Self Condemned (32 page)

Some of the insects escaped from the kitchen or bathroom; and from time to time she would put down the gas gun, and hurry out in pursuit, crushing them with the heel of her shoe. Stooping down, she would sometimes pick one up, and address it in the following way: “Aha, you threw off your bag did you.You hoped to save your brood, did you! Your auntie was too smart for you!” with which she would throw it down and stamp on it.

René soon left the Room, and Hester followed him in a few minutes. “That woman is possessed,” he remarked, when Hester joined him in the beverage room. “It cannot be good for her to breathe in all that stuff. She is the only person in the hotel who takes on the job, and if anyone else touches the gun she gets very angry.What do you suppose is the matter with her?”

When they returned to the Room a half-hour later, the dead ’roaches were being swept away, and René hurried over to a window which he propped open. The icy air entered the rooms, but even so it took a long time to expel this stink. Affie vanished, and already she could be heard in a neighbouring apartment, blasting away at the ’roaches.

XIV
THE PATRONESS OF
ROTTEN JANITORS

M
rs. McAffie was their favourite figure. They developed an affection for this flying wraith, with the faintly rouged cheeks, who dashed, flew and darted everywhere, as though she desired to get rid of every remaining piece of flesh on her bones. She was tall and still enjoyed, in the manner of an afterglow, a vanished grace. She was known as Affie in the Room, where she was a welcome apparition. The hooded figure with the gas gun was Affie in a sinister role which troubled them a little bit.

Mrs. McAffie arrived in succession to Vera. In addition to being an addict of Aromatic Spirits of Ammonia, Vera was insolent, lazy, thievish, sly, and bad-tempered. She shot off her mouth at Mrs. Plant one day, and that was when she left. Then Mrs. McAffie was hired and a spirit came into the place which was of a different texture — more volatile and sprightly than had been there before. Her age was unknown and unguessable. She endeared herself to René in one of their early conversations by the sincerity of her horror at the new war. “They are taking our boys,” she said in an undertone, as if speaking to herself and the fact that her eyes were dry was only because anger dried them up. “They are taking our boys
again
.”

Affie took no tips. She was the only decent person who ever found her way, or his way, into the Hotel Blundell. And she paid for it.

When Affie read the teacups once, René, who liked her, succeeded in thrusting a dollar bill down between her shrivelled breasts, and she ran hooting from the Room. But when she saw that neither René nor his wife believed in her hypnotic assurances that they should beware of a dark man, or that they would tread strange ground shortly, she refused to take another penny. She shot away, pawing the air, when he approached her with a dollar bill.

Affie had been married to an attorney in the long ago, dead some twenty years. She had acted as nurse-housekeeper. She had owned a shop up in the gold-mining country, where it is very cold. She came from a bush-city herself: but she had exceedingly bad man trouble: heavy, incurable, starry-eyed man trouble. Her old eyes sparkled, her old bones kindled at the touch of a male, and the male touched them as he was looking for money. Some personable deceiver had cheated her out of her nest egg up in the gold country. Her shop in Timmins was hers no longer. She often sat crouched at the telephone, in the zero weather, brooding. Her dream-man had spat on her old heart. When the glass went down to zero, the old wound hurt: she rocked herself in the lonely lounge. Naturally she did go on losing any weight she had, as she rushed like a witch all over the hotel — carrying towels or sheets, or just running for the sake of running after her shadow.

When she slapped the face of the young punch-drunk janitor, she flew up the stairs, screeching and croaking with glee. The janitor was ten seconds behind her on the annex landing. She had vanished with a hoarse cackle. — The Hardings heard the indignant roar of the alcoholic pugilist, a few feet from their door: “Come down here, you bloody old cow, Missis McAffie, and I’ll wring your f — neck!” — Silence. She had adroitly evaporated. When Affie and her colleague Miss Toole retired to the bathroom, and she dyed Miss Toole’s hair a most unreal brassy gold, and Miss Toole did the same for her in a dark brown, Affie, with her cheeks rouged and lips painted, looked for a while a not uncomely scarecrow, with the shawl held tight round her shoulders to keep warm, standing and smiling at the Hardings’ door, on which she had tapped, presenting herself like a child who had dressed herself up in her grandmother’s clothes — she having of course borrowed the bloom from the cheeks of a granddaughter, and stolen the brown tresses. She stood, tall, genteel, and at bottom severe, with the smile of a naughty girl who had been at the dye bottle with her little pal Molly Toole.

Affie is the nearest approach in Canada to the decayed gentlewoman. Affie certainly had decayed. And subsequently it was proved that she had in fact dwelt among the genteel, as a respected attorney’s lady, in Ottawa. She had enjoyed the amenities. As “well bred,” she beyond doubt still regarded herself.

Affie was a bad influence in the hotel. She was so cheerfully and openly on the side of copulation — in spite of her respectable and even outwardly solemn appearance — no matter who were to be the performers: she cried in her heart with King Lear “let copulation thrive!” — that she would rent the rooms preferably to women who could be depended on to use them for that purpose, and turn away people whom she felt had leanings to virtue, though otherwise more desirable tenants. The hotel as a consequence, in the “transients” section, was in a state of chronic disorder.

This suited Mrs.Plant, however,since people would pay several dollars more to use the apartments for acts of discreet prostitution than for less Babylonish purposes. Thus it was that when two French-Canadian civilians came in with girls with over-bright eyes, asking for a room for the four for a week, they were given the room above the Hardings. This had never happened before; always they had had peaceable overhead neighbours.

For a week the Hardings slept little. Loud intoxicated talk of four unbridled mouths, bottles falling, feet scraping, followed by the heavy rhythmic crunch and thump of beds, a truly French-Canadian crisis producing a furious pounding up and down, succeeded by an alligator quiet: the night-long periodic flushing of the toilet, and procession of bare-feet — sleep was impossible. They knew they had to thank Affie for this, and a coolness ensued.

But this unusual woman was not only the protector of harlots: she was the patroness likewise of rotten janitors. There was one, young, baldish, genteel-spoken — a bank clerk, a white-collar out-of-work. Affie called him “Sonny-boy”: said he looked like a boy she once knew. —
Was
she faithful to her memories? That antique casket of her heart exuded a strong nostalgic perfume. The more well-deserved hatred he aroused in the hotel, the more passionately she protected him.

Sonny-boy omitted to stoke the furnace. The guests were stark with cold in their rooms, while he lay in a stupor induced by mixing brandy, port wine, and beer. When sober he could not fix a fused light or put a washer on a faucet, let alone restart an element that had ceased to give off heat. But he stopped a long while in the hotel. “I have a privileged position,” he announced to one of the maids, who tried to move him off the bed in a guest’s room where he had gone for a nap. Affie shielded Sonny-boy truly and faithfully, until Mrs. Plant sent for the police and had him ejected, screaming imprecations over the shoulders of the policeman.

These are two examples of the way in which Aflie was bad. She did no good to the hotel, but then Mrs. Plant didn’t either. The latter lady liked young and inefficient janitors too, up to a point; showed remarkable distaste for industrious or sober ones. She only liked old janitors if they drank. Then she would just as soon have them as young ones.

The hotel was a matriarchate, as is America, run by what Affie called the “First Lady” — or sometimes the “Leading Lady”

— Mrs. Plant, its owner, and her attendant ladies, including a couple of Scottish maids, with impressive Glasgow accents.

There was a guest, as has already been mentioned, named Mr. Martin, who had been there some time, and had, apparently, a pipeline to the proprietress. Whether this little Englishman had, in the past, stood (however unbelievable) in a tender relationship with the big Jamaican proprietress, it is impossible to say, but there he was, in an apartment not far from hers, as one who could be appealed to in her absence. He did not much enjoy all of these privileges for, on one occasion, he observed, in confidence to René, “I
can
fix a washer or a fuse
of course
, but if I did they’d never let me alone.”

This group of women, all except Katie, the old Scottish maid, were not repelled by the criminal classes. They accepted them on equal terms with other guests, and if the police descended on them at night, that was the business of the police and the criminals, nobody else’s. So there were criminals. Apart from the fearful noise the police made at night, yelling “Open up — the police!” as they hammered on the malefactors’ door, the Hardings found the large family of criminals, one enceinte, the quietest people in the house. They never fought, they never drank too much.

Affie thought that, as it takes all sorts to make a world, and as a hotel was a microcosm, one should have one’s criminal element. But since her main interests lay in the direction of the sexual impulses, there were always far more followers of Aphrodite, than there ever were picklocks and motorcar thieves in the Blundell.

The Hotel Blundell was just an ordinary Canadian hotel. It was not a brothel like the Plaza or Marlborough in the next street, and was less spectacularly unvirtuous than the first-class hotel on the waterfront: the King George.

All
Canadian hotels had been for a long time drinking dens. This could not be otherwise, for the only place a Canadian business man could drink the whisky all his ancestors drank was in a hotel room. “Hard liquor” was not sold for consumption in public: but it was sold at the government shops, called Liquor Control Stores, in bottle. As the bottles cannot be taken home and drunk there — to this most women object — it is drunk in hotel bedrooms. Harry Martin had an old friend called Mulligan, who was the president of a big concern. He was a very big man, clothed like a big shot, with the big bullying voice and glassy eye of a tycoon. He came sailing in every six weeks or so (the times varied) with a nurse in attendance. He went to bed at once, and there he drank for a week.

During these periods Mr. Martin and the nurse moved cautiously in and out of the room, as if they were waiting upon a sick man. He never left the bed — except to knock the nurse down if she absented herself for too long. He urinated and defecated in the bed, and the sheets were removed, rolled up, and burnt in the furnace. He also relieved himself in this way in the bath.

One day the nurse would be seen no more, the bout was at an end, and the president was back in his office, sober till the next spasm arrived.

This was the only example in this small second-class hotel of how the big shot lives, but it was typical of what went on in thousands of rooms and suites all over Canada. It was (and perhaps is) a product of Methodism, with its edicts against pleasures that are taken for granted everywhere else, except parts of the United States. The more expensive, or as it is called “exclusive,” hotel is where the business man keeps his mistress. At the King George Hotel a Mr. Cox, the vice-president of a very large corporation — known in the first phase of their stay at Momaco to the Hardings — lived with a floozy of old standing. They had been there together for so long that this had become his real home. He only was at his official home, with the “Mrs. Cox” of the telephone book, on Thursday. At first you might be surprised that Mrs. Cox only invited you to dinner on Thursdays, until you were put wise to the true situation. — If you got to know Mr. Cox really well, you were asked to partake of a very much more agreeable dinner at the King George. And it was a far greater honour to be asked to the King George on Tuesday or Friday, than to the Cox home on Thursday.

When first in Momaco the Hardings stopped at the King George.The first hint they had of what lay beneath the Methodist surface of Canadian life, in the dominion — the formidable sabbaths, the wholesale restrictions on everything that is agreeable or convenient, even taxicabs — was as they left their room the first morning, and walked along to the elevator. A door was open leading into a large room: upon a bulky sideboard were ranged scores of large and small bottles and decanters, comprising every form of spirit and liqueur known to man. Both Mr. and Mrs. Harding stopped, licked their lips, and passed on, laughing.

“Some cellar!” said René, using Winston Churchill’s favourite and typically out-of-date Americanism. At that time René did not know, any more than his illustrious leader, that Americans no longer said “some” this and “some” that.

“A cellar in a very exposed position,” Hester remarked.

“Exhibitionism, I presume.” René shrugged his shoulders. A couple of moronic business sub-men passed them, and they saw that they entered the open door.They eyed René and his wife, in their English clothes, with dull, bold dislike.

What struck the Hardings most about these amazing
moeurs
was the way such things were reacted to by all these women, as much as by everybody else.

That, both René and his wife felt, was the proper manner — irresponsible detachment. Life was for Affie and Madame Plant a cinema performance. A violent performance. If it had no
kick
it would after all be dull. They disapproved of any kind of sobriety or restraint. That René did not beat up his wife, or was not seen drunk every night, was not in his favour. His irreproachable behaviour as a guest would be registered against him.