I had known him quite well . . . How did I dare to write that? How could I—or anyone—know him? No one in the world—no one but those half-beast forebears of his. And they, thank God, have gone out of the world—as he has. The line of the Black Erskines is ended, and forever.
I look.at the quiet picture above me. Samuel van Hoogstraaten—a still man, unperturbed. His world a hillside scene in Holland: small square houses, lines on canvas. To my right, on the wall there, is the Mortlake tapestry. And what association have these things with the things Menasseh told me in that room of his behind the shop? . . .
David Strange, the young negro lawyer—the descendant, he claimed, of Kings Cetewayo and Dingaan: for he had, as he showed Menasseh, the royal serpent of the Zulus needled into the dark skin of his breast. And the woman with him in the shop that day, with Menasseh copying the design on to her breast, while she flinched at every needle-prick, holding tight with her white hand to the dark hand of the negro . . . The sign of blood-kinship among the Zulus, that serpent. Menasseh had been intrigued by the design of it and had made, on paper, one copy: but no other copy, at any time, on any human skin but hers . . .
My hand aches terribly. I sit back. I look at my fingers as I stretch them out to ease them . . .
I think—oh God knows what I think! Of the two skulls that were the sounding boards of those hellish drums. Of Miss Logan tramping over the moors. Of those other two—of blood-kinship—setting off that Sunday afternoon for a walk on Ben Vrackie. Of Sir Simon saying he had a headache and so being unable to accompany them. Of the neat round holes in the skulls in which were inserted the ends of the silver mounts. Of the rifles on the walls of Vrackie Hall. Of the bodies that were never found. Of the shape of the larger skull, the low brow and long cranium of the primitive—the negro. Of the merciful hill mist that came down on the grim old mountain—red and terrible seen through the glass of that hideous house . . .
Yes, what do I think . . .
Of the two last years of the last of the Erskines, his fits of weeping, his fits of laughing, his fits of——
No. The image fades. The ghost goes out of me. I think of nothing. Except, coming over the years, the echo, terrible in this quiet room, of Miss Logan’s cheerful voice:
“Someone’s scratched some verse on the silver—Shelley, of all strange things . . .”
Yes. Shelley, of all strange things.
Cyclamen Brown
Among the people I know is a little man who makes his living by writing popular music. His real name is John Summers, but he calls himself professionally Eddie Wheeler. There is a sort of shining innocence about Eddie, and what I can only describe as an unconscious cynicism. He believes in things, profoundly: but he believes along well-worn channels. He lives enframed among conventions. He really does—sincerely—fancy that when he writes a song about mother love, or young lovers who pine for each other beneath the silv’ry moon, or meet each other only in their dreams—he really does fancy that he has done something. He sees himself as a serious artist—the more money he makes from a song, the more serious has he been in the creation of it. There is, to him, such a thing as love, in the grotesque sense in which the word is used in his trade. It moves him very much—every song he writes about it deeply and seriously moves him. His whole life is an emotional cliché.
But he is a wonderful little man in his way. I like him enormously. He lives among racketeers, sharks, and toughs—men who would pimp for their own mothers to make a few pounds for themselves and their tarts—little Eddie Wheeler lives right in the middle of it all, yet remains as innocent as he was on the day he was born. The whole mysterious world of Charing Cross Road revolves round him noisily, and he stays untouched. He is a “natural,” in the old sense of the word. I should think he knows more about the song-plugging racket than any man alive. He knows every personality in the profession—who is bribing whom, who got whom to write his latest hit for him for the price of a double scotch and a packet of gaspers, who paid whom a handsome premium for a date at such-and-such a club—it’s all of it there, glibly and innocently in Eddie’s head. He can tell you where So-and-so gets his dope, where Miss Whatshername had herself aborted, why little Mr. Whosit put his head in the gas-oven. And he’ll tell you it all with his little bald head shining, his eyes popping out at you through his thick oval spectacles—and the manuscript of his most recent mother song on the table before him. He looks like Schubert, does Eddie-only, of course, he doesn’t write like him.
It was Eddie who told me the story of Cyclamen Brown. Well, it’s hardly a story at all, really—there’s no plan to it, no design. It is something that happened, that’s all—a sudden glimpse into the queer half-world of the show folk. I am only setting it down because Eddie amused me so in the telling of it. It was so typical of him to tell it as he did—between puffs of the cheap little cigars he favours, and with a glass of lager in front of him. And all the time his small forehead perspiring and his blue eyes popping like wet glass marbles . . .
It was one night when I went out with Eddie for dinner. He took me along several side-streets off Shaftesbury Avenue and finally plunged down some area steps, coming to a halt in front of a massive black door. He tapped on it with a coin—three long taps, two short ones, and then a brisk rat-tat-tat-tat. A small shutter slid open opposite our eyes and I saw a man’s face peering at us—a thin dark face it was, set above the white triangle of a dress shirt.
Eddie thrust his hand through the opening and showed the man some small token he held in his palm—a little red celluloid check, I discovered it to be later, with a design stamped on it in intaglio—a representation of a cyclamen plant.
The dark man nodded. Then he swung the door open and we went inside, Eddie smiling jovially and peeling off his coat, myself a shade apprehensive, not quite sure if I was enjoying myself or not. We went along a small passage and pushed through a big swing door of painted glass. And then we were in the main hall of what Eddie told me was the Cyclamen Club.
It was a long, low room with an arched whitewashed ceiling. All round it was a raised platform with small tables all crowded together on it, and below this was a polished dancing floor. The lighting was dim—wreaths of tobacco smoke clung round the big pink electric globes overhead. At one end of the hall, on a dais, was a small dance band. At the moment of our entrance a slim young man with oiled black hair was crooning into a microphone—the syrupy tones hung, like the smoke, above the heads of the dancers and diners.
“That’s Woody Hunter,” said Eddie, as we followed a scantily clad usherette to our table. “He runs the band—and will insist on doing his own vocalist. God knows why—I think he stinks.”
We sat down.
“What are you having?” asked Eddie, in his soft lugubrious voice. “Eat as much as you want—don’t stint yourself. I’ve just sold a new song—it’s a smasher, a smasher. The best I’ve done since The Love Bird Waltz.”
I ordered as good a meal as the Cyclamen offered—and I must confess it was most elegant and satisfying. Eddie himself tucked in lustily to an immense plateful of devilled chicken, washing it down with glass after glass of his favourite lager. Then he sighed, belched apologetically, and settled back in his chair, after lighting one of his thin black cheroots.
“Not a bad little place,” he said, looking round him contentedly. “Good food, good music, lots of drink, and nice people. There’s Harry Nevin over there—that little man with the tall blonde. Just written a new lyric for Sammy Tolstoy, they tell me. The big fellow just opposite—the one shovelling the spaghetti into him—that’s Issy FitzGerald. Used to be the best vocalist in the business, but the snow was his trouble—couldn’t lay off it.”
“The snow?” I asked.
“Cocaine. Got so bad he had to take it every time before he went on, and then in the days of the big famine, when the boys weren’t getting through the police rings with the stuff, he went all to bits. He’s all right now, though—went into publishing. Still takes the
stuff, of course—once you start you can’t stop. You can always tell when Issy gets a yen on—you’re maybe talking to him, selling him a number, see, and suddenly he starts to yawn. You think, My God—he’s proper bored with this—I’ll have to try it on old Salmon . . . But it isn’t that at all—he really thinks your number’s the bee’s knees—it’s only that he’s got a yen, you see. That’s the way it takes them—they yawn and yawn, like you’d think they’d get lockjaw. Then he goes out to the Gents and gives himself a stab or two with the syringe and it’s all right, see. It’s amazing how desperate they are for it sometimes—I remember Iris Jackson, the coloured girl who used to dance for Bertolini—remember her?—got killed in a knife fight up in Greek Street about two years ago—well, she had it bad, and one night she’d the devil’s own yen and couldn’t get a drop of the dope. She was screaming mad—screaming. She smashed up everything in her dressing room—ran round and round throwing things against the walls, and yawning all the time. Bertolini asked me if I could get her any of the stuff, and in the end I said yes I could, I was so sorry for her, and went round to Spike Abel’s place and begged a paper-full from Spike himself. What a ’cello player that man was, by the way—that’s why he was called Spike, incidentally—cos of the spike on the end of a ’cello. Anyway, thank God, he was drunk that night, so he gave me some dope for Iris. When I got back Iris was out for the count—lying on the floor with her eyes turned up into her head and her skin all green underneath her colour. ‘Lord Almighty,’ says I to Bertolini, ‘how do we give it to her? We haven’t got a syringe!’ . . . ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ he says, ‘I’ve done this before for her—I know the routine. Have you got a cigarette lighter, Eddie?’ . . . Then he got a spoon, you see, and he made me hold it over the flame of my lighter with the dope in it, till it was all melting hot and bubbling. Then he took a safety-pin—just an ordinary safety-pin, and a bit rusty at that—and he opened one of the veins in Iris’s thigh. And he tilted this hot stuff in with the spoon and prodded it into her with the pin. It acted like a ruddy miracle. She was up as large as life in three minutes—I’ve never seen her dance better’n she did that night. Bloody marvellous! Poor old Iris!—a gem of a girl, and oh my God could she dance! But it’s just as well she went when she did, and the way she did. Bertolini had it in for her, and once he’d got going it would have been one hell of a sight worse for Iris than she ever got in the knife fight. Remember the big vitriol scandal about eight months ago, when Gloria Baum got a face burn and a half coming out of the Albany stage door?—well, Bertolini was behind that, only they never got him, of course: they got that little man Smithy Watson, but he was only Bertolini’s stooge . . .”
Eddie, under the influence of the food and the music and the lager, went on and on like this for almost an hour. I sat back contentedly listening to him—hypnotized. The whole world he chattered about was so utterly alien to me—it was impossible to believe that the people dancing on the floor below me, or eating at the tables on all sides of me, were the very people that Eddie was talking about. They seemed so normal. Perhaps the men were a little paler and suaver than most men, and the women a little more elaborately made-up—altogether harder and tougher than the women one normally encounters. But otherwise they were quite ordinary. It was an awesome thought.
“I don’t suppose I’ll ever get the hang of this queer life of yours, Eddie,” I said, in a gap in his chatter. “It’s all so wild, you know—so hopelessly immoral.”
“Immoral?” he said—and he looked up at me with a sort of mild sad reproach in his eyes. “Immoral? Oh, my dear, my dear! You don’t know what you’re talking about—you don’t really. No wonder you say you can’t get the hang of us. And you never will get the hang of us unless you get hold of the fact that it’s morals that’s the answer to the whole set-up. It’s morals that’s the matter—we’re most of us too moral. Of course, maybe it’s different morals, but it’s morals, my dear—it’s morals. What you’ve got to understand is that we’re the most moral folk there are.”
“Even that fellow over there?” I asked ironically, nodding towards a red-faced elderly man, who, very drunk, was lolling over a young girl in a corner, pawing at her, while she protested, giggling stupidly.
Eddie followed my gaze.
“Who? Old Fred Burrow? Lord, Lord—I should think he is the worst of the lot of us.” And he sighed. “Don’t you know old Fred? Written more hit lyrics than anyone else in the business. Started life playing the cornet in a Salvation Army Band in Wigan, then he joined Willie Mulligan’s outfit at Manchester and wrote a couple of hits with Willie’s pianist, Alf Tucker—you’re bound to remember Alf—hanged himself in old Salmon’s cloakroom when he couldn’t get Salmon to buy a new blues he’d written, and old Salmon said, How considerate of Alf to hang himself like that when there was such a shortage of meat in his family (Salmon would sacrifice anything for a gag, you know—he’s built like that).—Anyway, he suddenly repented—old Salmon did, I mean—and don’t you remember he advertised in the Melody Maker for somebody to adopt Alf’s little daughter, Bessie? It was old Fred Burrow that answered that advert. A tough little morsel Bessie turned out to be, though—my God, old Fred has had a job with her. He gets drunk, poor old soul, and then suddenly, when he’s sitting in a pub, he remembers Bessie and how he ought to be looking after her, so he staggers out from the pub and goes round the clubs looking for her, just to see that she’s behaving herself. And when he finds her he tries to take her home, see—but Bessie never wants to go home—well, you can see for yourself. That’s Bessie over there, with Fred now. He’s trying to use force, poor old boy—he always gets so drunk. As a matter of fact, it usually ends with Bessie seeing Fred home . . .”
Before I could say anything else there came a diversion from the orchestra dais. There was a roll on the side drums, and some spotlights at the back of the hall swung down their beams and focussed them on the slim figure of Woody Hunter, the band leader, who was standing at the microphone making an announcement.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I know that no evening at the Cyclamen would be complete for you without a song from the little lady who is your hostess. And so I’m going to ask her to step forward and give you her favourite number—Dark Red Roses. I’m happy to be able to say, by the way, that we have the composer of Dark Red Roses himself with us to-night—Mr. Eddie Wheeler.”
There was a burst of applause and one of the spotlights swung round for a moment to rest on Eddie. I blinked unhappily in the white glare, but Eddie rose cheerfully and bobbed up and down and shook his hands as if he were a prize fighter taking his bow. The light went back to Woody Hunter.
“Didn’t know they were going to do that,” said Eddie to me out of the corner of his mouth as he sat down again. “Pretty decent, eh. Good number too, the old Roses—best I’ve ever done, I think—since The Love Bird Waltz, of course.”
There was another tremendous burst of applause from the crowd as there stepped on to the platform a girl with the slimmest and most beautiful figure I think I have ever seen. She was dressed in a long flared gown of a flowing mauve material, with a neat little bodice that cupped tightly over her breasts. The strange thing was, however, that she wore a mask—a stiff silk-paper mask of the same colour as her gown; and it did not only cover her eyes, but her whole face—there was a small opening at her mouth and two little eye-holes and that was all. The effect was extraordinary—the white of her neck and arms stood out brilliantly against the mauve of the gown and the mask, and her whole figure was surmounted by a piled-up heap of platinum blonde hair with one stab of colour in it—a cyclamen flower that she wore just above her left ear.
Woody Hunter held up his hand for silence.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we present your own favourite—the Girl in the Mask—the lovely Cyclamen Brown herself, singing Dark Red Roses.”
The orchestra struck up the introduction and the crowd applauded again. The girl advanced to the microphone and began to
sing. Her voice was low and husky—very pleasant, I thought, in a slow, soporific sort of way. As she sang she swung her hips very slightly—the effect was voluptuous in the extreme. I could see that most of the men in the audience were staring at her with moist eyes and slightly parted lips. Eddie—innocent soul—was beaming like a schoolboy who has had full marks from a favourite teacher—he was more Schubertian than ever, with the white light from the stage reflecting on his spectacles.
“Wonderful girl,” he gasped, when Cyclamen Brown had finished singing. “Wonderful girl! Don’t you think so, my boy?”
“She can certainly sing,” I conceded. “And she has a lovely figure. Does she always——”
The rest of my sentence was drowned by a sound of rhythmic chanting that now came from the crowd, superseding the great wave of applause that had marked the end of the song. It was evidently part of the routine at the Club.
“Take off your mask,” chanted the crowd, “take off your mask, take off your mask, take off your mask . . .”
The girl had been bowing. Now she straightened herself—I saw just a pin-point gleam from her eyes through the holes in the mask. She raised her hand to her face and a great “Ah” of expectation went up from the crowd. For a moment she seemed to fumble with the fastening of her mask, then instead, with a quick and graceful little gesture, she snatched the cyclamen from her hair and threw it among the audience. And with a final lascivious shake of the hips she turned and ran off-stage.
There was a deep groan of disappointment from the crowd, mingled with some laughter and applause. Then the band struck up a fox-trot, and before very long the scene in the club was normal again.
“Well, I must say,” I murmured to Eddie, “I must say she’s clever. That act with the mask was one of the neatest things I’ve ever seen—more exciting than strip-tease. A very clever idea—you get so interested in her voice and her figure that you begin to long to see her face. I was going to ask you if she ever took the mask off, but I can see that she doesn’t—at least on the stage. I suppose she does in private life.”
The Other Passenger Page 23