Knock Four Times

by Margaret Irwin

  He cut his life into slices ; it had the effect of a ruthless operation, alarming in a world of compromises, while he remained peculiarly himself. Dicky would have liked to comment on it. Chance had opened the door to him, but with unwonted shyness he hesitated to ask what else he had done, where he had been, for Dicky was sure that at some time he must have travelled in remote places ; he had the look of it ; he was just that queer type of Englishman whose sense of lonely adventure leads him to become a Buddhist monk or a hermit in the hills of China or a chief of some wild tribe.

  He struck Dicky as more free than anyone he had known, but it was the freedom of one who had voluntarily marooned himself on a desert island, and in the glow of his more humane civilization he was able to feel a certain smiling wonder.

  “I have always thought,” he said reassuringly holding out a piece of cleverness instead to this strange and solitary creature, “that gambling, music, and higher mathematics are the most inhuman of the vices, and gambling the most inhuman of the lot, since it concerns itself only with money.”

  “One need not gamble only in money,” said Chance.

  Again Dicky felt that something in the room was taking shape, something that had to do with him. Restless and expectant, he wanted to show off again, but could think of no theme that would sufficiently display his talents. “God,” he said to himself, apostrophizing some mysterious and possibly divine force in that room, “it is terrible to be as much alive as I am.”

  And he pulled the stopper out and in of the Chinese snuff bottle with one hand until he pinched the skin of his finger in it.

  Chance said, “I have not gambled nor wished to do so for ten years. I wish to now, in a commodity I have never tried before. Will you let me gamble on you?”

  Dicky rolled the bottle over and over in his hand, opened his mouth and shut it again hastily just as it was about to emit a nervous giggle.

  “At what odds,” continued the other, “do you put your chances of success?”

  “Of the kind of success I aim at? There’s not the ghost of a hundredth chance that I should ever get it.”

  “A hundred to one then? In what time?”

  “Never, ever. Not in a hundred years. Or if I do, when I am old and doddering into my grave, unable to enjoy it.”

  “On the contrary, and as you know very well, you will make it in the next five years or not at all.”

  “Yes, I’ve ripened and will rot early. Here in England you none of you grow up until you die, and not then.”

  “Have you known your own country?”

  Dicky repressed the answer, “In racial memories,” and with fine restraint shook his head.

  “Will you take my bet for thirty pounds at a hundred to one,” said Chance, “that you will make a hundred thousand before you are twenty-six? If you make the sum in that time, you pay me three thousand. If you don’t, I lose my thirty pounds.”

  He pulled a cheque-book out of a drawer in the table. Dicky saw that he was making it out to him for the sum of thirty pounds.

  The bottle had worked unnaturally quickly. He felt quite drunk on an empty snuff bottle. Of course it was his story. This proved it. If he hadn’t gone in to buy the bottle he would have missed this lucky encounter which in its turn would lead him to Celia, wealth, fame, everything in life. He took the cheque. He was in a dream. Was it his dream or the other fellow’s? Whosoever it was, he must not wake up.

  “Look here,” he said, “what am I to do with this?”

  “Buy two suits, one lounge and one dinner jacket. As you said, two good suits of clothes are more likely to start you now than any brilliant writing, whether by you or about you. If you play for success you must start by being successful.”

  “I know, I know. And I can have the air of it—I’ve practised. I know how. I can impress women so that they think I dress as a Bohemian from the eccentricities of choice and carelessness. But not editors.”

  He began to tell of the telegram inviting him to dine with two editors which had reached him too late, and of his humiliating consolation that, since he had no decent clothes, it was perhaps as well that it had arrived too late. But Chance’s eyes looked through him rather than at him. He could not tell that he had impressed him by this humorously pathetic tale and he doubted if any scrap of personal interest were mixed with the motives for his extraordinary offer.

  “He is an inhuman experimentalist playing at God,” he thought with indignation, and wished passionately to show that he was more than a pawn in a game of chance whose one aim was vulgar success. He had been more than that on the night of the telegram, the night when he had stood on his leads and looked down through the skeleton branches of the tree below him, and seen through success.

  What was it he had seen? He could not remember. Something to do with Shelley, with Celia, with dying young ; he could not think why it had all been so important. That night he had known he was in love with Celia, and that night Ronny and not he had succeeded in taking her home. He had not seen her since. “It was a night,” he said aloud, “of triumphant failure.”

  “A good title,” said Chance.

  And Dicky knew that he had missed it, that he could not recapture that night whether for himself or others, but that his next story would be called “The Triumphant Failure.”

  Chance was holding out the cheque to him.

  “There’ll be just time before the bank closes if you take it now,” he said. “It’s the one that’s been repainted at the end of the road. Better cash it directly, as I know the money’s there now, but it may not be long.”

  “But,” stammered Dicky, “it’s absurd. You know nothing about me. You’ve never read a word I’ve written, and I’ve been talking like a pompous schoolmaster all the afternoon. What makes you think——”

  “I’m not thinking. I’m taking a chance.”

  “Funny it’s your name too. Chance. Funny I should have run into you to-day. I was just thinking when I did—— I don’t know ; I’ve forgotten what I was thinking.”

  Colours danced before his eyes, the world spun round him ; he had climbed the rainbow and saw London and Paris beneath his feet. The cheque crackled in his fingers. Fancy if he threw it into the fire. Fancy if he got to the end of the road, and found it was made out for £0. os. od. or to Mr. William Bloggs. It could not be a genuine cheque. It must be a hoax. At the end of the road he would find that he was holding a dead leaf instead of a piece of fairy gold.

  “Is it your real name? “he said.” Who the hell are you and why are you doing this? We must do it properly anyway. Write down the conditions of the bet and sign it with witnesses, or how are you going to know that I’ll pay the three thousand pounds if I make my hundred thousand before I’m twenty-six?”

  Chance looked at him.

  “I will gamble on that too,” he said.

  He might have put it more politely. As if it would be a gamble! But there was no time to be annoyed. The bank closed at half-past three. At the second impetus from Chance he went out into the road and stood a moment dazed, for he did not recognize it in this golden glory. It seemed that his thoughts had transfigured it until he saw that the sun had come out.

  Chapter XIII

  The voice that had been speaking to Celia of spring in Rainbow Road had suddenly died in her ears. She could not recall it. She hung up the receiver and ran up to her room. It was all such fun, just when everything had been so heavy and monotonous with no crises, for somehow crises refused to happen between her and Ronny.

  It could only be for a little time and then something would happen, or perhaps nothing would happen, and she would find that she had glided imperceptibly forward until there she was walking very slowly up the aisle with the veil that Iris had worn on her head, and the nervous muscles of her father’s neck contracting close beside her, while the organ played a solemnly triumphant march in recognition of the fact that she had achieved something she need never bother to achieve again.

  “No, it can’t last, it
can’t last,” she sang to herself, dancing round her room, trying on her new hat, bouncing up and down on the never-to-be-crushed blue and rose embroidered silk coverlid to her bed, too happy to know what she was doing, because she had seen an almond tree in blossom, because Dicky was such a donkey, and because Ronny was such a dear, of course, and because her new hat suited her even when she put it on back to front.

  “Dear child!” said Mrs. Belamy as Celia clattered downstairs with unnecessary noise. “How Ronny has woken her up!”

  Colonel Belamy grunted. He preferred his younger daughter asleep.

  Celia ran all the way to Rainbow Road. It was raining, but by the time she reached it the sun came out, though drops still fell heavily from a torn black cloud that covered only the top of the sky. All the windows on one side of the road were golden, the street was lit with an unreal and fugitive glory.

  A girl crossed the road under an umbrella. Her light stockings were splashed with mud, she had no hat, and her hair blew into her eyes. She called “Tony” in a sweet and piercing cockney. Celia thought she must be very happy until she saw Tony, but it did not appear to matter.

  The bank at the end of the road was white and shining like a Greek temple.

  On either side of the road there were pots of daffodil and hyacinth balanced on the balcony ledge, Celia, whose eyes were dazzled, saw them ascending, swirling, like pink and yellow flames in the sunlight. She walked on a golden pavement. The puddles were pools of fire.

  She stood on the broken doorstep and knocked four times.

  But nobody came.

  Dicky was not there. He had gone, she did not know where nor in what mood.

  It might so easily happen like that with Dicky, that he would just go away in the middle of a sentence, and people would come and knock four times, but nobody would answer the door until at last perhaps a shining head would protrude itself over the balcony and say, “Oh, do you want the Boy Upstairs? Yes, he’s gone away. No, I don’t know where. Nobody knows. But do come up and meet a man who knows all about Chinese porcelain—or Hakluyt’s Voyages—or Lipton’s teas.”

  She stood with her back to the door and looked at the street and thought how dingy it looked, even how desolate, in this sickly yellow glare. Dicky had said she should never see it by daylight, and he was right. She should not have seen it. It had broken the spell, and now for the first time she had knocked four times and no one had answered. She went slowly up to the end of the road and stood on the kerb, and watched the traffic go by, and wondered if Dicky had stood there just as she was standing now, feeling lost and aimless and wondering what he should do next, and had he perhaps got on a bus just for the sake of something to do, and been swirled away down that long torrent of traffic, and by some strange chance would never come back?

  And so she would never hear again from him, and never again come to Rainbow Road. She looked back at it for the last time and saw Dicky coming towards her. At first she thought it was a drunken man, and then that it was someone dancing. His face was dark against the light, the outline of his hatless head was blurred with a rim of fire ; she only knew it was he because it could be nobody else.

  When he saw her he began to run, and waved his hand which held something, a small piece of paper. She went to meet him, she ran, and as soon as she did so he slowed down to a correct and indifferent walk, his head back, his arms carelessly slack, and when they met, said in a polite tone, “I’m so glad you came. Do you mind walking up to the end of the road with me? I want to get to the bank before it closes to cash a cheque for a hundred thousand pounds.”

  “By all means. And then we’ll get on a bus and see where it goes to. There might be crocuses at Kew or fawns in Richmond Park, and you shall buy them all.”

  “You don’t believe me. Then read that.”

  “Thirty pounds,” she read slowly.

  “Does it say thirty? Ah well, it’s no matter. That is my surety that in the next five years I will make a hundred thousand pounds.”

  “But, Dicky, what do you mean? Who is it? I didn’t see the name. Is it a cheque for a story?”

  But to all her questions he would only reply that he had got the cheque by chance.

  “Things happen like that with me. Chance has thrown thirty pounds into my hands and I’m the man who took the right turning.”

  He turned sharply on his heel and went into the bank.

  In a few minutes he came out, stuffing notes into his trouser pockets with both hands until they were free, when he took her hand and swung her up on to the foot-board of a passing bus. They sat in the front seat on top and rocked and swung and rushed along through golden roofs and shop-windows blazing brighter than at night towards the minaret of fire that surmounted Harrods. They did not know where they were going. They were blown in a bubble on a chance breeze. “It can’t last, it can’t last,” sang Celia, and it could not : the sun fled, the torn cloud curtained the entire sky with a cold no-colour splashed with gusts of rain as though the bubble had burst in their faces.

  Yet still they clung to their top seat, rocking and swinging and rushing along over the top of the world, pulling Celia’s green silk umbrella well down over their heads, holding on to the spokes so that their hands touched and their faces peered out from beneath it like those of a goblin and an elf sheltering beneath a leaf.

  “But where are we going, Dicky?”

  “To a tailor.”

  She told him of Ronny’s and he nodded sagaciously, saying “Of course,” as though he had intended going there all along, but she did not believe this and felt a happy triumph that could not be spoilt by his effort to deprive her of it. For he was not really conceited, he could not be when he was telling her so naturally about the story that had come back this morning ; all his stories came back, yet he never said that the public could only appreciate rot. He said, “I’ve not found my line yet. I shall go on till I do, and then stick to it.”

  He must, he said, find a sound working subject that would appeal to the largest public, not some niggly little side-line such as witchcraft or the transformation of people and animals, but something that you could keep on and on at, like Women, “only that’s been bagged by so many.”

  “Why not Men, then?”

  “Nobody’s interested in ’em.”

  “Women are.”

  “No. They are interested in themselves in relation to men. A man is merely a means to an end.”

  He wrote this down on a torn envelope, then turned it over and wrote SUBJECT at the top in jerky capitals, left a space for suggestions and wrote STYLE below, saying he had better find that first, “so that anyone picking up a magazine and opening it at random will say, ‘Hullo, here are all these dots or dashes or non-stop sentences ; it must be another story by Basil Dictripoulyos.’”

  “They’ll never say that, Dicky. They won’t remember it.”

  “True. They’ll say, ‘By that damned dago.’ Well, I don’t care as long as it gets me known.”

  “But it won’t. They’ll think it’s something about the Balkan States during the War, or if they do grasp what it’s like and want a book by you they’ll tell the library girl, ‘I want that foreign man—I can’t remember the name ’ ; and she’ll give them something by Ludovici and they’ll see it’s about sex and think, ’ Oh well, that will do,’ and next time they’ll ask for Ludovici instead.”

  He looked at her with new respect. She had observation. “I believe,” he said slowly, “you can be positively useful to me,” and then laughed and tried to change it.

  But she flushed with pleasure and said : “Dicky!” in a rapturous gratitude that astonished him too much to touch him.

  She pulled the envelope towards her with an exaggeratedly useful air and wrote NAME near the bottom.

  “I’m not ashamed of my name nor my nation,” said Dicky. “Let’s keep it Greek.”

  “Yes, but not so that you’d notice. Basil is all right, but it suggests the wrong things, a green tie and someone all weed
y and willowy.”

  “There’s Constantine or Tino.”

  “Too political.” She was thinking of Papa. “Besides, why be a king?”

  “Why not? It’s what I want to be. Or an emperor. My God, Celia, that’s the idea! An Emperor. A conqueror.

  And just one name. No Christian name or anything else. One mighty and resounding name.”

  “Your coin! Heliogabalus!”

  “Too invidious. And as hard to remember as my own. No. Don’t you see—the name of him who wept that there were no worlds left to conquer—

  ‘ and thundered on

  To die at twenty-eight in Babylon.’”

  “Alexander!”

  “‘ The Great,’ if you please. Yet even he did not make a hundred thousand before he was twenty-six.”

  “Nor have you yet.”

  They laughed immoderately, were suddenly grave. Their eyes met. Between them like a flame leaped the memory of the kiss they had not achieved.

  The conductor asked if they were going on before they noticed they had gone past the tailor’s and had to struggle down the steps of the rapidly moving bus. Now they stood in Piccadilly and Celia stared about her at buildings huge as ancient temples, amazed to find she had been asleep all this time. Was Dicky right, would she have to vanish at the kiss that waked her?

  But there he was quite comfortable and ordinary again and lamenting that he had not got his hat, nor would he admit her suggestion that he could say it had blown off on the bus.

  “I will never explain anything,” he said superbly, and marched as a conqueror through the portals of Ronny’s tailor. They sat in happy consultation with those whose only business was to enhance his beauty, and the discreet glances she caught in the mirror gave her a slight and not unpleasant flutter at her perfidy in visiting the same tailor with two different men.