“It won’t always be like this,” he would tell himself as he made his way back stumblingly to the magnificence of the square he lived in. “Once this year is over, once I know that everything is all right, I shall settle down again, Louise and I will take a holiday together, a long holiday, the kind of holiday that Mr. Lyman was talking about. Then I shall feel easier in my mind again. I shall stop drinking.”
And a week later would find him making the same resolve with the same fixed intention as he turned unsteadily up the broad sweep of Sussex Gardens and searched out the way towards his house.
He had been drinking heavily one evening, squandering the spirits upon himself, when he resolved abruptly to have no more of it. Through the first mists of alcohol that had begun mercifully to cloud across his brain, the old panic, the urgent alarm that things were getting out of his control at the shop and that he was needed there to look after them, came back to him. He pulled out his watch and sat staring at it for a moment, his mind unable to register the hour that it showed. Then shifting himself awkwardly to his feet he quitted the saloon where he had been sitting and began to blunder through the lamp-lit streets towards the shop. The air on his face was cool; it blew soothingly. But it seemed only to increase the headiness of the drink that he had taken, and once or twice he swayed and had to raise his hand as if he were about to fall.
But the shop had no use for him at that time of night. It turned a blank face to him, black and forbidding; and he lacked the courage to ring for the night-watchman to let him in. The large building with its unlighted windows seemed some sort of tomb, a monument erected to things long dead. He would be back there soon enough—the morning could be only seven or eight hours away—by the time it had come to life again; and until then its stones would have to content themselves without him. He turned and began to walk slowly away.
He had walked for perhaps a hundred yards when his eyes suddenly caught his own name shining in the darkness in front of him. The letters, scrolled elaborate things, were etched across a brass plate on a door that caught the light of a solitary street lamp. He paused. This was something else of his, the hostel where the young ladies lived, some forty of them. He had never been inside the place; it was a chaste and separate harem ruled over by a grey-haired housekeeper of Mr. Hackbridge’s appointment. And then as he stood there he remembered that it was to this doorway that he had first showed Eve Harlow home; it was from this cheap dormitory that he had sought to take her and give her everything in life that could have made her happy. Why hadn’t he taken her? he asked himself. What was it that had prevented him when she at last had been so willing and so precious? But his mind was dim and indistinct to-night, and the mystery of the tragedy remained unsolved. He passed his hand across his forehead and to steady himself he rested his shoulder against the pillar of the door.
Then the idea came to him that he would see inside the place, would find out what kind of dwelling it was that Eve Harlow had known before he had cherished her. For a second he hesitated: it was late and the young ladies would be asleep refreshing themselves for their long hours of standing to attention on the morrow. But it was his, all his, he told himself; if he wanted to go inside he had only to give the order to the caretaker. Raising his hand, he set the bell pealing and waited impatiently for the man to answer.
The caretaker was clearly surprised to see him; surprised but respectful. He touched his forelock when he saw who it was and, when he heard that John Marco wanted to come in, he stepped aside and held the door politely back. He made a strange, dishevelled figure in his flannel nightgown tucked clumsily down into the top of his trousers, and John Marco threw back his head and laughed at him. He was still laughing as he crossed the hall and began to stumble up the high staircase.
The caretaker followed wonderingly, padding up the stairs in his felt slippers. Should he call the lady housekeeper? he asked.
But John Marco shook his head.
“Tour of inspection,” he said in a low, slurred voice. “Making sure that everything’s in order. No need to disturb anybody.”
There were two doors opening out from the landing in front of him. John Marco hesitated and then walked awkwardly towards the further one. It was the voice of the caretaker behind him that stopped him suddenly and made him turn.
“Not in there, sir.” The man said in horror. “That’s where the young ladies sleep.”
John Marco turned his back on him.
“That’s what I want to see,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s what I came here to see.”
He threw the door open and peered inside. It was a long room with a narrow aisle down the centre between a double row of curtains; at the far end a lamp, turned so low that it was a glow merely, was hanging.
“So this is the kind of life she knew,” he said, speaking aloud to himself. “This is what she came back to when she left me.”
And for no reason he began to laugh again.
The caretaker came nearer and dropped his voice.
“You’ll wake them, sir,” he said. “There’s ten of them in here.”
“Go away,” John Marco told him. “Go back and mind the door. I shan’t wake anyone.”
He tiptoed forward as he said it and stood for a moment waiting. It was strange standing there in that quiet, polished room with only the sound of breathing, the heavy, regular breathing of sleep, in the air. Then he raised his hand and slid one of the curtains back along its runners. Within, he could see the faint outline of a bed, a chair and a long cupboard.
“Like a cell,” he thought. “Like a nun’s bloody cell.”
But there was a movement from the bed. The sleeper stirred and then raised herself suddenly on one elbow. At the sight of the heavy form standing there, blotting out what small glimmer the lamp provided, she screamed.
John Marco did not remember how long after the scream he stood there. He recalled only that all round him behind those curtains there were sudden frightened movements; and the atmosphere of sleep was shattered. Then there were hands, strong angry hands, that seized him and dragged him out back onto the landing again. But they were not the hands of the caretaker, because he remained over by the door. They belonged instead to the grey-haired woman whose dressing-gown was belted across her like a uniform.
“Not while I’m in charge here you don’t,” she was saying. “You try and get at my girls again and I’ll send for the police.”
John Marco was silent for a moment and then he laughed again.
“Do you imagine,” he said, “that I came here to do mischief? Do you think that I wanted to ravish all forty of them?”
And leaning against the top column of the balustrade he went on laughing, louder this time; laughed until the whole staircase echoed with it and doors on the other landings began to open as well.
“He’s drunk,” he heard the woman saying. “We must fetch a cab. None of the girls must know that it was Mr. Marco.”
Chapter XLII
But of course the girls knew soon enough; everyone in the shop knew in fact. The incident, discreditable as it was, was enlarged upon and distorted. John Marco, the rumour went, had entered the ladies’ hostel, had attempted to abduct one of their number forcibly and had finally been ejected after a terrible scene of violence. The police, rumour had it, had been called: John Marco had been arrested, and had been released again.
Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge took careful notes of the whole affair; and they compared them. In the end there was nothing that they did not know about it. They interviewed the lady-housekeeper and the door-keeper, and they sent for the girl into whose cubicle John Marco had intruded. Her part of the story was slight and unconvincing at the start; she was diffident and nervous. But under cross-examination she improved. As she went on she recalled that it was not until he was actually beside her bed that she had wakened and as she had started up she had felt his hand upon her shoulder pressing her down, his reeking breath upon her cheek. Put that way it was a pretty horrifying
indictment, and Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge pored over it together.
“It can’t go on,” said Mr. Hackbridge lugubriously when the girl had gone. “He’s riding for a fall. He ought to be warned.”
But Mr. Lyman only shook his head.
“It suits us better that things should go on exactly as they are,” he said. “Just exactly as they are.”
And all through the autumn, almost as though unconsciously obeying Mr. Lyman, John Marco continued with his drinking. Under the influence of it he grew steadily more despotic and unapproachable; nowadays even tiny differences of opinion, put forward hesitatingly and with due politeness, produced rages that silenced all opposition. They left him a lonely, isolated figure, surrounded by men who hated and were afraid of him. The fear had always been there; there had never been an assistant in the place who would have answered him back to his face. But it was the hatred that was something new. So long as the weekly pay envelope had not been tampered with, the assistants had quaked and been contented. But men with families who have been earning three pounds ten a week and then find themselves reduced to thirty-five shillings are not of the stuff that loyal bodyguards are made. And there was not an employee in the store who would not have walked out and gone round to the Bon Marché for an extra half-a-crown a week if only the Bon Marché had offered it.
There was, too, another effect that the drinking was having on him: he was growing careless and untidy in his dress, slovenly even. His cravats were no longer the perfectly tied things they had once been; they hung round his neck nowadays, and there were stains and spots on the front of them. During the last year or so he had come to stoop a little and his clothes, his expensively cut clothes, hung from him awkwardly. As he usually wore his coat unbuttoned, he seemed at times to be shambling along like a man older than his years.
But in his own mind, he was, in fact, a little easier: he saw the position improving itself every day in front of his own eyes. The figures that Mr. Lyman brought to him showed entries in solid, reassuring black where there had been red before. And he knew that thanks to those endless unsleeping nights spent pacing up and down his study, thanks to his cleverness and sagacity and his courage in putting a knife through everyone’s salary including his own, John Marco Ltd. was now turning up on the right side again.
It was only the matter of ready money in his pocket that still troubled him. The eight hundred pounds that the little auctioneer had given him was almost exhausted; some of it had gone to pay the interest on the mortgage on the house, and some of it, of course, had gone back into the pockets of the little auctioneer himself. But it was November already and John Marco could see daylight breaking on the road ahead of him. And simply to ensure that he could go down the road decently and in style until the dawn was really there, he decided that he must raise some more money somehow.
This time there were only money-lenders to turn to. He found them in their hidden offices in dark courtyards and dubious alley ways. He bargained with them, matching his skill at figures against theirs, and he signed his name to pieces of paper that gave him what he wanted. “It’s only for three months or perhaps four,” he said to himself, “then I can tear up those documents in their faces. I can scatter the pieces over them.” And in the meantime, it was pleasant enough to feel his wallet bulging inside his coat again, to draw from his pocket a crackling, watermarked fiver with all the gold in the Bank of England behind it when he went to pay for something.
And when the Christmas trade was really upon them—it was a good shopping Christmas this year—and he saw the assistants breaking themselves in their efforts to serve the customers who were massed along the counters, he stood on his high balcony looking down on it all, and laughed to think of the despair that he had struggled through. Even when two of the young ladies who had been on their feet since nine o’clock in the morning fainted as seven o’clock came round—the shop remained open an hour later as Christmas approached—John Marco did not reproach himself when Mr. Hackbridge told him.
“Young girls often faint,” he said. “It’s their nature. I only hope that they didn’t upset the customers.”
And he waved Mr. Hackbridge aside and poured himself out a drink and went on adding and re-adding those sheets of golden figures that the counting house kept sending down to him.
But the tiredness, the sense of driving the machine that was himself harder than any machine ever should be driven, continued; his hand was unsteady as he opened his letters in the mornings and there were times as he sat quietly in his chair when his heart without warning would start pounding angrily as if he had been running, and he would begin gasping as if his breath were imprisoned inside him. After these attacks—and they lasted sometimes for minutes on end—his face would go ashen and he would feel the sweat breaking out along his forehead. But there was no one else in the room to see. And as soon as he could breathe again he would turn back to his desk and go on working.
The climax, the moment when his heart without warning refused altogether for the time being to work for him, came one night as he was at dinner with Louise. It was nearly nine o’clock before the meal had started, and they were alone. John Marco had not changed his clothes: he was still wearing the frock coat that he had worn all day at the shop. It was a handsome, well-cut garment and only the facing which had worn a little shiny on the lapels showed that it was not altogether new. But there was a flower in the button-hole and the shoulders were full and rounded with the weight of man inside them.
“He looks important,” Louise thought. “Someone that you would notice in a crowd.”
And then as she was watching him, he suddenly did not look important any longer. She saw him pull at his collar and falter for an instant as though someone had spoken to him; and then, quite slowly, he folded forward onto the table, his arms sprawling, and his head down on the cloth across which the purple stain of the wine from the overturned glass was spreading. And before either Louise or the maid who was waiting on them could reach him, he had slid off his chair and collapsed on the floor, lying there on his back with one hand tugging at his collar. Only it was a limp, clammy hand that fell away aimlessly as they moved him.
By the time the doctor had arrived, they had carried John Marco upstairs and laid him along the wide couch in the drawing-room.
The house now had the deep hush of disaster hanging over it. The maids were going about on tiptoe and the doctor’s heavy tread on the stairs seemed callous and unthinking. The doctor himself was slow and unconcerned, like a man who expects death to wait for him; he opened his bag as unhurriedly as a pedlar. And all this time, John Marco, with his collar pulled open and his neck swollen and suffused, was lying with his head on one of the ivory silk cushions and his legs in their striped trousers lounging across the upholstery. He was breathing ponderously, as if the air around him were drowning him.
Then the doctor bent down and applied his stethoscope. He was on his knees beside the unconscious man for nearly five minutes. When he got to his feet again he was grave and silent like the rest of them.
“He must have rest,” he said. “Absolute rest. He’s been killing himself.”
“Is he in danger?” Louise asked him.
The doctor shrugged his shoulders.
“Yes, if he goes on drinking,” he said quietly.
It was nearly midnight when John Marco awoke. He was in his bed by then and there was a nurse standing by him. She was mixing something coloured in a glass. For a moment he lay there, the pieces of his mind grating against each other, and then he sat up on his elbow, staring in front of him.
“What’s the matter,” he asked. “What’s happened to me?”
Out of the shadows by the fireplace Louise appeared.
“You’re ill, my dear,” she said. “You’re not to worry.” She forced his shoulders back down onto the pillow and began stroking his forehead. And because he had no strength in him he obeyed her, lying back staring up emptily at the ceiling.
“You’ll
be in bed a long time,” she remarked quietly. “You’ve got to rest.”
To rest! She was right, how right she was she would never guess. It had been more than one man could do to build up that business out of nothing; and then, because the seasons and the fashions had been difficult, to break it all up again and start building it anew. It was something that no one else could ever have done; and Louise in the security of that fine house of theirs had never known what he had suffered. But he had succeeded, too. The shop was minting its own gold again; Mr. Lyman’s ledgers were full of it. He could afford to rest for a while in the half light of this bedroom with only the soft voice of Louise to tell him things.
But these dreams disappeared abruptly, and his mind became clear again. He remembered that Mr. Lyman and Mr. Hackbridge were plotting against him, that the house wasn’t his really, that he had given his signature on notes to men whom he should never in his senses have trusted, and that the very bed that he was lying on belonged to a shabby little auctioneer who had visited the house one day when he had taken Louise out driving.
He sat up on his elbow again and pointed at the nurse with a hand that was shaking and unsteady.
“Send her away,” he said. “I don’t need her. I shall be getting up. I shall be back at the shop to-morrow. I’ve got to be there. Got to be there, I tell you.”
And next morning, at his usual time, his face greyer than ever and his collar turned up high round his cheeks, he was climbing out of his carriage in Tredegar Terrace. Louise was with him: she had insisted on coming. And he leant heavily on her arm as he went inside.
I Shall Not Want Page 46
