Poor Caroline Read online

  '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.

&nbs
p; '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."