He was angry again now, flushed and angry as he had been at the board-meeting.
“Who’s in there?” he demanded. “Who is it?”
But the girl only pulled out her handkerchief and started crying.
“I don’t know, sir,” she answered. “Really I don’t.”
John Marco turned his back on her—it was obvious that she was lying to him—and began pounding on the door with his fists.
“Who’s inside?” he shouted, “Let me in.”
There was a movement inside the room, and very faint through the thickness of the door, the sound of voices. They were frightened voices, muffled and indistinct. They might have been trying to say something to him. But John Marco did not wait. Stepping back a pace, he ran his shoulder full against the panel. The door seemed for a moment to bend under him and the house shook. But the lock held fast. It was not until he had thrown himself against it twice, three times, four times that something in the woodwork of the lock splintered and the door sprang open.
He was sweating by now and his face was red and furious.
The only sound in the room was the sound of Louise’s sobbing.
She was standing over by the dressing-table facing him, her hair dragged back from her head as though it had been pinned hurriedly by shaking fingers. The evening-dress that she was wearing was crumpled and disarranged. Beside her stood a young man, also in evening-dress. He was one of the pale young men whom John Marco dimly remembered. His hair was ruffled and he kept raising his hand to his collar from which his tie was somehow missing.
ii
John Marco went back down the stairs again without speaking; the maid was still there—she had flattened herself against the wall and was staring into the room of the secret—but John Marco did not notice her. He passed her, and went down below out of sight.
His great-coat and hat were down below in the hall where he had left them. He went up to them instinctively; they seemed to be part of him, and not to belong to this house at all. Then swinging the coat roughly onto his shoulders and pulling the hat down onto his head, he slammed the front door after him and was out in the street once more.
The air had grown still colder, and tiny particles of ice that cut into the skin like little frozen spears were being carried on the wind that had now sprung up. But he did not notice them. He was walking blindly, aimlessly and stumbling sometimes; walking in fact as Mr. Petter, miserable and broken, had once walked through the evening streets after hearing the awful warning of Mr. Tuke.
When he turned a corner, and the wind bore down full upon him, he set his head lower and forced his way against it, turning up the collar of his coat still higher. There was only one intention in the walking and that was to separate himself from the bedroom into which he had just looked. The memory of it—and his whole mind was full of nothing else: the room was lit up in his mind as if it had been a stage—made him walk faster. As he blundered along the gas-lit streets, he was almost running. He was not tired any longer, but numb. His legs ached and the cold had seeped into his limbs, drugging them. His head, too, was swimming and he wondered if he were going to faint, to collapse suddenly. The street that he was now in was one that he did not recognise: it stretched bleak and lifeless in front of him like a scenic backcloth, leading into the painted wilderness of Paddington and Maida Vale.
There was a public-house at the corner from which the jangle of mechanical music was coming. The door, as it swung open to admit someone, shot a band of vivid yellow light across the street, and there was the sound of voices and laughter. John Marco walked towards the threshold, his feet dragging as he moved, his lips quivering. Inside, the warmth smote him. The heat rose from the floor in great waves and danced around him. He went over to the bar and called for whiskey.
Not until the drink was in his hand did he look round him. Then he saw that they were cheap premises that he had come into, a place of no repute. Probably the whole neighbourhood was cheap as well—he had blundered right out of his style and class—and was lost in the wild boundaries of the Harrow Road. There was sand on the floor, scraped bare in places by a hundred feet, and below the bar a row of scarred spittoons were standing. He noticed, now, that the others in the bar were staring at him: it was evident that they did not get a gentleman like him with a velvet collar on his coat in the place every night. The house was crowded and as he stood there he felt these scores of eyes pressing in on him.
When his glass was empty—he had drunk quickly—greedily, throwing back his head like a carter—he called for his drink again, and because his knees were weak, he groped his way over towards the couch. At the opposite end of the saloon was another couch set below a large discoloured mirror across which the outlines of ferns and flowers had been stencilled.
This couch was crowded with occupants—all women. There was a tittering sofa-full of them, loud-voiced blowsy women with colouring younger than their figures and large, feathery hats. They were all dressed in bright, rubbishy clothes and they kept taking sips at the glasses in front of them and glancing encouragingly in his direction.
The penny pianola in the corner stopped suddenly and, even with the noise of the voices, the room seemed abruptly to have grown quiet. But already someone was reaching in his pocket and, a moment later, the thing started performing again. John Marco closed his eyes and sat back. But it was not the pianola that he was hearing; it was the sound of Louise’s sobbing. He could see her, too; her bare shoulders over the top of the frock showing white and half naked-looking, and her hair, that was all curls now, still half loose about her face. He opened his eyes again trying to forget it all and saw the landlord standing with his arms round his wife’s waist. She was a big, clumsy woman with a dull, flattened face and crude, dyed hair. But as he looked he saw her place her red hand over his. “They’re happier than I am,” thought John Marco. “They’re not alone.” And when the pot-man drew near him clearing the tables, John Marco called for his glass to be filled again.
It was this drink that overthrew him. The fatigue and then the shock, and now the heat of this stifling parlour, broke him down. His hands felt puffy and unfamiliar and he spilt a little from the glass as he raised it. As though by some inner sympathy among drinkers, the others in the bar recognised him now as one of them, as one of them who no longer was quite himself; and the barriers of class and dress were broken down. They drew in around him.
Before he had been sitting there for long, one of the women from the distant sofa came over and sat beside him. He was aware of her before he looked at her; and when he did look he saw a young woman—she was in her thirties probably—with bright yellow hair and a row of squalid teeth set in a smiling mouth. She moved closer towards him and, after a moment, when he still had made no advances to her, she said good-evening.
The fact that she did so, the fact that he should be sitting there because his big house in the Square was as suddenly shut to him as if it had been barred, and that this drab was now offering to console him in the only way she knew, amused him. After Louise, she was not an attractive companion; her hands which were resting on the table were loaded with rings that seemed to have been forced on them when her fingers had been thinner; the flesh now stood up in little ridges between them. But to have her speak to him, to listen to the tawdry nonsense which was all that she could utter—that would be something. Perhaps for a space she would even enable him to forget again.
“Why don’t you drink something?” he asked.
She ordered port, pecking at it politely like a lady, and let her hand rest lightly on his arm. He moved away a little but the hand remained there; it followed his arm. And, now that the others had seen that the gentleman was free with his money, they moved in closer still, and exchanged winks every time John Marco’s hand showed itself to be something less than steady. That such a one should drink himself silly in their presence seemed a piece of almost unthinkable entertainment.
The others had all crowded round him by now; they were as c
lose as sheep sheltering. He was aware of the hot, stifling odour of their bodies; but he did not stir. There was one man in particular who fascinated him: he was doing card tricks. In his sordid, dirty fingers the cards melted magically into the air and re-formed themselves again before his eyes, like wonders. The man seemed to have some power over these pieces of pasteboard that was denied to the rest of mankind. He was a Merlin with a broken nose and an almost green bowler set so low on his head that the thing crowned him like a helmet. There were others, too, whom John Marco could not see so plainly—men with red, glistening faces and loud guffaws; leering unpleasant men; and men like himself who could do no more than sit back and undo their waistcoats and fumble for their glasses and laugh a little sometimes. And always on his arm was the soft pull of the woman who had come over to him and now sat on the couch beside him, her foot touching his.
When her drink was finished—and even in those dainty ladylike pecks it disappeared—he told her to re-order and because there were so many others near him whose glasses were empty, too, he told them too to call for what they wanted. He drew from his pocket a gold sovereign case and every eye in the room seemed to be mesmerised by it. It was the woman beside him who called out shrilly for the change when the landlord was slow in bringing it; she seemed to have appointed herself his protectress and he did not stop her when her fingers plunged into his pocket pouring in the silver coins.
It was late by now and there were some in the bar who had been drinking all the evening; their heads were full of the fumes. And in that state, tempers and convictions ran high. The trouble started in one corner. There was a big man, hairy and unshaven, who rose suddenly in his place and shot the dregs of his glass into his neighbour’s face. The other man jumped to his feet—he was less than half the size of his opponent—and aimed one of those wild silly blows that are as much intended to satisfy honour as to hit anything. But the fact that he had been struck at, that he had been assaulted, was sufficient for the aggressor. He raised his fist—it was large and heavy like a boxer’s—and let drive at his assailant’s chin. There was a sound like the snapping of a stick, and the man went down. Then, proud and victorious, the unshaven one stepped over his victim and made his way towards the door. He was in the full pride of his blood by now and, coming upon John Marco suddenly, he stopped. The fact that a stranger was in the pub was something that he resented: he was in a mood when people did things only by his permission. Raising his hand again—it was cut and bleeding across the knuckles by now—he knocked John Marco’s glass onto the floor and stood there grinning. It was the woman again who attempted to save John Marco. She shot out her little pointed shoe and caught the big man on the shin. He stared at her stupidly for a moment and then caught her across the face with the back of his hand. Immediately she started screaming, and every man in the room who fancied himself came forward. By the time the landlord had scrambled over the bar to save the glasses, the fighting on the sandy floor was general.
John Marco’s chair was jerked away from under him—he tried feebly to save himself: he did everything feebly now, he was so blurred—and the next moment he saw the chair being waved wildly in the air and heard it come down on someone’s head; then it fell to the ground amid a splinter of glass. He was sprawling now amid the sawdust and dottle that was everywhere, and he pulled himself up onto his knees, clinging to the edge of a table as he did so. But the tide of battle surged towards him once more. There was a charge of sweaty bodies, and he was down again. Something struck him on the temple; and when he raised his hand to his face there was blood on it. Then, with the breaking of one of the lamps, the smell of gas filled the room, and the landlord began calling for the police.
It was as John Marco staggered to his feet that he felt a tug—a short, imperious tug this time—at his elbow and saw the woman from the couch standing beside him. She was beckoning him towards the door at the other end of the room. He followed her with faltering, uncertain steps and found that they were in the private bar. There was another door to the bar; and that one led into the street.
They went through it together. Out there in the night, the police whistles were sounding. The woman was supporting him by now.
iii
The room in which John Marco woke was a frowsty little cell of a room with wall-paper that plunged before his eyes in whorls and spirals of gaudy roses. He lay back trying to remember. But his ears were still full of the sound of fighting and the noise of glass being shattered. He recalled dimly the empty street into which he had been led out of all that tumult; recalled also how, at last, he had fallen and how the woman who had been with him had appealed to the loitering gentlemen of those parts to carry him.
His whole body felt bruised and damaged; there were little flames of pain in every part of him. And when he raised his head, the blood drummed and battered on his ears. But suddenly he threw back the cherry-coloured coverlet that was over him and sat up on his elbow. He had remembered suddenly why last night he had gone out at all.
The movement disturbed the other occupant of the room. She was standing over by the dressing-table clad in a dirty wrapper that fell away from her disclosing her faded satin stays, and she came over and stood by him. He recognised her suddenly as the woman who had sat beside him on the couch. She was smiling.
“Feeling better?” she asked brightly.
He stared at her, scarcely comprehending.
“Did you bring me here?” he asked.
She nodded.
“We carried you,” she said.
He passed his hand across his forehead.
“Where are my clothes?” he demanded.
“On the chair,” she answered. “They undressed you when they brought you here.”
She turned back to the dressing-table—there were large photographs of herself all over it—as though she had lost all interest in him, and he slid out of bed. His head reeled as he got onto his feet and his legs felt unsteady. But he pulled his clothes onto him and pushed his feet into his boots.
“I must reward this woman,” he was thinking. “She saved me, and I must repay her.”
As he stood there, his hand was straying over him—into his waistcoat pocket, his breast pocket, the pocket at his hip. But they were empty. His money, his watch and the watch-chain with the half-ring on it, his pocket-book, had all gone.
“I’ve been robbed,” he said. “Someone’s gone over me.”
The woman shrugged her shoulders.
“You were drunk last night,” she answered.
“You brought me here to rob me,” he said.
This time she did not even move.
“The police would have had you if I hadn’t,” she answered. “You can still go to them. Tell them where you spent the night.”
John Marco did not reply. He was dressing quickly, feverishly; dragging the clothes on to him. And the woman on the other side of the room seemed prepared to ignore him again. She was boiling a kettle on a spirit stove and washing up a cup, with an odd saucer with cigarette ash on it, in a hand basin. John Marco knotted his silk cravat round his neck—even the tie-pin was gone too—and went over to the mirror.
It was not a wholesome face that looked back at him; and he stood there peering at it. The stubble of his beard showed grey and harsh, and his forehead where the man’s foot had kicked it was stained and angry. A thin dried trickle descended from it.
Taking up his overcoat that was lying across the bed he put it on, turning up the collar around his face. There was no place here where he could wash the wound; the hand basin at which the woman was standing now had a plate and knife and fork in it as well. He turned his back on her and, with his hat in his hand, in the same way in which he walked up the aisle of St. Mary’s Parish Church on Sundays he went towards the door.
The woman reached out her hand towards him.
“Is that all the thanks I get?” she asked. “Is that all you’re going to say to me?”
Because he did not answer she came over
and leant against the door-post watching him go.
“You look such a pretty gentleman,” she said.
John Marco told the doorman to pay the cabby and went straight up in the lift to his private office. From the time he entered until his door had shut behind him had not been more than a couple of minutes; but even so his appearance had been noted and speculated upon. There were whispers. The doorman contended that Mr. Marco had met with an accident. But the lift girl who had actually been closeted with him confessed in the privacy of the lady’s rest room that she believed that he had been fighting. The one point of agreement was that something sinister and unusual had happened to the man.
And John Marco did nothing to dispel the rumour. On the contrary, he fed it. He locked himself in. Mr. Hackbridge who knocked on the door once or twice had to go away again, and only the shadow of John Marco as he passed and re-passed the glass panel of his door—he seemed simply to be pacing up and down the room as if trying to make up his mind about something—showed that there was anyone there.
It was not, indeed, until nearly lunch-time when he opened his door and called for his secretary. And from the way he behaved he might have been brazening the whole thing out. He was still unshaven and the broken bruise on his forehead, even after the blood had been washed off it, caught the eye immediately and held it.
But he was still the same John Marco; he might have been awake all night in his study thinking out the flood of instructions which he released—the fresh showcards, the messages of complaint to unlucky members of the staff, new ideas for window dressing, stricter regulations about talking, and the first draft of an ambitious plan for next Christmas. As the girl jotted down the last item she raised her eyebrows a little: Mr. Marco was proposing that every one of the assistants should be put into fancy costume from the beginning of December until Christmas Eve. The silver and gold Christmas tree that had stood in the central hall on the previous year, even the gay balloons at the opening, now seemed no more than trite and obvious pieces of invention.
I Shall Not Want Page 40
