Poor Caroline Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 com mercial 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 call ing 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 Den ton-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