Part 12

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 that was 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 dancers began 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, she was 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 the _salle 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. That creed 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 its _bona fides_ she 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 was hard 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-thinking child 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 a _crème de menthe_ and 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 it was the native force of that enthusiasm which had such a tonic effect upon her rather _blasé_ friend.

“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 white woman’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 the _Times_ for 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 champ on 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.

XXV

The morning of Wednesday saw the punctual Mame moving into that smart apartment house 16b Half Moon Street W. In the process, alas, a hole was made in her few remaining dollars. But she was feeling pretty “good” and therefore a trifle reckless. The dream still held. Her luck continued right in. Most girls in her position would have given a year of their lives for such a chance; and she was quietly determined to make the most of it.

Some of the money, which, in spite of her run of luck, was giving her so much concern, was spent on lending a smarter appearance to her luggage and personal effects. It was not that she minded her hostess so much. She had proved herself a true democrat by cottoning to “little Miss Chicago” as she had humorously christened her. But the nigger in the wood-pile was Davis. Her supercilious eyes were far more inquisitorial than those of her mistress. A suit case, of the right Bond Street breed, and some smart new “undies” might do something to appease the wretch. At least Miss Du Rance hoped fervently that they would, for deep in her ambitious young heart were fear and dislike of Davis.

However, in spite of straitened means, the new era began promisingly. It was a relief to escape at last from the gloom and the hostility of Fotheringay House. Mame had never liked the place and the people and they had never liked her. She was so much “the wrong kind of American” that those who were rapidly losing anything in the way of social status they had ever possessed had to be on their guard. This odd Miss Du Rance belonged to the very large class of persons they simply could not afford to know.

With the new hostess, however, things were otherwise. Lady Violet could afford to know anybody and everybody. All she asked of whomsoever she knew was that they should be straight and if possible amusing. There was no question that Miss Du Rance from the outset had greatly amused her new friend. She had stimulated her too; such enthusiasm was infectious. Besides, she had ideas. Not all were practicable, but they were evidence of a modern and progressive outlook. In a word “little Miss Chicago” was a force, she meant something. Lady Violet, who, in the opinion of those among her many friends whose judgment was worth the most, “was as clever as they made ’em,” had seen from the first that they might be of use to each other.

A few days of the new régime confirmed this view. Miss Amethyst Du Rance, called Mame for short, was a find. She was quick to learn, in some things she was curiously humble-minded; she had a charming animal zest in life and she was a very genuine worker. Indeed, the little American really seemed to love work for its own sake.

From Lady Violet’s point of view, this love of work was important. Like most Britishers, she herself had a hearty dislike of work; at the same time no one enjoyed the fruits of it more. It was a necessary evil which meant a life of independence. It meant a flat of one’s own, money in one’s purse, travel, a modest entertaining of one’s friends.

The Trehernes were influential people, but of late years they had grown poor. Since the father’s death, ten years ago, their mother had let the London house. By living a country life she had been able to keep things going during her son’s minority. But now that Bill was of age, it was more than ever necessary for his mother to pare cheese. What with death duties and the cynicism of politicians who lived by robbing the people who were in a minority at the polls, they were hanging on by their eyelids to the proud position they had inherited. One of the string of girls had recently married, but it could not be said that the family circumstances were easy.

If Lady Violet was to have the kind of life she wanted she must work or marry. Of the two evils she chose the less. It was not that she disliked men. She was far too sensible to draw arbitrary distinctions between the sexes, but at heart she was celibate. And having brains enough to maintain herself in a fitting manner, for the present, at all events, she saw no reason for bartering the personal freedom which meant more to her than anything else in life.

From the outset Mame proved her worth. In her own expressive phrase she was a “go-getter”; and with a little kindly mothering she soon began to develop her talent. All the “donkey-work” could safely be left to Mame. She didn’t mind writing down a dozen columns a week to Lady Violet’s fluent dictation; she didn’t mind clucking it out on a typewriter. Then, too, she had real powers of her own. She could be trusted to deal first-hand with all sorts of minor functions, from a new film to a sale of lingerie, in an arresting and informative manner. She had much of the flair of the journalist born. Celimene’s weekly letter grew infinitely less burdensome, and in certain respects more worth while.

Lady Violet generously acknowledged all this. And even if the new arrangement meant a slice out of her income she soon began to profit in other and unexpected ways. Miss Du Rance had ideas. Before long she revealed a power of turning them to commodity.

Mame had been a week under the happy and fruitful ægis of this new friend, when a second letter arrived from New York. Moreover, it contained a cheque. And this was welcome as flowers in May, particularly as it was made out for double the amount of the first.

Elmer P. Dobree had also written very nicely. The stuff was full of promise; but there was performance in it too. The editor of the _Monitor_ was tickled to death by it and was asking for more. Of course “the blue pencil” was still in use but Elmer P. was full of sage advice. Even in the Cowbarn days, he had been, but he had the art of giving it in a tactful way. Good old Elmer, what a white man he was! Mame gave a little sigh of gratitude as she fingered the cheque and then re-read the letter of the _Monitor’s_ new assistant editor.

When Lady Violet came out of her bath, over which she liked to spend at least half an hour between ten a. m. and eleven, the letter was handed to her.

“I’ve got an idea,” Mame announced when the letter had been duly returned with her friend’s congratulations. “And I want you to come in on it. Now listen, hon.”

“Fire away,” said Lady Violet, elegantly fixing her kimono-clad slimness in a bergère chair.

“Suppose we shoot that weekly syndicate letter upon New York? And why shouldn’t they broadcast it all over the U. S.? Or why not a specialty with all the latest news and town gossip done in the Chickest style? You see what I mean? Or we might send two letters. ‘Celimene’ for New York and Boston and Chicago and Philadelphia and the highbrow cities; and ‘Mame’ for the small towns. Let us mail a couple of specimens right now to Elmer P. and put it up to him to work it his end. What do you say?”

Enkindled by Mame’s enthusiasm, which began to rise to bubbling point, Celimene could only yield.

“Easy money, I’ll tell the world.” Mame’s optimism was a tax upon the gravity of her friend.

“If we can put over the he-stuff we might persuade Elmer to have it cabled; and then I guess there’d be five hundred bucks a week for us cool.”

“Five hundred bucks a week, honey, you don’t say!” Celimene had a sense of humour. But she knew Mame well enough by now to appreciate that her flow of ideas must be taken seriously.

Over a pleasant luncheon at the Ladies Imperium, of which Mame had been already made an honourary, temporary member, they discussed the details of the plan.

“Now then, Celimene, come to it. We’ll start in this very afternoon. One letter for New York and one for Cowbarn, Iowa. Let us turn in that grand new opera we saw last night at Covent Garden and the private interview you had with that mossy-faced old dago who said he was the composer.”

Celimene approvingly helped Mame to some early asparagus. She owned she would never have thought of that.