It’s a Battlefield Read Online Free Page B

flick, flick, like the leaves of a book Conder’s character turned and changed, and by the chief sub-editor’s chair he was again the able journalist, the husband and the father. ‘How are the kids, Conder?’
    â€˜I’m afraid of whooping cough. The youngest. They’ve had the doctor this afternoon. I shall know when I get home. Shall I try and get this Ruttledge par in under Streatham?’
    â€˜They may have to put it in the stop press. Is it worth a bill, d’you think, Conder?’ and flick, flick, Conder was the man who knew the secrets of Scotland Yard, the crime reporter. But the same melancholy voice which spoke of whooping cough replied: ‘Nothing to it.’ In the composing-room the clerk asked him: ‘How’s the wife, Mr Conder?’ while he searched the papers on his desk for the page plan, and at the stone the compositor, loosening the great slab of metal type to insert Conder’s message, asked: ‘And how does the new house suit you, Mr Conder?’ For while they knew nothing of the captain of industry and laughed at the revolutionary and smiled in private at the intimate of Scotland Yard, they had accepted for ten years the family man, although he too was only one among the many impersonations of Conder’s sad and unsatisfied brain. But it never occurred to him as strange that they should arbitrarily choose to recognize this as reality among all his unrealities, even during the few minutes of the day when he was the genuine Conder, an unmarried man with a collection of foreign coins, who lived in a bed-sitting-room in Little Compton Street.
    â€˜We are having trouble with the bathroom.’
    â€˜Ah.’
    â€˜How I envy you young unmarried men,’ And it was true: Conder the married man with whooping cough in the new house and a defective bath and a wife who wanted him to be in bed at eleven envied the independence of the young compositor, envied it with such bitter knowledge of his own lot that in a few hours’ time he would be himself young and independent, sowing his wild oats, twirling his umbrella down Piccadilly or across the Park, accosted by women, but they never got him beyond the doors of their flats, the entrances to their hotels, for on the threshold of enjoyment Conder, the revolutionary, whose vitality must not be weakened by enjoyment, or Conder, the married man, repelled him. Conder walked away along a passage which flashed with distorting mirrors.
    *
    The clock in the high tower struck six-thirty, and the siren cried through the dusk. No one responded; overtime was being worked in the match factory off Battersea Rise, but the siren, which was connected electrically with the clock, screamed on for a minute and a half while a hundred blue-and-white matchboxes jumped from the machines on to a great moving stair which drew them with slow solemnity, as if they were small coffins in a crematorium, to the blast of heat in the drying chamber. The hundred and fifty girls in the machine-room worked with the regularity of a blood beat; a hand to the left, a hand to the right, the pressure of a foot; a damp box flew out, turned in the air, and fell on the moving stair. It was impossible to hear the boxes falling, or a voice speaking, because of the noise of the machines, the machines in the hall, the machines in the cellar where tree trunks uncurled into thin strips of wood, the machines in the room above, where on a revolving band the pink-headed matches marched fifty deep up towards the ceiling, down towards the sulphur vats.
    Kay Rimmer moved a hand to the left, a hand to the right, pressed down her foot, and winked her left eye. The girl opposite winked twice. Between the spitting of the machines, before the stair could move a foot away, the message passed. ‘Hunting tonight?’ ‘No, the curse.’
    Two men halted for a moment by the machines; a mouth opened in a shriek which could be heard as a faint whisper: