A Little Tea, a Little Chat

by Christina Stead

  He had the door open for her, before she had her package wrapped. He met the blondine downstairs with a mischievous joy. To begin with, he felt himself well concealed; and he did not tell her he was going to Havana, he said he had changed his mind. He grinned to think how he had fooled Flack and Mrs. MacDonald, and also how he was fooling Mrs. Downs. He could handle his own affairs best.

  He listened to all the blondine had to say. She was neither more nor less than the bearer of an offer from her husband. If Grant would pay for the divorce and costs and compensation, the whole thing would be dropped; and she had brought with her a weekly newspaper in which their affair was hinted at in a startling way. Her husband was out for blood and had told everyone. She and Walker and Goodwin and others had managed to talk him over. The whole thing would cost twelve thousand dollars at the least: that or an eruption into the daily press with full details and all the names.

  “But the others?” said Grant, evilly.

  “I am only thinking of you, darling. What will people say when they see your name with Alexis and Mr. Exe? I am only thinking of our credit. I tell you he’s run amok.”

  Grant prolonged the discussion, going with her into every possible detail. He felt at ease with her. They arranged another meeting for the next afternoon. When he left her, he thought, “In this way I fool her; my technique is the right one.”

  40

  At eight in the morning he telephoned the store downstairs from the Flacks, which he had noted down in his address book, a white-wood furniture store. He asked them to call down Edda or David. While he waited, he thought about the furniture store. He could get them to make an estimate for his package-home scheme, which he wanted to promote in Europe after the war to replace the houses bombed and put to fire. He would telephone his editor friend, Bernard Robison, right away after the Flack call. Robison’s publishing house was backed by Mrs. Burthen, a beautiful society woman, with millions. He would get an appointment with the beauty and tell her there was a question of paper mills. There would be a paper shortage after the war. The only thing would be to get up a combine of small publishing firms like Burthen’s, and plant them in or adjacent to great forests, say in Canada, Scandinavia, or Siberia. No transport, no paper shortage. He’d put Robison out of business, oust Mr. Burthen, take over Mrs. Burthen, use her capital. The tree turned into a cheap edition overnight. Paper would be a splendidly profitable shortage after the war; and his idea for not so much a monopoly as a pulp empire would give good paper cheap, also promote education. What about the same thing for “boxed houses,” “package houses,” “too many dictionaries, too few houses,” “house of the month.”…Surely Edda was up by this? When she came to the phone, he said politely, “I hope I didn’t wake you. Listen, my dear girl, tell David to go straight to the apartment and look for those things he missed last night. I want the missing shoe covers and tell him to bring all the keys. The carpenter is coming here this morning. First thing of all, go to the tailor for the hat-box and get the collarbox from the optician. Get a new shagreen case…Now you have a white-wood store downstairs, they must make keyholes in things, and have cheap keys, eh? Ask them what to do about getting keys made cheap, not copied, made. See if you can buy from them an assortment of any keys they have lying about the place, just see what they want for them, don’t buy them right off. See what sort of keys you can get in Woolworth’s. Then you bring the keys here like a good girl. Also ask the furniture place if they have not a bandsaw, they could cut some shoe trees for me.”

  “Shoe trees!”

  He mumbled, “War scarcities, shoe trees very rare, I don’t mind putting up with some without springs just for the time being till after the war, see they’re coming back but not yet, wartime measure: ask them, my dear girl, ask them, I’ll give you the sizes on a piece of paper. Ask them if they have a bandsaw.”

  “You can get cheap shoe trees, I saw them in Stern’s yesterday.”

  “Ask down there, you’re downstairs now, do me this favor. The fella must have a bandsaw. What am I to do? I told the carpenter to be here at eight o’clock, and it’s nearly nine.”

  She must look round the workshop while she was down there, and see if they had any bits of wood lying round that they didn’t want. Waste wood, was worth nothing, they wouldn’t sell that kind of stuff for kindling. She could pay them for the work on the bandsaw, the wood was waste—or better, buy the waste wood from them, if she saw it lying round their workshop, and bring it up to him, in a taxi, in a taxi, of course, and he would give it to the carpenter, give the shoe plans to the carpenter and let him make shoe trees out of it, easiest thing in the world. What had he to do but turn on the bandsaw? He liked this new word and began to build schemes and save money round the very notion of “bandsaw.”

  “I’ll go and buy you some shoe trees, make you a present of them,” said Edda.

  “No, no, no. Let the fella make ’em. I did him enough favors, gave him business, I’m letting him fix the keys for me. One good turn deserves another. I’ll pay him the electric power cost on the bandsaw. All these chairborne officers bought them up—”

  The storm-center now shifted from the shoe trees to the carpenter and then to the keys, last of all to David Flack, who must proceed immediately to the other apartment.

  When Flack arrived at the Pickwick, Miss Robbins had been there an hour. Mrs. MacDonald was sitting on a chair sewing together shoe covers with old woman’s big stitches. She trembled and complained in a high rasping voice, “And today Mr. Goodwin telephones me and tells me that last night Mr. Grant sublet this apartment to him and his wife and sister-in-law, and I must work for two young women. I don’t want to leave but I can’t help myself. I haven’t the strength.”

  Flack started, “But last night, Robert promised me that Edda and I could stay here while he was away, and while we looked around for another place. He said—”

  Flack burst out laughing—“The old fraud—why do I believe in Robbie any more? He said, when he came back, we would live here and try out what living in common would be like.”

  He kept on chuckling, then his eyes grew large and he said sorrowfully, “What the devil makes him say things like that? He doesn’t need the rent. Why must he sublet?”

  “They will have to fight it out with Walker and his parents,” said Miss Robbins. She told them that Grant had long ago promised the apartment to the lawyer Walker for two hundred dollars monthly.

  The three, with Gilbert, who had just risen and not yet gone to visit the Wrights in Philadelphia (in fact, he declined to be boarded out at his age, he said easily), had assembled by eleven o’clock in the morning the following:

  Three pigskin valises, which, packed, one man could not lift;

  Four old suitcases, one dispatch case, and one hatbox—all leather;

  One old-fashioned opera-hatbox, the one from the tailor’s, locked;

  One shoe packer; one traveling sun lamp; one medicine case;

  One collar case, from the optician’s, locked, and two old shagreen spectacle cases;

  Several pieces of airplane luggage; four coats; a package of liquor out of the closet; several packets with coffee, tea, and other groceries.

  Grant, somewhat intimidated by Flack’s ill humor, had not dared to telephone them at the apartment; but the carpenter called twice, and indicated that Grant had been at him half the morning. Presently, a messenger came with a note from Grant to Flack, “Come over here immediately. Let Miss Robbins follow! Call at the carpenter’s on the way; and bring the hatbox and the collar case and Jones with you.”

  Flack had not left the apartment when Grant was on the phone, asking if he had left, raging because he had not. Miss Robbins must come at once with the valises in three taxis, with Gilbert and Mrs. MacDonald, “In no matter what condition—”

  “I don’t understand you, Mr. Grant; they’re in perfect health, better than yourself this morning!”

  “Eh? Eh? Bring the valises in no matter what condition and stop at the
carpenter’s on the way and see if his assistant has left.”

  “Mr. Flack’s gone for him!”

  “Do me a favor, my dear girl—”

  A quarter of an hour later, the doorman at the Pickwick, having hailed three taxis and seen the valises, et cetera, stowed away, had no difficulty in hearing to what address they all were being transported.

  At the door of the hotel Grant met them. He was pacing up and down without a hat, and eying the passers-by furiously. As soon as the taxis drove up he rushed at them, opened a door, and began dragging the valises from them, shouting at the same time, “Did you find the umbrella? Why the hell didn’t you bring the umbrella? Mrs. MacDonald, did you bring the shoe covers? Goddamn it, Miss Robbins, why didn’t you bring the carpenter’s boy? Where’s the boy? I told that fella to come here at once. Have I got to wait here all day to get a lock open? Where are my rubbers?”

  By this time, he had got all the stuff onto the sidewalk with the assistance of Gilbert and the taxi drivers, and he now rudely snapped his fingers at the doorman, “Pay them off!”

  Picking up the two heaviest pigskin cases, he shouldered the others aside and swung these into the lobby. A bellboy and a porter, who ran forward, could not move the cases. Grant saw this and took charge of all the heavy stuff, running up and down in the elevator, giving orders in the lobby and on the landing, and in his sitting room, for a moment busy and content. He had not yet greeted anyone there and ignored Flack, who kept asking him where to stow the things. His eyes were concentrated on the valises. His huge, smooth muscles were at work. He puffed, and occasionally uttered remarks like, “If that fella don’t come by—get the bandsaw man—can’t make out how you overlooked the rubbers—fourteen keys, not one fits that lock—”

  Somewhat calmed by his exertions and by the impressive mess of property in which he stood, he concluded with a mild reproof to Flack and Miss Robbins, “Can’t understand how you could have overlooked the umbrella!”

  Then he settled down to a more humane sort of discussion, striving to open their eyes to the seriousness of his luggage, with a few brief comments about the blonde and other personalities. He went on, deeply absorbed, delighted that his life had reached this boiling-point. What was the true situation with the blonde and her husband and Alexis? He doubted about the gigolo and the coiffeur. The husband had run amok. But if there were other men, he felt very gloomy indeed. Did he want to bathe in a muddied pool? Would he drink from a fouled well? Would he eat oysters from a bay where sewers opened? Supposing Mrs. Downs were a crook—he was himself partly to blame; but supposing she were not, then there was someone making suggestions to her, and it was much more serious. Who could it be?

  “It’s that bragging Goodwin,” said Flack.

  “Nonsense, my dear man, perfectly ridiculous! He put me on to it first.”

  “That’s why he’s guilty. You know the rule with an anonymous letter—suspect the first person who visits you after you receive it!”

  “Im-possible. Don’t let me hear any more of it.”

  “I’m tired of your insults, Grant!”

  “Now, my dear fellow, I apologize, sorry, very sorry, bear with me.”

  He became pathetic. Who was working against him behind the scenes and for why? He had been a guardian angel to the bloody ’ooman. She had nothing on him, that he swore, as he would never swear to his mother. He took Mrs. MacDonald’s hand and kissed her wedding ring. No-thing! He babbled on, as he tried the keys one after the other, kneeling in front of them, and snapping his fingers, lifting his eyes to them, asking for this and that, insisting upon their attendance, stopping in his narrative if anyone absented himself for a moment. He dropped clues, lifted masks, showed his tracks, all through his discourse, and then seeing what he had done, doubled back on himself, made false scents, artfully mixed in incompatibles, but not with any true idea of dodging them, but of keeping their minds intent on himself and his romantic situation. He did not care what they saw as long as they kept looking and wondering at him. He felt all kinds of rich emotions, a sentimental innocence, in the pleasure of showing himself to them as a creature they had never dreamed of—more sorrowful, wickeder, gayer, more romantic, more lecherous, more bewildered.

  The plot or conspiracy of his affair with Mrs. Downs was not just a straight relationship of give and take, I’m lonely and you console me, he explained to them, but a network of events, a country of shifting sands. It was something new in life for them. If they listened it would be instructive for them, he said. It was, let us say, like a war map, with front lines and back lines and strategic retreats and lines of communications and hidden depots, of spies and forces and even—he laughed—a hospital case or two, and a bit of battle surgery; that too. There was the question of supply, of general strategy: of not wearing out your strength, and not extending yourself too far. With the blonde it was even like a business. It was a pity the damn woman had not gone into business, but she had a lovely body, “I’m among friends—she—the boat goes into harbor, it’s a sweet harbor—that’s the secret of the woman—”

  As he went on, names came up of old acquaintances of his, proved scoundrels and promoters, that Grant had sworn were cast out long ago, but who now appeared in this great Blonde Network, as giving him advice, introducing him to lawyers, running between him and the blonde and the husband and the Goodwins and Delafield and innumerable strange people. When Flack questioned him about these dead, suddenly revived, Grant fumbled a bit but said it was an accident, only the other day the said rascal walked into the White Bar, and it happened he knew James Alexis—and in short, Grant now had him working as a footrunner, or an expendable, or a trench-digger in his great campaign with the blondine. Indeed, the very frauds, cheats, homeless swindlers, blackmailers and income-tax delators, Mann-law provocatrices, these café beggars who fancied themselves as Azevs, these international Counts and Majors, who never could sail for their own native lands—these were, it appeared, rather the ones Grant was employing, and had all along employed in his dealings with the blonde, and in his most secret and daring work. They were the proper ones to take trips in disguised planes to survey the enemy territory. If they told on him to the blonde, they also told on the blonde to him, said Grant, laughing wickedly, and he could do more with his knowledge than she! But just as they were viewing with open mouths this huge landscape and a kind of skirmishing with the blonde that had gone on for years, in undeclared war, the picture dwindled and became—the layout of a love nest taken by the pinhead eye of a newfangled movie camera in someone’s buttonhole. How else could anyone have taken pictures of the blonde and others in incorrect relations? He stoutly cried, “But I am not involved as is Alexis, only I ask myself how could they have any evidence? She’s a very smart woman, and he’s very smart.”

  Said Flack, “She fixed it with Downs.”

  “Im-possible, believe me, my boy, I’ve been sold up and down the river, but not by that ’ooman. I know her inside out. Better than that husband. If I found it was her, I’d soap her stairs.”

  “But since you’re not involved—”

  “You’re perfectly correct. But what about photomontage?”

  “You know yourself you were always suspicious of her.”

  “Yes, never went near her place. I thought, Walls have ears.”

  Gilbert heard all this with a morose expression. Grant noticed this, went up, clapped him on the arm, and roared, “It’ll work out as a blessing in disguise! Trust me. I’m through with her. It’s a blessing in disguise. What do you say, Edda? A blessing in disguise. We’ll get rid of this mess, and when I come back to New York we’ll pack up our traps and we’ll go out to Largo Farm, sell day-old chicks.”

  He did not notice Gilbert’s surprise. He continued with his usual promises for the future.

  Seeing that they were all trying to get away, he got up from the floor, saying, “We can’t do anything till the carpenter’s boy comes and Mrs. MacDonald finishes the shoe covers. Let’s have Karel Ka
rolyi and tell him to bring the play.”

  “What are you here for, you’re in hiding,” said Flack.

  He protested that Karel, that crazy man, didn’t know where he was living, or what street or—skip the details—even what country.

  “He knows the address of twenty dollars,” said Flack.

  Grant frowned, “Let him come over, and show us my play.”

  He telephoned the hotel and found that Karolyi had not been in overnight. Grant paced up and down, simulating immense anger and disturbance, so that they would not leave him. He began to pour out his notions about the “drama.”

  “I don’t know what you want to be an angel for,” said Gilbert disagreeably.

  “I don’t put in a cent more than the one hundred and eighty dollars I’ve put in the kitty! I told him I’d put up the money. See if the others put up. Then I’ll put up. It’ll be a four-star smash-hit, it’ll be the talk of Broadway, we’ll be rich overnight, a gold mine—”

  He called the desk angrily, suddenly breaking this off, “No calls for me yet? I can’t understand it.”

  He told them he was expecting “Gabriel Bitkoff from Jigago, and Sam Positive.”

  “That can’t be his name!”

  He mumbled. He kept them there waiting, though he expected calls from the blonde and from Miss Livy Wright at any moment. At last the blonde called. He ran into the other room and murmured hotly, then thinking that he heard the line click and that someone was listening in the other room or downstairs, he said, “Don’t think the line’s free. Wait till the play is produced, and you won’t be sorry you went in with me. You’ll get a big cut, I’ll let you in first, Goodwin’s friends are going to put in forty thousand dollars, and Karolyi has a friend with fifty thousand dollars; I myself will wait and see how they’re coming along, I don’t want to be an angel, but we’ll get one hundred thousand dollars easy, and you’ll get a cut, you’re in this with me, so don’t worry about money. It’s going to be a gold mine and you get your claim first, I found the field, you’re my partner. You cut in and the rest have got to wait till I get my money back and a good profit and then they can get whatever comes to them in equity, I’ll take it to arbitration, but we’re in this together. I talk my head off, they only listen for a profit. Caveat emptor. But you are my partner. I have to see you downstairs sometime today, in the lobby. I’ll call you in an hour. Good-bye,” and he cut her off. The phone at once rang again, and he said into it, “I’ll meet you downstairs in the lobby at half-past six. Wait in the inside room near the restaurant, near the mirror.”