Читать книгу Two Black Sheep - Warwick Deeping - Страница 13

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Vane returned to his hotel, and in the vestibule he caught himself explaining to a sleepy and uninterested night-porter that he had been kept by friends in the country. He was surprised to find himself fabricating such a lie. Now that he had returned to the herd was he so socially sensitive that he felt it to be his duty to propitiate hotel servants?

The man yawned. Probably he had heard that tale before.

“What number, sir?”

“I’ve got my key.”

But the porter developed a sudden quality of suspiciousness, and after taking Vane up in the lift, followed him along the corridor, and watched him apply the key to the door.

“If you want your boots cleaning, sir, better leave ’em with me.”

Vane, finding that the man reminded him too forcibly of a warder, left his boots and half a crown with him, and the door closed like the door of a cell.

He had decided to leave the Suffolk, and after breakfast he called for his bill and announced his departure. He looked up other hotels in a directory, and chose one of the smaller and more modest hotels in Bloomsbury—the Melrose—for it was not likely that he would meet familiar faces in Bloomsbury. But he had not forgotten the little, rubber-faced journalist, and when his very new luggage was brought out to the taxi, he gave the driver a fictitious address—Hotel Russell—and not till they were under way did he call through the speaking-tube: “I’ve made a mistake. The Melrose Hotel, not the Russell. It’s in Tavistock Square.”

When the taxi stopped outside the Melrose, Vane got out to inquire about a room. A tired and sandy-haired woman in the bureau offered him No. 12.

“Register, please.”

He signed his name and gave the address of his solicitors, and was taken in charge by a shabby, bald-headed porter who carried two new suit-cases and a kit-bag up to No. 12.

“That’s the lot, sir.”

He was a cheerful person, and Vane thought his cheerfulness worth a florin.

“Thanks.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He disappeared, leaving behind him a faint aroma of perspiration and pragmatism, and Vane sat on a chair by the window and looked at his luggage. Yes, as the porter had put it—that was the lot, all that he possessed, save securities quotable on the Stock Exchange and a considerable balance at his bank. Suits, shirts, socks, underwear, three pairs of pyjamas, collars, ties, and sundries. A man could possess just so much, or everything and nothing. And this room was four walls, ceiling and floor, a window, a fumed oak bed and other objects to match. Nothing in it was intimately his, just as nothing in this new world appeared to be his. He could buy the use of a room just as he had bought the body of a girl, and hundreds of other people had used this room, and scores of men had for a night possessed that live body, and feeling sad and depressed he got up to unpack.

But the room seemed determined to remind him of a previous occupant, for he found a couple of hairpins on the dressing-table, and hairpins belong to an obsolete generation. They have ceased to be associated with any romantic quality, but Vane was innocent, and the thing that did concern him was that they were just such hairpins as his wife had used. He picked one up, and holding it in the palm of his hand, stared at it. There was nothing mystical about this hairpin, and he did not think of it as belonging to any particular woman. It was a sort of universal, a timeless object, like a blue bead taken from an Egyptian tomb, or a Roman fibula recovered from the ruins of a villa.

He smiled faintly. He remembered that the woman who had been his wife was living somewhere in London. She had a child. She had married some other fellow, after he had shot her lover and divorced her. But how strange! And how very long ago it seemed, the War and its elementals, its sex storms and agonies, its cold, brooding rages, its very laughter.

He threw both those hairpins out of the window, and unpacked, making a complete and formal business of it. He had nothing else to do; for fifteen years he had been the creature of an official routine, a sort of living time-table, a clock that was wound up and regulated. Cells, slops, parade, roll-call, labour. He put his shirts and collars in one drawer, pyjamas and underclothing in another. His movements were deliberate and gentle. The arranging of his smaller possessions on the dressing-table kept him occupied for three minutes. He was like a child making a pattern with hair-brushes, comb, nail-scissors, razor, a writing-pad and a notebook. But why had he bought a writing-pad? He had no one to write to, and very few relations, a couple of cousins who were little better than strangers.

He placed two new pipes and a tin of tobacco on the mantelpiece. There was a mirror over the mantelpiece, and he caught sight of his reflection in it, and somehow it surprised him. The glass showed him the man of 1930. His hair seemed to have slipped back a little, and he was grey at the temples. There were lines. The eyes were the same, and yet not the same. He looked at himself with a kind of sardonic, gentle wonder.

Vane went downstairs. He wanted to rid himself of too much ready cash, and he asked the manageress to take charge of fifty pounds in notes. She counted the notes, slipped them into an envelope and sealed it. The red wax matched the colour of her mouth.

“I’ll put them in the safe.”

“Thank you.”

“Wait, I must give you a receipt.”

She had the air of a woman who had taught herself to suppress all that part of life that had no relation to business. Her pen scratched. Her hair and her skin were so much of a colour that neck and hair appeared to merge, and Vane found himself wondering why she reddened her mouth. It seemed superfluous.

She gave him the receipt, and he returned to the lounge-hall, where he met the bald-headed porter with a fistful of letters. The man smiled at him.

“Nothing for you, sir. Vane is the name—I think?”

“Yes.”

He was not expecting any letters, and his official address was that of Messrs. Blagden & Stephens, but he asked the porter a question:

“Have you a smoking-room here?”

“I’ll show you, sir.”

He led Vane down a tiled passage.

“Gent.’s lavatory to the right, sir.”

He opened a door and uncovered a long and rather shabby room, very stale and static as to its atmosphere, and with a window looking out upon a yard. The lower sash was filled with frosted glass. The room contained four arm-chairs and a sofa in brown leather, two brass-topped tables, a book-case, and another table upon which were arranged an assortment of periodicals, catalogues and directories. The carpet was a Turkey with the pile worn thin.

“You can smoke in ’ere, sir, or in the lounge.”

“Rather cold.”

“I’ll put a match to the fire.”

He did so, and remained squatting there while the flames licked their way through the paper and wood.

“That’s more like ’ome, sir.”

Vane thanked him, and the man departed, and Vane strolled to the table and examined the magazines. They did not pique him. One dealt with motor-cars, another with broadcasting, and the B.B.C. was an unknown world to him. Someone had left a copy of the Morning Post on the sofa, and Vane collected it and sat down in one of the arm-chairs with his back to the window.