Self Condemned (41 page)

The next morning at about nine o’clock there was an uproar at the foot of the stairs near which their apartment was situated. Both of them jumped up and ran to the stair-head. Charlie, screaming with laughter, was being beaten up by a large Jewish woman. She had torn his shirt to shreds, and Charlie whirled his arms about in an attempt to beat off this frantic woman, who kept spitting in a hoarse staccato, “Dirty teef.You shoplift — you break my shop in, you tak my sheese, I phone de pleece.” Charlie took a six-stair leap towards the Hardings, his face strained up towards them in the usual eager delight, but she caught him by the heel crying hoarsely, “You beast! You crim-in-al!” Clutching the banister, he kicked her off, and in a blue cloud of strips and tatters, he leapt past the Hardings. Mrs. Plant, it turned out, had come up behind Hester. That lady gazed after her tatterdemalion janitor, and when he had disappeared at the other end of the corridor, she turned to Hester, smiled and nodded her head, as if to say,“Well, what an odd fellow it is!”

Very soon the police arrived, and took him away, which he seemed to regard as the best joke of all. They were as morose as the great jitterbug was elated, and they marched off dourly with this tattered giant dancing between them.

This irrepressible jitterbug turned the hotel into the kind of place it would have been had the Mad Hatter been let loose in it for a week or two. He would have been found attempting to thrust Mrs. Plant into a teapot or purloin the medals of the Three Musketeers — “each for all and all for each.” As a matter of fact those were precisely the kind of things Charlie was doing all day long. His infatuation for medals led to a stirring scene.

Charlie was in the beverage room with his favourite concubine.

They were sitting with a man who had a magnificent Boer War gold medal. The prostitute was so impressed with this medal that she left Charlie’s side and sat beside the bemedalled veteran.

“You have no medals, Charlie. You have no beautiful gold medal like this. I don’t love you any more.”

“I have I have!” he cried as he sprang to his feet. With a banging of doors he violently vanished. Ten minutes later he returned, his breast jangling with medals of the most convincing kind. A number of suitcases were in store not far from the furnace room, and this depository was in Charlie’s care and keeping. Needless to say he had conducted a thorough examination of the contents of this luggage (for no locksmith was more expert than he), and in one large portmanteau he had come upon these beautiful medals. There, provisionally, he had left them.

When they were back in their apartment, René said, “If we were people who were inclined to forget, this hotel would always be reminding us what a chaos we live in.”

“I suppose it would,” Hester agreed without enthusiasm.

“We have got into rather a brisk little microcosm. But” — he looked at her placidly — “it is not brisker than the nations of Europe.”

At the usual time Bess arrived with her vacuum cleaner. She seemed glad to have seen the last of Charlie, for she did not at all share the irresponsible temper of the First Lady, or of the Second Lady. A small shop, which in England would be called a “general shop,” was the place Charlie had broken into the night before. It was situated in a neighbouring street, and both Hester and René were its patrons, from time to time. Bess growled on about the enormities of Charlie, and the disgraceful scenes that occurred down below, in the lowest row of apartments. She said that on one occasion she had seen Charlie completely naked, darting in and out, in a sort of obscene hide and seek with a couple of naked French-Canadian prostitutes. It seemed that he was at the top of his form before he put his clothes on.

At the time when usually the Indian was compelled to hold his teutonic wife upside down, there was a terrific shriek of an abnormal kind, though René felt sure that it was the same woman. The earlier disturbance had probably whetted his appetite for such things: for he rose immediately, opened the door, and moved quickly down the corridor in the direction of the shrieks. The sound grew louder, and then suddenly stopped. Mr. Martin’s was the first apartment you reached as you moved out of the annex into the main building. René found him, standing just outside his door, and looking in his direction. In light-coloured flannel trousers and a pale jumper, the faded pink of his cheeks pulled down a little by the set jowl, the eyes gently hooded, he was in some way a spectral figure. From the stairs leading down to the street level emerged the Indian; not at all a daunting figure, but a pleasant, dark-skinned young man. He was shouting, “Cut that out. Come back here, you bitch, d’you hear me.” But a moment later he was confronted by Mr. Martin, and he stopped. In a low voice of great impressiveness, he heard himself admonished, as though a text from scripture had been selected for the occasion, “A gentleman does not refer to a lady as a bitch!” The Indian stood rooted to the spot, as though he had seen a ghost, who had given utterance to some frightful curse. Mr. Martin stood, awful in his respectability, his mouth having scarcely moved to utter the tremendous sentence. Obviously he was perfectly aware that this was big medicine. The Indian, having glanced rebelliously once or twice at the Eternal Englishman, went back downstairs again in eloquent silence.

With a smile, René went up to Mr. Martin. He had decided that it was best to affect to have some errand in the hotel. “Good morning,” he said, “so Charlie has left us?” — “As far as I am concerned,” Mr. Martin replied, “… well, there are people I should miss more than Charlie.”

Over Mr. Martin’s shoulder René saw the inflamed face, the small girl-hiker figure of the German-Canadian, whom he knew principally as a Scream. The Scream looked at him as any Scream would, as if to say, “Yes, I am the Scream.”

Mr. Martin was sparing of his words, and, in any case, somewhat mentally congealed. But as René was moving on, he observed politely, “I suppose your arm is all right again now, Mr. Harding? It was very rough luck.”

XX
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BILL
MURDOCH

R
ené wandered through the hotel, and dropped in at the kitchen. Affie and Miss Toole were sitting at the table. They had been having their mid-morning tea, and Affie smokily scrutinizing Miss Toole’s cup. The normal everyday expression of Miss Toole’s face was one of astonishment. Her eyebrows were forever raised, and if she were chatting with a guest you would have said that the latter had been telling her some pretty tall stories — which, incidentally, she was scarcely prepared to credit. But now she looked not only startled but dismayed. René saw at once that Affie had been scaring the wits out of her. He had seen her at it before, and felt rather sorry for her victim.

Once or twice he had met Miss Toole in the corridor lately, and quite obviously she was terrified. She was moving about like an automaton, literally “scared stiff.”

René sat down at the table. Affie lifted her head slowly and looked at the intruder: for obviously he was that. “And how is Professor Harding this morning?” She knew that he did not like being called Professor Harding, and the fact that she addressed him in that manner signified that she would rather have his Room than his company. Plainly she had arrived at a point in her sorcery act at which the spell was working, but for complete success more time was needed. Another ten minutes and Miss Toole would be speechless with terror.

René pointed to the ice-box. “Did you discover who took the chicken?” The last time he had been down there, there was perturbation; no one had been in the kitchen for ten minutes or so and it must have been during that time that the chicken in the icebox had vanished.

Miss Toole’s look of astonishment increased, and she shook her head. “Mr. Harding,” she said slowly, in a tone of chronic astonishment deepening into dismay, “to think that one can’t leave a door open for ten minutes!”

But Affie, bored, observed, “Things are often stolen from the icebox,” as if to close the subject. “Who steals them?” René enquired. — “Your guess is as good as mine.” And Affie turned back to the teacups. René smiled at Miss Toole and sauntered out.

Back in the Room, René told Hester that the embodied Scream had sought sanctuary with Mr. Martin, and that she appeared perfectly safe there.

“How does that insignificant little man manage to …?”

“I wonder. Mr. Martin has succeeded in exploiting English respectability. This is rather a feat, especially in a country where the English are so unpopular. In the first instance he must have impressed Mrs. Plant terrifically with his genteelness. His voice is discreet, he exudes
it isn’t done
, he always seems a little tired.”

“He is the kind of man one sees everywhere in England,”

Hester said.

“Of course,” René agreed.“He belongs to the sports-jacketed lower-middleclass. He is a small provincial haberdasher, or (if he were younger) a trust house manager, or a seaside tobacconist.”

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Well, that is where
respectability
is to be found. The ‘decent fellows’ of the public schools become, on that level, ‘One of the best,’ ‘a white man.’ He would be as white a man as you could find if you tipped him well.”

“You are hard on Mr. Martin,” she demurred. “He is a harmless little man, is he not?”

“I believe you are wrong. He is not a very trustworthy man. But in a small way he has ‘made good’ in Canada. He knows the Northlands: he is one of the innumerable ‘prospectors’ one encounters, who have never prospected. I am sure he knows no more geology than the patter anyone picks up in the North. A few men come in here and have a drink with him every evening. They sit there in his apartment drinking Scotch, and talking of gold and nickel. I suppose the whisky is bootleg. They are the substantial men of the immediate neighbourhood. They do not get noisy, though they drink a lot. They sit there drinking easily and quietly, as sea captains do in a port, narrating their adventures in strange seas. I do not know what his adventures have been. When we first arrived Mr. Martin spoke to me of his life in the Northlands; how he played the doctor with the Indians, and so on. I think that is genuine enough.”

Hester regarded her husband with ironical expectancy. He returned her gaze, and smiled. “I say a mouthful about a very little man: a mild, soft-spoken, weak-kneed Briton. But such mild-mannered little Englishmen have often been at the bottom of very funny things.”

Hester opened her eyes a fraction more than usual, and stared, again expectant. For such hints of melodrama were not his line of country.

“If he has exploited his genteel personality, others might do so too,” René added, as though as an afterthought.

“Really, René!” Hester laughed. “If anything occurs in this hotel … of a startling nature, I shall suspect Mr. Martin — or
you
, darling.”

The janitor who succeeded Charlie was greatly disliked by Affie. He was the ex-boxer whose face she smacked. Everyone described him as “punch-drunk.” But to René it seemed that the punches that made him permanently muzzy and half-stupefied were in reality kicks that came out of a bottle. The kick induced by mixing two or more bottles of dissimilar alcohol.

This janitor’s name was Bill Murdoch. His behaviour was infinitely bad from the first day of his arrival, when he nearly killed a man in the beverage room. He was lazy, drunken, and surly. If, in the abstract, as a worthless ruffian, he qualified, he was dull and an unattractive man, and no one, man or woman, could take any interest in him.

Inured as they were to dramatic noises, both diurnal and nocturnal, some weeks after Charlie’s departure there was one which made them and the whole of the rest of the hotel sit up. It was in the middle of the night, and it seemed as though the house were being demolished by a giant. Both René and Hester were wakened by tremendous thumping in the basement. It was a blow which shook the annex to its foundations, followed, at intervals of about thirty seconds, by blows of equal force. Almost at once the most bloodcurdling screams were heard, appearing to come from somewhere below. Someone — or something — was battering with sinister power upon a wall; or so it seemed at first.

“This is too awful! What is happening!” Hester’s voice was a little breathless. For once this noise sounded as though the whole hotel was involved: as if at length this giant footstep would be heard outside their own door, as if the attack were upon all of them. For the imagination is apt to inhibit the rational faculties: and the imagination is basically anthropomorphic. And thus, although the faculties responsible for mathematics would assure the anxious heart that these sounds were a product of some sort of hammering, and it was
not
Thor’s hammer that was being used, nevertheless the imagination would have its way, would insist that the god Thor was in the basement, or else it would appear that these enormous thuds were the footsteps of a supernatural being.

It was the splintering and the crash of wood, which could be distinctly heard, which removed these sounds at last from the supernatural, and confined them firmly to the natural order. There was a final ghastly thud, echoing from the nether regions, the tearing and cracking of heavy wood, and a crescendo of screams, differing in quality from the German woman’s morning aubade in sharps, to which the annex was treated every morning, as the genuine M’Coy does from its opposite. These screams had terror in them.

All this frightful, menacing disturbance, in the heart of the night, was merely the lid lifted off the private life of Bill Murdoch. René went out and stood at the top of the stairs. There was no sound now except the distant stoking of the furnace. Mr. Martin had passed him — without recognition. His face had the same look of awful respectability, the cheeks of faded pink hanging a little dourly, the eyes hooded, as on the occasion of his reprimand to the Indian. Obviously he was prepared to say, “A gentleman does
not
employ a mallet to batter a lady’s brains out,” if that were necessary. — There were certain hoarse mutterings, and soon afterwards Mr. Martin re-ascended, going in the direction of his apartment. Again as he passed there was no recognition. Guests were not supposed to snoop, to poke their noses in things of that kind.