THE dinner to which Sam had been bidden that night was at the house of his old friend, Mr. Willoughby Braddock, in John Street, Mayfair, and at ten minutes to eight Mr. Braddock was fidgeting about the morning-room, interviewing his housekeeper, Mrs. Martha Lippett. His guests would be arriving at any moment, and for the last quarter of an hour, a-twitter with the nervousness of an anxious host, he had been popping about the place on a series of tours of inspection, as jumpy, to quote the words of Sleddon, his butler—whom, by leaping suddenly out from the dimly lit dining-room, he had caused to bite his tongue and nearly drop a tray of glasses—as an old hen. The general consensus of opinion below stairs was that Willoughby Braddock, in his capacity of master of the revels, was making a thorough pest of himself.
“You are absolutely certain that everything is all right, Mrs. Lippett?”
“Everything is quite all right, Master Willie,” replied the housekeeper equably.
This redoubtable woman differed from her daughter Claire in being tall and thin and beaked like an eagle. One of the well-known Bromage family of Marshott-in-the-Dale, she had watched with complacent pride the Bromage nose developing in her sons and daughters, and it had always been a secret grief to her that Claire, her favourite, who inherited so much of her forceful and determined character, should have been the only one of her children to take nasally after the inferior, or Lippett, side of the house. Mr. Lippett had been an undistinguished man, hardly fit to mate with a Bromage and certainly not worthy to be resembled in appearance by the best of his daughters.
“You’re sure there will be enough to eat?”
“There will be ample to eat.”
“How about drinks?” said Mr. Braddock, and was reminded by the word of a grievance which had been rankling within his bosom ever since his last expedition to the dining room. He pulled down the corners of his white waistcoat and ran his finger round the inside of his collar. “Mrs. Lippett,” he said, “I—er—I was outside the dining room just now——”
“Were you, Master Willie? You must not fuss so. Everything will be quite all right.”
“——and I overheard you telling Sleddon not to let me have any champagne to-night,” said Mr. Braddock, reddening at the outrageous recollection.
The housekeeper stiffened.
“Yes, I did, Master Willie. And your dear mother, if she were still with us, would have given the very same instructions—after what my daughter Claire told me of what occurred the other night and the disgraceful condition you were in. What your dear mother would have said, I don’t know!”
Mrs. Lippett’s conversation during the last twentyyears of Willoughby Braddock’s life had dealt largely with speculations as to what his dear mother would have said of various ventures undertaken or contemplated by him.
“You must fight against the craving, Master Willie. Remember your Uncle George!”
Mr. Braddock groaned in spirit. One of the things that make these old retainers so hard to bear is that they are so often walking editions of thechroniques scandaleusesof the family. It sometimes seemed to Mr. Braddock that he could not move a step in any direction without having the awful example of some erring ancestor flung up against him.
“Well, look here,” he said, with weak defiance, “I want champagne to-night.”
“You will have cider, Master Willie.”
“But I hate cider.”
“Cider is good for you, Master Willie,” said Mrs. Lippett firmly.
The argument was interrupted by the ringing of the doorbell. The housekeeper left the room, and presently Sleddon, the butler, entered, escorting Lord Tilbury.
“Ha, my dear fellow,” said Lord Tilbury, bustling in.
He beamed upon his host as genially as the Napoleonic cast of his countenance would permit. He rather liked Willoughby Braddock, as he rather liked all very rich young men.
“How are you?” said Mr. Braddock. “Awfully good of you to come at such short notice.”
“My dear fellow!”
He spoke heartily, but he had, as a matter of fact, been a little piqued at being invited to dinner on the morning of the feast. He considered that his eminence entitled him to more formal and reverential treatment. And though he had accepted, having had previous experience of the excellence of Mr. Braddock’s cook, he felt that something in the nature of an apology was due to him and was glad that it had been made.
“I asked you at the last moment,” explained Mr. Braddock, “because I wasn’t sure till this morning that Sam Shotter would be able to come. I thought it would be jolly for him, meeting you out of the office, don’t you know.”
Lord Tilbury inclined his head. He quite saw the force of the argument that it would be jolly for anyone, meeting him.
“So you know young Shotter?”
“Oh, yes. We were at school together.”
“A peculiar young fellow.”
“A great lad.”
“But—er—a little eccentric, don’t you think?”
“Oh, Sam always was a bit of nib,” said Mr. Braddock. “At school there used to be some iron bars across the passage outside our dormitory, the idea being to coop us up during the night, don’t you know. Sam used to shin over these and go downstairs to the house master’s study.”
“With what purpose?”
“Oh, just to sit.”
Lord Tilbury was regarding his host blankly. Not a day passed, he was ruefully reflecting, but he received some further evidence of the light and unstable character of this young man of whom he had so rashly taken charge.
“It sounds a perfectly imbecile proceeding to me,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know, you know,” said Mr. Braddock, for the defence. “You see, occasionally there would be a cigar or a plate of biscuits or something left out, and then Sam would scoop them. So it wasn’t altogether a waste of time.”
Sleddon was entering with a tray.
“Cocktail?” said Mr. Braddock, taking one himself with a defiant glare at his faithful servant, who was trying to keep the tray out of his reach.
“No, I thank you,” said Lord Tilbury. “My doctor has temporarily forbidden me the use of alcoholic beverages. I have been troubled of late with a suspicion of gout.”
“Tough luck.”
“No doubt I am better without them. I find cider an excellent substitute.... Are you expecting many people here to-night?”
“A fairish number. I don’t think you know any of them—except, of course, old Wrenn.”
“Wrenn? You mean the editor of myHome Companion?”
“Yes. He and his niece are coming. She lives with him, you know.”
Lord Tilbury started as if a bradawl had been thrust through the cushions of his chair; and for an instant, so powerfully did these words affect him, he had half a mind to bound at the receding Sleddon and, regardless of medical warnings, snatch from him that rejectedcocktail. A restorative of some kind seemed to him imperative.
The statement by Mr. Wrenn, delivered in his office on the morning of Sam’s arrival, that he possessed no daughter had had the effect of relieving Lord Tilbury’s mind completely. Francie, generally so unerring in these matters, had, he decided, wronged Sam in attributing his occupancy of Mon Repos to a desire to be next door to some designing girl. And now it appeared that she had been right all the time.
He was still staring with dismay at his unconscious host when the rest of the dinner guests began to arrive. They made no impression on his dazed mind. Through a sort of mist, he was aware of a young man with a face like a rabbit, another young man with a face like another rabbit; two small, shingled creatures, one blonde, the other dark, who seemed to be either wives or sisters of these young men; and an unattached female whom Mr. Braddock addressed as Aunt Julia. His Lordship remained aloof, buried in his thoughts and fraternising with none of them.
Then Sam appeared, and a few moments later Sleddon announced Mr. Wrenn and Miss Derrick; and Lord Tilbury, who had been examining a picture by the window, swung round with a jerk.
In a less prejudiced frame of mind he might have approved of Kay; for, like so many other great men, he had a nice eye for feminine beauty, and she was looking particularly attractive in a gold dress which had survived the wreck of Midways. But now that very beauty merely increased his disapproval and alarm. He looked at her with horror. He glared asthe good old father in a film glares at the adventuress from whose clutches he is trying to save his only son.
At this moment, however, something happened that sent hope and comfort stealing through his heart. Sam, who had been seized upon by Aunt Julia and had been talking restively to her for some minutes, now contrived by an adroit piece of side-stepping to remove himself from her sphere of influence. He slid swiftly up to Kay, and Lord Tilbury, who was watching her closely, saw her face freeze. She said a perfunctory word or two, and then, turning away, began to talk with great animation to one of the rabbit-faced young men. And Sam, with rather the manner of one who has bumped into a brick wall in the dark, drifted off and was immediately gathered in again by Aunt Julia.
A delightful sensation of relief poured over Lord Tilbury. In the days of his youth when he had attended subscription dances at the Empress Rooms, West Kensington, he had sometimes seen that look on the faces of his partners when he had happened to tread on their dresses. He knew its significance. Such a look could mean but one thing—that Kay, though living next door to Sam, did not regard him as one of the pleasant features of the neighbourhood. In short, felt Lord Tilbury, if there was anything between these two young people, it was something extremely one-sided; and he went in to dinner with a light heart, prepared to enjoy the cooking of Mr. Braddock’s admirable chef as it should be enjoyed.
When, on sitting at the table, he found that Kay was on his right, he was pleased, for he had now come to entertain a feeling of warm esteem for this excellentand sensible girl. It was his practice never to talk while he ate caviare; but when that had been consumed in a holy silence he turned to her, beaming genially.
“I understand you live at Valley Fields, Miss Derrick.”
“Yes.”
“A charming spot.”
“Very.”
“The college grounds are very attractive.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Have you visited the picture gallery?”
“Yes, several times.”
Fish arrived—sole meunière. It was Lord Tilbury’s custom never to talk during the fish course.
“My young friend Shotter is, I believe, a near neighbour of yours,” he said, when thesole meunièrewas no more.
“He lives next door.”
“Indeed? Then you see a great deal of him, no doubt?”
“I never see him.”
“A most delightful young fellow,” said Lord Tilbury, sipping cider.
Kay looked at him stonily.
“Do you think so?” she said.
Lord Tilbury’s last doubts were removed. He felt that all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Like some joyous reveller out of Rabelais, he raised his glass with a light-hearted flourish. He looked as if he were about to start a drinking chorus.
“Excellent cider, this, Braddock,” he boomed genially. “Most excellent.”
Willoughby Braddock, who had been eying his own supply of that wholesome beverage with sullen dislike, looked at him in pained silence; and Sam, who had been sitting glumly, listening without interest to the prattle of one of the shingled girls, took it upon himself to reply. He was feeling sad and ill used. That incident before dinner had distressed him. Moreover, only a moment ago he had caught Kay’s eye for an instant across the table, and it had been cold and disdainful. He welcomed the opportunity of spoiling somebody’s life, and particularly that of an old ass like Lord Tilbury, who should have been thinking about the hereafter instead of being so infernally hearty.
“I read a very interesting thing about cider the other day,” he said in a loud, compelling voice that stopped one of the rabbit-faced young men in mid-anecdote as if he had been smitten with an axe. “It appears that the farmers down in Devonshire put a dead rat in every barrel——”
“My dear Shotter!”
“——to give it body,” went on Sam doggedly. “And the curious thing is that when the barrels are opened, the rats are always found to have completely disappeared—showing the power of the juice.”
A wordless exclamation proceeded from Lord Tilbury. He lowered his glass. Mr. Braddock was looking like one filled with a sudden great resolution.
“I read it in Pyke’sHome Companion,” said Sam. “So it must be true.”
“A little water, please,” said Lord Tilbury stiffly.
“Sleddon,” said Mr. Braddock in a voice of thunder, “give me some champagne.”
“Sir?” quavered the butler. He cast a swift look over his shoulder, as if seeking the moral support of Mrs. Lippett. But Mrs. Lippett was in the housekeeper’s room.
“Sleddon!”
“Yes, sir,” said the butler meekly.
Sam was feeling completely restored to his usual sunny self.
“Talking of Pyke’sHome Companion,” he said, “did you take my advice and read that serial of Cordelia Blair’s, Lord Tilbury?”
“I did not,” replied His Lordship shortly.
“You should. Miss Blair is a very remarkable woman.”
Kay raised her eyes.
“A great friend of yours, isn’t she?” she said.
“I would hardly say that. I’ve only met her once.”
“But you got on very well with her, I heard.”
“I think I endeared myself to her pretty considerably.”
“So I understood.”
“I gave her a plot for a story,” said Sam.
One of the rabbit-faced young men said that he could never understand how fellows—or women, for that matter—thought up ideas for stories—or plays, for the matter of that—or, as a matter of fact, any sort of ideas, for that matter.
“This,” Sam explained, “was something that actually happened—to a friend of mine.”
The other rabbit-faced young man said that something extremely rummy had once happened to a pal ofhis. He had forgotten what it was, but it had struck him at the time as distinctly rummy.
“This fellow,” said Sam, “was fishing up in Canada. He lived in a sort of shack.”
“A what?” asked the blonde shingled girl.
“A hut. And tacked up on the wall of the shack was a photograph of a girl, torn out of an illustrated weekly paper.”
“Pretty?” asked the dark shingled girl.
“You bet she was pretty,” said Sam devoutly. “Well, this man spent weeks in absolute solitude, with not a soul to talk to—nothing, in fact, to distract his mind from the photograph. The consequence was that he came to look on this girl as—well, you might say an old friend.”
“Sleddon,” said Mr. Braddock, “more champagne.”
“Some months later,” proceeded Sam, “the man came over to England. He met the girl. And still looking on her as an old friend, you understand, he lost his head and, two minutes after they had met, he kissed her.”
“Must have been rather a soppy kind of a silly sort of idiot,” observed the blonde shingled girl critically.
“Perhaps you’re right,” agreed Sam. “Still, that’s what happened.”
“I don’t see where the story comes in,” said one of the rabbit-faced young men.
“Well, naturally, you see, not realising the true state of affairs, the girl was very sore,” said Sam.
The rabbit-faced young men looked at each other and shook their heads. The shingled young women raised their eyebrows pityingly.
“No good,” said the blonde shingled girl.
“Dud,” said the dark shingled girl. “Who’s going to believe nowadays that a girl is such a chump as to mind a man kissing her?”
“Everybody kisses everybody nowadays,” said one of the rabbit-faced young men profoundly.
“Girl was making a fuss about nothing,” said the other rabbit-faced young man.
“And how does the story end?” asked Aunt Julia.
“It hasn’t ended,” said Sam. “Not yet.”
“Sleddon!” said Mr. Braddock, in a quiet, dangerous voice.
It is possible, if you are young and active and in an exhilarated frame of mind, to walk from John Street, Mayfair, to Burberry Road, Valley Fields. Sam did so. His frame of mind was extraordinarily exhilarated. It seemed to him, reviewing recent events, that he had detected in Kay’s eyes for an instant a look that resembled the first dawning of spring after a hard winter; and, though not in the costume for athletic feats, he covered the seven miles that separated him from home at a pace which drew derisive comment from the proletariat all along the route. The Surrey-side Londoner is always intrigued by the spectacle of anyone hurrying, and when that person is in dress clothes and a tall hat he expresses himself without reserve.
Sam heard nothing of this ribaldry. Unconscious of the world, he strode along, brushing through Brixton, hurrying through Herne Hill, and presently arrived, warm and happy, at the door of Mon Repos.
He let himself in; and, entering, was aware of a note lying on the hall table.
He opened it absently. The handwriting was strange to him, and feminine:
“Dear Mr. Shotter: I should be much obliged if you would ask your manservant not to chirrup at me out of trees.“Yours truly,“Kay Derrick.”
“Dear Mr. Shotter: I should be much obliged if you would ask your manservant not to chirrup at me out of trees.
“Yours truly,“Kay Derrick.”
He had to read this curt communication twice before he was able fully to grasp its meaning. When he did so a flood of self-pity poured over Sam. He quivered with commiseration for the hardness of his lot. Here was he, doing all that a man could to establish pleasant neighbourly relations with the house next door, and all the while Hash foiling his every effort by chirruping out of trees from morning till night. It was bitter, bitter.
He was standing there, feeding his surging wrath by a third perusal of the letter, when from the direction of the kitchen there suddenly sounded a long, loud, agonised cry. It was like the wail of a soul in torment; and without stopping to pick up his hat, which he had dropped in the sheer shock of this dreadful sound, he raced down the stairs.
“’Ullo,” said Hash, looking up from an evening paper. “Back?”
His placidity amazed Sam. If his ears were any guide, murder had been done in this room only a fewseconds before, and here was this iron man reading the racing news without having turned a hair.
“What on earth was that?”
“What was what?”
“That noise.”
“Oh, that was Amy,” said Hash.
Sam’s eye was diverted by movement in progress in the shadows behind the table. A vast shape was rising from the floor, revealing itself as an enormous dog. It finished rising; and having placed its chin upon the table, stood looking at him with dreamy eyes and a wrinkled forehead, like a shortsighted person trying to recall a face.
“Oh, yes,” said Sam, remembering. “So you got him?”
“Her.”
“What is he—she?”
“Gawd knows,” said Hash simply. It was a problem which he himself had endeavoured idly to solve earlier in the evening. “I’ve named her after an old aunt of mine. Looks a bit like her.”
“She must be an attractive woman.”
“She’s dead.”
“Perhaps it’s all for the best,” said Sam. He leaned forward and pulled the animal’s ears in friendly fashion. Amy simpered in a ladylike way, well pleased. “Would you say she was a bloodhound, Hash?”
“I wouldn’t say she was anything, not to swear to.”
“A kind of canine cocktail,” said Sam. “The sort of thing a Cruft’s Show judge dreams about when he has a nightmare.”
He observed something lying on the floor; and stooping, found that his overtures to the animal had caused Kay’s note to slip from his fingers. He picked it up and eyed Hash sternly. Amy, charmed by his recent attentions, snuffled like water going down the waste pipe of a bath.
“Hash!” said Sam.
“’Ullo?”
“What the devil,” demanded Sam forcefully, “do you mean by chirruping at Miss Derrick out of trees?”
“I only said oo-oo, Sam,” pleaded Mr. Todhunter.
“You said what?”
“Oo-oo!”
“What on earth did you want to say oo-oo for?”
Much voyaging on the high seas had given Hash’s cheeks the consistency of teak, but at this point something resembling a blush played about them.
“I thought it was the girl.”
“What girl?”
“The maid. Clara, ’er name is.”
“Well, why should you say oo-oo at her?”
Again that faint, fleeting blush coloured Hash’s face. Before Sam’s revolted eyes he suddenly looked coy.
“Well, it’s like this, Sam: The ’ole thing ’ere is, we’re engaged.”
“What!”
“Engaged to be married.”
“Engaged!”
“Ah!” said Mr. Todhunter. And once more that repellent smirk rendered his features hideous beyond even Nature’s liberal specifications concerning them.
Sam sat down. This extraordinary confession had shaken him deeply.
“You’re engaged?”
“Ah!”
“But I thought you disliked women.”
“So I do—most of ’em.”
Another aspect of the matter struck Sam. His astonishment deepened.
“But how did you manage it so soon?”
“Soon?”
“You can’t have seen the girl more than about half a dozen times.”
Still another mysterious point about this romance presented itself to Sam. He regarded the great lover with frank curiosity.
“And what was the attraction?” he asked. “That’s what I can’t understand.”
“She’s a nice girl,” argued Hash.
“I don’t mean in her; I mean in you. What is there about you that could make this misguided female commit such a rash act? If I were a girl, and you begged me for one little rose from my hair, I wouldn’t give it to you.”
“But——”
“No,” said Sam firmly, “it’s no use arguing; I just wouldn’t give it to you. What did she see in you?”
“Oh, well——”
“It couldn’t have been your looks—we’ll dismiss that right away, of course. It couldn’t have been your conversation or your intellect, because you haven’t any. Then what was it?”
Mr. Todhunter smirked coyly.
“Oh, well, I’ve got a way with me, Sam—that’s how it is.”
“A way?”
“Ah!”
“What sort of way?”
“Oh, just a way.”
“Have you got it with you now?”
“Naturally I wouldn’t ’ave it with me now,” said Hash.
“You keep it for special occasions, eh? Well, you haven’t yet explained how it all happened.”
Mr. Todhunter coughed.
“Well, it was like this, Sam: I see ’er in the garden, and I says ‘Ullo!’ and she says ‘Ullo!’ and then she come to the fence and then I come to the fence, and she says ‘Ullo!’ and I says ‘Ullo!’ and then I kiss her.”
Sam gaped.
“Didn’t she object?”
“Object? What would she want to object for? No, indeed! It seemed to break what you might call the ice, and after that everything got kind of nice and matey. And then one thing led to another—see what I mean?”
An aching sense of the injustice of things afflicted Sam.
“Well, it’s very strange,” he said.
“What’s strange?”
“I mean, I knew a man—a fellow—who—er—kissed a girl when he had only just met her, and she was furious.”
“Ah,” said Hash, leaping instantly at a plausible solution, “but then ’e was probably a chap with a facelike Gawd-’elpus and hair growing out of his ears. Naturally, no one wouldn’t like ’aving someone like that kissing ’em.”
Sam went upstairs to bed. Before retiring, he looked at himself in the mirror long and earnestly. He turned his head sideways so that the light shone upon his ears. He was conscious of a strange despondency.
Kay lay in bed, thinking. Ever and anon a little chuckle escaped her. She was feeling curiously happy to-night. The world seemed to have become all of a sudden interesting and amusing. An odd, uncontrollable impulse urged her to sing.
She would not in any case have sung for long, for she was a considerate girl, and the recollection would soon have come to her that there were people hard by who were trying to get to sleep. But, as a matter of fact, she sang only a mere bar or two, for even as she began, there came a muffled banging on the wall—a petulant banging. Hash Todhunter loved his Claire, but he was not prepared to put up with this sort of thing. Three doughty buffets he dealt the wall with the heel of a number-eleven shoe.
Kay sang no more. She turned out the light and lay in the darkness, her face set.
Silence fell upon San Rafael and Mon Repos. And then, from somewhere in the recesses of the latter, a strange, bansheelike wailing began. Amy was homesick.
THE day that followed Mr. Braddock’s dinner party dawned on a world shrouded in wet white fog. By eight o’clock, however, this had thinned to a soft, pearly veil that hung clingingly to the tree tops and lingered about the grass of the lawn in little spiderwebs of moisture. And when Kay Derrick came out into the garden, a quarter of an hour later, the September sun was already beginning to pierce the mist with hints of a wonderful day to come.
It was the sort of morning which should have bred happiness and quiet content, but Kay had waked in a mood of irritated hostility which fine weather could not dispel. What had happened overnight had stung her to a militant resentment, and sleep had not removed this.
Possibly this was because her sleep, like that of everyone else in the neighbourhood, had been disturbed and intermittent. From midnight until two in the morning the dog Amy had given a spirited imitation of ten dogs being torn asunder by red-hot pincers. At two, Hash Todhunter had risen reluctantly from his bed, and arming himself with the number-eleven shoe mentioned in the previous chapter, had reasoned with her. This had produced a brief respite, but by a quarter of three large numbers of dogs were once more being massacred on the premises of Mon Repos, that ill-named house.
At three, Sam went down; and being a young man who liked dogs and saw their point of view, tried diplomacy. This took the shape of the remains of a leg of mutton and it worked like a charm. Amy finished the leg of mutton and fell into a surfeited slumber, and peace descended on Burberry Road.
Kay paced the gravel path with hard feelings, which were not removed by the appearance a few moments later of Sam, clad in flannels and a sweater. Sam, his back to her and his face to the sun, began to fling himself about in a forceful and hygienic manner; and Kay, interested in spite of herself, came to the fence to watch him. She was angry with him, for no girl likes to have her singing criticised by bangs upon the wall; but nevertheless she could not entirely check a faint feeling of approval as she watched him. A country-bred girl, Kay liked men to be strong and of the open air; and Sam, whatever his moral defects, was a fine physical specimen. He looked fit and hard and sinewy.
Presently, in the course of a complicated movement which involved circular swinging from the waist, his eye fell upon her. He straightened himself and came over to the fence, flushed and tousled and healthy.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Good morning,” said Kay coldly. “I want to apologise, Mr. Shotter. I’m afraid my singing disturbed you last night.”
“Good Lord!” said Sam. “Was that you? I thought it was the dog.”
“I stopped directly you banged on the wall.”
“I didn’t bang on any wall. It must have been Hash.”
“Hash?”
“Hash Todhunter, the man who cooks for me—and, oh, yes, who chirrups at you out of trees. I got your note and spoke to him about it. He explained that he had mistaken you for your maid, Claire. It’s rather a romantic story. He’s engaged to her.”
“Engaged!”
“That’s just what I said when he told me, and in just that tone of voice. I was surprised. I gather, however, that Hash is what you would call a quick worker. He tells me he has a way with him. According to his story, he kissed her, and after that everything was nice and matey.”
Kay flushed faintly.
“Oh!” she said.
“Yes,” said Sam.
There was a silence. The San Rafael kitten, which had been playing in the grass, approached and rubbed a wet head against Kay’s ankle.
“Well, I must be going in,” said Kay. “Claire is in bed with one of her neuralgic headaches and I have to cook my uncle’s breakfast.”
“Oh, no, really? Let me lend you Todhunter.”
“No, thanks.”
“Perhaps you’re wise. Apart from dry hash, he’s a rotten cook.”
“So is Claire.”
“Really? What a battle of giants it will be when they start cooking for each other!”
“Yes.”
Kay stooped and tickled the kitten under the ear, then walked quickly toward the house. The kitten, having subjected Sam to a long and critical scrutiny, decided that he promised little entertainment to an active-minded cat and galloped off in pursuit of a leaf. Sam sighed and went in to have a bath.
Some little time later, the back door of Mon Repos opened from within as if urged by some irresistible force, and the dog Amy came out to take the morning air.
Dogs are creatures of swiftly changing moods. Only a few hours before, Amy, in the grip of a dreadful depression caused by leaving the public house where she had spent her girlhood—for, in case the fact is of interest to anyone, Hash had bought her for five shillings from the proprietor of the Blue Anchor at Tulse Hill—had been making the night hideous with her lamentations. Like Rachel, she had mourned and would not be comforted. But now, to judge from her manner and a certain jauntiness in her walk, she had completely resigned herself to the life of exile. She scratched the turf and sniffed the shrubs with the air of a lady of property taking a stroll round her estates. And when Hash, who did not easily forgive, flung an egg at her out of the kitchen window so that it burst before her on the gravel, she ate the remains lightheartedly, as one who feels that the day is beginning well.
The only flaw in the scheme of things seemed to herto consist in a lack of society. By nature sociable, she yearned for company, and for some minutes roamed the garden in quest of it. She found a snail under a laurel bush, but snails are reserved creatures, self-centred and occupied with their own affairs, and this one cut Amy dead, retreating into its shell with a frigid aloofness which made anything in the nature of camaraderie out of the question.
She returned to the path, and became interested in the wooden structure that ran along it. Rearing herself up to a majestic height and placing her paws on this, she looked over and immediately experienced all the emotions of stout Balboa when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. It is not indeed, too much to say that Amy at that moment felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken; for not only was there a complete new world on the other side of this wooden structure but on the grass in the middle of it was a fascinating kitten running round in circles after its tail.
Amy had seen enough. She would have preferred another dog to chat with; but failing that, a kitten made an admirable substitute. She adored kittens. At the Blue Anchor there had been seven, all intimate friends of hers, who looked upon her body as a recreation ground and her massive tail as a perpetual object of the chase. With a heave of her powerful hind legs, she hoisted herself over the fence and, descending on the other side like the delivery of half a ton of coal, bounded at the kitten, full of good feeling. And the kitten, after one brief, shocked stare, charged madly at the fence and scrambled up it into the branches ofthe tree from which Hash Todhunter had done his recent chirruping.
Amy came to the foot of the tree and looked up, perplexed. She could make nothing of this. It is not given to dogs any more than to men to see themselves as others see them, and it never occurred to her for an instant that there was in her appearance anything that might be alarming to a high-strung young cat. But a dog cannot have a bloodhound-Airedale father and a Great Dane-Labrador mother without acquiring a certain physique. The kitten, peering down through the branches, congratulated itself on a narrow escape from death and climbed higher. And at this point Kay came out into the garden.
“Hullo, dog,” said Kay. “What are you doing here?”
Amy was glad to see Kay. She was a shortsighted dog and took her for the daughter of the host of the Blue Boar who had been wont to give her her meals. She left the tree and galloped toward her. And Kay, who had been brought up with dogs from childhood and knew the correct procedure to be observed when meeting a strange one, welcomed her becomingly. Hash, hurrying out on observing Amy leap the fence, found himself a witness of what practically amounted to a feast of reason and a flow of soul. That is to say, Amy was lying restfully on her back with her legs in the air and Kay was thumping her chest.
“I hope the dog is not annoying you, lady,” said Hash in his bestpreux-chevaliermanner.
Kay looked up and perceived the man who had chirruped at her from the tree. Having contracted tomarry into San Rafael, he had ceased to be an alien and had become something in the nature of one of the family; so she smiled amiably at him, conscious the while of a passing wonder that Claire’s heart should have been ensnared by one who, whatever his merits, was notably deficient in conventional good looks.
“Not at all, thank you,” she said. “Is he your dog?”
“She,” corrected Hash. “Yes, miss.”
“She’s a nice dog.”
“Yes, miss,” said Hash, but with little heartiness.
“I hope she won’t frighten my kitten, though. It’s out in the garden somewhere. I can hear it mewing.”
Amy could hear the mewing too; and still hopeful that an understanding might be reached, she at once proceeded to the tree and endeavoured to jump to the top of it. In this enterprise she fell short by some fifty feet, but she jumped high enough to send the kitten scrambling into the upper branches.
“Oh!” cried Kay, appreciating the situation.
Hash also appreciated the situation; and being a man of deeds rather than words, vaulted over the fence and kicked Amy in the lower ribs. Amy, her womanly feelings wounded, shot back into her own garden, where she stood looking plaintively on with her forepaws on the fence. Treatment like this was novel to her, for at the Blue Anchor she had been something of a popular pet; and it seemed to her that she had fallen among tough citizens. She expressed a not unnatural pique by throwing her head back and uttering a loud, moaning cry like an ocean liner in a fog. Hearing which, the kitten, which had been in two minds about risking a descent, climbed higher.
“What shall we do?” said Kay.
“Shut up!” bellowed Hash. “Not you, miss,” he hastened to add with a gallant smirk. “I was speaking to the dog.” He found a clod of earth and flung it peevishly at Amy, who wrinkled her forehead thoughtfully as it flew by, but made no move. Amy’s whole attitude now was that of one who has got a front-row seat and means to keep it. “The ’ole thing ’ere,” explained Hash, “is that that there cat is scared to come down, bein’ frightened of this ’ere dog.”
And having cleared up what might otherwise have remained a permanent mystery, he plucked a blade of grass and chewed reflectively.
“I wonder,” said Kay, with an ingratiating smile, “if you would mind climbing up and getting her.”
Hash stared at her amazedly. Her smile, which was wont to have so much effect on so many people, left him cold. It was the silliest suggestion he had ever heard in his life.
“Me?” he said, marvelling. “You mean me?”
“Yes.”
“Climb up this ’ere tree and fetch that there cat?”
“Yes.”
“Lady,” said Hash, “do you think I’m an acrobat or something?”
Kay bit her lips. Then, looking over the fence, she observed Sam approaching.
“Anything wrong?” said Sam.
Kay regarded him with mixed feelings. She had an uneasy foreboding that it might be injudicious to put herself under an obligation to a young man so obviously belonging to the class of those who, givenan inch, take an ell. On the other hand, the kitten, mewing piteously, had plainly got itself into a situation from which only skilled assistance could release it. She eyed Sam doubtfully.
“Your dog has frightened my kitten up the tree,” she said.
A wave of emotion poured over Sam. Only yesterday he had been correcting the proofs of a short story designed for a forthcoming issue of Pyke’sHome Companion—Celia’s Airman, by Louise G. Boffin—and had curled his lip with superior masculine scorn at what had seemed to him the naïve sentimentality of its central theme. Celia had quarrelled with her lover, a young wing commander in the air force, and they had become reconciled owing to the latter saving her canary. In a mad moment in which his critical faculties must have been completely blurred, Sam had thought the situation far-fetched; but now he offered up a silent apology to Miss Boffin, realising that it was from the sheer, stark facts of life that she had drawn her inspiration.
“You want her brought down?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Leave it to me,” said Sam. “Leave it absolutely to me—leave the whole thing entirely and completely to me.”
“It’s awfully good of you.”
“Not at all,” said Sam tenderly. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you—nothing. I was saying to myself only just now——”
“I shouldn’t,” said Hash heavily. “Only go breaking your neck. What we ought to do ’ere is to stand under the tree and chirrup.”
Sam frowned.
“You appear to me, Hash,” he said with some severity, “to think that your mission in life is to chirrup. If you devoted half the time to work that you do to practicing your chirruping, Mon Repos would be a better and a sweeter place.”
He hoisted himself into the tree and began to climb rapidly. So much progress did he make that when, a few moments later, Kay called to him, he could not distinguish her words. He scrambled down again.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“I only said take care,” said Kay.
“Oh!” said Sam.
He resumed his climb. Hash followed him with a pessimistic eye.
“A cousin of mine broke two ribs playing this sort of silly game,” he said moodily. “Light-haired feller named George Turner. Had a job pruning the ellums on a gentleman’s place down Chigwell way. Two ribs he broke, besides a number of contusions.”
He was aggrieved to find that Kay was not giving that attention to the story which its drama and human interest deserved.
“Two ribs,” he repeated in a louder voice. “Also cuts, scratches and contusions. Ellums are treacherous things. You think the branches is all right, but lean your weight on ’em and they snap. That’s an ellum he’s climbing now.”
“Oh, be quiet!” said Kay nervously. She was following Sam’s movements as tensely as ever Celia followed her airman’s. It did look horribly dangerous, what he was doing.
“The proper thing we ought to have done ’ere was to have took a blanket and a ladder and a pole and to have held the blanket spread out and climbed the ladder and prodded at that there cat with the pole, same as they do at fires,” said Hash, casting an unwarrantable slur on the humane methods of the fire brigade.
“Oh, well done!” cried Kay.
Sam was now operating in the topmost branches, and the kitten, not being able to retreat farther, had just come within reach of his groping hand. Having regarded him suspiciously for some moments and registered a formal protest against the proceedings by making a noise like an exploding soda-water bottle, it now allowed itself to be picked up and buttoned into his coat.
“Splendid!” shouted Kay.
“What?” bellowed Sam, peering down.
“I said splendid!” roared Kay.
“The lady said splendid!” yelled Hash, in a voice strengthened by long practice in announcing dinner in the midst of hurricanes. He turned to Kay with a mournful shaking of the head, his bearing that of the man who has tried to put a brave face on the matter, but feels the uselessness of affecting further optimism. “It’s now that’s the dangerous part, miss,” he said. “The coming down, what I mean. I don’t say the climbing up of one of these ’ere ellums is safe—not what you would call safe; but it’s when you’re coming down that the nasty accidents occur. My cousin was coming down when he broke his two ribs and got allthem contusions. George Turner his name was—a light-haired feller, and he broke two ribs and had to have seven stitches sewed in him.”
“Oh!” cried Kay.
“Ah!” said Hash.
He spoke with something of the smug self-satisfaction of the prophet whose predicted disasters come off as per schedule. Half-way down the tree, Sam, like Mr. Turner, had found proof of the treachery of ellums. He had rested his weight on a branch which looked solid, felt solid and should have been solid, and it had snapped under him. For one breathless moment he seemed to be about to shoot down like Lucifer, then he snatched at another bough and checked his fall.
This time the bough held. It was as if the elm, having played its practical joke and failed, had become discouraged. Hash, with something of the feelings of a spectator in the gallery at a melodrama who sees the big scene fall flat, watched his friend and employer reach the lowest branch and drop safely to the ground. The record of George Turner still remained a mark for other climbers to shoot at.
Kay was not a girl who wept easily, but she felt strangely close to tears. She removed the agitated kitten from Sam’s coat and put it on the grass, where it immediately made another spirited attempt to climb the tree. Foiled in this, it raced for the coal cellar and disappeared from the social life of San Rafael until late in the afternoon.
“Your poor hands!” said Kay.
Sam regarded his palms with some surprise. In theexcitement of the recent passage he had been unaware of injury.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Only skinned a little.”
Hash would have none of this airy indifference.
“Ah,” he said, “and the next thing you know you’ll be getting dirt into ’em and going down with lockjaw. I had an uncle what got dirt into a cut ’and, and three days later we were buying our blacks for him.”
“Oh!” gasped Kay.
“Two and a half, really,” said Hash. “Because he expired toward evening.”
“I’ll run and get a sponge and a basin,” said Kay in agitation.
“That’s awfully good of you,” said Sam. Oh, woman, he felt, in our hours of ease uncertain, coy and hard to please; when pain and anguish rack the brow, a ministering angel thou. And he nearly said as much.
“You don’t want to do that, miss,” said Hash. “Much simpler for him to come indoors and put ’em under the tap.”
“Perhaps that would be better,” agreed Kay.
Sam regarded his practical-minded subordinate with something of the injured loathing which his cooking had occasionally caused to appear on the faces of dainty feeders in the fo’c’sle of theAraminta.
“This isn’t your busy day, Hash, I take it?” he said coldly.
“Pardon?”
“I said, you seem to be taking life pretty easily. Why don’t you do a little work sometimes? If you imagine you’re a lily of the field, look in the glass and adjust that impression.”
Hash drew himself up, wounded.
“I’m only stayin’ ’ere to ’elp and encourage,” he said stiffly. “Now that what I might call the peril is over, there’s nothing to keep me.”
“Nothing,” agreed Sam cordially.
“I’ll be going.”
“You know your way,” said Sam. He turned to Kay. “Hash is an ass,” he said. “Put them under the tap, indeed! These hands need careful dressing.”
“Perhaps they do,” Kay agreed.
“They most certainly do.”
“Shall we go in then?”
“Without delay,” said Sam.
“There,” said Kay, some ten minutes later. “I think that will be all right.”
The finest efforts of the most skilful surgeon could not have evoked more enthusiasm from her patient. Sam regarded his bathed and sticking-plastered hands with an admiration that was almost ecstatic.
“You’ve had training in this sort of thing,” he said.
“No.”
“You’ve never been a nurse?”
“Never.”
“Then,” said Sam, “it is pure genius. It is just one of those cases of an amazing natural gift. You’ve probably saved my life. Oh, yes, you have! Remember what Hash said about lockjaw.”
“But I thought you thought Hash was an ass.”
“In many ways, yes,” said Sam. “But on some points he has a certain rugged common sense. He——”
“Won’t you be awfully late for the office?”
“For the what? Oh! Well, yes, I suppose I ought to be going there. But I’ve got to have breakfast first.”
“Well, hurry then. My uncle will be wondering what has become of you.”
“Yes. What a delightful man your uncle is!”
“Yes, isn’t he! Good-bye.”
“I don’t know when I’ve met a man I respected more.”
“This will be wonderful news for him.”
“So kind.”
“Yes.”
“So patient with me.”
“I expect he needs to be.”
“The sort of man it’s a treat to work with.”
“If you hurry you’ll be able to work with him all the sooner.”
“Yes,” said Sam; “yes. Er—is there any message I can give him?”
“No, thanks.”
“Ah? Well, then look here,” said Sam, “would you care to come and have lunch somewhere to-day?”
Kay hesitated. Then her eyes fell on those sticking-plastered hands and she melted. After all, when a young man has been displaying great heroism in her service, a girl must do the decent thing.
“I should like to,” she said.
“The Savoy Grill at 1:30?”
“All right. Are you going to bring my uncle along?”
Sam started.
“Why—er—that would be splendid, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, I forgot. He’s lunching with a man to-day at the Press Club.”
“Is he?” said Sam. “Is he really?”
His affection and respect for Mr. Matthew Wrenn increased to an almost overwhelming degree. He went back to Mon Repos feeling that it was the presence in the world of men like Matthew Wrenn that gave the lie to pessimism concerning the future of the human race.
Kay, meanwhile, in her rôle of understudy to Claire Lippett, who had just issued a bulletin to the effect that the neuralgic pains were diminishing and that she hoped to be up and about by midday, proceeded to an energetic dusting of the house. As a rule, she hated this sort of work, but to-day a strange feeling of gaiety stimulated her. She found herself looking forward to the lunch at the Savoy with something of the eagerness which, as a child, she had felt at the approach of a party. Reluctant to attribute this to the charms of a young man whom less than twenty-four hours ago she had heartily disliked, she decided that it must be the prospect of once more enjoying good cooking in pleasant surroundings that was causing her excitement. Until recently she had taken her midday meal at the home of Mrs. Winnington-Bates, and, as with a celebrated chewing gum, the taste lingered.
She finished her operations in the dining room and made her way to the drawing-room. Here the photograph of herself on the mantelpiece attracted her attention. She picked it up and stood gazing at it earnestly.
A sharp double rap on the front door broke in onher reflections. It was the postman with the second delivery, and he had rapped because among his letters for San Rafael was one addressed to Kay on which the writer had omitted to place a stamp. Kay paid the twopence and took the letter back with her to the drawing-room, hoping that the interest of its contents would justify the financial outlay.
Inspecting them, she decided that they did. The letter was from Willoughby Braddock; and Mr. Braddock, both writing and expressing himself rather badly, desired to know if Kay could see her way to marrying him.
THE little lobby of the Savoy grill-room that opens on to Savoy Court is a restful place for meditation; and Kay, arriving there at twenty minutes past one, was glad that she was early. She needed solitude, and regretted that in another ten minutes Sam would come in and deprive her of it. Ever since she had received his letter she had been pondering deeply on the matter of Willoughby Braddock, but had not yet succeeded in reaching a definite conclusion either in his favour or against him.
In his favour stood the fact that he had been a pleasant factor in her life as far back as she could remember. She had bird’s-nested with him on spring afternoons, she had played the mild card games of childhood with him on winter evenings, and—as has been stated—she had sat in trees and criticised with incisive power his habit of wearing bed socks. These things count. Marrying Willoughby would undeniably impart a sort of restful continuity to life. On the other hand——
“Hullo!”
A young man, entering the lobby, had halted before her. For a moment she supposed that it was Sam, come to bid her to the feast; then, emerging from her thoughts, she looked up and perceived thatblot on the body politic, Claude Winnington-Bates.
He was looking down at her with a sort of sheepish impudence, as a man will when he encounters unexpectedly a girl who in the not distant past has blacked his eye with a heavy volume of theological speculation. He was a slim young man, dressed in the height of fashion. His mouth was small and furtive, his eyes flickered with a kind of stupid slyness, and his hair, which mounted his head in a series of ridges or terraces, shone with the unguent affected by the young lads of the town. A messy spectacle.
“Hullo,” he said. “Waiting for someone?”
For a brief, wistful instant Kay wished that the years could roll back, making her young enough to be permitted to say some of the things she had said to Willoughby Braddock on that summer morning long ago when the topic of bed socks had come up between them. Being now of an age of discretion and so debarred from that rich eloquence, she contented herself with looking through him and saying nothing.
The treatment was not effective. Claude sat down on the lounge beside her.
“I say, you know,” he urged, “there’s no need to be ratty. I mean to say——”
Kay abandoned her policy of silence.
“Mr. Bates,” she said, “do you remember a boy who was at school with you named Shotter?”
“Sam Shotter?” said Claude, delighted at her chattiness. “Oh, yes, rather. I remember Sam Shotter. Rather a bad show, that. I saw him the other night and he was absolutely——”
“He’s coming here in a minute or two. And if hefinds you sitting on this lounge and I explain to him that you have been annoying me, he will probably tear you into little bits. I should go, if I were you.”
Claude Bates went. Indeed, the verb but feebly expresses the celerity of his movement. One moment he was lolling on the lounge; the next he had ceased to be and the lobby was absolutely free from him. Kay, looking over her shoulder into the grill-room, observed him drop into a chair and mop his forehead with a handkerchief.
She returned to her thoughts.
The advent of Claude had given them a new turn; or, rather, it had brought prominently before her mind what until then had only lurked at the back of it—the matter of Willoughby Braddock’s financial status. Willoughby Braddock was a very rich man; the girl who became Mrs. Willoughby Braddock would be a very rich woman. She would, that is to say, step automatically into a position in life where the prowling Claude Bateses of the world would cease to be an annoyance. And this was beyond a doubt another point in Mr. Braddock’s favour.
Willoughby, moreover, was rich in the right way, in the Midways fashion, with the richness that went with old greystone houses and old green parks and all the comfortable joy of the English country. He could give her the kind of life she had grown up in and loved. But on the other hand——
Kay stared thoughtfully before her; and, staring, was aware of Sam hurrying through the swing door.
“I’m not late, am I?” said Sam anxiously.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Then come along. Golly, what a corking day!”
He shepherded her solicitously into the grill-room and made for a table by the large window that looks out onto the court. A cloakroom waiter, who had padded silently upon their trail, collected his hat and stick and withdrew with the air of a leopard that has made a good kill.
“Nice-looking chap,” said Sam, following him with an appreciative eye.
“You seem to be approving of everything and everybody this morning.”
“I am. This is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year, and you can quote me as saying so. Now then, what is it to be?”
Having finished his ordering, a task which he approached on a lavish scale, Sam leaned forward and gazed fondly at his guest.
“Gosh!” he said rapturously. “I never thought, when I was sitting in that fishing hut staring at your photograph, that only a month or two later I’d be having lunch with you at the Savoy.”
Kay was a little startled. Her brief acquaintance with him had taught her that Sam was a man of what might be called direct methods, but she had never expected that he would be quite so direct as this. In his lexicon there appeared to be no such words as “reticence” and “finesse.”
“What fishing hut was that?” she asked, feeling rather like a fireman turning a leaky hose on a briskly burning warehouse full of explosives.
“You wouldn’t know it. It’s the third on the left as you enter Canada.”
“Are you fond of fishing?”
“Yes. But we won’t talk about that, if you don’t mind. Let’s stick to the photograph.”
“You keep talking about a photograph and I don’t in the least know what you mean.”
“The photograph I was speaking of at the dinner last night.”
“Oh, the one your friend found—of some girl.”
“It wasn’t a friend; it was me. And it wasn’t some girl; it was you.”
Here the waiter intruded, bearinghors d’œuvres. Kay lingered over her selection, but the passage of time had not the effect of diverting her host from his chosen topic. Kay began to feel that nothing short of an earthquake would do that, and probably not even an earthquake unless it completely wrecked the grill-room.
“I remember the first time I saw that photograph.”
“I wonder which it was,” said Kay casually.
“It was——”
“So long as it wasn’t the one of me sitting in a sea shell at the age of two, I don’t mind.”
“It was——”
“They told me that if I was very good and sat very still, I should see a bird come out of the camera. I don’t believe it ever did. And why they let me appear in a costume like that, even at the age of two, I can’t imagine.”
“It was the one of you in a riding habit, standing by your horse.”
“Oh, that one?... I think I will take eggs after all.”
“Eggs? What eggs?”
“I don’t know.Œufs à lasomething, weren’t they?”
“Wait!” said Sam. He spoke as one groping his way through a maze. “Somehow or other we seem to have got onto the subject of eggs. I don’t want to talk about eggs.”
“Though I’m not positive it was à la something. I believe it wasœufs Marseillaisesor some word like that. Anyhow, just call the waiter and say eggs.”
Sam called the waiter and said eggs. The waiter appeared not only to understand but to be gratified.
“The first time I saw that photograph——” he resumed.
“I wonder why they call those eggsœufs Marseillaises,” said Kay pensively. “Do you think it’s a special sort of egg they have in Marseilles.”
“I couldn’t say. You know,” said Sam, “I’m not really frightfully interested in eggs.”
“Have you ever been in Marseilles?”
“Yes, I went there once with theAraminta.”
“Who isAraminta?”
“TheAraminta. A tramp steamer I’ve made one or two trips on.”
“What fun! Tell me all about your trips on theAraminta.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Was that where you met the man you call Hash?”
“Yes. He was the cook. Weren’t you surprised,” said Sam, beginning to see his way, “when you heard that he was engaged to Claire?”
“Yes,” said Kay, regretting that she had shown interest in tramp steamers.
“It just shows——”
“I suppose the drawback to going about on small boats like that is the food. It’s difficult to get fresh vegetables, I should think—and eggs.”
“Life isn’t all eggs,” said Sam desperately.
The head waiter, a paternal man, halted at the table and inquired if everything was to the satisfaction of the lady and gentleman. The lady replied brightly that everything was perfect. The gentleman grunted.
“They’re very nice here,” said Kay. “They make you feel as if they were fond of you.”
“If they weren’t nice to you,” said Sam vehemently, “they ought to be shot. And I’d like to see the fellow who wouldn’t be fond of you.”
Kay began to have a sense of defeat, not unlike that which comes to a scientific boxer who has held off a rushing opponent for several rounds and feels himself weakening.
“The first time I saw that photograph,” said Sam, “was one night when I had come in tired out after a day’s fishing.”
“Talking about fish——”
“It was pretty dark in the hut, with only an oil lamp on the table, and I didn’t notice it at first. Then, when I was having a smoke after dinner, my eye caught something tacked up on the wall. I went across to have a look, and, by Jove, I nearly dropped the lamp!”