The Man Upstairs and Other Stories
employed at modest salaries by various banks, corporations, stores,
shops, and business firms. They are put to work when young, and they
stay put. They are mussels. Each has his special place on the rock, and
remains glued to it all his life.
To these thousands George Albert Balmer belonged. He differed in no
detail from the rest of the great army. He was as respectable, as
neatly-dressed, as mechanical, and as unenterprising. His life was
bounded, east, west, north, and south, by the Planet Insurance Company,
which employed him; and that there were other ways in which a man might
fulfil himself than by giving daily imitations behind a counter of a
mechanical figure walking in its sleep had never seriously crossed his
mind.
On George, at the age of twenty-four, there descended, out of a dear
sky, a legacy of a thousand pounds.
Physically, he remained unchanged beneath the shock. No trace of hauteur
crept into his bearing. When the head of his department, calling his
attention to a technical flaw in his work of the previous afternoon,
addressed him as 'Here, you--young what's-your-confounded-name!' he
did not point out that this was no way to speak to a gentleman of
property. You would have said that the sudden smile of Fortune had
failed to unsettle him.
But all the while his mind, knocked head over heels, was lying in a
limp heap, wondering what had struck it.
To him, in his dazed state, came Harold Flower. Harold, messenger to the
Planet Insurance Company and one of the most assiduous money-borrowers
in London, had listened to the office gossip about the legacy as if to
the strains of some grand, sweet anthem. He was a bibulous individual
of uncertain age, who, in the intervals of creeping about his duties,
kept an eye open for possible additions to his staff of creditors. Most
of the clerks at the Planet had been laid under contribution by him in
their time, for Harold had a way with him that was good for threepence
any pay-day, and it seemed to him that things had come to a sorry pass
if he could not extract something special from Plutocrat Balmer in his
hour of rejoicing.
Throughout the day he shadowed George, and, shortly before closing-time,
backed him into a corner, tapped him on the chest, and requested the
temporary loan of a sovereign.
In the same breath he told him that he was a gentleman, that a
messenger's life was practically that of a blanky slave, and that a
young man of spirit who wished to add to his already large fortune
would have a bit on Giant Gooseberry for the City and Suburban. He then
paused for a reply.
Now, all through the day George had been assailed by a steady stream of
determined ear-biters. Again and again he had been staked out as an
ore-producing claim by men whom it would have been impolitic to rebuff.
He was tired of lending, and in a mood to resent unauthorized demands.
Harold Flower's struck him as particularly unauthorized. He said so.
It took some little time to convince Mr Flower that he really meant it,
but, realizing at last the grim truth, he drew a long breath and spoke.
'Ho!' he said. 'Afraid you can't spare it, can't you? A gentleman comes
and asks you with tack and civility for a temp'y loan of about 'arf
nothing, and all you do is to curse and swear at him. Do you know what
I call you--you and your thousand quid? A tuppenny millionaire, that's
what I call you. Keep your blooming money. That's all I ask.
_Keep_ it. Much good you'll get out of it. I know your sort.
You'll never have any pleasure of it. Not you. You're the careful sort.
You'll put it into Consols, _you_ will, and draw your three-ha'pence
a year. Money wasn't meant for your kind. It don't _mean_ nothing
to you. You ain't got the go in you to appreciate it. A vegetable--that's
all you are. A blanky little vegetable. A blanky little gor-blimey
vegetable. I seen turnips with more spirit in 'em that what you've got.
And Brussels sprouts. Yes, _and_ parsnips.'
It is difficult to walk away with dignity when a man with a hoarse
voice and a watery eye is comparing you to your disadvantage with a
parsnip, and George did not come anywhere near achieving the feat. But
he extricated himself somehow, and went home brooding.
Mr Flower's remarks rankled particularly because it so happened that
Consols were the identical investment on which he had decided. His
Uncle Robert, with whom he lived as a paying guest, had strongly
advocated them. Also they had suggested themselves to him
independently.
But Harold Flower's words gave him pause. They made him think. For two
weeks and some days he thought, flushing uncomfortably whenever he met
that watery but contemptuous eye. And then came the day of his annual
vacation, and with it inspiration. He sought out the messenger, whom
till now he had carefully avoided.
'Er--Flower,' he said.
'Me lord?'
'I am taking my holiday tomorrow. Will you forward my letters? I will
wire you the address. I have not settled on my hotel yet. I am popping
over'--he paused--'I am popping over,' he resumed, carelessly, 'to
Monte.'
'To who?' inquired Mr Flower.
'To Monte. Monte Carlo, you know.'
Mr Flower blinked twice rapidly, then pulled himself together.
'Yus, I _don't_ think!' he said.
And that settled it.
The George who strolled that pleasant morning on the Promenade des
Strangers differed both externally and internally from the George who
had fallen out with Harold Flower in the offices of the Planet
Insurance Company. For a day after his arrival he had clung to the garb
of middle-class England. On the second he had discovered that this was
unpleasantly warm and, worse, conspicuous. At the Casino Municipale
that evening he had observed a man wearing an arrangement in bright
yellow velvet without attracting attention. The sight had impressed
him. Next morning he had emerged from his hotel in a flannel suit so
light that it had been unanimously condemned as impossible by his Uncle
Robert, his Aunt Louisa, his Cousins Percy, Eva, and Geraldine, and his
Aunt Louisa's mother, and at a shop in the Rue Lasalle had spent twenty
francs on a Homburg hat. And Roville had taken it without blinking.
Internally his alteration had been even more considerable. Roville was
not Monte Carlo (in which gay spot he had remained only long enough to
send a picture post-card to Harold Flower before retiring down the
coast to find something cheaper), but it had been a revelation to him.
For the first time in his life he was seeing colour, and it intoxicated
him. The silky blueness of the sea was startling. The pure white of the
great hotels along the promenade and the Casino Municipale fascinated
him. He was dazzled. At the Casino the pillars were crimson and cream,
the tables sky-blue and pink. Seated on a green-and-white striped chair
he watched a _revue_, of which from start to finish he understood
but one word--'out', to wit--absorbed in the doings of a red-moustached
gentleman in blue who wrangled in rapid French with a black-moustached
gentleman in yellow, while a snow-white _commere_ and a _compere_
in a mauve flannel suit looked on at the brawl.
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 assiduously 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 space 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 shine. What sort of an utter outsider could she
have considered him? An east wind sprang up. What kind of a Cockney
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 passed 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, dashingly 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 institutions provided by the municipality
for the purpose of enabling visitors temporarily to kill thought. Chief
among these is the Casino Municipale, 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