Read Poor Caroline for Free Online

dear?'
    'Rector's son. Second cousin of Lord Herringdale, a great Evangelical peer - or his father was, anyway. Eton. Ox ford. Ex-service. Noblesse oblige. Secretary or - no - chair man 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 some body 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 Recrea tion 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."
    She was absurd, of course. But so was life absurd. Basil lit a cigarette and lay blowing exquisite smoke-rings toward the ceiling, and listened. The sight of Gloria in her crepe- de-Chine chemise and scarlet kimono, so engagingly incon gruous to her subject, tickled his sense of humour. He en joyed the thought of Caroline Denton-Smyth and all her type of moralizing churchwomen finding a protagonist in his wife. He appreciated the comedy of vengeance which he could exact upon all the hours of boredom spent during his boyhood while sitting in the Rectory drawing-room,
    hearing his mother's conversation with the ladies of the Mothers' Union. He sat up and laughed at Gloria. 'Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.' 'And then, just think how excited poor old Caroline what's-her-name would be to see an idea of hers come true. I don't suppose she's ever had many of her ideas catch on, do you? Oh, Basil, we must do it. Think of her, fluttering about her Bayswater Boarding House, collecting subscribers, or shareholders or whatever we decide to call them. The more we can make it sound commercial, the more of a novelty it'll be to them. Oh, we'll give her a run for her money before we've done with her, poor Caroline!"

    Chapter 2 : Joseph Isenbaum

    §1

    number 987 Sackville Street, London, W.1, though regis tered in the Street Directory as the Gentleman's Tailoring