Poor Caroline (16 page)

All the way home to the club, Eleanor felt the old familiar
pain at her heart. She went up to her room and lay on her
bed in the darkness, seeing again the stoep, overgrown with
feathery plumbago and deep magenta bougainvilia. She
saw her father's big wicker armchair, its one arm broken
and bound up with string. She saw the table with its pile
of crumpled papers, and the fly whisk, and the empty soda
syphon, and the pipe rack and tobacco tin. She could hear
again the heavy shuffling tread and laboured breathing of
the men who carried the stretcher across the stoep and into
her father's room. Every detail of the interval between Jan
du Plessis's message and the arrival of the body reacted itself
in her awakened memory. 'Immune. Immune.' She beat
her small clenched fist against her forehead, hoping to find
relief in physical pain. Her father's big signet ring, which
she wore on her second finger, cut her eyebrow. She did not
care. She welcomed pain. Oh Father, Father!

There was a knock on her door.

'Hullo, de la Roux! Are you in?'

A pause.

'I say. Hullo!'

She made no answer. She held her breath, praying that
they would go away. She heard Rita's voice saying to some
one else, 'She can't have come in yet. Well, she'll miss the meeting.' She heard footsteps vanishing down the stone
corridor.

Hour after hour she lay in the darkness, thinking about
her father, and immunity, and poor Caroline.

§5

The first thing that struck Eleanor about Saint Augus
tine's Church was that it might have been a building in the
Cape. It was about fifty years old, large, ugly, dark, and
built in an awkward combination of Gothic and Classical
styles.

Eleanor had been brought up as a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, but both she and her father had been agnostics without much interest in religion. She had at
tended Anglican services only twice before.

She noticed the pictures round the walls - 'The Stations
of the Cross,' Caroline whispered. Eleanor thought them
crude and rather repulsive. She disliked the smell of incense,
and the attitudes of the shabby men and women who
dropped almost to their knees facing the chancel before they
turned in to the pitch-pine pews.

She did not know why people wanted to meet together
at fixed intervals in the formal discomfort of a church, to
kneel down and stand up and sing preposterous words about their bones melting and their enemies flying, and the king's
daughter wearing clothing of wrought gold. Those frag
mentary readings from the Old and New Testament, those
prayers repeated so often that the words flowed smoothly
past the consciousness of the congregation, those ridiculous
hymns; why did anyone want them? Why did they imagine
that such performances could possibly be agreeable to Al
mighty God - if there was a God? Why didn't they see
what a waste of time it all was, when there was so much to
be done, infant welfare centres to be established, and indexes to be prepared, street directories to be marked for canvassers,
slum landlords to be confronted, facts about India and
China and the wickedness of international oil trusts to be
made known? All the best people were over-working themselves into nervous breakdowns, and these smug Christians
bobbed up and down before a grotesque and ugly altar. There was so much to be done. In four days' time, on
Thursday night indeed, Macafee's ultimatum expired. The
Christian Cinema Company would be saved or lost. It
seemed to Eleanor only too probable that it would be lost. Mr. Isenbaum remained completely inaccessible. Mr. St.
Denis had gone to Paris for Christmas, and there had in
considerately fallen a victim to the influenza epidemic. He
was better, and returning at the end of the week, and had
wired asking Macafee to postpone his action. But Macafee
was obstinate.

'I see his point. I see his point,' Caroline had said. 'It's
his invention. He says he needs the money. He has post
poned it once. But then pioneer work is like that. Friends
will come with you part of the way. Then they get fright
ened. They begin to ask for their reward to be given on
earth as it is in heaven.'

'We must pray,' Caroline told Eleanor as they walked to
church. Tray for the miracle. I believe that this is being
sent to try our faith and that at the eleventh hour we shall
be saved. They talk about the excitement of gambling. We
could tell them something about that, couldn't we?' Her
protest of the previous week was quite forgotten. She drew
Eleanor into the circle of her experience by that inclusive
'we.' 'I always say that the ordinary racer or gambler
doesn't know what risk is. Why, we've staked everything -
everything - on a hundred-to-one chance, we pioneers. And
we're going to win, aren't we?'

It was perfectly true, thought Eleanor. Caroline with her
gallantry and enthusiasm and recklessness took enormous
risks. Moreover, that one moment of weakness over, she
faced the odds with magnificent gusto.

She seemed even to
enjoy the situation. Whatever fears of anguish of spirit as
sailed her during the long nights when she found herself
unable successfully to emulate Mr. Lloyd George's gift of sleep, she showed no signs of faltering by day. On her way to church she had seemed radiant, even exalted, as though
'facing the worst' for her meant looking into a vision of forthcoming glory.

But in church, after the organ had played, and the short
procession of choirboys in rumpled lace-trimmed surplices and scarlet cassocks had stumbled along the aisle, Caroline
turned to Eleanor with a look of dismay.

'He's not here,' she whispered. 'Father Lasseter's not
here. It's a stranger.'

'Oh well,' thought Eleanor. 'Even if he had been here, I don't suppose he would have done anything. I wonder how
seriously other people do take Caroline? I wish I'd seen this
Mr. St. Denis. Well, in any case, it will be all over by
Thursday. Nothing really can save them now.'

For she was very sure that Mr. Isenbaum meant to evade
all further responsibility and that the dilettante Mr. St.
Denis did not really care. The Christian Cinema Company
could collapse unmourned by anyone but Caroline.

She was not interested in the service. She wanted to get away, from the church, and from Caroline. She told herself
that the Christian Cinema Company was nothing to her. If no more fantastic than a dozen other semi-philanthropic enterprises, it was impractical enough. It annoyed Eleanor
that Caroline should hitch her wagon to so remote a star.

'The psalms for the 27th evening of the month,' an
nounced the priest who was not Father Lasseter. 'The 126th
psalm.'

Caroline nudged Eleanor. Her eyes were shining.

'I had forgotten it was to-night,' she whispered. 'Surely
this is a sign. I always count so much on the psalms.'

The choir sang,

'When the Lord turned the captivity of Sion: then were
we like unto them that dream.

'Then was our mouth filled with laughter: and our tongue with joy.

'Then said they among the heathen: The Lord hath done
great things for them.

'Yea, the Lord hath done great things for us already:
whereof we rejoice.'

The tears were rolling down Caroline's cheeks, but she
held her head high, and joined in the singing with her husky,
tremulous voice.

'Turn our captivity O Lord: as the rivers in the south.

'They that sow in tears: shall reap in joy.

'He that now goeth on his way weeping, and beareth forth
good seed: shall doubtless come again with joy, and bring
his sheaves with him.'

After that even the
De Profundis
seemed an anti-climax.
Eleanor could feel Caroline beside her sailing through the
service on the crest of a wave of excitement. Even she herself was moved, though she distrusted her emotion. It was
nothing more than a coincidence that this was the 27th
evening of January, and that the
126th
psalm happened to
fall upon that day. Almost any other psalm in the prayer
book could have been as significant. This pretence of seeking signs in the accidental choice of a psalm savoured of necromancy. Caroline belonged to the foolish if not adulterous generation which sought after a sign. Eleanor could
not forget that vision of her as a witch, bending over the
kettle beside her sitting-room fire, the flames flickering upon
her crimson velvet dress, and painting curious shadows on
her face. Caroline was a witch. She believed in magic. She
sought for signs in the psalms.

Eleanor began to long for the society of plain practical people who earned a respectable living, and kept their feet
on the firm ground of common sense, and talked about cattle
diseases and the condition of the market.

Yet her heart burned with pity for Caroline. Life was
so short, the future so unstable. Some people walked so
richly endowed with friends and wealth and fortune and success. Others had nothing. Caroline had nothing. The
benevolence of fortune was too wholly dissociated from
merit.

If Caroline had forgotten her cry of protest against the
cruelty of Eleanor's privileged youth, Eleanor had not. She
thought that she would never again forget. The contrast between her own comparatively enviable future and Caroline's loneliness and poverty haunted her throughout the service. She watched" Caroline's head bent devoutly over her worn woollen gloves. She watched her raise it proudly
as she stood up for the responses. She watched the grand-
ladyish air with which she snapped her lorgnettes open to
follow the lesson in her Bible.

'If I were God,' thought Eleanor, 'I would make Caro
line's miracle happen, just because it's time that something nice did happen to her. What's the use of being a snorting,
magical, bull-roaring, miracle-working, storm-quelling, Je
hovah-deity, if you can't have a little fun sometimes?'

'He hath put down the mighty from their seat,' Caroline sang with robust conviction, 'and hath exalted the humble
and meek.'

That was a pious hope, thought Eleanor, not a statement of fact. The mighty generally remained firmly established in their seats, and if they fell, they crushed the meek and
humble in their fall.

By the time they reached the anthem, she was in a con
dition of prickly irritation, disliking God more than ever, for
His failure to make good use of all His opportunities. But
Caroline at her side seemed to be drawing spiritual susten
ance from every sentence of the service, even from the prayer
for the Royal family.