THE ALBANY
G.J. Hoape--He was usually addressed as "G.J." by his friends, and
always referred to as "G.J." by both friends and acquaintances--woke
up finally in the bedroom of his flat with the thought:
"To-day I shall see her."
He inhabited one of the three flats at the extreme northern end of the
Albany, Piccadilly, W.I. The flat was strangely planned. Its shape
as a whole was that of a cube. Imagine the cube to be divided
perpendicularly into two very unequal parts. The larger part,
occupying nearly two-thirds of the entire cubic space, was the
drawing-room, a noble chamber, large and lofty. The smaller part was
cut horizontally into two storeys. The lower storey comprised a very
small hall, a fair bathroom, the tiniest staircase in London, and
G.J.'s very small bedroom. The upper storey comprised a very small
dining-room, the kitchen, and servants' quarters.
The door between the bedroom and the drawing room, left open in the
night for ventilation, had been softly closed as usual during G.J.'s
final sleep, and the bedroom was in absolute darkness save for a faint
grey gleam over the valance of the window curtains. G.J. could think.
He wondered whether he was in love. He hoped he was in love, and the
fact that the woman who attracted him was a courtesan did not disturb
him in the least.
He was nearing fifty years of age. He had casually known hundreds of
courtesans in sundry capitals, a few of them very agreeable; also a
number of women calling themselves, sometimes correctly, actresses,
all of whom, for various reasons which need not be given, had proved
very unsatisfactory. But he had never loved--unless it might be,
mildly, Concepcion, and Concepcion was now a war bride. He wanted to
love. He had never felt about any woman, not even about Concepcion, as
he felt about the woman seen for a few minutes at the Marigny Theatre
and then for five successive nights vainly searched for in all the
chief music-halls of Paris. (A nice name, Christine! It suited her.)
He had given her up--never expected to catch sight of her again; but
she had remained a steadfast memory, sad and charming. The encounter
in the Promenade in Leicester Square was such a piece of heavenly and
incredible luck that it had, at the moment, positively made him giddy.
The first visit to Christine's flat had beatified and stimulated him.
Would the second? Anyhow, she was the most alluring woman--and
yet apparently of dependable character!--he had ever met. No other
consideration counted with him.
There was a soft knock; the door was pushed, and wavy reflections of
the drawing-room fire played on the corner of the bedroom ceiling.
Mrs. Braiding came in. G.J. had known it was she by the caressing
quality of the knock. Mrs. Braiding was his cook and the wife of his
"man". It was not her place to come in, but occasionally, because
something had happened to Braiding, she did come in. She drew the
curtains apart, and the day of Vigo Street, pale, dirty, morose,
feebly and perfunctorily took possession of the bedroom. Mrs.
Braiding, having drawn the curtains, returned to the door and from the
doorway said:
"Breakfast is practically ready, sir."
G.J. perceived that this was one of her brave, resigned mornings.
Since August she had borne the entire weight of the war on her back,
and sometimes the burden would overpower her, but never quite. G.J.
switched on the light, arose from his bed, assumed his dressing-gown,
and, gazing with accustomed pleasure round the bedroom, saw that it
was perfect.
He had furnished his flat in the Regency style of the first decade
of the nineteenth century, as matured by George Smith, "upholder
extraordinary to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales". The Pavilion
at Brighton had given the original idea to G.J., who saw in it the
solution of the problem of combining the somewhat massive dignity
suitable to a bachelor of middling age with the bright, unconquerable
colours which the eternal twilight of London demands.
His dome bed was yellow as to its upper works, with crimson valances
above and yellow valances below. The yellow-lined crimson curtains (of
course never closed) had green cords and tassels, and the counterpane
was yellow. This bed was a modest sample of the careful and
uncompromising reconstitution of a period which he had everywhere
carried out in his abode.
The drawing-room, with its moulded ceiling and huge recessed window,
had presented an admirable field for connoisseurship. Here the clash
of rich primary colours, the perpendiculars which began with bronze
girls' heads and ended with bronze girls' feet or animals' claws,
the vast flat surfaces of furniture, the stiff curves of wood and a
drapery, the morbid rage for solidity which would employ a candelabrum
weighing five hundredweight to hold a single wax candle, produced a
real and imposing effect of style; it was a style debased, a style
which was shedding the last graces of French Empire in order soon to
appeal to a Victoria determined to be utterly English and good; but
it was a style. And G.J. had scamped no detail. Even the pictures were
hung with thick tasselled cords of the Regency. The drawing-room was a
triumph.
Do not conceive that G.J. had lost his head about furniture and that
his notion of paradise was an endless series of second-hand shops.
He had an admirable balance; and he held that a man might make a
faultless interior for himself and yet not necessarily lose his
balance. He resented being called a specialist in furniture. He
regarded himself as an amateur of life, and, if a specialist in
anything, as a specialist in friendships. Yet he was a solitary man
(liking solitude without knowing that he liked it), and in the midst
of the perfections which he had created he sometimes gloomily thought:
"What in the name of God am I doing on this earth?"
He went into the drawing-room, and there, by the fire and in front of
a formidable blue chair whose arms developed into the grinning
heads of bronze lions, stood the lacquered table consecrated to
his breakfast tray; and his breakfast tray, with newspaper and
correspondence, had been magically placed thereon as though by
invisible hands. And on one arm of the easy-chair lay the rug which,
because a dressing-gown does not button all the way down, he put over
his knees while breakfasting in winter. Yes, he admitted with pleasure
that he was "well served". Before eating he opened the piano--a modern
instrument concealed in an ingeniously confected Regency case--and
played with taste a Bach prelude and fugue.
His was not the standardised and habituated kind of musical culture
which takes a Bach prelude and fugue every morning before breakfast
with or without a glass of Lithia water or fizzy saline. He did,
however, customarily begin the day at the piano, and on this
particular morning he happened to play a Bach prelude and fugue.
And as he played he congratulated himself on not having gone to seek
Christine in the Promenade on the previous night, as impatience
had tempted him to do. Such a procedure would have been an error in
worldliness and bad from every point of view. He had wisely rejected
the temptation.
In the deep blue arm-chair, with the rug over his knees and one hand
on a lion's head, he glanced first at the opened _Times_, because
of the war. Among the few letters was one with the heading of the
Reveille Motor Horn Company Ltd.
G.J. like his father, had been a solicitor. When he was twenty-five
his father, a widower, had died and left him a respectable fortune
and a very good practice. He sold half the practice to an incoming
partner, and four years later he sold the other half of the practice
to the same man. At thirty he was free, and this result had been
attained through his frank negative answer to the question, "The law
bores me--is there any reason why I should let it continue to bore
me?" There was no reason. Instead of the law he took up life. Of
business preoccupations naught remained but his investments. He
possessed a gift for investing money. He had helped the man who had
first put the Reveille Motor Horn on the market. He had had a mighty
holding of shares in the Reveille Syndicate Limited, which had so
successfully promoted the Reveille Motor Horn Company Limited. And in
the latter, too, he held many shares. The Reveille Motor Horn Company
had prospered and had gone into the manufacture of speedometers,
illuminating outfits, and all manner of motor-car accessories.
On the outbreak of war G.J. had given himself up for lost. "This
is the end," he had said, as a member of the sore-shaken investing
public. He had felt sick under the region of the heart. In particular
he had feared for his Reveille shares. No one would want to buy
expensive motor horns in the midst of the greatest war that the world,
etc., etc.
Still the Reveille Company, after sustaining the shock, had somehow
continued to do a pretty good business. It had patriotically offered
its plant and services to the War Office, and had been repulsed with
contumely and ignominy. The War Office had most caustically intimated
to the Reveille Company that it had no use and never under any
conceivable circumstances could have any use whatever for the Reveille
Company, and that the Reveille Company was a forward and tedious
jackanapes, unworthy even of an articulate rebuff. Now the autograph
letter with the Reveille note-heading was written by the managing
director (who represented G.J.'s interests on the Board), and it
stated that the War Office had been to the Reveille Company, and
implored it to enlarge itself, and given it vast orders at grand
prices for all sorts of things that it had never made before. The
profits of 1915 would be doubled, if not trebled--perhaps quadrupled.
G.J. was relieved, uplifted; and he sniggered at his terrible
forebodings of August and September. Ruin? He was actually going to
make money out of the greatest war that the world, etc. etc. And why
not? Somebody had to make money, and somebody had to pay for the
war in income tax. For the first time the incubus of the war seemed
lighter upon G.J. And also he need feel no slightest concern about
the financial aspect of any possible developments of the Christine
adventure. He had a very clear and undeniable sensation of positive
happiness.