Self Condemned (40 page)

In the nursing home, incarcerated though she was, she had had a splendid time. Now she was idyllically happy, with her baby. Affie looked a little happy with the happy mother.

René sat for a moment thinking of this. Then he made a pronouncement.“It sounds primitive at first. But I do not believe it is so, really. The expense of bringing a new citizen into the world is borne by the older, economically better-placed member of a family. Then the male bird (temporarily absent) returns to the nest, and the care of the newborn is assured. If the male bird does
not
return, it means the female is unattractive. But she had no right to reproduce her graceless self: so the male, in this case, acts in the best interests of nature to keep away, and to refuse to help her to perpetuate her unlovely self.”

“
That
,” smiled Affie, “sounds to me a little primitive.”

“And to me, too,” Hester softly clamoured. “How about ugly
men
? Many of the greatest men have been hideously ugly.”

There were sounds of polite exultation from the female side. But René put this down at once.

“You think you have reasoned well. But the fact is that the children of the great are their deeds. Their biological offspring is generally the dullest or vilest.”

After a little argument they left that subject, to discuss a neighbour, called by the Hardings “The Duchess.” Affie had the latest information as to the new type of drug she was taking. This drug addict was a lesbian, and she had been crossed in love. Hence the new drug.

Finally, René attempted to discuss the Russians who occupied the apartment immediately opposite their own.A young man and a young woman, and the mother of the young man, lived there.

But Affie became remote at once: this was one of the only apartments about which she observed a strict discretion. The young Russian was unusually good-looking.

“Do you not know who that is?” someone had asked René with surprise. “It is the ‘Toronto Kid.’” He was well-known as a boxer. But somehow he had got to Momaco, and he did no boxing there. Instead of that he held people up and robbed them, with violence. Or so the detectives said, with whom René had spoken in the hotel kitchen. There were two detectives who haunted the hotel for some weeks, but they appeared to be quite impotent: for why did they not arrest the young Russian, if they really had the evidence, which they claimed to have, that he was the next thing to a murderer?

Another puzzling question was why the hotel disregarded the warnings of the police. If the police informed the owner of a hotel that a certain guest was a dangerous criminal it might be supposed that he would be asked to leave immediately. Not so at the Hotel Blundell. René speculated as to the probable reason for this. The only explanation was money. Numbers of men used to visit the Russians’ apartment, and they were always of an ostentatiously criminal type. This alone would be sufficient corroboration of what the two detectives said.

But now the underworld came there no more.The “Toronto Kid” was the owner of a superb car, the wonder of the hotel. It still stood near the annex door, but its tires had been so badly slashed (who was responsible no one knew) that it was completely disabled.The discontinuance of the visits of gorillas may have had something to do with the tire-slashing.

A more likely explanation of this fact, however, was the presence in the hotel, by night as much as by day, of the police. It had recently been an almost nightly occurrence for the police to visit the Russians. At two or three in the morning Hester and René were wakened by the tramp of heavy boots. This was immediately followed by “Open up, the Police!” shouted over and over again, and an imperious banging upon the Russians’ door, which continued until the door was opened. This lasted sometimes for ten minutes. The women would have to get up every time, no doubt. This was an extraordinary persecution; it was obvious that the police were convinced that something was hidden there, and it was equally obvious that they did not find it. But there was now what seemed to be a complication. The police, it was said, were also on this young man’s track as a draft dodger. Some weeks before, duly manacled, the young Russian was marched off; but late the next morning he was back again. What this meant no one seemed to know. Not even Bess. If this was to do with draft dodging, then clearly his claim for exemption had not been disproved. If it was to do with a criminal charge it had not the effect of stopping their nocturnal visits. The police may not have succeeded in wearing down the resistance of the Russian family, but they were successful in almost reducing the Hardings to nervous wrecks. But, dominating everything else, the mystery remained as to why the proprietor of the Hotel Blundell did not turn these people out, and
that
veil Affie not only refused to lift, but would not admit that it existed. She, who was the incarnation of indiscretion! This must indeed be hush-hush to affect Affie in that way.

XIX
THE JANITORS

O
f the janitors most remained unseen, in the regions where the furnace was situated, beneath the street level. One cannot refer to those regions as cellars, they were not deep enough for that, and also there were many other things there besides cellar-like areas. There were, for instance, a number of rather squalid apartments, there was a small office, a storeroom, and the remains of what was once a saloon. All janitors, theoretically, must ascend to the upper part of the hotel: for it was one of their duties to attend to the windows or fix the elements in the electric cooker, or keep the elevator in shape. But the majority of janitors omitted, for one reason or another, to do this. What was mainly responsible for their failing to carry out these rather ill-defined functions, was drunkenness. The furnace they just must attend to, or everyone in the hotel would freeze to death: but everything else they were supposed to do could, at a pinch, be done by somebody else. More than half the time, for instance, there was an occupant of a fourth-storey apartment, a Mr. Jacobs, who fixed the elements, and attended generally to breakdowns in the lighting, heating, and elevator systems.

Why all the janitors were so defective in honesty, industry, in restraint with respect to the bottle, or what goes with that,
das
Weib
, has already been explained. It was because Mrs. Plant, Affie, and everybody else, on the whole, preferred them that way. The hotel had no use for an honest, hardworking, and sober janitor. He would be out of tune with the hotel, and the janitor is a very important functionary in such a place. Charlie, the present janitor, was an exception to all rules. And
he
did not stay all the time out of sight. Quite the contrary. Charlie was flying all over the hotel all day long and for half the night. He awakened in René a rather similar alarm to that he had felt for Mrs. Harradson. Charlie was a very large Norwegian, like a gigantic squirrel, with a small head, in which a wild pale blue eye at all times lit up and was madly expressive. He enjoyed the unusual advantage of being
persona
grata
with both Mrs. Plant and Affie. Affie displayed the breadth of her sympathies by the variety of characters she sponsored and protected among the long succession of janitors: and without that protection no janitor would be there very long.

She had been passionately devoted to “Sonny-boy.” It was
she
who named him “Sonny-boy” — the bank-clerk-like young man, who was the most useless of all the janitors. In a way she was equally fond of Charlie, the old jailbird, with his wild eyes and torrents of broken English, indeed so broken that not a particle was intact, unless it was the Norse intermixture.

She actually preferred a man to be a thief and drunkard. Having been a nurse might account in part for her tastes. She once described to the Hardings an experience of hers at a hospital, where she had acted as an auxiliary unqualified nurse, or such was her story. One day a violently protesting hag was brought in. They immediately thrust her screaming and kicking into a hot bath. She was a confirmed vagrant: her hair was full of hundreds of hairpins and also the greasy hideout of a horde of lice. She, for some time, defended her head with a fanatical ferocity; it required all the muscular endurance and hygienic militancy of Affie and two other nurses to force her to surrender her head. They cleared out all the hairpins and effected a thorough delousing of her entire person, and in the end she turned out to be a delightful old woman, according to Affie; a professional
wandervogel
, an indigent tourist, sleeping in the barns when the dogs would let her, a mettlesome philosophic wit. Affie struck up a great friendship with this old wreck who had once been a tobacconist. So all her life Affie had had to deal with sick or eccentric people (her most permanent type of employment being that of nurse-companion) until perhaps she had developed an appetite for helplessness. — However that may be, the only kind of janitor she heartily disliked was a competent one, like a man called Jan — whom everybody hated because he was so clean, sober, and good at his job.

Again, her sex reactions were original. A big, strong man said nothing to her. Jan was that, and this side of him was greatly appreciated by the Belgian woman who ran the house next door. Even the hairdresser widow on the other side appreciated this too, and Jan was greatly in demand on either side of the hotel — until the Belgian lady beat up the lady hairdresser one day just outside the front door, after which Jan deserted the hairdresser and went to live with the Belgian rooming house lady. But to Affie he was nothing, she said he smelled. This, René thought, was because he was definitely of the workman or seaman class. Affie disliked all workmen. Charlie was an ordinary seaman too; but he was mad, and more often in a jail — everybody supposed — than in a ship.

But then there was something more than either of those things. Affie had an eye for life. In Charlie she saw the ruined Peer Gynt, but still a wild piratic lunatic. She loved his screaming laugh, his staring hyper-eager eyes. She knew he had lived with the Troll-king and played every scurvy trick upon his fellows, out of giddiness — and that he would at last be melted down by the button moulder. He lied so much he chased himself, whirling in and out of his wildly blurted stories. If you caught him in a lie, he burst into a peal of shrieks and dashed off, leaping along the passages and up and down the stairs like a demented kangaroo. Solveig had been sitting and singing, ah for so long. But what does Solveig’s song turn into if you stop and listen to it? Into a brood of bawling children. So he vaulted away, and until he died would be skipping and screaming with laughter, thieving and lying.

When René had occasion to descend into the basement during the Charlie epoch he would find it full of the rolling pyjama’ed bottoms of French-Canadian prostitutes. Their black Indian eyes blazed with merriment when they saw Charlie come leaping down, with a duck in one hand and a coil of rope in the other, which he was swinging round his head, as if he would lasso the amused harlots.

Upstairs, he and Mrs. Plant would engage in shouting matches in some room where he was working. He liked her deafness, it gave him the opportunity to scream. As she always talked at the top of her voice too, they made a deafening uproar. Anybody would suppose they were having an appalling showdown: but if they listened they would find that the First Lady and her janitor were only violently agreeing with one another.

It was René’s good fortune to observe Charlie, in the midst of one of these transports, slap Mrs. Plant on the shoulder, nearly knocking her down, so great was his approval of what she had said. Though visibly shaken, she did not mind a bit. Nothing that Charlie did was wrong. When he robbed a store she might have been expected to mind a little. But she understood, or Affie did, that he was irresponsible, and that it was, like everything else, a prank merely.

One evening after tea, René and Hester were in conference, and both were speaking in low tones, for they preferred that what they were talking about should not be heard by Affie. Hester was frowning as she listened, then suddenly without warning the door flew open. There may have been a knock, but neither of them heard it. Charlie stood there panting, his hat on the back of his head, and the right eye, which did all the expressive work, was darting about, full of the maddest light they had ever seen in it. His hands too were in ceaseless movement, and one flipped out of one of his pockets with a baby packet of tea. As he held it out he was convulsed with crazy mirth, and he continued to pour out a jerky stream of largely incomprehensible speech. But “want buy” was said a great number of times with great eagerness.

Charlie dropped a small packet of tea upon the table by the side of which the Hardings were sitting. A lightning dive into the dark hole of his pocket, and out shot a second packet, then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, and an eight, and a ninth, and a tenth, and an eleventh, and a twelfth. So there were a dozen miniature packets of tea. As each packet was produced, he riveted a moist eye upon Hester, and when Hester and René began to laugh, as the pile of tea packets went on increasing, he laughed with extraordinary glee. They were entering into the joke of the thing — that was as it should be.

They asked him how much he wanted for these packets of tea, and he screamed with laughter at the idea of knowing how much he wanted for them. Tea was in short supply and the Hardings wanted the tea. All he knew was they wanted the tea, and that he had the tea. He tried to twist his body in a hysterical knot, coughing with laughter. Then he darted his head down towards René and poured out a lot of urgent confidences, mostly in Norwegian. René’s nervousness increased, and taking a couple of dollars out of his pocket he held them up, he made an offer. Charlie almost tore the notes out of his hand, and pushed the tea packets over towards Hester. Then he reached down into the other pocket, and with the abruptness of legerdemain a huge cheese, actually processed cheese supplied in cubes, flew out of his pocket and then, with a bang, there it sat, immense and greasy, upon the table. This big square of cheese seemed to strike him as the funniest thing he had ever seen. He kept pointing to it, gulping with laughter, as he jumped about.“Cheese!” he shrieked. Hester and René shook their heads. Charlie had one more try at getting them to see the joke. Then he snatched the cheese up and thrust it back in his noticeably unclean pocket, and darted out of the Room. The Hardings had not the least idea of the nature of this joke. But very soon they were to be enlightened.