4
Bedtime at Roville is an hour that seems to vary according to one's
proximity to the sea. The gilded palaces along the front keep deplorable
hours, polluting the night air till dawn with indefatigable jazz: but at
the pensions of the economical like the Normandie, early to bed is the
rule. True, Jules, the stout young native who combined the offices of
night-clerk and lift attendant at that establishment, was on duty in the
hall throughout the night, but few of the Normandie's patrons made use
of his services.
Sally, entering shortly before twelve o'clock on the night of the day on
which the dark man, the red-haired young man, and their friend
Scrymgeour had come into her life, found the little hall dim and silent.
Through the iron cage of the lift a single faint bulb glowed: another,
over the desk in the far corner, illuminated the upper half of Jules,
slumbering in a chair. Jules seemed to Sally to be on duty in some
capacity or other all the time. His work, like women's, was never done.
He was now restoring his tissues with a few winks of much-needed beauty
sleep. Sally, who had been to the Casino to hear the band and afterwards
had strolled on the moonlit promenade, had a guilty sense of intrusion.
As she stood there, reluctant to break in on Jules' rest--for her
sympathetic heart, always at the disposal of the oppressed, had long
ached for this overworked peon--she was relieved to hear footsteps in
the street outside, followed by the opening of the front door. If Jules
would have had to wake up anyway, she felt her sense of responsibility
lessened. The door, having opened, closed again with a bang. Jules
stirred, gurgled, blinked, and sat up, and Sally, turning, perceived
that the new arrival was the red-haired young man.
"Oh, good evening," said Sally welcomingly.
The young man stopped, and shuffled uncomfortably. The morning's
happenings were obviously still green in his memory. He had either not
ceased blushing since their last meeting or he was celebrating their
reunion by beginning to blush again: for his face was a familiar
scarlet.
"Er--good evening," he said, disentangling his feet, which, in the
embarrassment of the moment, had somehow got coiled up together.
"Or bon soir, I suppose you would say," murmured Sally.
The young man acknowledged receipt of this thrust by dropping his hat
and tripping over it as he stooped to pick it up.
Jules, meanwhile, who had been navigating in a sort of somnambulistic
trance in the neighbourhood of the lift, now threw back the cage with a
rattle.
"It's a shame to have woken you up," said Sally, commiseratingly,
stepping in.
Jules did not reply, for the excellent reason that he had not been woken
up. Constant practice enabled him to do this sort of work without
breaking his slumber. His brain, if you could call it that, was working
automatically. He had shut up the gate with a clang and was tugging
sluggishly at the correct rope, so that the lift was going slowly up
instead of retiring down into the basement, but he was not awake.
Sally and the red-haired young man sat side by side on the small seat,
watching their conductor's efforts. After the first spurt, conversation
had languished. Sally had nothing of immediate interest to say, and her
companion seemed to be one of these strong, silent men you read about.
Only a slight snore from Jules broke the silence.
At the third floor Sally leaned forward and prodded Jules in the lower
ribs. All through her stay at Roville, she had found in dealing with the
native population that actions spoke louder than words. If she wanted
anything in a restaurant or at a shop, she pointed; and, when she wished
the lift to stop, she prodded the man in charge. It was a system worth a
dozen French conversation books.
Jules brought the machine to a halt: and it was at this point that he
should have done the one thing connected with his professional
activities which he did really well--the opening, to wit, of the iron
cage. There are ways of doing this. Jules' was the right way. He was
accustomed to do it with a flourish, and generally remarked "V'la!" in a
modest but self-congratulatory voice as though he would have liked to
see another man who could have put through a job like that. Jules'
opinion was that he might not be much to look at, but that he could open
a lift door.
To-night, however, it seemed as if even this not very exacting feat was
beyond his powers. Instead of inserting his key in the lock, he stood
staring in an attitude of frozen horror. He was a man who took most
things in life pretty seriously, and whatever was the little difficulty
just now seemed to have broken him all up.
"There appears," said Sally, turning to her companion, "to be a hitch.
Would you mind asking what's the matter? I don't know any French myself
except 'oo la la!'"
The young man, thus appealed to, nerved himself to the task. He eyed
the melancholy Jules doubtfully, and coughed in a strangled sort of way.
"Oh, esker... esker vous..."
"Don't weaken," said Sally. "I think you've got him going."
"Esker vous... Pourquoi vous ne... I mean ne vous... that is to say,
quel est le raison..."
He broke off here, because at this point Jules began to explain. He
explained very rapidly and at considerable length. The fact that neither
of his hearers understood a word of what he was saying appeared not to
have impressed itself upon him. Or, if he gave a thought to it, he
dismissed the objection as trifling. He wanted to explain, and he
explained. Words rushed from him like water from a geyser. Sounds which
you felt you would have been able to put a meaning to if he had detached
them from the main body and repeated them slowly, went swirling down the
stream and were lost for ever.
"Stop him!" said Sally firmly.
The red-haired young man looked as a native of Johnstown might have
looked on being requested to stop that city's celebrated flood.
"Stop him?"
"Yes. Blow a whistle or something."
Out of the depths of the young man's memory there swam to the surface a
single word--a word which he must have heard somewhere or read
somewhere: a legacy, perhaps, from long-vanished school-days.
"Zut!" he barked, and instantaneously Jules turned himself off at the
main. There was a moment of dazed silence, such as might occur in a
boiler-factory if the works suddenly shut down.
"Quick! Now you've got him!" cried Sally. "Ask him what he's talking
about--if he knows, which I doubt--and tell him to speak slowly. Then
we shall get somewhere."
The young man nodded intelligently. The advice was good.
"Lentement," he said. "Parlez lentement. Pas si--you know what I
mean--pas si dashed vite!"
"Ah-a-ah!" cried Jules, catching the idea on the fly. "Lentement. Ah,
oui, lentement."
There followed a lengthy conversation which, while conveying nothing to
Sally, seemed intelligible to the red-haired linguist.
"The silly ass," he was able to announce some few minutes later, "has
made a bloomer. Apparently he was half asleep when we came in, and he
shoved us into the lift and slammed the door, forgetting that he had
left the keys on the desk."
"I see," said Sally. "So we're shut in?"
"I'm afraid so. I wish to goodness," said the young man, "I knew French
well. I'd curse him with some vim and not a little animation, the chump!
I wonder what 'blighter' is in French," he said, meditating.
"It's the merest suggestion," said Sally, "but oughtn't we to do
something?"
"What could we do?"
"Well, for one thing, we might all utter a loud yell. It would scare
most of the people in the hotel to death, but there might be a survivor
or two who would come and investigate and let us out."
"What a ripping idea!" said the young man, impressed.
"I'm glad you like it. Now tell him the main out-line, or he'll think
we've gone mad."
The young man searched for words, and eventually found some which
expressed his meaning lamely but well enough to cause Jules to nod in a
depressed sort of way.
"Fine!" said Sally. "Now, all together at the word 'three.'
One--two--Oh, poor darling!" she broke off. "Look at him!"
In the far corner of the lift, the emotional Jules was sobbing silently
into the bunch of cotton-waste which served him in the office of a
pocket-handkerchief. His broken-hearted gulps echoed hollowly down the
shaft.
