Voice of the Conqueror. John Russell Fearn
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Empty, silly dreams! Bob will never give you anything, and you know it!”
Albert was silent, realising that Emily was probably right. Bob Simpkins was Albert’s elder brother, possessed of all the terrific self-assurance that Albert completely lacked. He was a big man in the grocery distribution business somewhere in North London, and spent his time making his money, and his spare moments sneering at failures. By some kind of legal know-how that Albert had never been able to fathom, his brother had claimed all the money left in Mrs. Simpkins’ will. It had been a fair sum, for Mrs. Simpkins had had plenty at her death. The net result was that the roaring, domineering Bob had got the lot and—as usual—Albert had got nothing. Emily knew the facts, and so did the children. Because of them Albert was considered to be an even bigger fool than his appearance suggested.
“No,” Emily decided, hauling her fat back as she rolled in her chair at the supper table, “Bob will never give you a thing—unless it’s a slap on the back that will knock you silly. Sillier, that is, than you are already.”
Albert looked at her and did not like what he saw. In twenty years Emily had become gray-haired, and so fat it was difficult to tell where her head ended and her shoulders began. Of course her eyes were still blue, but this was all that remained of the once-laughing girl who had waved a torch so adroitly for the latecomers at the Premier Cinema.
As for Albert, he was pinched and pale. His lack of color was not so much due to ill health as to the constant inhalation of carbon fumes from the projectors. Twenty years of breathing in poison had left their mark. He looked unhappy and somewhat vacant, though actually his uncomprehending gaze was born of the fact that lie was always dreaming—dreaming of that which he had not got. Money, fame, fortune, all the world at his feet. Yet—and here was the unusual thing—Albert believed he could have all these things if he could only pin together several really bright ideas that for years had been chasing around in his mind in dissociated form. It was just a matter of linking them up, and some day he would.
“Where are the kids?” he asked presently, apropos of nothing, and Emily yawned.
“Dick and Betty are in bed. Ethel’s not got back yet from night school, and Vera’s been out since seven with young Hal Morrison. They’re in a dancing competition or something.”
“Mmmm.” Albert finished drinking his tea. “Be a help if Hal would take Vera off our hands. One less to bother about.”
“Wouldn’t make any difference. Ethel makes enough to keep herself. If she went, we’d still be where we are now—on the edge of the rocks.”
Albert muttered something to himself and got to his feet. He wandered about the untidy little kitchen for a moment or two, then selected one of the dozens of scientific magazines lying in a haphazard pile in a corner and sat in the worn armchair to read. Emily’s blue eyes followed his movements and her cushiony lips compressed.
“That’s what I complain about with you, Albert. When you haven’t your job to do, you waste your time instead of improving it! Most men, when the day’s work is done, spend their time thinking up ways to get more money and improve the lot of themselves and their families. But not you! Oh, no! You have to read all this scientific trash—day in, night out. Every spare moment! What good does it do you?”
Albert turned the worn magazine pages slowly but did not look up. “It never hurts to improve the mind, Emmy. I don’t get much chance to relax, remember. Matinees and evening shows swallow up a lot of time, and on my day off, I’ve things to do—tidying the garden, titivating the house, and so on. ’Sides, I like reading about scientific things when we live in a scientific age. Won’t be long now the way rocketry is progressing before travel into space becomes an everyday thing.”
“I’m not interested in reaching the moon! I’m only interested that you should better things. You’ve got to forty-five and haven’t done it yet. Doesn’t leave much time, you know. Dreams! Always dreams!”
“Uh-huh,” Albert sighed. “Pretty well all I have left these days, Emmy.… Yet, you know,” he continued, his eyes brightening a little, “there’s one dream which I believe I shall one day make come true. And if I do I’ll be—”
“Oh, such rubbish!” Emily surged to her feet, disgusted, her immense bosom flopping. “It’s a waste of time talking to you. Here, give me a hand with these crocks and leave that scientific rubbish until later. It’ll keep.”
Uncomplaining, Albert tossed the magazine down upon its battered companions and struggled out of the armchair. Thereafter, in pensive silence, he helped his ample spouse with the washing-up, and such was the scientific slant in his mentality he actually seemed to find something intriguing in the way the soapsuds exploded on her fleshy forearms as she savagely swabbed the plates and cups.
“If you’d get an automatic washer instead of dreaming, we’d be better off!” she commented acidly. “I’m getting past doing all the washing, cleaning, pot washing, ironing, and chores ad infinitum. Sometimes I wonder why I ever quit working as a cashier. Might even go back to it. They take ’em at forty-five even now. Some cinemas prefer them. You’re not prone to goings-on in the dark when you’re forty-five.”
“Know something, Emmy? Those suds explode on your skin because of the air pressure inside being greater than that outside. A simple scientific fact, and yet it has interest.”
“Has it?” Emily stared at her wet forearms. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“Just thinking out loud. The idea I have chasing around in my mind hasn’t anything to do with soapsuds, but the basic principle is just as simple.”
This time Emily did not say anything. She was accustomed to Albert talking in this vague fashion, and since none of his theories seemed to crystallize into anything, she considered them beneath her notice.
“I suppose,” she resumed presently, as the washing-up came to an end, “that you propose to end your days at the Premier, if the management tolerate you that long?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Depends how much I learn. It can be quite interesting in a projection room, Emmy. The scientific side of it fascinates me, particularly the interpretation of sound by light through the transparent track on the side of the film. Then again, the three-dimensional illusion is one of the big—”
“You missed this cup and saucer,” Emily interrupted, and brought the conversation to a close.
And it remained at a close until bedtime. Ethel and Vera came home in the interval, but had little to say to their father as once more he browsed through his scientific magazine and took not the least notice of their teenage vaporings. It was not that he had no interest in his daughters—he was merely dominated by the theories that wove constantly through his mind.
“The main thing wrong with this world, Emmy,” he said, when he and his wife had at last retired, “is that there’s too much selfishness. Too much greed. Take Bob, for example. If he were not so greedy he—”
“He knows how to take care of himself anyway, and that’s more than you can do!”
The blow went fully home, and Albert subsided, but long after his wife had fallen asleep he still remained awake, staring at the ceiling vaguely patterned from the street light outside the house. It was in the quiet of the night, when he lay like this, no longer in fear of derision or interruption, that his thoughts had a chance to link up all the scattered theories he had been gathering for so long a time. And he felt that if only he could perhaps.… Then he was asleep, to awaken again to the drabness of the autumn morning.
So to the usual routine—the hurried breakfast, then out to the Premier Cinema with its dank morning coldness and smell of amyl-acetate. His two assistants were already at work re-spooling film from the previous night’s performance. They greeted Albert perfunctorily as he arrived, but he took little notice of them. Instead he set to work with a newly purchased writing-pad and left the bulk of the projection room cleaning routine to the two boys. What he was doing he would not say, but from what the boys could see he appeared to