CHAPTER IX
A LITTLE LUNCH AT DIEUDONNÉ’S
SORE were the ravages of the ancient malady. It made it worse for the sufferer that he had never had it before.
He was twenty-eight, a very healthy and normal citizen, “a little slow in the uptake,” to be sure, but with private means already, and the heir to the paternal greatness. He should, of course, like other paladins, have tried to keep out of mischief by serving his king and country.
It was a mistake to have left the Second, said his admirable parents. He wanted a wife, said all the world. It was really necessary that a young man of his age should provide himself with this most indispensable accessory.
In his torpid way he rather agreed. But he got no forrarder, although it was perfectly clear that the indispensable accessory was his for the asking.
To be sure, he had never exactly hit it off with Adela. Self-willed and overbearing young women, doubtless, had their reason to be; but he was much too shrewd a young chap to crave to be tied up for life with one of them. Still, if he wasn’t careful the fetters might easily be riveted. Things had rather shaped that way for twelve months past.
All the same, it behooved him to be wary. The fruit was ripe. A single shake of the branch and it might fall from the tree.
Cinderella had shaken the tree pretty severely. Simple, kind and cheerful she was just the sort of girl you could get on with. Straight as a die, overflowing with life and sympathy, she had the noble faculty of being genuinely interested in all the world and his wife.
Would she come out to lunch?
Oh, yes, any day except Wednesday and Saturday, when she had to play.
So the very next morning they lunched at Dieudonné’s, and everything seemed perilously pleasant.
Punctual to the minute! How delightful to have a table in the corner! The restaurant of all others she liked to lunch at; and lark and oyster pudding and Chablis, the fare above all others that she coveted.
Comparisons are odious, but really...!
Didn’t he think Granny was wonderful? And really quite great in her day. A link with the past, of whom the profession was very proud.
Was Miss Caspar never tired of the theater? Wasn’t it an awful grind? Didn’t she ever want a night off? When she felt as cheap as she must have been feeling a fortnight ago last Saturday, didn’t she just want to turn it up?
Perhaps—sometimes. But then her motto was Nelson’s, never to know when you were beaten. It was Nelson’s motto, wasn’t it? Besides, having two thousand people in your pocket gave you such a sense of power. And then the princely salary, a hundred pounds a week, and next year it was going to be doubled. She really didn’t know how she would be able to spend it.
Why spend it at all? Why not invest it at four and a half per cent.?
Oh, yes—for a rainy day!
Such an idea was evidently quite new to Cinderella, and she proclaimed it as the very zenith of human wisdom.
“You must let me spend a little, though.”
She spoke as though he had charge already of her hundred pounds a week.
“Not more than a fiver now and again. No need, really. Of course when you take a holiday abroad you can dip a bit if you want.”
Granny thought the provinces were vulgar, but Cinderella was quite sure that Mr. Shelmerdine didn’t agree with Grandmamma.
“Now look me right in the eye, and tell me whether the provinces are vulgar. Honest Injun now!”
The good gray eyes were open to a width that was positively astonishing. “Look right in, and consider yourself upon your oath.”
Mr. Shelmerdine did not agree with Grandmamma—being upon his oath.
“No, of course. The provinces are hearty and easy to get on with, and we are very fond of each other, and I don’t consider either of us vulgar. It is Granny’s Victorianism, to which I always pretend to give in—although I don’t, of course. Do you know dear, dirty old Sheffield? The next time you go and play against the Wednesday—I beg your pardon, I had forgotten those wretched Tories had made your father a peer—well, the next time you go to Sheffield—which you never will again—ask the dear old Tykes whether they have ever seen Mary Caspar as Alice in Dick Whittington. Why, it was I who presented the Cup and Medals to the United when they won the Hallamshire and West Riding Charity Vase.”
“Oh, really.”
“You mustn’t say, ‘Oh, really.’ You must say, ‘Did you, ma lass! I wish I’d been playin’ in ta match.’”
Would Miss Caspar have a cigarette?
With pleasure; but she insisted on lighting his before he was allowed to light hers.
“I wonder if I know you nearly well enough to call you Philip?” she said at about the fourth puff. “Your name is such a long one, isn’t it?”
The heir to the barony was bound to admit that his name was long, and that even Philip was shorter when it became Phil.
“Wouldn’t Phil be just a little familiar, considering that we have only known each other a week?”
“I seem to have known you for years and years and years.”
“Well, if you really mean that, Philip, I don’t think there is any reason why it shouldn’t be Phil. But you mustn’t go beyond Mary, you know. There is only one other person outside the family who calls me Polly, because somehow I object to Polly on principle. And you’ll never be able to guess who that is.”
“Mr. Vandeleur?”
“Dear no—of all people. I am a perfectly ferocious Rag.”
“Well, I hope it isn’t—?”
“—Be careful, Philip. Very dangerous ground. But, no, it isn’t he. The only other person who is allowed to call me Polly is the Lessee and Manager of the Royal Italian Opera House, Blackhampton.”
A sudden pang of consternation went through the heart of Mr. Philip. There was a confounded ring on her finger!
“Goose,” said Mary, amused not a little by the course of the young man’s gaze. “Old enough to be my father. But he’s a dear; and if I ever marry anyone—which I never shall, of course—I don’t think I should mind marrying him, although he’s just celebrated his silver wedding, and he’s got a family of eleven, seven girls and four boys, all with a broad enough accent to derail any tram in Blackhampton.”
Yes; Mr. Philip enjoyed every moment of this little luncheon at Dieudonné’s.
Before going to misspend his afternoon at one of his clubs, he accompanied the charmer as far as Bedford Gardens. They went on foot for the sake of the exercise, which she vowed she would rather die than do without; along the Strand if he didn’t mind, because she loved it so.
The Strand was a wonderful place, they both agreed. Certainly, he had been in it before—often—though always on the way to the play or to supper at the Savoy. But he had to admit that this was the first time he had come to it in broad daylight as an amateur.
“You get more human nature to the square inch in the dear old Strand than any place in the world,” said this young woman who had traveled the five continents in the exercise of her calling.
“Piper, miss. ’Orrible murder in the Borough.”
Mary was proof against this lure, and with true feminine irrelevance proceeded to pile insult upon the head of injury by calling upon a young gentleman of nine, who apparently was not going to Eton next term, and whose person was held together by a single button, to explain the absence of his shoes and stockings.
“Aren’t got none, lidy.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Ain’t ’ad none, lidy, since mother was put away for doin’ in father a year lawst Boxin’ night.”
“I daresay it is quite a good reason,” said Mary Caspar, “if only it could be translated into English. What did your mother do to your father?”
“’E come ’ome ravin’, and mother throwed a paraffin lamp at him, and the judge give her ten years.”
Mary Caspar opened her purse and produced the hundredth part of her week’s salary.
“Never let me see you again without your boots—or your stockings, either.”
The recipient looked at the sovereign doubtfully. Then he looked up at the donor.
“Lidy,” he said, depositing this incredible wealth in some inaccessible purlieus of his late father’s waistcoat, “you’re a toff.”
The heir to the barony was rather silent as they turned up Bedford Street. He was, of course, a drone in the hive, but he sometimes indulged in the pernicious habit of turning things over in his mind.
“There’s something wrong, you know, somewhere. A kid not a day more than nine, all on his own. I think we ought to have got his name and address.”
Mary thought he would have forgotten his name, and that he wouldn’t have been at the trouble to possess himself of anything so superfluous as an address, but she agreed with a further display of true feminine irrelevance—and what would any Principal Girl be without it?—that they certainly ought to have got them.
And so they turned back for the purpose. But the bird had flown. They walked as far as Trafalgar Square, crossed over, and came back on the other side, but their quarry had quitted the Strand.
“We must look out for him again,” said the heir to the barony. “Although I expect there are thousands like him.”
“Millions,” said Mary.
“And, of course, it don’t matter what you do in individual cases, so the Johnnies say who know all about it—but you must let me stand that sovereign, although it is sweet of you and all that.”
The heir to the barony produced the sum of one pound sterling, and inserted it in Mary’s muff, a very ordinary sort of rabbit-skin affair.
Mary declined point-blank to accept the sovereign, which irresponsible behavior on her part made her escort look rather troubled and unhappy.
“Oh, but you must.”
“Why?”
The heir to the barony seemed perfectly clear in his own mind that she ought to do as she was told, but not being gifted in the matter of clothing his thoughts with language, the reasons he gave seemed both vague and inadequate to an independent-minded young woman whose salary, for the time being, was equal to that of the First Lord of the Treasury.
They parted on Grandmamma’s doorstep, with a hearty hand-shake, and a reluctant promise on Mary’s part to come out to tea on the morrow. The young man walked on air to one of his numerous houses of call, firm in the conviction that he had never enjoyed a luncheon so much in all his born days.
“Ye-es, Agatha, I a-gree with you,” said the first Baron Shelmerdine of Potterhanworth at half-past seven that evening, twisting his face in the torment of achieving the conventional without a suspicion of the baroque or the bizarre. “The ve-ry next shirts I order from Hoodlam shall all turn down. Harold Box, I believe—so why not I? Oh, confound it all—that’s the third I’ve ruined.”
“Fetch another Wally, and I will tie it for you,” said the Suffolk Colthurst superbly.
It was humiliation for a Proconsul, but we are pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in this ingenuous narrative. And of their courtesy we ask none of our readers to accuse us of malice.
“You must bend a bit, Wally.” The Suffolk Colthurst grappled firmly with the situation. “Better order two dozen at once from Heale and Binman. Theirs carry more starch.”
Here it was that Destiny came into the picture, casual-like.
“Wally.” The Suffolk Colthurst had just achieved a reticent self-respecting single bow. “Now that Lord Warlock has agreed to that settlement, if I were you I would send round a note to the Albany for Philip to come and see us in the morning.”
“Well tied, Agatha. I’ll write a note to Philip, now.”
If the truth must be set down, and that, of course, is essential in all circumstances, the parental communication, in spite of the fact that it had an impressive device on the back and a motto in a dead language, was not the first note that was opened at B4 the Albany on the following morning. It was not the second or the third either, because there was quite a pile of correspondence in front of the kidneys and bacon at a quarter-past ten in the forenoon of Tuesday, the first of February.
“Dear Philip,” said the parental communication when it was open at last, “your Mother will be pleased if you will come to luncheon to-morrow, as there is an important matter she would like me to speak to you about. Luncheon at one-thirty sharp, as I have to go down to the House. Your affectionate Father, S. of P.”
Mr. Philip helped himself pensively, but not illiberally, to kidneys and bacon. He sprinkled salt and pepper over them, spread mustard on the plate, buttered his toast, poured out a cup of tea of almost immoral strength, read over the parental communication again, and then made use of an objurgation.
“I wish the good old Mater wouldn’t get so meddlin’,” said he.
Nevertheless, like a dutiful young man, he decided he must go and lunch at No. 88 Grosvenor Square. But by the time he had put on his boots with five buttons, had been inserted into the coat with the astrachan collar, and had sauntered forth to his favorite florist’s, twirling his whanghee cane, somehow the good old sky of London didn’t look quite so bright as it did yesterday.
His favorite florist’s was in the charge of his favorite young lady assistant, Miss Pearson by name, whom a fortnight ago he had serious thoughts of calling Sally without her permission. But a good deal of water had flowed under London Bridge in the meantime, so that now whether she gave her permission, or whether she withheld it, he no longer yearned to be guilty of any such freedom.
Still, Miss Pearson was a very good sort for all that, and the heir to the barony raised his hat to her this morning in his politest manner, although perhaps it is right to remark that he would have done so on any other morning, and even if Miss Pearson had not been such a very good sort—but in that case he might have gone a little higher up the street, as far as Miss Jackson.
“Mornin’, Miss Pearson. How are we?”
Miss Pearson was so-so. Had been to the Coliseum to see Richard III the previous evening.
“Have you been to Drury yet, Miss Pearson?”
No, but Miss Pearson’s best boy had promised to take her next Monday—Monday being her night out.
“I envy you, Miss Pearson,” said the heir to the barony with emotion. “And the young chap—of course.”
“Mr. Shelmerdine,” said Miss Pearson, “do you know what my impression is?”
Mr. Shelmerdine had not the faintest notion what Miss Pearson’s impression was.
“My impression, Mr. Shelmerdine,” said Miss Pearson, “is that you are in love.”
No rebutting evidence being put in, Miss Pearson grew grave and serious as became a young lady of good Scottish lineage on the spindle side.
“If you’ll take my advice, Mr. Shelmerdine, you’ll go a short sea voyage. I’ve noticed a deterioration in you during the last fortnight. It is far worse than when Cassie Smallpiece was at the Gaiety. I shall go and see for myself on Monday, but I’ve no opinion of actresses as a class. It is time you married that Lady Adela, you know.”
It was the first time that Miss Pearson had been moved to these communications as far as this particular client was concerned; but the fair president of the smartest florist in Piccadilly was a lady of considerable social insight.
“Well, Miss Pearson,” said the heir to the barony, slowly and thoughtfully, “you know that I always value your opinion, but Mary Caspar is an absolute nailer.”
“Go across to Dean and Dawson’s,” said Miss Pearson. “Or you can use my telephone if you don’t want to run the risk of crossing the street. Egypt or Switzerland, or a short sea voyage. Think what a blow it would be to your father if you didn’t marry a lady in society.”
“Ha, you haven’t seen her yet, Miss Pearson,” cried the incredible young man. “If I could book a couple of stalls for Monday, do you think your young chap would mind accepting ’em?”
“Only too pleased, I’m sure,” said Miss Pearson promptly. “No false delicacy about Alf. He’s in the greengrocery the other side the Marble Arch.”
The heir to the barony was a little “slow in the uptake,” but, like others who labor under that natural defect, in the end he generally contrived to get to his destination.
“I hope you ain’t throwin’ yourself away, Miss Pearson,” said the heir to the barony. “Blow to your people, I’m sure, if you are side-tracked by anything under a bank clerk.”
“Money before position, Mr. Shelmerdine, is my motto,” said Miss Pearson. “If you’ve got the one, you can always get the other.”
The heir of the barony seemed rather impressed by this pearl of wisdom. He pondered it while that very able and personable young woman twined a piece of wire round a posy of violets. And then, as if to prove a general proposition, Position itself appeared, and somewhat abruptly terminated this instructive tête-à-tête.
Position entered in the person of a youthful marquis, leading a bull terrier whose natural beauty was almost as chastened as his own.
“Why, Shel—haven’t seen you for years!”
Position held out a hand, gloved somewhat aggressively in yellow. His senior by four years shook the gauntlet warily.
“Mornin’, Sally.”
Position turned its back and put its elbows on the counter. It might have been the sole proprietor, not only of those most desirable lock-up basement premises, but of Miss Pearson and all its other contents. Still, no reproof was forthcoming.
During an even earlier phase of Position’s adolescence, it had been Mr. Shelmerdine’s privilege as a member of the Eleven, a member of Pop, and of other high dignities, to lay into Position in no uncertain manner. Alas that his zeal had proved so unfruitful!
Autres temps, autres mœurs. Had we the pen of the sage, the fervor of the poet, the sæva indignatio of the preacher, what a theme is here, my lords and gentlemen! Position not only usurping the badge of intimacy, reserved for the peers of the Keeper of the Field, but actually venturing to take pas of him, addressing Miss Pearson by her first name, setting his elbows on the counter, and removing a bunch of violets from her ample bosom, while he—the unspeakable humiliation of it—actually had to wait meekly for his own.
Had there been a toasting fork within the precincts of those desirable lock-up basement premises, it is appalling to think of the consequences that might have ensued.
Miss Pearson handed Mr. Shelmerdine his bunch of violets in a manner sufficiently dégagé, as though her interest in him had assumed a less acute phase. Raging within, the heir to the barony, a mere 1905 creation, sought the purer air of the Ritz Arcade, leaving the field to 1720, who could be heard saluting Sally not too chastely, as his early benefactor hurriedly crossed the threshold of his favorite florist’s, and came into somewhat forcible collision with an elderly, but ample lady from Missouri, who was on a visit to Europe, and who had come to stay at the Ritz Hotel.
The elderly ample lady from Missouri was fluent in her diction; the heir to the barony was abject in his apologies; but eventually the incident was closed by the unlucky young man escorting the American citizeness to her palatial temporary residence, and giving her into the care of the hall porter.
Evidently, it was not going to be his day. But let justice be done to the Fates, even when they are behaving just about as badly as they know how. Had it not been that the heir to the barony lingered a moment to exchange a few brief but urbane civilities with the hall porter of the Ritz, he must inevitably have walked into Adela and her Pa who were passing very slowly and impressively by the portals of this coign of the plutocracy.
It was a hair’s-breadth escape. The young man had only just time to realize his danger, bolt across the road, almost under the very wheels of an oncoming Barnes and Hammersmith omnibus, escape a threefold death by violence at the instance of the passing motor, board a taxi, and in a voice tense with emotion beseech to be driven to Romano’s.
A gin and vermouth might be said to have saved this full but chequered life.
“Called me Shel—my God! If only I’d got that long-handled, old-fashioned one with the five prongs—!”