XXIV
A WEEK passed. Miss Du Rance taxi’d again to Half Moon Street; this time with a brand new pair of dancing slippers gracing her small but lively feet. The paucity of her remaining dollars was beginning to alarm her now. No further word had come from New York. But whatever happened she was going to follow her luck.
She found Lady Violet seated before a typewriter, clucking away as if for dear life. This was a form of effort with which Mame was only too familiar.
“So sorry.” Lady Violet glanced up from her task. “Please excuse me five minutes. I’m all behind as usual. This weekly syndicate letter is such a bore. One tangled mass of detail.” She made a wry mouth. “Always leave it to the last moment. How can one find anything new to say about the high-class underwear at Peary’s and Hodnett’s Annual Spring Sale? Help yourself to a gasper. The box on the table. And that’s the new novel of Loti, by the side of it; the one with the paper cover. My review for theCourierhas to be in to-morrow. Luckily one doesn’t have to say anything new about Loti, does one?”
Mame did not smoke and she did not read French. But when in Rome, had said Paula Ling; or was it theoffice calendar that had said it for her? She left the silver box alone but took up the latest work of Pierre Loti with the air of a connoisseur.
The book, however, did not claim much of her attention. She sat watching Lady Violet work. In the sight of an expert she was by no means skilful; it was rather pathetic to see her dabbing with one uncertain finger of each hand. She also lent an ear to Lady Violet’s stream of whimsical complaint and humorous apology. Plainly this journalistic egg was bored by her luck. That old syndicate of hers was surely worth good and regular money. If only—! But why indulge vain thoughts?
In ten minutes, or less, Lady Violet was through. She shovelled her copy, some twenty badly typed pages, into a large envelope; sealed and addressed it; then with a comic sigh of relief she picked up the meerschaum holder and had recourse to the silver box. “So sorry,” she apologized for thenth time. “But we are not expected at the Orient until five.”
She rang for Davis, that treasure among parlour maids, of whose old-family-retainer air Mame was a shade in awe, and set down as “sniffy.” To Davis the envelope was handed; she was told to send it at once to Fleet Street by district messenger. And she was asked to get a taxi.
In a time surprisingly short, as it seemed to Mame, the maid had returned to say that the taxi awaited them. Lady Violet crammed on an expensive hat without seeming to care, but Mame realised that shehad a marvellous knack of looking right in all circumstances. Paula Ling would not have treated a hat that way, not on her life. As for Mame herself, she had already taken a full twenty minutes to fix her own before starting from Fotheringay House. But this skirt flopped it on and there you were. Mame would have liked Paula to have seen her.
If Mame could have banished the feeling of being on such terribly thin ice, she would have enjoyed herself immensely at the Orient Dance Club. The floor was good; the band, although by no means equal to what New York could do—in Mame’s opinion it was hardly at the Cowbarn level in its interpretation of jazz music—was still well enough for London, England. All the folks were real select, even if their dancing was nothing to write home about. As for the soft drinks and the eats, they were quite O. K. But these matters, grave in their way, were of minor importance.
The really vital things, when all was said, were the lounge lizards with whom Mame was privileged to take the floor. First of all there was Bill. He was not as light in hand as Elmer P., to mention only one of Cowbarn’s kernoozers. Even if he didn’t move just naturally to jazz music he was a good trier. Mame was wise enough not to expect too much of the bo in the matter of hitting the parquet. But even if he was no star, and his stiff British joints would have been none the worse for a little oil, he was well enough, he would serve.
Anyhow the young man appeared to enjoy himself.He was all smiles and willingness and good humour. Mame felt quite proud of him as she guided his somewhat errant steps amid the Chick if slightly immobile throng. She also felt rather proud of herself. It was not a real top-notch dancing as she understood the art, but she had a kind of hunch that she was sort of cutting a shine.
Bill was only one among the lads of the village. There were others; to the taste of Miss Du Rance perhaps not so choice as he; still she was nowise ashamed to be seen with them in the centre of the floor. For the most part they were Bill’s brother officers and school pals and so on. And all were regular fellows even if they did not quite know how to move to ragtime.
What struck Mame as the chief difference between this mild festivity and a hop in her native land was the quietness of it all. The folks were so much more solemn, so much more serious. There was no whirling you off your feet, no shouting; compared with Cowbarn, Iowa, or even New York, it was rather like a high-class funeral. Mame had a powerful desire to let herself out a bit. However, she soon concluded that it would not be wise to do so. When in Rome! ... particularly when Rome has not even heard of the Monkey Clutch!
Still, these handsome, strapping, brown-faced, blue-eyed mothers’ boys were very friendly and very pleasant. Mame noticed that Lady Violet took to them quite kindly. She was the best dancer there, Mameconsidered, barring of course present company, and a couple of professionals, who had New York written all over them, although said to be French. But Lady Violet was a very good mover indeed, in an amateurish way. She had evidently benefited by her American experience; she got these lads around in proper style; and she seemed a great favourite with them all. A real sport Mame considered her.
The same applied to Bill; also to his friends and brothers in arms. And they had excellent taste in ices and cakes and in nice soft drinks; although the best drink of all, that was called Cup, was not so soft either. For a rather backward village like London things really went pretty well. If Miss Du Rance could have forgotten for a single moment that she was dancing on a full-sized volcano she would have thoroughly enjoyed herself.
Apart from the uncomfortable feeling that she ought not to be there at all, Mame was conscious of only one other blot on the proceedings. Not so much a blot as a cloud. And yet cloud was hardly the word. Everybody was so charming to everybody, so kind and so polite and yet so quietly merry, that it was a hunch rather than a rock-bottom fact which ever so slightly took the edge off Mame’s enjoyment.
The hunch assumed the form of a Miss Childwick. She was a hefty girl of twenty-three, buxom, upstanding, and a looker as Mame was bound to own. Lady Violet sought an early opportunity of telling her little friend that this was a regular Crœsus of a girl, the soleheiress of Childwick’s Three Ply Flannelette, whose singular merits were the theme of every hoarding from Land’s End to Hong Kong.
Miss Childwick’s money would not have mattered so much, but where the snag came, as it seemed to Miss Du Rance, was that its statuesque owner, as Lady Violet also took an early opportunity of making known to her, was very keen on Bill. In other words, although Lady Violet did not put it quite so crudely, it was up to the little lady from Cowbarn, Iowa, to keep off the grass.
Speaking strictly by the card, there was of course no particular reason why Miss Du Rance should keep off the grass. Bill was fair game for any little angler who really understood the use of a bug and pole. But Lady Violet gave a sort of hint that it would hardly be cricket for Miss Du Rance to butt in and spoil things. Miss Childwick was so rich that everybody in London and Shropshire hoped very much that she and Bill were going to make a match of it.
That’s all very well, thought Mame. Evidently she considers it will be unsporting of me to dance more than twice with the dandiest bird on the bough. At all events, if these were not exactly Lady Violet’s own views, it was a fair presumption they were the views of Miss Childwick. In fact the Celebrated Three Ply Flannelette had already given the Funny Little American a once-over at pretty close range. Her fine eyes seemed to glow out at the good grey ones of Miss Du Rance from every quarter of the room. And each timethey did so they seemed to glow with the light of battle.
Mame did not blame Miss Childwick altogether. Human nature is just as liable to be human nature at the Orient Dance Club, Knightsbridge, London, England, as at the Temple of Terpsichore, Cowbarn, Iowa, or any other dive you care to name.
No, Miss Du Rance did not really blame Miss Childwick for sending a sort of general warning along the wires. But where she did blame Miss Childwick was for trying to put one over on her. When she came to think about it afterwards she was not exactly sure that the Three Ply Flannelette had really meant to do that, but it certainly looked uncommonly like it. When you are mozing around with the real nutty bits of nougat in Knightsbridge, London, England, it is easier, no doubt, to be mistaken than in a small burg in a Middle Western state.
What really happened was, that after Miss Du Rance had put Bill through his paces the second time in three, and they had encored a vanilla ice and cracker, and were just going to take the floor the third time in four, up barges the Three Ply Flannelette, all smiles and politeness, yet with an undercurrent of just owning the earth, though perhaps not really meaning it. And Bill, for all his dyed-in-the-wool niceness, at heart a simpleton, chose that identical moment to make his old friend Miss Childwick known to his new friend, Miss Du Rance of Chicago.
If ever youth, since the world began, simply insistedon finding trouble, it was the tactless Bill. Miss Childwick’s eyes snapped and Miss Du Rance did not blame her. The eyes of Miss Du Rance snapped back and it is to be hoped that Miss Childwick attached no blame to her either. It was a mere temperamental action on the part of Miss Du Rance. Honours were easy over that course. But immediately there followed the passage, which, brief as it was, caused Mame seriously to ask herself whether this girl was not trying to put one over on her.
Perhaps, after all, it did not amount to that. When, in cool blood, in the seclusion of her chamber, Miss Du Rance pondered Miss Childwick, quietly and sincerely, extenuating nought, yet attributing nothing to her in malice, she reached the conclusion that she had no real ground of complaint against the Three Ply Flannelette, beyond the fact that it looked a little too superior. Perhaps it didn’t mean to really. But she was one of those trained-to-the-minute girls whom Mame had glimpsed from time to time taking the air on Riverside Drive, previous, as Paula Ling declared, to their sailing for Europe in search of a stray Italian prince or British earl.
Miss Childwick had just that air. You could not call it “lugs.” It was something deeper, more full of meaning and less irritating than the quality the Britishers speak of as “side.” She had an I-mean-to-be-a-marchioness-if-it-kills-me look about her, which did not accord with the democratic notions of Miss Du Rance. No, they could never be real friends. And thatwas why, having been warned to keep off the grass, little Miss Du Rance was not quite clear in her own little mind whether she was going to obey the signal.
After all, a cat may look at a king even if it is not allowed to look at a canary. What sport it would be to get into the cage when Miss Three Ply was not about. Before now such things had happened. In fact they were always happening. It would not be the first occasion by many that a small outsider had made her way into a private aviary.
Still, at the moment such thoughts were far removed from the region of the practical. Yet Bill was a marquis, so his sister said. Therefore he was simply asking for trouble, from even the humblest of Columbia’s daughters. If Miss Three Ply, who had kind of appointed herself to look after the sweet rube, did not watch out, some other young skirt might easily get away with his coronet.
However, these were vain thoughts. At the present time Miss Du Rance had about fifty dollars between herself and bankruptcy. So really and truly the ice was thin. But she was determined to yield to the passing hour, even if she could never quite forget her nearness to unplumbed fathoms of icy water.
If she could have laid that knowledge by, these two crowded hours at the Orient Dance Club would have been the jolliest ever. This was a real taste of life. All was harmony, gaiety, good-humoured fun. But the clock struck seven, the band stopped playing, the dancersbegan to collect their taxis. Then it was that a kind of Cinderella feeling came upon Mame.
The ball was over. The dream was at an end. She would have to go back to Montacute Square, to inferior food and inferior people, to drudgery and grubbing, to the forming of plans for a mighty precarious to-morrow. As she stood on the Club steps by the side of Lady Violet, who was giving her friends a cheerful good-bye, Mame’s heart sank. She had been lifted up only to be cast down. Life was pretty tough for girls of her sort, with nothing between them and the weather. She watched Bill hand Miss Childwick into the smartest limousine imaginable, with chauffeur and footman complete in dark liveries faced with buff; and a Robert-E.-Lee-at-Gettysburg feeling came upon her.
“Which way are you goin’?”
Lady Violet’s clear gay voice suddenly impinged upon the bitterness of Mame’s reverie.
Mame hardly knew which way she was going. And at that moment she didn’t care. The bottom seemed out of things. “Any old way, I guess, is good enough for me,” she said despondently.
Lady Violet laughed. Mame had a great power of making this high-flyer laugh, but why she should have she didn’t know. But the laugh was friendly and kind; it implied no more than an unlimited capacity for seeing the most human side of human nature.
“Will you come and take pot luck with me at my club?”
Nascent hope stirred in Mame. Life could not be altogether a washout while twenty-two-carat fairy godmothers were out and about in it.
“I’d just love to do that.” There was no mistaking the note of gratitude.
“Come along, then. But we shall probably get nothing to eat. Hen clubs are hen clubs when it comes to fodder.”
“Anything in the way of a bone will fix me.” A blessed feeling of hope had begun to stir in Mame quite strongly again.
The evening being fine and lit by British summer-time which puts the clock back an hour, and as the club, by name the Ladies Imperium, was only a few doors beyond Hamilton Place, there seemed no reason why they should not walk.
Lady Violet said good-bye to her friends and several of them, including Bill and one or two of his brother officers, said good-bye to Miss Du Rance. And then these ladies strode off towards what the hostess prophesied would be the worst dinner in Europe.
Privately Mame doubted that. What she called the “worst” dinner and what Lady Violet called one were likely to come out of very different casseroles. A fortnight ago Miss Amethyst Du Rance might have argued the point, but in the past fourteen days a lot of water had flowed between the arches of London Bridge. She was not so certain of the things she knew and far more certain of the things she didn’t know. Anyhow, shewas much less free with her opinions than she had been a fortnight ago.
They turned in at Albert Gate and took that pleasant path which the Metropolitan Force had managed to close against the wiser members of the public at nightfall. But night as yet had not fallen. None the less Miss Du Rance was stirred by certain memories. She kept a shrewd eye open for a certain dour-faced Scots constable.
There was not a sign of the young officer. Perhaps there was still a little too much light in the sky, away beyond the statue of Achilles. It might have been Mame’s idiom, her personal force, her gift of mimicry, but all the way from the park gates to the marble portico of the Ladies Imperium her friend was kept in a state of mirth. Even when they had emerged from the cloak room and made their way up the fine staircase as far as thesalle à manger, the hostess of Miss Du Rance was still inclined to smile. She was great fun, this girl.
The Club’s most popular member had no difficulty in choosing a table for two, in a comfortable corner. As they sat down, she glanced at the menu. “You mustn’t expect terrapin and canvasback here, you know,” she said apologetically, handing the card to Mame.
Their first choice was plovers’ eggs, with cutlets and a charlotte russe to follow; a light and eupeptic meal. Miss Du Rance was offered a dry Sauterne to go with it. But the guest, in spite of agreeable memories of a recent “cup,” was by way of being a pussyfoot. Thatcreed was good for the health, good for the purse, good for the moral nature. Yet having no wish to cast a blight on Lady Violet’s ardour, she saw no reason why her friend should not order something for herself.
Lady Violet said there was only one sort of wine she really liked and “fizz” was the name of it. And it was so expensive since the War that she only enjoyed drinking it when paid for by other people. But the Club had rather a reputation for barley water. To prove itsbona fidesshe asked the waitress to bring some.
Mame accepted the first beaker of that mild beverage and found it good. The plovers’ eggs, too, were excellent. Still, a quaint combination, as Lady Violet remarked. Yet could Cinderella have forgotten for one moment the nature of the ice beneath her slippers she would have given herself up to frank enjoyment of the nicest food she had had in years.
A spectre was there all the time. But Elmer P. on a Lodge night could hardly have been more full of quip than Lady Violet. Not only was she witty in herself, she seemed a cause of wit in others. First Family was writ large upon her, yet she was everybody’s friend. She passed the time of day with the majority of her fellow members; she had a gay word or a bit of chaff for even the staidest of them; and in her frank and genial fashion she introduced “my friend Miss Du Rance of Chicago” to a discreetly chosen two or three.
As this delectable meal neared its end Mame washard set to keep the Cinderella feeling at bay. That forward-looking mind of hers could not help contrasting the blithe evening so rapidly wearing thin, with the endless procession of drab to-morrows which surely lay in wait for her. She loathed the thought of the count-every-dollar existence to which she was doomed to return. If only she had a couple of thousand or so laid up in the bank! For a chance had come to enter the life that had such a powerful knack of making every other seem not worth while.
In the midst of these prickly Cinderella thoughts, she woke with a little start to the fact that her vis-à-vis was gazing at her over the flowers in the centre of the table. That was an odd sort of look Lady Violet sometimes had. Once or twice already Mame had surprised it stealing across her face; and she couldn’t help wondering what it meant.
“You’ll have a cup of coffee, won’t you?”
Mame was glad to have a cup of coffee, yet she was sure the look on the face of the fairy godmother had really nothing to do with that aromatic berry.
A waitress came with the coffee.
“Noir? Or sugar and milk?”
Miss Du Rance took plenty of sugar and plenty of milk. They had lingered over their meal. It had been very jolly; and although Mame had been oppressed throughout by a sense of destiny she had managed to keep up her end. Her free comments on men and women, on habits and customs, on powers and principalities had delighted the hostess. This quick-thinkingchild from the back of beyond was an Original. And so plucky! And really pretty if she wouldn’t trick herself out in that second-rate style!
The famous meerschaum holder was produced. Mame declined acrème de mentheand the mildest of all imaginable gaspers. Nay, she was in the act of trying to drown her gloom in barley water; a pretty hopeless task, for that beverage, sound as it may be, is no antidote for the blues, when hey! presto! the fairy godmother came back into the picture. And poor Cinderella suddenly began to sit up and take notice.
“Did I tell you that Cousin Edith is going abroad for the summer?”
Miss Du Rance had not been enlightened.
“Well, she is. Some friends of hers have a villa at Lausanne and next week she is off to stay with them until September. I shall miss her dreadfully. She is such a good sort. And of course she plays propriety at Half Moon Street. Personally I don’t mind a row of beans, I defy the breath of scandal to touch sweet innocents like Davis and me; but my mother, you know, thinks it not quite nice. Anyhow, I am wondering if you feel inclined to tolerate Cousin Edith’s room at the flat for a month or two?”
Feel inclined to tolerate! Cinderella’s eyes began to glow, yet she kept a rigid silence. For she was plunged in some deep and rapid calculations.
“What do you say?”
“Glory, that’s what I’d say.” Mame could not dissemble her enthusiasm. As well, no doubt; since itwas the native force of that enthusiasm which had such a tonic effect upon her ratherblaséfriend.
“A firm offer if you care to take it.” The tone was amused and casual. “Cousin Edith’s mattress is a hard beast, and Davis and I are a pair of Bolshies before breakfast and a couple of bores after it, but we shall be full of gratitude if you’ll come and stand between us and the milkman, who, according to Davis, is a bit of a Don Juan.”
“Why of course I’ll come. I’ll simply love to. But—”
The meerschaum holder queried the weak word But.
“I’m kind of wondering about the dough.”
“The dough?” Lady Violet collected new idioms for their own sake, but somehow this Americanism had eluded her.
“What you call ‘the dibs’ over here.”
“My dear child, it won’t cost you a sou. In fact, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be money in your purse.”
Mame’s heart gave a leap. A fairy godmother with a vengeance!
“I don’t get you.” Cinderella spoke half forlornly, half with joy. “Your ways aren’t my ways. I’m not half the go-getter that you are. Personally I have to look both sides of a dollar to see if it’s wearing out in the middle.”
“That’ll be all right. If only you feel inclined to ease the white man’s burden, in this case the whitewoman’s, you’ll not need to trouble much about dollars.”
All this seemed too good to be true, but Cinderella gave the fairy godmother a very respectful hearing.
“The fact is, at present I’ve more work than I can do. Or perhaps one ought to say more than one cares to do. It’s the weekly letter to the provincial papers that’s so troublesome. I don’t mind the books and the plays and the harmless cackle about the inoffensive creatures with whom one occasionally dines out. Most of ’em seem rather to like it, if you go a bit careful with the trowel. But it’s having to write puffs for tradesmen, boosting their white sales and their spring pyjamas, that makes one want to tear the bedclothes.”
Mame listened with intensity, but she didn’t speak. Lady Violet went on: “For weeks I’ve been thinking of advertising in theTimesfor a secretary. I don’t want to let the thing go; it pays like fun; and if I can find some good sportsman who is not afraid of the donkey-work she shall have a hundred pounds a year and her keep.”
Mame was a complex of emotions. But the one uppermost was joy. Miracles are no longer in fashion, but just now they seemed to be happening at the rate of three per ten days.
“What do you say?”
It was the kind of billet Mame had been praying for every night these seven months past. But it was not until she had performed the operation of pinching herself mentally to find out if she was truly awake, that she quietly answered: “Search me. If I’m not a champon a Remington and don’t write as slick as you can shoot it, I’ll go back to Ioway by the next boat.”
“A go then. Cousin Edith leaves Tuesday. When can you move in? But no doubt you’ll like to think it over?”
Miss Du Rance, however, had done her thinking already. “Wednesday morning, at ten, I’ll be around at Half Moon Street with my trunk—if that’s agreeable.”
“The sooner the better.”
So there it was.
But what a funny world! Cinderella, secretly, was still in a maze. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this new turn of the shuttle was a bit uncanny.