Читать книгу The Abbey Girls Again - Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley - Страница 5

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“Did you have a good time? Was it Garbo again?” Mary asked, as she laid the table for supper.

“No, it was silly stuff. I wished I hadn’t gone. The rest thought it was awfully funny, but I got sick of it. But they didn’t want me to come away before the end.”

Mary listened gladly, but made no comment. Now and then a remark of Biddy’s showed that there was hope for her still. Occasionally a healthy tomboy strain asserted itself and revolted against the inanities which amused the rest of her set; at these times she spoke and felt as a schoolgirl of fifteen and not as a prematurely grown-up city child. It was this side of Biddy that Mary would gladly have strengthened, if she had known how. To-night, stirred to new and active thought by Jen’s visit, she made a really useful suggestion.

“Biddy, have you ever thought of joining the Guides? There are some who must meet near here. I often see them in the street.”

Biddy stared at her. “Whatever put that into your head? You are funny, Mary! You’ve never mentioned the Guides before! I don’t think I want to, thank you!”

“I thought perhaps you’d like to. It was a sudden idea. Do any of your crowd belong?”

“Help, no! They laugh at the Guides. It would be too much fag. You have to work too jolly hard. Now tell me about the flowers, Mary! What did she come for?”—she had already identified the fairy godmother with the violet girl of the afternoon.

“I’d have waited in to see her if I’d known!” she said hungrily, as Mary told her story. “Let me see the programmes! I’ll be very careful.—Oh, I know some of these! We did a few country-dances at school. I liked ‘Gathering Peascods.’ And ‘Rigs’ is great sport; you have sticks, and bang your partner. Well, I mean you bang her stick, of course. I could do that one still. ‘Glorishears’—oh, how weird!”

“Why is that one weird? I didn’t know you had done any folk-dancing,” Mary said thoughtfully, a new idea dawning in her mind.

“We did this one at school, and the girls thought it was rather silly. You have hankies, one in each hand, and you clap and stamp; they used to say it was an infants’ dance, and too kiddy for us. It’s weird to think of grown-up people doing these dances. I thought they were only for schools!”

“Miss Robins didn’t speak like that at all. She sounded as if she loved them. Perhaps it depends how they’re done.”

“I’d like to see how she does them! I say, Mary, couldn’t we ask her to squeeze us into a corner? If she’s such a good sort, I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

Mary laughed, and coloured a little in unusual excitement. “I wouldn’t have liked to ask, but she thought of it for herself. We’re going, Biddy! She asked us both; she mentioned you especially.”

“Oh, cheers! Cheers!” and Biddy sprang up and did a Bampton hey round the table, the programme held aloft in her right hand, and ended with both arms flung overhead. “Oh, she is a sport! I’ll simply love it! When is it, Mary? What shall we wear? You’ll come, won’t you? You’d like it, I’m sure!” with a spasm of anxiety lest Mary should back out. “It will be quite different from the pictures! I’m sure you’ll love it!”

“Of course I’m going,” Mary said swiftly. “I’m every bit as keen as you are. I’d go out oftener if we could afford to go to decent things, but your endless cinemas don’t appeal to me. This will be worth while.”

Biddy allowed the slur on her beloved “pictures” to pass. “When is it to be, Mary? Is she coming to fetch the programmes? I’d love to see her!”

“I shall take them to the office to-morrow. I expect she’ll come in there for them, but she may not think they would be ready so soon. She didn’t seem to have the vaguest notion how long it would take me to do them,” Mary said, laughing.

“Tell me every word she told you about it!” Biddy begged. “We’ll wash up afterwards!” and pushed Mary down on the stool before the fire and squatted on the rug herself.

It was not often they found such a common interest. Mary was thankful anew to Jen Robins, as she sat with her arm round Biddy and repeated everything she could remember, and told her own impressions of Jen.

Biddy giggled at the thought of Jen’s safety because of the difficulty of concealing her body if she were murdered; and laughed out at the reference to the “den of kidnappers or coiners.”

“You don’t look the part, Mary dear! She must have talked a lot! I wish I’d been in! Let me see that programme again; let’s try to imagine what it will look like! Blue frocks, all alike, did you say? They can’t have found a colour that will suit everybody, surely! I’m simply dying to see your fairy godmother, Mary!”

“A godmother with bobbed hair, and twelve years younger than I am, and ever so much taller!” Mary laughed.

The fairy godmother went flying into her own flat. It was a ground floor flat, to Jen’s endless regret; but that had been necessary on her father’s account. She liked top storeys, and had hoped for one with a flat roof, but had been obliged to accept the inevitable and had characteristically found reason to rejoice in it.

“At least I can practise jigs and do capers without worrying about the people underneath!”

“I don’t remember hearing that you ever did worry very much!” her father had hinted.

She played an impatient tattoo on the knocker, and as the door opened burst out, “Has Joy—oh, Joy! You dear!” and she hurled herself on the bronze-haired girl of twenty-one who had answered her knock.

“I sent your girl away and came myself,” Joy gasped, half strangled. “Don’t knock me down, Jenny-Wren, or I’ll never come again! Remember you weigh about a ton.”

“I don’t! Oh, I don’t, Joy Shirley! How long have you been waiting?”

“Yes, you do, when you throw yourself at people like that. Oh, hours and hours! Long enough to have a bath, and unpack and change my dress! Where have you been, my child? Who are these new people for whom you neglect your very-oldest-in-the-world friend?”

“Oh, you’re not that!” Jen was throwing off her fur cap and coat. “Jack’s hours older than you! She spoke to me when I was a perfectly new kid, while I still only dared to gaze at you reverently from a distance, because you were a senior! Joan spoke, too, and was jolly and friendly, because she was the May Queen. I was fearfully in awe of you!”

“I’d had a year of queening and was fed up. I was only too glad to leave the new kids to Joan. Of course, if I’d dreamt one of the new kids was going to develop into our Jenny-Wren, I’d have rushed to take her to my heart at once.”

“And if I’d only known that the great Queen Joy was going to turn out to be only you, I’d have been a lot less scared than I was,” Jen retorted, shaking out her short curls before the glass.

“You were neither scared nor shy, ever. Who are these interlopers you’ve taken up?” Joy demanded. “Your mother only said there was a girl you seemed interested in.”

“I want to tell you about her,” Jen sobered suddenly. “I want you to help me, ‘Travellers’ Joy.’ That’s why I went to see her. I told her I went because I wanted her to do a typing job for me, but really and truly it was to find out more about her. I think she’s a case for you. I’ll tell you all about her, but I must just run in to father and mother first, or they’ll think I have been kidnapped in earnest this time.”

“Oh, my dear kid, they’ve heard you long ago! You make noise enough for six!”

“They like it,” Jen assured her heartily. “It cheers them up. I’d never dare to have you here if they wanted quietness. I exert myself day and night to keep them lively. You slip into my room, and I’ll come in a sec., and we’ll have a talkee-talkee. I want to hear all about to-day from you.”

Joy was sitting in the firelight when she returned; Joy in a pretty brown frock with embroidery which matched her bronze-red hair; Joy with a more serious look than usual. Jen dropped on the rug beside her, as Biddy had dropped beside Mary, and said quietly, “You tell first, Joy. My new people can wait. Did you see the Pixie? Didn’t she keep you longer than you expected? I’d nearly given you up. Or did you come up to town late? Or did you have a smash-up? Have you punctured Eirene?”

“No, the car’s all right, and I came early,” Joy said soberly. “It wasn’t the Pixie who kept me, though it’s always hard to come away from her. We’re to go and see her. She’s got some new and exciting stunt on, and she wants to show us all about it. She wouldn’t tell me a thing. She wants you to see, too.”

“How thrilling! She is one for ideas! We’ll go, of course,” Jen said fervently. “But what made you so late, ‘Travellers’ Joy’?”

“The kiddies,” Joy’s face sobered again.

“Oh! The crippled children you were to take out for a ride?”

“Yes,” Joy moved restlessly. “I couldn’t bear to take them back again, and say they’d got to go home. They were just in heaven; I hated to tell them it was all over! The Pixie had them waiting when I called at the Club, five of them—poor little twisted things; Jen, it’s horrible! Tiny kids, and they’ll never be any better! For the first time I wished Eirene was a touring car, or a pantechnicon, or a lorry, so that I could have taken a dozen. We packed them in and I whizzed them off into the country. I thought, with a cargo like that, I’d better keep to roads I knew, so I came out west, though it would have been more exciting to go down into Surrey. But it didn’t matter to those kiddies where they went; they were off their heads with excitement, and they thought Hyde Park was the country! We went as far as Uxbridge, and then turned off on the Slough road, and I ran them through the woods near Iver Heath, and showed them the lake in the Black Park; they’d never seen so much water in their lives. I’d only meant to give them a two or three hours’ ride; but when I saw it was the great day of their lives, I couldn’t bear to cut it short. I took them to the inn and gave them lunch in the garden—eggs and jam and cakes and milk, because I wasn’t sure what they could eat. Then we went into a field and picked buttercups,—and if you’d heard the shrieks of excitement! They’d positively never done such a thing before. So then we went and bought a basket at a cottage—where, by the way, they saw white hens, and yellow hens, and a canary in a cage, and ducks, and a black and white cat. More wild excitement! And in the woods we filled the basket—it was a big one—with fir cones, which they thought perfectly wonderful, and with a heap of those lovely long yellow leaves of sweet chestnut that cover the ground in there; and they’ve taken them home, and stacks of wild flowers. We had tea—buns and cakes—on logs in the wood; they only had to walk a very few yards, and they were simply crazy to get out and kick about in the leaves. So you’ll understand it was quite late, and they were all fagged out, before we got back to Plaistow! I apologised to the Pixie, but I think she understood.”

“Joy, what a beautiful day! For them and for you!” Jen said warmly. “I can just see how lovely you would be with those children!”

“My dear, I was stiff with shyness! I hadn’t the first idea how to speak to them. I longed to have you to help; but there wouldn’t have been room for them if you’d been there. I shall sell Eirene; no, I shan’t! I shall keep her; but I shall buy a big family car, and take a dozen kids out at a time.”

“I don’t believe you were shy. You’ve never been shy yet. And you always have plenty to say.”

“Well, I hadn’t plenty to-day. I didn’t know how to talk to those East-End kiddies.”

“We’ll know how to cool you off when we want to,” Jen remarked unkindly. “We’ll send for a Plaistow crowd and keep them in reserve. But it isn’t anything to joke about. Joy, you have been a real fairy godmother to those children to-day. I wish I could have seen you with them!”

“The trouble is,” and Joy’s strong hands, so used to the steering-wheel of her car, clenched in tense feeling, “that there are hundreds and thousands of them. And I can go once a week to take out five at a time!”

“I know,” Jen said soberly. “But you can be glad you’re doing even that. Think of your five to-night! Think how they’ll talk of it for months!”

“Think how they’ll want to go again! I’d have liked to promise to take them once a week. But it wouldn’t be fair. There are all the others. And I can’t go every day. I can’t leave aunty alone at Grace-Dieu. And there are other things to do.”

“Yes, you mustn’t do only one thing,” Jen said, with energy. “There’s your hostel for working girls; I’m keen on that at the moment, for I’ve found a girl I want you to ask down to it. How is it getting on, Joy?”

“We’re stuck. I can’t find just the right house-keeper. She has to be a hostess as well, to make the girls feel at home. She’s very important. I won’t go ahead till I find her. I’m afraid your girl will have to wait. Tell me about her, Jenny-Wren! I’ve done my share!”

“She’s called The Mary and Dorothy,” Jen’s eyes laughed in the firelight.

“Jen Robins!”

“She is. Well, Mary-Dorothy, then; and the little sister’s Biddy; there are only the two of them. She’s the typist who’s going to do Daddy’s Yorkshire stuff, and she’s going to do our programmes for next Wednesday. I’ve asked her to come and watch. I’m starting a Crusade, ‘Travellers’ Joy!’ I’m going to make Mary-Dorothy folk-dance, or know the reason why.”

“Will it be so awfully difficult?” Joy laughed.

“My dear, I think it will need an earthquake!” Jen said dramatically. “I haven’t dared to tell her! She’d die at the thought. She’d think I was laughing at her, anyway. It will have to be done very, very carefully, and very, very gently, and very, very tactfully. That’s why it’s a Crusade. But I’m going to make her dance!”

“But why?” Joy asked, laughing again. “Why are you so keen to convert her? And why will it be so hard?”

“She needs it,” Jen said, with conviction. “I feel it in my bones, in every separate one of them, that Mary-Dorothy needs it. I don’t know why; I hardly know a thing about her. But I know she needs stirring up. And dancing will do it. I don’t say she’ll ever do morris; that depends on how keen she gets; but there’s no earthly reason she shouldn’t be a country-dancer. She’s small and slight, and she’s got neat ankles, just made for dancing. Her balance isn’t good, but perhaps that will come. She looks as if she hadn’t ever done a thing in the way of games, or anything active, in her life. I don’t suppose she’ll be able to run or skip.”

“Help!” said Joy. “Aren’t you taking on rather a large order, my child?”

“You’d think so, if you’d seen her. I tell you, it’s a regular Crusade. But I mean to see it through. It will change her altogether.”

“You mean it will be difficult because she hasn’t done anything of the kind; at least, you think she hasn’t?”

“She’ll think she’s too old,” Jen said, in a tone of conviction. “She’ll be scared stiff; I expect she’s horribly self-conscious and shy, and miserable because of it. She looks all shut up inside herself. I saw her in the typewriting office, Joy; and I gave her some violets because she looked so fagged and headachy. She was awfully touched and pleased, and fearfully shy about taking them. So I thought I’d see more of her, and I made an excuse of our programmes, and ran round in the car after tea. Of course, she never dreamt it was an excuse! Well, she was sitting there all alone, darning her sister’s stockings, while the kid was out at the cinema with a crowd of chums. Now you know——! After typing in an office all day! If she can’t stick the pictures—and I don’t blame her for that—she could go out and walk, or something.”

“I’ve an idea you don’t walk the streets in London just for the sake of walking,” Joy observed. “I fancy it isn’t done. But she could get on top of a bus; it wouldn’t cost more than the pictures! You think she’s the kind of working girl who ought to be folk-dancing in her evenings; the kind we were speaking of last term?”

“Well, don’t you think so, too? Think how good it would be for her! The music, and the exercise, and the friends, and the fun of it! Think how it would freshen her up!”

“Yes, I’m with you there. If she’s coming to your show, perhaps you could get her into the club; then you’d have your chance to wake her up.”

“I think that’s what I want to do; wake her up,” Jen said reflectively. “She struck me as only half alive. I don’t wonder; if I had to type all day, and had nothing to look forward to at nights, I should try to be as little alive as I could. It wouldn’t seem worth while. But she’ll need a lot of persuading, ‘Travellers’ Joy.’ She’s thirty; and I think she feels sixty.”

“Thirty! H’m! What made her tell you?”

“She didn’t exactly. But she said her little sister was fifteen. And later she said if Biddy lived with a sister twice her age, she might very well expect to get her stockings darned for her. It’s not too old, Joy. Look at the people we know who must be over thirty; and how beautifully they dance!”

“I know. But it’s different if you’ve been doing it for ten or twelve years. It’s old to begin.”

“I know that. She’ll be stiff, and awkward, and awfully shy and frightened of it. But she can get over that, Joy. And just think how she’ll enjoy it! Think of living all those years without anything!”

“You’re a good little child, Jenny-Wren,” Joy said swiftly. “And I’ll aid and abet your schemes in any way I can. We’ll convert the Mary-and-Dorothy between us! Do you want me to ask her to Grace-Dieu?”

“They used to live in the country,” Jen said simply. “And if you’d seen her with some bluebells and daffodils I took! They’d just come from home. I meant to send some to the Pixie for her Plaistow people, but I took them to Mary-Dorothy instead, and only kept back a few for Madam, because she loves country things so.”

“I took bluebells to the Pixie to-day, so she won’t go without. She ran all over the Club with them at once.”

“And gave them all away! I thought you’d remember. Mary-Dorothy nearly cried when she saw them, and held out her arms for them; and stuck them up in front of a mirror so that she’d get them twice over! If you’d got the hostel started, I’d have asked you to invite her, Joy. Perhaps later on you will be able to.”

“I’ll see her first,” Joy said evasively.

“Oh, Joy! I’d forgotten. I want you to come with me to-morrow night. You are staying till Saturday, aren’t you? I want you to come to see her; well say we’ve come to fetch the programmes! But really and truly I’m going to take my pipe and let her hear some of the tunes, and see what effect they have on her.”

“Oh, you can play it, then?” Joy teased. “You’re getting on well with your new toy?”

“It’s not a toy. It will be most useful when I get my class started,” Jen said, with dignity. “The pianist’s sure not to turn up sometime. Then I shall produce the pipe, and create a sensation.”

“You don’t think you’ll be able to play for dancing, surely?” Joy mocked.

“I don’t think; I know!” Jen said calmly. “Daddy always makes me pipe when we have visitors, and they gasp and gaze in wondering admiration, dumb with surprise! Nobody has ever seen a three-hole pipe, or heard of one. When I say I can get eleven notes on it, or more, with semitones, they refuse to believe it, and I have to play scales, and then arpeggios. Those thrill them most, because they see that I get three notes out of one hole, without moving a finger. You can’t imagine the excitement that pipe causes. I believe Mary-Dorothy will love folk music.”

“Right-o! You take the baby music along to-morrow night. I’ll come with you,” Joy said willingly. “Then we’ll go on to classes, I suppose? There are classes, aren’t there? Aren’t the holidays over?”

“The first classes of the term. It’s the last week of April. I wonder who will be teaching? I mean to go every week.”

“I’ll go with you when I’m in town. But you’re coming to stay with me at the Hall when the others come home, and for the May-Day doings,” Joy reminded her. “You must come to see Queen Rosamund crowned!”

“Is she all right? And Maidlin?”

“Maidie’s been visiting her aunty in Cumberland, and Ros has gone to her folks for the holidays, so we’ve had a childless household since Easter. I nearly came to fetch you to fill the blank, but I knew you’d be still getting settled.”

“I couldn’t have come. But I will come for the Coronation. Any news of Cicely coming home?”

“Not a word. But she promised. She’ll turn up some day and give us a surprise.”

“Have you seen Joan yet?” Jen asked wistfully. “I haven’t had a line from her, though she said she’d let me know when she was in London.”

“She doesn’t know your new address, my dear kid. She’s arrived; I saw her for half a sec. on my way to Plaistow this morning. We’re to go to lunch with her to-morrow; she told me to bring you. She’s staying in Kensington with the mother-in-law.”

“Does she seem different?” Jen asked anxiously.

“Not the slightest scrap of an atom! You wouldn’t believe she’d got a husband and had had a honeymoon. Looks ever so well and jolly and brown, and says they’ve had a gorgeous time in Switzerland and Italy; and if anything she’s prettier than ever. But otherwise she’s just our Joan, and not changed a bit.”

“Thank goodness!” Jen said fervently. “I was afraid she’d come back different!”

“Not she! Her letter telling me where she was staying had an urgent P.S.—‘When you come, bring my gymmy and shoes, at the earliest possible moment. For we shall be in town for some time, and I mean to go to classes and meet Jenny-Wren there.’ So I handed over her tunic this morning, with the remark that it was hardly the thing for an old married lady.”

“And Joan said: ‘What about Madam?’ I suppose,” Jen laughed.

“She did. She said just that. You’ve evidently kept her well up to date in all your plans and doings. She’s coming to your show.”

“Oh, I’ve been writing reams! I always do to Joan. Of course she’s coming! I’ll make her dance,” Jen said happily. “I’m dying to see her again! How we’ll talk to-morrow!”

“It will be as bad as Cheltenham,” Joy grinned. “And Jack will sit and gaze at Joan, and put in a word now and then. He’s still rather shy; except with her.”

“Oh, but he’s better than he used to be! We did him heaps of good!” Jen said, with conviction.