Authors: Winifred Holtby
'Well, we did save the films,' Roger consoled her.
They drifted into silence, as the taxi bumped and rattled down the gusty streets. At the main entrance of the hospital
the policeman left them to go in search of the night-porter.
Roger, a little beyond himself with pain and shock and
excitement, turned to Eleanor. Suddenly it seemed to him
as though all the evening's events fell into their proper place.
He felt tremendously confident and happy.
'I want to apologize for the way I behaved in the factory. I was grossly rude. But I was frightened for you,' he began
in a polite conversational voice.
'It was perfectly all right - rather funny really. I suppose
you saved my life. I'm very grateful.'
'You needn't be. You know, of course, I love you.'
'You what?'
'I love you. I don't want to bother you about it, but it
may explain a little why I was so savage when I was afraid
you might be killed.'
'Oh,' said Eleanor very softly. 'Oh.'
'I had not really meant to tell you,' he continued with conversational equanimity. 'But it occurred to me that no other explanation of my conduct was rational, and really there is no reason why you should not know. I mean, you
see, loving a person puts one under a definite obligation to them. I have got so much happiness from simply knowing
that you are in the world, that I naturally should be glad
to have any chance of repaying it. Of course, I realize that this can mean nothing to you,' he went on, arguing with a
sort of fierce good humour. 'But sometimes it might be con
venient to know that there is somebody in the world who
would give all he possesses for the chance of serving you. I'm
not suggesting that there
is
anything I can do. But just in
case.'
'Oh - er - thank you,' she said flatly.
'It's very good of you to bother with me. Now I promise
not to refer again to this unless you choose. And now ought
you really to be waiting here? You must be frightfully
tired?'
'Oh, I'm perfectly all right. I wouldn't have missed it all for anything - the wind, I mean. But I see our friend the
policeman coming back with a whole retinue of stretcher-
bearers and whatnots.'
'Good. Excellent. Oh, by the way, if you happen to be
seeing Miss Denton-Smyth within a day or two, would you
be so awfully good as to tell her why I can't go round to-morrow? I think she was expecting me,'
'But, of course, she'll have to hear about all this. She'll
probably come rushing round to see whether you're still alive.
She thinks the world of you, you know. Poor Caroline!'
Chapter 6 :
Clifton Roderick Johnson
§1
earlier
that same evening Clifton Roderick Johnson,
proprietor, manager, secretary, tutor and director-of-
studies to the Anglo-American School of Scenario Writing,
led his four pupils to the window of his Essex Street
Office and bade them contemplate the view to their
left.
'There,' he boomed, thrusting his vast head and shoulders through the window and gesticulating towards Essex Stairs.
'There's a bit of old London. That's Romance. That's
Beauty.' He withdrew his body and one by one the clerk
from Islington, the maiden lady from a Bayswater boarding-
house, the retired jeweller from Streatham and the young
woman from Barnes, who wanted to be like Pola Negri,
strained their necks to look upon Romance and Beauty, then
followed him back to their table. This was the Tutorial
Glass in Scenario Suggestion, Course II, a class which Mr. Johnson gave his pupils to understand was the most subtly advanced and select
of all his classes, a class at which He
Himself presided, and to which only his most promising
pupils were admitted Th
e Chosen Four, who sat gaping at
the deal table covered with apple-green casement cloth and
ink splashes, thought that they were the star students chosen
from a clientèle of some hundreds, w
ho in a larger, ruder,
less eclectic hall heard words of wisdom from Mr. Johnson's
Staff. They did not know, an
d indeed it is only fair to
add that at the moment Mr, Johnson hardly remembered, that they were the sole pupils whose fees of six guineas,
cash in advance, had been paid into the school account.
They did not know, and indeed Mr. Johnson hardly
knew, that their lecturer who spoke so confidently of
technique, cuts,
drama and royalties had himself been
able to sell for performance only one scenario and a set of
captions.
Johnson was certainly feeling good that evening. Ideas
flooded his mind so fast that they almost choked him, and
the four pupils had no sense that they were being defrauded
of their money's worth.
'Write down in your note-books, and engrave upon your memories,' roared Johnson, 'that you should never waste a
good view. Every view looks picturesque from some angle.
The dullest life gives scope for spot-lights somewhere. Bear
ing that in mind, let's turn to the Home Exercise. Got that
view of the Essex Stairs in your heads? Right. Fire away. Design five different scenes suitable for
(a)
Sil
ent films
(A) Talking films
(c)
Colour - talking films
against the background of the Essex Stairs - making use of
The movement up and down the stairs
The
teashop door half-way up the stairs
The view of the Embankment from the stairs
The busy life of Essex Street at the top. Think of
Essex Street - movement - traffic - City life - street musicians
— proximity to Fleet Street — Press — Strand — Law Courts —
Temple - Business Offices. Then think of the Embank
ment — River - Romance — Roaming - London the biggest
Port in the World — Gateway to the unknown — New
London - Old London. Now think of different moods for a
scenario.
Comedy - light - spring - love - pathos - human -
sentiment. An April shower - primroses or violets sold on the pavement - a girl runs to shelter under Essex arch. The
young man shelters too.
Farce - a chase - fat Jew hawker - absconding up
and down the steps - cars parked by embankment gardens
- motor-cycle - try to ride cycle down the stairs - fat woman
at bottom selling toy ducks.
Tragedy - hero leaving the Law Courts - disgraced
alone - all lost - river suggests flight - suicide - peace - be
tween the indifferent hustle of the Strand an' the eternal
peace of the river -
That no lives live for peace
That dead men rise up never — er — er
That even the weariest river
winds somewhere home — down? home to the sea.
Look it up. Look it up. Always verify your quotations -Remember that a little verse goes a long way in sentimental
comedy, drama, or tragedy - Keep it outa crook stuff an'
farce.
(d)
Historic - that's the fourth - look up history costume
stuff.' What would happen on Essex Stairs? You gotta find
out how old the Stairs are - what happened there. An'
what could have happened there. Remember that film his
tory deals with possibilities rather than facts. Local colour —
time colour. Keep it vivid. Pep it up with a bit o' farce.
Love story an' s
o on. Keep your love stories light, without any
sex
in them. I'm gonna talk straight. You're not kids,
nor'm I. Man to man. The public wants good strong
human interest, but it doesn't need
Sex.
Give clean humour.
Don't mind riskin' a tear or two. What do we t
ake the
Missus to the Movies for but to give her a good cry, eh? But
keep it
strong
an' keep it
simple.
Now send me in those
synopses before next Friday; write on one side of the paper
only an' don't forget a penny-halfpenny stamp. That's all.'
He dismissed the class with much hand-shaking and saluta
tion. 'Well - good night - So-long - Cheerio. Good night,
Mr. Simpson. 'Night, Miss Brodie. 'Night, Miss Elloway.
'Night, Mr. Loram.
Good
night.'
The pupils snapped up their dispatch-cases. They fum
bled for their umbrellas, and off they went, clattering down the steep stone steps, chattering: 'Well,
wasn't
he good this
evening?' 'Mustn't it be
marvellous
to have all those ideas?'
Even Loram, the jeweller, with masculine restraint, con
ceded, 'Brilliant fellow. Very. Expect we shall hear more
of him one day.' Whatever else Johnson might do for his pupils, he certainly gave them a sense of vitality. His enormous physical gusto invigorated them. He made them feel
that life was full of exciting possibilities; he made them feel
that they were in close contact with a cultured mind.
In his search for culture and beauty, Johnson had ac
quired almost every kind of outline and selection that
modern publishers' advertisements could recommend. On
his shelves were Outlines of History, Science, Philosophy
and Religion; Literature was served up to him in the
Hun
dred Most Famous Stories of the World,
in the
Thirty-Seven Forms
of the Plot,
and the
Dictionary of Literary Characters.
He knew the characteristics of Mr. Micawber and Paul Dombey with
out having read a word of Dickens. He could adorn his
tales with classical allusions and paint his morals from great
fiction of the Continent. All modern labour-saving devices
for recognizing allusions to Cervantes, Bellerophon, Cicero
and Ella Wheeler Wilcox lay at his elbow, and if in the
course of his headlong gallops through history, science,
literature and religion, he sometimes misplaced an island,
or swept an artist or composer into the wrong century. who
among his audience was to question him? And, if challenged, had he not his perfect justification?
'Dates?' said Johnson. 'What are dates? An arbitrary
division of time invented for the convenience of unimaginative men. 'Smy belief that in the future you'll never stop to
bother about the date of this A.D. or that B.C. If you want
facts an' dates, hop along the Strand to Somerset House, You'll get 'em there. You'll get nothing else. Dead stuff, I
say. Dead stuff. I give you living knowledge. I give you
Beauty — The Eternal Quest. The Eternal Question. I give
you the key to the Universe. Culture —'
His breast expanded to the thought, of culture and his
eyes glowed. He soared high on the wind of his own words. His borrowed Americanisms infected him with a Great Glad
sense of Pep and Progress. He forgot the unfortunate slump in Bolivian Minerals, the return of his latest scenario from
his agent, with a brief note to say that he had exhausted
all possible markets, the gnawing worry of accumulating
debts, and the thought that Mollie was going to have
another child.