Aliens

"There was a trolley car station just outside the gates of the Dogana, and I halted there and said to him:

""Look here, don"t you worry to come any farther with me. You"ve got business to attend to, I dare say. Run right along and attend to it.

Good morning."

"I was none the better for this encounter when I finally reached the Hotel Robinson and stood in an entrance-hall that was high and dark and as cold as an ice box. I felt humiliated as well as depressed. They say people take a man at his own valuation. People don"t. They average their own experience, and the answer is never very high.

"The Hotel Robinson was one of those rather shabby, half-hotel, half-pension affairs which seem to hang on year after year with any visible means of support. I say "seem." As a matter of fact it was a steady, prosperous establishment with a steady, prosperous connection.

It never advertised, never cleaned up, nor modernized, nor did anything, as far as I could ever see, except exist and prosper. I don"t know who owned it--Robinson perhaps--whether it was a company, or anything else about it. I had stayed in it once or twice, and a four-poster bed in a sort of giant crypt, with plenty of comfort so long as you didn"t step on the flags in your bare feet, a quiet, well-cooked breakfast, and moderate charges were my chief memories of the establishment. _You_ would never find it if you went to Genoa. You and other tourists would be in the Bristol or the Savoy or the Miramare up on the heights above the railroad terminal. You would never find the Hotel Robinsons of Europe. They are like a mirage to the tourists, those quiet, clean, cheap hotels. You hear of them and perhaps catch a glimpse of them in the distance, and you press on, and find they have vanished. They have become dear, and noisy, and flashy, and are waiting for you at the station with a brand-new motor omnibus! Humph!

"A woman came out of a little glazed office, a woman dressed in black plush, as it seemed to me, with list slippers on her feet and a mangy old fur wrap over her arms and across the small of her back. Perhaps it was the unusual state of mind I was in; but to me she had the appearance of a discontented Sibyl, a Sibyl who had been waiting for years for somebody to make an offer for her books. n.o.body, apparently, had ever come, and she had to put up with me, who only wanted Doctor West. I was just asking about him when we tumbled back into the Twentieth Century.

The telephone bell rang in the office.

"The Hotel Robinson had once been a palace, a marble palace with marble walls a couple of feet thick and staircases like a stonecutter"s nightmare. The place was feudal. A coat-of-arms and a hat, in marble, still balanced themselves over the portico--Robinson"s perhaps. I suppose the little glazed office was the sentry-box in the old days, where mendicants got their doles and tall freelances from Germany applied for a situation. May be. I looked through the gla.s.s part.i.tion and saw the woman bending forward, the telephone to her ear, her hand held out over a little charcoal brazier, her lips moving inaudibly, her eyes nearly closed, as though she were weaving a spell.

"I was beginning to feel cold when she rang off and came out again.

"Doctor West? I"ve just spoken to him," she said. "He is at his office in the harbour. He returns at eleven."

""I want to see him on a private matter," I said.

""To consult him?" she queried.

""Not professionally, you understand, _signora_, but on a personal affair."

""Then come in the evening. He dines at seven. He is always in until ten. Will you leave your name?"

"I left my card and wrote on the back of it that I wished to see him about the relatives of Signorina Rosa Cairola. The woman read it, looked at me, shivered, murmured "All right," and went back to her brazier in the office.

"It was more cheerful in that marble tunnel in the evening. There were lights and people about. Not many, but enough to make the place less like a tomb. Perhaps the gloom of the morning was in myself. The Sibyl had put a flower in her hair by way of evening dress and was ordering servants about. I have often wondered who exactly she was. It is the fate of us who wander over the earth to leave so many by-ways unexplored. We can only glimpse and conjecture and, generally, forget.

Life for us is like a walk along the broad, modern streets of an Italian city. Every little while we pa.s.s narrow alleys, mere slots in the ma.s.s of marble architecture, which dive down into darkness and mystery. Every little while we pa.s.s low-lying ramps and odd little causeways, where lighted windows give one sudden vivid pictures of heads and faces and arms, sudden s.n.a.t.c.hes of gesture and conversation flung out at us as we pa.s.s. We want--I want--to investigate them all, to see what"s round the corner, as they say. And we can"t. We"ve got to go on to our destinations, and try and find our fun when we get there. But it wasn"t just the vague, generalized appet.i.te for odd characters which made me contemplate that fusty manageress with interest. It was the sudden fleeting reflection that, but for me, but for a chance accident, there was Rosa in years to come, faded, obscure, efficient, querulous and a failure. And in Hank I saw myself in years to come, only not so successful, not so rich, not quite so shady, I hope. I watched her moving about in her funereal draperies, the flower flopping as she shuffled and gesticulated. Presently she saw me and beckoned, and then I was shown up those ponderous stone stairs, the marble bal.u.s.trade covered with red-baize for fear people might be frozen to it on the way, no doubt. A pair of vast double doors bore a microscopic inscription of the Doctor"s name, together with an almost invisible pimple that was the bell, and before those sombre and enigmatic portals I was left to my fate. For once in a way, I was going to see what was round the corner.

"One leaf of the door opened and remained so for a second before a head appeared, a head of grey, upstanding hair and a dark, bushy beard. You don"t often meet with doors that open in that fashion at home. You know the English fashion--six inches and a face peering at you suspiciously, or a wide fling open and the servant standing right up to you and blocking the way with a paralyzing stare. On the continent there is the porter below and the door opens to let you in, not just to see what you want. So in I walked, the door closed and I found myself in the ante-room of Doctor West"s apartment, faced by Doctor West himself, and watched by a mummy-case standing close to the wall, a mummy-case painted with a strange, anxious face. Its gold eyes had luminous whites and strong black brows. That bizarre curiosity was the key of the Doctor"s furnishing scheme, and it had for me another significance. I knew then that I had heard of him with some certainty. I connected him at last with various stories I had vaguely picked up, s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation on the bridge-deck or in the mess-room. I recalled the Chief telling me once of some doctor who had come, years ago, to stay at some hotel and who had never left it since except to spend a month every year in Egypt.

Great student of mummies, the Chief said. Yes, I remembered it all.

Perhaps, if I had not had Rosa, I might have fastened more securely to the story in the first place. Now Rosa had brought me to him. I told him who I was. He nodded and showed me into his front room.

"It is difficult to convey the sense of overwhelming vastness which oppresses men in such chambers. You might not feel it so. My quarters are limited, as you may imagine. Even a millionaire-pa.s.senger gets no more than a cottager ash.o.r.e. And Rebecca"s place had small rooms full of plush furniture and ship-models in bottles and catamarans in gla.s.s-cases, a.s.segais and j.a.panese junk. Ugly and comfortable. But this room of Doctor West"s was terrifying to me. I couldn"t see the ceiling at all save that, just above where his reading lamp glowed green on an immense table, there floated some far-off drapery and a plunging knee--a fresco lost in the gloom. The walls were painted, on stucco, into panels and each panel had a bunch of flowers tied with interminable ribbons in the centre. You don"t like that sort of thing? Well, it is indigenous there, anyway, and you can"t put shiny dadoes and humorous borders on a forty-foot wall, can you?

"And yet, you know, I saw in a moment, before I had opened my mouth, what lay at the back of all this. I could see that was only a variation of the traditional hermit"s cave, a modern hole in a marble cliff. This tall, high-shouldered man with his spade-shaped beard and ragged smoking jacket, the cotton wool oozing from the quilting and the pockets burst at the corners, had recluse written all over him. He walked over the half dozen rugs that lay between the door and his encampment behind the table and left me forlorn, twiddling my hat and pulling at my coat, somewhere in outer darkness. He was nervous, yet anxious to show he was at ease. I had disturbed him. Once he looked behind him at a door with a black curtain before it, as though he contemplated flight to his bedroom. Suddenly he started off on a journey into the darkness and returned with a chair, a gilt thing with a rounded k.n.o.b of upholstery for a seat. And he asked me gently to sit down.

"A recluse! I had that idea in my mind all the time I was telling him my story, as I am telling it to you, as far as it concerned my girl, and I watched him with a certain abstract curiosity, as well as a very lively anxiety. For I couldn"t think how he came into it. In rapid succession I thought of the possibilities. In a novel, no doubt, he would be her father or a wicked uncle. Or perhaps he had, in a professional capacity, we may say, concocted some villainy! But then his flag wouldn"t be P or any other letter. Villains don"t carry on the humdrum business of attending ships in port for a lump sum down. Yes, as I told him my story I was wondering what his was. And I was conscious also that I was increasing my experience. Here was a recluse. They do not grow on bushes. It stands to reason a young man will not come across many. A young man grows so accustomed to reading about things nowadays that he may quite possibly never miss the actual experience. I could not do that. I have always had some sort of touchstone by which I could keep a hold on the difference between reality and mere imagination. There were many things, common things if you like, which I had never experienced, and I meant to experience them. Nothing dismayed me. I had in me at that time a singular pa.s.sion for life. No doubt this showed in my face, as I have seen it in others--a thirsty look, with a rather over-confident manner. And Doctor West seemed almost to draw back from me as though I were dangerous, explosive. I dare say I was to him. He had left all that, had sunk into a sort of intellectual torpor, insulated, as one may say, from the great dynamos of human life.

""But why," he repeated, after looking at me nervously for a long time and listening to my words. "Why do you wish to marry her?"

""Well," I said, "I suppose it"s because we are in love."

""But do you realize the risks?" he asked gently, moving his papers and books about. "I"m a.s.suming, of course, that you are a gentleman," he went on. "Always best to marry in one"s own cla.s.s, don"t you think?" He studied my card for a while and looked up suddenly.

""But suppose I"ve considered all that," I suggested. "Suppose it isn"t so easy to know one"s cla.s.s, as you call it."

""Oh," said he, getting up and walking off into the darkness. "Oh, if one is a gentleman ..." His voice tailed off.

""But," I persisted, "I"m not sure I _am_ a gentleman. Really I"m not."

""What!" The solitary word came to me out of the shadows with startling distinctness. I nodded. I sat there on that spindley, gim-crack chair and stared contemptuously at the paraphernalia of learning and refinement on the great table, at the silver cigarette box, the bronze inkstand, the sphinxes and scarabs and cenotaphs, the bits of papyrus under gla.s.s, the books and magnifying gla.s.ses. Stared at them and defied them. I nodded.

""It is a fact," I said. "I have been brought up in a genteel position and I don"t consider the whole business to amount to a heap of beans."

"I could hear him walking to and fro, and presently, as my eyes grew accustomed, I made him out, a tall phantom moving in front of other motionless phantoms. I became aware, too, of a warmth coming from that quarter and saw him stoop and open the damper of a closed stove, a studio stove, I think it was.

""Then what can it matter to you what her parents were?" he demanded, straightening up and coming into the light.

""I didn"t say I wasn"t respectable," I told him, "as well as curious.

Anybody would be that."

"He admitted that was so, and came and sat down.

""The girl was born at sea, on a ship," he observed slowly.

""Well," I said, "what of that? So was I."

""Oh, is that so?" He looked at me again in his nervous way. Lit a cigarette and contemplated the smoke.

""Born at sea, on a ship," he repeated. "Her mother came from somewhere up the Adriatic coast, Loreto, if I remember rightly. A lady"s maid. She and her mistress joined the mail-boat at Port Said. They had been living at Cairo. On the voyage she died in giving birth to a child. There was some trouble, which I never fathomed, about the mistress, the Honourable Mrs. James. She did not know her maid was married when she engaged her at Venice. Letters were found in her pockets from a Sergeant Cairola.

Just about this time the Italian Army was severely defeated in Abyssinia, and as far as could be ascertained the sergeant, who had married the girl at Ancona on the very point of embarking, was killed.

Mrs. James was not in a condition, nor was she, I imagine, of a temperament to interest herself in the case. The girl, of course, was buried at sea, several days before we arrived here. As the vessel was British, the disposal of an Italian child was complicated. Not born on Italian soil, she was not eligible for the state inst.i.tutions for orphans. I really forget the details. I had to make a declaration, of course, being the surgeon, but the captain and purser saw the authorities. On our return voyage we learned that they had found foster parents for the child, who received a grant out of the pension due to the widow had she lived. Since then, on only one occasion, a very painful one for me, I may say, have I had anything to do with the case."

"So that I was really no forrader than before, you see. Rosa herself had told me about all of importance that was known. She had been a baby at Rebecca"s, then a little girl and then a big girl. And the story, though Rosa had no part in it, the story spread. I had seen around the corner, and there were so many things I wanted to know! Things I had no right to know, come to that, if I was a gentleman. No right to ask anyway. I got up to go.

""Thank you, doctor," I said. "I suppose I"ll have to be satisfied with what you"ve given me. It won"t make any difference to us, I"m glad to say. But I should have thought you would have been interested in the case, even if Mrs. James wasn"t." He shrugged his shoulders and moved his papers about, plainly anxious for me to be gone.

""Remember, I did not settle here until some time had elapsed. I should have forgotten the whole affair but for the occasion I spoke of."

""I see," I said. "Well, good-night and thank you."

""Good-night," he said nervously. "Excuse me if I don"t go down with you. I am rather busy."

""Literary work, I presume?" I said politely, and he nodded.

""Yes," he replied. "I"m engaged on the Book of the Dead. I go to Egypt every year--next month, in fact--and I am behind in my notes."

"I stood with my hand on the door, looking across the great chamber, and saw him hastily picking up the threads my intrusion had broken. All around the vague walls stood the painted mummy-cases of the dead, like sentinels, watching him with their brilliant, unwinking, expectant eyes.

On a shelf close to me stood cats in dissipated att.i.tudes, mere yellow bundles of swathings and fustiness. On trestles behind the door was a long packing case containing a slender shape. There was no casing here, no painted visage, only a vague impression. The sharp frontal bones had shorn clean through the rotted fabrics and I could see the snarling teeth. The small head seemed thrown back, the eyes closed, in enjoyment of some frightful joke. I looked back again and saw him writing, his head in his left hand, writing, no doubt, something in the Book of the Dead.

"Curious, wasn"t it? Curious, I mean, the sort of people who had crossed one another"s paths at the moment of my girl"s coming so forlornly into the world? I was taken with the grimness of it. I was obsessed with the Book of the Dead. It seemed to me shocking that a man, cultivated, well-to-do apparently, with good health into the bargain, should be absorbed in so crazy a hobby. And the English woman, the honourable creature whose temperament unfitted her to take any interest in an orphan whose mother had died in her service and whose father had perished on the field of battle. Impossible, say you. It isn"t at all impossible. Rich people--I mean the rich who are forever rushing about the world or hiding in Mediterranean villas or in yachts on the Dalmatian coast--are very curious people. The very nature of their mode of existence makes them monsters of selfishness. They are the logical outcome of our predatory social system. They are like the insects which we are told will some day triumph over other forms of life. At least, I think of them as such when I encounter them rushing thither and yon over the face of the earth, crawling up mountains and flying through the air, their shiny wing-cases flashing in the sun and the sound of their progress making a buzz in the newspapers. Well! as I said, it was curious. Curious I should have found my girl in such surroundings, growing there like a straight, healthy plant, just blooming in a bed among all those old decayed and discarded people of the world. Curious, too, I thought, that these people, like old Croasan, had rejected life.

Though they were, if anything, less estimable than he was, for he defied life, in his silly, senile, drunken way, while they seemed simply scared of it.

"But we weren"t. We had, you may say, nothing in common, but we were not afraid of life, and that is the great thing. To me it was wonderful, the experience of courage and curiosity, because I had been brought up to shrink from contact with reality, to keep myself unspotted from the world. It may be, therefore, that I am only describing to you perfectly normal emotions. It may be that I had profited nothing by my long probation. It may be: I cannot tell. I am not a believer in a vicarious existence, living by proxy and tallying each minute, each crisis, by something in a book. n.o.body could love literature more than I; but I am sure at the same time that, while life may chance to be literature, literature is not life. It can"t be. There was the doctor with his Book of the Dead. Do I judge him? Not I. It may be he was a great genius who will be immortal as we count immortality. To him I was, possibly, a mere annoyance, an impertinent interlude in his entrancing studies of his mouldy mummies, indecorously calling his attention to the existence of a modern effete civilization. I don"t know. I never took the trouble to find out. He never materialized again. He moved back into the shadows; a name, tall, pale and with a black beard, pa.s.sing in his little launch, at the call of the code-flag P.

"Well, there it was, a vague and inconclusive episode, like so many others in my life. So many, in fact, that as I look back at it all, if it were not just for Rosa and the children, the sum-total of life for me would be futility. When I read biography, and I have read a good deal of it, I reflect upon the achievements of men, their loves and hates, their steady ambitions hacking away at obstacles until victory is in sight and the guerdon won, or their glorious deaths in action and the fullness of their posthumous fame, and I--I doubt. There is a tinge of theatricality about it all. I doubt. It is not so much that I regret my own failure to copy their example, but rather that the stories don"t tally with my own experience. Often, when I tire of a novel, I ask myself why? And the answer is, This isn"t the way at all! People aren"t _like_ that. Love isn"t like that either. While as for hate, there is very little of it in the world, I fancy, but rather ill-temper and selfishness and indifference. These make for futility, just as our uncertainty of ambition does. We grope.