Regal Cinema is the place from which Alexander Bonaparte Cust emerges after a film, unaware that a commotion behind him is becoming the day’s sensation. Its ordinary audience and exit become a small but consequential point of misdirection: Cust leaves while others are still trying to understand what has happened to the man in front of him.

Setting and audience

The cinema is quiet on the afternoon in question because many people are at the races. Mr Leadbetter, another patron, does not approve of racing, cards, drinking, or smoking, and takes pleasure in going to the pictures instead. The scene places the cinema among the day’s competing entertainments, with the excitement of the races outside and the drama on screen inside.

The disturbance at the exit

As the audience hurries out, Mr Leadbetter prepares to follow. A man in the seat ahead is slumped down, his legs stretched across the way; Mr Leadbetter is indignant that anyone could sleep through the drama of Not a Sparrow. An irate gentleman addresses the sleeper, and Mr Leadbetter reaches the exit before looking back at a gathering around a commissionaire. He considers that the man might be dead drunk rather than asleep, but does not stop to find out.

Cust’s departure and the missed sensation

Cust comes out of Regal Cinema and looks up at the beautiful evening sky; a line from Browning comes into his mind. The contrast between this calm departure and the commotion inside is sharpened by what he misses: Mr Leadbetter hesitates, then leaves too, and so misses what the narrative calls the sensation of the day, greater even than Not Half winning the St Leger at 85 to 1. The commissionaire’s words indicate that the man is ill, not simply asleep or drunk.

Narrative function

Chapter 25 is explicitly marked as not from Captain Hastings’s personal narrative. The shift accompanies Cust’s appearance outside the cinema and changes the account’s narrative frame, while the incident inside is seen only incompletely by the departing patrons. Regal Cinema thus links an everyday outing to a public commotion that Cust does not witness, underscoring the gap between what is happening and what he understands at that moment.