Laughter in the Dark (11 page)

“I don’t know, gentlemen, what you think of Udo Conrad,” said Albinus, joining in the fray. “It would seem to me that he is that type of author with exquisite vision and a divine style which might please you, Herr Rex, and that if he isn’t a great writer it is because—and here, Herr Baum, I am with you—he has a contempt for social problems which, in this age of social upheavals, is
disgraceful and, let me add, sinful. I knew him well in my student days, as we were together at Heidelberg, and afterward we used to meet now and then. I consider his best book to be
The Vanishing Trick
, the first chapter of which, as a matter of fact, he read here, at this table—I mean—well—at a similar table, and …”

After supper they lolled and smoked and drank liqueurs. Margot flitted from place to place and one of the minor poets followed her like a shaggy dog. She suggested burning a hole in his palm with her cigarette and started doing so and, though perspiring freely, he kept smiling like the little hero he was. Rex, who had at length been impossibly offensive to Baum in a corner of the library, now joined Albinus and began to describe to him certain aspects of Berlin as if it were a distant picturesque city; he did it so well that Albinus promised to look up, in his company, that lane, that bridge, that queer-colored wall …

“I’m dreadfully sorry,” he said, “that we can’t get to work together on my film idea. I’m sure you’d have achieved wonders, but to be quite frank I cannot afford it—not just now, at any rate.”

At length the guests were caught in that wave which, beginning as a low murmur, swells until,
in a whirl of foamy farewells, it has swept them out of the house.

Albinus was left alone. The air was blue and heavy with cigar smoke. Somebody had spilled something on the Turkish table—it was all sticky. The solemn, though slightly unsteady, footman (“If he gets drunk again, I’ll dismiss him”) opened the window, and the black clear frosty night streamed in.

“Not a very successful party, somehow,” thought Albinus as he yawned himself out of his dinner jacket.

“A
CERTAIN
man,” said Rex, as he turned round the corner with Margot, “once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish—but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Margot trotted along by his side with her sealskin coat wrapped tightly around her. Rex seized her by the elbow and forced her to come to a halt.

“I never expected to run across you again. How did you get there? I couldn’t believe my eyes, as the blind man said. Look at me. I’m not sure that you’ve grown prettier, but I like you all the same.”

Margot suddenly gave a sob and turned away. He pulled her by the sleeve, but she turned away still farther. They revolved on one spot.

“For heaven’s sake, say something. Where would you rather go—to my place or yours? What’s the matter with you?”

She shook him off and walked quickly back to the corner. Rex followed her.

“What on earth is the matter with you?” he repeated in perplexity.

Margot hastened her steps. He caught her up again.

“Come along with me, you goose,” said Rex. “Look, I’ve got something here …” He drew out his wallet.

Margot promptly struck him a backhand blow in the face.

“That ring on your forefinger is very sharp,” he said calmly. And he continued to follow her, hurriedly fumbling in his wallet.

Margot ran to the entrance of the house and unlocked the door. Rex tried to thrust something into her hand, but suddenly he raised his eyes.

“Oh, that’s the little game, is it?” he said, as he recognized the doorway from which they had just emerged.

Margot pushed open the door without looking round.

“Here, take it,” he said roughly, and as she did not, he pushed it down inside her fur-collar. The door would have banged, had it not been
of the reluctant, compressed-air kind. He stood there, pulled at his lower lip, and presently moved away.

Margot groped through the darkness up to the first landing, and was about to go on when suddenly she felt faint. She seated herself on a step and sobbed as she had never sobbed before—not even that time when he had left her. She felt something crinkly against her neck and grasped it. It was a piece of rough paper. She pressed the light-switch and saw that she was holding in her hand, not money, but a pencil drawing: the back view of a girl, bare-shouldered, bare-legged, on a bed, with her face to the wall. Under it a date was written, first in pencil, then overwritten in ink—the day, month and year when he had left her. That was why he had told her not to look round—because he was sketching her! Was it really only two years since that day?

The light went out with a thud, and Margot leaned against the grating of the lift crying afresh. She was crying because he had left her that time; because he had concealed his name and his reputation from her; because she might all this time have been happy with him if he had stayed; and because she would then have escaped the two Japanese, the old man and Albinus. And then she cried, too, because at supper Rex had touched
her right knee and Albinus her left—as though Paradise had been on her right hand and Hell on her left.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve, groped in the darkness and pressed the switch again. The light calmed her a little. She examined the sketch once more; reflected that, however much it meant to her, it would be dangerous to keep it; tore it into fragments and flung these through the grating into the well of the lift. This reminded her of her early childhood. Then she pulled out her pocket mirror, powdered her face with a swift circular motion, straining her upper lip as she did so, closed her bag with a resolute click and ran up the steps.

“Why so late?” asked Albinus.

He was already in his pyjamas.

She explained breathlessly that she had found it difficult to get rid of von Ivanoff, who had kept insisting that she must let him drive her home.

“How my beauty’s eyes are sparkling,” he murmured, “and how tired and hot she is. My beauty has been drinking.”

“No, leave me alone tonight,” replied Margot softly.

“Bunny, please,” implored Albinus, “I’ve been waiting so.”

“Wait a bit longer. First I want to know something:
have you done anything about the divorce yet?”

“The divorce?” he repeated, taken aback.

“Sometimes I can’t understand you, Albert. After all, we must put things on a proper footing, mustn’t we? Or perhaps you mean to leave me after a while and go back to Lizzy?”

“Leave you?”

“Stop repeating my words, you idiot. No, you shan’t come near me till you give me a sensible answer.”

“Very well,” he said. “On Monday I’ll speak to my lawyer.”

“Positively? You promise?”

A
XEL
R
EX
was glad to be back in his beautiful native land. He had been having troubles lately. Somehow, the hinges of luck had got stuck—and he had abandoned it in the mud like a broken car. There had been, for instance, that row with his editor who had failed to appreciate his last joke—not that it was ever intended for reproduction. There had been a row generally. A rich spinster had been mixed up in it and a fishy (“though very amusing,” thought Rex sadly) money-transaction, and a rather one-sided conversation with certain authorities on the subject of undesirable aliens. People had been unkind to him, he reflected, but he forgave them readily. Funny the way people admired his work and the very next moment attempted (once or twice fairly successfully) to punch his face.

Worst of all, however, was the question of his financial position. Fame—not quite on the
world scale which that mild fool had yesterday suggested it to be—but still, fame—had brought in a good deal of money at one period. Now, when he was rather at a loose end and hazy about his cartoonist’s career in Berlin, where people were, as they always had been, at the mother-in-law stage of humor, he would have had that money still—at least some of it—had he not been a gambler.

Having cultivated a penchant for bluff since his tenderest age, no wonder his favorite card-game was poker! He played it whenever he could get partners; and he played it in his dreams: with historical characters or some distant cousin of his, long dead, whom in real life he never remembered, or with people who—in real life again—would have flatly refused to be in the same room with him. In that dream he took up, stacked together, and lifted close to his eyes the five dealt to him, saw with pleasure the joker in cap and bells, and, as he pressed out with a cautious thumb one top corner and then another, he found by degrees that he had five jokers. “Excellent,” he thought to himself, without any surprise at their plurality, and quietly made his first bet, which Henry the Eighth (by Holbein) who had only four queens, doubled. Then he woke up, still with his poker face.

The morning was so bleak and dark that he had to turn on his bedside light. The gauze on the window looked filthy. They could have given him a better room for his money (which, he thought, they might never see). Suddenly, with a sweet shock, he remembered that curious meeting yesterday.

As a rule, Rex recalled his love affairs without any particular emotion. Margot was an exception. In the course of these two last years, he had often found himself thinking of her; and he had often gazed with something very like melancholy at that rapid pencil sketch; a strange sentiment because Axel Rex was, to say the least of it, a cynic.

When, as a youth, he had first left Germany (very quickly, in order to avoid the War), he had abandoned his poor half-witted mother, and the day after his departure for Montevideo she had fallen downstairs and injured herself fatally. As a child he had poured oil over live mice, set fire to them and watched them dart about for a few seconds like flaming meteors. And it is best not to inquire into the things he did to cats. Then, in riper years, when his artistic talent developed, he tried in more subtle ways to satiate his curiosity, for it was not anything morbid with a medical name—oh, not at all—just cold, wide-eyed curiosity,
just the marginal notes supplied by life to his art. It amused him immensely to see life made to look silly, as it slid helplessly into caricature. He despised practical jokes: he liked them to happen by themselves with perchance now and then just that little touch on his part which would send the wheel running downhill. He loved to fool people; and the less trouble the process entailed, the more the joke pleased him. And at the same time this dangerous man was, with pencil in hand, a very fine artist indeed.

Uncle alone in the house with the children said he’d dress up to amuse them. After a long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the table silver into a bag. “Oh, Uncle,” they cried in delight. “Yes, isn’t my make-up good?” said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism of humor. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children); antithesis: it was a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was Uncle (fooling the reader). This was the super-humor Rex liked to put into his work; and this, he claimed, was quite new.

A great painter one day, high up on the scaffold, began moving backward to view better his finished fresco. The next receding step would have taken him over, and, as a warning cry might
be fatal, his apprentice had the presence of mind to sling the contents of a pail at the masterpiece. Very funny! But how much funnier still, had the rapt master been left to walk back into nothing—with, incidentally, the spectators expecting the pail. The art of caricature, as Rex understood it, was thus based (apart from its synthetic, fooled-again nature) on the contrast between cruelty on one side and credulity on the other. And if, in real life, Rex looked on without stirring a finger while a blind beggar, his stick tapping happily, was about to sit down on a freshly painted bench, he was only deriving inspiration for his next little picture.

But all this did not apply to the feelings which Margot had aroused in him. In her case, even in the artistic sense, the painter in Rex triumphed over the humorist. He felt a little annoyed at being so pleased to find her again: indeed, if he had left Margot, it had been only because he was afraid of becoming too fond of her.

Now first of all he wanted to find out whether she was really living with Albinus. He looked at his watch. Noon. He looked into his note-case. Empty. He dressed and made his way on foot to the house where he had been on the previous evening. Snow was falling softly and steadily.

Albinus happened to open the door himself and
did not at first recognize his guest in the snow-covered figure before him. But when Rex, after rubbing his shoes on the mat, raised his face, Albinus welcomed him very cordially. The man had impressed him the evening before not only by his ready wit and easy manner, but also by his extraordinary personal appearance: his pale, hollow cheeks, thick lips and queer black hair went to form a kind of fascinating ugliness. On the other hand it was pleasant to remember that Margot, when they were discussing the party, had observed: “That artist friend of yours has a revolting mug—there’s a man I’d not kiss at any price.” And what Dorianna had had to say of him was interesting too.

Rex apologized for the informality of his visit, and Albinus laughed genially.

“To tell the truth,” Rex said, “you’re one of the few people in Berlin whom I’d like to know more intimately. In America men make friends more easily than here and I’ve formed the habit over there of behaving unconventionally. Excuse me if I shock you—but do you really think it advisable to allow that natty rag-doll to straggle on your divan when there’s a Ruysdael right above it? By the way, may I examine your pictures more closely? That one over there looks superb.”

Albinus led him through the rooms. Every
one of them contained some fine painting—with a sprinkling of fakes. Rex gazed in rapture. He wondered whether that Lorenzo Lotto with the mauve-robed John and weeping Virgin was quite genuine. At one time of his adventurous life he had worked as a faker of pictures and had produced some very good stuff. The seventeenth century—that was his period. Last night he had noticed an old friend in the dining room, and now he examined it again with exquisite delight. It was in Baugin’s best manner: a mandolin on a chessboard, ruby wine in a glass and a white carnation.