XIX
THE JANITORS
Of the janitors most remained unseen, in the regions where the furnace was situated, beneath the street level. One cannot refer to those regions as cellars, they were not deep enough for that, and also there were many other things there besides cellar-like areas. There were, for instance, a number of rather squalid apartments, there was a small office, a storeroom, and the remains of what was once a saloon. All janitors, theoretically, must ascend to the upper part of the hotel: for it was one of their duties to attend to the windows or fix the elements in the electric cooker, or keep the elevator in shape. But the majority of janitors omitted, for one reason or another, to do this. What was mainly responsible for their failing to carry out these rather ill-defined functions, was drunkenness. The furnace they just must attend to, or everyone in the hotel would freeze to death: but everything else they were supposed to do could, at a pinch, be done by somebody else. More than half the time, for instance, there was an occupant of a fourth-storey apartment, a Mr. Jacobs, who fixed the elements, and attended generally to breakdowns in the lighting, heating, and elevator systems.
Why all the janitors were so defective in honesty, industry, in restraint with respect to the bottle, or what goes with that, das Weib, has already been explained. It was because Mrs. Plant, Affie, and everybody else, on the whole, preferred them that way. The hotel had no use for an honest, hardworking, and sober janitor. He would be out of tune with the hotel, and the janitor is a very important functionary in such a place. Charlie, the present janitor, was an exception to all rules. And he did not stay all the time out of sight. Quite the contrary. Charlie was flying all over the hotel all day long and for half the night. He awakened in René a rather similar alarm to that he had felt for Mrs. Harradson. Charlie was a very large Norwegian, like a gigantic squirrel, with a small head, in which a wild pale blue eye at all times lit up and was madly expressive. He enjoyed the unusual advantage of being persona grata with both Mrs. Plant and Affie. Affie displayed the breadth of her sympathies by the variety of characters she sponsored and protected among the long succession of janitors: and without that protection no janitor would be there very long.
She had been passionately devoted to “Sonny-boy.” It was she who named him “Sonny-boy” — the bank-clerk-like young man, who was the most useless of all the janitors. In a way she was equally fond of Charlie, the old jailbird, with his wild eyes and torrents of broken English, indeed so broken that not a particle was intact, unless it was the Norse intermixture.
She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard. Having been a nurse might account in part for her tastes. She once described to the Hardings an experience of hers at a hospital, where she had acted as an auxiliary unqualified nurse, or such was her story. One day a violently protesting hag was brought in. They immediately thrust her screaming and kicking into a hot bath. She was a confirmed vagrant: her hair was full of hundreds of hairpins and also the greasy hideout of a horde of lice. She, for some time, defended her head with a fanatical ferocity; it required all the muscular endurance and hygienic militancy of Affie and two other nurses to force her to surrender her head. They cleared out all the hairpins and effected a thorough delousing of her entire person, and in the end she turned out to be a delightful old woman, according to Affie; a professional wandervogel, an indigent tourist, sleeping in the barns when the dogs would let her, a mettlesome philosophic wit. Affie struck up a great friendship with this old wreck who had once been a tobacconist. So all her life Affie had had to deal with sick or eccentric people (her most permanent type of employment being that of nurse-companion) until perhaps she had developed an appetite for helplessness. — However that may be, the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent one, like a man called Jan — whom everybody hated because he was so clean, sober, and good at his job.
Again, her sex reactions were original. A big, strong man said nothing to her. Jan was that, and this side of him was greatly appreciated by the Belgian woman who ran the house next door. Even the hairdresser widow on the other side appreciated this too, and Jan was greatly in demand on either side of the hotel — until the Belgian lady beat up the lady hairdresser one day just outside the front door, after which Jan deserted the hairdresser and went to live with the Belgian rooming house lady. But to Affie he was nothing, she said he smelled. This, René thought, was because he was definitely of the workman or seaman class. Affie disliked all workmen. Charlie was an ordinary seaman too; but he was mad, and more often in a jail — everybody supposed — than in a ship.
But then there was something more than either of those things. Affie had an eye for life. In Charlie she saw the ruined Peer Gynt, but still a wild piratic lunatic. She loved his screaming laugh, his staring hyper-eager eyes. She knew he had lived with the Troll-king and played every scurvy trick upon his fellows, out of giddiness — and that he would at last be melted down by the button moulder. He lied so much he chased himself, whirling in and out of his wildly blurted stories. If you caught him in a lie, he burst into a peal of shrieks and dashed off, leaping along the passages and up and down the stairs like a demented kangaroo. Solveig had been sitting and singing, ah for so long. But what does Solveig’s song turn into if you stop and listen to it? Into a brood of bawling children. So he vaulted away, and until he died would be skipping and screaming with laughter, thieving and lying.
When René had occasion to descend into the basement during the Charlie epoch he would find it full of the rolling pyjama’ed bottoms of French-Canadian prostitutes. Their black Indian eyes blazed with merriment when they saw Charlie come leaping down, with a duck in one hand and a coil of rope in the other, which he was swinging round his head, as if he would lasso the amused harlots.
Upstairs, he and Mrs. Plant would engage in shouting matches in some room where he was working. He liked her deafness, it gave him the opportunity to scream. As she always talked at the top of her voice too, they made a deafening uproar. Anybody would suppose they were having an appalling showdown: but if they listened they would find that the First Lady and her janitor were only violently agreeing with one another.
It was René’s good fortune to observe Charlie, in the midst of one of these transports, slap Mrs. Plant on the shoulder, nearly knocking her down, so great was his approval of what she had said. Though visibly shaken, she did not mind a bit. Nothing that Charlie did was wrong. When he robbed a store she might have been expected to mind a little. But she understood, or Affie did, that he was irresponsible, and that it was, like everything else, a prank merely.
One evening after tea, René and Hester were in conference, and both were speaking in low tones, for they preferred that what they were talking about should not be heard by Affie. Hester was frowning as she listened, then suddenly without warning the door flew open. There may have been a knock, but neither of them heard it. Charlie stood there panting, his hat on the back of his head, and the right eye, which did all the expressive work, was darting about, full of the maddest light they had ever seen in it. His hands too were in ceaseless movement, and one flipped out of one of his pockets with a baby packet of tea. As he held it out he was convulsed with crazy mirth, and he continued to pour out a jerky stream of largely incomprehensible speech. But “want buy” was said a great number of times with great eagerness.
Charlie dropped a small packet of tea upon the table by the side of which the Hardings were sitting. A lightning dive into the dark hole of his pocket, and out shot a second packet, then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, and an eight, and a ninth, and a tenth, and an eleventh, and a twelfth. So there were a dozen miniature packets of tea. As each packet was produced, he riveted a moist eye upon Hester, and when Hester and René began to laugh, as the pile of tea packets went on increasing, he laughed with extraordinary glee. They were entering into the joke of the thing — that was as it should be.
They asked him how much he wanted for these packets of tea, and he sc
reamed with laughter at the idea of knowing how much he wanted for them. Tea was in short supply and the Hardings wanted the tea. All he knew was they wanted the tea, and that he had the tea. He tried to twist his body in a hysterical knot, coughing with laughter. Then he darted his head down towards René and poured out a lot of urgent confidences, mostly in Norwegian. René’s nervousness increased, and taking a couple of dollars out of his pocket he held them up, he made an offer. Charlie almost tore the notes out of his hand, and pushed the tea packets over towards Hester. Then he reached down into the other pocket, and with the abruptness of legerdemain a huge cheese, actually processed cheese supplied in cubes, flew out of his pocket and then, with a bang, there it sat, immense and greasy, upon the table. This big square of cheese seemed to strike him as the funniest thing he had ever seen. He kept pointing to it, gulping with laughter, as he jumped about.“Cheese!” he shrieked. Hester and René shook their heads. Charlie had one more try at getting them to see the joke. Then he snatched the cheese up and thrust it back in his noticeably unclean pocket, and darted out of the Room. The Hardings had not the least idea of the nature of this joke. But very soon they were to be enlightened.
The next morning at about nine o’clock there was an uproar at the foot of the stairs near which their apartment was situated. Both of them jumped up and ran to the stair-head. Charlie, screaming with laughter, was being beaten up by a large Jewish woman. She had torn his shirt to shreds, and Charlie whirled his arms about in an attempt to beat off this frantic woman, who kept spitting in a hoarse staccato, “Dirty teef.You shoplift — you break my shop in, you tak my sheese, I phone de pleece.” Charlie took a six-stair leap towards the Hardings, his face strained up towards them in the usual eager delight, but she caught him by the heel crying hoarsely, “You beast! You crim-in-al!” Clutching the banister, he kicked her off, and in a blue cloud of strips and tatters, he leapt past the Hardings. Mrs. Plant, it turned out, had come up behind Hester. That lady gazed after her tatterdemalion janitor, and when he had disappeared at the other end of the corridor, she turned to Hester, smiled and nodded her head, as if to say,“Well, what an odd fellow it is!”
Very soon the police arrived, and took him away, which he seemed to regard as the best joke of all. They were as morose as the great jitterbug was elated, and they marched off dourly with this tattered giant dancing between them.
This irrepressible jitterbug turned the hotel into the kind of place it would have been had the Mad Hatter been let loose in it for a week or two. He would have been found attempting to thrust Mrs. Plant into a teapot or purloin the medals of the Three Musketeers — “each for all and all for each.” As a matter of fact those were precisely the kind of things Charlie was doing all day long. His infatuation for medals led to a stirring scene.
Charlie was in the beverage room with his favourite concubine.
They were sitting with a man who had a magnificent Boer War gold medal. The prostitute was so impressed with this medal that she left Charlie’s side and sat beside the bemedalled veteran.
“You have no medals, Charlie. You have no beautiful gold medal like this. I don’t love you any more.”
“I have I have!” he cried as he sprang to his feet. With a banging of doors he violently vanished. Ten minutes later he returned, his breast jangling with medals of the most convincing kind. A number of suitcases were in store not far from the furnace room, and this depository was in Charlie’s care and keeping. Needless to say he had conducted a thorough examination of the contents of this luggage (for no locksmith was more expert than he), and in one large portmanteau he had come upon these beautiful medals. There, provisionally, he had left them.
When they were back in their apartment, René said, “If we were people who were inclined to forget, this hotel would always be reminding us what a chaos we live in.”
“I suppose it would,” Hester agreed without enthusiasm.
“We have got into rather a brisk little microcosm. But” — he looked at her placidly — “it is not brisker than the nations of Europe.”
At the usual time Bess arrived with her vacuum cleaner. She seemed glad to have seen the last of Charlie, for she did not at all share the irresponsible temper of the First Lady, or of the Second Lady. A small shop, which in England would be called a “general shop,” was the place Charlie had broken into the night before. It was situated in a neighbouring street, and both Hester and René were its patrons, from time to time. Bess growled on about the enormities of Charlie, and the disgraceful scenes that occurred down below, in the lowest row of apartments. She said that on one occasion she had seen Charlie completely naked, darting in and out, in a sort of obscene hide and seek with a couple of naked French-Canadian prostitutes. It seemed that he was at the top of his form before he put his clothes on.
At the time when usually the Indian was compelled to hold his teutonic wife upside down, there was a terrific shriek of an abnormal kind, though René felt sure that it was the same woman. The earlier disturbance had probably whetted his appetite for such things: for he rose immediately, opened the door, and moved quickly down the corridor in the direction of the shrieks. The sound grew louder, and then suddenly stopped. Mr. Martin’s was the first apartment you reached as you moved out of the annex into the main building. René found him, standing just outside his door, and looking in his direction. In light-coloured flannel trousers and a pale jumper, the faded pink of his cheeks pulled down a little by the set jowl, the eyes gently hooded, he was in some way a spectral figure. From the stairs leading down to the street level emerged the Indian; not at all a daunting figure, but a pleasant, dark-skinned young man. He was shouting, “Cut that out. Come back here, you bitch, d’you hear me.” But a moment later he was confronted by Mr. Martin, and he stopped. In a low voice of great impressiveness, he heard himself admonished, as though a text from scripture had been selected for the occasion, “A gentleman does not refer to a lady as a bitch!” The Indian stood rooted to the spot, as though he had seen a ghost, who had given utterance to some frightful curse. Mr. Martin stood, awful in his respectability, his mouth having scarcely moved to utter the tremendous sentence. Obviously he was perfectly aware that this was big medicine. The Indian, having glanced rebelliously once or twice at the Eternal Englishman, went back downstairs again in eloquent silence.
With a smile, René went up to Mr. Martin. He had decided that it was best to affect to have some errand in the hotel. “Good morning,” he said, “so Charlie has left us?” — “As far as I am concerned,” Mr. Martin replied, “… well, there are people I should miss more than Charlie.”
Over Mr. Martin’s shoulder René saw the inflamed face, the small girl-hiker figure of the German-Canadian, whom he knew principally as a Scream. The Scream looked at him as any Scream would, as if to say, “Yes, I am the Scream.”
Mr. Martin was sparing of his words, and, in any case, somewhat mentally congealed. But as René was moving on, he observed politely, “I suppose your arm is all right again now, Mr. Harding? It was very rough luck.”
XX
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF BILL
MURDOCH
René wandered through the hotel, and dropped in at the kitchen. Affie and Miss Toole were sitting at the table. They had been having their mid-morning tea, and Affie smokily scrutinizing Miss Toole’s cup. The normal everyday expression of Miss Toole’s face was one of astonishment. Her eyebrows were forever raised, and if she were chatting with a guest you would have said that the latter had been telling her some pretty tall stories — which, incidentally, she was scarcely prepared to credit. But now she looked not only startled but dismayed. René saw at once that Affie had been scaring the wits out of her. He had seen her at it before, and felt rather sorry for her victim.
Once or twice he had met Miss Toole in the corridor lately, and quite obviously she was terrified. She was moving about like an automaton, literally “scared stiff.”
René sat down at the table. Affie lifted her head slowly and loo
ked at the intruder: for obviously he was that. “And how is Professor Harding this morning?” She knew that he did not like being called Professor Harding, and the fact that she addressed him in that manner signified that she would rather have his Room than his company. Plainly she had arrived at a point in her sorcery act at which the spell was working, but for complete success more time was needed. Another ten minutes and Miss Toole would be speechless with terror.
René pointed to the ice-box. “Did you discover who took the chicken?” The last time he had been down there, there was perturbation; no one had been in the kitchen for ten minutes or so and it must have been during that time that the chicken in the icebox had vanished.
Miss Toole’s look of astonishment increased, and she shook her head. “Mr. Harding,” she said slowly, in a tone of chronic astonishment deepening into dismay, “to think that one can’t leave a door open for ten minutes!”
But Affie, bored, observed, “Things are often stolen from the icebox,” as if to close the subject. “Who steals them?” René enquired. — “Your guess is as good as mine.” And Affie turned back to the teacups. René smiled at Miss Toole and sauntered out.
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