The Man Upstairs and Other Stories Part 52

It was during that evening that there flitted across his mind the first suspicion he had ever had that his Uncle Robert's mental outlook was a little limited.

And now, as he paced the promenade, watching the stir and bustle of the crowd, he definitely condemned his absent relative as a narrow-minded chump.

If the brown boots which he had polished so a.s.siduously in his bedroom that morning with the inside of a banana-skin, and which now gleamed for the first time on his feet, had a fault, it was that they were a shade tight. To promenade with the gay crowd, therefore, for any length of time was injudicious; and George, warned by a red-hot shooting sensation that the moment had arrived for rest, sank down gracefully on a seat, to rise at once on discovering that between him and it was something oblong with sharp corners.

It was a book--a fat new novel. George drew it out and inspected it.

There was a name inside--Julia Waveney.

George, from boyhood up, had been raised in that school of thought whose watchword is 'Findings are keepings', and, having ascertained that there was no address attached to the name, he was on the point, I regret to say, of pouching the volume, which already he looked upon as his own, when a figure detached itself from the crowd, and he found himself gazing into a pair of grey and, to his startled conscience, accusing eyes.

'Oh, thank you! I was afraid it was lost.'

She was breathing quickly, and there was a slight flush on her face.

She took the book from George's unresisting hand and rewarded him with a smile.

'I missed it, and I couldn't think where I could have left it. Then I remembered that I had been sitting here. Thank you so much.'

She smiled again, turned, and walked away, leaving George to reckon up all the social solecisms he had contrived to commit in the s.p.a.ce of a single moment. He had remained seated, he reminded himself, throughout the interview; one. He had not raised his hat, that fascinating Homburg simply made to be raised with a debonair swish under such conditions; two. Call it three, because he ought to have raised it twice. He had gaped like a fool; four. And, five, he had not uttered a single word of acknowledgement in reply to her thanks.

Five vast bloomers in under a minute! What could she have thought of him? The sun ceased to s.h.i.+ne. What sort of an utter outsider could she have considered him? An east wind sprang up. What kind of a c.o.c.kney bounder and cad could she have taken him for? The sea turned to an oily grey; and George, rising, strode back in the direction of his hotel in a mood that made him forget that he had brown boots on at all.

His mind was active. Several times since he had come to Roville he had been conscious of a sensation which he could not understand, a vague, yearning sensation, a feeling that, splendid as everything was in this paradise of colour, there was nevertheless something lacking. Now he understood. You had to be in love to get the full flavour of these vivid whites and blues. He was getting it now. His mood of dejection had pa.s.sed swiftly, to be succeeded by an exhilaration such as he had only felt once in his life before, about half-way through a dinner given to the Planet staff on a princely scale by a retiring general manager.

He was exalted. Nothing seemed impossible to him. He would meet the girl again on the promenade, he told himself, das.h.i.+ngly renew the acquaintance, show her that he was not the gaping idiot he had appeared. His imagination donned its seven-league boots. He saw himself proposing--eloquently--accepted, married, living happily ever after.

It occurred to him that an excellent first move would be to find out where she was staying. He bought a paper and turned to the list of visitors. Miss Waveney. Where was it. He ran his eye down the column.

And then, with a crash, down came his air-castles in hideous ruin.

'Hotel Cercle de la Mediterranee. Lord Frederick Weston. The Countess of Southborne and the Hon. Adelaide Liss. Lady Julia Waveney--'

He dropped the paper and hobbled on to his hotel. His boots had begun to hurt him again, for he no longer walked on air.

At Roville there are several inst.i.tutions provided by the munic.i.p.ality for the purpose of enabling visitors temporarily to kill thought. Chief among these is the Casino Munic.i.p.ale, where, for a price, the sorrowful may obtain oblivion by means of the ingenious game of _boule_.

Disappointed lovers at Roville take to _boule_ as in other places they might take to drink. It is a fascinating game. A wooden-faced high priest flicks a red india-rubber ball into a polished oaken bowl, at the bottom of which are holes, each bearing a number up to nine. The ball swings round and round like a planet, slows down, stumbles among the holes, rests for a moment in the one which you have backed, then hops into the next one, and you lose. If ever there was a pastime calculated to place young Adam Cupid in the background, this is it.

To the _boule_ tables that night fled George with his hopeless pa.s.sion. From the instant when he read the fatal words in the paper he had recognized its hopelessness. All other obstacles he had been prepared to overcome, but a t.i.tle--no. He had no illusions as to his place in the social scale. The Lady Julias of this world did not marry insurance clerks, even if their late mother's cousin had left them a thousand pounds. That day-dream was definitely ended. It was a thing of the past--all over except the heartache.

By way of a preliminary sip of the waters of Lethe, before beginning the full draught, he placed a franc on number seven and lost. Another franc on six suffered the same fate. He threw a five-franc cart-wheel recklessly on evens. It won.

It was enough. Thrusting his hat on the back of his head and wedging himself firmly against the table, he settled down to make a night of it.

There is nothing like _boule_ for absorbing the mind. It was some time before George became aware that a hand was prodding him in the ribs. He turned, irritated. Immediately behind him, filling the landscape, were two stout Frenchmen. But, even as he searched his brain for words that would convey to them in their native tongue his disapproval of this jostling, he perceived that they, though stout and in a general way offensive, were in this particular respect guiltless.

The prodding hand belonged to somebody invisible behind them. It was small and gloved, a woman's hand. It held a five-franc piece.

Then in a gap, caused by a movement in the crowd, he saw the face of Lady Julia Waveney.

She smiled at him.

'On eight, please, would you mind?' he heard her say, and then the crowd s.h.i.+fted again and she disappeared, leaving him holding the coin, his mind in a whirl.

The game of _boule_ demands undivided attention from its devotees.

To play with a mind full of other matters is a mistake. This mistake George made. Hardly conscious of what he was doing, he flung the coin on the board. She had asked him to place it on eight, and he thought that he had placed it on eight. That, in reality, blinded by emotion, he had placed it on three was a fact which came home to him neither then nor later.

Consequently, when the ball ceased to roll and a sepulchral voice croaked the news that eight was the winning number, he fixed on the croupier a gaze that began by being joyful and expectant and ended, the croupier remaining entirely unresponsive, by being wrathful.

He leaned towards him.

'Monsieur,' he said. _'Moi! J'ai jete cinq francs sur huit!'_

The croupier was a man with a pointed moustache and an air of having seen all the sorrow and wickedness that there had ever been in the world. He twisted the former and permitted a faint smile to deepen the melancholy of the latter, but he did not speak.

George moved to his side. The two stout Frenchmen had strolled off, leaving elbow-room behind them.

He tapped the croupier on the shoulder.

'I say,' he said. 'What's the game? _J'ai jete cinq francs sur huit,_ I tell you, _moi!_'

A forgotten idiom from the days of boyhood and French exercises came to him.

'_Moi qui parle_,' he added.

'_Messieurs, faites vos jeux_,' crooned the croupier, in a detached manner.

To the normal George, as to most Englishmen of his age, the one cardinal rule in life was at all costs to avoid rendering himself conspicuous in public. Than George normal, no violet that ever hid itself in a mossy bank could have had a greater distaste for scenes.

But tonight he was not normal. Roville and its colour had wrought a sort of fever in his brain. _Boule_ had increased it. And love had caused it to rage. If this had been entirely his own affair it is probable that the croupier's frigid calm would have quelled him and he would have retired, fermenting but baffled. But it was not his own affair. He was fighting the cause of the only girl in the world. She had trusted him. Could he fail her? No, he was dashed if he could. He would show her what he was made of. His heart swelled within him. A thrill permeated his entire being, starting at his head and running out at his heels. He felt tremendous--a sort of blend of Oliver Cromwell, a Berserk warrior, and Sir Galahad.

'Monsieur,' he said again. 'Hi! What about it?'

This time the croupier did speak.

'_C'est fini_,' he said; and print cannot convey the pensive scorn of his voice. It stung George, in his exalted mood, like a blow.

Finished, was it? All right, now he would show them. They had asked for it, and now they should get it. How much did it come to? Five francs the stake had been, and you got seven times your stake. And you got your stake back. He was nearly forgetting that. Forty francs in all, then. Two of those gold what-d'you-call'ems, in fact. Very well, then.

He leaned forward quickly across the croupier, s.n.a.t.c.hed the lid off the gold tray, and removed two louis.

It is a remarkable fact in life that the scenes which we have rehea.r.s.ed in our minds never happen as we have pictured them happening. In the present case, for instance, it had been George's intention to handle the subsequent stages of this little dispute with an easy dignity. He had proposed, the money obtained, to hand it over to its rightful owner, raise his hat, and retire with an air, a gallant champion of the oppressed. It was probably about one-sixteenth of a second after his hand had closed on the coins that he realized in the most vivid manner that these were not the lines on which the incident was to develop, and, with all his heart, he congratulated himself on having discarded those brown boots in favour of a worn but roomy pair of gent's Oxfords.

For a moment there was a pause and a silence of utter astonishment, while the minds of those who had witnessed the affair adjusted themselves to the marvel, and then the world became full of starting eyes, yelling throats, and clutching hands. From all over the casino fresh units swarmed like bees to swell the crowd at the centre of things. Promenaders ceased to promenade, waiters to wait. Elderly gentlemen sprang on to tables.

But in that momentary pause George had got off the mark. The table at which he had been standing was the one nearest to the door, and he had been on the door side of it. As the first eyes began to start, the first throats to yell, and the first hands to clutch, he was pa.s.sing the counter of the money-changer. He charged the swing-door at full speed, and, true to its mission, it swung. He had a vague glimpse from the corner of his eye of the hat-and-cloak counter, and then he was in the square with the cold night breeze blowing on his forehead and the stars winking down from the blue sky.

A paper-seller on the pavement, ever the man of business, stepped forward and offered him the Paris edition of the _Daily Mail_, and, being in the direct line of transit, shot swiftly into the road and fell into a heap, while George, shaken but going well, turned off to the left, where there seemed to be rather more darkness than anywhere else.

And then the casino disgorged the pursuers.

To George, looking hastily over his shoulder, there seemed a thousand of them. The square rang with their cries. He could not understand them, but gathered that they were uncomplimentary. At any rate, they stimulated a little man in evening dress strolling along the pavement towards him, to become suddenly animated and to leap from side to side with outstretched arms.