“Real, sir. Gives you a shock, doesn’t it? It gave me one the first time I saw it four years ago.”
Mr. Best seemed to be squinting down his predaceous nose.
“By Jove!” he said; and then: “Where the devil did you get——”
“Came in a lot, sir, I bought from De Vries. No; it didn’t come from your nursery.”
“A sport. But does it come true?”
“It has flowered true four years—and the other two in bloom were bulbils from it.”
The bulb merchant stood amazedly yet intelligently silent. His little eyes glimmered. He stroked his long upper lip.
“How many of them have you, Bob?”
“These three full-sized bulbs and a dozen or so youngsters. I wanted to be sure, sir, and to work up a small stock.”
“By Jove!” said Mr. Best in a whisper, and again, “By Jove!”
And suddenly their eyes met. Those of the bulb merchant were watchful, glinting with business; Maskray’s seemed to be looking through Mr. Best at something beyond him.
“Say, Bob, this is going to be the sensation of the century. What about it?”
He saw Maskray smile.
“I take these bulbs up to my bedroom at night——”
“Jove, man! They’re more valuable than bullion.”
“I know. Is it—is it—a question of business between us, sir?”
“Well—what’s your idea?” said the cautious one.
“I’m in love with your daughter,” said Maskray with abrupt quietness. “I have been in love with her for years.”
Another shock! Mr. Best sat down on the greenhouse staging, half off and half on a box of mustard and cress.
“Well—I’m——!”
But he did not damn himself. The possibilities of the situation were too extraordinary. He stared at one of the blue tulips.
“Began as a working-man myself,” he said; and then, “What’s the exact idea, Robert?”
Maskray, standing with one of the precious pots in his hand, and with a queer, luminous shine on his face, seemed to speak to the blue tulip.
“I called it ‘Irene,’ the first blue tulip. Yet it isn’t so wonderful as she is. I’m a plain man, but there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to make her happy. Money—oh—yes! I’d want her to live as she has always lived. I’m not a man for mere money, Mr. Best, but there is money in this flower—and I want the gold to throw at your daughter’s feet.”
Mr. Best observed his foreman’s transfigured face. Talk about miracles! And all this devotion prayerfully on its knees before Flora Irene! Miss Best might be his daughter, but Mr. Horatio knew his daughter’s limitations. Wonderful! Was she? Poor Robert! But, chiefly, he was concerned with the business proposition, for he had no doubt at all that Maskray had opened a floral gold-mine.
“A partnership, Bob. Is that your idea?”
“In a way, sir, on the understanding——”
“That you marry my daughter? But, come, come, she has to be considered.”
Maskray answered with quiet humility:
“Of course, sir. I’m no more than a plain man at her feet. I have got to work and fit myself, and all I ask is that I may have my chance with her.”
He raised his head and smiled suddenly.
“But the Maskray who raised the blue tulip. Maskray of Best and Maskray. Not plain Bob.”
Mr. Horatio understood him.
“Ah—that’s it. There’s a fortune in that flower-pot. By Jove, the sensation, the splash! Saved any money, Robert?”
“About three hundred pounds.”
“Well—well, not so bad. Supposing you were to bring your money and the tulip into the business, and take a third share. We could talk about the details later.”
Maskray looked at his tulip.
“Something comes before that, sir. I want to be allowed to speak to Miss Irene, to tell her what’s in my heart. I want to show her her tulip. Maybe—she’ll be willing to let me hope.”
Mr. Best concealed a business man’s impatience. Hang it all, was not business good enough without importing a young woman into it?
“Quite so, Robert, quite so. Supposing I give my daughter a hint. And supposing you come up this evening—and bring that flower.”
Robert Maskray’s face seemed to see heaven opened.
“Thank you, sir. Tell her I’m a plain man and know it; but, as sure as God has given me this flower, I’ll try to be worthy of her.”
Mr. Horatio shook hands with Maskray and hurried home. Diplomacy—yes, diplomacy was needed, for his daughter was a young woman who could go off like a Chinese cracker. Obviously she must be persuaded to smile, even if the smile were only temporary. The thing was to get control of that tulip. Mr. Best had foresight and a quick sense of smell. The horticultural sensation of the century! What a coup! His brain seethed with the possibilities of it.
He found his daughter at home, amusing herself with a cross-word puzzle.
“My dear, I have had a surprise, the surprise of my life.”
He declaimed, and she listened with a perfectly expressionless yet attentive face. So, fool Bob Maskray—a working man—was in love with her! No new news that. And he was hoping to climb to her favour like a Jack-of-the-Beanstalk up the stem of a monstrous tulip!
She kept a quiet face, but inwardly she raged, for it so happened that on this very day life had hurt her and humiliated her, and she was no gentle creature. Her raw young spirit raged to pass on the pain.
“So he’s coming up?”
“Yes, my dear. Now, sentiment apart, it’s a business proposition.”
“Quite so,” said she. “I’ll see him.”
When the critical hour and Robert Maskray and his tulip arrived, Mr. Horatio withdrew himself to the dining-room and lit a cigar and straddled in front of the fire. Rum business this! But then—Flora Irene should be able to handle it successfully.
But—good heavens—what was that? A smashing of glass? Investigation was needed, and when Mr. Best opened the drawing-room door he beheld an open window, and his daughter standing by the sofa and laughing hysterically.
“My dear——”
He went to the window, and pulling it down, found one of the big panes smashed.
“How—who——? Where’s Maskray?”
Her laughter frightened him.
“He—oh, he went out of the window after I had thrown his tulip—pot and all—through the glass.”
Mr. Best’s upper lip quivered. He stared for a moment, and then rushed to the door and, going out into the garden, shouted to Robert Maskray; but no one answered him. On the path in front of the drawing-room window he was able to discover a few broken pieces of pot.
“Oh—women, women!”
He went in again, snatched a hat, and hurried down the road in the direction of Kings Barton. It took him a quarter of an hour to reach Maskray’s cottage, and he calculated that the tulip grower could not have been very far ahead of him. There was a light in the cottage. He knocked.
“Who’s that?” said a voice.
Mr. Best tried the door and it opened to him, but he paused on the threshold of Maskray’s room, for Robert Maskray was sitting all hunched up on a Windsor chair in front of the fire with a coal shovel in his hand. He was staring at the fire.
“Bob,” said Mr. Horatio softly, but suddenly afraid.
Maskray did not turn his head, but continued to stare at the fire.
“The tulips?”
“I have burnt them,” said the man.
And then he added:
“God gave it me. ’Twas a beautiful thing, and I was for selling the soul of a flower. But the Devil spoke the word. Yes, I have burnt the lot.”
A RED BLIND
It was a window with a red blind.
Anthony Vance passed it twice a day: at 7.30 in the morning and at 8.30 at night. Always there was light burning behind the red blind, because it was December when Vance began to travel to and fro from Rickmansworth, and his
morning train was early and his evening train late. He worked some twelve hours a day—a young man creating his own opportunities and collecting a career. He was a departmental manager with the world-renowned firm of Killick & Paul.
His parents had christened him Anthony Dawn Vance. Inevitably at school he had been known as Advance, or more vulgarly as Hustle. Nicknames are not always fair to the victim; Vance was not all hustle.
He had imagination, curiosity, a sense of colour. Probably that was why he noticed the red window and continued to notice it—an unknown window in an unknown street. It was one of many windows at the back of an ugly row of flat-faced houses of a yellowish blackness. It belonged to the third floor. It had the bare branches of a black old poplar tree in front of it, and like a miniature sunset or dawn it outlined the spreading twigs.
The railway line passed through a deepish cutting below this row of houses. Vance was rather vague as to the neighbourhood; it might be Chalk Farm or Camden Town, but certainly it would be shabby and semi-respectable, a neighbourhood that would make you wonder who lived there, and how and why?
But the red window continued to interest him; in fact his interest in it increased. It set him speculating as to the human contents of the room to which it belonged. Was the window male or female, or both? He had a feeling that it was feminine. And what sort of woman would occupy such a room? A clerk, or typist, or shop-girl or waitress? His tendencies were towards youthfulness. It was just speculation, for Vance was not exactly a sentimentalist; Killick & Paul demanded a fierce efficiency, not sentimentalism. And there were occasions when he would laugh at his speculations, and reflect that probably the red blind veiled a very frowsy person, the kind of stout lady you saw serving in a greengrocer’s shop, and looking like a cold and over-ripe plum on the edge of bursting its integument.
In Vance, speculation tended to become active. In his Bloomsbury days when he had occupied a very top-floor bed sitting-room, and had lunched at Messrs. Lyons’ or with the Aerated Bread Company, on sixpence, he had been an inveterate explorer. The red window was like a solitary light seen in strange, wild country after dark. It occurred to him that it would be quite amusing to hunt up that unknown house in an unknown street. It would not be altogether easy. The red blind was visible only from the railway line.
It happened that towards Christmas life became so strenuous at Killick & Paul’s that Vance, who courted strenuosities and their possibilities, decided to sleep in town for a week. He put up at a little private hotel not far from Russell Square. And with a week-end arriving, and providing him with a portion of Saturday and the whole of Sunday to do as he chose with, he thought of the red window. The locating of it suggested the solving of a sort of Chinese puzzle. There was much of the boy in Anthony Vance.
He had looked up possible streets in a large-scale section map of London, and had jotted down the names of several that ran parallel to the railway. He chose Camden Town. He had scribbled the names of these streets on the back of an envelope.
He set out. It was rather foggy, and all that shabby neighbourhood grew more dim and grey; it seemed to fade away into the dusk. It was endless, and Vance got lost. His explorations had never carried him into these parts, and as the dusk changed to a darkness that was smudged with the lights of lamps and windows, he knew himself much lost.
He stopped a postman, and plumped for one of his hypothetical addresses.
“Excuse me, do you know Endover Street?”
“Yes. First on left, and take the second to the right.”
“Thanks.”
Vance found Endover Street, only to realize that it could not contain that row of houses with the red window. Endover Street offered him nothing but squat little semi-detached villas. It seemed to specialize in prowling cats.
He stopped a baker’s boy who was out late trundling a hand-cart.
“D’you know Mordant Street?”
The boy did.
“Go along ’ere. Cut through a sort o’ passage between a pub and a row of ’ouses, and you’ll be in Mordant Street.”
“Runs beside the railway line, doesn’t it?”
“Can’t say. But that’s the way to Mordant Street.”
Vance found the passage between the public-house and the row of houses. The pub had steaming windows, and the mouth of the passage was denied to wheeled traffic by a couple of iron posts resembling cannon with their breeches let into the ground. The passage passed the entrance to a builder’s yard, where two dark figures were bending over the engine of a lorry. Mordant Street displayed itself in the darkness as two rows of highish houses set back behind dingy little gardens. The houses had semi-basements and flights of steps going up to the front doors.
Vance paused at the end of Mordant Street. The row of houses on the left had the appearance of being the very row of houses he was in search of. They were three stories high, and as far as he could judge the brickwork was of the same sooty yellowness. And then he heard a train pass in the cutting at the back of the row, and the rumble of its wheels seemed to applaud the conviction that Mordant Street held the window with the red blind.
He strolled on. The house with the red window would be somewhere in the centre of the row, and he saw the numbers of the houses painted upon the glass lights above the doors. Seventeen, nineteen, twenty-one. The red window was on the side of the odd numbers.
He paused outside the iron gate of No. 21. Mordant Street was as melancholy and depressing a street as you could wish for in order to stress a hideous utilitarianism, yet it was like hundreds of other streets, hiding its shabby secrets behind dingy lace curtains. The houses seemed to peer at each other suspiciously across the roadway. Their windows looked short-sighted and dim. A fire was burning in the basement of No. 21; the blind was up, and Vance could see the white leg and corner of a kitchen table.
He was leaning on the iron gate, thinking that Mordant Street was no very glorious discovery, when the front door opened and closed and a woman came down the steps. She carried a little attaché case; she moved with the deliberate swiftness of a person who had a purpose in life; also, her movements were youthful. She caught Vance in the act of withdrawing from the gate.
She spoke to him.
“Don’t hang about here. I suppose you are one of them. If you want to see him, go up.”
Astonishing salutation! But delivered with a brusqueness and a touch of contempt, and Vance raised his hat.
“Thank you. Very good of you——”
But she left him standing there. Obviously, she had business of her own, and no particular use for the loafing male. Her face, with its firm chin and straight nose had a crispness. And Vance stood possessed of an extraordinary situation. She had supposed that he was “one of them”; but who were “them”? And if he wanted to see “him,” he was to go up, and not loaf outside the gate.
But who was “him”? and what was “him’s” mysterious business in life? and was he not becoming rather ungrammatical with his thems and his hims? Intriguing situation! But why not accept it; why not seize it? Was it possible that “he” occupied the room with the red blind? The adventure was becoming actual; it was not to be resisted.
Then Vance had an idea. Of course! “He”—was a bookie, and people came to 21 Mordant Street to make their bets. Yes; that was the most probable explanation.
The girl’s footsteps had died away, and Vance went up the path, and climbed the steps. Should he ring, or go straight in? He decided to ring.
He heard shuffling footsteps. The door was opened six inches by a short, stout, elderly woman. She did not ask any questions. She eyed the dim, masculine figure on the doorstep with a kind of passive and stolid hostility.
“Is—he—in?”
The woman stood back and opened the door, and Vance walked into the narrow hall where a gas jet, turned low, showed him the foot of the stairs covered with brown linoleum.
“May I go up?”
“They always do.”
“My first visit. Wh
ich floor?”
“Top-floor back.”
“Thank you.”
He started to climb the stairs. He was very much aware of the strangeness of those stairs, and of the unexpectedness of the whole affair. Surely it was both an impudent and imprudent adventure. Danger? No, he did not think there was any danger in his climbing of those unknown stairs. The girl would not have spoken to him as she had done; she had struck him as being a very practical young person, and not in the least sinister.
He arrived on the top-floor landing; it was in semi-darkness; he saw a line of light at the bottom of a door, the door of the third-floor back. Obviously “he” was in there, and for a moment Vance’s boyish cheek failed him. He was on the edge of bolting down the stairs and out into the street. But, hang it, was he going to funk at the last moment? Did he not flatter himself that in business he could call any man’s bluff.
He knocked at the door. A clear, sharp voice answered from within. It was one of those voices that suggest the bugle—a metallic, ringing quality.
“Come in.”
Vance opened the door, and found himself looking at a red blind. Extraordinary linking up of circumstances! So this was the very room whose window he had looked at so often. He saw a narrow bed with a red coverlet, tucked away in a far corner, a round table, a chest of drawers. There were books and writing materials on the table. But for the moment the occupant of the room was screened by the open door, and he did not come into view until Vance stepped into the room.
He stared.
“I beg your pardon. I was told to come up.”
He stood holding the handle of the door, and looking down at the man in the arm-chair beside the fire. This man had an old grey rug over his knees; he was dressed in dark-blue dressing-gown and flannel shirt. And he was as unexpected as the whole absurd adventure, though there was nothing absurd about the figure by the fire. On the contrary “he” looked a rather formidable person, with his head of red hair going grey, and the fierceness of his striking face. His eyes were of an extraordinary light-blueness, rather like brittle ice. He had a disconcerting way of staring.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 38