“It isn’t printed. It’s been made into a film—super-film, they call it.”
His hand came to a pause on the cat’s back, and he glared at me. I hastened on:
“I ought to have told you what I was doing, but you’re so prickly, and you’ve got such confounded superior notions. I thought if I did you’d be biting off your nose to spite your own face. The fact is it made a marvellous scenario. Here’s the contract, and here’s a cheque on my bank for the price—three thousand pounds. If you like to treat me as your agent, you owe me three hundred pounds. I don’t expect it, but I’m not proud like you, and I shan’t sneeze.”
“Good God!” he said.
“Yes, I know. But it’s all nonsense, Bruce. You can carry scruples to altogether too great length. Tainted source! Everything’s tainted, if you come to that. The film’s a quite justified expression of modern civilisation—a natural outcome of the age. It gives amusement; it affords pleasure. It may be vulgar, it may be cheap, but we are vulgar, and we are cheap, and it’s no use pretending we’re not—not you, of course, Bruce, but people at large. A vulgar age wants vulgar amusement, and if we can give it that amusement we ought to; life’s not too cheery, anyway.”
The glare in his eyes was almost paralysing me, but I managed to stammer on:
“You live out of the world—you don’t realise what humdrum people want; something to balance the greyness, the—the banality of their lives. They want blood, thrill, sensation of all sorts. You didn’t mean to give it them, but you have, you’ve done them a benefit, whether you wish to or not, and the money’s yours and you’ve got to take it.”
The cat suddenly jumped down. I waited for the storm to burst.
“I know,” I dashed on, “that you hate and despise the film——”
Suddenly his voice boomed out: