The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts. Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.
“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again. Okey?”
He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”
“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”
Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.
“Beer-parlor drunks are all the customers now.”
She smiled at him again.
“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”
“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”
He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio—to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.
“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.
The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.”
The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there for a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”
“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.”
She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes, as if he was looking at an altar.
Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.
It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered: “Windermere Hotel. Garage speaking.”
“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”
“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.”
He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it. The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.
“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.
“What’s the professional rate on Fourteen-B?”
The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”
“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”
“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”
“Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Friend of yours?”
“No. Just a drunk with delusions of grandeur and no dough.”
“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”
“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Why?”
The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.
The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”
Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.
“Tony? Tony Reseck?”
“Talking.”
“A message from Al. Shoot?”
Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.
“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good. Backfire.”
Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”
“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.”
Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.
“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”
Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.
The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, hub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.
Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.
“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?”
Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.
Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.
THE BRONZE DOOR
1
The little man was from the Calabar coast or from Papua or Tongatabu, some such remote place like that. An empire-builder frayed at the temples, thin and yellow, and slightly drunk at the club bar. And he was wearing a faded school tie he had probably kept year after year in a tin box so the centipedes wouldn’t eat it.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish didn’t know him, at least not then, but he knew the tie because it was his own school tie. So he spoke to the man timidly, and the man talked to him, being a little drunk and not knowing anybody. They had drinks and talked of the old school, in that peculiar, remote way the English have, without even exchanging names, but quite friendly underneath.
It was a big thrill for Mr. Sutton-Cornish, because nobody ever talked to him at the club except the servants. He was too defeated, too ingrowing, and you don’t have to talk to people in London clubs. That’s what they’re for.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish got home to tea a little thick-tongued, for the first time in fifteen years. He sat there blankly in the upstairs drawing room, holding his cup of tepid tea and going over the man’s face in his mind, making it younger and chubbier, a face that would go over an Eton collar or under a school cricket cap.
Suddenly he got it, and chuckled. That was something he hadn’t done in a good few years either.
“Llewellyn, m’dear,” he said. “Llewellyn Minor. Had an elder brother. Killed in the War, in the horse artillery.”
Mrs. Sutton-Cornish stared at him bleakly across the heavily embroidered tea cozy. Her chestnut-colored eyes were dull w
ith disdain—dried-out chestnuts, not fresh ones. The rest of her large face looked gray. The late October afternoon was gray, and the heavy, full-bottomed, monogrammed curtains across the windows. Even the ancestors on the walls were gray—all except the bad one, the general.
The chuckle died in Mr. Sutton-Cornish’s throat. The long gray stare took care of that. Then he shivered a little, and as he wasn’t very steady, his hand jerked. He emptied his tea on the rug, almost delicately, cup and all.
“Oh, rot,” he said thickly. “Sorry, m’dear. Missed me trousers, though. Awfully sorry, m’dear.”
For a full minute Mrs. Sutton-Cornish made only the sound of a large woman breathing. Then suddenly things began to tinkle on her—to tinkle and rustle and squeak. She was full of quaint noises, like a haunted house, but Mr. Sutton-Cornish shuddered, because he knew she was trembling with rage.
“Ah-h-h,” she breathed out very, very slowly, after a long time, in her firing-squad manner. “Ah-h-h. Intoxicated, James?”
Something stirred suddenly at her feet. Teddy, the Pomeranian, stopped snoring and lifted his head and smelled blood. He let out a short snapping bark, merely a ranging shot, and waddled to his feet. His protuberant brown eyes stared malignantly at Mr. Sutton-Cornish.
“I’d better ring the bell, m’dear,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish said humbly, and stood up. “Hadn’t I?”
She didn’t answer him. She spoke to Teddy instead, softly. A sort of doughy softness, with something sadistic in it.
“Teddy,” she said softly, “look at that man. Look at that man, Teddy.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish said thickly: “Now don’t let him snap at me, m’dear. D-don’t let him snap at me, please, m’dear.”
No answer. Teddy braced himself and leered. Mr. Sutton-Cornish tore his eyes away and looked up at the bad ancestor, the general. The general wore a scarlet coat with a diagonal blue sash across it, rather like a bar sinister. He had the winy complexion generals used to have in his day. He had a lot of very fruity-looking decorations and a bold stare, the stare of an unrepentant sinner. The general was no violet. He had broken up more homes than he had fought duels and he had fought more duels than he had won battles, and he had won plenty of battles.
Looking up at the bold-veined face, Mr. Sutton-Cornish braced himself, leaned down and took a small triangular sandwich from the tea table.
“Here, Teddy,” he gulped. “Catch, boy, catch!”
He threw the sandwich. It fell in front of Teddy’s little, brown paws. Teddy snuffled it languidly and yawned. He had his meals served to him on china, not thrown at him. He sidled innocently over to the edge of the rug and suddenly pounced on it, snarling.
“At table, James?” Mrs. Sutton-Cornish said slowly and dreadfully.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish stood on his teacup. It broke into thin light slivers of fine china. He shuddered again.
But now was the time. He started quickly toward the bell. Teddy let him get almost there, still pretending to worry the fringe of the rug. Then he spit out a piece of fringe, and charged low and soundlessly, his small feet like feathers in the nap of the rug. Mr. Sutton-Cornish was just reaching for the bell.
Small bright teeth tore rapidly and expertly at a pearl-gray spat.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish yelped, pivoted swiftly—and kicked. His neat shoe flashed in the gray light. A silky brown object sailed through the air and landed gobbling.
Then there was a quite indescribable stillness in the room, like the silence in the innermost room of a cold-storage warehouse, at midnight.
Teddy whimpered once, artfully, crept along the floor with his body close to it, crept under Mrs. Sutton-Cornish’s chair. Her purplish-brown skirts moved and Teddy’s face emerged slowly, framed in silk, the face of a nasty old woman with a shawl over her head.
“Caught me off balance,” Mr. Sutton-Cornish mumbled, leaning against the mantelpiece. “Didn’t mean…never intended—”
Mrs. Sutton-Cornish rose. She rose with the air of gathering a retinue about her. Her voice was the cold bleat of a foghorn on an icy river.
“Chinverly,” she said. “I shall leave at once for Chinverly. At once. This hour…Drunk! Filthily drunk in the middle of the afternoon. Kicking little inoffensive animals. Vile! Utterly vile! Open the door!”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish staggered across the room and opened the door. She went out. Teddy trotted beside her, on the side away from Mr. Sutton-Cornish, and for once he didn’t try to trip her in the doorway.
Outside she turned, slowly, as a liner turns.
“James,” she said, “have you anything to say to me?”
He giggled—from pure nervous strain.
She looked at him horribly, turned again, said over her shoulder: “This is the end, James. The end of our marriage.”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish said appallingly: “Goodness, m’dear—are we married?”
She started to turn again, but didn’t. A sound like somebody being strangled in a dungeon came from her. Then she went on.
The door of the room hung open like a paralyzed mouth. Mr. Sutton-Cornish stood just inside it, listening. He didn’t move until he heard steps on the floor above—heavy steps—hers. He sighed and looked down at his torn spat. Then he crept downstairs, into his long, narrow study beside the entrance hall, and got at the whiskey.
He hardly noticed the sounds of departure, luggage being descended, voices, the-throbbing of the big car out in front, voices, the last bark from Teddy’s iron-old throat. The house grew utterly silent. The furniture waited with its tongue in its cheek. Outside the lamps were lit in a light fog. Taxis hooted along the wet street. The fire died low in the grate.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish stood in front of it, swaying a little, looking at his long gray face in the wall mirror.
“Take a little stroll,” he whispered wryly. “You and me. Never was anyone else, was there?”
He sneaked out into the hall without Collins, the butler, hearing. Him. He got his scarf and overcoat and hat on, grasped his stick and gloves, let himself out silently into the dusk.
He stood a little while at the bottom of the steps and looked up at the house. No. 14 Grinling Crescent. His father’s house, his grandfather’s house, his great-grandfather’s house. All he had left. The rest was hers. Even the clothes he wore, the money in his bank account. But the house was still his—at least in name.
Four white steps, as spotless as the souls of virgins, leading up to an apple-green, deep paneled door, painted as things used to be painted long ago, in the age of leisure. It had a brass knocker and a thumb latch above the handle and one of those bells you twisted, instead of pushing or pulling them, and it rang just on the other side of the door, rather ridiculously, if you were not used to it.
He turned and looked across the street at the little railed-in park always kept locked, where on sunny days the small, prim children of Grinling Crescent walked along the smooth paths, around the little ornamental lake, beside rhododendron bushes, holding the hands of their nursemaids.
He looked at all this a little wanly, then he squared his thin shoulders and marched off into the dusk, thinking of Nairobi and Papua and Tongatabu, thinking of the man in the faded school tie who would go back there presently, wherever it was he came from, and lie awake in the jungle, thinking of London.
2
“Keb, sir?”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish halted, stood on the edge of the curb and stared. The voice came from above, one of those wind-husked, beery voices you don’t hear very often any more. It came from the driver’s seat of a hansom cab.
The hansom cab had come out of the darkness, sliding oilily along the street on high rubber-tired wheels, the horse’s hoofs making a slow, even clop-clop that Mr. Sutton-Cornish hadn’t noticed until the driver called down to him.
It looked real enough. The horse had time-worn black blinkers and the characteristic well-fed and yet somehow dilapidated look that cab horses used to have. The half doors of the hansom were folded back and Mr. Sutton-Corn
ish could see the quilted gray upholstery inside. The long reins were riddled with cracks and following them upward he saw the beefy driver, the wide-brimmed coachman’s “topper” he wore, the huge buttons on the upper part of his greatcoat, and the well-worn blanket that swathed the lower part of him round and round. He held his long whip lightly and delicately, as a hansom driver should hold his whip.
The trouble was that there weren’t any more hansom cabs.
Mr. Sutton-Cornish gulped, slipped a glove off and reached out to touch the wheel. It was cold, very solid, wet with the muddy slime of the city streets.
“Doubt if I’ve ever seen one of these since the War,” he said out loud, very steadily.
“Wot war, guv’nor?”
Mr. Sutton-Cornish started. He touched the wheel again. Then he smiled, slowly and carefully drew his glove on again.
“I’m getting in,” he said.
“Steady there, Prince,” the driver wheezed.
The horse switched his long tail contemptuously. Telling him to be steady. Mr. Sutton-Cornish climbed in over the wheel, rather clumsily, because one had lost the knack of that art these many years. He closed the half doors around in front of him, leaned back against the seat in the pleasant harness-room smell.
The trap opened over his head and the driver’s large nose and alcoholic eyes made an improbable picture in the opening, like a deep-sea fish staring you down through the glass wall of an aquarium.
“Where to, guv’nor?”
“Well…Soho.” It was the most foreign place he could think of—for a hansom cab to go to.
The cabman’s eyes stared down at him.
“Won’t like it there, guv’nor. Too many dagoes.”
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 103