II
TheInspector came along to look at the tickets.
“You must either pay excess or change into a third,” he said firmly at the sight of the third class ticket.
“But there’s no room,” its owner faltered. It is a phrase no longer in vogue in the best novels, but the little lady of the green ulster was of the faltering type.
“Plenty of room presently.” So firm was the Inspector he might have been Marshal Foch himself. “Meantime you must find a place somewhere else.”
At this cruel mandate the little lady shivered under her bright thin garment.
“How much—how much is there to pay?” It was mere desperation. There were only a few—a very few shillings in her purse. All her available capital had been put into the green ulster and the new serge suit she was wearing and a black felt hat with a neat green ribbon. But to be torn out of that haven of refuge, to be flung again, bag and baggage, into the maelstrom of Platform Three—the thought was paralyzing.
The Inspector condescended to look again at the third-class ticket. “Clavering St. Mary’s. There’ll be twenty-one and six-pence excess.”
Miss Gray Eyes wilted visibly.
“I can’t stand here all day,” announced the Inspector. “This train was due out a quarter of an hour ago.”
“But—” faltered the unlucky passenger.
“You’ll have to come out and find room lower down.”
At this point a slow, cool, rather cautious voice said “Inspector.”
“Madam?” It was a decidedly imperative “madam.”
“If there is no room in the third-class compartments this lady is allowed a seat here, isn’t she?”
“There is room—if she’ll take the trouble to look for it.”
“She says there isn’t.” If anything the voice of Miss Fur Coat had grown slower and cooler.
“I say there is.” The Inspector knew he was addressing a bona fide first-class passenger, all the same he was terribly inspectorial.
“Well perhaps you’ll find it for her.” The considered coolness was almost uncanny. “And then, perhaps, you’ll come back and show her where it is.”
The Inspector was obviously a little stunned by Miss Fur Coat’s suggestion, but he managed to blurt out, “And what about the train in the meantime?” Then he went for Miss Green Ulster with a truculence that verged on savagery. “Come on, madam. Come on out.”
“I don’t think I’d move if I were you.” The manner of the other lady was quite impersonal.
“Very well, then,”—the Inspector produced a portentous looking notebook—“I must have your name and address.”
It is quite certain that Miss Gray Eyes would have yielded to this awful threat of legal proceedings to follow had it not been for the further intervention of the good fairy or the evil genius opposite.
“You had better take mine, Inspector.” The voice was really inimitable. “My father, I believe, is a director of your company.”
Miss Fur Coat knew that her father was a director of a railway company. She didn’t know the name of it, nor did she know the name of the company by which she was traveling, nor was she a student of Hegel, or for that matter of any other philosopher, but there really seemed no reason at that moment why they should not be one and the same.
The Inspector turned to confront the occupant of the corner seat. It would be an abuse of language to say that he turned deferentially, but somehow his notebook and pencil certainly looked a shade less truculent.
“I had better give you a card.” It was almost the voice of a dreamer, yet the dry precision was really inimitable. “Pikey,”—she addressed the lady opposite—“you have some cards?”
The duenna opened the queer-shaped dressing bag with an air of stern disapproval. At the top was a small leather case which she handed to her mistress.
“Inspector, this is my mother’s card. My father isLord Carabbas. That ismyname”—a neatly gloved finger indicated the middle—“Lady Elfreda Catkin.” She pronounced the name very slowly and distinctly and with a care that seemed to give it really remarkable importance.
The Inspector glanced at the card. Then he glanced at Lady Elfreda. He made no comment. All the same a subtle change came over him. It was hard to define, but it seemed to soften, almost to humanize him. Finally it culminated in an abrupt withdrawal from the compartment with a slight raising of the hat.
Before the train started, which in the course of the next three minutes it reluctantly did, the guard came and locked the carriage door.
England ranks as a democratic country, but the fact that a daughter of the Marquis of Carabbas was sitting in the left-hand corner, with her back to the engine, lent somehow a quality to the atmosphere of the compartment which would hardly have been there had its locale been the rolling stock of the Tahiti Great Western or the Timbuctoo Grand Trunk. At any rate two diligent students ofThe Timesnewspaper peered solemnly at each other over the top of their favorite journal. Both lived in Eaton Place, they had belonged for years to the same clubs, they were known to each other perfectly well by sight but they jobbed in different markets; therefore they had yet to speak their first word to each other—for no better reason thanthat he who spoke first would have to make some little sacrifice of personal dignity in order to do so.
Now, of course, was not the moment to break the habit of years, but if their solemn eyes meant anything their minds held but a single thought. Carabbas himself did not cut much ice in the City, but if he was joining the board of the B. S. W. it meant that the astute Angora connection was coming into Home Rails, in which case purely as a matter of academic interest, there would be no harm in turning to page fifteen in order to look at the price of B. S. W. First Preferred Stock.
That was all the incident meant to these Olympians, just that and nothing more. But for the little lady of the green ulster it was of wholly different portent. When shortly after nine o’clock that morning she had left the home of her fathers in the modest suburb of Laxton she had not dreamt that before midday she would find herself under the personal protection of the daughter of a marquis. It was her good fortune to be living in the golden age of democracy, but...!
She stole a covert glance at the fur coat opposite. Such a garment in itself was no longer a mark of caste, but this was rather a special affair, a sealskin with a skunk collar, so simple, so unpretending that it needed almost the glance of an expert to tell that it had cost a great deal of money. Then she glanced at the hat above it, a plain black velour with a twist of skunk round it, then down at the neat—the adorably neat!—shoes,and then very shyly up again to their wearer. But their wearer was holding theSociety Pictorialin front of her, and in the opinion of the third class passenger it was, perhaps, just as well that she was. Otherwise she could hardly have failed to read what was passing in the mind of the Lady of Laxton. She must have seen something of the envy and the awe, of the eager, the too-eager interest which all the care in the world could not veil.
Miss Gray Eyes knew and felt she was a little snob, a mean and rather vulgar little snob in the presence of Miss Puss-in-the-Corner, the tip of whose decisive chin was just visible between her paper and her rich fur collar.
What must it feel like to be the daughter of a marquis? A crude and silly inner self put the question. A daughter of a marquis is just like anybody else’s daughter—the answer came pat, but somehow at that moment the third class passenger was unable to accept it. A gulf yawned between herself and the girl opposite. They were of an age; their heights and their proportions were nearly identical; at a first glance they might almost have passed for sisters except that Miss Gray Eyes was quite sure in her heart that she was the prettier; all the same there was a world of difference in the way they looked at life and a whole cosmos in the way life looked at them.
The little lady sighed at her thoughts—they were hard thoughts—and opened her pilgrim basket. Shetook from it a notebook and pencil and a dog-eared copy ofThe Patrician, the famous novel of Mr. John Galsworthy, which bore the imprint of the Laxton Cube Library. For two years past she had prescribed for herself a course of the best modern English fiction. She was reading it diligently, less for relaxation and human enjoyment than for purposes of self improvement. Her social opportunities had been few and narrow, although her parents had rather ambitiously given her an education excellent of its kind at the Laxton High School for Young Ladies, which she had been able to supplement by passing the Oxford Preliminary Examination.
For the second time in her life of twenty years Miss Cass—she was known to her friends as Girlie Cass—had taken a situation as a nursery governess. She had had one brief experience which had been terminated by her mother’s illness and death. Since then she had been three months a government clerk, but she was not quick at figures and she couldn’t write shorthand. Life as a nursery governess was not going to be a bed of roses for one as shy and sensitive as herself, but she was genuinely fond of young children and somehow such a career with all its thorns seemed more suited to one of her disposition than a stand-up fight in the peace that was coming with terribly efficient competitors, who, if they happened to want your particular piece of cake, would have no scruples aboutknocking you down and trampling upon your prostrate body in order to get it.
If Miss Cass had any taint of vanity it was centered in the fact that she was by way of being a high-brow. She was not a high-brow of the breed that looks and dresses and acts and thinks the part. In her case it was more a secret sin than anything and it took the form of competing week by week in the literary competition of theSaturday Sentinel, under the “nom de plume” of Vera.
The subject this week was the “Influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English Novel.” It was, perhaps, a little advanced for the Laxton Cube Library, but Vera was ambitious. She had not yet won a prize, truth to tell she had not even been in sight of one, but three weeks ago her essay onJane Eyrehad been commended as showing insight. She had not yet got over her excitement at receiving a compliment which in her heart she felt she fully merited. If she plumed herself upon anything it was upon her insight. One day when she had learned a little more about life—her trouble was that she had so little invention—she might even try to write a novel herself. But in her case it would have to be based on first-hand experience. She would not be able, like the Brontë Sisters, to weave a romance out of her inner consciousness.
“The Influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English Novel.” Miss Cass had the bad habit of sucking her pencil, but it was not easy to marshal or to setdown one’s thoughts with the train converging upon Reading at forty miles an hour. However, she was able to write the heading quite legibly. But then her difficulties began. What exactly was the influence of Mr. John Galsworthy upon the English novel?
“Pikey.” It was almost the nicest voice Miss Gray Eyes had ever heard, yet curiously low and penetrating in quality. “Do you recognize that?” Miss Fur Coat folded back a page of her paper to display a photograph of a famous beauty. “Rather flattering, don’t you think?”
Pikey loweredThe Queen, which she had been studying with a kind of latent ferocity, and exchanged periodicals without comment. She was evidently a creature of very few words, and to judge by a certain morose dignity it seemed to argue considerable hardihood on the part of anyone to address her at all familiarly.
Miss Cass could not help wondering what the status was of this duenna who seemed a cross between a lady’s maid and a werewolf. But the chain of her reflections was interrupted by the stopping of the train at a station of which she could not see the name. Here the two gentlemen got out, after one of them had lowered the window and had called to an official to unlock the door. And in the order of their going the student ofThe Patriciannoticed that while neither of them showed any particular concern for the green ulster, both were very careful not to tread upon the fur coat.