Poor Caroline (11 page)

'I asked you a straight question, Isenbaum.'

'Look here, Macafee. I haven't much time now. Lunch
with me one day next week.'

'I've got an interview to-morrow with the managing
director of British-American Movietone Company. I want
to know if I'm to put the Tona Perfecta into his hands.'

'That's a dud concern, anyway. I happen to know. But
why didn't you bring this up at the Board?'

'It's my fault, Mr. Isenbaum,' cried Miss Denton-Smyth. 'I didn't want him to raise such a very, very serious subject
just when everything was going so nicely. You
know
how
easily frightened Mr. Guerdon is, and Mr. Johnson makes
things just a
little
difficult to deal with, and besides there was
your other proposal, Mr. Macafee. And I thought that
really, perhaps, seeing that Mr. Isenbaum could really settle everything quite easily, it wasn't worth while making it all a
matter for the Board at this stage.'

'What do you want me to do?'

'I've made a very reasonable offer, Isenbaum. I've said
that if the company can show £3,000 capital raised before
the New Year, I'll stick to it for a bit longer. If not, I go.'

'And I thought,' panted Miss Denton-Smyth, 'that see
ing you are
sure
to be putting some more capital in sooner
or later, it would be just as easy for you to put in three
thousand now just to show that you
do
believe in the com
pany, and to convince Mr. Macafee that all his fears are
simply the result of inexperience and over-anxiety."

'This ought to have come before the Board. It's a
very serious proposition.' Damn them, damn them. He'd
paid enough already. They'd bleed him before they were
through. God Almighty, there were other Etonians beside
St. Denis. There were other schools beside Eton. Three
thousand would almost pay for the boy's entire education.

'I can't deal with a matter like this now,' he said brusquely.
'I'm very sorry you kept Mr. Macafee from raising it at the Board meeting. Naturally you know my interest in the com
pany. But you can't deal with a matter of this importance
now all in a hurry. When's the next Board meeting?'

'Not in the ordinary course of things till after the New
Year, you know. Oh, Mr. Isenbaum.'

'Can't you wait, Macafee?'

'No, I can't. And I won't. I'm seeing these British-
American Movietone people. I want to know what to say
to them.'

'You'll have to call another Board meeting,' said Joseph.
'Of course this must come before the Board. I don't think
you need have any fears, Macafee. Naturally I see your
point of view. Let me know when a meeting has been
arranged. Good night. Good night.'

He took his hat. He ran down the stairs, his small feet in
their patent-leather shoes twinkling below his rounded waist
coat. He had got away very cleverly. He had done the
adroit, the sensible thing. Postpone. Postpone. And then
slip quietly out of further responsibility. After all, he was
the only man who stood to lose. Five hundred was five
hundred.

He rang for the lift, climbed inside and shut the door.
His eyes were just on a level with the corridor when Maca
fee's worn brown shoes slouched into his vision. He did not
reverse the lift, but shot down to the ground floor, let himself out of the lift, and out of the building. In order to make doubly sure his own escape, he left the lift door ajar. Maca
fee would have to walk downstairs.

Only when he jumped upon a bus, he remembered that
unless Macafee closed the door - an unlikely courtesy for
that gauche young man - Miss Denton-Smyth would have
to walk down also. Well, after all, the Christian Cinema Company was her hobby, not his. She must take the rough
with the smooth, he thought. Poor Caroline.

Chapter 3 :
Eleanor De La Roux

§1

in
the autumn of 1928, Eleanor de la Roux came to stay with the Smiths of Marshington. She was the daughter of Mr. Smith's young sister, Agatha, who in 1903 had been
sent for the sake of her health to South Africa with a school
friend from the West Riding, whose father had business on
the Rand. And there a terrible thing happened to her. She
had fallen in love with a Boer veterinary surgeon, and mar
ried him. A Boer. One of those fellows who lay in ambush
to shoot on the white flag and the red cross
and all that.
And a veterinary surgeon. A common vet. It was incredible.

Naturally the Smiths had been very much upset. There
were family consultations at Marshington, cables to Pretoria, collapses at Kingsport, and visits to solicitors. The
West Riding family were warned
never to communicate
with a Smith again. Three Smith ladies approached the
brink of a nervous breakdown, and had to recuperate to
gether at Torquay, where in the hotel lounge they discussed
and rediscussed the astonishing folly of poor Agatha.

Agatha herself, after her first long, rambling, joyful letter
to tell of her engagement, only wrote home three times. The first letter described her marriage. The second de
fended her husband, Hugo de la Roux, in terms more credit
able to her heart than her discretion. The third announced
the birth of her son. The next letter from South Africa came
a year later and was from Hugo de la Roux himself. It
told of the death of his wife in giving birth to a second child,
a girl called Eleanor. After that, the Smiths heard of the de
la Roux's no more, until years later a business friend of Mr.
Smith's described a pleasant visit to the de la Roux's home outside Pretoria. 'De la Roux's a very decent fellow - very
well thought of. In the Government service. Of course, the
veterinary service in South Africa's quite IT. Different to a
vet in England. Yes, the boy's A.
1.,
going to study mining
engineering in the U.S.A. he tells us. The girl? Oh! a fine little girl - quite a kid. High-diving champion of the Trans
vaal Girls' schools, they tell me, and plays a top-hole game of tennis. Clever too. Going to college next year. Says she's
going to be a vet like her father. Not much sort of a job for a woman,
I
say, but you never know what girls will do in
these days. A game little lass. Quite the hostess and all that.
Thought a lot of out there, I should say, the de la Roux's.'

That was in 1926. Two years later the Smiths heard that
Hugo de la Roux had been killed in a motor accident, that
the boy was in America, and the girl quite alone. They
decided to let bygones be bygones. Mr. Smith asked his
wife to invite Agatha's child to Marshington. Somewhat to their surprise, she came, and within forty-eight hours of her arrival, the Smiths decided that they had been right in their
original estimation of the catastrophe of a mixed marriage
and its products. They did not like Eleanor de la Roux.
They did not like her small, thin figure, her lean brown
hands, nor her boyish tweed coats and tailored shirts. They did not like her disconcerting silence, nor her equally dis
concerting questions. They did not like her low husky voice,
with its faint suggestion of a colonial accent, and her frequent use of Afrikaans ejaculations. She was not what Mrs.
Smith called an easy guest. The girls confirmed this con
demnation.

'Well, anyway, she won't be here for long. She says she's
going to London to a secretarial college.'

'Why on earth? When she
has
done two years at science
in South Africa, why doesn't she go on with it?'

'She says she does not want to be a vet, now.'

'I expect she's the sort of girl who never knows what she
does want.'

'I don't like this idea of a girl at her age on her own in
London,' said Mrs. Smith.

'Well. We don't want her here, do we?' asked the prac
tical Betty.

'And she's of age, isn't she? And her money's all her own.
She can do what she likes.'

Eleanor was of age. She had nearly four thousand pounds of her own. She could do what she liked. She was going to
London to a secretarial training school to learn shorthand,
typing and business method. She did not consult the Smiths
about her future. She went forward very quietly, using in
troductions from her university in the Transvaal, writing
her letters, making her plans. She told the Smiths just as
much as she thought it necessary for them to know about her business, and she sat for hours, her small hands folded in her lap, her grey eyes staring straight before her, saying nothing,
doing nothing.

'If you ask me,' concluded Betty, 'I should say she was a
bit queer in the head.'

It did not occur to the Smiths to attribute any of their
cousin's eccentricity to the shock of her father's death, to her
loneliness, her grief, and the disruption of all that had been her former life. They did not know of the agony which kept her wakeful night after night, feeling in her nerves the jolt of
her father's car as its wheel caught in the rut, and the axle
snapped, turning the whole world upside down in a crashing
nightmare. They could know nothing of her torturing won
der whether her father had been stunned immediately, or
whether he had lain conscious, helpless, and in pain, pinned
beneath the car through the long night and through half
the dusty day. The road had been lonely, and a wandering
native found him late the following afternoon; and neither
the Smiths nor anyone else knew that.

Eleanor had refused to go with him on that six days' tour
in the northern Transvaal. She had wanted to finish her
term in the laboratories; she had wanted to play in a tennis
match at Potchefstroom. Being a convivial creature, her
father disliked driving alone. He enjoyed Eleanor's com
pany. And she had not gone. And because she had not
gone, he had probably drunk rather too much whisky at his
last stopping-place and he had driven carelessly, and he
was dead. Eleanor felt that it was all her fault. There was, it seemed to her in the weeks which followed, no remedy
for remorse. Grief might soften; disappointments could be
conquered; fears migh
t be proved false. But the pain that
gnawed at her mind was constant and untempered.

She could not endure the Transvaal, because he had died
there. She did not want to take her degree and train as a
veterinary surgeon, because it seemed ignoble to step into the career thus taken from him. She had come to England because she was sure that she would hate it, to the Smiths
because she was sure that they would hate her. Only by
inflicting upon herself the discipline of discomfort could she
endure her father's death.