I Am Your Brother Page 3

  When she enters, no salesman pays any attention to her, and the manager, Mr. Stefanovitch, waves his hand, explaining that they are not interested in charity. She doesn’t seem to take the insult in, walks over to the bundle of camel-hair blankets, yanks two out, and then, with an idiotic movement of her head towards a smiling salesman, she says: “How much?”

  “Fifty shillings,” the salesman says, still smiling.

  “All right, wrap them up at once,” says Mrs. Spencer, pays and waddles out. At the entrance she stops, takes out two pennies and drops them into a charity collecting-box that stands on the cashier’s desk. Mr. Stefanovitch, who was ready to make a jolly good remark, catering for laughs among his employees, is completely flustered by this unforeseen incident, and sits down heavily on a bale of Smyrna carpets—the kind that come from Czecho­slovakia by the thousand.

  Another street; a taxi stand; more and more houses; expensive-looking cars parked in front of them: Mer­cedes, Daimlers; liveried chauffeurs; delivery wagons; John Bell and Croydon; Burroughes and Wellcome; physicians in top hats and nurses in their worldly nunnery outfit; and over there an ambulance.

  This is Harley Street. And when Mrs. Spencer arrives in front of Number 199B, she takes off her spectacles, cleans them, and then looks at the two little brass plates fixed next to the bell. On the upper one: Dr. M. Heliotrope, M.D.; on the lower one:—that’s where she rings—Dr. Hamilton Finnagan.

  A rather young-looking chap in a short white coat opens the door and after taking a quick look at her says, sharply: “The doctor, Doctor Finnagan, is out.”

  But Mrs. Spencer just brushes him aside:

  “I know he is out, but I shall wait for him, just wait for him.”

  The man with the white coat goes after her.

  “You can’t see him, Mrs. Spencer. It’s no good waiting for him. He has gone away for the day. Listen, listen to me.”

  “I shall wait,” says Mrs. Spencer determinedly. “I have plenty of time, plenty of time.”

  There is a waiting-room. A few old ladies sitting about, every one of them probably a beauty of the Edwardian era. One has a bouquet of frost-eaten violets attached to her sealskin wrap, another one has a nervous tic, the third a slightly idiotic, frustrated smile on her face, as she holds an old Christmas number of “Punch” and glances over this daring and dashing magazine. Plenty of antlers on the wall and a beauty of an elaborate picture: rocks, a twilight-of-the-gods sky, a cave-man, with a leopard-skin draped about his waist for protection, swinging a hatchet, trying, with fluttering beard, to approach three beautiful half-dressed women in gallant fashion. A gorgeous conception of “Love in the Stone Age” by the famous painter, Sir John Pick, R.A., 1843-1899. Two or more paintings by the same master, mostly landscapes of Shropshire. Next to the gas fire on a piano-stool a marvellous statue of a woman feeding pigeons, two of those little pets having no heads any more. Even marble breaks as time goes on. And over there is a clock and its continuous monotonous tick-tock seems to put everybody and everything in this room to sleep. It is like unexpected lightning when suddenly the door opens, and in swarms another elderly lady with a Pekinese under her arm.

  “Chin,” she says, “lie down, and be good and quiet.”

  And this four-pawed, fur-covered Japanese goldfish sits down asthmatically.

  Every one in this room had looked up when Dame Laura Knoll entered. And so they can’t help seeing that after another struggle at the door with James, the doctor’s servant, Mrs. Spencer finally gets into the dignified waiting-room, looking like a rag-covered rat. She sits down on one of those fragile little gold chairs; she sits motionless, with closed eyes, staring at the ceiling as usual. Everybody is obviously annoyed and very uncomfortable, all the more so as nobody can possibly make out how this shabby proletarian woman came into Doctor Finnagan’s waiting-room. The adjoining door of Doctor Finnagan’s inner sanctum opens, and Doctor Finnagan’s assistant says quietly:

  “Next, please! I think it’s Lady Moorhen, please.”

  Mrs. Spencer gets up, and before Lady Moorhen has even been able to lift her ponderous behind from the chair, she sails straight into Doctor Finnagan’s room, closing the door behind her.

  “Outrageous,” says Lady Moorhen excitedly. “This common creature!”

  “It would have been impossible in my time,” says Dame Laura Knoll. “Poor Doctor Finnagan has to put up with these sort of people.”

  “It’s like Russia,” says another woman, obviously just woken up. “Gerrard, my son, has just come back from Russia.”

  “Never mind your son,” says Lady Moorhen, still excited, “I have to be at luncheon at one o’clock, at the Ritz.”

  At this very moment the doctor’s assistant, this very young man, appears in the door and in an apologetic voice, he says:

  “Doctor Finnagan is very sorry about this unpleasant incident. It won’t be but a minute.”

  The famous Doctor Hamilton Finnagan, a man of sixty-eight, clean-shaven, with a few white hairs carefully, almost artistically covering his obvious baldness, walks restlessly and nervously up and down his room. He suddenly stops and turns around: he has a face some­thing like a man’s: no eyebrows, no eyelashes, but an enormous long-pointed sharp nose, a mouth thin-lipped, as if carved with a sharp knife into his head. Protruding ears, enormous ears, like fleshy wings: a thin neck stuck in a high, stiff collar, with a glittering button in the middle and an Adam’s apple moving up and down, like the strange liquid in a blood-pressure apparatus.

  Mrs. Spencer is standing in front of him, quite close to him, her face tilted up at him. With closed eyes she repeats like a parrot:

  “Hundred pounds, hundred pounds, Finnagan! Finnagan, hundred pounds!”

  And Finnagan, suddenly swinging his bloodless hand: “And I say you won’t get it, you see? You won’t get it, and out you go! We said the fifteenth of each month. Isn’t that what we said? But you, you come every week and ask for some extra money. You can’t have it, not till the next fifteenth. Oh,” he says, sitting down exhaustedly, “if I could have known. . . .”

  “Finnagan,” says Mrs. Spencer quietly, but very firmly, “you knew what you were in for. It’s not my fault. Twenty-two years ago——”

  Doctor Finnagan interrupts her, obviously frightened: “That’s all right. Don’t start telling me the story every time you come.”

  Trying to reason with her he opens one of the drawers of his desk and takes out an enormous bundle of manu­script, with photo­graphs stuck in between. “Look, Mrs. Spencer,” he starts again, “I shall have it finished in three to four months. Then everything will be different. But I can’t finish it now. Don’t you see my waiting-room is full of patients every day? Throat trouble and that sort of thing? Silly, but I can’t drop my practice. I must go on; besides I have to collect more material. Research work, and corresponding with a professor in Australia. To get a letter there takes weeks.”

  “Never mind Australia,” says Mrs. Spencer. “I want my hundred and two pounds, sixteen shillings and fourpence. Don’t argue with me, give me the cheque! You wouldn’t like me to talk about——”

  Finnagan did not expect her to say anything like this. He sits upright, as if paralysed in his heavy chair at the desk. Then reaches for his cheque-book, his gaze still fixed on Mrs. Spencer’s spectacled eyes. “All right, I’ll send James to cash a cheque for a hundred.”

  “A hundred and two pounds, sixteen shillings and fourpence,” corrects Mrs. Spencer sharply. “You see, Finnagan, I can’t starve and I am getting very thin.” And she starts unbuttoning her coat, while the doctor dips his pen in the ink-bottle. “If you care to look,” she hisses, unbuttoning her dress.

  “Don’t, don’t!” says Finnagan, quickly, horrified.

  “Then you just write a hundred and two, sixteen shillings and fourpence.”

  Finnagan only nods his head. James enters the room.

  “Lady Moorhen can’t wait, she says, will the doctor please . . .”

  F
innagan hands him the cheque. “Go to the bank, James, cash it and give the whole amount to Mrs. Spencer! Now ask Lady Moorhen in.”

  The sky has cleared up and the sun firmly, decidedly, breaks through the mist. Workmen drilling in the street. Wooden partitions: a few jobless men hanging about. Leaning against them, looking on, as there is nothing better to do. Suddenly a stout little man in a shabby overcoat—the foreman—takes a whistle out of his pocket, blows up his cheeks, and sharp and loud: Stop. And the chimes of Marylebone Church fall in, and the siren from a factory nearby shouts: Midday! Every­thing stops. A milk wagon—United Dairies—slender and slick, stops at the kerb, and the chap jumps down and hands out sterilised milk in bottles, paper cups, and shiny loaves of bread, long ones and round ones.

  James, Doctor Finnagan’s servant, comes along, stops to regu­late his wrist-watch, three-quarters of a minute past twelve. When he looks up, having adjusted the hands of his timepiece, a leaflet is handed to him by a bearded sandwich-man who walks in slow procession with six other fellows celebrating the funeral of a widely-advertised show.

  A glance over the leaflet: Last Performance Of Jimmy Walker’s Vaudeville Show, Melody Theatre, Hammersmith. And in even bigger letters: Viva Naldi And The Twenty Melody Ladies In A Dazzling West-End Show. Right across the announcement: Bring Her Along.

  James feels rather uneasy about this, oh, so coarse suggestion, and drops the leaflet at once, mincing along more quickly, padded shoulders, torn silk shirt, little hat and all. Owing to a brisk wind, the leaflet on the pavement starts a voyage on its own. Flies. Stops. Flies again. Stops. Just pavement. Feet passing by. Shoes of men and dainty chaussures of women, and bigger ones for ladies from the North. The leaflet.

  Mr. Shark, the stage-manager, sinister, yellow-fanged and freezing, is standing on the street at the stage entrance of the Melody. There is a moderate gale and the man he is talking to is fat: goose-like fat, jovially smiling, and obviously unhampered by problems. He is Mr. Bailey, owner and general manager of Curtis, Freshwater and Higginson, Theatrical Scenery Contractors and Removers. His van is parked farther down the street and his men are out for lunch. They’ll be back shortly, work for an hour, and then leave hurriedly for their afternoon tea.

  Shark is depressed, and the reason he now states: “Brighton, Bournemouth, and Folkestone is no solution. We are in the soup all right. Who, I say, is, at this time of the year, in any of those places? Take my Mother. She goes to Brighton for the winter months, but would she go to see a show for three and six, five or six bob?”

  Bailey understandingly says: “She certainly wouldn’t. Why should Mrs. Shark go and see a strictly lousy show?”

  “No,” says Shark, annoyed. “That isn’t what I mean. She couldn’t pay it. From the little money I send her she couldn’t even pay two and six. And why can’t I send her any money?”

  Bailey, gently smiling: “Because you haven’t any.”

  Shark wants to give up. Bailey is too quick with his arguments. But then: “We worked since July at reduced wages. And why must they cut our salaries?”

  “Because,” replies Bailey, merciless, “the show is lousy and nobody goes to see it. Instead of improving what he has, putting in a little money here and there, the Boss believes in advertising. Look at this,” he says, picking up a leaflet which has fallen at his feet, dirty, freezing, and crumpled up.

  “Right,” says Shark, lighting his cigar again. “Nobody goes to see us.”

  Bailey feels this might be a given cue to start dishing up his old stuff. “Six months ago,” he says, “I said to Baker: ‘Look,’ I say——”—he interrupts himself—“you know I was talking to Baker? It was in July, and I say: ‘Baker, you have a pip of a show. Cochran couldn’t do better. Good numbers, good music, swell little orchestra. Pretty feet, looks and all. But—and I mean it, Baker—the scenery is beyond words. What you need first,’ I say, ‘is a chateau with an illuminated fountain in front. Second, a new jungle. What you have looks like Mitcham Common.’ ‘All right,’ says Baker. ‘Looks like Mitcham Common, but my girls, if you hear them singing, see them dancing, only brassières and little trunks, and all that sort of thing, you know, and Viva Naldi—you don’t look at the scenery.’ ‘All right,’ I say, ‘have it your own way. I’m not trying to sell you anything,’ says I. Third and last, you know, Shark, I didn’t want it, to make him go broke. Easy, I said to myself, Bailey, go easy, he hasn’t the money. So I said: ‘But what you need, and you know it, is a new French café. On the programme it says Montmartre, and what do you have? A back-drop from “Chu-Chin-Chow,” two chairs from “Private Lives,” a table from “Princess Charming,” and a telephone from “Journey’s End”.’ ”

  “And what’s wrong with that?” says Shark thoughtfully, scratching his neck.

  Bailey looks at Shark flabbergasted, and lowering his voice in despair he says: “Shark, have you ever been in Paris?”

  “No,” says Shark, “but I am going back on the stage now.”

  Bailey is hurt. But he realises at once that Shark is only a common little man and can’t be blamed for his blessed ignorance in artistic matters; so he thinks he might just as well throw in a humorous remark. “I shall come down to Brighton, Shark. One in the audience is better than nothing.”

  Some sort of sour “he-he!” is Shark’s polite reaction.

  “Come on, boys,” shouts Bailey. “Let’s get a grip on this damn jungle! Hey! Don’t make another hole in this rotten piece of canvas. Take your time, and I wouldn’t put a case of firecrackers on the harp. That’s no good to anybody.”

  The orchestra is fully assembled in the pit, this time in derbies, overcoats and shabby felt hats. They wait for Monsignor Ritornelli. He again is busy waiting, open-mouthed, to sneeze into a large white handkerchief. Obviously the cold got him this time.

  “Come on,” says the first violinist to Ritornelli. “It’s no good waiting for an explosion. Besides, it’s three o’clock and we want to go to lunch.”

  “All right,” says Ritornelli, sneezing like anything.

  “Santé,” shouts the drummer, out for fun again.

  “We start from the chorus,” says Ritornelli. “Number two and we diddle right down. You know, boys, on the left corner, page three, where the first violin starts with ‘hia-hia’ and the second trumpet goes into ‘yuh-hu-hu-hu’ and in falls the drum ‘pi-pi-pi-bum’! That’s right. And the girls start. Girls, where are you? ‘Brighton, Brighton, here we come!’ But don’t shout it. Just work it up to: ‘We-he-he come!’ ”

  The twenty dazzling beauties, dressed in their ordinary clothes, are standing on the stage, going through their opening routine. Cold, hungry, drowsy and disgusted.

  “Where’s Kraut?” shouts Shark. “Where are the Six Esmonds? Where is Coco and his Little Wizard? Don’t you want him, Ritornelli, for the opening curtain?”

  “I do,” says Ritornelli, “but it doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t matter?” shouts Shark. “Hell, they have to know where to take their places. Kraut will stand in front, and one won’t be able to see—oh, hell, where is Kraut?”

  And sitting down exhaustedly on a lonely Louis Quinze chair, he murmurs: “We shall never get anywhere near Brighton.”

  Kraut steps forward: this man is up to no good, and his strength might be destructive any minute. “Listen, Shark,” he says, “we have been standing here since nine o’clock. Waiting with our dinner since one o’clock. And you say you didn’t see me. Of course,” he says, pitying Mr. Shark, “Mr. Shark won’t honour us with a single look.” And suddenly getting aggressive again: “Why do you always look at the right corner of the stage? Look in the left, where the Esmonds and Coco and the God-damned Wizard—shut up, anyway—getting cold feet, influenza, asthma and other liver and kidney disorders. . . .”

  “That’s right,” says Coco, in a high-pitched voice: he looks like his own after-birth. “Mr. Kraut is right.”

  “Shut up, you freak,” says Mrs. Esmond, who is stout and
has asthma already. “Mr. Shark is a busy man.”

  “That’s right,” says Shark, relieved. “Thank you, Mrs. Esmond. A little understanding and co-operation, that’s all one expects.” And turning to Kraut: “Kraut, it’s no use getting the wind up. Now, let’s start, Ritornelli.”

  Ritornelli, imitating the whole orchestra: “Hum-hum-him-hum-piu-pu-pu-ba-ba!” And shouting loud: “ ‘Hallo, Brighton, here we come!’ Girls! With me. ‘Hallo, Brighton, here we come!’ ”

  A pretty dry, leathery sound comes from the chorus: ‘Hallo, Brighton, here we come!’

  Ritornelli tries to bargain with the girls, and says: “Look, girls, put some pep in it. One has to hear you are glad to go to Brighton. You are enjoying it.”

  Kraut steps forward. Bending down over the orchestra pit, he says loud and plain: “Ritornelli, come on, don’t make a fool of yourself. ‘Enjoying it.’ Be reasonable.”

  Ritornelli: “Mr. Kraut, I must ask you to leave me alone. If I have a certain artistic conception of a line it’s no good interfering with me. All right, girls. Let’s do it again.”

  Shark, who has sat so far with his face buried in his hands, as if in deep pain and contemplation, suddenly jumps up. “Stop!” he shouts. “What nonsense! ‘Hallo, Brighton, here we come!’ Who made this line up? Rubbish!”