Chapter 1 of 23 · 3999 words · ~20 min read

Part 1

THERE IS A TIDE

By J. C. SNAITH

THERE IS A TIDE ARAMINTA THE VAN ROON THE COUNCIL OF SEVEN THE ADVENTUROUS LADY THE UNDEFEATED THE SAILOR THE TIME SPIRIT THE COMING ANNE FEVERSHAM

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY Publishers New York

THERE IS A TIDE

BY J. C. SNAITH

AUTHOR OF “THE VAN ROON,” “THE SAILOR,” “THE UNDEFEATED,” ETC.

[Illustration]

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK :: :: MCMXXIV

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

THERE IS A TIDE

So this was England.

A slight, pretty girl, in a corner seat of the boat express, was looking out of the window. To her everything was new and odd and a face curiously expressive was quick to register its emotions.

All was on a scale so much less than the land from which she had come. The neatly parcelled acres somehow reminded her of Noah’s ark. Farmsteads trim and tiny; amusing hedgerows; the cattle and horses in the fields; the comic little villages, each with its moss-grown church tower peering through the damp mist, were so expected and yet so unnatural to the eye of a stranger that it was rather like a scene in a play.

The girl was in the compartment alone. By her side was a “grip,” cheap looking, battered, with an air of travel; in the rack, above her head, was its fellow with a mackintosh and an umbrella. Like their owner, these articles had a subtle air of the second rate. Yet the girl herself, had she known how to wear her clothes, which were not bad of their kind, had certain points that seemed to promise a way out.

For one thing, she was alive. Grey eyes, shrewd, keen and clear, looking out from under the brim of a hat that had a touch of smartness, seemed to absorb every detail of this film reeled off at the rate of sixty miles an hour. It was like the movies, but less exciting. Not that the traveller craved excitement. This trip to an unknown land was far from being a pleasure jaunt.

So intent were the grey eyes in absorbing a scene which was a good deal below expectation, that they were not content with the window against which her elbow pressed. Now and then they roved to the left across the narrow corridor, for a glimpse of the more distant view. Broadly speaking, this, too, was a washout. The mist, clammy and all-pervading, might have a lot to do with the general effect, but England, so far, was nothing to write home about.

Disappointment already loomed in a receptive mind, when a man appeared in the corridor. He gazed through the glass at the compartment’s sole occupant; then he came in and closed the door carefully. With a quiet air he took a corner seat immediately facing the girl. She had a feeling that she had seen him before; but where or in what circumstances she could not say. Indeed, so vague was her memory that she soon decided it was a mere reaction to the man’s striking personality.

He was not a man to forget. Big, handsome, muscular, clean and trim, he had all the snap of the smart New Yorker. Evidently he went to good tailors and he paid for dressing.

He raised his ten-dollar Stetson with an air of class. “Miss Durrance!”

The girl gave a start and coloured hotly.

“Don’t remember me, eh, Miss Durrance?”

It was clear that she didn’t. But he remembered her, and the calm enforcement of his knowledge in a tone near the familiar flecked the girl’s cheek with a picturesque confusion.

“Can’t say I do.”

At the awkward answer his eyes twinkled into a slow, bright smile. “Myself, I never forget a face or a name.”

The voice sounded oddly familiar, but she could not recall it. Not able to place this man, the effort to do so teased her forehead into a frown.

“My job, you see, to remember folks.”

She half resented the cool laugh. “Not sure I want to remember everybody.”

“I’ll say not. Pikers good and plenty don’t want to remember me.” His tone was jocular, but there was something in it beyond mere banter.

Mame Durrance realised suddenly that she had taken a strong dislike to the man opposite. He realised it, too. The breadth of his smile became aggressive. As her eyes met it they received a challenge which they were too proud to accept. She withdrew them quickly and looked ostentatiously away through the carriage window.

Even the English scene, as much as was visible, could not divert her mind from a gentle snigger that stole upon her ear. Whoever this man was she hoped he would go. But he showed not a sign. Settling into the opposite corner, he sprawled his long legs, brushing her knees as he did so, and finally crossed them. And then, past master of the art of making himself offensive, he began to hum softly, but in a way to keep in the middle of her consciousness.

“Miss Durrance.” The voice was mild but half a sneer was in it.

Somehow “it got her goat” to have his conversation thrust upon her after she had taken pains to let him know that she had no use for it. Anger made her eyes sparkle. “You quit,” she said. “Beat it.”

Rude, certainly, but she meant it to be. But in that art, too, he had nothing to learn. “Now, then, Miss Durrance, come off it.” His laugh was hateful.

One outstanding detail of the compartment there was, which the sharp-eyed traveller had already noted. A metal disc fixed below the luggage rack was within reach. It was adorned by the words, “To communicate with the Attendant, pull the handle.”

On the spur of the moment she half turned and raised her hand. But the voice of the man opposite grew instantly so full of menace that she felt a little frightened.

“Can that, Miss Durrance, or I’ll have to make it hot for you.”

The force of the threat made the girl withdraw her hand. She met the laugh which followed with a look of defiance, but she had not art nor cleverness enough to conceal the fact that she was rattled. Her cheeks grew scarlet. Some very white and even teeth bit savagely into her lower lip.

The man, watching narrowly, was obviously pleased with the effect.

“Got me now, hey, Miss Durrance?”

“I don’t know who you are,” was the answer of Miss Durrance. A brave and steady answer it was. “And I don’t want to know anyway.”

The look in the girl’s eyes, the note in her voice, appeared sharply to recall the man opposite to a sense of his position. After all, it would not do to carry the thing too far. It was as if he suddenly remembered that in an especial degree he was a guardian of the public interest. When he spoke again his voice had consideration, even a certain kindness.

“I’m one of Tillotson’s men.”

Already her startled mind had flown to that conclusion. But neither the man’s change of tone nor her own insight softened the steely hostility of her eyes. She lifted a fighting chin to rake him with a glance of grey fire. “I’m a very respectable girl.” The note was deeper than she had touched yet. “I don’t know you an’ I don’t want to know you. Cops are no class anyway.”

Detective Addelsee, an eminent member of a highly specialised calling, was a long way from being a fool. He was growing a bit annoyed with himself for his lack of diplomacy. In spite of the girl’s insolence there was something about her that he respected. And, what was just as important, he respected human nature.

He decided to remove the bad impression he had made. “Got in wrong in New York, hey? Over here, ain’t you, to try and change the luck?” His voice was honey now. Its only reward was grim silence.

“Know folks this side?”

The girl looked at Detective Addelsee as if he were dirt. She curled her lip and shook a scornful head.

“Then you better watch your step. London crawls with slick ducks. All sorts, all nations. Up to every game. A bad place, London.”

“If it’s worsen New York, it must be,” conceded Miss Durrance.

“Capital of a free country. Every kind of cag-handed dago lies around loose in London. No place for a lone girl. What’s the stuff you goin’ to pull?”

“That’s my affair.”

Detective Addelsee smiled. He had caught a tartar. But he secretly liked the way she gave it him back. Sand always appealed to him.

“Well, I wish you the best, Miss Durrance.” The voice was official, yet kindness came uppermost. “We’ve nothing against you in New York; but we might have had. You got in with a crooked push. Sorry to have to run you in, but findin’ you on the premises and callin’ yourself the old Haunt’s secretary--she done two goes of time already--how was _we_ to know _you_ were on the level?”

Detective Addelsee meant well, but this display of tact hardly met the case. The grey eyes looked straight through him. He laughed. Serve him right for being clumsy. A regular little hell cat, but he admired her. Most girls of her kind would have been scared to death; he half suspected Miss Durrance was; but she would have died sooner than let him know it.

He liked the cut of her so much that he felt he must try to improve the acquaintance or at least to soften a bad impression. It was a shame to rag her, because to the expert eye she had a look of being up against it. But her pride, her grit, lured him on.

“What you goin’ into, Miss Durrance, in this bum island? The movies?”

“No, I ain’t, Fatty Arbuckle.”

The answer was pat as your hat. Detective Addelsee chuckled.

“Make good on the fillum, a girl of your looks and style.”

She eyed him with cool scorn from under the brim of her hat. “What’s a cheap guy like you know about looks and style?”

Her drawl could only have come from one place on earth, yet each little word had a kick in it quick and vicious, as if from the hind leg of a mule. Detective Addelsee felt this live child of the Middle West had had old Ned for a sire.

He decided now that only one course would be safe. That course was silence. But he had not been so amused in years. The trained professional memory at once recalled the circumstance of their previous meeting. During a raid on the apartment of an old harpy in the neighbourhood of Madison Avenue, who mingled crystal-gazing and fortune-telling with other illegal practices, this girl had been found seated at a typewriter. Investigation proved, however, that she had only held her job a fortnight, and that in the first place her association with such a dangerous person was due to an advertisement she had incautiously answered. Mame Durrance had no difficulty in satisfying the police that she was in total ignorance of the character and history of the notorious Cassandra, alias Zeno, alias Madame Bretsky. All the same the law took pains to impress on the unlucky stenographer that her escape had been narrow. In future she must be more discreet. Innocence as great as hers was apt to incur heavy penalties in such a city as New York.

This episode, as Detective Addelsee was shrewd enough to suspect, had shaken Miss Durrance to her foundations. She was undoubtedly a very respectable girl, the daughter of a simple Iowa farmer, and she had come East to try her luck. Having made a bad break at the start of her career she had decided to seek fortune elsewhere. As William R. Addelsee sat gazing at that fighting profile out of the corner of his left eye, all that he knew about the girl passed in review order through a well-regulated mind. His had been the job of running her in; and of setting her free with a caution. He had caught sight of her again as she left the second-class deck of the _Sidonia_; he had seen her board the London train. She had the sort of personality not easy to forget. He was interested in this girl for her own sake; but the effort to get into conversation was having no success. The plain truth was, that as far as Miss Durrance was concerned William R. Addelsee was in the discard.

Man of the world, he was amused by her attitude. And he admired her grit. Moreover, he wished her well. That, however, was not easy to convey.

He tried the dulcet and disarming. “You see, Miss Durrance, there’s a bunch of jewel thieves I’m lookin’ for. Scotland Yard has rounded up several. I expect we’ll soon fix the hull circus.”

Miss Durrance, with glacial eye, continued to gaze upon the English scene. “The frozen mit” with a vengeance. Jewel thieves, Scotland Yard, even the brightest of Tillotson’s Agency, haloed with romance for a normal girl, were cutting no ice for the moment. Her pride had been wounded and Detective Addelsee had now to foot the bill.

“You can quit.” A fierce eye pinned him like an arrow. “Cops don’t interest me nothing.”

Silence again. The position was a little humiliating for a man of the world. But this charming spitfire intrigued him. Such a you-be-damnedness quite took the fancy of William R. And the simple independence touched his sense of chivalry.

“If I can help you any I’ll be glad,” he said, humble as pie, yet adroitly raising a hand to hide the laugh in his eyes.

Said Miss Spitfire: “You can beat it. That’ll help me considerable.”

The entrance at this moment of a very small and very polite boy in a strangely bright and extremely tight suit of livery was most opportune. Miss Durrance, who had a fixed determination to see, mark and learn as much as she could in the shortest time possible, was taken at once by this new kind of “bell-hop.”

“Corfee, miss?”

The fair traveller ordered coffee.

Under cover of this diversion William R. suddenly rose. It was the best chance he was likely to get of extricating himself with any sort of dignity from a position which every second grew worse. Nothing doing with this girl, and it was hardly fair to bait her.

As Detective Addelsee, on the heels of the departing boy, moved towards the corridor, he was guilty of one more false step. For he looked back and said: “Good-bye, Miss Durrance, an’ good luck. Be careful this time to get in on the level. But I’ll say London is a tough burg. If any time I can help you any, my name’s Addelsee.” He had the temerity to open a gold cigar case and produce his card. “Scotland Yard, Whitehall, ’ll get me pro tem.” As concrete evidence of good will, Detective Addelsee had the further temerity to write his address upon the card and then with a bland smile to hand it to Miss Durrance.

It was asking for trouble. William R. Addelsee duly received a full ration. Miss Durrance tore the card across. Then she coolly lowered the window and flung out the pieces. “Beat it.” Her face was crimson, her eye ruthless. “And thank you for nix. Cops are no class at all, cops aren’t.”

With a little sigh that was offset by a humorous eye, Detective Addelsee raised the ten-dollar Stetson and followed the bell-boy along the corridor.

III

“Say, Jackie Coogan, there’s no sugar.”

The polite boy in the button suit gazed at Miss Durrance with mild surprise. New stars constantly swam into his ken. Few had better opportunities than he of testing the simple truth that all sorts of people are needed to make a world. It was this, no doubt, which gave depth to his character. Nothing could have exceeded the grace of his regret for the sugar’s omission and of his promise to bring some.

“That kid’s fierce,” was the mental comment of the traveller to the English scene as this by-product gently closed the door upon her. She had a very keen and lively sense of things and the air and manner of the button suit’s wearer gave it a jolt.

Mame Durrance had certain preconceived ideas about the land she had come to and the odd folks who peopled it, derived in the main from exquisitely humorous writers, usually with Irish names, in her favourite magazines. The British, if not given to mirth themselves, were yet the cause of mirth in others. An obvious back number, the land of George Washington’s forebears was a mass of weary pomposities; it took itself so seriously that it couldn’t raise a smile to save its soul. Up till now she had not had much opportunity of judging it, but the funny little toy of a train in which she was puffing along to London, the tame scenery--what she could see of it--through which it passed, the little cubbyhole in which she sat alone, and the comic child with oiled hair and the manner of a senator who ministered to her wants, all seemed to fit neatly into the theory.

Buttons came back with two small pieces of sugar on a large tray.

“Say, son, does it hurt you any to look that way?”

“Beg your pardon, moddam?”

“All right, Mr. Asquith. On’y my ignorance. You can beat it.”

“Thank you, moddam.” Gently and gravely, without a ghost of a smile, the polite child went.

It was well for Mame Durrance that she had these resources within herself. For at the moment she was not on good terms with life. The railway company’s _café au lait_, for which it had the nerve to charge a quarter, allowing for the rate of exchange, was not very stimulating either. And Detective Addelsee had shaken her considerably. It surely looked as if the bad luck which had dogged her ever since she left Cowbarn, Iowa, six months ago was going to cling.

It was just six months ago that Mame Durrance had heard the call of ambition in rather strange circumstances. At that time she was a stenographer, earning a few dollars a week, in the office of the Cowbarn _Independent_. But her Aunt Lou, a sister of her long dead mother, having left her a legacy of two thousand dollars, she at once turned her face east.

These providential dollars must be invested in seeing life. And as native wit had carried her already from a farm kitchen to a stenographer’s chair, she saw no reason why, with money in her purse, that priceless quality should not take her much further. Anyhow it should not be for lack of trying.

She would see life. And in moments of optimism, of which at the start she had many, she went on to describe what she saw. The seeing, alas, proved easier than the writing; or rather the seeing and the writing were easier than to persuade editors “to fall” for her copy. Too many were at the game in the bright city of New York; wisenheimers of both sexes, who instead of coming via Poppa’s pig-farm had been through College.

There was the rub. At Cowbarn the folks didn’t set much store by College. But New York was different.

She was a shrewd girl and it did not take long for her to realise that she was some way behind the game. Human nature was always human nature, when you came down to cases, but there was no denying that she lacked experience. Back of everything was faith in herself, but so wide was the gulf between Cowbarn, Iowa, and the banks of the Hudson that no amount of faith could bridge it.

New York had laughed at her, scorned her, humiliated her deeply and cruelly in more ways than one. She had been advised by newspaper men and also by police officers, professing a disinterested care for rustic ignorance playing a lone hand, to go back to dad and the pigs. These experts were confident that Miss Mame Durrance would get no good of New York.

However, they didn’t know quite so much about Mame Durrance as she knew about herself. She might be down but she was not out. New York had no use for her, but there were other places on the map. For instance, there was London. No, not London, Ontario. As far as the big stuff was concerned, that burg was in the Cowbarn class. London, England, was the spot. She heard that London, England, offered scope for ambition. A few years in Europe might even stop the gaps in her education. It would be like putting herself through College. Hers was a forward-looking mind. And as with set lips and ten fingers on a purse, which in spite of Aunt Lou’s legacy, was not so heavy as her heart, she put off in the _Sidonia_, she determinedly envisaged the future return of Mame Durrance to the land of her fathers with at least three trunks of real Paris frocks and an English accent. New York would laugh then at the little mucker on the other side of its mouth.

Conflicting opinions had been expressed to Miss Durrance about London. But in her small circle only one was able to speak from first-hand knowledge. Paula Wyse Ling had been there. The others spoke from hearsay, and in one or two cases with a little help from the imagination. But Paula Ling had lived in London a year. This rising columnist, who in the view of Mame was “the goods,” had taken pains to impress the traveller with the stark truth that in the Strand ten cents went no further than they did on Broadway.

Miss Ling had provided the adventurous Mame with the address of a cheap but respectable boarding house in Bloomsbury, where she had stayed herself, where, all things considered, she had received value for her money, and could conscientiously recommend. This enterprising girl had also given the traveller a letter of introduction to the editor of _High Life_, a weekly journal with an address in Fleet Street, whose ostensible business was to record the doings and sayings of Society with a large S.

As the train sped on the practical Mame began to arrange certain things in her mind. First she opened the small bag which was attached to her wrist, to make sure that the sinews of war were really there; and then, in spite of having made all sorts of calculations already, she did one more sum in her head to find out just how far Aunt Lou’s legacy would carry her. Then she searched for the address of Miss Ling’s boarding house and found it written on an envelope: Beau Sejour, 56 Carvell Street, Bloomsbury, London, W. C. Sole Proprietress Miss Aimee Valance. Terms _en pension_.

Somehow the information in its fulness and dignity was quite reassuring. Next the pilgrim reverently fingered the sealed envelope which bore the address: Walter Waterson, Esq., c/o _High Life_, 9 Tun Court, Fleet Street, London, E. C. That was reassuring too. Finally she took in her fingers her own private card and they thrilled as she did so.

Her own private card, which had been engraved just before she had sailed in the _Sidonia_, had a cosmopolitan air. The world was going to be impressed by it.