Massingham noticed that Mrs. Farren’s eyes hardly ever left the child, and in one moment of frankness she let him see the inwardness of her devotion.
“Oh—one must hold on to something.”
“Of course.”
“There is so little that matters—really.”
He sat considering the shreds of his own creed.
“We men——” he began.
“Oh, men are good——”
He gave her a glance of surprise.
“You’re kind—mostly, such boys. And then—of course—you are such failures—the best of you—in the vulgar sense, I mean.”
“You think so?”
“Well—aren’t you? And yet——”
She brooded a moment.
“I’m married to one of the failures, a most lovable failure. Too scrupulous—you know. He can’t do the little dirty things that make for success. Even now——”
Her eyes were tender.
“A managing clerk in a solicitor’s office. We let our little house to give the child a chance. He is living in two rooms, scraping, saving every halfpenny for this. But so much of the world makes me sneer.”
From that moment Mr. Massingham understood her sneer; it was part of her armour, her retort to the successful greeds of progress. It humiliated him; it was like a hot wire touching the secret shame that was in him.
“Restitution,” he said, “sometimes one gets a chance.”
“Oh, sometimes, perhaps,” she agreed, with her eyes on the child.
Old Crossby, all red after dinner, looking like a man who had been peppered, and occupying the only arm-chair in the lounge of the Hesperides, smoked a cigar and read an English paper. He was addicted to comments; he liked to retail the news as though by the doing of it he expressed a sense of superiority over his fellows. A man is never too old to show off, and age has methods of its own.
“Ha—here’s that Victoria Trust Co. again. If I were the Official Receiver. What? Of course, my dear lady—a case for the Public Prosecutor. Fraudulent scoundrels. Assets—two-pence halfpenny—and some office furniture.”
He shook the paper and bristled at it.
“Adventure! What? You said adventure, Mrs. Farren?”
“Well, isn’t it so—sometimes? Call it financial piracy.”
“I’d adventure the scoundrels. Ha! One director unable to attend, doctor’s certificate. Another fellow gone abroad for three weeks. Better cut his throat at the end of it.”
He glanced at Massingham, who was standing very stiff behind a chair and making an effort to light a pipe. Mr. Crossby liked to be disagreed with; it was productive of argument, and appeared to help his digestion.
“Disgraceful. Our public morals——”
“Very much on the surface,” said Elsie’s mother.
“My dear lady——”
“It is mostly surface. Underneath—most of us do what we want to do. I don’t think we can help it.”
“That’s rank anarchy,” said old Crossby. “Civilization could not go on.”
“But that’s just why it does go on. Don’t you think so, Mr. Massingham?”
Massingham, coming out of a stare, and ceasing to watch a fly crawling on the wall, answered in a slack voice:
“You can’t keep the flies away from the sugar.”
“Damn it, sir—then we can lock up the sugar.”
“That’s—death,” said the tall man.
But he drifted out and disappeared, and very soon his feet were leaving footprints on the sand, wavering chains of interminable impressions, like the writhings of some repulsive parasitic worm. Massingham had dined, but his body felt empty with a horrible and chilly emptiness. It was not that the words of a red-faced and explosive old man had convinced him of villainy, of guilt, of shame—Mr. Crossby had been no more than a barking dog. The world was full of such dogs, kept chained up to the kennel of convention. It was the black ghost of his self walking beside him on the sands, the shadow of his own ineffectual will, his blank failure that made the soul of him feel like a wet and soiled dish-clout. Failure is the bottom of the uttermost pit when a man’s self-respect can show him no glimmer of light. There is nothing to scramble towards when self-pride goes out like a blown candle flame.
“Sleep—sleep!” was his craving, inward cry. “Why do I delay it?”
And yet his anguish had an echo.
“If I could do something decent, just once, get out of this damned self of mine—just for five minutes.”
He wandered far over the sands until La Marondou had become a coronet of little lights fastened upon the brow of its bay. He stood and mused, hands hanging slackly, thinking how life went on, and that no man was indispensable except to himself. Were he to be fished up out of the sea that little town over yonder would not blink an eyelid. Mrs. Farren and old Crossby had gone to the Minerva for their game of cards. Elsie was asleep. To-morrow there would be the same game of cards and the same sleeping child. Someone might casually remark “Poor devil!” and fill another pipe.
It must have been somewhere about ten o’clock when Massingham turned towards La Marondou where the little pinpricks of light were dying out in the background of the night. He strolled, keeping no direct course, a man so absorbed in his thoughts and their atmosphere that his senses were mere concern of his body. He arrived at the point where the pine wood marched down towards the sea, and the diminishing lights of La Marondou were visible between the trunks. He saw six splodges of yellow increase suddenly in the cushion of darkness, six oblong and brilliant panels of light. Queer—that! It drew his attention, fixed it, turned it towards a live conjecture.
What were those lights? A row of windows very brilliantly lit. But surely the glare of them was unusual? The length of his stride increased; he was hurrying almost without realizing the increase in his pace. Something on fire, a house, and in just that place where the Hôtel Hesperides confronted the sea?
He was aware of a sudden tenseness, a tightening of all his fibres, mental and physical. He moved rapidly, his eyes on that pattern glowing against the darkness, and it seemed to him that it was no dead glow, but a live and rampant force, increasing, spreading, devouring.
A little later Massingham knew that it was the Hôtel Hesperides that was on fire. He was running now towards a sound of voices and a suggestion of confused movement upon the sands, a shadow-show of panic. He heard the voice of the fire answering the gentler voice of the sea.
He arrived breathless, looking up at that smoking, crackling façade. He ran into a group of people, some of them half-dressed. Figures were running from the houses along the sea-front.
A loud voice—the voice of a woman—dominated the confusion. It belonged to Madame of the hotel.
“Oh, la-la——! It will burn to the ground. We have nothing in La Marondou. Are we all here?”
A man’s voice chattered.
“La petite! Madame Farren—was at the Minerva.”
“Mon Dieu!”
“Petite Elsie! Where is the child?”
The crowd scuffled and swayed as though it were searching its own interstices for the little figure of a child.
“Mon Dieu! She is not here.”
“She is up there.”
“Oh, mon Dieu!”
The fire had begun upon the second floor, and above it the shuttered windows of the upper floor were patches of darkness, and Massingham, looking up at those enigmatic shutters, felt the heart of him utter a cry that was a cry of mingled anguish and of exultation. He disappeared, and some time later the crowd saw the shutters of an upper window thrust open, and two figures outlined against the glare.
A shout went up, and then a silence fell. The man up there was waving and calling to those below.
“The staircase is burning. A ladder.”
There was no ladder, and a vague and baffled clamour made it known to him.
He called down.
“A sheet—a carpet. Hold it. I must let her drop.”
One of the fishermen was shouting.
“Jump, monsieur.”
Massingham jumped and missed the sail. The crowd saw his body crash upon one of the blue tables in the garden, and for a moment there was stillness—horror.
A little while before he died a woman came and knelt where he was lying on a mattress spread upon the sands. The glare from the burning building played upon his face, but it seemed to shine also with an inward light, white with death, but triumphant.
“Oh—I’m sorry, I’m sorry. What can I say? It was so great of you.”
She held one of his hands, and saw his smile. He never spoke a single word to her, for he was beyond speech, but that dying and smiling face of his expressed supreme happiness.
When it was over she knelt awhile, looking at him with wonder, yet becoming vaguely conscious of a mystery that would explain itself, though there had been nothing mysterious in his smile. He had died, satisfied with something. Perhaps it had been with himself!
AT “THE GOLDEN PALACE”
Mr. John Smith received a letter. It came to him through the hands of his publishers, addressed to Norman Gage, Esq., and though Mr. John Smith received letters of adoration and abuse, letters from beggars and swindlers and idle women, this particular letter surprised him. It was a novelty. It suggested the fitting of a new pair of wings to the body of some enterprising publicity agent.
Mr. John Smith was quite unknown, happening to be one of those peculiarly shy men who loathe a public parade. Mr. Norman Gage was famous: you met him on the bookstalls, and lying in the laps of young women at Hastings and Bournemouth, and sometimes he was seen in the illustrated papers. Norman Gage had been the victim of a boom.
It would appear that a syndicate with imagination had bought, refurnished and redecorated The Golden Palace Hotel at Cap d’Or on the French Riviera, and that the syndicate’s scheme of decoration had not ended with the paint pots and the upholstery. John Smith had seen the phenomenon advertised in the papers. Apparently, the syndicate had conceived the idea of decorating its hotel with human splendours, live successes, celebrities. It proposed to set the latest public idols walking across its carpets. Its patrons should have something to look at. The Golden Palace Hotel should be a temple of fame.
Mr. Smith read his letter while he spooned up his porridge in his Surrey cottage.
“Dear Sir,
“Should you care to honour us by visiting our hotel for a month we can assure you of a very pleasant welcome. We are inviting a number of celebrities to witness the inauguration of our first season, and we should like you to be one of them.
“May we say—without offence—that no charge will be made. The privilege of your presence in our hotel will amply compensate us. We shall regard it as a favour.
“We remain,
“Yours very faithfully,
“——”
Mr. Smith poured out his coffee, looked through the window at the rain, and at his beloved garden lying hooded and grey against the rain-smirched, pine-covered hills. It had been raining for months, a second deluge.
“Filthy weather,” he reflected.
And then he smiled. He ate his bacon and continued to smile; for, like many shy and quiet men, Mr. Smith had a delicate sense of humour.
“It would be rather a joke to go. As myself—of course. Plain Smith. Watch things. A sort of peacock parade. And the sun.”
Over his toast and marmalade he came to a decision.
“I’ll go.”
After breakfast he sat down and wrote to The Golden Palace Hotel, asking them if they could provide him with a little suite facing south, and what their terms would be. In four days he received a reply. The Golden Palace would be delighted to accommodate Mr. Smith. The terms en pension were distinctly prodigious.
“Obviously,” thought Mr. Smith, “one has to pay for the peacocks.”
He wrote off and booked his suite for a day early in February.
Mr. Smith travelled on the Blue Train. On arriving at Cap d’Or in an orgy of sunlight he was met by an equally blue porter who carried more gold braid and buttons than a general of a South American republic. A brilliantly blue bus conducted Mr. Smith and three other travellers up a winding road towards the immensities of The Golden Palace. He had glimpses of palms, mimosa, beds of cineraria and primula, orange trees, gay people playing tennis, an array of sumptuous private cars. The Golden Palace loomed over him like a vast white cliff, topped by three gilded cupolas from which flew the flags of France, England and the U.S.A.
Bowed through the great doors into a lounge that had the proportions of a classic temple he stood on the edge of a vast blue and gold carpet, a little figure in a brown overcoat, and holding rather self-consciously a soft grey hat. One minion in blue relieved him of his hat; a second helped him off with his overcoat. He was conscious of feeling dirty, crumpled, travel-stained; he remembered that he had not shaved.
A polite and sallow person in a black tailed coat came and purred to him.
“Mr. Smith——?”
Mr. Smith nodded.
“No. 103. No doubt, sir, you would like to go——”
Again, Mr. Smith nodded. He felt voiceless in this vast place where the very cushions were so superfine and new, and the carpet of fame spread its blue and golds at his feet. He was a little bewildered. In the scattered arm-chairs the syndicate had arranged dozens of superior people, superfine young women who stared for a moment till they seemed to discover that a stare at Mr. Smith was not worth while. Mr. Smith had to walk round the legs of a very long and impressive man with an eyeglass who fixed him momentarily with that crystal circle, and then returned with an air of satisfaction to his book.
“Salterhouse—by Jove!” thought Mr. Smith, “the author-publisher. Glad he doesn’t know me.”
“This way, sir,” said the suave person in the tail coat.
Mr. Smith crossed the immensities of the lounge to the distant music of an orchestra playing ragtime. A flunkey in a scarlet coat, plum-coloured breeches and white stockings bowed him and the polite person into a gilded lift. The lift ascended, with Mr. Smith reflecting that this gilded cage was symbolical. He was going up. But he was deposited on the first floor; that, too, was symbolical—even to a person of the name of Smith——!
Some tea, a bath and a shave restored Smith’s confidence and his sense of humour. Having dressed he strolled along his corridor and down the immensely wide staircase into the lounge. The place had a hushed vastness. It reminded Smith of those spacious interiors in which the American film father smokes his cigar, and is embraced by his daughters, or frowns a corrugated and financial frown in the midst of white pillars and cyclopean furniture. Mr. Smith had some of the feelings of a mouse in a palace.
“Plenty of room for heads to expand,” he thought.
At the bottom of the majestic flight of stairs he came upon Vernon Doyle, the actor, obviously in a very bad temper, and Doyle was famed for his powers in the expressing of passion.
“Suppose Doyle had one of those letters. Thank heaven—I——”
The great man passed him, and Smith went on to discover Sir Richard Tempest—an even more popular actor than Doyle, drinking cocktails with a number of expensive ladies, and it seemed to Smith that Sir Richard also was a man displeased. Was it possible that these two public idols——?
Mr. Smith sat down in a corner with the impression that he might be on the edge of certain piquancies. It was possible that the syndicate had been a little too free with its invitations, and that to get Saturn and Jupiter on to the same Olympus was tactless. But then—actors——! He peered his way through the consolidating masses of human gorgeous
ness that had begun to flow and spread over the blue and gold carpet and beheld Herbert Zwanker, the novelist. Zwanker’s pallid, oriental profile had a stilted peevishness; he looked desirous of biting somebody.
“Might be another novelist somewhere about,” thought Mr. Smith; “not me—of course.”
There was! Standing with his back to a pillar Sir Percival Hackett was talking pontifically to three elderly ladies.
“By George!” chuckled Mr. Smith.
For Messrs. Hackett and Zwanker had brought out novels within a week of each other under titles that had had an unfortunate likeness; nor were the plots and the ladies concerned in the plots unalike. And Hackett and Zwanker were “best sellers,” and had their photos in the advertising column of The Times.
Mr. Smith crinkled up his eyelids.
“I wonder if people have been telling Sir Percival how they enjoyed reading his ‘Piccadilly Perfumes.’ ”
As a matter of fact they had. “Piccadilly Perfumes,” of course, had come from the pen of Mr. Zwanker.
Somehow and somewhere during the evening Mr. Smith fell into conversation with an elderly woman whom the strenuous life of The Golden Palace had washed into an obscure corner of the Salle des Fêtes. Feeling perdu in this world of nobodies who looked somebodies, and of somebodies who looked nobodies, he had craved a quiet corner, and had discovered this pathetic figure of bourgeois bewilderment isolated and afraid. For such places as The Golden Palace impose fear upon certain simple souls.
The old lady had let her brocade bag slide from her stout knees to the floor. Mr. Smith picked it up for her.
“Excuse me—you have dropped your bag.”
She reacted to the obvious, and to the kindness of his quiet voice.
“Much obliged to you—I’m sure.”
Mr. Smith sat down beside her as he might have sat down beside a lost and bemused child. She looked very worthy in her Sunday best, and straining in it under the vague lines of its unworthiness. She was the eternal worker, the admirable washerwoman whirled breathlessly into the rectory drawing-room which was full of her imagined betters.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 58