Chapter IX: Consuelo Brown

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.