Authors: Winifred Holtby
'The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind,' thought
Roger. 'Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the
earth? Declare, if thou hast understanding! Well, it's a
good whirlwind. But will the Lord answer me?'
A great car droned and purred up to the door. Roger
went down and saw D'Aynecourt sitting with a large, spec
tacled personage, so amazingly like Roger's imaginary conception of film magnates that it was all he could do to keep
from laughing during D'Aynecourt's laconic introduction
in the little lighted saloon of the Rolls Royce. Mr. Simon L. Brooks drove at night with his car lit and its blinds down so
that he was enclosed in a small and secret conference cham
ber like a ship's cabin, spinning through the rapids of the
London traffic. He had an appearance of owlish benevolence. The eyes behind his horn-rimmed spectacles were
kind rather than keen, and instead of questioning Roger
about the company he told ribald tales with inexhaustible
fluency and enjoyment. Roger listened half-heartedly, disturbed by the thought of Macafee's perversity, which might
easily lead him to choose this evening to keep away from the
laboratory. To his immense relief his sight of the battered
hoardings screening the Chemical Works from the road was
followed by a shaft of light from the uncurtained windows of
the laboratory itself.
'It looks as though he were here all right. You'll have to
leave the car outside, I'm afraid.' He found
himself
looking
for Eleanor's Clyno, but no other car was there. Simon
Brooks's light-grey spats twinkled on the pavement. 'I'm
afraid you'll find it muddy inside,' Roger warned him. 'There's a sort of field to cross.'
'Is there?' Simon Brooks looked meditatively through the gap in the hoarding. 'I feel like a bootlegger. Huh? Better take these off, eh?' he asked, indicating his spats.
'If you don't want them ruined,' said Roger gravely, and
was thankful that D'Aynecourt's face was in the shadow
when the great man leaned against the door of the car
and with splendid absence of embarrassment tore off first
one spat and then the other, and tossed them on to the
seat.
'That's better. Huh? Come along, then. You'd better
lead the way, Mr. Mortimer. Expect us when you see us,'
he told his chauffeur. 'But if we're not back in about two
hours, come to look for my dead body-with a gun.'
The wind was wilder than ever. It rattled and creaked
in the crazy hoardings. It buffeted Roger as he pushed
his way across the uneven ground, stumbling over broken
pottery, and squelching into puddles. The land round the
factory reminded him of France in war time, and his old
phobia of treading on a decomposing corpse returned to
him. Simon L. Brooks swore jovially behind him, and
Roger strained his ears throug
h the wind to hear, for though
debarred from overt profanity by his cloth, he prided him
self that his temperance was not due to poverty of diction,
and appreciated opportunities of enriching his potential
vocabulary.
But what a wind! Shut up in the Rolls Royce, Roger had
failed to appreciate its ferocity, Here it swooped down on
him, snatched at his hat and made his scarf a whip for his
face. The factory itself seemed in the last stage of dilapida
tion. The wonder was that those high unsupported walls stood the strain of such assault.
'I don't think I envy Macafee his home to-night,' thought
Roger, and turned to encourage the profane but pleasant
Mr. Brooks.
Locating Macafee's light from across the field was one matter; finding his door in the darkness was another. Roger
groped his way over piles of fallen masonry, and bruised his
knuckles against several yards of wall before at last he
knocked on what seemed to be a door. At first there was no
response, but a gleam of light reassured him. He knocked,
and finally kicked to save his knuckles, summoning his gently
blaspheming companions. But at last the door opened, and
Macafee, more rumpled, dusty and shock-headed than ever,
stood before them, blinking through tinted spectacles. Stam
mering a little, but very conciliatory and polite, Roger introduced Brooks and D'Aynecourt, and followed them into the
laboratory. Then, down the long lighted room, he saw the
smooth brown head of Eleanor de la Roux, bent over a gas-
jet in which she held a bubbling tube.
A stormy gust of emotion shook Roger. Joy, tenderness, dismay and anger broke down his valiant defences of irony and amusement. His benevolent patronage of Macafee was swept away in a gust of jealousy. So this was how she spent
her evenings. This was where she came every night after her
work at the Business College. This was the new hobby which
had supplanted her enthusiasm for the I.L.P. There she sat,
serenely indifferent alike to his anguish and to the possi
bilities of Simon L. Brooks, watching a vivid blue liquid
which bubbled in her tube and noting on a slip of paper its
reactions.
How was it, thought Roger, that ability to laugh at one
self proved so poor an armour against pain? He could see
perfectly well the comic element in his distress. He saw how
neatly he had conspired with fate to serve his rival. He had
taken all this trouble to impress Eleanor, and had only succeeded in helping the detestable Macafee. Yet his apprecia
tion of the comedy could not ease the torment of his
mind.
His experiment, however, was succeeding. Mr. Brooks
was accustomed to touchy and difficult young inventors, and
apart from his financial ability, he really understood the
technical possibilities of the cinema. Macafee discovered at once his capacity, and respected it. It was a relief to him to
talk to a man who spoke his own language. He unbent and
grew almost eloquent and obliging, explaining diagrams and chemical formulae. When Brooks suggested a brief demon
stration, he lifted his voice and called to his temporary
assistant.
'Eleanor. Hi, Eleanor!'
Roger started. So it had gone as far as this. He called her Eleanor as though she were his maid, his chattel, his
mistress. 'Absurd, absurd,'he told his raging temper. 'They
are working together. He is an uncouth mannerless crea
ture. He calls her by the name that comes quickest and
easiest to him.'
He watched her adjusting the lights and setting up the
apparatus. She was nimble, intelligent and quiet, intent on
her job.
'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt
not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his
maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass,
!
thought Roger. But
the commandment does not forbid one to covet that which
is not yet one's neighbour's. It leaves the way open for free
competition,
Eleanor turned down the lights. Roger found himself
standing beside D'Aynecourt and Brooks, facing a softly
luminous screen, tinted with pale ochre. Macafee's voice
spoke from the shadows. 'In order to make a test film I
made use of the Western Syndicate's studios in Hertford
shire, and simply took on the Tona Perfecta one of the
settings of a talkie, simultaneously with theirs. This is the
ordinary Western Syndicate Film.'
Roger had never been to the talkies, and he was astounded by the volume of brazen noise which emerged from the loud
speaker below the quivering screen. He was amused to see
that Macafee, with his concentration upon technical probl
ems and his contempt for artistic values, had been lured by an impish providence to choose for his test film a comedy
scene of triumphant vulgarity. For the blaring syncopation
of the music was followed by a vision of Bathing Beauties,
splashing through synthetic shallows towards a rocking, if deceptive, fisherman's cobble. Their squeals of ecstatic dis
comfort, as they
dashed into the cold water, broke like the
notes of a high-powered saxophone through the orchestral
accompaniment; but the music slowly died away to allow
the dialogue to sound above the soft whirring of the
apparatus.
'You will notice that there is no sense of inevitability
about the relationship between the sound and the picture,'
said Macafee. 'The speech might perfectly well not be
speech by the people you see on
the screen.'
The Scotchman was quite sure of himself here, thought
Roger, and not at all ridiculous. Supposing that he had
really done a good piece of work, was not Eleanor justified in admiring him? Was she not right to place herself on the side of technical progress? Was it not just in this control by
man over his material environment that the triumph of the
twentieth century lay? And was she not a woman of her
age?
'She wants to master one kind of technical achievement,*
Roger told himself, 'and to force herself into the competitive
business world. She believes in power, money and efficiency.
She believes that women and Socialists both suffer from lack
of these things. They enjoy being victims instead of masters.
and she disapproves of the enjoyment.'
The film danced and cackled in front of him. Suddenly
Macafee switched it off and turned on the lights.
'I'm going to put on the Tona Perfecta. I shall use the
same sound producers. I want you to notice the difference in synchronization,'
'Quite,' said Mr. Brooks. 'I get you. May we smoke?'
Eleanor came quietly forward with a saucer for an ashtray, returning immediately to her place beside the instru
ment. Mr. Brooks watched her quiet movements.
'That's a smart girl you've got.'
'She will be when I've done with her. I've only had her
a month and that for half-time. She's all right
.'
From Macafee that was glowing praise, but Roger
loathed the possessive patronage of his voice.
The lights went down again, and Roger found himself
watching the same girls splashing and screeching through
the same water. But this time, it was true, there was a differ
ence. The photography was clearer and softer, The sun
light on the water gave an astonishing impression of vivacity.
The sounds came with perfect accuracy as part of the
picture. It seemed as though the girls really uttered their
futile words, and the water really splashed about their
feet.
'This is good work,' he thought, 'The man's clever., damn him; the man's clever.' He contrasted Macafee's mastery of
his technique with his own halting incompetence as a
preacher, and the sick weight of depression settled upon his
body till it became an aching physical discomfort.
But the demonstration ended, the lights went up, and
Macafee talked again to the great man, while D'Aynecourt,
supercilious and amused, wandered about the laboratory.
Roger found Eleanor at his side. Her smooth hair was a
little rumpled, and a smudge of oil had found its way on to
her hot cheek.