Emptying his third cup of tea, René rose. “Well!” He spoke with fists raised to the dirty heaven of the hotel apartment, as if this bitter well were an imprecation. His stretch took him forward several thudding paces, like a man with locomotor. “I guess I’ll make this Room fit for a hero to live in…. Why don’t they say that this time? They don’t say anything nice this time like ‘a war to end war’! Effrontery!”
“Hush!” remarked his wife.
“Yes, I know.” He heaved a sigh that was loaded with stale revolt, that was like a freshwater tear, that had lost even its salt.
A pair of large tarnished scissors were at his feet: he picked them up and dropped them into a work-basket that was a miniature oyster basket from Boulogne-sur-mer: picked up a breakfast cup with an empty packet of cigarettes stuck in it, a square-toothed breadknife and a last night’s beer-pocked tumbler, and carried them to the kitchen. Watched by his wife, as animals watch each other with sullen reserve in cages, when one comes to life, René returned and collected his overshoes, the ice from which had wetted the floor, and his damp Bond Street overcoat, and went with them towards the closet. His wife got up and drifted with the listlessness of captivity towards the bathroom, against the window-pane of which the birds were knocking with their beaks.
“Some birds …”
“Yes!” he answered emphatically.
“Some birds get to think …”
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Tell Philips we can’t afford to feed so huge a bird.”
“Poor Philips.”
“Never mind! Shoo the pigeons away. Why allow Philips …”
“It isn’t Philips,” she said, watching the birds from the bathroom door. “It’s two sparrows.” The knocking had stopped.
“They have been looking at me from that bough for the last ten minutes.”
“Tell them we don’t like Canadian sparrows.”
“It’s no use.They don’t know they’re Canadian. Besides, they can’t help it.”
René, who was sitting at the table filling his pipe, showed exasperation. He felt she never properly understood.“Bread!” he exclaimed. “Ask them how the hell they think we can get all that bread! Where from? Ask them. Say we’re on relief.”
She looked at him. She had fetched some stale bread from the kitchen. “We soon shall be, if …”
“All right. But don’t be blackmailed by a gang of sparrows.
They’re too lazy to dig for worms. They prefer to sponge on us.”
“Oh well …”
“They think they’re romantic because they’ve got feathers.
Say you’ve got feathers too!” She put her bread down and began to cry a little, softly and stupidly.
The knocking on the window began again. With this she had a burst of crying, and sat down heavily. René rushed to the window shouting, “
It’s Philips! I can see him.”
He struggled with the window which would not move. He ran back into the Room and fetched the screwdriver they used for that purpose and prised it open. The birds had flown away and were watching him from the neighbouring trees and roof gutters. There were not many, it was too cold. He gave vent to an unfriendly roar in the icy air: then forced the window down, with as much noise as possible.
His wife was weeping beside the pieces of stale bread. René felt sorry, but he could not forgive his wife for not seeing through these parasites, just because they had violet wings.
“I don’t know where I can get the bread for Philips, upon my word I don’t,” he grumbled. “I was a nickel out yesterday. Three cents of that went for Brown and Philips and a gang of common little gutter finches. — Don’t cry. — They know you’re an English sucker. These bloody peasants wouldn’t give them a crumb. Let them go to …”
He stopped.
“I hear the gas gun…. Not at this time in the morning!”
His wife got up, wiping her eyes.
A big fact in the Hotel Blundell was the Cockroach. — What Hester had at first taken to be garden insects at last became more numerous. Then one day Bess came in as usual and asked, in an indifferent voice, whether the Hardings had seen any cockroaches. No, they answered (for they were always both there when Bess arrived to do the Room). They had read of “’roaches” in American stories, but they had never seen a ’roach.
After that, however, they began looking out for the cockroach. And soon they became convinced that the “garden insects” were in fact cockroaches.
These animals began moving in on the Hardings in droves. For, in other apartments, war was being made on them, and they began crawling in to the only apartment where they were not interfered with. So the Hardings complained to Bess, and an insect spray was lent them. This was no use at all. Apparently all over the hotel — all over every hotel and everywhere else, from the market downtown to the drugstore at the corner — they were swarming.
The cockroach (with diabetes, one of the national handicaps of the North American Continent) is about the size of a bedbug, but elongated, lighter in colour, and speckled, with a detachable pouch full of embryos which it throws away when pursued. It exists equally in the bush and in cities. — There is another kind, which is black, called the German variety. But the reddish one is what one mainly sees.
About the time the cockroach began to obsess the Hardings, and all the hotel, it also became a burning question throughout Momaco, and even in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada, it closed government offices. Fifty girl clerks struck, because these animals were running all over their typewriters and over their clothes. So the department had to be shut down and fumigated.
In the beverage room downstairs, they were crawling up people’s legs and getting in the beer. Customers were leaving to go to other beverage rooms. Mrs. Plant was extremely sensitive about anything that happened to her beverage room trade. She took steps accordingly.
A man arrived to demonstrate the use of the gas gun. The Hardings were the people with the greatest collection of cockroaches, so it was to the Hardings’ apartment that he was brought, but he merely came to talk, not to deliver an attack upon the ’roaches. He told them how he had been all over the city, rescuing people from this pest. The City Hall was full of them. Only yesterday he had been asked to go to a Jewish workers’ establishment, where the floor was so thick with them that you could not walk without treading on them; and when a girl was going to put a needle into a piece of cloth, she would put it through a cockroach first. The girls were screaming and weeping.
Then he produced the gas gun. Since that time this instrument had been in use in the hotel day and night. But Mrs. McAffie had especially interested herself in the destruction of these pests: and it was she who almost exclusively handled the gas gun.
It was about ten minutes before Affie made her appearance. Now, as a personality, or visually at least, Affie was in two parts. There was the normal Affie that went about the house discharging her duties as manageress; and there was the hooded, rather sinister and witch-like figure who appeared, gas gun in hand, and, after knocking at the door, this was the figure which entered the Room, enquiring if they wished her to go into action, or whether she should come later on.
They had always up till now postponed a showdown with the ’roaches. They looked at one another, and they did not have to speak to reach agreement: both thought that a showdown with the ’roaches was overdue. René beckoned Affie in. They both of them proceeded to remove, or to place under cover, things like cooking utensils, crockery, toilet articles, and the rest. Some were brought into the Room, and others locked in cupboards. Then Affie entered the kitchen, and turned the gas gun on the ceiling. It filled the whole apartment with its acrid fumes, and within a few minutes hundreds of cockroaches were pouring from the ceiling upon Affie’s head and shoulders. This continued for twenty minutes or half an hour, as long in fact as cockroaches continued to appear from crevices and hideouts all over the kitchen and bathroom, and succumb to the fumes. The floor was carpeted with the bodie
s of these insects. Many of them fell on the face of the gunner, and her cheeks were also streaming with the poisonous liquid. She appeared to be devoured by an insane itch for destruction; it was personal, not at all a matter of duty. She did not spare herself, but seemed rather to enjoy the tumbling bodies of the vermin sticking to her face and hands, or garments — her hair being protected by the hood.
Some of the insects escaped from the kitchen or bathroom; and from time to time she would put down the gas gun, and hurry out in pursuit, crushing them with the heel of her shoe. Stooping down, she would sometimes pick one up, and address it in the following way: “Aha, you threw off your bag did you.You hoped to save your brood, did you! Your auntie was too smart for you!” with which she would throw it down and stamp on it.
René soon left the Room, and Hester followed him in a few minutes. “That woman is possessed,” he remarked, when Hester joined him in the beverage room. “It cannot be good for her to breathe in all that stuff. She is the only person in the hotel who takes on the job, and if anyone else touches the gun she gets very angry.What do you suppose is the matter with her?”
When they returned to the Room a half-hour later, the dead ’roaches were being swept away, and René hurried over to a window which he propped open. The icy air entered the rooms, but even so it took a long time to expel this stink. Affie vanished, and already she could be heard in a neighbouring apartment, blasting away at the ’roaches.
XIV
THE PATRONESS OF
ROTTEN JANITORS
Mrs. McAffie was their favourite figure. They developed an affection for this flying wraith, with the faintly rouged cheeks, who dashed, flew and darted everywhere, as though she desired to get rid of every remaining piece of flesh on her bones. She was tall and still enjoyed, in the manner of an afterglow, a vanished grace. She was known as Affie in the Room, where she was a welcome apparition. The hooded figure with the gas gun was Affie in a sinister role which troubled them a little bit.
Mrs. McAffie arrived in succession to Vera. In addition to being an addict of Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia, Vera was insolent, lazy, thievish, sly, and bad-tempered. She shot off her mouth at Mrs. Plant one day, and that was when she left. Then Mrs. McAffie was hired and a spirit came into the place which was of a different texture — more volatile and sprightly than had been there before. Her age was unknown and unguessable. She endeared herself to René in one of their early conversations by the sincerity of her horror at the new war. “They are taking our boys,” she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them up. “They are taking our boys again.”
Affie took no tips. She was the only decent person who ever found her way, or his way, into the Hotel Blundell. And she paid for it.
When Affie read the teacups once, René, who liked her, succeeded in thrusting a dollar bill down between her shrivelled breasts, and she ran hooting from the Room. But when she saw that neither René nor his wife believed in her hypnotic assurances that they should beware of a dark man, or that they would tread strange ground shortly, she refused to take another penny. She shot away, pawing the air, when he approached her with a dollar bill.
Affie had been married to an attorney in the long ago, dead some twenty years. She had acted as nurse-housekeeper. She had owned a shop up in the gold-mining country, where it is very cold. She came from a bush-city herself: but she had exceedingly bad man trouble: heavy, incurable, starry-eyed man trouble. Her old eyes sparkled, her old bones kindled at the touch of a male, and the male touched them as he was looking for money. Some personable deceiver had cheated her out of her nest egg up in the gold country. Her shop in Timmins was hers no longer. She often sat crouched at the telephone, in the zero weather, brooding. Her dream-man had spat on her old heart. When the glass went down to zero, the old wound hurt: she rocked herself in the lonely lounge. Naturally she did go on losing any weight she had, as she rushed like a witch all over the hotel — carrying towels or sheets, or just running for the sake of running after her shadow.
When she slapped the face of the young punch-drunk janitor, she flew up the stairs, screeching and croaking with glee. The janitor was ten seconds behind her on the annex landing. She had vanished with a hoarse cackle. — The Hardings heard the indignant roar of the alcoholic pugilist, a few feet from their door: “Come down here, you bloody old cow, Missis McAffie, and I’ll wring your f — neck!” — Silence. She had adroitly evaporated. When Affie and her colleague Miss Toole retired to the bathroom, and she dyed Miss Toole’s hair a most unreal brassy gold, and Miss Toole did the same for her in a dark brown, Affie, with her cheeks rouged and lips painted, looked for a while a not uncomely scarecrow, with the shawl held tight round her shoulders to keep warm, standing and smiling at the Hardings’ door, on which she had tapped, presenting herself like a child who had dressed herself up in her grandmother’s clothes — she having of course borrowed the bloom from the cheeks of a granddaughter, and stolen the brown tresses. She stood, tall, genteel, and at bottom severe, with the smile of a naughty girl who had been at the dye bottle with her little pal Molly Toole.
Affie is the nearest approach in Canada to the decayed gentlewoman. Affie certainly had decayed. And subsequently it was proved that she had in fact dwelt among the genteel, as a respected attorney’s lady, in Ottawa. She had enjoyed the amenities. As “well bred,” she beyond doubt still regarded herself.
Affie was a bad influence in the hotel. She was so cheerfully and openly on the side of copulation — in spite of her respectable and even outwardly solemn appearance — no matter who were to be the performers: she cried in her heart with King Lear “let copulation thrive!” — that she would rent the rooms preferably to women who could be depended on to use them for that purpose, and turn away people whom she felt had leanings to virtue, though otherwise more desirable tenants. The hotel as a consequence, in the “transients” section, was in a state of chronic disorder.
This suited Mrs.Plant, however,since people would pay several dollars more to use the apartments for acts of discreet prostitution than for less Babylonish purposes. Thus it was that when two French-Canadian civilians came in with girls with over-bright eyes, asking for a room for the four for a week, they were given the room above the Hardings. This had never happened before; always they had had peaceable overhead neighbours.
For a week the Hardings slept little. Loud intoxicated talk of four unbridled mouths, bottles falling, feet scraping, followed by the heavy rhythmic crunch and thump of beds, a truly French-Canadian crisis producing a furious pounding up and down, succeeded by an alligator quiet: the night-long periodic flushing of the toilet, and procession of bare-feet — sleep was impossible. They knew they had to thank Affie for this, and a coolness ensued.
But this unusual woman was not only the protector of harlots: she was the patroness likewise of rotten janitors. There was one, young, baldish, genteel-spoken — a bank clerk, a white-collar out-of-work. Affie called him “Sonny-boy”: said he looked like a boy she once knew. — Was she faithful to her memories? That antique casket of her heart exuded a strong nostalgic perfume. The more well-deserved hatred he aroused in the hotel, the more passionately she protected him.
Sonny-boy omitted to stoke the furnace. The guests were stark with cold in their rooms, while he lay in a stupor induced by mixing brandy, port wine, and beer. When sober he could not fix a fused light or put a washer on a faucet, let alone restart an element that had ceased to give off heat. But he stopped a long while in the hotel. “I have a privileged position,” he announced to one of the maids, who tried to move him off the bed in a guest’s room where he had gone for a nap. Affie shielded Sonny-boy truly and faithfully, until Mrs. Plant sent for the police and had him ejected, screaming imprecations over the shoulders of the policeman.
These are two examples of the way in which Aflie was bad. She did no good to the hotel, but then Mrs. Plant didn’t either. The latter lady liked young and inef
ficient janitors too, up to a point; showed remarkable distaste for industrious or sober ones. She only liked old janitors if they drank. Then she would just as soon have them as young ones.
The hotel was a matriarchate, as is America, run by what Affie called the “First Lady” — or sometimes the “Leading Lady”
— Mrs. Plant, its owner, and her attendant ladies, including a couple of Scottish maids, with impressive Glasgow accents.
There was a guest, as has already been mentioned, named Mr. Martin, who had been there some time, and had, apparently, a pipeline to the proprietress. Whether this little Englishman had, in the past, stood (however unbelievable) in a tender relationship with the big Jamaican proprietress, it is impossible to say, but there he was, in an apartment not far from hers, as one who could be appealed to in her absence. He did not much enjoy all of these privileges for, on one occasion, he observed, in confidence to René, “I can fix a washer or a fuse of course, but if I did they’d never let me alone.”
This group of women, all except Katie, the old Scottish maid, were not repelled by the criminal classes. They accepted them on equal terms with other guests, and if the police descended on them at night, that was the business of the police and the criminals, nobody else’s. So there were criminals. Apart from the fearful noise the police made at night, yelling “Open up — the police!” as they hammered on the malefactors’ door, the Hardings found the large family of criminals, one enceinte, the quietest people in the house. They never fought, they never drank too much.
Self Condemned Page 24