Poor Caroline Winifred Holtby

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WINIFRED HOLTBY

(1898-1935) was born in Rudston, Yorkshire. In the First World War she was a member of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps, and then went to Somerville College, Oxford where she met Vera Brittain. After graduating, these two friends shared a flat in London where both embarked upon their respective literary careers. Winifred Holtby was a prolific journalist, writing for the Manchester Guardian, the J^'ews Chronicle and Time and Tide of which she became a director in 1926. She also travelled all over Europe as a lecturer for the League of Nations Union.

Her first novel, Anderby Wold, was published in 1923, followed, in 1924, by The Crowded Street. She wrote five other novels: The Land of Green Ginger (1927), Poor Caroline (1931), Mandoa, Mandoa! (1933) and South Riding (1936), published posthumously after her tragic death from kidney disease at the age of thirty-seven. She was awarded the James Tail Black prize for this, her most famous novel.

She also published two volumes of short stories, Truth is Not Sober (1934) and Pavements at Anderby (1937); a satirical work, The Astonishing Island (1933); two volumes of poetry; My Garden (1911) and The Frozen Earth (1935); a critical work, Virginia Woolf (1932); a study of the position of women, Women and a Changing Civilisation (1934), and numerous essays.

Winifred Holtby's remarkable and courageous life is movingly recorded in Vera Brittain's biography, Testament of Friendship, published by Virago.

WINIFRED HOLTBY

POOR CAROLINE

With a New Introduction by GEORGE DAVIDSON

PENGUIN BOOKS —VIRAGO PRESS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

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Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

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Eirst published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited 1931 First published in the United States of America by

Robert M. McBride & Co. 1931 This edition first published in Great Britain byVirago Press Ltd. 1985 Published in Penguin Books 1986

Printed in the Linked States of America by

R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia

Set in Baskerville

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, bv way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on

In Piam Memoriam M.C.H.

Author's Note

So far as my knowledge extends, there has never been a Christian Cinema Company formed for the Purification of the British Film, there has never been an Anglo-American School of Scenario Writing, nor a Metropolitan and Provincial Correspondence College for the teaching of Journalism. But my ignorance is wide. These institutions may have an existence outside my own imagination. If so, I beg to inform their promoters and organizers that I forgive them their plagiarism in advance, and wish them the success that they deserve.

Winifred Holtby.

Contents

OPENING CHORUS

I BASIL REGINALD ANTHONY ST. DENIS

II JOSEPH ISENBAUM

III ELEANOR DE LA ROUX

IV HUGH ANGUS MACAFEE
V ROGER AINTREE MORTIMER

VI CLIFTON RODERICK JOHNSON

VH CAROLINE AUDREY DENTON-SMYTH

FINAL CHORUS

Introduction

Poor Caroline was hailed as 'easily the wittiest novel of the season' upon its appearance in 1931. This represented a watershed in Winifred Holtby's career as a novelist, since her previous three novels had more or less dissatisfied her, and been commercially unsuccessful. At the time of writing her fourth novel she was well-known as a radical campaigner and journalist. But it was with Poor Caroline that her fortunes as a novelist changed: it was favourably reviewed and sold well. Sadly, this was also the year which saw the onset of the kidney failure that was to drastically reduce her wide-ranging literary and polemical output.

Although Poor Caroline was received as a tragi-comedy, its overall tone is consciously comic. Despite a strong love element and gradual pathos, the author's perception is satirical, in the same mould she was to use in her next novel, Mandoa, Mandoa! One contemporary criticism of Poor Caroline as suffering 'from excess of cleverness' reinforces the impression of Winifred's increased self-assurance. 'All the characters are drawn in a few strokes with a deft touch', approved one reviewer. The author was praised for appearing 'intelligent, unsentimental yet benign', particularly in respect of the eponymous heroine, Caroline Denton-Smyth. This old maid, with her vision of perfect movies, is the improbable thread holding together her society for the moral purification of British cinema, the 'Christian Cinema Company'. Winifred had tried to elevate from literary obscurity another traditionally unpersonable, depressing subject, the home-ridden young anti-heroine of The Crowded Street. As The Yorkshire Post critic, Alice Herbert, observed of Caroline: 'Altogether, she has pulled the comic spinster out of her rut, which fiction has made wearisome ...

Miss Holtby's gift lies partly in taking a type that many novelists accept as ready-made, and in showing its enormously varied and complicated humanity.'

What immediately distinguishes Poor Caroline from Winifred Holtby's 'Yorkshire' novels is its setting in London. In so far as all the other novels are designated by location - albeit metaphorically in two instances, the very title announces a different flavour to Poor Caroline. Otherwise only in Mandoa, Mandoa.', Winifred's exotic treatment of colonialism in Africa, is the main action centred elsewhere than in the rural East Riding she knew and loved, or the small-town north of England she despised and avoided. With the exception, therefore, of the 'Opening Chorus' (a sharp stab at the complacent, provincial middle class) and two scenes, including the balancing 'Final Chorus', in Monte Carlo (where Winifred holidayed during the writing of the novel and was fascinated by the loose-living gossipy circles of artists), the events of Poor Caroline take place in London in the twenties. The metropolis excited Winifred right from the initial prospect of coming down from Oxford in 1921. But although she spent the greatest and most active part of her working life in the city, her only other sizeable fictional use of London is Book One of Mandoa, Mandoa! This apparent imbalance in favour of her childhood home is accounted for by Winifred's idyllic upbringing under a remarkable mother. The author is pinpointing a home truth in the passage describing Caroline's reflections on her own life: 'It was strange, but that child's life at Denton now seemed more vivid to her than all her subsequent adventures.'

Winifred's years in London were spent at a scarcely credible pace of production. She lectured on Pacifism and campaigned for Feminism, revelling in the atmosphere like Eleanor De La Roux, for whom 'London hummed with the activities of propaganda and reform'. Although she was generally engaged upon the writing of her next novel or short story, her lifestyle was, as we know from Vera Brittain's biography of her flatmate in Testament of Friendship, rarely tranquil enough to allow sustained periods of creativity. For instance, she sat on numerous committees, believing avidly in decision-making and progress by means of discussion and debate. Hence the detail and insight, in this work and in South Riding, with which she evokes such formal meetings. She also saw the dramatic potential of such gatherings as choice battle-grounds for the antagonistic interaction of characters.

Poor Caroline originated in a family connection. Mary Home was an aunt of one of Winifred's early governesses, who, like so many hangers-on to the Holtby family, drew on the patient favours and hospitality of Winifred or her mother. Caroline is evidently directly based upon this Mary Home, since Vera Brittain describes how the idea for the novel came to a regretful Winifred after the death of this tiresome, yet likeable, old eccentric, who must have impinged upon Winifred's acute conscience. Hence the dedication 'In piam memoriam M.C.H.', and the fact that one reviewer unwittingly complimented Miss Holtby upon her 'ability to create characters who are so real one suspects her of knowing them'.

Caroline's lead-part as the founding organiser of the ill-fated Christian Cinema Company is unquestioned, but her primacy among the female characters is to a degree challenged by the naturally intelligent Eleanor with her wide-eyed idealism and straightforward aspirations. Eleanor is Winifred's archetypal modern woman in the making, and as such the oracle for feminism in Poor Caroline. Eleanor is half South African to allow Winifred to recall her favourite foreign land, the only country outside Europe she visited, and a place to which she could remain closely attached because of her friendship with Jean McWilliam (of Letters To a Friend) in Pretoria. There she espoused the plight of the natives, a cause with which she became closely associated after her tour of 1926. The heroine of The Land of Green Ginger, who dreams constantly of far-off places, is also half South African. She came to England as an infant after the death of her non-Afrikaans father. Eleanor leaves South Africafollowing the same bereavement, but is an adult newcomer to England.

If Winifred's letters had been lost, or her biography not written by her closest friend, we could still glean from Eleanor a central obsession of her creator; namely, in Eleanor's words, 'this intolerable burden of immunity'. In order to overcome this inverted inferiority complex, the rich but orphaned young lady seeks out suffering and struggle, hardship and adversity: 'I have capital behind me, and education, and opportunities. All this ugliness and poverty can't really hurt me.' Winifred likewise bore the hang-ups of privilege and wealth, which her talent exacerbated. In marked contrast to Vera Brittain, she was also unscathed by the bereavements of the Great War. 'I always feel when I take my pleasures that I have snatched them in the face of fortune,' she wrote. 'But I am glad when I take them, all the same' she concluded, for she was, like Caroline, with her penchant for sweet foods, beautiful flowers and pretty clothes, no ascetic, but someone who took pleasure in rare luxuries. Winifred's nature was happy and optimistic. Believing she had no real problems, she deliberately put herself out for others in an almost self-sacrificial way to atone for being among those 'who have been gifted by fortune, we who are rich and healthy and unbound'. Overworking herself to pay back the debt she felt she owed to life, this sense of immunity was clearly cauterised by her collapse into virtually constant ill-health, which this personal complex must ironically have helped bring on.

If Eleanor voices Winifred's horror of immunity, the Anglo-Catholic curate, Roger Mortimer, represents the author's connected religious leanings. Religion, which, she once admitted, was one of the chief reasons for unhappiness in her life, was not prominent in her public utterings, but is a more obtrusive feature of her stories - Winifred had undergone a period of theological crisis, just about resolving her beliefs in an experience similar, it seems, to Roger's call to the Church one night in France. Eleanor's uncertainty about contributing to the ChristianCinema Company is also suddenly clarified as a result of listening to Roger's sermon condemning compromise. Roger's wavering between Catholicism and Protestantism, as between the demands of his vocation and the temptation of earthly love, recalls Winifred's earlier portrayal of Wyclif in The Runners, her only full-length prose work never published. Roger's dilemma also foreshadows the serious mess the endearingly sensual lay preacher, Huggins, creates for himself in South Riding. Vulnerable vicars, whether venal or virginal, thus crop up regularly in Winifred Holtby's novels. But churchmen are not exclusively ogres or figures of fun. Roger, initially timid, develops into one of Winifred's nobler male characters, overcoming his image to Eleanor of 'a comic curate, praying among the buns'.

Love scenes, Winifred freely admitted, were difficult passages for her to write. Her own love life involved one spasmodic and unsatisfactory relationship. She wrote of 'being disappointed if I go through life without once being properly in love. As a writer, I feel it my duty to my work, but they [men] are all so helpless and such children'. Along with so many women of her generation she was affected by the dearth of adequate men after the Great War, which does to some extent account for the rarity of strong male characters in her novels and the frequency of listless survivors, either physically or psychologically crippled. Nevertheless, Roger Mortimer, despite being manipulated by Caroline and besotted with Eleanor, is healthy and shows moral strength as well as progressive views on love and marriage. Equally, Eleanor is independent and direct. Indeed, she represents a new departure in Winifred's attitude towards women's self-determination. The earlier heroines are shackled by domestic ties of one form or another. Mary Robson and Joanna Leigh, farmer's wives, are spirited individuals circumscribed by the restraints of their position in the family and in the community.

Poor Caroline is about the divergent tendencies of philanthropy and exploitation, and the humour, tinged with sadness, arising from their clash in an oddly constituted Company, bringingtogether incompatible people. The Jewish merchant, Isenbaum, and the dilettante, St Basil, scratch each other's backs. Johnson and Macafee are out solely for themselves. Roger and Eleanor have more palatable ulterior motives, but they too use Caroline. Eleanor is no impressionable altruist, but entertains self-professed business ambitions and involves herself in her relative's project for the sake of being associated with an apparently good cause. Even Caroline, the only true believer in her brain-child for the actual spiritual benefits she intends it to bring, is perhaps merely trying to justify herself when society has no real further need of her. Although Vera Brittain accurately described her as 'a self-deceived optimist with an unbalanced devotion to hopeless projects', Caroline is so observed as to be likeable despite her absurdity. Her world of 'uplift, good works and propaganda' was very much her creator's sphere as a fervent believer in education and the benefits of religion. Winifred, however, was no unrealistic idealist like Caroline. Her optimistic canvassing on behalf of the League of Nations or South African Trades Unions was not so earnestly self-important as to be above self-mockery - there could be an element of self-parody in her Caroline, despite Winifred assuring Lady Rhondda: 'Caroline is not a symbol of me, but an expression of herself... I meant to leave the impression of someone silly but vital, directly futile but indirectly triumphant.'

Caroline's demise is not treated tragically, because it leads to the prospect of future benefit. Parallel with this undefeated attitude lies a positive view of progress, both moral and technical. Poor Caroline may not be most memorable as a discussion of the ethics of scientific progress, but the issue is not raised lightly, and admonitions concerning society's future are deliberately made. The Christian Cinema Company falls between two stools not just for lack of a unified commitment, but also, it is suggested, because the twin aims of the Company may be contradictory in practice. In Mandoa, Mandoa! Bill Durrant comes to a conclusion about colonial development in termswhich apply to Caroline's contusion of commerce and morality: 'You can either make a profit out of people or you can lecture them for their own good. But you can't do both with any effect at the same time.' If this is a truism, Poor Caroline's message would be 'to distribute uplift' rather 'than dividends among mankind. It was easier to Do Good than to Make Money.' The personal motives affecting a decision about how best to utilise a technological breakthrough show how the issue has even gained in relevance in the last half century. Johnson's every word deserves suspicious scrutiny, but amidst the regurgitated verbiage we find some valid, if gratuitous, observations, for instance when he chastises Macafee as a lover of science for science's sake: 'Ah, you scientists, who pursue the means an' despise the ends, take care.'

A fine writer's themes and obsessions continually engage important issues with a perspicacity which remains modern and pertinent over and beyond the particular fictional and historical context. Winifred Holtby was a flash of brilliant dynamism, who threw herself with a combined sense of duty and conviction into the burning issues of her day, hoping to help improve society. Her texts and speeches were persuasive in the twenties and thirties and, fortunately, she left an artistic testament which enriches posterity. For despite her dichotomy she was able to combine her dual instincts as writer and reformer without making Caroline's alleged sacrifice of one for the other: 'If I'd had more time I could have been a poet ... only between the claims of art and science I had to choose, being by nature a pioneer and fighter.' If Winifred Holtby was by nature a writer, then appropriately it is her novels which fight on as the lasting vehicle for her pioneering beliefs.

George Davidson, London, 1984

Opening Chorus

on that April evening, in 1929, the five-thirty train from King's Cross to Kingsport was half an hour late. Betty and Dorothy Smith, returning home from Caroline's funeral, had to scramble through luggage, porters and trolleys and run along the platform, nearly dropping their newly acquired parcels, in order to catch the last train out to Marshington. But their mother was waiting for them in the dining-room with sandwiches and tea; the fire leapt gaily; their father drifted in from the billiard-room professing indifference, but really agog for news, and the pleasant atmosphere of home-coming was augmented rather than decreased by the lateness of the hour and the precariousness of suburban connections.

'Tea?' Mr. Smith asked himself. 'Well, I wouldn't mind a cup as it is here. Now, girls, how's London? Have you got Caroline safely underground?'

'We have, we have,' laughed Betty, helping herself to a ham sandwich. 'We've buried her and, if you ask me, pretty nearly canonized her. What with a purple pall over the coffin, and the service so High that it nearly fell over itself backwards, and Uncle Ernest green in the face with trying to find his way among the prayers and things, it was the grandest funeral I ever saw.'

'And who is paying for all that, I should like to know?' snorted Mr. Smith. 'As Caroline's nearest relative I naturally have some feelings on the subject.'

'Well, you'll be relieved to hear that the actual Church service was all done free, so far as I can gather. That Father Mortimer Caroline was always writing about got his Church to do it.'

'Yes, and do you know,' interrupted Betty, 'he isn't old at all - he's quite young - young enough to be Caroline's son.'

'Grandson.'

'Son, anyway, and quite sweet. Not a bit like a curate, and a perfect lamb in his vestments, or whatever you call them.'

'A perfect scream calling him "Father." '

'I'm not surprised now that Caroline was a little dotty about him.'

'Now, Dorothy, you shouldn't say such things, really,' Mrs. Smith remonstrated, secretly enjoying every word spoken in Caroline's disfavour, but anxious to maintain her pose of broad-minded matron.

'Well, Mums, she was a bit queer, wasn't she? You ought to have heard the will."

'The will?'

'Oh, my goodness, I wish you'd both been there. You'd have died. I never saw such a scream. After the funeral Eleanor insisted on us all going back to Caroline's room -that awful little room in Lucretia Road. There was Mrs. Hales, the landlady - what a dragon! - all hymn singing and vindictiveness; but we let her help herself to Caroline's old clothes, so perhaps she's satisfied. And Eleanor, as queer as ever, in the same old tweed coat, not a stitch of mourning, looking about seventeen and very ill, we thought, and a queer old stick called Mr. Guerdon and Uncle Ernest and us. And then Eleanor read the will.'

'And you never smelled anything like that room, cluttered with fearful old papers and all the clothes we've sent Caroline for years.'

'Mr. Guerdon looked as though he'd like to drown us all.'

'He'd come from the Christian Cinema Company - you know - the thing she was always trying to get us to put money into.'

'But, my dears, the Will. Do you know, she left five hundred pounds each to Betty and me, and eight thousand to her dear young friend and kinswoman, Eleanor de la Roux, and twenty thousand - yes, twenty thousand, to the Rev. Roger Mortimer, Assistant Priest at St. Augustine's, in token of all that his help and encouragement had meant to her in her lonely life. Just think of it - she must have been a little bit potty, wasn't she, Mums, dying in an infirmary at seventy-two, and making a will like that leaving thousands of pounds, that she hadn't got, to people she hardly knew?'

'Well, of course, I do think that at the end she must have been a little odd. But what I do want to know is, did she really get that three thousand pounds out of Eleanor?'

'Well, Mr. Guerdon seemed to think that Eleanor had put all her money into the Christian Cinema Company, and of course as it went bust I suppose the money was lost, but we couldn't get Eleanor to say anything.'

'Monstrous, monstrous,' said Mr. Smith. 'I always blamed de la Roux. No man ought to leave a child of twenty-two in sole charge of her capital, without trustees or anything. Eleanor came over to England simply asking to be robbed, simply asking for it.'

'Well, we did warn her against Caroline,' said Dorothy. 'We let her see the old girl's letters. We told her she would cadge, borrow or steal from anyone in the world that she could get hold of-Eleanor needn't have gone near her when she went to London.'

'Oh, catch Miss Eleanor taking advice! Dear me no. More tea, please, Mums. But she certainly seems to have got more than she bargained for from Caroline. Apparently she used to lend her money when she was alive, looked after her while she was ill, and finally arranged the funeral and saw the undertakers, and everything.'

'I always said,' observed Mr. Smith, 'and I say it again: Caroline should have gone on the Old Age Pension. She used to say it wasn't dignified, but it would have been far more dignified than borrowing from her relatives and being in debt to the tradesmen.'

'Oh, you can't alter people like Caroline. She always thought she knew better than anyone. She was always going to do something extraordinary.'

'Oh, she was extraordinary all right,' laughed Betty. 'She was an extraordinary nuisance, anyway.'

'Well,' reflected Dorothy, soothed by tea, warmth and sandwiches into toleration. 'I suppose that making a nuisance of herself was the only way she had left of making herself important. It can't have been much of a life, can it? for a woman of over seventy, living alone in lodgings, in debt to her landlady, wearing our cast-off clothes, trotting round after jobs that never materialized, writing articles that nobody would publish, and eating bread and margarine for supper. There really was something rather pathetic about that awful room of hers - crowded with papers full of impossible schemes. I don't envy Eleanor the job of looking through them all. I don't suppose there can ever have been anyone whose life was much less important, or who had less influence on anybody else.'

'Well, she did get us to London, anyway. I suppose that if she hadn't died, and we hadn't gone to the funeral, we should have had to do our spring shopping in mouldy old Kingsport. Oh, Mums, I must show you my new blue three-piece. It's perfectly adorable, isn't it, Dot?'

'It is rather nice - and my evening frock. Do you know, skirts are getting lower and lower, Mums?'

'Well, of course, dears,' said Mrs. Smith gently. 'I don't like to seem heartless in any way, but it would have been a pity to waste the expense of going up to London, and it wasn't as though Caroline were more than your second cousin. I am very glad that you were able to do something really useful.'

'Nothing like combining business and pleasure, eh, girls?" Mr. Smith smothered a great yawn. 'Well, I'm off to bed. Don't you women sit gossiping till to-morrow.' He rose laboriously, and went to the door, but with his hand on the knob he turned. 'Good night, all. There is one thing; she'll never trouble us again this side the golden gates, poor Caroline.'

Mr. Smith, rope merchant of Marshington in the East Riding of Yorkshire, went upstairs to bed.

Chapter 1 : Basil Reginald Anthony St. Denis

§1

providence failed to do its duty by Basil Reginald Anthony St. Denis. If he had been born heir to Lord Herringdale's title and estate, instead of being merely a second cousin on his mother's side, he would have been an ornament to the peerage. The stately ritual of the House of Lords would have been decorated by his presence. The bay windows of a certain club overhanging Piccadilly would have derived distinction from his profile.

But his birth and station were unpropitious to his happiness; for he was the only son of a country rector who inhabited a Devonshire rectory seven times too large for his stipend or his needs.

His father came of Huguenot stock, and his mother was a descendant of that Countess Herringdale whose melting delicious beauty languishes from more than one of the canvases of Sir Peter Lely. If life in the Rectory at Trotover was frugal, it was dignified. Basil's infant porringer was bent and dented, but it was an heirloom of seventeenth-century silver. He cut his teeth on fine Georgian plate, and bruised his head against the angle of a Jacobean oak chest. The Rector, his father, dined easily and often with the County, and carried the ordered ritual of his Services into the conduct of his daily life.

As for Basil, he was a lovely child. His flower-like complexion and sweet fluting voice won the hearts of his papa's parishioners. Had the laburnum trees from the Rectory garden scattered golden sovereigns instead of golden blossoms on to his perambulator, no family in his father's parish would have grudged the compliment, and Basil himself would have recognized that nature did no more than her duty by him.

It was not that in adult life he cultivated appetites for great wealth and luxury. Political responsibility fatigued, and business adventure repelled him. He remarked upon several occasions that true civilization was incompatible with the life of action, and he disliked nothing more heartily than the untempered energy of pioneers. All that he asked of fortune was adequate opportunity to exercise fastidious taste.

It must be admitted that, considering the circumstances of his birth, Providence made erratic efforts to assist him. Lord Herringdale, charmed by the manner and appearance of his young kinsman, offered to bear the expenses of Basil's education at Eton and at Oxford. At Eton, Basil laid the foundation of a fine sense of social discrimination and achieved an understanding of the gulf which separates those who have been to the greater English public schools from those who have not. It took him several years to realize in how considerable a majority are those who have not been there.

Dependence upon charity, however, is accompanied by notable disadvantages. When Basil eventually went to Oxford, his education in the arts of civilized living involved him in certain trivial expenses. The cultivation of a palate cannot be achieved on grocer's port and Australian Harvest Burgundy. The arts of hospitality cannot be mastered without practice. The unerring discipline of the collector's taste cannot be achieved without trial and error. Naturally, such education costs money. Naturally, it was for such education that Basil assumed he had been sent to Oxford.

Lord Herringdale failed to realize his full responsibility. When the bills came in after Basil's first year, he sent for the young man and subjected him to the discomfort of an interview which, in Basil's opinion, transgressed the bonds of civilized conversation. Lord Herringdale demanded promises; he made conditions; he filled his kinsman with vicarious shame. At that age Basil blushed to see gentlemen misconduct themselves. For the first and last time he abandoned his own principle of compromise and resignation. He refused to return to Oxford on Lord Herringdale's terms.

He went home to the Rectory. He remained there for

several weeks contemplating the re-edition of some trifles of eighteenth-century verse which had appealed to him at Oxford. He applied unsuccessfully for the posts of assistant-curator of Chinese embroideries at the Dulwich Museum, and adviser on Adams Decorations to Messrs. Maring and Staple. But his experience only confirmed his theory that one essential condition of a civilized existence is a small independent income of-say-three thousand a year. He was beginning to consider that twelve hundred might be just tolerable.

That was in the summer of 1914. The outbreak of war came just in time to save Basil from the humiliation of his father's request to Lord Herringdale that he should overlook all earlier indiscretions and continue to pay his son's bills at Oxford. Basil was able to step into the post of private secretary to old Lord Farndale, vacated by a more commonplace and robust young man who had joined the army. There, until 1916, he remained, but the catastrophes of international war made civilized living impossible, and the inconvenience of Philistine disapproval outweighed the horror of military discipline. In 1916 Basil responded to the Call of King and Country.

He looked delightful in uniform. The crudity of army life distressed him, but he was fortunate enough to be sent as a cadet to Balliol and to find in war-time Oxford several congenial companions. When he was finally gazetted as a second lieutenant, his fastidious charm, his delicacy, and his taste were uncorrupted. Then he was sent to France.

Nobody ever knew exactly in what degree the war affected Basil. It was presumably a nightmare which on awakening he was unable to describe. In 1918 he appeared at a hospital in Carlton House Terrace with a shattered elbow. He spent the subsequent two years in tedious alternations between the operating theatre and convalescent homes. In 1920 he left the army with a stiff arm, a disillusioned though still charming manner, and the pension proper to second lieutenants suffering from partial disablement.

He returned for a time to the Rectory in Devonshire, and lay on soft but badly tended lawns or on the faded Morris chintzes of his mother's sofas. He read; he smoked cigarettes; he composed epigrams which he felt too fatigued to utter. But the boredom of country life, the inadequacy of the hot-water supply, and the monotony of his mother's catering drove him back to London.

'But what are you going to do, my dear boy?' asked the Rector.

'Well, man cher papa.' Basil smiled his charming melancholy smile. 'What can a fellow do?'

There were, it appeared, a number of things that a fellow could, and did, do. Basil's acquaintances enlightened him as to the possibilities of employment in London. He could sell cars on commission, or trade in first editions, or advise newly created peeresses about the decoration of their country seats, or write occasional reviews for the Epicurean. But the Epicurean survived only six issues after its first appearance; the cars betrayed inexpert salesmanship, and the peeresses had their own preposterous notions about interior decoration.

An optimistic young gentleman called Wing Stretton, whom Basil had met in hospital, formed a syndicate at Monte Carlo for playing roulette according to a co-operative system, which he thought infallible. Once, in an expansive mood, he asked Basil to come out as secretary to the Syndicate. Basil remembered his offer when, in 1923, he had his final interview with Lord Herringdale.

'I like you. Damn it, I like you,' declared that much-tried nobleman. 'But what with the country going to the dogs and the Government taxing us out of house and home, I can do no more for you, young man. Why don't you emigrate? Emigration. That's the stuff for you younger men. Go abroad. Start afresh. This old country's overcrowded. Take my advice.'

Basil took his advice. 'Emigration,' he read in a copy of the Spectator which lay on his father's study table, 'gives opportunities for the display of that courage, initiative, pluck and common sense, which have made the English what they are.'

'Quite,'said Basil. He emigrated. He joined Wing Stretton at Monte Carlo.

Under the soothing influence of the Casino ritual, so elaborate, so unfaltering, and so meaningless, the memory of the brutal outrage of the war's disorder faded from Basil's mind. Listening to the monotonous whirring of the wheels, the soft melancholy cries of the croupiers performing the eternal ceremony of their unchanging Mass, he began to forget the harsh, shattering explosion of the shells. In that enchanted palace, where life is so remote from all other reality, he lost his sense of the imminent menace of death.

'It had to be Catholicism or roulette,' he observed later, 'and on the whole, I found roulette more satisfying.'

But in spite of the consolations of roulette, he had his troubles. He suffered from recurrent pain in his wounded arm. He was troubled by a dry, tedious cough. His increasing lassitude arose as much from general ill-health and weariness as from natural indolence of temperament. He was lonely. Too fastidious to love promiscuously, he was too poor to love expensively, and in Monte Carlo he had found no third alternative. His colleagues on the syndicate were business acquaintances with whom he had little in common except the desire to make a living.

In spite of his apparent detachment and urbanity, Basil knew hours when he lay on the chaise longue beside his bedroom window, watching the changeful blue and green of the unruffled bay and acknowledging to himself that he was ill and lonely, that his youth was passing without satisfaction, and that the malignity of providence could not be endured much longer.

§2

One evening about ten o'clock, after a dull and disappointing day, Basil stood on one of the small rounded balconies that lean from the windows of the Salles Privees and overhang the Casino gardens. It was the hottest week in the summer of 1923. The season was unfashionable, the room half empty. All but two tables in the room behind him wore their draping petticoats, while in the Kitchen the whirring of wheels, the jangle of voices, and the stifling atmosphere of scent and humanity, had grown intolerable. The System was doing badly. Basil's distaste for his colleagues had increased with the rising temperature of the summer.

He was in debt again; his head ached; neuralgic pains throbbed through his wounded elbow. He laid his arms along the stone balustrade and stared into the night.

Beyond and below him lay the warm, perfumed darkness of Monte Carlo, the lighted town seeming no more than an inverted mirror of the star-sprinkled sky. A motor-boat shot like a shooting star across the bay. A shooting star shot like a motor-boat across the sky. Far down below in the Casino garden a shaft of light from a half-shuttered window struck a pink-flowering oleander.

'I wonder,' thought Basil, 'whether there is any truth in the legend that those who shoot themselves in the Casino gardens are immediately set upon by swift attendants, who pad their pockets with notes for a thousand francs, so that the distracted relatives of the victim may not attribute his suicide to a gambler's losses. I wonder if it is true,' his weary mind continued, 'that if one throws oneself down from this balcony, death rushes up straight and sure from the ground and kills one in mid-air. Indeed, seeing that earth and sky appear so very similar, might a man not fall down to heaven, and even rise to hell?' He smiled, thinking how his father would fasten upon a similar fantasy, and elaborate it in a whimsical sermon to puzzle the yeomanry of Devon.

'I wouldn't do it if I were you,' a strange voice startled him. 'For one thing, it can't be done. They grab you before you've got one leg over the balustrade. And to go on with, it doesn't really work.'

It was a woman's voice, rich, warm, irregular. Basil turned slowly, and bowed towards the shadows, but he could see no more than the gleam of one pale arm and the denser blackness of a dark dress against the night. He sighed. Too well he knew the ritual of encounters on a shadowed balcony. He could play as prettily as any other man the game of flattery and evasion. He appreciated the ceremonial niceties of flirtation. But to-night he was tired.

'I am deeply flattered by your solicitude,' he said, 'but I assure you that it was misplaced. Had the world held no other consolation, your unseen presence . . .'

She laughed, so merry, surprising and frank a laugh that it completely disconcerted him.

'Come, come,' she cried. 'You hadn't the least idea that I was sitting here. And you know perfectly well that I didn't really think you were going to jump off the balcony. I spoke to you because I was bored. I've lost my shirt already today, so I can't play any more. I only bring down so much money with me to the rooms, and when that's gone, I just sit. But to-night it's too early to go home to bed, and none of my friends are here. So . . .'

To excuse himself from further effort, Basil invited the lady into the bar to have a cocktail. She rose with alacrity and stepped before him into the lighted room. He knew then that he had often seen her at the tables, for she was unmistakable, a large magnificently built brunette, with warm brown colouring and mobile eye-brows. Basil, who understood such things, guessed that she wore her gown low, painted her face, and tinted her fingernails merely because to do otherwise would have seemed an affectation. She followed exaggerated fashions because she was natural and sensible. As she went, she turned once and smiled at Basil over her shoulder, without coquetry, but with experienced and friendly understanding.

They drank cocktails together at the bar. They talked about Cannes, and roulette, and the heat. Basil drove her back to her hotel, a non-committal place in the Boulevard des Moulins. She told him that her name was Gloria Calmier, that she was the widow of a French officer, and that she adored bathing. They met the next day at the Casino, and the next, and the next.

§3

Their frequent encounters suggested to the Syndicate that Basil was attracted by Madame Calmier. Wing Stretton told everyone that St. Denis was having an affair with a rich French widow, but when he attempted to tease Basil according to the accepted convention of their circle, he was surprised by the ferocity of his secretary's repudiation.

'That woman?' cried Basil. 'Heavens! I can't escape her. I go to the Casino and she is there. I go to the Hotel de Paris and she is there. I go down to the beach and she is there, arising from the waves like a slightly over-ripened

Aphrodite. If I take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts of the earth, she will be there also, dying to tell me a perfectly screaming limerick about a young lady called Hilda who had an affair with a builder.'

He mimicked with such observant malice Madame Calmier's deep, laughing voice that Wing Stretton accepted his derision as bona fide evidence of his untroubled heart, and left him alone to avoid his own entanglements.

But Basil did not tell Wing Stretton the other confidences which Madame Calmier had entrusted to him, though they were infinitely more amusing than the limerick about the young lady called Hilda. For Madame Calmier had no inhibitions. Her candour shocked almost as much as her egotism astounded him. She took for granted his desire to know all that could be told about her past, and talked of herself with unaffected enjoyment.

During their second meeting she informed him that her name was not Gloria at all, but Gladys Irene Mabel. Gladys Irene Mabel Wilcox - 'Well, what could you do with a name like that?' said she. 'When I went on the stage I changed it to Gloria. Gloria Wilcox went quite well, and I kept the Wilcox just to spite Dad because I knew he'd throw fits if they ever found out in Peterborough that he had a daughter in the chorus.'

Her father had been a solicitor's clerk in Peterborough, but Gladys Irene Mabel had found her style unsuited to cathedral cities. When just sixteen she was expelled from the High School for an outrageous flirtation with the grocer's assistant who played the part of 'Fairfax' in an amateur performance of The Teaman of the Guard. 'An awful little man he was really. Short legs, you know, and wore a bowler hat and said, "Pleased to meet you," though that wouldn't have troubled me then. For if he was common, so was I, thank heaven. There's some virtue in vulgarity that swings you over the hard places when you're young. He had a nice tenor voice, though, and I was crazy about the stage. I tried to make him run away with me to London, but he was much too pure. In fact, you know, my first attempt at seduction was a wash-out. He married an elementary school teacher and sings solos in the choir and has seven children. Oh well.'

But Gloria-Gladys, since she could not persuade the young man to accompany her to London, went there alone, and encountered such adventures in that city as are commonly supposed to occur to stage-struck girls of sixteen from the provinces. She found, to her dismay, that she was thought too tall for the chorus. She walked on in pantomime as one of Dick Whittington's young men friends in green tights and a leather jerkin, and she eventually crossed to America with a vaudeville producer in a capacity never clearly denned by contract. She sold cigarettes in the foyer of a New York hotel. She acted as hostess in a dance saloon. She displayed models as an outsize mannequin in a Chicago dress store, and in Rio de Janeiro she bore a child, which died, to an Italian real-estate agent whom she had met in Illinois. During the war she returned to Europe with an extremely respectable semi-amateur concert party under the auspices of the American Y.M.C.A.

The concert party went to Paris and there she met Gaston Calmier, a childless widower, no longer very young, the son of a Lyons silk merchant. He was a gentle, ineffective little man, but Gloria liked him, and when, in a panic of loneliness before he was finally called up to join his reserve regiment, he asked her to marry him, she accepted even before she knew that he had a small but pleasant fortune, carefully invested. 'A nice little man. He wouldn't have hurt a chicken. And he was killed six weeks after he'd reached the front. It was murder to send little creatures like him to fight. Well - life being what it is, perhaps it was better so. For him, and me.'

Basil, perforce, listened to this autobiography. While in Monte Carlo, he could not escape from Madame Calmier, and could not leave Monte Carlo while his sole means of livelihood lay there. But after three weeks of unsuccessful attempts at evasion, he suddenly succumbed to a sharp attack of gastric influenza. He thought then that Providence had sent his illness as an order of release, but on the third evening he awoke from an uneasy sleep to find Madame Calmier sitting on his chaise longue, placidly polishing her rose-tipped finger-nails with his ivory-backed polisher.

'Nobody seemed to know how you were or what was wrong, so I came to see for myself. Your landlady tells me it's la grippe. You certainly do look pretty mouldy.'

Basil was unshaven. His bed was rumpled, his fair hair tousled as threshed straw, his room squalid, his head aching; and he knew that he was going to be sick. For the first time in his life, he swore at a lady.

'God damn you, go away!" he cried in agony. Then that which he feared must happen, happened.

Madame Calmier was neither embarrassed nor insulted.

'My poor lamb!' she cried. 'You are in a bad way.'

Then she rose, and with sensible promptitude set about making him more comfortable.

She made his bed and washed his face and found him clean pyjamas and gave him milk and soda and bullied the landlady, secured a room for herself in the same house, and sat down to nurse him. She was lonely, and she had found a friend. She was bored, and she had found an occupation. Too indolent for professional efficiency, too feckless for prolonged caution, she made a good enough nurse to justify her presence in his room.

As for Basil, his first horror melted into acquiescence. He derived a measure of comfort from her affirmation that there was nothing about a bedroom to embarrass her. The nature of his illness stripped him of all dignity. To his surprise, she never seemed to see his nakedness. Or perhaps, he reflected, she never saw men or women as anything but naked. Her cheerful glance ignored the masks and the ritual behind which men like Basil seek to hide themselves. She set no value on the decorum which he had cultivated with such care. At first he was too ill to do anything but surrender to her unperturbed initiative. Later he was amazed by the restfulness of complete collapse. As he grew stronger he found himself even enjoying her shameless intimacy, her Rabelaisian anecdotes, her absurd yet amicable limericks. He had found somebody before whom he could relax completely the rigid discipline of his pose, and he was grateful.

A month after his recovery, he married her. 'And quite time too,' said she. 'Anyone could see with half an eye that you were a neglected only child from a country rectory. If I hadn't rescued you, you'd have been a finicky old maid in

no time.' And that was the extent to which his grand poses had impressed her.

§4

For nearly five years Basil and Gloria drifted about the continent, losing a little money here, speculating profitably there. Gloria once did a good trade in Viennese embroideries, and once she lost money in a stupid venture in Hungarian gas works.

'If the worst comes to the worst,' said Gloria, 'I'll sell out my French bonds and buy a little hotel somewhere between Nice and Cannes. We ought to do quite well there. You understand all about food and wines, and I know how to deal with people.'

'That will indeed be the worst," said Basil.

'Well, my friend, life being what it is, it's as well to have a way of retreat mapped out. Still, we won't despair yet. What about London for a change?'

They went to London. Gloria found a post as saleswoman of outsize models in a Hanover Square dress-maker's establishment. She and Basil took a small flat in Maida Vale, and Basil went home for a week-end to the Rectory. He showed his parents a photograph of his handsome wife, and they were too thankful to learn that she was a wife to ask disturbing questions.

By this time Basil had succumbed almost completely to Gloria's dominion. In her presence he relaxed his heroic tension of deportment. He had learned to drink port out of a claret glass, to scribble a note on unstamped paper, and to sit down to supper in a lounge suit. On the other hand he could now sleep for more than two hours consecutively. He ate better; his cough left him: he was less cadaverously thin, and more handsome than ever. His wife was well pleased with her handiwork.

One August Sunday morning in 1928, just before noon, Basil lay on his bed in the Maida Vale watching Gloria, who, in a brief apricot-coloured chemise, wandered about the room performing a leisurely Sabbath toilet. She painted her eyebrows; she examined a ladder in a silk stocking; she criticized London in August; she complained of the price of

invisible mending; and she turned up the ends of her thick curling hair with a pair of heated tongs. She was trying out the tongs on a sheet of the Churchman's Weekly, left in the flat by an Anglo-Catholic charlady, and the smell of scorching paper mingled pleasantly with the scent of Quelques Fleurs and cigarette smoke.

'You know, Basil,' she said with her habitual irrelevance, 'you ought to get a job.'

'My dear Gloria! What next? And why that now?'

'This loafing's bad for you. You'll lose your figure. You'll develop into the Perfect Clubman - all smile and stomach. Incidentally, Mitchell's won't let you have any more credit, and I'm not exactly rolling in money at the moment. You ought to do some of the world's work.'

'I have a wife who works. Surely one member of the family suffices to satisfy this Anglo-American god of commercial Go-getting? Besides, I have the very strenuous job of being your husband.'

'Well, you're going to have something else very soon if you're not careful. I've been thinking. It doesn't matter so much what you do, so long as you do something.'

'Jobs, my charming Gloria, do not seem exactly to fall into my lap.'

'I know. That's why you've got to make your own job. You know, where we go wrong is that we always try looking for money in the same place. That's no good. I remember a man in America telling me, "You can't go on hammering the same nail for ever. One day it'll get right down into the wood." I remember him telling me that if I wanted to make money I must keep off cabarets and clubs and go in for uplift. He said that there was an enormous lot of kick to be got out of uplift, and that what people liked best in the world was to feel that they were getting fifteen per cent, interest and the pleasant sensation of doing good at the same time.'

'But, my dear Gloria, do you suggest that I should attempt to uplift anyone?'

'Rather. Why not? I want you to listen to this.' She cleared a place on the dressing-table by sweeping aside bottles of pomade, talcum powder and cosmetics. She spread there the scorched and goffered sheet of the Churchman's

Weekly on which she had been testing her tongs, scattering brown flakes of charred paper like faded rose petals on to the bedroom carpet. 'This paper's called the Churchman's Weekly, and it's got the largest circulation among the real uplift Press - or so it claims. Now it's been running a series of articles by bishops and schoolmasters and M.P.'s and all that sort of thing on ''Our Scandalous Cinema" -all about the harm done by immoral pictures to the young, and calling up the churches to make a great effort, before the talkies come right in, to get 'em pure.'

'I believe you.'

'Well. This week there's a woman called Caroline Denton-Smyth writing a letter to the editor saying that some months ago she had an idea of a Christian Cinema Company which should combine profit with pioneering and produce only absolutely one hundred per cent, guaranteed pure films - talkies and all - made in Britain. You know. The sort the curate could take his mother to.'

'Loathsome idea. Well?'

'Well?'

'Well? What has this to do with me, my dear?'

'Rector's son. Second cousin of Lord Herringdale, a great Evangelical peer - or his father was, anyway. Eton. Oxford. Ex-service. Noblesse oblige. Secretary or - no - chairman of the Christian Cinema Company - modern but moral. Happily married. Artistic. Wants to help the youngsters. Make a happy England, and beat the Yanks at their own game. Can't you see it?'

Basil lay speechless. Gloria gathered a tumbled but vivid silk kimono about her and proceeded to sketch her scheme.

'Enormous appeal to fathers of families, Conservatives, patriots, Nonconformists, chapels, school teachers, town councillors - can't you see it? Get the Press to take it up. "See British films. The Christian Cinema Company earns dividends (at least, it may one day) while doing its duty." This Caroline Denton-Smyth. There must be thousands like her. Spinsters and widows in stuffy boarding-houses in Bayswater and Bournemouth. Longing to do good to somebody before they die. Aching for a little flutter with their

money. I bet you Caroline's got thousands and thousands put away in Brazilian railway stock or something, and keeps a depressing companion, and quarrels with the Rector about candles on the altar. But she's hit on a great idea. There's nothing on earth people like better than to feel that they're doing good and making money. What's more, when it's a question of charity and causes and all that, they never ask for the same security as in a purely commercial speculation. I remember all those collections for clubs and missions and all that at Peterborough. Dad had shares in some sort of a holiday home. Never paid a sou in dividends, but he always hoped it would, and he felt that he was doing good. We don't want to offer a steady three-and-a-half per cent. We want to offer a chance of twenty per cent, and a sure sense of virtue."

'We?'

'We - the Christian Cinema Company Limited. Properly registered and all that. Semi-charity. You know old Guerdon, that Quaker stick we met at Aix-les-Bains. He knows all about Company law and so on. We'll have him on the Board as a director. Nothing like the Quakers, my dad always used to say, for money and uplift. Righteous Recreation for the People - issue £1 shares - up to £500,000 say — to produce wholesome British entertainment. We'll get them on the "British" - catch all this and-American feeling that's floating round. Even if it never comes to anything much there should be directors' fees and a few commissions, and so on. There's that fellow Johnson - the Canadian who knows all about films and runs that correspondence school business."

She was absurd, of course. But so was life absurd. Basil lit a cigarette and lay blowing exquisite smoke-rings toward the ceiling, and listened. The sight of Gloria in her crepe-de-Chine chemise and scarlet kimono, so engagingly incongruous to her subject, tickled his sense of humour. He enjoyed the thought of Caroline Denton-Smyth and all her type of moralizing churchwomen finding a protagonist in his wife. He appreciated the comedy of vengeance which he could exact upon all the hours of boredom spent during his boyhood while sitting in the Rectory drawing-room,

hearing his mother's conversation with the ladies of the Mothers' Union. He sat up and laughed at Gloria. 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.' 'And then, just think how excited poor old Caroline what's-her-name would be to see an idea of hers come true. I don't suppose she's ever had many of her ideas catch on, do you? Oh, Basil, we must do it. Think of her, fluttering about her Bayswater Boarding House, collecting subscribers, or shareholders or whatever we decide to call them. The more we can make it sound commercial, the more of a novelty it'll be to them. Oh, we'll give her a run for her money before we've done with her, poor Caroline!"

Chapter 2 : Joseph Isenbaum

§1

number 987 Sackville Street, London, W.1, though registered in the Street Directory as the Gentleman's Tailoring Establishment of one Augustus Mitchell, was less of a shop than a club, and less of a club than a sartorial chapel. Mr. Augustus Mitchell's clients did not enter his heavy swing-doors idly, carelessly or wantonly. They came reverently, soberly and discreetly to consult the High Priest of their temple upon matters of religious solemnity, the cut of a trouser, the width of a stripe, or a change in the shape of a collar so subtle that it would have been invisible to the untutored eye. None knew better than Mr. Mitchell the profound and mystic significance of that distance between two buttons on a waistcoat which makes all the difference between the well-groomed gentleman and the outsider.

Mr. Joseph Isenbaum was aware of that significance, and he respected Mr. Mitchell's mastery of it. There were several things about Mr. Mitchell which he did not respect, but this knowledge of detail was impressive. Mr. Isenbaum was a ritualist by racial tradition. He knew what it meant to tithe anise and cummin, and to broaden or narrow the phylacteries. A Jew by birth, name and temperament, an exporter of agricultural implements by profession, a free-thinker by religion, a family man by accident, and a connoisseur by inclination, he regarded his visits to Mr. Mitchell's shop as unpleasant but sacred obligations.

For Mr. Isenbaum cherished a wistful and often misplaced devotion to the Best. He maintained that a man's possessions should be Few but Good, that his habits should be Restrained but Splendid, and that his associations should be Eclectic but Intimate. Unhappily his worship was hampered by his limitations of taste and judgment. In pursuit of the Rare and Beautiful, he had filled his house at Richmond with a catholic collection of monstrosities, picked up at auction sales all over London and the Home Counties. Though he went to Mitchell's for his clothes, the eccentricity of his figure prevented even that master from fulfilling his highest possibilities. Though he belonged to two tolerable clubs, the dissonance of his name, and a certain hesitation and obsequiousness of manner, prevented him from forming those few but choice friendships which he desired. His desire for a son involved him in a disastrous sequence of five daughters, at the end of which had come at long last his beloved, his Benjamin.

Benjamin Isenbaum. Benjamin Isenbaum. As Mr. Isenbaum sat on one September afternoon in Augustus Mitchell's shop, he repeated the name over and over to himself as though it were a painful yet exciting charm. Whenever Joseph had nothing else of special moment to think about, his thoughts turned to his son. Yet always the contemplation hurt as well as comforted. For Joseph had inflicted upon this splendid son, this lamb without spot or blemish, this glorious boy, an intolerable burden. Benjamin Isenbaum. Benjamin Isenbaum. What could a man do in the world with a name like that?

Joseph had originally intended, if ever he had a son, to change his own name to Bauminster and to call the boy William or Richard. He had discussed the matter with his wife, who was content to acquiesce in all his decisions. As a free-thinker and modernist, he was bound by no tie of piety or interest to Judaism.

But when it came to the point of taking out letters patent, the delicacy of spirit which was with him a motive stronger even than his paternal love, frustrated him. Three weeks before the birth of the boy, he heard an ex-Jew, Ferguson, whose father had been called Abrams, talking to a group of men about his recently acquired membership of a coveted club. 'Thank God,' cried Abrams-Ferguson. 'You can eat without meeting any Jews there!'

Joseph saw the polite acquiescence of the Gentile listeners. His pride and his hunger for perfection combined in revolt against both the meanness which inspired Ferguson and the scorn which greeted him. He made a vow to the God in whom he professed enlightened disbelief that if he had a son he would call him Benjamin, and that he would remain an Isenbaum till death.

The decision was made. The son was born. The name was given. But Joseph lived to repent daily and hourly his magnanimous gesture. The boy was everything that a boy could be. Nothing could be too good for him. Eton or Harrow, Oxford or Cambridge, the best clubs, the best companionship, the best profession. The Bar and then Parliament? Harley Street? A Professorial Chair? The presidency of the Royal Academy? All these pinnacles of achievement appeared accessible to Dicky Bauminster. But to Ben Isenbaum?

Torn between obstinacy and compunction, his father laboured to undo the harm of his rash oath.

He endeavoured to enter Benjamin for one of the big public schools. But he learned by bitter experience that the son of Joseph Isenbaum, exporter of agricultural implements, might knock in vain at the gates of Eton or Harrow unless he could go sponsored by some more welcome visitant. House-masters wrote politely to say that they had no vacancies. Non-committal replies left Joseph sick with apprehension. Fear lest he should have ruined his son's chances lay like a weight of indigestion across his chest.

But if he could secure a letter of introduction from an Etonian, a Bishop or a Peer, or even a plain gentleman of good standing, then the situation would be changed.

Among his acquaintances were men who had been to public schools, but not one of them, Joseph felt, was the right man for his purpose.

He was thinking of his need when he sat in Augustus Mitchell's show-room, handling patterns of gent's autumn suitings.

Here in this sombre, spacious room he was surrounded by the Best that English tailoring could offer. The bales of cloth dripped to the floor their smooth dark drapery. The assistants trod silently up and down the rich fawn carpet, moving like acolytes at their priestly task. Here was taste not to be bought with money, and dignity which was incorruptible. Yet even here were barbs to prick Joseph's sensitive conscience. There was one characteristic of Mitchell's shop which he found almost intolerable.

Mr. Mitchell was an autocrat. He was an undiminished Paternal Despot surviving from the Victorian era. He refused to employ a member of a trade union; he refused to employ a professing agnostic; and he refused to call his assistants by their names. His ideal, he confided sometimes in more favoured clients, was Anonymous Service. While at his work no man of Mitchell's save Mitchell himself, was permitted to exercise Personality. His clients were attended not by Smith, Jones, or Robinson, but by assistants number 49, 17, or 63.

To Joseph Isenbaum this custom was odious. He knew too well the importance of a name. Every time he saw Mitchell, he intended to revolt against the barbarous humiliation of his adult skilled, competent and dignified assistants. But he never did.

To-day, however, as he sat brooding and dreaming, he became aware that farther down the room Mr. Mitchell himself was talking to a client. Too unhappy to choose autumn suitings, Joseph looked up idly, and began to watch the comedy displayed before him. For very soon he realized that something unusual was happening just beyond the palm in the brown china stand, and the oval table supporting copies of the Spectator, Debrett, Who's Who and the Tailor and Cutter.

Mr. Mitchell's client was a tall, very fair, very slender and handsome gentleman, with a foppish, drawling, languid, elegant manner. He was exquisitely attired, a credit, thought Joseph, even to Mr. Mitchell's tailoring, and a consolation for the discomforts and encountering assistants number 17 and 63. He lounged against the long table which served in Mitchell's for a counter, and with the point of his stick drew patterns in the nap of Mitchell's turf-like carpet. Of all odd things in the world, he was discussing cinemas.

Joseph bent over his cloths again; but he was listening.. The elegant gentleman was talking about films, Russian films, German films, Hollywood and English films, their actual vulgarity, their potential excellence. He talked well, with a knowledge which seemed topical rather than profound. Could Mitchell find suitable entertainment in the cinema for his three daughters? He could not.

'Of course, aesthetically, they are contemptible. Educationally,' the client shrugged slender shoulders. 'Well, of course, personally, I find it a little difficult to gauge the taste of the average schoolboy. When I was at Eton . . .'

Eton. Eton. Eton, echoed Joseph's conscience. This exquisite creature was a product of Eton. Benjamin . . . He missed several sentences.

'. . . from the ethical standpoint,' concluded the client.

'Oh, there you have it. There you have it, Mr. St. Denis,' said the tailor. 'From the ethical standpoint I agree with you. I endorse your sentiments. I uphold you. We do not want Hollywood morals in our English Homes. As for the Empire. Look at the effect that this sort of thing must have upon the natives. As an imperial responsibility, Mr. St. Denis, the Government ought to take the matter in hand. British prestige is being lowered, reduced, degraded by the obscenities - pardon the word - the indecencies of American actresses.'

'The Government? Hum. Now, as a Conservative, Mitchell, I put it to you. Do you really approve of Government interference with industry?'

'Industry, sir? Industry's a different matter. This is a question of morals.'

'Ultimately, Mitchell. Ultimately. I grant you that the final judgment upon the cinema may be ethical. But the immediate motive is - I put it to you - commercial.'

'What we need is a censor, Mr. St. Denis.'

'We have one. We have one, Mitchell. An entire Board of Censors. And what do they achieve? - What is the use of banning a few bad films? The demand is there. It will be supplied somehow. What we want, I suggest, Mitchell, is enterprise - competition. We want to place upon the market a film which will be worth showing.'

'Very pretty, Mr. St. Denis. Very pretty. But where is it to come from, sir? America? Can we make silk purses out of sows' ears? England? British enterprise is dead to-day. Dead. Killed by the Dole and Government interference.'

'Not dead, Mitchell. Not dead. Sleeping. The Sleeping Beauty waiting for Prince Charming.'

'I dare say. I dare say. And where is he, Mr. St. Denis? Where is he, I say?'

St. Denis laughed.

'I am a modest man,' he said. 'Far be it from me . . .'

'You, Mr. St. Denis?'

'Well, Mitchell. And why not? Don't you think it about time that I did something to justify my existence?'

And then it seemed to Joseph as though he were watching a very intricate and expert duel, which proceeded according to the ritual of all good sword-play. The elegant client called St. Denis was clearly determined to interest Mr. Mitchell in some scheme for the formation of a company to reform the British cinema. Nor did the interest appear to be purely impersonal. Joseph had himself an hereditary understanding of finesse. He understood why Mr. St. Denis pressed so lightly, so ironically, the claims of his cinema company. He understood the heavier retreats and defences of the tailor.

The tailor, of course, was in the superior position. He only had to listen and deny. St. Denis had to do more than that. It became evident to Joseph, watching, that St. Denis, like many other exquisite young men, was in financial difficulties. In short, he could not pay his tailor's bill. He sought instead to prolong his credit by dazzling Mr. Mitchell with the prospects of a new cinema company of which he was, it seemed, to be the chairman of the directing board.

'So suitable, don't you think, Mitchell, being a rector's son?' murmured Mr. St. Denis.

A rector's son who had been to Eton, noted the father of Ben Isenbaum.

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