Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  There had been dozens in the house since then, for Mrs. McCarthy alone remained, persistent as life or death, while the changing Floors gyrated above her. But the young actor still haunted the second floor in Dicky’s imagination with the echo of old musical-comedy tunes, old ragtime dances, and rowdyism of which there was nothing now left to say except—“The bread is eaten and the company broke up.”

  In some mysterious way he felt that the poor young gentleman was a prototype of himself and that all his gaiety and charm and possible genius was doomed to an early and violent end, he did not know how ; perhaps they would have to have another war in order to provide him with it.

  “No harm in it at all,” said the caretaker, “except that I have to speak to him a bit sharp like sometimes or else where would you be with a man about the place?”

  Dicky gathered that the Ground Floors had been complaining of her conjugal quarrels. He pulled his thoughts back from the figure of his predecessor, whom he imagined like himself, only tall and handsome, and listened for a moment while she got sentimental over her grandson Cyril who made a hellish din on tea-trays in the back-yard—“and if they turn us out of this he’ll have to stay indoors, for I’d never think of letting him play in the street like common children. There’s that girl that left school a year ago, and done nothing ever since but go up and down this street, up and down, on the step of a bicycle, she ain’t going to come to no good by it, and I saw she’d got as far as a pair of high-heeled shoes already.”

  “You don’t say so,” said Dicky, greedily snatching at his plum. But she was off again on Cyril and his delicate chest and what a bright little boy he was with his book and something about a letter which apparently was a crowning piece of furtive malice on the part of the Ground Floors. “But if you and the First Floors would speak for us, I’ve always said they were real ladies whatever some people might think, and if some people do think it just shows their ignorance that’s all, and I know they appreciate Mr. McCarthy as they’ve always been very pleasant-spoken with him, but there, they know an educated man when they see one which is more than some people do. Those Ground Floors——”

  A furious tattoo on the front door shook the house. It might be any number of knocks. People were apt to knock like that after ringing all the bells in turn for about half an hour and at last striking the match that enlightened them as to the uselessness of their labour.

  Dicky said, “Of course, of course, Mrs. McCarthy. Down with the Ground Floors,” and hurled himself down the eight flights of stairs in eight leaps. They had not lit the gas in the hall, but he could not wait; he opened the door, which was flung back on him, precipitating Leila on to his chest. In his disappointment he began to swear, but she gave him a violent warning below the belt with her elbow, while she waved her other backwards, designating two mysterious forms behind her which, as far as the doubled-up Dicky could distinguish between his gasps for breath, were both male in contour.

  “Who the hell——” he began again, and leapt into the air to dodge her second signal.

  Leila explained in cool and languishing tones. “It’s a telegram for you, I think. He was here when we came up and you opened the door just as I did. Excuse me, please ; I haven’t got my key out.”

  So it was only Leila and one of her young men, a new young man that she wasn’t sure of yet, hence her tones, and the telegram, damn it, was to say that his aunt was dead, if indeed it were for him at all.

  “What name is it?” he asked the shorter of the two figures.

  “Gawd knows,” said the boy despondently.

  “Oh, then it must be yours,” said Leila, who was still coaxing her key out of the lock in her most aloof manner.

  Dicky took it in disgust and thrust it into his pocket.

  “Any answer?” said the boy.

  “Good Lord, no. Do you think I’d waste a shilling on a dead aunt?” he replied so savagely that the boy apologized and hurried down the steps to his bicycle.

  “You might waste a match on her anyway,” said Leila. “It’s disgraceful the hall isn’t lighted yet.”

  “She can wait till I get upstairs,” said Dicky, who saw no reason to oblige Leila after her angular admonition. There was no chance for a girl to be pretty who was as bony as that.

  “Look here, can’t I do something with a match? Where’s the gas?” asked a smiling voice from the new young man.

  Dicky held his breath. He had heard that voice before. It had said, or might have said something like “The Navy’s all right.”

  “Thanks awfully,” said Leila. “Do come in, Commander Haversham.”

  She kicked Dicky to show that she wanted him to get out of the way. He was damned if he would get there. He was going to know what was happening. He was going to see that it happened in the right way. If his aunt hadn’t died at just the right moment for his cousin to send that telegram to reach him at just that moment, he would never have known that Leila had returned with Celia’s young man. It showed that they had been right in his religious training, and that a Providence was watching over him after all.

  “I think I’ve met you before. At the Belamys’ dance,” said that inert but pleasant voice.

  At the same moment the match flared up beneath two highly cut nostrils and a patiently weary smile.

  “Oh yes,” said Dicky.

  He felt cowed. It was terrible. He looked at the detestable young man who looked too mature and secure and finished to look young, and who was lighting the gas in such a leisurely manner as to suggest that all occupations were alike to him and that he was indifferent as to which he should pursue until he died.

  He looked at his suit and knew that he couldn’t get one like it under fifteen guineas, which as far as he was concerned might as well be fifteen hundred. He listened to him being friendly. He tried to think he was being patronizing, but he wasn’t. He remembered he was Celia’s young man. He knew that he himself loved Celia.

  Nothing else could explain the hate that surged up in him in a rush of blood to the head and to the finger-tips that itched in an insane desire to fasten themselves round the white and well-shaved throat of Celia’s young man.

  Then the corollary again rushed back on him. He was in love with Celia. This proved it. All the best novelists were agreed that such bitter hatred and envy and jealousy meant love. At last it had come to him. After all these years. After all the episodes that hadn’t counted. He was not, after all, to grow old without it. He was in love.

  Meanwhile they were all going upstairs and Ronny’s assumption that Dicky would accompany them into Leila’s sitting-room was quite lost on Leila. So were Dicky’s nudges and signs that he wanted a word with her in the kitchen as soon as she had deposited Ronny inside her door. At least he could obtain no answering sign from her, but he could not tell ; she might relent and come down to him. So when her door had shut behind them he went up only one more flight of stairs, and then slipped down again and behind the curtain which had been his parents’ double bedspread and was too large for anything on the top floor.

  He plunged up over the step into the conservatory kitchen, and put his foot into a pile of plates. He hoped Leila might hear the smash and come down, but she did not.

  He waited in a frenzied apprehension. Any moment in the sitting-room four steps up she might be saying or doing something which would wreck the intricate plot that had begun to hatch in his brain the moment he had seen her with Celia’s young man. She might even give away the secret of Celia’s visits to him. He had warned her on pain of a horrible ancient system of slow strangulation as practised by all the best torturers in the East not to give this away to the Belamys, but she was apt to become forgetful when with a young man.

  Of course it had begun to rain. He had noticed that it always did when you were in that leaky kitchen. It was now pouring. A drop slid down his neck and then a stream. He moved one step, because two would have landed him in the minute table in front, or the gas-stove on his left, or the sink on his ri
ght. As it was he knocked over a large object that resounded tinnily ; he was not sure if it were the bread-pan or the pail. He could not find any matches in his pockets, there must be some on the shelf above the stove where the conservatory flower-pots used to stand, he thought Leila kept them there, or at any rate some spills which he could light from the gas in the passage. He felt along the shelf and knocked over a dish. This made a really good crash. He waited full of bright hopes. But nobody came.

  “They must be getting on very well up there,” he thought, and this slightly consoled him for the discovery that he was standing in a pool of rain-water. He stepped down out of the kitchen into the coal-box, which so much disheartened him that he sat on the step into the kitchen and began to pray.

  “Please, God, make her come down to me. Make her come down.”

  After considerable repetition he saw he had better try something else.

  “Please, God, don’t let her be a bloody fool. Don’t let her give away about me and Celia. Don’t let her give herself away. And God, do, do try to make her remember she’s a lady.”

  If he went upstairs for matches and a book he might just miss her. The minutes passed. They might have been hours, weeks, years. Nothing but the unchanging night showed him the contrary. She would never come. She would never let Ronny go.

  “For silver moons are naught to her, and naught to her the suns that reel.”

  Then as if from a great distance he heard the sitting-room door open and shut and Leila’s high heels come clacking down the four steps into the lobby.

  “Darling!” he whispered so softly in his discretion that she never noticed and began a thin high squeak that was plainly going to be a shriek when she saw the crouched figure of a man on her kitchen step. He stopped it with a quick movement.

  “Ass! It’s me. I told you I was going to wait here.”

  “You didn’t. How dare you frighten me like that?”

  “I didn’t. I mean I didn’t mean to. Darling Leila, do be nice. I had to speak to you. I’ve waited for hours in the rain.”

  “Oh, hell, is it raining? So it is. Oh well, I suppose he’s good for a taxi. Get out of the way, Dicky, I want to find my shoes. Give me a match, do.”

  “I haven’t got one. Are you going out with him?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not indeed? Leila, you are an angel, you are the cleverest and most attractive girl in London. Is this your shoe box?”

  “No, you fool, it’s the potato basket. What do you want?”

  “Nothing, for you are doing it all perfectly. But I only just wanted to say——”

  “Where are the matches? I know I left some on the hat-box. Oh well, there are some in the kitchen.”

  “No, don’t look in there,” said Dicky nervously. “I mean, do just listen to me first. Leila, you want to get married, don’t you? Well, I can help you to do so.”

  “My dear Dicky, it’s awfully sweet of you, but what a trying moment for a proposal!”

  “Leila, darling, darling, darling, I love you far too much ever to dream of marrying you. What you want is a perfectly good English gentleman with smooth hair and clothes fit to wear in heaven, and when you are married I will be your first lover, for no nice English girl would ever want one before marriage.”

  “Oh, shut up. What I want is a match. I know they are in this linen-box. What are you here for? I think you’ve gone mad.”

  “No, Leila.” He became very stern. “I am here to warn you. If you tell him at this point about Celia coming here to see me, you’ll do in your own chances. You may think it’s a good move for you, but it isn’t. Jealousy will only stir up his interest in her. Do be careful. Don’t be funny. Be pensive and sympathetic. Any chivalrous English gentleman would long to marry you then. But don’t for God’s sake tell stories like the one about the bishop.”

  “Which one?”

  “Any one. All the worst stories are about bishops.”

  “Thanks awfully,” said Leila. “But I might be expected to know all this myself, mightn’t I?”

  “You might, but you don’t. Look at the hash you’ve made of all the others.”

  “You are right there,” she said with surprising good-humour, and having at last found the matches, she lit the gas in the kitchen. Dicky waited trembling. There was silence, a gasp, a low cry, and then a hurriedly flowing torrent which he vainly sought to interrupt.

  “I say I’m awfully sorry.

  “—Have I really?

  “—No, not really?

  “—I couldn’t help it. I was looking for the matches.

  “—Oh, I say, have I really tipped the bread into the rainwater? I thought it was only the pail. I did really.

  “—I’m awfully sorry.

  “—Yes, Leila.

  “—Yes, I know I am.

  “—I’ll get another lot. I will really.”

  “You know jolly well you can’t unless you starve altogether, and I don’t want your corpse on our hands, though I do think it is rather curious behaviour, to say the least of it, that you should spend the time down here by smashing our crockery and upsetting the coal and the bread and think you can make it all right by telling me I’ve made a hash of all my love-affairs. And you think that you can teach me how to attract a gentleman.”

  “But, Leila, I can, that’s why. It’s just because I am a cad that I know so well what it would be like to be a gentleman. Don’t rush off like that, let me get you your shoes.”

  “I’ve got them.”

  “Leila, do remember what I said. You are a fool not to listen to me. I am a cad, but I’m a cad of genius.”

  In the heat of this last declaration he snatched at her skirt, and as she pulled it away somehow became involved in the curtain, and the pole, precariously balanced at one end on a gimlet instead of a nail, descended sharply on their heads, enveloping them in fold after fold of Dicky’s parental bedspread.

  Leila’s shriek brought Ronny to the door, where he saw in the dim lobby a vast and formless mass that heaved and sank and struggled and emitted smothered noises that sounded now like sobs and now like laughter. From this Leila first emerged, calling Dicky by a variety of names any one of which disposed of her chances to appear in a pensive and sympathetic light, until her sudden pause warned Dicky of their audience and sent him surging up from the curtain into the face of the helplessly laughing Ronny.

  It was Leila who met the occasion.

  “This curtain,” she said with nonchalance, “is always coming down.”

  “And so am I,” chimed in Dicky. “This time we came down together.”

  “I must really put a nail in to-morrow,” said Leila, smoothing her head. “The gimlet is no use, but the wall is so rotten, you can’t get a nail long enough.”

  “The landlord,” said Dicky.

  “Of course,” said Leila.

  “Of course,” said Ronny.

  Dicky felt a paroxysm of politeness seize all three. A swift consideration of Ronny led him to think that a judicious frankness might release them.

  “I borrow all their things, you see,” he explained ingenuously, “and bag their food, and to-night when I was rummaging for matches I broke some of their plates. I’m now going upstairs to commit suicide.”

  He pointed out the disaster, thinking that if Ronny were going to get really friendly with Leila there was no harm in letting him know what he might do for her. Ronny said it was rotten luck and was thankful he hadn’t done it, and told Leila she must be a martyr for patient sweetness, he would have expected to hear the curses a mile off. He then told Dicky that they hadn’t noticed how late it was, and when they did Leila had very kindly invited him to stay to a supper of Indian corn, but he, being more grossly inclined, had asked her to come out to dinner with him instead, and they would so much like it if Dicky came too, “wouldn’t we, Miss James-Duff?”

  “Yes, rather,” said Leila, “do come, Dicky. It’s 8.30, and you must be ravenous.”

  The tactless fo
ol! He might have accepted but for that. No, he wouldn’t, of course he wouldn’t—what was he thinking of? As if he would let himself be taken out to dinner by Celia’s young man, who was asking him as a kindness too, because he had guessed without Leila’s prompting that he was longing for a real dinner, the kind of dinner that began with hors d’œuvre or possibly oysters. To let himself be fed by Celia’s young man! To say nothing of the fact that he would be seen in this abominable suit by the side of that perfect grey.

  He told Ronny he had an article to write to-night.

  “But we’re coming back directly after dinner,” said Ronny hastily.

  “Even so,” replied Dicky, “it would take up too much time. It’s awfully decent of you, but I have to refuse all invitations when they are clamouring for my stuff like this.”

  This time at least he could trust Leila not to give him away. His manner expressed haughty reserve as he saw them off the premises and mounted the stairs with a stately tread. He had sacrificed more than the dinner, for he could have kept an eye on Leila and steered her past any awkward corners.

  She had been a fool on purpose, for she had not wanted him to come ; but she was a fool in that, for Ronny had wanted it, he had not at all wanted to take her out alone, he had seen that. His eagerly plotting brain surveyed with wonder the dull acquiescence with which people like Ronny and even that gliding opportunist Leila slipped into whatever situation presented itself instead of seizing and using it to the utmost.

  His was the master brain.

  He supposed there was some brawn left from lunch.

  He was very tired.

  He went into his room, put his hand in his pocket for his handkerchief, and found a crumpled piece of paper. He pulled out the telegram and opened it, yawning. The name at the end was wrong. It wasn’t his cousin’s. It wasn’t for him. There was some mistake. He read it again, smoothing it out. He felt sick and his head was swimming. He read : “Can you dine to-night and theatre. Ivy 7.45. Mary Vane coming. Gordon.”