The noise, the glare, the clouds of smoke, the roaring and crackling of the flames, this great traditional spectacle only appealed to him for a moment. But he could not help being amazed at the spectral monster which had been there for so long, and what it was turning into. It was a flaming spectre, a fiery iceberg. Its sides, where there were no flames, were now a solid mass of ice. The water of the hoses had turned to ice as it ran down the walls, and had created an icy armour many feet in thickness. This enormous cocoon of ice did not descend vertically, but swept outwards for perhaps fifty yards, stopped by the wall of the house of the Friseur; half submerging the beverage room in its outward progress. The flames rising into the sky seemed somehow cold and conventional as if it had been their duty to go on aspiring, but they were doing it because they must, not because they had any lust for destruction. These were the flames that still reached up above the skyline of the façade. But a new generation of fiery monsters, a half-hour younger, appeared behind them, a darker red and full of muscular leaps, charged with the authentic will to devour and to consume. And there were dense volumes of black smoke too, where fresh areas were being brought into the holocaust.
But René believed he could see a still fresher group of flames, which must be sprouting out of the annex. He moved farther on, where he could see the annex. It was still quite intact, but there was a very active flame which he felt sure was feeding on the first timbers of the annex. Two streams of water began playing on it, and it grew shorter and paler, but it did not disappear. He heard someone saying that the fire marshal was in the backyards upon which their windows looked, and that he believed the annex could be saved. They were fighting the flames in the corner, attempting to stop them at that point. He could see a dark group near the centre of the white strip where the backyards were.
“Well there it is,” René summed up for himself, “a bonfire, a very large bonfire. Every Murphy bed, and every settee had a latent flame in it, as the stuff of a bonfire. As we lived in our apartment, in our wonderful crapulous Room, we were kept away from chaos and dissolution by its strong walls and orderly shapes. But it can all be set a match to, and daemonic nature appear from nowhere and eat it up.”Then he thought of war. “War is so respectable. The rulers, the firebugs, dare not do more than kill a few million people. Theirs is a hypocritical destruction, it takes them years to go round bumping off small packets at a time. How much better it would be if they summoned a few million people to the Sahara and destroyed them all within twenty-four hours by poison gas or some quicker exterminator. But no; they must pretend. They must say that it is a very holy cause that they are serving, and fool around for four or five or six years. Fire is not frivolous and hypocritical, it is not human. The hotel will not be there tomorrow morning. Instead of it there will be a beautiful iceberg. What a pity that dear Affie could not have got herself embalmed in the ice.”
René did not return to Mrs. Waechter’s the same way. He circled round past the groceteria. As he walked warily along, he reflected what a handicap it was, from the standpoint of the Fire, that there was no wind. The whole place would have been burned down long before this if there had been a good wind. It was completely windless, and a really beautiful moonlit night, if one had any time for beauty.
When at last he reached the door of the annex, he saw that the fire had not been stopped, as anticipated, but had its teeth in the beginning of the annex. It was already filling the street with smoke, and smoke as well as water was now coming out of the annex door. As he was looking at the door, the young Russian came out of the smoke, coughing and patting his eyes with a handkerchief. He had only taken a step or two when another man who had also come out of the smoke loomed up behind him, and seizing the hand which held the handkerchief, fixed on the wrist a manacle, with almost as little trouble as if this had been a prearranged scene. The two men were now fastened to one another, but as if coming to life the young Russian hit the other in the face with his free hand, and they both seemed to slip and fall to the ground, kicking, struggling, and shouting. But another man appeared from nowhere, and bent down over René’s ex-neighbour, whom he hit with something. It was difficult to see what. The next thing René saw was the two men dragging and carrying the young man to a waiting car, which was parked beyond the disabled car of the “Kid.”
So the “Toronto Kid” had at last had to leave his apartment, as the police had foreseen. Had he been obliged to leave his treasure trove, or whatever it was, up there in the smoke, or had he got it in his pocket, or tied round his waist, or in the lining of his hat? Or had the women …? But René had been so busy watching the capture of the “Kid” that he had turned from the annex door, from which, as he now saw, the two women had also emerged. They stood at present, wailing and weeping, in the custody of two detectives, who kept their eyes very closely upon them, especially, of course, upon their hands. But this was a rapidly moving scene; and it was hardly a minute before a car drove up and the two women were pushed into it. The men jumped in behind them, and as the car door was banged to, the car was already under way and disappearing in the wake of the other one. The people in the street all seemed to be shouting, and it was not certain if they were shouting for anything more than pleasure at seeing three people pinched, or anger at the thought that one day the same men might find some excuse for pinching them.
XXII
HAD I THE WINGS OF
THE MORNING
For the remainder of the night René and Hester attempted to rest, but the noise of the fire itself, and the noisiness of those putting it out, and those looking on, made this very difficult. The fitful rest they did, however, manage to obtain, made them, by nine in the morning, fresh compared with most people in the immediate neighbourhood. To gloat over the destruction, Mrs. Waechter related the high spots; how a fireman on the ice cap over the beverage room had been killed by the collapse of a wall, and how the bodies recovered were said to number twenty. “How lovely!” René exclaimed, and Mrs. Waechter thought what a brute he was. Only Apartment 27A and its immediate neighbours remained to be burned into unrecognizabiity. The Fire Brigade felt in honour bound to prolong the agony of these four or five remaining apartments. As a slight wind had sprung up, this was demonstrably impossible.
After an excellent breakfast they went outside, and almost the first person they met was Bessie (“another nitwit”): she appeared to be mooching round in the hope of meeting Mrs. Plant. The wind made it ferociously cold and they invited her inside.
What Bess obviously hoped was that with the insurance money Mrs. Plant would acquire another hotel, and that she would be the manageress, now that Affie was gone. They both felt Bess had grown in stature because of this opportune demise. She was at present in the running (she felt) for managerial status, and, meanwhile, she had become the sole transmitter of gossip, and bearer of news.
The latter function she exercised immediately. The following are a few specimens of this. Would the insurance company pay up? This was her first line. The hotel had been secured by Mrs. Plant by means of mortgages: she had been in the habit of boasting that she had never paid a penny for anything. She would refer to this as “The modern way.” But the insurance companies had become notorious for their scepticism, wriggling out of payment wherever they could. They were not such “suckers” as their English opposite numbers. — When asked by René on what these sceptical companies would base their refusal to pay, she stared with the crafty innocence of a slum child through her hideous steel spectacles, “Oh, I don’t know.” She appeared to be as sceptical as were, according to her, insurance companies. Bess said the account of Affie’s death in currency (though from what mint this story came she had been unable to discover) was that she had gone back into a part of the hotel where the fire was quickly gaining ground, to fetch her cherry fur. But that story did not agree with the position in which her body had been found. “Where was that?” René had enquired. She, with a mock-innocent craft, answered, “It was not far from you. It was just beyon
d the door of Mr. Martin’s apartment. And that was early on — there was no fire there then.” René confirmed that he had seen her body in Balmoral Street, at a relatively early stage of the fire. “Where did you see her?” Bess enquired. “Not far from Lafitte’s hotel!” he told her. And Bess exclaimed, “Ah. Right over there!” She was full of information about the goods and valuables lost by the majority of the guests, and the people who now were penniless and with nothing left but the clothes they stood up in. These destitute fire victims were resolved to get the money out of Mrs. Plant: “But what hopes!” chanted Bess.
“Will they get nothing, then?” said René. But Bess knew the law regarding innkeepers’ liability in the case of fire. It seemed as if the law had been drawn up by innkeepers themselves or their personal friends. For, Bess assured them, in Canada, innkeepers were exempt from any claim for loss of damage to goods caused by fire.
When asked as to whether she had managed to save all her belongings, Bess tended to be obscure: but René concluded that all this meant was that she had lost nothing, but did not care to be so utterly without a grievance. Katie and Bess had been lodged in a small apartment adjacent to the kitchen, in the extreme rear of the hotel proper. The two maids only had to carry their belongings the length of the ground floor of the annex, and there was the street.
Asked if Mr. Martin was as elusive as Mrs. Plant, Bess did not seem to like that question. She appeared to become quite unusually cagey.
“Well,” said Hester, “I last saw Mr. Martin when you (nodding at René) were down below, looking for the case that was in store. As I stood outside the annex door, Mr. Martin appeared, moving effortlessly down the cataract on the stairs. His expression was at once mild and stern. Turning at the bottom, he descended into the cellar, the way you had gone!”
“When I was down there in the furnace room!” René said, astonished. “Well, he never got as far as the furnace room.”
“There are apartments down there,” Hester reminded him. “I suppose he went into one of them.”
Bess offered no suggestion, but appeared to catch sight of something out of the window. And the subject of Mr. Martin dropped.
Bess said she must get on with her search for Mrs. Plant.
They told her to come in and see them again: when they left they would leave their new address with Mrs. Waechter. Bess looked so prosperous and so Canadian in her outdoor clothes, but her personality, no clothes could transmute. She remained indelibly the small Scottish skivvy, with her morning greeting of “Another Nitwit!”
That day they went on foot to a neighbouring boulevard, where there were two or three apartment hotels. It was a long street, nearly half of which was in the French-Canadian quarter, and its hotels were spoken of as swarming with Peasoup prostitutes, or at the best very liable to be that. But after the Hotel Blundell such personalities as they encountered did not suggest a knocking shop. At the Laurenty the executive and service staff were French Canadian, and seemed quite decent people. It was settled that they should move in on the following day.
On their return to their lodgings René telephoned Mr. Furber, who, to his surprise, was impressed by the fire, and treated him momentarily as a social equal, because he had just been part of the cast in a first-class local thriller, a banner headline affair. This was very American. Mr. Furber thought less of him when he heard that he had lost nothing, had not come down on a fire escape, and had not been robbed by a fireman of his wallet. But he received new stimulation when René told him about the little Detroiter, and how there had been a stink of benzene, how this had caused him to smell a rat, and how arson had been whispered.
When Mr. Furber was told that they were now going to live at the Hotel Laurenty, he tittered. He referred to it as the “Lorelei.” René’s visit was fixed for the following afternoon, so that was taken care of.
Before leaving for the Laurenty the next morning they walked around the amazing iceberg into which the Hotel Blundell had been transformed. It was a magnificent sight; a block of ice towering over everything in the immediate neighbourhood. It was of course a hollow iceberg. The interior could be inspected through what had been the street-door of the main hotel building, on Balmoral Street. What René and Hester gazed into was nothing to do with what had been the Hotel Blundell. It was now an enormous cave, full of mighty icicles as much as thirty feet long, and as thick as a tree, suspended from the skeleton of a roof. Below, one looked down into an icy labyrinth: here and there vistas leading the eye on to other caverns: and tunnels ending in mirrors, it seemed. To the right a deep green recess, as if it had been stained with verdigris.
This hollow berg was an unearthly creation, dangerous to enter because so unstable. An icicle weighing twenty tons, rooted in an insufficiently deep, an aerial upside downness, might prove too weighty a vegetation in this inverted world. Probably it would hold in present temperatures, but a relaxation consequent upon thermometrical decline from forty below to twenty below zero, might cause the hugest icicles to crash. It was a cave in which no polar bear could inhabit, in which the Great Auk could not lay its egg, and into which no ex-guest could enter with his ice pick, to search for diamonds which, in his breathless exit, he had had to leave behind. It was a sinister, upside down forest of ice, rooted in the air; a piece of sub-polar absurdity, which would stand there till the first thaws: but René saw it as a funeral vault for Affie, which would be mysterious and inviolable for long enough to suit her volatile taste. Her hooting cry could sound there in the night — the only human sound that could be heard, for only as ghosts could men qualify for admittance, and only Affie be at home in this unearthly scenery.
The “Lorelei,” to give it Mr. Furber’s name, was a far better-run hotel than the Blundell had been, although Bessie, when she came to see the Hardings there two days later, was highly critical, and spoke disrespectfully of the French-Canadian servants. “I have never yet met with a Peasoup who was clean,” she said. To which René replied, “I am half a Peasoup. Perhaps that will help me to put up with it.”
To which Bess tartly retorted, in her Glasgow prim-talk, “It may be all recht for yew, Mr. Harding, but Mrs. Harding is no’ a Pea-sup.”
But what Bessie had come for was to inform the Hardings that Affie was now at a mortician’s, and that a service was to be held there that afternoon. A number of people were coming over from Ottawa, who had known her when her husband was alive and when socially her position had been very different from what it was at her death. The service would be at 3 p.m. René and Hester told her they would be there.
These establishments known as “Mortician’s” consist, of course, in a “lying in state” for everybody. Formerly only famous men and royal personages lay in state, but the American democracy could not but perceive that this was a bad example of privilege. So these morticians multiplied, until today no one economically superior to a rat catcher but is stuck up in a mortician’s upon their demise. So that afternoon the Hardings were introduced to this American mystery: they were led through a large waiting room, and leading out of that was the curiously misnamed Funeral Parlour. They had only taken a half a dozen steps when, turning their heads to the right, they found themselves gazing down at Affie. They were in a small chapel. There were perhaps ten rows of chairs, half of which were already occupied. Facing the latter was the coffin in which Affie lay, rather more than waist high. It was somewhat inclined, and arranged so that the chapel audience could see in part the face. Affie was fully clothed, in a green dress she had recently bought. Her face was heavily made up, powdered, and heavily rouged: and whether any facial injection had been practised or not, Affie looked much healthier and younger than she had ever looked in life. The scar had been in some way filled in, and the discoloration removed.
On the other hand, it was a little Affie that they now saw, so small a face, like a sleeping child. This immovable expression of a false content, the slight smile of the last sleep, and of the mortician’s art, succeeded in making it look as though
Affie, from the unearthly calm of this final phase of her self-presentation, were smiling at the people who had come to look at her, just as she would have done had she been conscious — had she been asked to climb into the box and arrange herself there, heavily made up. So Affie still seemed active in this last display.The only thing which destroyed the impression that this indeed was life, was the smallness of the face. It had not been a child who used to stand there, just inside their apartment, with a slight ironical smile, always faisant des façons with an unspoken “Shall I come in? Am I intruding?” — (She, who had been listening at the keyhole for anything up to ten minutes.) She had not been of childish stature, but tall and straight, with a sense for style — not like a doll, with its feet together, arranged in a cardboard box for the Toy Fair.
Hester and René only paused for a few seconds to gaze down at the dead. They then proceeded to the rear of the rows of seats. “A gathering of well-heeled bourgeois,” whispered René. But substantial citizens were arriving all the time, and continued to do so, until the last of the seats were occupied. Nearly all those present dated back a good time, to those days when Affie and her lawyer husband were living in Ottawa, before his unexpected death. The heads of most of those in the audience, the males, that is, had the wintry thatch which would also have been that of Affie, were it not that she and Miss Toole dyed their hair in the bathroom every other Saturday. And finally it must be said that Mr. and Mrs. McAffie must have been both prosperous and popular, for all these people to make so considerable a journey to be present at the last rites of Mrs. McAffie. The gathering was almost complete when not the least prosperous-looking of this élite attendance made her appearance. It was Bessie, in a handsome fur coat (borrowed, as Hester recognized at once, from Miss Toole). She came up to them a little shyly; and all three sat on chairs placed in the corner for such as had not reserved seats.
Self Condemned Page 34
