Knock Four Times Read online

  MARGARET IRWIN

  Knock Four Times

  IN GRATITUDE TO

  G. B. STERN

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter I

  When Chance left Rainbow Road, he left it to give up writing and go into business. His sojourn therefore in Rainbow Road had been proved a failure, though he himself did not look on it as this. He neither regretted the time he had spent there nor the fact that it was over.

  He had to move out of his own flat down at the farther end of the road before he had settled on the place where he would now live. A young man he knew slightly on the top floor of Number 39 had gone away in a hurry, leaving all his possessions behind, and Chance took his flat furnished in September for two or three months.

  There he felt himself an intruder. He came to know that the comfortable little sitting-room, glowing with red-shaded gaslight and pseudo-Eastern cushions and rugs and one whole wall of brightly bound modern books, a room that had been empty for several weeks, was too full to receive him. It was perched at the top of the tall narrow house in a London side-street like the nest of some exotic bird, “a nest of love” were the words that occurred to Chance, their vulgarity startling him into laughing aloud, a nest moreover which its owner had deserted in his flight towards a rarer air.

  It was compact in character as well as size under its low ceiling ; it was well sure of itself and very much alive. Nothing was here that the owner had not acquired himself; the possessions had never had a father, let alone a grandfather, and if the young man had ever possessed such appendages he had long ago cast them off without a shilling.

  The cushions covered with Heal’s cretonnes on the low divan contrived out of a truckle-bed made a brave attempt to resemble the couch of a Roman Emperor. Those self-important rows of books that looked well satisfied to have a wall to themselves, flaunting their gilt titles on their black, yellow, and red covers, made romance cheap and easy, displayed a bold and lively interest in such subjects as murder, London streets, strange sins, great families, haunted houses, Regency rakes, tyrants of the Renaissance, social adventurers of the eighteenth century, and woman of every age from the point of view of seduction. A long row of the Yellow Books, and of the works of George Moore and Wilde, paid tribute to the giants of the past. Their owner had not conceived that an author could exist before the nineties, with the single exception of the author of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The few pictures combined a showy but clever appreciation of the fantastic with an almost grim determination to be in the movement. There was not a thing in the little room that was from its own aspect a flaw, a hesitancy, or a blunder. It knew exactly what it had wanted for its money and it had got it.

  Chance had laughed when he had settled down in it, and the room had liked that. It too could laugh at itself ; that was why it had left that ridiculous harlequin doll on top of the Debrett which showed signs of careful study. The room exasperated but could not affront him ; it was too humorously frank for that. It boasted, it triumphed over him. Its owner had left Rainbow Road because he had succeeded ; Chance was leaving it because he had failed.

  It was like being in a room full of people, or of one person who talked all the time, glibly, amusingly, charmingly, but incessantly. “Stop thinking so loud,” he said once to the empty room.

  That was on his last evening, the last evening of November after tea, when the long red curtains were drawn across the windows and the room snuggled into itself, saying “Now let’s be cosy,” in its mock low-comedy accents. Next day the movers were coming to pack all the things and take them away, and then Chance too would go, leaving the room empty of everything but dust and spiders.

  But he could not believe his time there was just over. It seemed as yet incomplete, as though something must happen before he left it to-morrow.

  He found himself stopping in his letters to listen to sounds far below in the street, starting at the bang of a front door, waiting, he did not know for what. The silent air was tingling with expectation, yet he expected nobody and wanted only to get on with what he was doing.

  Twice he left it to go to the window and lean out over the low parapet at the sound of a taxi far down the street. If the taxi stopped at the door, it would not be for him, but for one of the three floors below him, for this house, like all the others in the street, had suffered a faint-hearted conversion into flats, retaining a communal bathroom and front door, but showing the independence of its occupants in a row of electric bells that had always gone wrong, so that opposite each bell on the card bearing its owner’s name was a scrawled injunction to knock once, or twice, or thrice, and on the top card that bore his name was the legend “Knock four times.”

  But the taxi did not stop, and nobody knocked, not once, nor twice, nor thrice, nor yet four times.

  “It can’t be I who am waiting,” he said to himself, and returned to his pen, his sheet of notepaper, and the three lines of neat but undecipherable handwriting at the top of it.

  Underneath them he began to scribble rhymes instead of his business letter :

  In another country,

  Neither night nor day,

  There I met a lady,

  But I had naught to say.

  She looked like a flower,

  She went on her way.

  Ever since that hour

  I’ve thought what to say.

  The handwriting looked blurred, he could scarcely distinguish his hieroglyphics, he presently perceived that the walls and objects round him were growing dim, that the light burned blue and very low. He did not accept the portent as a sign that spirits were abroad, for experience had taught him an interpretation yet more disconcerting. The gas was going out because the meter required another shilling. The fire gave an expiring pop, leaving its skulls to turn from livid blue to white. He ransacked the mantelpiece and the little corner table for a stray shilling. Perhaps one had fallen down, and he hung over the back of the divan, feeling along the floor.

  His fingers met on something hard and smooth and solid, not a shilling, and held it up against the dying light. It was a small round crystal bottle, thick but translucent, so that he could see the tracing of lines too faint for him to discern now what they represented. He could feel and dimly perceive the smooth and rounded stopper glowing at its summit.

  He sat in the darkening room holding between his hands this unknown and hardly seen object that had been dropped into a corner and forgotten. It was, he thought, of some antiquity and possibly of some little value. It was odd that it should have been forgotten by a young man whose taste, although half intentionally bizarre, could obviously know a good thing when he saw it. It occurred to him that it had been forgotten on purpose; not thrown away, for that would be pique, and might flatter the trifling thing into an absurd importance. It had been good for it to drop it into a corner, forget it, leave it behind.

  But the bottle had kept its importance. Such a bitter sense of frustration, of wounded vanity, and, worse, of wounded self-belief, stole into his mind, creeping upwards as it seemed from his fingers, that he forgot the gay, cheeky triumph of the room round him, now almost hidden in the darknes
s, or remembered it only as something that had shrunk shuddering away from the light. It was no longer the room of a successful bounder, but of a bounder that had failed. And again he wanted to laugh, for the thing that he held had been an occasion for laughter, both mocking and tender, but for the first time since he had been in that room he knew that the laughter had covered tears.

  He knew also, without memory or understanding, that this object he had not seen before, touched his own life, and would change it.

  Then the light went out and the darkness became dense and solid, pressing on him. He groped his way to the door and went downstairs to borrow a shilling from the Second Floors. The door was opened by a pale, plump, and untidy young man whose light eyes looked at him in a rather vacant stare.

  “The usual tragedy of Rainbow Road,” he said when he heard the request. “Come in and see if I have one in the tea-caddy.”

  He spoke slowly in a grand, drawling voice. There was no shilling in the tea-caddy nor even in the cigarette-tin. He asked Chance to wait till his wife returned from the Delicatessen shop at the end of the road, where she was sure to have collected several shillings. From his windows they could see the silent stretch of Rainbow Road, gloomily losing itself down at one end in darkness and a row of sooty trees imprisoned behind a wall that should have concealed a murder.

  Up at the other end was the bright clatter and turmoil and traffic of the Palace Road, and across it, its doorway crowded with dark figures, its windows impudently flaunting their blaze of lights and festoons of long German sausages in different-coloured cracker papers as gay as a Harlequinade, was the little French Delicatessen shop, the pivot and conqueror of Rainbow Road. For this was the refuge of all those who were too lazy or too busy to cook on their gas-rings in those semi-converted houses that were drawn close together in two long blocks, sheltering their battered gentility under a pinnacle that announced their founder as Albert Rainbow, Esq., and their date as 1860, in vain reminder of their respectable days when each house contained only a single family and plenty of servants in the dungeons of the basement.

  “That’s a pretty little thing you’re holding,” said Jimmy, whom nobody knew as Mr. Jameson.

  Chance held it up and saw it clearly, an old Chinese snuff-bottle hollowed out of white soapstone, with Chinese characters traced on one side of it and on the other a picture in pale coloured lines of a river, a bridge shaped like a rainbow, a distant mountain-peak. But so faint were both the lines and characters that they could hardly be seen even in the unshaded glare of gaslight in the Jimmys’ sitting-room. The stopper was a rose crystal, he drew it out, discovering it to be at the summit of a narrow spoon, verdigrised and crumbled at the edges.

  “Looks as though it’s been spoilt by some strong chemical. There’s certainly been some corrosive on the spoon. It’s all eaten away.”

  “It’s a pity,” said Chance, and heard the words echo back to him more tragically than he had thought of speaking them. It seemed as though a sigh ran tingling up his fingers from the old Chinese bottle. “But oh, the pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!”

  “Did you find this round the corner at old Mo’s?” pursued Jimmy. “He’s got lots of jolly old things like this all jumbled together. And all good. Old Mo’s an artist in his way and not so much of a cheat, considering his nose.”

  “No ; I found it upstairs when I was groping for a shilling. Dicky must have dropped it behind the sofa.”

  Jimmy’s tone at once cooled to a distant and off-hand note. “Oh yes. Dicky the Dago. Clever little beggar. You know who he is now, don’t you? This road is too wonderful. Everybody artistic or literary seems to have been here some time or other, though they don’t always like to say so afterwards. But he never understood about old things. Not he. One of his fair ladies must have given it to him. Now, this chair I picked up round the corner——”

  Jimmy displayed his old furniture with self-conscious pride. With a larger and franker gesture Dicky had used Debrett rather than Chippendale as a jumping-board for his ambitions.

  Into the middle of the display came Mrs. Jimmy, small and round and red-cheeked and bright-eyed, chirping like a robin in a shrill gay cockney that soared unheeding over her husband’s now still more leisurely cultured drawl.

  “Well I never!” she said. “Le Coche gets worse every time—quite a queue right out on to the pavement. Why ever can’t people remember that the shops shut on Thursday afternoon? But there, I must say one’s terribly glad foreigners are so hardworking—aren’t you, Mr. Chance?—when one’s run clean out of cheese and coffee and anything for supper. But it cuts both ways, I will say, for they’re so terribly thrifty they’ll give you short weight every time if you don’t look out. So you are out of a shilling, Mr. Chance? It’s always the good old gas-meter, isn’t it? And off to-morrow, aren’t you? And how have you liked Dicky’s rooms? Though I suppose we mustn’t call him that any more. Changed his name as well as his address and his friends. You know who he is now, don’t you? Well, he used to be glad enough some evenings to come down to us for a bit of our beefsteak or bacon and eggs when he’d only got a tin of sardines and a couple of olives from Le Coche, wasn’t he, Fred? Until he took up with the Girls Below. But he’d dropped them too, by the time he gave that farewell supper party in the summer. Oh my goodness, the row they made that night! Broke our gas-mantle, they did, doing patter dances overhead till three o’clock. Larks’ tongues and caviare and champagne, for I found the menu on the stairs. And all al fresco.”

  “Impromptu, dawling,” whispered Mr. Jimmy.

  “Oh yes, al fresco’s out of doors, isn’t it? Well, it was that too, for they sat out on the leads in couples, they did, to look at the moon.” She giggled a trifle nervously. “Not that I was there, I’d like you to know. None of us asked to that party, you bet; and I did hear he’d brought most of the crowd back after a dinner in Berkeley Square. And off he goes next day to America. Good old Dicky. Going fast up the ladder, isn’t he, Fred?”

  This was not entirely a monologue, since her husband occasionally accompanied it by expressions of assent and lofty amusement which interrupted it no more than did Mrs. Jimmy’s own activities as she unpacked her bulging shopping-bag, unwrapping and putting in the genuine Jacobean cupboard the half of a ready-roasted chicken, a few slices of ham, a bottle of mixed hors d’œuvres, a carton of freshly made mayonnaise, and a cone-shaped twist of paper that smelt deliciously of just-ground coffee.

  These and the mention of olives reminded Chance that there were only eggs upstairs and he too should visit Le Coche this evening, so that when he left the Jimmys he went straight down the narrow stairs, over patched oilcloth, past the glimmering gas-jets on the landings into the obscurity between them, past the great Egyptian curtain on the landing of the first floor whose procession of kings and huntsmen and outrageous beasts was probably conceived in Birmingham but looked worthy to enshrine all the mysteries of the East, behind its majestic folds. It had been there the only time that he had come to the house before taking Dicky’s flat. That had been nearly a year ago. He had brought a book for Dicky who had opened the door with an ecstatic expression that had changed in a flash to one of agonized disappointment.

  “I was expecting someone else,” he had explained unnecessarily, “but you might just help me get out of something. The Girls Below are giving a party. Come along upstairs and I’ll tell you about it.”

  As they went upstairs towards that curtain, one of the Girls Below came out from behind it with a cigarette drooping from the corners of her lips and a tray of wine-glasses in her hands. Dicky had introduced them and she had been very friendly. She had told Chance that she had been so much interested to hear his name from Dicky because she had heard his books were too wonderful, quite like Marcel Proust in fact, and she wondered if he were a relation of the Chances of Chinchadiganmore whom she knew very well and what a lovely place they had up there, such shooting, no doubt he often stayed there and she had been up there for a week-end only th
e other day, about five years ago it appeared from further reminiscence, but anyway it did not matter since Chance was not related to the Chances of Chinchadiganmore and did not know them at all.

  But on discovering that he was from Donegal, Leila, as her sister was calling her in repeated despairing screams from the sitting-room, wanted to know if he knew the Muffs of Muckish or had hunted with the Swillys of Ballyjamesduff, and on recovering a satisfactory answer to one of these questions, led him behind the curtain to see their extensive landing complete with cupboards, the coal-cellar and box-room all piled on top of each other, and beyond them the kitchen made out of a tiny conservatory, a sink in one corner and gas-stove in another, and the rain beating a frenzied tattoo on the glass roof which leaked in various places so that you had to be careful where you stood.

  “The landlord won’t do anything,” complained Leila as she stepped in and out of puddles to show where they were, “but at least it’s an advantage that being a conservatory the floor’s on a slope and all the water runs away in time through a hole. Yes, it is draughty. Still, it’s something to have a kitchen at all. I can’t think how those top floors manage. Dicky, here, carry up the logs, there’s a darling, and don’t run away upstairs whatever you do. You’ve got to come to our party. You can expect your somebody in our room just as well as yours, and you will come too, won’t you, Mr. Chance? The sexes have just got unbalanced, and I hate having a girl too many even if it is only talk, don’t you?

  “Do you like that curtain? We got it off Dicky when we were being kind to him. He’s glad enough to split a tin of Indian corn with us now and then. All right, Mab ; I’m just coming. And so are you, aren’t you? There’s an artist I’d love you to meet; he’s a wonderful man ; he says Japanese women are the only ones whose faces have any expression. That is original, isn’t it?” she asked anxiously, “as I always think they look like buttered buns myself.”

  The cigarette drooped and dripped ash from her carelessly painted mouth. Her sleeveless jade frock disclosing her thin arms, her wine-dark hair, burnished and polished close to her head and inclining to purple rather than copper, her tawdrily white face and beseeching eyes that matched her frock, made Chance think of a battered bird of paradise.