Читать книгу His Official Fiancée - Berta Ruck - Страница 8

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In the dressing-room, where Miss Robinson was rinsing out the sooty basin before washing her hands in it, Miss Holt “smarming” her hair-net down over her little brown chocolate of a head, and Miss Smith tearing yet another leaf out of the inevitable book of papiers poudrés, the silence that met me was quite as death-like as if the girls had just been pulled up by Mr. Dundonald’s “Talk-ing, ladies!”

Talking? I didn’t need to be told that, from the moment they’d seen, out of the landing window, the last of that taxi in which the Governor and his private clerk had driven off, to the moment they had heard my returning footstep on the stairs, they had done nothing but talk about me and my incredible, my epic lunch.

As I drew the hat-pins from the admired new hat, I prepared for a hurricane of comments and questions.

None came. Not one of the girls seemed to have a word to say to me!

Perhaps they thought they would hear more by seeming not too eager. (That’s rather Miss Robinson’s style of “drawing out” her companions.)

Perhaps they considered the subject too vast for immediate discussion. Perhaps, for they are all good-natured girls, they had come to the conclusion that it wasn’t fair to “rag” me about it—that I might be feeling too utterly nervous and flurried over the unexpected (?) event.

They didn’t even ask me whether I had enjoyed myself! I even saw them, distinctly, avoid looking at me.

Only Miss Holt’s eyes seemed drawn, as if in spite of herself, to the flowers I was taking out of my coat to put in water in the grimy jam-jar on the dressing-table that so often holds Smithie’s bunch of violets; and it was Miss Holt who breathed an involuntary—

“I say, what lovely carnations!”

“Do have some,” I said, as a matter of course, dividing the cluster and holding out half to her.

“Oh, no. I wouldn’t deprive you for the world, Miss Trant,” murmured Miss Holt, stiffly drawing back.

I realized from her tone that she considered I had made a mistake.

Of course! Those flowers ought to have been thought “too precious” to share with anybody. Smithie would never think of giving one of her “boy’s” violets away. Dear me, I thought, what an added bore, having to remember to keep up the correctly sentimental attitude about every trifle of this kind.... Ah!

I broke off what I was thinking at that moment with quite a sudden start.

For, just as she turned away, I had caught Miss Smith’s glance at that cluster of fresh, crimson carnations. It might have been a bunch of withered wall-flowers that had been left too long in water, for the disgusted wrinkle that lifted the prettiest typist’s small, powdered nose.

“I wouldn’t touch them,” it seemed to say.

“Not those flowers.” ...

And at last I saw why.

The reason my three colleagues had forborne to question, or chaff, or even look at me when I came in from that expedition with the Governor was not because they were too considerate, too puzzled, or too wily.

It was merely because they were shocked—scandalized!

They were thinking worse things of me than I thought I saw behind Lady Vandeleur’s lifted lorgnette. I found myself suspected—probably more than suspected!—of having run counter to the standards of a class which is perhaps more innately virtuous than Lady Vandeleur’s and my own and Cicely’s, and certainly more rigid in its judgments. I remembered gossip about typists and their employers, gossip from the days when I was taking my training at Pitman’s. And out of this I could imagine for myself the tone of the talk about me that had passed across that marble-topped table in the “Den of Lyons” at lunch-time.

“Well, Still Waters have been running deep, with a vengeance! This is the meaning of her taking down his letters for a whole fortnight—without any complaints, girls! We might have seen there was something funny in that!”

“She’s been pretty artful, too, not letting on that there was anything at all, until to-day!—And there must have been some sort of beginning. A girl’s boss doesn’t take her out to a swagger lunch, with flowers and a new hat and all, without there’s been some sort of a leading up to it!”

Perhaps Miss Robinson might suggest—“Well, I should never have thought she’d been that kind of girl. Fact of the matter is, I suppose she funked losing her job if she didn’t.”

But Smithie and Miss Holt would chorus vehemently, “She ought to have lost her job, first! I would!—And chance it!”

Yes; according to this jury of maidens, I was already pronounced “Guilty.”

And, innocent as I was of anything they would have thought “mattered” in the least—for I don’t think the keeping-up of a false engagement would have outraged their conventions at all in comparison—I felt myself turn hot and cold with shame over the false position.

I was even thankful not to have to stay in the same room with these other girls that afternoon—thankful to be able to beat a retreat to the large, light office where I took down letters from the Governor’s rapid dictation as if my whole life depended on it—thankful that he did make such claims on the whole of my attention and capabilities; thankful that the boring “dinner-partner,” who had allowed a glimpse of a slightly more human personality in the cab when he’d discussed the difference between frocks and furs, had been entirely swallowed up again in the business-employer.

As he was leaving, he gave me the last of his orders for the following day.

“I should be glad if you would have lunch with me again to-morrow.”

“Very well, Mr. Waters.”

That means another ordeal in the dressing-room, where the ill-ventilated atmosphere will again be set simmering with the unspoken—and the unspeakable. I never did think that this ten pounds a week was going to be exactly easy to earn. But I hadn’t bargained for this—This is outrageous! It makes me hate everybody: Mr. Waters, to begin with, for making the proposal; Jack next, for making it necessary for me to accept it; the girls at the office here, for so hideously misconstruing the position!

My ordinary work, which had for two or three hours pushed my complicated “supernumerary duties” to the back of my mind, has come to an end, and the other thing looms well into the foreground again. I’ve walked nearly all the way back to Battersea, but that hasn’t worked off my simmering indignation even yet.

I shall spend the evening ironing out washing-ribbon and oddments in our tiny kitchen; I can’t stay with Cicely—I should only snap at her, and she would wonder why.

The one relief that I have been able to give to my feelings was when, in crossing the bridge, I tore those glorious crimson carnations (which I wouldn’t leave at the Near Oriental!) out of my coat again, and flung them far, far down into the sluggish brown waters of the river below me. How soon they were out of sight! How I wish that I could put them and everything connected with them, out of mind!

To-day, the day of my second lunch with Mr. Waters, has been one that I don’t think I shall ever forget, even when I’m a white-haired maiden-lady, with no one to lunch with but a parrot or a tabby-cat, and no man’s “appointments” to consult but those of the individual who has to pay me over my Old Age Pension!

Silence—a silence that ought to have rejoiced the heart of Mr. Dundonald, reigned throughout the whole long morning. I knew that the girls meant me to realize that Miss Trant, for outraging the code of the self-respecting business-girl, had been “sent to Coventry.”

This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For I flung it down like a gauntlet.

It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy “Gracious!”

The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat, fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie and Miss Holt were probably thinking.

“Miss Trant! D’you mind me asking you if you’re going out with Mr. Waters because you like it, or because you can’t say ‘No’?”

“Who would say ‘No’”—I fenced flippantly—“to a Savoy lunch?”

“Some girls might,” murmured Miss Smith. Miss Robinson, answering not my words, but my tone, said, “Of course it’s none of my business—except that while you’re here you are supposed to be one of us. And I can’t say——”

“Can’t say what?” I demanded, meeting her shrewd eyes squarely with my defiant ones. She flushed a little, and I was glad. But she stuck to her guns.

“I can’t say that it looks any too well! A man in his position, and a girl in yours! Under those circumstances——”

“You know nothing,” I said, deliberately and coldly, “about the circumstances.”

Still more deliberately I tossed a glance into the inevitably soap-splashed mirror at the set of my hat. Then, without another word, I turned out of the open door and walked to the lift, humming a tune just loud enough for them all to hear.

This time I didn’t trouble to glance up from the entrance, where my employer joined me, to the landing window. The girls would not be watching me off this time.

“Savoy!”

The taxi-driver touched his peaked cap with a quite unusual suggestion of deference. I suppose he had found Savoy luncheon-escorts were generous tippers. I wondered if he had ever before driven a couple in quite these “circumstances.”

Miss Robinson’s sincerely-meant reproof, “It doesn’t look any too well! A girl in your position. A man in his!” echoed in my ears louder than the whirring of the wheels and the noise of the traffic. It rankled poisonously throughout the drive, throughout the whole luncheon.

We lunched outside, which Mr. Waters said laconically would be “more amusing for me than inside.” Personally I felt that nothing would ever amuse me less than this duty-lunch with its hateful obbligato-accompaniment of what those other girls were thinking, what they were saying.

Oh, it’s all very well to quote that French axiom—

“They say—What do they say?—Let them say!” The average person will always find that a counsel of perfection.—Especially the average girl. The impulse not to let them “say” if we can help it is nearly as strong in us as the instinct of self-preservation, and of touching our hair when we pass a mirror. So that there must be some really important basic reason for it. I do wish I knew what would happen if that suddenly crumbled away ...?

But it isn’t “away” yet: it spoiled every trace of amusement that I might otherwise have enjoyed in the lunch and the people that passed. I’ve merely a vague impression of cab-whistles, of taxis whirling up beyond the trellis of the low balustrade, of obviously American figures appearing and disappearing among the evergreens; of a small, unhappy-looking face with dark eyes that stared resentfully at me out of the bowls of spoons, and of a voice that said half-absently, “I’m afraid you’ve made a very poor lunch, Miss Trant.”

“Oh, not at all.”

“Perhaps you are tired?”

“Oh, not in the least, thank you.”

“Not too tired to come on somewhere? I thought if you didn’t mind”—this always preludes an order—“we’d drive to Gemmer’s in Bond Street, and choose that ring for you.”

“Ring?” I repeated vaguely, as I put on my gloves.

“You will have to have one, you know. An engagement ring, as the outward and visible sign of the new conditions,” he said nonchalantly, as we rose. “Must have a ring to clinch the effect!”

Yes, I thought resentfully, that “clinches” it—for him. He doesn’t think of my side of the affair at all! He doesn’t see that his accurately mapped-out time-table includes any unpleasantness—just because he doesn’t choose to admit it!

I turned to him as we sat in the cab. I felt like “the turning worm” as I pulled myself together for what I meant to say.