Back in the Room, René told Hester that the embodied Scream had sought sanctuary with Mr. Martin, and that she appeared perfectly safe there.
“How does that insignificant little man manage to …?”
“I wonder. Mr. Martin has succeeded in exploiting English respectability. This is rather a feat, especially in a country where the English are so unpopular. In the first instance he must have impressed Mrs. Plant terrifically with his genteelness. His voice is discreet, he exudes it isn’t done, he always seems a little tired.”
“He is the kind of man one sees everywhere in England,”
Hester said.
“Of course,” René agreed.“He belongs to the sports-jacketed lower-middleclass. He is a small provincial haberdasher, or (if he were younger) a trust house manager, or a seaside tobacconist.”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“Well, that is where respectability is to be found. The ‘decent fellows’ of the public schools become, on that level, ‘One of the best,’ ‘a white man.’ He would be as white a man as you could find if you tipped him well.”
“You are hard on Mr. Martin,” she demurred. “He is a harmless little man, is he not?”
“I believe you are wrong. He is not a very trustworthy man. But in a small way he has ‘made good’ in Canada. He knows the Northlands: he is one of the innumerable ‘prospectors’ one encounters, who have never prospected. I am sure he knows no more geology than the patter anyone picks up in the North. A few men come in here and have a drink with him every evening. They sit there in his apartment drinking Scotch, and talking of gold and nickel. I suppose the whisky is bootleg. They are the substantial men of the immediate neighbourhood. They do not get noisy, though they drink a lot. They sit there drinking easily and quietly, as sea captains do in a port, narrating their adventures in strange seas. I do not know what his adventures have been. When we first arrived Mr. Martin spoke to me of his life in the Northlands; how he played the doctor with the Indians, and so on. I think that is genuine enough.”
Hester regarded her husband with ironical expectancy. He returned her gaze, and smiled. “I say a mouthful about a very little man: a mild, soft-spoken, weak-kneed Briton. But such mild-mannered little Englishmen have often been at the bottom of very funny things.”
Hester opened her eyes a fraction more than usual, and stared, again expectant. For such hints of melodrama were not his line of country.
“If he has exploited his genteel personality, others might do so too,” René added, as though as an afterthought.
“Really, René!” Hester laughed. “If anything occurs in this hotel … of a startling nature, I shall suspect Mr. Martin — or you, darling.”
The janitor who succeeded Charlie was greatly disliked by Affie. He was the ex-boxer whose face she smacked. Everyone described him as “punch-drunk.” But to René it seemed that the punches that made him permanently muzzy and half-stupefied were in reality kicks that came out of a bottle. The kick induced by mixing two or more bottles of dissimilar alcohol.
This janitor’s name was Bill Murdoch. His behaviour was infinitely bad from the first day of his arrival, when he nearly killed a man in the beverage room. He was lazy, drunken, and surly. If, in the abstract, as a worthless ruffian, he qualified, he was dull and an unattractive man, and no one, man or woman, could take any interest in him.
Inured as they were to dramatic noises, both diurnal and nocturnal, some weeks after Charlie’s departure there was one which made them and the whole of the rest of the hotel sit up. It was in the middle of the night, and it seemed as though the house were being demolished by a giant. Both René and Hester were wakened by tremendous thumping in the basement. It was a blow which shook the annex to its foundations, followed, at intervals of about thirty seconds, by blows of equal force. Almost at once the most bloodcurdling screams were heard, appearing to come from somewhere below. Someone — or something — was battering with sinister power upon a wall; or so it seemed at first.
“This is too awful! What is happening!” Hester’s voice was a little breathless. For once this noise sounded as though the whole hotel was involved: as if at length this giant footstep would be heard outside their own door, as if the attack were upon all of them. For the imagination is apt to inhibit the rational faculties: and the imagination is basically anthropomorphic. And thus, although the faculties responsible for mathematics would assure the anxious heart that these sounds were a product of some sort of hammering, and it was not Thor’s hammer that was being used, nevertheless the imagination would have its way, would insist that the god Thor was in the basement, or else it would appear that these enormous thuds were the footsteps of a supernatural being.
It was the splintering and the crash of wood, which could be distinctly heard, which removed these sounds at last from the supernatural, and confined them firmly to the natural order. There was a final ghastly thud, echoing from the nether regions, the tearing and cracking of heavy wood, and a crescendo of screams, differing in quality from the German woman’s morning aubade in sharps, to which the annex was treated every morning, as the genuine M’Coy does from its opposite. These screams had terror in them.
All this frightful, menacing disturbance, in the heart of the night, was merely the lid lifted off the private life of Bill Murdoch. René went out and stood at the top of the stairs. There was no sound now except the distant stoking of the furnace. Mr. Martin had passed him — without recognition. His face had the same look of awful respectability, the cheeks of faded pink hanging a little dourly, the eyes hooded, as on the occasion of his reprimand to the Indian. Obviously he was prepared to say, “A gentleman does not employ a mallet to batter a lady’s brains out,” if that were necessary. — There were certain hoarse mutterings, and soon afterwards Mr. Martin re-ascended, going in the direction of his apartment. Again as he passed there was no recognition. Guests were not supposed to snoop, to poke their noses in things of that kind.
“Very official!” René thought to himself, and he speculated as to whether Mr. Martin were the real owner of the hotel, and Mrs. Plant merely a rather subtle blind.
He watched the small grey figure, with its genteel flexing of the knees, as it went down the corridor. And he thought he saw something white in the dark angle where Mr. Martin’s apartment was situated. Yes, René pondered, there is more in Mr. Martin than meets the eye. He reproached himself with having been so unobservant. So quiet a little man, so harmless, so genteel.
In the morning, Affie visited them after breakfast. This, according to her, was what had occurred during the night. A Peasoup, living in a basement apartment, cohabited with a woman not a French Canadian. This man worked at night. The woman was quite nice, Affie reported; she came from “a good family” in Ottawa. This made it all the more surprising that, not content with living in sin with a repulsive Peasoup (who looked like a defrocked priest, and Affie felt quite sure he was — and it was a great pity they did not defrock more of them) — not content with this flagrant exhibition of bad taste, she had — at night, of course, when the Peasoup was out at work — palled up with the unspeakable janitor, who was always too drunk to be of much use to any woman, and sent his shirt to the wash once a year.
Well, for some reason, the Peasoup had unexpectedly returned last night and failed to find this woman in their apartment. After a little investigation, he discovered her in the janitor’s room very drunk, in bed beside the even drunker Bill Murdoch. He had gone away, secured something at once heavy and handy, and returned to the room of the janitor who was now alone, since the offending woman had succeeded in staggering back to her apartment. With a rain of Gallic curses he rushed at the prostrate janitor who had not moved from where he was, or indeed had any consciousness of what was happening, and gave him a terrific beating with the weapon he had found in the furnace room.
This had occurred at about 12:30, as Affie timed it. She had been woken up by the commotion. Then about four o’clock the stunned and drunken janitor
came to his senses, or enough so to experience resentment, and to be in possession of sufficient strength to undertake retaliatory action.
He banged with his fist on the door of the Peasoup’s apartment, uttering the most unspeakable threats; he flung himself against it, and kicked it with great violence. But these were all very solid doors of good Canadian wood, and he made no impression on it. He seemed, though, quite resolved to get in somehow, and his fury increased as he found himself thwarted.
The Peasoup’s sensations were not of the pleasantest, for he was a small man, and the janitor would certainly eat him alive if he broke down the door. So he escaped through the window, and he had been watched by Affie, hopping through the backyards, which were knee-deep in snow.
Unable to bring down the door by hurling himself against it, Bill Murdoch had fetched from the storeroom a heavy baulk of wood about six feet in length. Supplied with this battering ram he opened the assault proper upon the Peasoup’s apartment. His imprecations filled the whole of the lower part of the house, and the woman inside, who had not fled with her mate, was terrified, it was plain to hear. Why she too had not escaped across the snow Affie could not understand. When at length Bill Murdoch battered the door down, she was beaten within an inch of her life. (Perhaps Affie exaggerated, but it was no doubt probably unpleasant enough.) It was most likely that Bill was still too drunk to see that this was not the Peasoup, or else not very particular who it was received his retributive blows.
Somewhere about noon the police arrived, and the battered, bloodshot, cursing janitor was marched off. The uncouth quarters reserved for janitors were cleaned out, clean linen replaced the soiled, and within a few hours a new janitor was installed.
XXI
THE MICROCOSM BECOMES
AN ICEBERG
Not much more than two weeks had passed when René received a telephone call from Mr. Furber, asking him if he would care to resume his duties as “librarian.” The following afternoon René was sitting once more upon one of the two unsoftened chairs at the side of Mr. Furber’s office table, offering his opinion as to the value of several books, and as to whether they would be an acquisition to Mr. Furber’s collection. Regarding the first of these two questions, he had not the remotest idea what the answer was. He knew as little about the market value of a book, as he did of the value of diamonds or fur coats. As regards the second question, since most of Furber’s books did not interest him, it was a waste of time consulting him as to the desirability of adding a little-known Marquis de Sade to the collection. But he had to affect enthusiasm, in order to retain his position upon one of the unsoftened and malformed chairs, reserved for those of very low income brackets. But he and Hester were overjoyed: black Christmas was forgotten, and they prayed with fervour that he maintain his precarious perch upon Mr. Furber’s awful chairs for many months to come.
The actual date of this reinstatement was January 18. The evening of January the 22 was spent as usual. First of all they listened to the bulletins, reporting acts of war all over the world; the slow unfolding of World Ruin,Act II. After that they listened to a talk by an American expert on Asia. He was a very aggressive Anglophobe, who once a week told the American public that “White Empire in Asia” was at an end — and he made it very clear what he meant by that. He meant that England must immediately quit India, Burma, Malaya, the East Indian and Pacific Islands, Hongkong, etc., etc., etc. He also made it perfectly plain that the English must do this because they were unpleasant people; not because the wickedness of white people occupying and bossing Oriental countries worried him particularly. He was not a moralist, like an English Liberal or Socialist — he was not possessed of an uneasy white conscience. He was just a violent imperialist who objected to other imperialists occupying all the territories that would be better run by Uncle Sam. And England was after all a small island, not much bigger than Long Island.
“Europe will be crushed between American and Russian Imperialism,” René remarked absentmindedly. “And England’s Empire will vanish like smoke — literally overnight, this war being the night in question. I wonder if there is a single Englishman, bar Mr. Churchill and a few dozen more in politics and in banks, who knows that?”
“Is it really as bad as all that?” Hester protested.
“It is what we call History.The only thing that is bad about it is that the civilization which is now enjoyed by France (and if it were not for Nazis, by Germany) will be destroyed, and there will be nothing anywhere to take its place. That is bad.”
But, as has already been explained, the ruin of these two people’s world was by now so much an accepted thing that it had lost its power to depress. No cloud went with them from the war bulletins over into the other programmes consistently lighthearted, which immediately followed.
The night was exceptionally cold, even for Momaco. And although the heating system was good enough, on such nights,when it went to forty or fifty below zero, they switched on an electric fire which was also provided. Even so, they felt uncomfortably cold, and when they went to bed they placed their overcoats on top of the blankets, and slept in a Laocoon-like embrace.
About 3:30 in the morning there was a sound that woke both of them; it was a new sound that they had never heard before. They did not know what it meant, they lay and listened. Actually it was the clanging of the large bell, which was installed in a corner of the entrance lounge. It was a very powerful bell, which could be heard plainly in the annex: its sound was harsh and unpleasant. The Hardings had never taken any notice of it, but it was an alarm bell, provided to alert the guests in case of fire. René sat up in bed and exclaimed, “What is that? It is in the house somewhere.”
“It sounds to me like an alarm,” Hester said. There was a stir and murmur throughout the hotel, upstairs someone was pounding frantically about. Then there was a tenuous screaming, from a long way off, and almost immediately afterwards the Indian’s wife went into action. René jumped out of bed, turned on the electric light, and went over to the window. As he held the curtain aside, he said, “There are flames. The hotel is on fire. We must be quick.We must try and get our belongings out.”
Hester jumped out of bed, and moved quickly over to the window. Flames were coming out of the top of the hotel, against the moon-illumined sky. It was a bright orange kicking against an electric blue. Both had the same experience, both felt incredulous. The idea of the hotel, the shell in which they had lived for so long, going up in smoke and flames, they had to become accustomed to; the destruction of a microcosm gives one a foretaste of the destruction of the world, and René thought afterwards how much they had taken their especial universe for granted, and how far they had been from a realization of the destruction they were always talking about.
“What do we do?” asked Hester, her teeth chattering
“The first thing is to dress. And dress warm. We shall probably have to get out. It is at least forty below zero.”
He tore their overcoats off the Murphy bed, and afterwards pushed it up into the air, until it fitted neatly into its cupboard, the doors of which he banged shut. Next he went to the clothes closet, lifting from its hanger his warmest suit, and picked up his overshoes. In a few minutes he was dressed, all but his overcoat.
Hester, on her side, had disappeared into the bathroom. There was not much noise in the annex. Everyone was engaged in the same way, no doubt, as were the Hardings. There was a sound of people hurrying along the corridor, which was probably guests streaming out of the main part of the hotel, from which direction came confused noises, among them the screaming of women. All these sounds filled both them with horrified apprehension, and in René, more than in Hester, there was the sense of pressure, from a time that was now constantly narrowing. René had lifted on to the table a large portmanteau: into this he rapidly packed clothes, underclothes as well as suits and dresses, snatching them out of drawers, and pulling them out of the clothes closet. “Won’t that be too heavy, René?” was Hester’s anxious enquiry. He
seemed not to hear.
For some little time, smoke had been seeping in beneath the door. When he had piled everything in the portmanteau, he strapped it up, and then went quickly into the corridor. It was full of smoke. The young Russian was standing at his door, and smiled.
“What is the fire chief doing?” he asked. “Where are the hoses? It is a quarter of an hour now since that bell went.The fire chief is a Peasoup. He don’t like being woken up.”
“Ah, that’s it!” René responded. As he was going back into his apartment, he saw Mr. Martin coming along the corridor, with the expression that would be there if he were on his way to point out to somebody that “a meat saw is not the implement a gentleman uses to saw off a lady’s head!” The bottom of his flat cheeks of faded pink flapped very slightly, and he called out, “The hotel is on fire. Open all windows.”
“Needless to say do not open the windows,” René warned Hester. “Come with me,” he continued. “I must carry this out. We will come back if the smoke is not too bad.”
René dragged the portmanteau outside the door. Firemen now were rushing down the corridors, banging upon the doors, shouting “Get out.” The fireman on their floor sprang over the portmanteau on his way out.
“Let me give you a hand with that,” said the Russian. René was glad of this help, and the portmanteau was quickly carried out into the street. There were a number of people gathered there, guests and sightseers. René caught sight of a woman with whom he had often talked, who occupied a house almost facing the street door of the annex. She offered to take in their luggage, if they wanted somewhere to put it. Hester had carried out a suitcase, and this and the big valise were placed just inside the front door. Mrs. Waechter was the woman’s name; she explained to them how it was that the fire had got such a hold. The hydrants had been frozen and it had taken them some time to get rid of the ice. It was only a few minutes ago that the water had been directed on the flames.
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