It is told by young Raymond Paris, the novelist:
A few days after my arrival at the hotel on the hill behind Algiers,
where I intended to stay some time for reasons best known to myself, I
wrote to a friend in London, Ralph Trevor, telling him of the place and
the people, and, in particular, of the people in my hotel. I must
explain that I am a traveller of ignoble inclinations, so that my
descent on Africa was in every way very dissimilar from that of Mrs.
Rosita Forbes. I cannot lay claim to a very adventurous spirit--though,
of course, I am always ready to make a fourth, a third, or a second, as
the case may be but only too seldom is. What I mean to say is that on my
arrival in Algiers, instead of hiring a room so situated in the town
that I could see or smell its Arab activities, I straightway made for
the large building which dominates the hill of Mustapha: and which has
about as much relation to Algeria as the Carlton at Cannes, the Paris at
Monte Carlo, or the Normandy at Deauville.
There I stayed, and I wrote to my friend, describing the hotel, and the
people in the hotel, and how Robert Hichens was worshipped by the
directors thereof, and how they fell down before effigies of the
authoress of _The Sheik_, as well they might, for who knows how many
people would not go to Algeria but for _The Garden of Allah_ and _The
Sheik_. In particular I described an amiable gentleman, and how he
looked exactly like Lord Beaverbrook might have looked if he hadn’t made
so much money all by himself, a sort of rugged grandeur being spread
over features not otherwise remarkable; and then I went on to say that
of course there was the usual hotel Pretty Girl, and very pretty she was
too. “I do not know her yet,” I wrote, “and I probably never will, for
they tell me--the barman tells me--that she and her mother are inclined
to be rather exclusive and do not mix with the other guests. Be that as
it may, the girl is extraordinarily pretty in a slim, fascinating way
which is quite indescribable. She must be very young, for I notice that
it’s only with difficulty that she manages to repress a giggle at things
her mother says, which is really very nice of her, don’t you think? On
the other hand she dresses so amazingly well, really well, I mean, no
home-made stuff, that she simply can’t be under twenty--unless, of
course, her mother chooses her clothes for her, but I am rather inclined
to doubt that, her mother’s clothes being excessively county and
therefore not remarkable for _chic_....” and so on and so on in a
friendly way about this and that.
When next I wrote to Ralph Trevor, which was not before I had to, he
having written to me several times about one thing and another, I
mentioned that I had, so to speak, put the lid on the exclusive business
as regards the hotel Pretty Girl and her agreeable parent. “Her name is
Consuelo Brown,” I wrote, “and they live not far from Leicester. If you
ask me how in the world a girl who lives not far from Leicester comes to
be called Consuelo, I will tell you that it is because her mother has
always admired that beautiful lady who was Miss Consuelo Vanderbilt; but
I am only surmising that for your benefit, for Mrs. Brown has not as yet
told me the true facts of the matter. Miss Brown is English and American
in equal parts, her late father having been an American Admiral. If he
was anything like his daughter he must have been a very pretty Admiral.
“By the way, I was quite wrong about Miss Brown’s age, she turns out to
be only eighteen! And when she talks I can quite believe it, not that
she is at all silly or giggly--she still deliciously represses the
giggly part--but because she prefaces a good many of her remarks with an
“Oh!” which sounds exactly as though she had just eaten a piece of
Turkish Delight and had liked it rather a lot. I met her at a dance
given at the hotel the other night. A _Gala Bal_, they called it. A
_Soirée de Gala_. Well, I wandered into the _Gala Bal_, and saw her
sitting in a far corner with her mother, looking very absent-minded, I
thought; and well she might, for the difference between a _Gala Bal_ and
a common-or-garden _Bal_ is that five hundred people are shoved on to a
floor made to hold fifty; and so I sidled across the floor, made my bow
and formed words indicative of a pressing desire to dance with her, all
of which went quite well. It went even better, when, just as we were
about to take the floor, I asked her ‘whether she preferred to be held
by the spine or the liver?’ at which she suddenly gave such a laugh that
various Frenchwomen looked for the first time away from her clothes to
her face, which was a very agreeable contrast to theirs, they having
used powder and what-nots to excess in honour of the _Gala Bal_.
“I suppose you know what a French hotel orchestra is like at playing
dance music? It is very good as an orchestra over meals, very classical
and all that, but what is the use of a fox-trot without saxophones and
drums and little tiddley-bits here and there? One has to be a little mad
to dance a fox-trot, a little mad or a little drunk, but one can’t be a
little mad to the polite strains of an orchestra lead by a _chef
d’orchestre_, which every now and then dries up completely to give the
first violin a chance to be a first violin.
“So we gave up dancing after a while--we had to, anyhow, for the _Gala
Balists_ began dancing in open formation--and I lured her out on to the
terrace with a promise of a lemon-squash: which, however, turned out to
be an orangeade--two straws and a lump of ice, you know--but she seemed
to enjoy it none the less for that. Did she like orangeade? Oh, yes, she
liked orangeade frightfully. Then what to say? I asked her if she liked
dancing.
“‘Oh, yes!’ she said very softly. ‘Why, what else is there!’
“Well, when one comes to think of it, there doesn’t really seem to be
very much else, and so that was that. Later on, however, there turned
out to be skiing. Oh, yes, she liked skiing. Dancing and skiing.... And,
somehow or other, she asked me what I was, and I said ‘Nothing,’ which
is a good deal truer than I like to think. But she said in her soft,
brown way: ‘Oh, how splendid! for I’m nothing, too, so we can be nothing
together.’ That sounded charming at the time, though now I have written
it down there looks something the matter with it. But that girl is quite
beyond me.
“When I was eighteen I seemed to know quite a lot about girls of
eighteen, but now I feel like a cow when Consuelo looks at me with her
brown eyes, and my conversation with her degenerates into asking her a
series of questions, like that dancing-skiing business. It is simply
extraordinary, you know, how little one seems to know about what goes on
inside girls of eighteen, and I think something ought to be done about
it. I mean, one simply can’t go on living one’s whole life knowing
nothing at all about girls of eighteen but pretending to know a whole
lot about women of thirty who, on the other hand, know a good deal less
than they think they do about chaps. This girl, though, is not at all a
typical specimen, she can’t be, for (a) she is so amazingly
well-dressed, (b) she has travelled a good deal, and (c) she ran away
two years ago from Heathfield, by the simple expedient of climbing the
school wall at six o’clock in the evening, hailing a passing
motor-lorry on the Ascot Road, and so to London and to the home not far
from Leicester. And here she is now, like a flower out of season among
all these elderly people, who keep on saying that they don’t play bridge
for money but that a shilling-a-hundred _does_ lend a zest to the game.
I can’t help wanting, you know, to find out what she thinks of things
_now_. It won’t be in the least interesting to find out what she thinks
of things when she is in her twenties, for her fascinating kind of
beauty--you want to pass your hand over it, that kind--can’t help
spoiling her, the mere daily business of refusing proposals of marriage
can’t help spoiling her--but _now_! Well, those brown eyes are the
devil’s own barrier, and she’s so infernally simple that one has to talk
intelligibly about everything, which is a habit one has almost gotten
out of ever since one grew up and lived among grown-up people. Do girls
of eighteen, does Consuelo, _know any_thing? I mean, does she know
anything of the beauties and the dirts that men and women do to each
other in the ordinary course of things, men and women being what they
are and life being what it is? Or does Consuelo--she allowed me to call
her that, by the way, by pulling a face when I Miss Browned her--does
Consuelo, with her slim, brown, enchanting, touchable loveliness, know
nothing about anything like that, does she think that young men admire
only with their eyes and that therefore life is great fun? Or does she
want them to admire her with something besides their eyes and their
hearts and all the nice clean things? What does a girl of eighteen think
about when she’s alone? Was Charles Garvice right or was Charles Garvice
wrong?--I am serious--about the inner thoughts of a much admired girl of
eighteen? Or are they more or less like boys? Do girls of
eighteen--really nice ones, I mean, not the meretricious golden things
one sees about London ballrooms in July with a tremendous air of having
been bored at their first Garden Party--do the really nice ones just go
fluttering on and on until a nasty big net comes plump down on them,
calling itself Marriage and Womanhood and so on? It is all very
puzzling, I do think, and I see no reason at all for my going on calling
myself a novelist if I don’t know a damn thing about what goes on behind
the brown eyes of a girl of eighteen! What do other writers do when they
are writing about girls of eighteen? I suppose they just go on making up
lies like anything, and bitterly hope for the best. If it comes to that
I am a thundering good liar when I am put to it, but I simply couldn’t
make up enough to put inside a girl like Consuelo with any hope of
getting away with it. No, but it’s very depressing, and me calling
myself a writer. It’s all right of course, when one is dealing with
older women--on paper, I am talking about--for no matter how many lies
one makes up about them, just to make them seem real and lifelike, some
of them are sure to be true, or as near the truth as makes no
matter....”
And then, a good while later, when I had moved from Algiers to Lagouat,
which is right away in the desert, hundreds of miles away in the desert,
Ralph Trevor wrote to me, and among other things he asked: “Why haven’t
you mentioned Consuelo Brown in your last two letters? I am quite
interested in her, and have been wondering whether you have fallen in
love with her and had your advances rejected with contumely, which would
be a quite sufficient reason for you to have lost all interest in her.”
I wrote back rebuking him for his harsh opinion of me and pointing out
various of the less lustrous episode in his own career of celibacy, and
then I came to Consuelo. “Yes, there is certainly a reason why I ceased
to mention her in my letters, but it is not the reason to which you have
quite bestially subscribed. There are some things one simply does not,
of one’s own accord, write about, not for any consideration, and so not
even to cure you forever of your fatuous pessimism concerning my
character will I ever again mention the name of Consuelo Brown. I am, as
you see, in Lagouat now, an aeroplane from Biskra dropped me here, and
here I will stay until the spring, between the sand and the sun and the
beggars....”
But when in the spring I returned to London, loveliest of all towns in
the spring, and I dined one night with Ralph Trevor, he said to me, at
that period after dinner when such things are commonly said: “Now then,
out with it, old man. The later history of Miss Consuelo Brown, if you
please.”
Very unwillingly, I told him how one day a young man I knew, not very
well, was added to the guests of the hotel on the hill over the bay of
Algiers. “A pleasant young man he was, and I was shocked at the sight of
him, he was so white and fragile. He said he had been ill of a rheumatic
fever for a long time and was now convalescing.
“We had met by chance on the very first day of his arrival, and we did
the ‘Hello! Fancy seeing _you_ here!’ business, but I fancied that his
‘Hello!’ was not so hearty as it might have been, considering that I was
one of his elder brother’s oldest friends. We sat down, on the terrace
there, just before luncheon it was, and he seemed to be getting at
something, until finally he came out with: ‘Don’t you know? Haven’t
you--haven’t you heard?’ I told him I hadn’t seen an English paper for
weeks, and then he sort of gasped out: ‘Just the other day--in
Paris--Basil--Basil shot himself! Awful. Oh, my God, awful!’ Your own
letter telling me of poor Basil’s suicide was to arrive that very
evening, so you can imagine how shocked I was to hear of the ghastly
thing like that--and shocked too, at this poor boy’s face, it was so
livid with pain! I was so sorry for him that I was quite, quite silent.
Here had he, at the end of a long illness, been running away from the
turmoil of his elder brother’s suicide--and the first man he meets is
one of his brother’s oldest friends! He had somehow had to tell me about
it, the poor boy. And then there we sat, staring down at the silent
Mediterranean a mile below, but the sea at noon was not more silent than
we were. Not until that moment had I seen so clearly the wide,
blue-white bay of Algiers, the sea as blue as a pretty doll’s eyes and
the bending coast dotted with white villages looking so deceptively
clean in the sunlit distance, and away in the west, from the sea to the
desert, the long low ridge of the Atlas Mountains with here and there
snow-capped peaks towering up behind them, like huge white minarets in
the blue haze of the sun ... and then Consuelo came up the steps between
us and the sea, pretty Consuelo, so slim, so young, so smart, and the
poor boy beside me gasped, ‘My God!’ Consuelo gave him one white look
and was gone into the hotel, and that afternoon out of the hotel and, I
hope to God, out of my life. Now, if you please, I am tired of this
tale, and if you will be a little more active with that not very
superior port, as becomes a host to his guest, I shall be infinitely
obliged. Thank you.”
“But, my dear man, you have not finished the tale! What the devil was it
all about?”
“Yes, the devil and hell certainly had a lot to do with it, Ralph. There
was hell in that poor boy’s eyes when he saw Miss Brown and said, ‘My
God!’ You see, he loved that girl quite frantically and seriously, and
she came to stay with him and his people in Hampshire so that the
engagement could be confirmed and all that, and early one morning he saw
her coming out of Basil’s room. A hungry girl. After that he went away
without a word, to give poor Basil his chance--you remember, we guessed
that poor Basil was in love at last, the queer, furtive way he came by
of breaking dinner-engagements?--and then the next thing he heard was
that the girl had broken the engagement and that Basil had put a bullet
into his silly sweet head....
“Perhaps,” said Ralph Trevor, “she couldn’t help it. Life is very hard
for very pretty girls, Raymond. Perhaps she just couldn’t help it....”
But I said nothing, what was the use? I had seen that white look she
gave that wretched boy, and that white look was like a disease in the
sunlight. Lithe limbs and curling lips, laughing eyes and loose heart--a
hungry girl, made to rot men.
X: THE IRREPROACHABLE CONDUCT OF A GENTLEMAN WHO ONCE REFUSED A
KNIGHTHOOD
I
Said Mr. Fall to Lord Tarlyon on the telephone, one day in July:
“Pleased if you’d dine with me to-night.”
“Sorry,” said Lord Tarlyon; and he was sorry, for he liked Mr. Fall very
well. “Promised to dine with a man.”
“Pleased if you’d bring him along,” said Mr. Fall.
Mr. Fall lived in Lord Brazie’s house in Grosvenor Square. (Lord Brazie,
of course, lived somewhere else, but he wouldn’t have been able to live
at all if Mr. Fall had not taken his house.) As George Tarlyon and I
walked thither through the quietening streets and the dainty noises of
the Town in the evening, we spoke of Cyrus Fall; and then a silence fell
upon us, for we were meditating on millionaires of the Canadian sort. In
the last decade of the last century millionaires were always American:
in the first decade of this century an Australian mode set in, and many
a young lady of birth was married to a fruit-farm, and many a
chorus-girl decorated the bush: but fashion, as _The Tatler_ has
brilliantly put it, is proverbially fickle, and with the war all
millionaires who were not Canadian fell into great discredit, so that
many women exchanged theirs for the Canadian model on the first
opportunity. Now of these, the greatest was Cyrus Fall....
The history of Mr. Fall and his millions is simple. Like all Canadian
millionaires he was born near Limerick and emigrated, with his parents,
to Canada at the age of three. For a time he was dancing-master and
chucker-out in a _cabaret_ in Toronto; but, deciding that that was a
discreditable profession, bought some newspapers and edited them in such
an original way that he very soon became a Force. Throughout this time
he never failed to consult his mother at every turn, and though in doing
so he sometimes made mistakes, he never missed an opportunity of saying
that a man’s best friend is his mother; and when, at the age of thirty,
having been a Force in Canada for some years, he came to England, he
wrote to his mother, who of course lived in Winnipeg, every day, saying
that a man should be grateful to the woman who gave him birth. In
England Mr. Fall went on being a millionaire until the war broke out,
when he at once became a multi-millionaire. He was offered a knighthood
for his services on the field of finance, but humbly refused the honour
in a letter which, his newspapers said, was that of a simple, sincere
and great-hearted man and should be a historic model for all letters
refusing knighthoods. Later on he refused a baronetcy in the same simple
and sincere way, excusing himself to his friends on the grounds that his
mother wouldn’t like him making a guy of himself; and when some one said
that Canadians can’t be choosers Mr. Fall biffed him one. About the time
when George Tarlyon and I were going to dine with him he was said to be
about to accept a barony, excusing himself on the ground that he was
getting too old for letter-writing. Mr. Fall had not married.