He replied gloomily, "Good morning," and the dog started to sniff at some ordure and he turned and kicked it with fury, with depression, with despair.
And at that moment a taxi with the two policemen in it passed us on its way to the bridge. They must have seen that kick; perhaps they were cleverer than I had given them credit for, perhaps they were just sentimental about animals, and thought they'd do a good deed, and the rest happened by accident. But the fact remains -those two pillars of the law set about the stealing of Mr. Calloway's dog.
He watched them go by. Then he said, "Why don't you go across?"
"It's cheaper here," I said.
"I mean just for an evening. Have a meal at that place we can see at night in the sky. Go to the theatre."
"There isn't a chance."
He said angrily, sucking his gold tooth, "Well, anyway, get away from here." He stared down the hill and up the other side. He couldn't see that that street climbing up from the bridge contained only the same moneychangers' booths as this one.
I said, "Why don't you go?"
He said evasively, "Oh—business."
I said, "It's only a question of money. You don't have to pass by the bridge."
He said with faint interest, "I don't talk Spanish."
"There isn't a soul here," I said, "who doesn't talk English."
He looked at me with surprise. "Is that so?" he said. "Is that so?"
It's as I have said; he'd never tried to talk to anyone, and they respected him too much to talk to him—he was worth a million. I don't know whether I'm glad or sorry that I told him that. If I hadn't, he might be there now, sitting by the bandstand having his shoes cleaned-alive and suffering.
Three days later his dog disappeared. I found him looking for it, calling it softly and shamefacedly between the palms of the garden. He looked embarrassed. He said in a low angry voice, "I hate that dog. The beastly mongrel," and called "Rover, Rover" in a voice which didn't carry five yards. He said, "I bred setters once. I'd have shot a dog like that." It reminded him, I was right, of Norfolk, and he lived in the memory, and he hated it for its imperfection. He was a man without a family and without friends, and his only enemy was that dog. You couldn't call the law an enemy; you have to be intimate with an enemy.
Late that afternoon someone told him they'd seen the dog walking across the bridge. It wasn't true, of course, but we didn't know that then—they'd paid a Mexican five pesos to smuggle it across. So all that afternoon and the next Mr. Calloway sat in the garden having his shoes cleaned over and over again, and thinking how a dog could just walk across like that, and a human being, an immortal soul, was bound here in the awful routine of the little walk and the unspeakable meals and the aspirin at the botica. That dog was seeing things he couldn't seethat hateful dog. It made him mad—I think literally mad. You must remember the man had been going on for months. He had a million and he was living on two pounds a week, with nothing to spend his money on. He sat there and brooded on the hideous injustice of it. I think he'd have crossed over one day in any case, but the dog was the last straw.
Next day when he wasn't to be seen I guessed he'd gone across, and I went too. The American town is as small as the Mexican. I knew I couldn't miss him if he was there, and I was still curious. A little sorry for him, but not much.
I caught sight of him first in the only drug-store, having a Coca-Cola, and then once outside a cinema looking at the posters; he had dressed with extreme neatness, as if for a party, but there was no party. On my third time round, I came on the detectives—they were having CocaColas in the drug-store, and they must have missed Mr. Calloway by inches. I went in and sat down at the bar.
"Hello," I said, "you still about?" I suddenly felt anxious for Mr. Calloway, I didn't want them to meet.
One of them said, "Where's Calloway?"
"Oh," I said, "he's hanging on."
"But not his dog," he said, and laughed. The other looked a little shocked, he didn't like anyone to talk cynically about a dog. Then they got up—they had a car outside.
"Have another?" I said.
"No, thanks. We've got to keep moving."
The man bent close and confided to me, " Calloway's on this side."
"No!" I said.
"And his dog."
"He's looking for it," the other said.
"I'm damned if he is," I said, and again one of them looked a little shocked, as if I'd insulted the dog.
I don't think Mr. Calloway was looking for his dog, but his dog certainly found him. There was a sudden hilarious yapping from the car and out plunged the semisetter and gambolled furiously down the street. One of the detectives—the sentimental one—was into the car before we got to the door and was off after the dog. Near the bottom of the long road to the bridge was Mr. Calloway-I do believe he'd come down to look at the Mexican side when he found there was nothing but the drugstore and the cinemas and the paper shops on the American. He saw the dog coming and yelled at it to go home"home, home, home," as if they were in Norfolk—it took no notice at all, pelting towards him. Then he saw the police car coming and ran. After that, everything happened too quickly, but I think the order of events was this—the dog started across the road right in front of the car, and Mr. Calloway yelled, at the dog or the car, I don't know which. Anyway, the detective swerved—he said later, weakly, at the inquiry, that he couldn't run over a dog, and down went Mr. Calloway, in a mess of broken glass and gold rims and silver hair, and blood. The dog was on to him before any of us could reach him, licking and whimpering and licking. I saw Mr. Calloway put up his hand, and down it went across the dog's neck and the whimper rose to a stupid bark of triumph, but Mr. Calloway was dead—shock and a weak heart.
"Poor old geezer," the detective said, "I bet he really loved that dog," and it's true that the attitude in which he lay looked more like a caress than a blow. I thought it was meant to be a blow, but the detective may have been right. It all seemed to me a little too touching to be true as the old crook lay there with his arm over the dog's neck, dead with his million between the moneychangers' huts, but it's as well to be humble in the face of human nature. He had come across the river for something, and it may, after all, have been the dog he was looking for. It sat there, baying its stupid and mongrel triumph across his body, like a piece of sentimental statuary. The nearest he could get to the fields, the ditches, the horizon of his home. It was comic and it was pitiable; but it wasn't less comic because the man was dead. Death doesn't change comedy to tragedy, and if that last gesture was one of affection, I suppose it was only one more indication of a human being's capacity for self-deception, our baseless optimism that is so much more appalling than our despair.
Jubilee
Mr. Chalfont ironed his trousers and his tie. Then he folded up his ironing-board and put it away. He was tall and he had preserved his figure: he looked distinguished even in his pants, in the small furnished bed-sitting-room he kept off Shepherd's Market. He was fifty, but he didn't look more than forty-five; he was stony broke, but he remained unquestionably Mayfair.
He examined his collar with anxiety; he hadn't been out of doors for more than a week, except to the publichouse at the corner to eat his morning and evening ham roll; and then he always wore an overcoat and a soiled collar. He decided that it wouldn't damage the effect if he wore it once more; he didn't believe in economizing too rigidly over his laundry, you had to spend money in order to earn money, but there was no point in being extravagant. And somehow he didn't believe in his luck this cocktail time; he was going out for the good of his morale, because after a week away from the restaurants it would have been so easy to let everything slide, to con fine himself to his room and his twice-daily visit to the public-house.
The Jubilee decorations were still out in the cold windy May. Soiled by showers and soot the streamers blew up across Piccadilly, draughty with desolation. They were the reminder of a good time Mr. Chalfont hadn't shared; he hadn't blown whistles or thrown pape
r ribbons; he certainly hadn't danced to any harmoniums. His neat figure was like a symbol of Good Taste as he waited with folded umbrella for the traffic lights to go green; he had learned to hold his hand so that the one frayed patch on his sleeve didn't show, and the rather exclusive club tie, freshly ironed, might have been bought that morning. It wasn't lack of patriotism or loyalty which had kept Mr. Chalfont indoors all through jubilee week. Nobody drank the toast of the King more sincerely than Mr. Chalfont so long as someone else was standing the drink; but an instinct deeper than good form had warned him not to be about. Too many people whom he had once known (so he explained it) were coming up from the country; they might want to look him up, and a fellow just couldn't ask them back to a room like this. That explained his discretion; it didn't explain his sense of oppression while he waited for the Jubilee to be over.
Now he was back at the old game.
He called it that himself, smoothing his neat grey military moustache. The old game. Somebody going rapidly round the corner into Berkeley Street nudged him playfully and said, "Hullo, you old devil," and was gone again, leaving the memory of many playful nudges in the old days, of Merdy and the Boob. For he couldn't disguise the fact that he was after the ladies. He didn't want to disguise it. It made his whole profession appear even to himself rather gallant and carefree. It disguised the fact that the ladies were not so young as they might be and that it was the ladies (God bless them!) who paid. It disguised the fact that Merdy and the Boob had long ago vanished from his knowledge. The list of his acquaintances included a great many women but hardly a single man; no one was more qualified by a long grimy experience to tell smoking-room stories, but the smoking-room in which Mr. Chalfont was welcome did not nowadays exist.
Mr. Chalfont crossed the road. It wasn't an easy life, it exhausted him nervously and physically, he needed a great many sherries to keep going. The first sherry he had always to pay for himself; that was the thirty pounds he marked as expenses on his income tax return. He dived through the entrance, not looking either way, for it would never do for the porter to think that he was soliciting any of the women who moved heavily like seals through the dim aquarium light of the lounge. But his usual seat was occupied.
He turned away to look for another chair where he could exhibit himself discreetly: the select tie, the tan, the grey distinguished hair, the strong elegant figure, the air of a retired Governor from the Colonies. He studied the woman who sat in his chair covertly: he thought he'd seen her somewhere, the mink coat, the overblown figure, the expensive dress. Her face was familiar but unnoted, like that of someone you pass every day at the same place. She was vulgar, she was cheerful, she was undoubtedly rich. He couldn't think where he had met her.
She caught Mr. Chalfont's eye and winked. He blushed, he was horrified, nothing of this sort had ever happened to him before; the porter was watching and Mr. Chalfont felt scandal at his elbow, robbing him of his familiar restaurant, his last hunting ground, turning him perhaps out of Mayfair altogether into some bleak Paddington parlour where he couldn't keep up the least appearance of gallantry. Am I so obvious, he thought, so obvious? He went hastily across to her before she could wink again. "Excuse me," he said, "you must remember me. What along time..."
"Your face is familiar, dear," she said. "Have a cocktail."
"Well," Mr. Chalfont said, "I should certainly not mind a sherry, Mrs.—Mrs.—I've quite forgotten your surname."
"You're a sport," the woman said, "but Amy will do."
"Ah," Mr. Chalfont said, "you are looking very well, Amy. It gives me much pleasure to see you sitting there again after all these—months—why, years it must be. The last time we met..."
"I don't remember you clearly, dear, though of course when I saw you looking at me... I suppose it was in Jermyn Street."
" Jermyn Street," Mr. Chalfont said. "Surely not Jermyn Street. I've never... Surely it must have been when I had my flat in Curzon Street. Delectable evenings one had there. I've moved since then to a rather humbler abode where I wouldn't dream of inviting you.... But perhaps we could slip away to some little nest of your own. Your health, my dear. You look younger than ever."
"Happy days," Amy said. Mr. Chalfont winced. She fingered her mink coat. "But you know-I've retired."
"Ah, lost money, eh?" Mr. Chalfont said. "Dear lady, I've suffered in that way too. We must console each other a little. I suppose business is bad. Your husband—I seem to recall a trying man who did his best to interfere with our idyll. It was an idyll, wasn't it, those evenings in Curzon Street?"
"You've got it wrong, dear. I never was in Curzon Street. But if you date back to the time I tried that husband racket, why that goes years back, to the mews off Bond Street. Fancy your remembering. It was wrong of me. I can see that now. And it never really worked. I don't think he looked like a husband. But now I've retired. Oh, no," she said, leaning forward until he could smell the brandy on her plump little lips, "I haven't lost money; I've made it."
"You're lucky," Mr. Chalfont said.
"It was all the Jubilee," Amy explained.
"I was confined to my bed during the Jubilee," Mr. Chalfont said. "I understand it all went off very well."
"It was lovely," Amy said. "Why, I said to myself, everyone ought to do something to make it a success. So I cleaned up the streets."
"I don't quite understand," Mr. Chalfont said. "You mean the decorations?"
"No, no," Amy said, "that wasn't it at all. But it didn't seem to me nice, when all these Colonials were in London, for them to see the girls in Bond Street and Wardour Street and all over the place. I'm proud of London, and it didn't seem right to me that we should get a reputation."
"People must live."
"Of course they must live. Wasn't I in the business myself, dear?"
"Oh," Mr. Chalfont said, "you were in the business?"
It was quite a shock to him; he looked quickly this way and that, fearing that he might have been observed.
"So you see I opened a House and split with the girls. I took all the risk, and then of course I had my other expenses. I had to advertise."
"How did you—how did you get it known?" He couldn't help having a kind of professional interest.
"Easy, dear. I opened a tourist bureau. Trips to the London underworld. Limehouse and all that. But there was always an old fellow who wanted the guide to show him something privately afterwards."
"Very ingenious," Mr. Chalfont said.
"And loyal too, dear. It cleaned up the streets properly. Though of course I only took the best. I was very select. Some of them jibbed, because they said they did all the work, but as I said to them, it was My Idea."
"So now you're retired?"
"I made five thousand pounds, dear. It was really my jubilee as well, though you mightn't think it to look at me. I always had the making of a business woman, and I saw, you see, how I could extend the business. I opened at Brighton too. I cleaned up England in a way of speaking. It was ever so much nicer for the Colonials. There's been a lot of money in the country these last weeks. Have another sherry, dear, you are looking poorly."
"Really, really, you know, I ought to be going."
"Oh, come on. It's Jubilee, isn't it? Celebrate. Be a sport."
"I think I see a friend."
He looked helplessly around: a friend: he couldn't even think of a friend's name. He wilted before a personality stronger than his own. She bloomed there like a great dressy autumn flower. He felt old: my jubilee. His frayed cuffs showed; he had forgotten to arrange his hand. He said, "Perhaps. Just one. It ought really to be on me," and as he watched her bang for the waiter in the dim genteel place and dominate his disapproval when he came, Mr. Chalfont couldn't help wondering at the unfairness of her confidence and her health. He had a touch of neuritis, but she was carnival; she really seemed to belong to the banners and drinks and plumes and processions. He said quite humbly, "I should like to have seen the procession, but I wasn't up to it. My rheumatism," he
excused himself. His little withered sense of good taste could not stand the bright plebeian spontaneity. He was a fine dancer, but they'd have outdanced him on the pavements; he made love attractively in his formal well-bred way, but they'd have outloved him, blind and drunk and crazy and happy in the park. He had known that he would be out of place, he'd kept away; but it was humiliating to realize that Amy had missed nothing.
"You look properly done, dear," Amy said. "Let me lend you a couple of quid."
"No, no," Mr. Chalfont said. "Really I couldn't."
"I expect you've given me plenty in your time."
But had he? He couldn't remember her; it was such a long time since he'd been with a woman except in the way of business. He said, "I couldn't. I really couldn't." He tried to explain his attitude while she fumbled in her bag.
"I never take money—except, you know, from friends." He admitted desperately, "or except in business." But he couldn't take his eyes away. He was broke and it was cruel of her to show him a five-pound note. "No. Really." It was a long time since his market price had been as high as five pounds.
"I know how it is, dear," Amy said, "I've been in the business myself, and I know just how you feel. Sometimes a gentleman would come home with me, give me a quid and run away as if he was scared. It was insulting. I never did like taking money for nothing."
"But you're quite wrong," Mr. Chalfont said. "That's not it at all. Not it at all."
"Why, I could tell almost as soon as you spoke to me. You don't need to keep up pretences with me, dear," Amy went inexorably on, while Mayfair faded from his manner, until there remained only the bed-sitting-room, the ham rolls, the iron heating on the stove. "You don't need to be proud. But if you'd rather (it's all the same to me, it doesn't mean a thing to me) we'll go home and let you do your stuff. It's all the same to me, dear, but if you'd rather—I know how you feel," and presently they went out together arm-in-arm into the decorated desolate street.
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