The Return of Mr Campion Read online

  But, as Margery Allingham commented years later, "cures are tricky affairs."

  Ever since then I have certainly had the power of speech, but ... I never dare speak in public, not because of what I cannot say, but because of what, alas, I can freely, audibly and without a thought!

  In 1923 even more inspiriting than reprieve from the inhibition which hitherto had forced her to walk the last stage of any bus journey "to Clerkenwell, Cricklewood or Kew," and to eschew friendship with "Kalhornes or Constances," she was doing what always she had dreamed of doing, working on short stories and a novel and she was "learning to write under my father's tuition."

  Herbert Allingham passed her over for commercial care to his own literary agent and A. P. Watt sold "The Wind Glass," to Sovereign Publications for eighteen pounds, in 1924 no mean sum for a novice, but it was her father who taught her to be canny in her dealings with editors. Even for this, the first successful invasion of the market in her adult years as ever after throughout her career she refused to concede any but first periodical rights.

  The Beauty King

  In the days when Ricci Blomme was the one competent assistant in Picquet's hairdressing shop in Bray Street, Islington, the Process Blomme was a subject for ridicule, opprobrium and, on occasions, for abuse.

  Papa Picquet, himself a sad little man with the eyes of a Madonna and the mustaches of a Victorian villain, used to regard Ricci's florid exuberance with regret.

  "He is a fool," he would say, peering at his client in the mirror, "the man is mad. He stamps upon his bread and butter. It is pathetic."

  Ricci remained unsuppressed. The germ of greatness was in him and he recognized and fostered it. His quarry was beauty in the female. He strove for it as men strive for power, he starved himself to buy its chemical ingredients, he believed in it as in a holy vision, and in the end he created it and did not recognize his masterpiece when he saw it.

  At the time of his employment in Picquet's salon, which was homely and a little dirty, he strode among the shiny plastic curtains of the cubicles a Napoleon unrecognized. His great chest strained against the bone buttons of his soiled white coat and his wild black hair was ever in need of his professional attention. He was not a visual advertisement for Picquet but his work was good and he remained on sufferance. His conceit exasperated both Picquet and most of the customers. Like all true artists he was tactless.

  "If you were only beautiful, madam," he would murmur in a moment of confidence to the volatile proprietress of The Lion next door as he superintended the delicate tinting of her hair, "then you would be happy. You would have lovers. Your wildest midnight dream would be realized ... is it not so? Wait, wait until the Process Blomme is complete ..."

  It made trouble. Not unnaturally there were frequent altercations at the back of the shop. Both Blomme and Picquet shared an inability to speak any one language with ease. Accidents of birth and an aptitude for mimicry had deprived either of a specified tongue but they each expressed themselves with some fluency in a mixture of French, Italian and English, adding a Latin wealth of imagery to a Saxon crudity in the statement of fact.

  Picquet insulted the process and Ricci insulted two generations of Mesdames Picquet.

  During this period there were only two people in the world who believed in the Process Blomme. The first was Ricci himself, who spent his evenings at chemistry classes and his nights in research, and the second was Francine. Francine was seventeen and not beautiful.

  Her duties in the Picquet establishment were at once undefined and unending. They included the washing of the floor of the salon each morning before the shop opened and the scouring of the shampoo vases in the evening after it closed.

  Francine and Ricci slept at the same lodging house in Old Compton Street, a circumstance which Madame Picquet considered of great significance. However, even her long Normandy nose could detect no irregularity in their relationship and Madame Sousa, the concierge of the lodging house, was of a respectability recognized throughout Soho.

  She was an Arlesienne and since Francine was also of that city it seemed only natural that she should give the girl a bed in the room behind the stove and a ptit ptit dejeuner in return for her services during those hours when she was not at Picquet's.

  This arrangement suited Francine very well. She saw a great deal of Ricci. She was a small person, undersized and almost emaciated, with a sallow skin, a wide mouth inclined to droop at the corners, and two dark smudges of eyes set far apart beneath heavy brows.

  Ricci never looked at her. He was aware of her and frequently honored her with news of the Process but his fine dark eyes never rested upon her face for two moments together.

  Francine did not resent this. She was content to wait. For her Ricci was both the means and the end, both the giver and the gift. Her plan was elementary and she contemplated it with the patient faith with which a votaress contemplates the celestial gardens.

  When Ricci should achieve the Process Blomme and plain women should be plain no more, Francine, so her plan had it, would be his first client. In her rare moments of relaxation she would imagine herself slowly emerging from the plasters, a vaguely defined but eminently lovely being, exquisite and desirable.

  Ricci would then look upon her. His bright brown eyes would quicken and he would stretch out his hands.

  Francine's dreams took her no further but swooned away deliciously, leaving her eager to struggle with the washing up of Madame Sousa and the shampoo vases of Monsieur Picquet. Her life was simplicity itself.

  Meanwhile things did not go smoothly. On the day of the great row when Picquet blew himself up to fighting size and fourteen bottles of assorted unguents were smashed upon the white wall at the far end of the salon. Ricci and Francine left Bray Street, Islington, for ever.

  Ricci strode along breathless and exalted, his old overcoat buttoned over his white jacket and his face burning with righteous anger.

  Francine trotted a pace or so behind him clutching a paper carrier containing his tongs, his scissors and his comb besides her apron.

  Madame Picquet's Parthian observations tingled in her ears. "If he were your lover one could have understood. When he is not even aware of you such fidelity is a degradation."

  The crisp French phrases stung her but she bore them resolutely. She had hitched her wagon to a star and traveling was bound to be uncomfortable.

  Ricci was voluble. That cothon! That excrement! That aging pervert! That Picquet! On the day on which the Process Blomme revealed itself to an enchanted world, Picquet should see himself in all the naked horror of the blessed truth and would vomit. In silence Francine agreed.

  The next few months presented certain difficulties. The cost of the chemical ingredients of the Process were not negligible and the saveable margin of Ricci's income had never been wide. Francine took the place of Madame Sousa's maid of all work, Eva, who had, by the divine instigation of a providence working directly towards the fulfillment of the Process, chosen this particular period to become incentive by a chef sufficiently affluent to support her.

  Ricci filled his bedroom with paraphernalia and devoted himself to the fulfillment of his destiny, but it took time and there were disappointments.

  Francine, staggering up the rickety stairs with a broom or clean linen, would find her Napoleon sleeping exhausted among his little jars or sitting sullen and unapproachable in a dirty shirt, his eyes fixed grimly upon the crazy roofs of the houses over the way.

  Madame Sousa who was, she hoped, a woman of business was at first suspicious and then alarmed. So Francine worked harder. And because she was invaluable and Madame was not committed to provide Ricci with board as well as bed, the account of Monsieur Blomme was allowed to run on.

  Francine suffered agonies of delightful pain in these secret sacrifices for the Process and for its creator. These were sweets for which she was duly punished in the best providential manner by the outcome of the sacrifices themselves. Because she was so unbelievably overworked,
because her presence in Madame's insufferable kitchen was a necessity which ensured the fruition of the Process, it came out that when Ricci began to need a model upon whom to experiment it was Madame's pallid twenty-year-old daughter Odette who was the obvious recipient of the honor.

  Francine steeled her heart. It is necessary to suffer to be beautiful and to love is to endure.

  The day on which Ricci actually succeeded in turning Odette into something on which the average passerby would look with interest was not marked by any natural phenomena.

  Madam herself doubtingly consented to a complimentary trial of the Process Blomme and was volubly amazed and delighted by the result.

  Francine, toiling in the basement, was summoned to see the miracle. She stood trembling in the doorway of Ricci's bedroom like the heroine in a nightmare pantomime where the ugly sisters were not ugly and Cinderella was.

  If the transformed Madame and Mademoiselle Sousa were not actually academically beautiful, at least they were very much more than personable. The Process Blomme consisted largely of a method by which the under skin was rendered instantly mature when the surface peel was removed. It also included Ricci's private eyebrow treatment, his lip stain and his coiffure.

  The change in both mother and daughter was startling. Ricci was in tears. He glanced at Francine in speechless ecstasy and waved his hand towards Madame.

  Francine did not move or speak. Her eyes grew darker and her body sagged. It was a moment of intense emotion. Ricci controlled himself. He threw out his arms. His great chest swelled and strained against the buttons of his shirt. "I have Her!" he said. "I have Her fast! I have caught Her and put Her in a pot." There is nothing so wearying as the ever-receding dream. Francine wept every night for a fortnight but not with ecstasy.

  Her disaster was certainly not due to any conscious cruelty of Ricci's; she realized that. It was fate. Fate had made her unavailable at the moment when Beauty and the love which she confidently believed must instantly be attendant upon it might have been hers. Fate had decided that she must wait.

  Meanwhile Ricci's affairs had begun to move. Madame Sousa was a woman of influence and her support had been magnificently purchased. Interviews were arranged, conferences took place.

  Ricci still talked to Francine when she cleaned his rooms and she found her little wagon bumping along behind a star which threatened to shoot away into spheres beyond her comprehension.

  If the Process Blomme had not been the Process Blomme but some lesser discovery doomed to shine and disappear, Ricci might well have been accused of losing his head, but since it was no less than what it was, it remains on record that he seized his opportunities, fired his backers with his own enthusiasm and soared happily upwards towards those heights which he afterward achieved.

  To say that Graustadt made Blomme is to say that the jar makes the marmalade or the dust-jacket the book, but in the beginning he was very useful. He was a small fair man, delicate in dress as in physique, and he came to Ricci from the original backer who was no fool. Ricci found the new shop off Regent Street embarrassingly clean and austere but he recognized its advantages. The Grey paint, pale gold carpets and cut-glass accoutrements made him feel lonely and inferior at first, but he stomached them because Graustadt had won his confidence.

  Very wisely Monsieur Blomme remained in the background except when the actual operation was in process. Graustadt engaged the assistants, all of them people of education and sound hospital training, the backer arranged for the patents, and Ricci, with unexpected business foresight, saw that he was not cheated.

  There was quite a contretemps about Francine. Both she and Ricci had taken it for granted that a place would be found for her in the shop, and when Madame Sousa and Graustadt both put up separate opposition Ricci was first amazed, then indignant and finally triumphant.

  "She is a good girl, a hard worker. I like her," he said to Graustadt when he had won his point. Graustadt shrugged his shoulders and smiled with an inference which was at once conciliatory and insulting.

  Ricci saw the smile but because Francine was an unrecognized influence in his life he did not understand it in the least. Not wishing to display ignorance he did not pursue the matter.

  Francine took up a position at Chez Blomme as lowly as her situation at Picquet's, and Ricci's rise to fame and fortune was a period of bewilderment and the destruction of faith for her.

  She saw him very seldom in these days. He receded from her. When she caught sight of his plump, white-coated figure hurrying through a crowd of respectful assistants, each one her superior, he was as far away as if she had seen him through a telescope.

  Chez Blomme, which began as a moderately busy beauty shop, became a fortress besieged. The cocktail bars spoke of the Process in the hushed accents of the recently converted. Lonely women in big deserted houses, aging women in youthful circles, women in love and women soured, joined the ordinary horde of beauty hounds who descended upon the small Grey shop like a plague of starlings.

  Legends began to spring up around Ricci as legends sprang up around Merlin. Ricci had magnetic hands. Ricci studied in Vienna. Ricci had secret ingredients flown from China.

  The stories grew wilder as his fame increased and the evidence of the power of the Process became more widely distributed.

  Graustadt took the situation in hand. From her lowly position Francine observed a change of policy. Chez Blomme became exclusive and exorbitant. It moved to a quiet Georgian house off Bond Street, whose elegant front door was not disfigured even by so much as a brass nameplate. Within it was cool, aristocratic and alarming.

  Francine always used the basement entrance and in these days saw no more of Ricci, not even from a distance. Patrons so exalted that their names were not divulged to the assistants who attended the maestro came in their great cars, and after hours certain ladies were treated secretly and for enormous sums.

  Ricci grew sleeker and at night went home, to a mysterious flat which Graustadt had acquired for him, in a shining, chauffeur-driven car of his own. The chauffeur often had to wait in the basement for his overworked employer and he struck up a friendship with Francine. She did not speak very much but always evinced great interest when the man talked, and from him she learnt that the boss was a funny cove, that he never spoke of anything but his work or went anywhere save to his business.

  This intelligence comforted Francine. At least her Napoleon was still a Napoleon on the march. As the money piled up and the backer became positively respectful Ricci might easily have succumbed to the fleshpots, but since his genius was of the true fire, he remained absorbed by the Process itself.

  It was on a midsummer afternoon when even the cool rooms of Chez Blomme smelt faintly of exhaust from the hot roadway that the momentous disagreement took place. Not only the news but the actual vulgar sounds of it penetrated throughout the whole house.

  The effect was sensational. Epithet after epithet, roar after roar filtered through the fine old paneling, shaking the candelabra and shattering the rarefied atmosphere like a rowdy in a concert hall.

  The old house, barely inured to the desecration of trade, winced beneath this final indignity and seemed to huddle the shreds of its Georgian elegance about it. Startled minions paused in their ministrations, incredulity in their eyes. Dignified but sophisticated clients pretended not to have heard, and in the basement Francine listened, new hope in her heart.

  Graustadt left. He fled. His pattering feet scuttled on the thick stair-carpet and were heard no more.

  Ricci remained in his office, the door locked. When his secretary tapped furtively at a quarter to six he answered her ungraciously and would not come out.

  The staff went home at a little past the normal hour, an unusually silent crowd. Ricci's car stood in the street outside.

  Francine remained alone in the basement. She was cleaning a tray of silver ash bowls and cigarette boxes when Ricci came in. He looked tired and disheveled and was in stockinged feet.

  He di
d not greet her but began to talk at once as though there had been no break in their regular communication.

  "He thinks I am to be arranged," he said, his brown eyes blinking in his honest indignation. "I have told him. I am Ricci Blomme. The Process is mine. The whole thing is 'ere in my head. I have told him. 'Go to hell!" I said. "Go to hell where you belong, you piece of pink effeminacy. We shan't see him again. That's a good thing, eh?"

  He sat down on the table and began to turn over the bits of silver with a plump thumb and forefinger.

  "Muck," he said presently. "Don't waste your time with it. I don' want this sort of thing. What do they think I am? A pansy flower? I am Ricci Blomme, Francine. You know that, don't you? You know who I am. I don't want this sort of thing."

  He threw out his hands with a gesture which included the house and its accoutrements and, pursing up his lips, made an expressive and derisive sound.

  Francine was breathless. Her dark eyes were hidden and a faint color pierced the sallowness of her cheeks.

  Ricci padded round the room, prying into cupboards. From time to time he emitted little disconsolate sounds. Finally he returned to his seat on the table.

  "Look, Francine," he said persuasively as he held out his podgy hands, "look, these are the hands of Ricci Blomme. They can make any woman beautiful, any woman in the world."

  The girl in the Grey uniform raised her face and looked at him. Her eyes were secretive and her lips parted. Hungry children look so. Ricci was still explaining his point.

  "Why should I hide myself, Francine? Why should I attend only to the few? It is not the ingredients of any Process that are so expensive. I tell you, Francine, I am a Napoleon, a Hercules ... and they would turn me into a smart servant. This is the way to make money," he imitated Graustadt's gentle lisp. "Francine, have I ever cared about money? Did I care for money at Picquet's? At Madame Sousa's? Never in my life. I don' care about money!"