The man who found himself (Smith's Magazine 1920)/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
Madame Rossignol was a charming old lady of sixty, a production of France—no other country could have produced her. She lived in Duke Street, Leicester Square, supporting herself and her daughter Cerise by translating English books into French. Cerise did millinery. Madame combined absolute innocence with absolute instinct. She knew all about things. Her innocence was not ignorance; it was purity, rising above a knowledge of the world, and disdaining to look at evil.
She was dreadfully poor. Her love for Cerise was like a disease, always preying upon her. Should she die, what would happen to Cerise?
Behold these together, clasped in each other's arms.
“Oh, mother!” murmured the girl. “Is he not good?”
“He is more than good,” said madame. “Most surely the Bon Dieu sent him to be your guardian angel.”
“Is he not charming?” went on Cerise, unlinking herself from the maternal embrace and touching her hair into order again with a little laugh. “So different from the leaden-faced English! So gay and yet so, so”
“There is a something—I do not know what—about him,” said the old lady. “Something of romance. Is it not like a little tale of Madame Perrichon's, or a little play by Monsieur Baree? Might he not just have come in as in one of those? You go out, lose your purse, are lost. I sit waiting for you at your nonreturn in this wilderness of London. You return, but not alone. With you comes the Marquis de Grandcourt, who bows and says: 'Madame, I return you your daughter. I ask in return your friendship. I am alone like you; let us then be friends.' I reply: 'Monsieur, you behold our poverty, but you cannot behold our hearts or the gratitude in my mind.' What a little story!”
“And how he laughed, and said: 'hang monee!'” cut in Cerise. “What means that 'hang monee,' maman? And how he pulled out all the gold pieces like a boy, saying: 'I am rich!'—just as a little boy might say: 'I am rich! I am rich!' No bourgeois could have done that without offending, without giving one a shiver of the skin.”
“You have said it,” replied madame. “A little boy—a great and good man, yet a little boy. He is not in his first youth, but there are people like Pierre Pan who never lose youth. It is so I have seen it.”
“Simon Pettigrew,” murmured Cerise with a little laugh.
A knock came at the door and a little maid of all work and down at heel, entered with a huge bouquet, one of those bouquets youth flings at prima donnas.
Simon, after leaving the Rossignols, had struck a flower shop. This was the result. A piece of paper accompanied the bouquet, and on the paper was written in a handwriting that hitherto had only appeared on letters of business and documents of law, words: “From your Friend.”
Simon, having struck the flower shop, might have struck a fruit shop and a bonnet shop, only that the joy of love—the love that comes at first sight, the love of dreams—made him incapable of any more business, even the business of buying presents for his fascinator.
It was now five o'clock and, pursuing his way west, he found Piccadilly. He passed girls without looking at them; he saw only the vision of Cerise. She led him as far as St. George's Hospital, as if leading him away from the temptations of the west, but the gloomy prospect of Knightsbridge headed him off and, turning, he came back. Big houses, signs of wealth and prosperity, seemed to hold him in a charm, just as he was held by all things pretty, colored, or glittering.
A glittering restaurant drew him in presently and here he had a jovial dinner—all alone, it is true, but with plenty to look at. He had also a half bottle of champagne and a maraschino.
He had already consumed during that day a cocktail, colored, two glasses of brandy and water, cold, and a half bottle of champagne. His ordinary consumption of alcohol was moderate—a glass of green-seal sherry at twelve, a half bottle of St. Estéphe at lunch, and a small whisky-and-soda at dinner, or, if dining out or with guests, a couple of glasses of Pommery.
And to-day he had been drinking restaurant champagne “tres sec” and two half bottles of it! The excess was beginning to tell. It told in the slight flush on his cheeks, which, strange to say, did not make him look younger; it told in the tip he gave the waiter, and in the way he put on his hat. He had bought a walking stick during his peregrinations, a dandy stick with a tassel—the passing fashion had just come in—and with this under his arm he left the café in search of pleasures new.
The West End was now ablaze and the theaters filling. Simon, like Poe's man of the crowd, kept with the crowd. A blaze of lights attracted him as a lamp a moth.
The “Pallaceum” sucked him in. Here, in a blue haze of tobacco smoke and to the tune of a band, he sat for a while watching the show, roaring with laughter at the comic turns, pleased with the conjuring business, and fascinated—despite Cerise—with the girl in tights who did acrobatic tricks, aided by two poodles and—a monkey.
Then he found the bar, and there he stood, adding fuel to pleasure, his stick under his arm, his hat tilted back, a new cigar in his mouth and a smile on his face, a smile with a suggestion of fixity. Alas! If Cerise could have seen the Marquis de Grandcourt now—or was it madame who raised him to the peerage of France?—if she could have been by just to raise her eyebrows at him! Yet she was there, in a way, for the ladies of the foyer, who glanced at him not unkindly, taken perhaps by his bonhomie and smiling demeanor and atmosphere of wealth and enjoyment, found no response. Yet he found momentary acquaintances, of a sort. A couple of university men, up in town for a lark, seemed to find him part of the lark. They all drank together, exchanged views, and then the university men vanished, giving place to a gentleman in a very polished hat, with diamond studs, with a face like a hawk, who suggested “fizz,” a small bottle of which was consumed mostly by the hawk, who then vanished, leaving Simon to pay.
Simon ordered another, paid for it, forgot it, and found himself in the entrance hall, calling in a loud voice for a hansom. A taxi was procured for him and the door opened. He got inside and said:
“Wait a moment—one moment.”
Then he began paying half crowns to the commissionaire who had opened the taxi door for him. “That's for your trouble,” said Simon. “That's for your trouble. Where am I? Oh, yes! Shut that confounded door, will you? And tell the chap to drive on.”
“Where to, sir?”
Oppenshaw would have been interested in the fact that champagne beyond a certain amount had the effect of wakening Simon's remote past. He answered:
“Evans'.”
Consultation outside.
“Evansis—which Evansis? There ain't no such 'otel—there ain't no such bar. Ask him which Evansis.”
“Which Evansis did you say, sir?” asked the commissionaire, putting his head in. “The driver don't know which you mean. Where does it lay?”
He got a chuck under the chin that nearly drove his head to the roof of the taxi. Then Simon's head popped out of the window. It looked up and down the street.
“Where's that chap that put his head through the window?” asked Simon.
A small crowd and a policeman drew round.
“What is it, sir?” asked the policeman.
Simon seemed calculating the distance with a view to the bonneting of the inquirer. Then he seemed to find the distance too far.
“Tell him to drive me to the Argyle Rooms,” said he. Then he vanished.
Another council outside, the commissionaire presiding.
“Take him to the Leicester 'Otel, Why, Lord bless me! The Argyle Rooms has been closed this forty years. Take him round about and let him have a snooze.”
The taxi man started with the full intention of robbery, not by force but by strategy—robbery on the clock. It was not theater-turning-out time yet and he would have the chance of earning a few dishonest shillings. He turned every corner he could, for every time a taxi turns a corner the “clock” increases in speed. He drove here and there but he never reached the Leicester 'Otel, for in Full Moon Street, the home of bishops and and earls, the noise inside the vehicle made him halt. He opened the door and Simon burst out, radiant with humor and now much steadier on his legs.
“How much?” asked Simon, and then, without waiting for a reply, thrust half a handful of coppers and silver into the fist of the taxi man, hit him a slap on the top of his flat cap that made him see stars, and walked off.
The man did not pursue. He was counting his takings, eleven and fivepence, no less.
“Crazy,” said he; then he started his engine and went off, utterly unconscious of the fact that he had entertained and driven something worthy to be preserved in the British Museum, a real live reveler of the sixties.
The full moon was shining on Full Moon Street, an old street that still preserves in front of its houses the sockets for the torches of the linkmen. It does not require much imagination to see phantom sedan chairs in Full Moon Street on a night like this, or the watchman on his rounds, and to-night the old street, if old streets have memories, must surely have stirred in its dreams, for, as Simon went on his way, the night began suddenly to be filled with catcalls.
A lady, airing a Pom, whisked her treasure into the house as Simon passed and shut the door with a bang, such a bang that the knocker gave a jump and Simon a hint. Ten yards farther on he went up a step, paused before a hall door that in daylight would have been green, and took the knocker.
Just a few turns of his wrist and the knocker was his, a glorious brass knocker, weighing half a pound. No other young man in London that night could have done the business like that or shown such dexterity in an art, lost as the art of pinchbeck-making.
He Collected two more knockers in that street, retaining only one as a trophy. He threw the others into an area, pulled the house doorbell violently, and ran.
In Berkley Square he was just beginning to deal with another knocker when the door opened on an elderly woman of the housekeeper type and a dachshund.
“What do you want?” asked the housekeeper.
“Does the Duke of Miccacbriah live here?” hiccuped Simon.
“No, sir, he does not.”
“Sorry—sorry—sorry,” said Simon. “My mistake—entirely my mistake—very sorry to trouble you, indeed. What a pretty little dog! What's his name?”
He was entirely affable now and forgetful of knockers, wishing to strike up a friendhsip, a desire unshared, evidently, by the lady.
“I think you had better go away,” said she, recognizing a gentleman and mourning the fact.
He considered this proposition deeply for a moment.
“That's all very well,” said he, “but where am I to go, that's the question.”
“You had better go home.”
This seemed to irritate him slightly.
“I'm not going home—this time of night! Not likely.” He began to descend the steps, as if to get away from admonition. “Not me! You can go home yourself.”
Off he went. He walked three times round Berkeley Square. He met a constable, inquired where that street ended and when, found sympathy in return for half crowns, and was mothered into a straighter street. Halfway down the straighter street, he remembered he hadn't shown the sympathetic constable his door knocker, but the policeman, fortunately, had passed out of sight.
Then he stood for a while, remembering Cerise. Her vision had suddenly appeared before him. It threw him into deep melancholy, profound melancholy. He went on till the lights and noise of Piccadilly restored him. Then, farther on, he entered a flaming doorway through which came the music of a band.