CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
DISCUSSION AT A LUNCHEON TABLE
THE little lobby of the Savoy grill-room that opens on to Savoy Court is a restful place for meditation; and Kay, arriving there at twenty minutes past one, was glad that she was early. She needed solitude, and regretted that in another ten minutes Sam would come in and deprive her of it. Ever since she had received his letter she had been pondering deeply on the matter of Willoughby Braddock, but had not yet succeeded in reaching a definite conclusion either in his favour or against him.
In his favour stood the fact that he had been a pleasant factor in her life as far back as she could remember. She had bird’s-nested with him on spring afternoons, she had played the mild card games of childhood with him on winter evenings, and—as has been stated—she had sat in trees and criticised with incisive power his habit of wearing bed socks. These things count. Marrying Willoughby would undeniably impart a sort of restful continuity to life. On the other hand——
“Hullo!”
A young man, entering the lobby, had halted before her. For a moment she supposed that it was Sam, come to bid her to the feast; then, emerging from her thoughts, she looked up and perceived that blot on the body politic, Claude Winnington-Bates.
He was looking down at her with a sort of sheepish impudence, as a man will when he encounters unexpectedly a girl who in the not distant past has blacked his eye with a heavy volume of theological speculation. He was a slim young man, dressed in the height of fashion. His mouth was small and furtive, his eyes flickered with a kind of stupid slyness, and his hair, which mounted his head in a series of ridges or terraces, shone with the unguent affected by the young lads of the town. A messy spectacle.
“Hullo,” he said. “Waiting for someone?”
For a brief, wistful instant Kay wished that the years could roll back, making her young enough to be permitted to say some of the things she had said to Willoughby Braddock on that summer morning long ago when the topic of bed socks had come up between them. Being now of an age of discretion and so debarred from that rich eloquence, she contented herself with looking through him and saying nothing.
The treatment was not effective. Claude sat down on the lounge beside her.
“I say, you know,” he urged, “there’s no need to be ratty. I mean to say——”
Kay abandoned her policy of silence.
“Mr. Bates,” she said, “do you remember a boy who was at school with you named Shotter?”
“Sam Shotter?” said Claude, delighted at her chattiness. “Oh, yes, rather. I remember Sam Shotter. Rather a bad show, that. I saw him the other night and he was absolutely——”
“He’s coming here in a minute or two. And if he finds you sitting on this lounge and I explain to him that you have been annoying me, he will probably tear you into little bits. I should go, if I were you.”
Claude Bates went. Indeed, the verb but feebly expresses the celerity of his movement. One moment he was lolling on the lounge; the next he had ceased to be and the lobby was absolutely free from him. Kay, looking over her shoulder into the grill-room, observed him drop into a chair and mop his forehead with a handkerchief.
She returned to her thoughts.
The advent of Claude had given them a new turn; or, rather, it had brought prominently before her mind what until then had only lurked at the back of it—the matter of Willoughby Braddock’s financial status. Willoughby Braddock was a very rich man; the girl who became Mrs. Willoughby Braddock would be a very rich woman. She would, that is to say, step automatically into a position in life where the prowling Claude Bateses of the world would cease to be an annoyance. And this was beyond a doubt another point in Mr. Braddock’s favour.
Willoughby, moreover, was rich in the right way, in the Midways fashion, with the richness that went with old greystone houses and old green parks and all the comfortable joy of the English country. He could give her the kind of life she had grown up in and loved. But on the other hand——
Kay stared thoughtfully before her; and, staring, was aware of Sam hurrying through the swing door.
“I’m not late, am I?” said Sam anxiously.
“Then come along. Golly, what a corking day!”
He shepherded her solicitously into the grill-room and made for a table by the large window that looks out onto the court. A cloakroom waiter, who had padded silently upon their trail, collected his hat and stick and withdrew with the air of a leopard that has made a good kill.
“Nice-looking chap,” said Sam, following him with an appreciative eye.
“You seem to be approving of everything and everybody this morning.”
“I am. This is the maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year, and you can quote me as saying so. Now then, what is it to be?”
Having finished his ordering, a task which he approached on a lavish scale, Sam leaned forward and gazed fondly at his guest.
“Gosh!” he said rapturously. “I never thought, when I was sitting in that fishing hut staring at your photograph, that only a month or two later I’d be having lunch with you at the Savoy.”
Kay was a little startled. Her brief acquaintance with him had taught her that Sam was a man of what might be called direct methods, but she had never expected that he would be quite so direct as this. In his lexicon there appeared to be no such words as “reticence” and “finesse.”
“What fishing hut was that?” she asked, feeling rather like a fireman turning a leaky hose on a briskly burning warehouse full of explosives.
“You wouldn’t know it. It’s the third on the left as you enter Canada.”
“Are you fond of fishing?”
“Yes. But we won’t talk about that, if you don’t mind. Let’s stick to the photograph.”
“You keep talking about a photograph and I don’t in the least know what you mean.”
“The photograph I was speaking of at the dinner last night.”
“Oh, the one your friend found—of some girl.”
“It wasn’t a friend; it was me. And it wasn’t some girl; it was you.”
Here the waiter intruded, bearing hors d’œuvres. Kay lingered over her selection, but the passage of time had not the effect of diverting her host from his chosen topic. Kay began to feel that nothing short of an earthquake would do that, and probably not even an earthquake unless it completely wrecked the grill-room.
“I remember the first time I saw that photograph.”
“I wonder which it was,” said Kay casually.
“It was——”
“So long as it wasn’t the one of me sitting in a sea shell at the age of two, I don’t mind.”
“It was——”
“They told me that if I was very good and sat very still, I should see a bird come out of the camera. I don’t believe it ever did. And why they let me appear in a costume like that, even at the age of two, I can’t imagine.”
“It was the one of you in a riding habit, standing by your horse.”
“Oh, that one?... I think I will take eggs after all.”
“I don’t know. Œufs à la something, weren’t they?”
“Wait!” said Sam. He spoke as one groping his way through a maze. “Somehow or other we seem to have got onto the subject of eggs. I don’t want to talk about eggs.”
“Though I’m not positive it was à la something. I believe it was œufs Marseillaises or some word like that. Anyhow, just call the waiter and say eggs.”
Sam called the waiter and said eggs. The waiter appeared not only to understand but to be gratified.
“The first time I saw that photograph——” he resumed.
“I wonder why they call those eggs œufs Marseillaises,” said Kay pensively. “Do you think it’s a special sort of egg they have in Marseilles.”
“I couldn’t say. You know,” said Sam, “I’m not really frightfully interested in eggs.”
“Have you ever been in Marseilles?”
“Yes, I went there once with the Araminta.”
“Who is Araminta?”
“The Araminta. A tramp steamer I’ve made one or two trips on.”
“What fun! Tell me all about your trips on the Araminta.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“Was that where you met the man you call Hash?”
“Yes. He was the cook. Weren’t you surprised,” said Sam, beginning to see his way, “when you heard that he was engaged to Claire?”
“Yes,” said Kay, regretting that she had shown interest in tramp steamers.
“It just shows——”
“I suppose the drawback to going about on small boats like that is the food. It’s difficult to get fresh vegetables, I should think—and eggs.”
“Life isn’t all eggs,” said Sam desperately.
The head waiter, a paternal man, halted at the table and inquired if everything was to the satisfaction of the lady and gentleman. The lady replied brightly that everything was perfect. The gentleman grunted.
“They’re very nice here,” said Kay. “They make you feel as if they were fond of you.”
“If they weren’t nice to you,” said Sam vehemently, “they ought to be shot. And I’d like to see the fellow who wouldn’t be fond of you.”
Kay began to have a sense of defeat, not unlike that which comes to a scientific boxer who has held off a rushing opponent for several rounds and feels himself weakening.
“The first time I saw that photograph,” said Sam, “was one night when I had come in tired out after a day’s fishing.”
“Talking about fish——”
“It was pretty dark in the hut, with only an oil lamp on the table, and I didn’t notice it at first. Then, when I was having a smoke after dinner, my eye caught something tacked up on the wall. I went across to have a look, and, by Jove, I nearly dropped the lamp!”
“Why?”
“Why? Because it was such a shock.”
“So hideous?”
“So lovely, so radiant, so beautiful, so marvellous.”
“So heavenly, so——”
“Yes? There’s Claude Bates over at that table.”
The effect of these words on her companion was so electrical that it seemed to Kay that she had at last discovered a theme which would take his mind off other and disconcerting topics. Sam turned a dull crimson; his eyes hardened; his jaw protruded; he struggled for speech.
“The tick! The blister! The blighter! The worm! The pest! The hound! The bounder!” he cried. “Where is he?”
He twisted round in his chair, and having located the companion of his boyhood, gazed at the back of his ridged and shining head with a malevolent scowl. Then, taking up a hard and nobby roll, he poised it lovingly.
“You mustn’t.”
“Just this one!”
“No!”
“Very well.”
Sam threw down the roll with a gesture of resignation. Kay looked at him in alarm.
“I had no idea you disliked him so much as that!”
“He ought to have his neck broken.”
“Haven’t you forgiven him yet for stealing jam sandwiches at school?”
“It has nothing whatever to do with jam sandwiches. If you really want to know why I loathe and detest the little beast, it is because he had the nerve—the audacity—the insolence—the immortal rind to—to—er”—he choked—“to kiss you. Blast him!” said Sam, wholly forgetting the dictates of all good etiquette books respecting the kind of language suitable in the presence of the other sex.
Kay gasped. It is embarrassing for a girl to find what she had supposed to be her most intimate private affairs suddenly become, to all appearance, public property.
“How do you know that?” she exclaimed.
“Your uncle told me this morning.”
“He had no business to.”
“Well, he did. And what it all boils down to,” said Sam, “is this—will you marry me?”
“Will I—what?”
“Marry me.”
For a moment Kay stared speechlessly; then, throwing her head back, she gave out a short, sharp scream of laughter which made a luncher at the next table stab himself in the cheek with an oyster fork. The luncher looked at her reproachfully. So did Sam.
“You seem amused,” he said coldly.
“Of course I’m amused,” said Kay.
Her eyes were sparkling, and that little dimple on her chin which had so excited Sam’s admiration when seen in photographic reproduction had become a large dimple. Sam tickled her sense of humour. He appealed to her in precisely the same way as the dog Amy had appealed to her in the garden that morning.
“I don’t see why,” said Sam. “There’s nothing funny about it. It’s monstrous that you should be going about at the mercy of every bounder who takes it into his head to insult you. The idea of a fellow with marcelled hair having the crust to——”
He paused. He simply could not mention that awful word again.
“——kiss me?” said Kay. “Well, you did.”
“That,” said Sam with dignity, “was different. That was—er—well, in short, different. The fact remains that you need somebody to look after you, to protect you.”
“And you chivalrously offer to do it? I call that awfully nice of you, but—well, don’t you think it’s rather absurd?”
“I see nothing absurd in it at all.”
“How many times have you seen me in your life?”
“Thousands!”
“What? Oh, I was forgetting the photograph. But do photographs really count?”
“Yes.”
“Mine can’t have counted much, if the first thing you did was to tell your friend Cordelia Blair about it and say she might use it as a story.”
“I didn’t. I only said that at dinner to—to introduce the subject. As if I would have dreamed of talking about you to anybody! And she isn’t a friend of mine.”
“But you kissed her.”
“I did not kiss her.”
“My uncle insists that you did. He says he heard horrible sounds of Bohemian revelry going on in the outer office and then you came in and said the lady was soothed.”
“Your uncle talks too much,” said Sam severely.
“Just what I was thinking a little while ago. But still, if he tells you my secrets, it’s only fair that he should tell me yours.”
Sam swallowed somewhat convulsively.
“If you really want to know what happened, I’ll tell you. I did not kiss that ghastly Blair pipsqueak. She kissed me.”
“What?”
“She kissed me,” repeated Sam doggedly. “I had been laying it on pretty thick about how much I admired her work, and suddenly she said, ‘Oh, you dear boy!’ and flung her loathsome arms round my neck. What could I do? I might have uppercut her as she bored in, but, short of that, there wasn’t any way of stopping her.”
A look of shocked sympathy came into Kay’s face.
“It’s monstrous,” she said, “that you should be going about at the mercy of every female novelist who takes it into her head to insult you. You need somebody to look after you, to protect you——”
Sam’s dignity, never a very durable article, collapsed.
“You’re quite right,” he said. “Well then——”
Kay shook her head.
“No, I’m not going to volunteer. Whatever your friend Cordelia Blair may say in her stories, girls don’t marry men they’ve only seen twice in their lives.”
“This is the fourth time you’ve seen me.”
“Or even four times.”
“I knew a man in America who met a girl at a party one night and married her next morning.”
“And they were divorced the week after, I should think. No, Mr. Shotter——”
“I suppose I ought to after this. No, Sam, I will not marry you. Thanks ever so much for asking me, of course.”
“Not at all.”
“I don’t know you well enough.”
“I feel as if I had known you all my life.”
“Do you?”
“I feel as if we had been destined for each other from the beginning of time.”
“Perhaps you were a king in Babylon and I was a Christian slave.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. And what is more, I’ll tell you something. When I was in America, before I had ever dreamed of coming over to England, a palmist told me that I was shortly about to take a long journey, at the end of which I should meet a fair girl.”
“You can’t believe what those palmists say.”
“Ah, but everything else that this one told me was absolutely true.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. She said I had a rare, spiritual nature and a sterling character and was beloved by all; but that people meeting me for the first time sometimes failed to appreciate me——”
“I certainly did.”
“——because I had such hidden depths.”
“Oh, was that the reason?”
“Well, that shows you.”
“Did she tell you anything else?”
“Something about bewaring of a dark man, but nothing of importance. Still, I don’t call it a bad fifty cents’ worth.”
“Did she say that you were going to marry this girl?”
“She did—explicitly.”
“Then the idea, as I understand it, is that you want me to marry you so that you won’t feel you wasted your fifty cents. Is that it?”
“Not precisely. You are overlooking the fact that I love you.” He looked at her reproachfully. “Don’t laugh.”
“Was I laughing?”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry. I oughtn’t to mock a strong man’s love, ought I?”
“You oughtn’t to mock anybody’s love. Love’s a very wonderful thing. It even made Hash look almost beautiful for a moment, and that’s going some.”
“When is it going to make you look beautiful?”
“Hasn’t it?”
“Not yet.”
“You must be patient.”
“I’ll try to be, and in the meantime let us face this situation. Do you know what a girl in a Cordelia Blair story would do if she were in my place?”
“Something darned silly, I expect.”
“Not at all. She would do something very pretty and touching. She would look at the man and smile tremulously and say, ‘I’m sorry, so—so sorry. You have paid me the greatest compliment a man can pay a woman. But it cannot be. So shall we be pals—just real pals?’”
“And he would redden and go to Africa, I suppose.
“No. I should think he would just hang about and hope that some day she might change her mind. Girls often do, you know.”
She smiled and put out her hand. Sam, with a cold glance at the head waiter, whom he considered to be standing much too near and looking much too paternal, took it. He did more—he squeezed it. And an elderly gentleman of Napoleonic presence, who had been lunching with a cabinet minister in the main dining-room and was now walking through the court on his way back to his office, saw the proceedings through the large window and halted, spellbound.
For a long instant he stood there, gaping. He saw Kay smile. He saw Sam take her hand. He saw Sam smile. He saw Sam hold her hand. And then it seemed to him that he had seen enough. Abandoning his intention of walking down Fleet Street, he hailed a cab.
“There’s Lord Tilbury,” said Kay, looking out.
“Yes?” said Sam. He was not interested in Lord Tilbury.
“Going back to work, I suppose. Isn’t it about time you were?”
“Perhaps it is. You wouldn’t care to come along and have a chat with your uncle?”
“I may look in later. Just now I want to go to that messenger-boy office in Northumberland Avenue and send off a note.”
“Important?”
“It is, rather,” said Kay. “Willoughby Braddock wanted me to do something, and now I find that I shan’t be able to.”