Читать книгу Windlestraws - Bottome Phyllis - Страница 3

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Jean Arbuthnot stood on the steps of Claridge's Hotel, feeling uncomfortably small.

She hadn't minded the mysterious Turk who had suggested himself as a pupil desiring to master the English language by travelling abroad with her. It wasn't poor Miss Pratt the agent's fault that foreigners were often fishy.

A cool English manner and a History First had easily disposed of the Turk's olive complexion and melting chocolate eyes.

Jean had simply looked along her nose and dropped ice into her voice and the thing was over. But Lady Margaret Hamilton, whose daughter was a leading society beauty, and who would be sure to know how much Jean's clothes had cost, would be a sterner ordeal.

'She can't eat me,' Jean told herself doubtfully, feeling as she did so that cannibalism would be the lesser evil.

'And if I've got to go back to Carrie, I've got to--I'd rather sleep in a barrel, of course. But Diogenes had a different sort of climate.'

She sniffed once more at the acute, familiar drizzle smelling drearily of soot and petrol which was what she chiefly knew of London, before she faced the deep-upholstered, vaguely scented hotel lounge. She was, as she had expected to be, standing there with a dripping umbrella, steadily ignored by half a dozen well-dressed women; but after the porter had dealt with her name and removed the offending umbrella, one of the repellent women lowered her copy of the 'Times' and looked across the lounge with a good-natured sparkle in her frosty blue eyes. Lady Margaret's manner seemed to expect that people would be sent to see her, but promised that, when they came, they would be pleasantly treated.

'You must have been told to come here by Miss Pratt, weren't you?' she demanded, holding out her hand without getting up. 'She seems a sensible woman and she hasn't sent me dozens of unsuitable girls; in fact, you're the first, and I dare say you aren't unsuitable! Won't you sit down?' Jean sat down. She began to feel less frightened.

Lady Margaret was not formidable unless she meant to be; her age was non-committal and her beauty had been hers so long that she knew exactly what to do with it. When she smiled, her teeth, of which she had a right to be proud, shone dazzlingly. She wouldn't have minded telling anyone that she was over fifty and had had none of them out.

'I hope you don't object to questions,' she began, 'I've promised my daughter not to leave a stone unturned. It's not for myself, you know, that I want you. I've not been accustomed to a secretary; when I was young and busy, the world was smaller and quieter and we did things for ourselves. But you won't mind that! You'll find Windlestraws more amusing than Tunbridge Wells!

'Her house is always full of visitors, and somebody is always up to something; and then, of course, you'll be in Town for the season. I can't afford the season now, but my daughters are well married.

'I sit at home with a box of Mudie books and a curate.

'You look as if you'd do for Beatrice, but one can't tell by looks alone, can one? Poor Beatrice is quite good-looking herself, but she doesn't mind having a pretty girl in the house.

'What she really wants is some one who'll be a stay and a prop.

'She hates writing notes and looking up people's trains. They never come by the ones you choose, of course; and then they think it's your fault if the connections aren't good. But the most important thing, of course, is to get Sir Reginald into Parliament.

'Wasn't your father a Professor or something?'

Jean admitted that her father still was a more or less famous Egyptologist, and that, as she was accustomed to looking up obscure statistics, she might probably be trusted to deal with trains. She had been his secretary for several years, she had helped him with his lectures, she had even written and published several articles. She ought to have been a teacher, but she hadn't liked teaching--and, until her father's second marriage, she had kept his house.

She didn't blame her father for marrying again; he was only fifty and had been a widower for ten years when he shattered Jean's life and his own by the abrupt introduction of Carrie.

Lady Margaret's sympathetic, compelling eyes reproduced the image of this frank disaster. Carrie seemed to stand there before them, till her bangles rattled. She was a large, strident blonde, without an idea, but with a lovely complexion, quantities of cheap clothes, and a preference, which she instantly put into execution, for filling the house with little silver boxes.

'The only way to escape a second marriage,' Lady Margaret observed kindly, 'is to avoid making a first! There's nothing--especially for men--so vulnerable as widowhood. However old men are and however wise, they want a second wife much as a baby wants a dummy if it can't get a bottle! A dummy isn't the same thing as a bottle, of course, but it soothes the nerves.

'I dare say your stepmother is quite impossible, but she's sure to keep your father quiet!'

Jean sighed; perhaps Lady Margaret was right, but then she didn't know how intensely quiet her father had been before the advent of Carrie. Hadn't he liked, as much as Jean herself liked, the dim pleasant home full of leather armchairs and tobacco smoke? He had made, and must have enjoyed the incisive, impersonal talk which had drawn enthralled undergraduates and austere but constant dons continually to their door? The new Mrs. Arbuthnot had reduced these talks to spasmodic mutterings. The dons melted away as only dons can melt, and even the undergraduates, their kind of undergraduates, grew rapidly less. No doubt Carrie would soon find an audience for her brawling, prodding personalities punctuated by shrieks of good-natured laughter; ribs of the kind that like being dug would present themselves for that purpose in sufficient quantities; but Jean confessed to Lady Margaret that she had a desperate desire to keep her ribs intact.

'She promised,' Jean explained, 'to marry me off in a jiffy, and I don't think that's the kind of way I at all want to be married.'

'You will, when you're in love,' Lady Margaret suggested. 'Marriage is like the dentist's, you know--you hate the idea unless you have a toothache--and then the sooner you're off the better! But you're young yet, and I've never hurried my own girls. They did what they thought they wanted and I took good care that they should be too well brought up to want to marry a poor man; that's all you can do for young people nowadays. Do you know anything about politics?'

Jean admitted that she had studied them with a certain seriousness, but she saw in a flash that politics as a science hadn't quite been what Lady Margaret meant.

'Reggie,' said Lady Margaret thoughtfully, 'hunts and shoots most of the time, and only reads about Test matches. Still he's very sound on politics, and I think he only wants his thoughts sorted out a little and put together smartly. You know what I mean?'

Jean hesitated. She tried to make her eyes express reassurance and an ability to be smart with Sir Reginald's ideas, which she was far from feeling.

Lady Margaret went on more thoughtfully still. 'One can see that you aren't a frump and that's all to the good, but they simply can't in their house do with a God-forsaken idiot; and if you don't mind my saying so, girls have such idiotic lapses--even the clever ones! Perhaps the clever ones are the worst!'

'What kind of lapses?' Jean cautiously inquired.

'Oh, the usual lapses!' Lady Margaret exclaimed impatiently. 'They break their tiresome little hearts and lose their silly little heads the moment a good-looking young man takes the trouble to say "Boo!" to them.'

Jean stiffened a little, and ventured to remind Lady Margaret that she was, after all, twenty-four and had won a History First; but Lady Margaret waved her Honors degree to one side as if university attainments were mere twaddle from an underworld; and she refused to consider twenty-four as any age at all.

'The great thing,' Lady Margaret added more mildly, 'is that you're a lady, and as far as I can tell not a poop. Are you used to men?'

'I've seen far more of them than of women,' Jean assured her. 'You see, they came in and out a good deal at home. But of course they came to see father!'

'Ah, that isn't what I mean at all!' Lady Margaret disconcertingly exclaimed. 'They aren't, in my sense of the word, men unless they're in love with you! Still, it can't be helped. You're not in the least like anything they've ever seen at Windlestraws, but I dare say a change'll be good for them. You dress quite nicely, too! You'll find Beatrice perfectly easy to get on with. She was considered the best cross-country rider in the Pytchley before her marriage. She's got more brains than that racing crowd they're in with now. Racing people are mostly only just all there, you know, and as hard as nails into the bargain! But you'll find Beatrice most kind-hearted--and she reads memoirs. She's a good mother, too, and far cleverer than Reggie.

'Still, I think that's such a pity, don't you, even if a woman can hide it? It's so good for men to be cleverer than their wives, and makes them far better husbands! You can't expect a man to be true to you, can you, if you think he's a fool?'

Jean hesitated; in the world she lived in brains were not considered a disadvantage, nor were they capable of being hidden in order to make their owners more attractive.

If she had married a fool, her father would simply have considered that she was one.

'Perhaps,' she said cautiously, 'Sir Reginald has a different kind of brain from his wife?'

'He hasn't one at all,' said Lady Margaret impatiently, 'but he has twenty thousand a year and that ought to be enough for any woman!'

Jean, who didn't agree with her, said nothing. She was glad that she had been brought up to say nothing and look intelligent for hours at a time; but she was surprised to find that Lady Margaret saw through her.

'You will think so when you're older!' Lady Margaret said, with a disconcerting smile. 'I shouldn't be surprised if you found Windlestraws rather amusing.

'It's good riding country; and although Reggie owns such a lot of land his mother's money quite keeps the wolf from the door. Her father, old Sir William Prout, you know, made a fortune out of yeast. I always tell Beatrice that accounts for a lot.'

Jean took this as perhaps the best moment which had yet presented itself for dropping an embarrassed plea to be told her salary.

Lady Margaret hunted up a letter which was hidden under the 'Times' and read out loud, though perhaps she hadn't intended to, 'Not a professional siren, of course, but she must have looks and breeding enough not to be a bore.'

She covered this hurriedly by adding, 'Three hundred a year and at least a month's holiday.' 'It sounds absurdly little,' Lady Margaret murmured apologetically. 'But it'll cover your expenses and there'll be extras. They're really rather nice to people who work for them.' Three hundred a year was what the Turk had offered Jean, but he, like Lady Margaret, had hinted that there might be extras. It was a salary to jump at if you were living in.

Jean hesitated no longer, she said: 'If you think I'll do----'

Lady Margaret smiled reassuringly. 'They'll be as pleased as punch to have a clever girl like you in the house!' she said encouragingly. 'Oughtn't you to have a glass of milk or something?'

It had suddenly dawned on Lady Margaret that a girl who really wanted three hundred a year as a salary would probably be hungry.

But Jean explained to her gravely that her immediate needs were satisfied, and asked in her turn when she was to go to Windlestraws. Lady Margaret dived once more into her daughter's letter, but this time she studied with greater caution the decisive, clearly marked handwriting, which filled four sides of a sheet. Beatrice was, Lady Margaret explained, wonderfully business-like. The money she made out of pigs was simply extraordinary. She'd explained everything most thoroughly and even enclosed a cheque for Jean's fares.

'The car will meet you at Ashcomb,' Lady Margaret went on. 'It's an enchanting place--if you like scenery, you know. Beatrice has a nice garden. She goes in for roses; they work in wonderfully with the pigs--there has to be such heaps of manure; and whenever there's a show her "teas" get the first prize. It's so good for all the poor people in the neighbourhood.' Lady Margaret's eyes had begun to wear a faintly glazed look, and to wander speculatingly about the lounge.

Jean rose to depart and the glaze vanished. 'I do hope I'll do,' Jean murmured shyly, 'but I'm so afraid I shan't be clever enough!'

Lady Margaret rose, too; there was a hint of raillery in the kind smile she gave Jean. 'What you don't know,' she said decisively, 'I dare say you'll learn at Windlestraws; it's rather a good place for picking things up.'