a twenty pound bonus this year . . .’
‘. . . lapped at seventy-five . . .’
‘. . . Burst his gasket and blew out his cylinder heads . . .’
‘. . . Broke both arms and cracked his skull in two places . . .’
‘. . . Tailwag . . .’
‘. . . Speed-wobble . . .’
‘. . . Merc . . .’
‘. . . Mag . . .’
‘. . . crash . . .’
When they finished breakfast Miss Runcible and Adam and Archie Schwert
and Miles went to the garage to look for their Speed King. They found
him hard at work listening to his engine. A corner of the garage had
been roped off and the floor strewn with sand as though for a boxing
match.
Outside this ring clustered a group of predatory little boys with
autograph albums and leaking fountain-pens, and inside, surrounded by
attendants, stood the essential parts of a motor car. The engine was
running and the whole machine shook with fruitless exertion. Clouds of
dark smoke came from it, and a shattering roar which reverberated from
concrete floor and corrugated iron roof into every corner of the
building so that speech and thought became insupportable and all the
senses were numbed. At frequent intervals this high and heart-breaking
note was varied by sharp detonations, and it was these apparently which
were causing anxiety, for at each report Miles’ friend, who clearly
could not have been unduly sensitive to noise, gave a little wince and
looked significantly at his head mechanic.
Apart from the obvious imperfection of its sound, the car gave the
impression to an uninstructed observer of being singularly unfinished.
In fact, it was obviously still under construction. It had only three
wheels; the fourth being in the hands of a young man in overalls, who,
in the intervals of tossing back from his eyes a curtain of yellow hair,
was beating it with a hammer. It also had no seats, and another mechanic
was screwing down slabs of lead ballast in the place where one would
have expected to find them. It had no bonnet; that was in the hands of a
sign painter, who was drawing a black number 13 in a white circle. There
was a similar number on the back, and a mechanic was engaged in fixing
another number board over one of the headlights. There was a mechanic,
too, making a windscreen of wire gauze, and a mechanic lying flat doing
something to the back axle with a tin of grate polish and a rag. Two
more mechanics were helping Miles’ friend to listen to the bangs. ‘As if
we couldn’t have heard them from Berkeley Square,’ said Miss Runcible.
The truth is that motor cars offer a very happy illustration of the
metaphysical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’. Some cars, mere
vehicles with no purpose above bare locomotion, mechanical drudges such
as Lady Metroland’s Hispano Suiza, or Mrs Mouse’s Rolls Royce, or Lady
Circumference’s 1912 Daimler, or the ‘general reader’s’ Austin Seven,
these have definite ‘being’ just as much as their occupants. They are
bought all screwed up and numbered and painted, and there they stay
through various declensions of ownership, brightened now and then with a
lick of paint or temporarily rejuvenated by the addition of some minor
organ, but still maintaining their essential identity to the scrap heap.