Poor Caroline (18 page)

This was his inner life. His outer life was passed in making himself indispensable to his firm, living upon an incredibly small income, saving with heroic concentration the tips
and windfalls which came his way, and informing everybody
who had patience to listen to him that he would one day go
to college. And to college he went. When he was nineteen
he borrowed two hundred pounds from his richest relative,
a pig-dealer in Dundee, and took himself to Edinburgh Uni
versity. In Edinburgh he worked all day and half the night.
He denied himself friendships, recreations, luxuries and hob
bies, and lived in an isolated world where matter became
transparent, where it seemed to him that with his naked eyes
he could watch the solid world dissolving into the rushing activity of unsubstantial protons. But he took his engineer
ing and his chemistry examinations and fulfilled hi
s promise
to succeed in both. At the end of his course he had won a
unique reputation for dogged ability, resourcefulness, and
the power to make himself objectionable. His professors
were prepared to recommend him for academic posts in any
university but Edinburgh. The further he removed him
self, the better pleased they would be. When he won a
travelling fellowship and went to Germany to study colour reproduction, they congratulated themselves with warm
sincerity.

Hugh went to Germany. He remained there for two
years, doing admirable work, strengthening his disapproval
of the English, and acquiring a rough mastery of the German language and scientific methods. He returned to join
National Cinema Products Limited as experimental chemist
at a salary
rising from £600 a year. He endured the really
liberal conditions of commercial employment for just eigh
teen months, during which time he treated the company's laboratory as though it were his private experimental de
partment, quarrelled with all his colleagues and insulted the
managing director. But the
few ideas which he presented
to the company were so valuable that it treated him as a
chartered libertine, until he declared his intention of work
ing only three days a week at the firm's own business and devoting the rest of his time to the Tona Perfecta Synchro
nizing Sound Film. Then that laden camel, the managing
director, faltered. He threatened to resign if he had to
soothe any more tempers ruffled by the eccentricitie
s of
Macafee. He had nothing to say against the Scotsman's
efficiency, which was brilliant, nor against his honesty which
was clear to the point of insult. But he could not work with
him. He could not induce other members of the staff to
work with him. Less originality and more co-operation
might bring greater profit to the firm.

The Board sent for Macafee. The directors approached him as friends and brethren. They suggested tact to him;
they counselled co-operation; they urged meekness and
moderation. Hugh heard them out for twenty minutes, and
then he turned and rent them. He told them his true
opinion of business methods, advertising ethics, publicity,
compromise, and the English character, and he said that if
they came grovelling to him on their hands and knees, beseeching him to work for them, if they offered him £10,000
a year and a free run of their laboratories, he would not cross
the road to enter their buildings.

Then he put on his battered Homburg hat, and marched incontinently from the room.

While drawing his salary of £600 a year, Hugh had been
living at the rate of 355. a week. He now regretted his ex
travagance, but he had at least a pleasant sense of solvency.
He tramped round London and found one day the half-
ruined buildings of some derelict Chemical Works at An-
nerley. The main block had been bombed during the war, and never rebuilt, but the laboratories were in tolerable
condition, having been used for some years by the manu
facturers of a patent medicine. The lease of the two acres
of ground on which the works were built was due to fall in
at the end of three years, but until that time the owners were
only too charmed to find in Hugh a tenant for such undesir
able property. It was just what he needed. It was adequate,
it was isolated; it was cheap. He spent almost the entire sum
of his savings on its equipment, then settled down to com
plete the Tona Perfecta Film.

When this was done he went to the Patents Office, secured
the registration of his invention, and returned to National Cinema Products Limited with his offer. They might have
his film, completed without their help, at his own price.
Had the directors been moved only by those motives of enlightened self-interest discerned in economic man by text
book writers, they would have accepted his proposal and his
terms. But they were human and they had been insulted.
They never wanted to hear of or from Hugh Macafee again.
They wrote, politely but triumphantly, advising him to go elsewhere. A week after their bold refusal they learned of
the Glasgow Galloway Film, and almost wept with joy. For the Glasgow Galloway process was in several details better
than the Tona Perfecta. But they did not inform Hugh
Macafee of his rival.

Hugh received their refusal with proud and angry
triumph. 'Poor worms,' he thought, 'how little they know
their own best interests.' He shut himself up in his grim
laboratory, while late in the night his light streamed out on
to the broken bottles and rusting tins, the oily pools and tufts
of dock and nettles that decorated the waste land surrounding it. He was, however, in a difficult situation. His con
centration upon technical details had entirely blinded him
to the importance of legal and commercial knowledge. He did not realize that designing an invention is merely an
amusing prelude to the serious business of selling it. In his innocence he thought that men had only to do good work in
order to be paid for it. But the truth was that he simply did not know what to do next about his film.

Had he made friends, he could have sought advice from
them about it. But he prided himself that he neither sought
nor took advice. He declared that he valued no man's
opinion, but he was terrified of the least suggestion of criti
cism. Ridicule flayed him. Patronage caused him anguish.
In the world of business competition he was about as capable
of looking after his own interests as an unshelled tortoise
below a herd of charging elephants.

He had taken a small unfurnished back bedroom above a monumental mason's shop in Penge. He paid six shillings a
week for it, and thought the rent extortionate. Between his
rooms, his laboratory, and the Public Library, he walked
with dour regularity, sometimes for days speaking to no one but Campbell, a discredited and unemployed chemist whom
he employed as his assistant. He regarded with contempt
the people whom he saw in the London streets. He hated
the fat women who fell into trances in front of Stupendous
Sale Reductions. He loathed the fatigued but insatiable mothers who pushed laden perambulators like battering-
rams through the spell-bound crowd, pausing in front of
Genuine Winter Bargains - Lady's fur-trimmed Coats, only
49
s
.
6d. -
Celanese Silk Underwear - and 'Beauty Cases -
everything for the Toilet.' He loathed them because they
were ugly and stupid and futile, because they blocked his
way when he was hurrying on serious business; he loathed them because they were leisured and happy and convivial,
while he was lean, hungry, and distracted, consumed by
unattainable desires, mastered by dreams, lonely and fierce
and arrogant. He loathed them because there was not one
individual in those gaping crowds who would tell him how to sell his To
na Perfecta design, nor who would care the
farthing's change from a
is.
nfever was marketed or not. At such times he longed for a machine-gun to mow down those loitering figures, those
gaping vacant faces. He wanted a bayonet to thrust his
way through the crowd. He wanted an earthquake to rend
the earth beneath their dragging feet, almost content that he should perish like Samson in the general ruin. On one such occasion a small child lolling half-drowsily on its mother's
arm looked up and saw his white staring face and furious
eyes and burst into a roar of terror, dropping the dummy
from its mouth. Hugh, wedged in the crowd, saw its mother
stop, retrieve the dummy, dust it on her black coat, suck it
herself to remove further impurities, and thrust it once more
into the child's wide mouth. Sick, furious, wretched, Hugh
turned away and nearly ended his life under a motor-bus as
he
strode angrily down the street.

§2

One evening in the early autumn of 1928 Hugh was kept
waiting at the Public Library. He wanted Fowell's
Experiments with Light,
and he wanted it badly. He was irritated
almost to the verge of insanity, fatigued, despondent and
hungry, and he wanted his book so that he could return at
once to the soothing solitude of his back bedroom. He was
at work on a new preparation of cellulose which he believed
would increase by 100 per cent, the subtlety of colour repro
duction, but at the moment the composition baffled him.
All this exasperation
with his own failures kindled his
wrath against society, and at last he turned on the assistant
librarian and told her what he thought of public library
methods.

She was a foolish-looking young person with large roman
tic hazel eyes and a soft drooping mouth. Her high Cockney
voice was pitched to refinement, and a tiresome affectation
of squirming her shoulders beneath her blue crocheted
jumper set Hugh's teeth on edge. The more he railed at
her, the more she squirmed.

'But Mr. Macafee,' she protested, directly she made her
voice heard above his flow of ferocious Scots, 'I have men
tioned the matter to the chief librarian. I have really.'

'I put it down in the suggestion-book six weeks ago.'

'I know. And I did go to Mr. Bruce about it. I said you'd
told me it was very important.'

'I hope you did.'

'And he said that it was not the kind of book that there would be much demand for. He said that these technical
books aren't really what we're supposed to supply.'

'Oh, he did, did he?'

'Well, we must consult the needs of our rate-payers.'

'I see. And I'm not a rate-payer, I suppose?'

'Mr. Bruce said that if you wanted the book in all
that
hurry, you'd better go to the British Museum Reading Room
for it.'

'And do you think, woman, that I'm going to waste good shoe leather tramping to the British Museum because some gauntless, pop-eyed, yammering half-wit doesn't know the
value of a great book when he hears of it?'

'Oh, come, come, not a great book now. Even in its own
line, not a great book.'

At the rough jovial voice, Hugh spun round, and found
himself confronted by a very singular person. He was a
large, heavily built, picturesque, slovenly and almost hand
some man, of whose low-collared, ill-laundered blue shirt,
broad-brimmed hat carried in stubby blackened fingers, and
thick grizzled hair Hugh immediately disapproved. Every
thing about him seemed over-decorative and under-washed,
while the slight cast in his handsome bold dark eyes con
firmed the air of Bloomsbury-Wild-Western villainy sug
gested by his swaggering manner and Spanish whiskers.