The stranger stood peering, gripping his cheap suitcase. Though the foyer was empty, he seemed to be looking longingly for somebody or something.
At last Mary Saunders could stand it no longer. She raised the glass slide before the grille bars and peered out into the draughty street.
“Anything I can do for you, sir?” she asked politely.
The man descended two of the steps and stooped to look to look at her through the gold-painted filigree. “What time do you open, miss?”
“Half-past seven, sir—and the performance starts at quarter to eight, finishing at ten o’clock....”
“It doesn’t matter when it’s over.... Look, that poster on the foyer there—next to the picture of Hedy Lamarr. It is advertising Lydia Fane in Love on the Highway. Is that on now?”
Mary pointed up through the bars of her cage to the underside of the canopy. “It’s advertised up there, sir, on the streamer....”
The stranger looked above him at a lengthy oblong board painted green along its borders and suspended by chains. It swung to and fro in the cold wind, and a long paper sheet within it advertised Lydia Fane in gigantic letters with Love on the Highway in a small scroll beneath it. As yet, with the canopy lights off, it was not immediately visible from below.
“Starting tonight, sir,” Mary explained. “Runs tonight, Tuesday, and Wednesday.”
“Can I book?”
“Certainly, sir—Circle only, though. We block-book the Stalls for regular patrons....” Her slim arm went up to the charts out of the stranger’s view.
“Circle will do,” he decided. “I want the best seat in the front row for tonight, tomorrow, and Wednesday night....”
Mary Saunders blinked. Then she drove the point of her blue crayon through seat A-11 on the charts for that night, the next, and Wednesday. Skilfully she thumbed the ticket-blocks and then handed three tickets under the goldwork.
“Seven-and-six, sir, please.”
Without a word the stranger planked down three half-crowns. “Do you have matinées?” he asked, as he took up the tickets and prepared to go.
“Every day except Monday, sir.”
“Thank you, miss.”
He picked up his case, looked once more at the streamer under the canopy, then began to walk across the road towards the ‘Golden Saddle’.
That same evening, still in his grey coat but with his hat resting on the plush balustrade in front of him, he watched the programme through with that immovable fixity which seemed to be a habit with him....
And the following evening at precisely the same time, he was once more in A-11 in the centre of the row. This time the usherette in charge of the Circle remembered him from the previous night, and wondered to herself what anybody could wish to see twice in such an indifferent programme.
* * * *
Frederick Allerton always left home for duty at the Langhorn Cinema with a profound sense of the responsibility ahead of him. Maybe his comparative youth—he was twenty-one—caused him to magnify his position out of all normalcy, but it did at least make him extremely conscientious. As the chief projectionist of the cinema, he took pride in the fact that everything depended on him, that the smiles or curses of the patrons would in the main be the outcome of his control. And in his five years of employment, creeping up from lowly rewind-boy to chief, he had shown himself ambitious, a clever electrical engineer, and at times an excellent showman. His key-job and low medical grade had kept him at his post, a diligent controller of the whirring, hot machines that plough through miles of celluloid, different and indifferent.
At six-forty-five precisely on this Wednesday evening he took his usual farewell of his parents, buttoned up his overcoat, and went out through the kitchen into the back garden. Cold wind under icy December stars smarted his cheeks as he tugged his bicycle from the outside shed. He threw one long leg over the saddle and rested his foot on the pedal. With the other foot he pushed himself along until free of the pathway up the side of the house—then he went sailing illegally down the pavement to his favourite dip in the kerb and so out into the road.
With a whirr his homemade dynamo came into being and cast a fan of radiance on the asphalt of the quiet suburban road ahead of him. To his rear the red companion light glowed in baleful warning. He was rather proud of his dynamo, as he was of all his electrical handiwork, but it troubled him that the damned thing had developed an obstinate flicker. Now and again it would go out and leave him pressing against searing wind and darkness—then back the light would come with exasperating brilliance. Still, he knew the way blindfolded: the only worry was the possibility of the police happening on him at the wrong moment.
To reach the centre of Langhorn he had two miles to cover, and he usually reckoned to do it in exactly ten minutes—longer if the wind was against him. Tonight it was against him all the way, and he pedalled with his head down against it, cursing under his breath.
Eleven minutes after leaving home he reached Langhorn High Street, but beyond a brief glance ahead he did not bother to survey it thoroughly. It was dark now, anyway, as far as the shops were concerned. The only light came from the lamps edging the kerb at needlessly wide intervals and the canopy globes of his destination.
Stubbornly he pedalled onwards, preparing for a sharp right turn when he neared the cinema.... Then the dynamo went off again. He threatened it savagely, reached down with one hand to bang the dynamo against his front wheel—then all of a sudden he was knocked off his saddle and landed somehow with the bicycle round his legs. Near him somebody was floundering in the road and cursing him fiercely.
“You—you damned idiot! Why didn’t you have a light on...? God! My leg.”
Aided by his youth and long thin body, Fred Allerton was quickly on his feet, vaguely aware of a tingling knee as he helped to raise a heavily-built man in a grey overcoat and slouch hat.
“Idiot!” the man repeated, rubbing his leg. “You might have broken it.”
“Evidently I didn’t, though,” Allerton said cheerfully. “You see, my dynamo doesn’t always work as it should. I never even saw you....”
“It comes to something when a man can’t step off the pavement without a blasted cyclist knocking him flying. No light—no bell. I’ve a good mind to tell the police about this.”
“All right, if you want to get awkward about it!” Allerton could be very short-tempered sometimes. “You can find me at the Langhorn Cinema. I’m the chief projectionist.”
The man in the grey overcoat looked at him for a moment; then without another word to signify his intentions, he walked off towards the pavement, heading in the direction of the ‘Golden Saddle’ hotel. Allerton watched him, then after a guilty look about him he trundled his somewhat lopsided machine towards the cinema, raising the cycle on his shoulder as he walked up the steps.
“Who were you rowing with?” asked Bradshaw.
Bradshaw was the doorman, though there had been occasions when the more select patrons had called him a commissionaire. It was left to the insensitive cinema staff to tell him what he really was. To the public he was merely a big, six-foot man with shoulders widened by the epaulettes on his bottle-green uniform. His face, red by nature, had an almost fiery tint through constant exposure to the winds that chose the High Street as their sporting ground. Blue eyes, inflamed round the edges with grit, gazed with disconcerting fixity from under the gleaming peak of his cap.
“I was rowing with an idiot,” Allerton answered briefly, pushing through the little assembly of people awaiting the cinema’s opening. “Anyway, how did you know?”
“I ’eard you shouting, of course. Wind’s that way tonight.”
Allerton grunted, eased the bicycle from his shoulder, then entered the foyer. Mary Saunders looked