WALES FOREVER!
Well, here we are again, as the clown says in the harlequinade.
Once more the lives of Miss Million and her maid have been set amidst scenes until now quite unfamiliar to us.
After the noise and bustle of the Strand about the hotel in July, the quiet, leafy depths of a remote Welsh valley. After the glaring London sunshine on the baked pavements, the soft Welsh rain that has been weeping ever since our arrival over the wooded hills and the tiny, stone-fenced fields, and the river that prattles over its slaty bed and swirls into deep, clear pools a stone's-throw below this furnished country house that Miss Million has taken for three months.
At present the house party consists of Miss Million, Miss Vi Vassity, Mrs. Flukes, the ventriloquist's wife, her baby and her monthly nurse. Mr. Jessop, who wrote all the business letters with regard to the taking of the house, is to come down later, I believe.
So is Mr. Reginald Brace.
In the meantime we have the place to ourselves, also the staff left behind by the people of the house, consisting of one fat cook, two housemaids who speak soft Welsh-English, and a knives and boots boy who appears to say nothing at all but "Ur?" meaning "I beg your pardon?"
I, the lady's-maid, have meals with the staff in the big, slate-floored kitchen.
This I insisted upon, just as I insisted upon travelling third-class down from Euston, while my young mistress "went first."
"We've simply got to behave more like real mistress and maid, now that you've taken a country house for the summer," I told her. "This isn't the 'Refuge'——"
"It's nowhere so lively, if you ask me," said Miss Million, looking disconsolately out of the dining-room window. "Look at that view!"
The "view" shows a rain-soaked lawn, stretching down to a tall rhododendron hedge, also dripping with rain. Beneath the hedge is spread a dank carpet of fallen pink blooms. Beyond the hedge is a brook that was once a lane, leading down to a river that was once a brook.
Beyond this come a flooded field and the highroad that is a network of puddles. In the distance there rises like a screen against the sky a tall hill, wooded almost to the top, and set half-way up this hill we can descry, faintly through the driving rain, a long white house, with gables and a veranda overgrown with red roses. And above all is a strip of grey sky, from which the white rain falls noiselessly, ceaselessly.
"Here's a place!" says Miss Million disgustedly. "Unless something happens to make it a bit different, I shan't stay no three months, nor three weeks. It fair gives me the pip, and I wish I was back in good old London!"
"Cheer up. The rain may leave off one of these days," I say, "or some of the people of the neighbourhood may come to call."
This afternoon both my prognostications were fulfilled.
The rain did leave off, and the valley in which this house is set became a green and smiling paradise, scented with the fragrance of wet pine trees, and of sweet peas and honeysuckle, and suddenly pregnant with that other flavour which is new to me—part scent, part sight, part sound. "The flavour of Wales"—some quality quite indescribable; some wild native atmosphere richer, sadder, sweeter, more "original" than any that I had breathed in those flat, smiling garden plots that are described as "rural England."
No wonder I've always heard that Welsh people who have left their country suffer at times from such poignant longings, such "hiræth" or home-sickness as is unknown to the colonising, conquering Saxon!
Even Miss Million and Miss Vi Vassity are more inclined to approve of the scenery now! And this afternoon "the neighbourhood" called on the new tenant of this place.
"The neighbourhood" seems to comprise any other house within an afternoon's walk, or even motor-drive.
I heard the car drive up, from my attic bedroom, and I flew down to the front door. For cook was baking, and both of what she calls "them girls" had taken their departure. It was the legitimate afternoon out of Maggie-Mary, the first housemaid. And Blodwen, the other, had asked special permission to attend a funeral in the next valley.
I had said I would be housemaid in her place, so she had sallied forth, all new black and gratified grins.
I found myself opening the door to three heterogeneous parties of people at once, and ushering them into the faded, pretty, pot-pourri-scented drawing-room. It was empty. My mistress and her guests had suddenly fled!
They—Miss Million, Vi Vassity, and Mrs. Flukes—had betaken themselves into the bedroom that has been given over to the baby's nursery, and were sitting over the fire there gossiping with the young, mauve-clad monthly nurse.
"Must I go down? Oh, what a nuisance; now I'll have to change," began my mistress, but I was firm.
"You'll go down in your garden tweeds and your brown boots as you are," I said, "so as not to keep the people waiting."
"What style of people are they? What do they look like, dear?" put in Vi Vassity eagerly. She has been strangling yawns all the morning, and I am sure she was only too delighted at the idea of seeing a fresh face. "Any nice boys with them?"
"No. No men at all——"
"Never are, in the country. Yet people wonder nobody takes any notice of being told to get back to the land!" said London's Love, rising to her tiny kid-shod feet, and refastening a suspender through the slit in her skirt. "What are the women like? Country rectory?"
"Yes, one lot were," I reported. "The others that came in the motor wore sort of very French hats and feather boas, and look as if they never walked."
"Charity matinée," commented England's Premier Comedienne, bustling to the door. "It's a shame not to dress for 'em. I shan't be long, Nellie. You and Ag go down first."
"How can I go down to the company until I've given my little Basil his four o'clock feed?" protested the ventriloquist's wife. She held out her arms for the long white bundle of shawls that Olive, the young nurse, lifted from the cradle set on two chairs in the corner of the room. "Nellie'll have to make her entrance alone."
And she did.
The confidence in herself that was first inspired by the Honourable Jim has been greatly fostered by Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. So I was not afraid that Miss Million would be really overpoweringly shy, even on entering a drawing-room full of strange callers.
I left her at the drawing-room door, and was hastening kitchenwards again to bring out the tea when the front-door bell rang once more. I opened it to two very tall girls in Burberry mackintoshes.
They were both young; one had a long black plait down her back. Both of them wore the same expression of suppressed and gleeful, giggling excitement as I told them that Miss Million was at home.
"Then, now for it!" breathed the flapper with the plait, in a gale of a whisper, as I took her mackintosh. Both girls were in blue serge underneath, of a cut more chastened than their arrogantly young voices. "I wonder what on earth she's going to be like!"
"Alice! Do shut up!" muttered the elder girl angrily. Then, turning to me: "Are there crowds of other people here already?"
"Yes, Miss," I answered demurely. But I felt a sudden warm sympathy with the two young things in the hall. We had, I suspected, the same kind of voice, the same carriage of the head, we had had the same sort of clothes.
We'd been "raised," as Mr. Jessop puts it, with much the same outlook. We had a class in common, the class of the nouveaux-pauvres! Our eyes flashed understanding as they met.
Then the younger girl exclaimed: "Wait a minute. I must finish laughing before we go in!"
And she stood for a full minute, quivering and swaying and rocking with perfectly silent mirth. Then she pulled herself together and said gravely:
"Right. I've finished now. Say the Miss Owens, please."
I rather wanted to have a good silent laugh to myself as I solemnly announced the two girls.
They came, I afterwards gleaned, from the long white house that faces us across the valley. Who the other people were who were filling the chintz-covered couch and easy-chairs in the drawing-room I didn't gather.
I haven't "disentangled" the different hats and faces and voices and costumes; I suppose I shall do so in due course, and shall be able to give a clear description of each one of these callers "from the neighbourhood" upon Miss Million. I knew she would be an object of curiosity to any neighbourhood to which she came!
And I wonder how many of these people know that she is one of the heroines of the Rattenheimer ruby case, that hangs over our heads like a veritable sword of Damocles the whole time!
But to get on to the principal excitement of the afternoon—the utterly unlooked-for surprise that awaited me in the kitchen!
The typically Welsh kitchen in this newly acquired place of Miss Million's is to me the nicest room in the house.
I love its spaciousness and its slate floor, and the ponderous oak beams that bisect its smoke-blackened ceiling and are hung with bunches of dried herbs and with hams.
I love its dresser, full of willow-pattern china, and its two big china dogs that face each other on the high mantelpiece.
The row of bright brass candlesticks appeals to me, and the grandfather's clock, with the sun, moon, and stars on its face, and the smooth-scrubbed white deal kitchen-table pitted with tiny worm-holes, and the plants in the window, and everything about it.
Miss Million declares she never saw such a kitchen "in all her puff." Putney was inconvenient enough, the dear knows, but the Putney kitchen was a joke to this one, where the kitchen range you can only describe "as a fair scandal," and nothing else!
If she means to take the landlord's offer, later on, and to take this place as it stands, she's going to have everything pretty different.
I should be sorry if she did; I like the place to be an utter anachronism in our utilitarian twentieth century, just as it is. I don't mind the honeycomb of draughts. I can put up with the soft, cave-like gloom of it——
It was this gloom that prevented me from seeing, at first, that there was anybody in the kitchen but cook, who was busily beating up batter for light cakes in a big, yellow, white-lined bowl.
"Is the tea made?" I said.
It was not; the silver teapot, with the tea in it, was being heated on the hob.
I moved to take up the singing kettle. It was then that a tall man's form that had been sitting on a settle on the other side of the fire rose and came towards me.
The red glow of the fire through the bars shone on the silver buttons and on the laurel-green cloth and on the high boots of a chauffeur's livery. Of course! This was the man who had driven over the people who had come in the car.
But above the livery a voice spoke, a voice that I knew, a voice that I could hardly believe was speaking to me here.
"Allow me," said this softly inflected Irish voice. And the kettle was gently but firmly taken out of my hand by the hand of—the Honourable James Burke.
I gave such a start of surprise that it is a mercy I did not jolt against that kettle and send a stream of scalding hot water over the laurel-green-cloth-clad knees of the man before me.
And I said exactly what people always say in meloramas when they are surprised at meeting anybody—thus showing that melodrama is not always so utterly unlike real life.
I cried "You!"
"Myself," announced the Honourable Jim, smiling down at me as he deftly took the silver teapot from me and filled first that and then the hot-water jug on the tray that was already laid on the big table. "And what is all this emotion at the sight of me? Is it too much to hope that it's pleasure? Or is it just amazement?"
"I—I certainly never expected to s-see you," I spoke falteringly in my great surprise, "or—or like this!" I glanced at the gleam of the livery buttons. "May I ask what in the world you are doing in those clothes?"
"Is it my livery you mean? Don't you think it's rather neat?" suggested the Honourable Jim ingratiatingly. "Don't you consider that it suits me almost as well as the black gown and the apron and the doaty little cap suit Miss Million's maid?"
"But——" I gasped in amazement. "But why are you wearing a chauffeur's livery?"
"Isn't the reason obvious? Because I've taken a chauffeur's job."
"You, Mr. Burke?"
"Yes, I, Miss Lovelace!" he laughed. "Is there any reason you have to give against that, as you have against every other mortal thing that the unfortunate Jim Burke does?"
"I——Look here, I can't wait here talking," I told him, for just at this minute I caught the surprised glance of cook upon us both.
The spoon with which she beat up the batter was poised in mid-air as she listened to everything that this superior-looking lady's-maid and still more superior-looking chauffeur had to say to each other. "I must take the tea into the drawing-room."
He opened the kitchen door for me as I hastened away with the tray.
Gentleman-adventurer, bronco-buster, stoker, young gentleman of leisure, chauffeur! What next will be the rôle that the Honourable and Extraordinary Jim will take it into his head to play?
Chauffeur, of all things! Why chauffeur?
My head was still buzzing with the surprise of it all, when I heard the other buzz—the shrill, insistent, worrying buzz that is made by women's voices when a lot of them are gathered together in a strange house, and are all talking at once; "made" talk, small talk, weather talk, the talk that is—as Miss Vassity, for instance, would put it—"enough to drive any one to drink."
In the drawing-room where these callers were grouped I just caught a scrap here and a scrap there as I moved about with the tea-things. This sort of thing:
"And what do you think of this part of the country, Miss Million? Are you intending to make a long stay——"
"She seemed such a nice girl! Came to me with such a good character from her——"
"Never touch it. It doesn't suit me. In coffee I like just a very little, and my daughter's the same. But my husband"—(impressively)—"my husband is just the reverse. He won't touch it in coff——"
—"hope you intend to patronise our little Sale of Work, Miss Million, on the twenty-sixth? Oh, you must all come. And I'm still asking everybody for contributions to my——"
"Do shut up, Alice!" (fierce whisper from the young girl in navy-blue).
"Now we've got this new chauffeur we may hope for a little peace!" This languidly, from the lady in the uncountrified-looking hat. She, I suppose, is the Honourable Jim's employer. "Quite an efficient man, as far as one can judge, but——"
"Quite right, quite right. Far too many trees about the place. I like a good view. Plenty of space around a house.... Of course, you've only ten bedrooms here, Miss Million; ah, eleven? quite right. But at home.... Of course, I had a most lovely home in the——"
Wearisome gabble! I thought.
I caught an ineffable grimace on Miss Million's small, shrewd face behind the silver teapot. I bent down to add hot water to it. Under cover of my ministrations she murmured: "You see, I don't have to bust myself talkin' polite to this lot; nothing'll stop 'em. I say! Does that cook know enough to give a nice cup o' tea to the shaveer of her that came in the car, Smith?"
"I think the chauffeur knows enough to get one!" I murmured dryly. "Or anything else he——" Here I found I was the only person in the room who was talking.
A suddenly deathly silence had fallen upon the roomful of talking women, who all knew each other, even if they had never met their little hostess before. Something had "stopped 'em." The chatter and buzz of small talk left off with a click.
And that quite definite "click" was the opening of the drawing-room door upon an apparition such as none of them, I am certain, had ever seen in a drawing-room before.
Its brightly fair hair seemed to have "sprouted" not so much a hat as a grotesque halo of black, long, feathery wisps that surrounded a face with black eyes and a complexion "made-up" to be dazzlingly pink.
Its transparent corsage gave glimpses of fair and sumptuous shoulders and of much lingerie ribbon.
The frock was layer upon layer of folded ninon in different yellows, shading down from bright lemon yellows through chrome yellow and mustard colour to a kind of marigold tint at the hem, under which appeared scarlet silk stockings and tall, gilt boots with heels so high that the wearer was practically walking on her toes, à la Genée, as she made her startling entrance.
It was, of course, Miss Vi Vassity, in one of her most successful stage get-ups; the frock in which she sings her topical song—
"They've been there a long time now!"
with the usual verses about courting couples, and the Gorgonzola, and the present Government.
And she beamed round upon this gathering of natives of a quiet country neighbourhood with the same dazzling, prominent-toothed smile as she flashes from her friends in the front row of the stalls to her equally devoted gallery boys.
"No need for introductions, eh?" uttered London's Love, lightly, to the petrified-looking assembly.
I felt that I would have sacrificed another quarter's salary rather than have missed the look on the face of the acidulated lady who came in the car as Miss Vi Vassity perched herself lightly on the arm of the couch where she was sitting, and called to Nellie for the love of anything to give her a nice cup of tea.
"Does one good to see a few faces around me once again!" prattled on the artiste, while the two girls from the other side of the valley leant forward and devoured every detail of her appearance with gluttonous brown eyes.
Pure ecstasy was painted all over the plain ironic face of the tall girl with the thick black plait. I saw from the look of the hussy that she was "taking in" everything to reproduce it at home, in that white house on the hill. And presently there was plenty to reproduce.
For one of the rectoryish-looking party plucked up courage to ask Miss Vassity "what she thought of this place."
That opened the floodgates!
Perched on the arm of the couch, England's Premier Comedienne proceeded to "hold the house" with her views on this mansion and its furniture.
"Not what I'd call a lively spot; still, there's always the pheasant and her little 'uns walking about on the lawn at three G.M., if you're fond of geology, and the rabbit on the tennis-court at eight o'clock sharp. That's about all the outdoor entertainment in this place," she rattled on.
"Indoors, of course, is a fair museum of curiosities. Continuous performance, eh, Nellie? The oil-lamps everywhere, with the collection of midges on all the bowls; those are very fine.
"Couldn't beat those at the Tower of London! And the back kitchen, with the water from the stand-pipe outside overflowing into the middle of the floor. Talk about Glimpses into the Middle Ages!
"What takes my fancy is the girls clinkin' to and from the scullery in those pattens they wear. Makes the floor look like nothing on earth but a bar-counter where glasses have been set down, doesn't it?"—this to the rector's wife.
"And the paint, too. And the wall-papers. Oo-er! And all the window-cords broken," enlarged the beaming apparition in all-yellow, whose personality invaded the room like a burst of brilliant sunshine through a thunder-cloud.
"Not to mention all the doors having to be propped open! No complete set of china anywhere. Wedges bitten out of every—er—blessed egg-cup! Pick up a bit of real Dresden, and the seccotined piece comes off in your hand.
"As for the furniture, well, half of it looks as if it had bin used for Harry Tate to play about with in a screaming new absurdity, entitled 'Moving,' or 'Spring-cleaning,' or something like——"
Here the acidulated voice of the lady who'd come in the motor broke in with some very rebukeful remark. Something to the effect that she had always considered everything so delightful that the dear Price-Vaughans had in the house——
"Pr'aps the dear What-Price-Vaughans," retorted the comedienne, "can get along with their delightful style of bathroom?"
"Oh, do tell us," implored the girl with the black plait, "what's the matter with that?"
"The bath, Kiddy? Absolutely imposs!" decreed London's Love. "Water comes in at the rate of a South-Eastern Dead-Stop. Turn one tap on and you turn the other off. Not to speak of there only being one bath, and that five sizes too small, dear. The Not-at-Any-Price-Vaughans must be greyhound built for slimness, if you ask me. It don't seem to fit our shrinking Violet, as you can imagine. Why, look at her!"
Quite an unnecessary request, as the fascinated, horrified eyes of the whole party had not yet left her sumptuous and bedizened person.
"Call it a bath?" she concluded, with her largest and most unabashedly vulgar wink. "I'd call it a——"
We weren't privileged to hear what she could call it, for at this moment the lady with the very towny hat rose with remarkable suddenness, and asked in a concise and carrying voice that her man might be told to bring round Miss Davis's car.
I slipped out to the kitchen and to Miss Davis's man, who, as I expected, had finished an excellent tea and the subjugation of cook at the same time.
"Your mistress would like the car round at once, please," I said, with a frantic effort not to smile as I caught the mischievous, black-framed, blue eyes of the Honourable Jim Burke.
He rose. "Good afternoon, ma'am, and thank you for one of the most splendid teas I've ever had in my life," he said in that flattering voice of his to cook, as she bustled out, beaming upon him as she went into the scullery.
"Good afternoon, Miss Smith"—to me. "You've never shaken hands with me yet. But I suppose this is scarcely the moment to remind you, when I've taken on a job several pegs below what I was when I saw you last——"
Of course, at that I had to give him my hand. I said: "But why are you Miss Davis's chauffeur?"
"Because I couldn't get a job with Miss Million," he told me simply. "She hasn't got a car of her own yet. Not that she'd have me, in any case—a man she'd found out deceiving her about her own relatives!"
"But why 'the job,' anyhow?"
"I must earn my living—honestly if possible," said the Honourable Jim with his wickedest twinkle.
"Also I'd made up my mind a little change of air in Wales would do me good just now, and I'd no friends who happened to be coming to these parts. It was these parts I'd set my heart on.
"The mountain scenery! Can you beat it? And when I saw the advertisement of that old trout upstairs there—I mean that elegant maiden lady with private means and a nice house and a car of her own—I jumped at answering it. The country round about is so romantic. That drew me, Miss Lovelace.... Well, I suppose I must be tooting her home."
He turned to the back entrance.
Then he turned to me once more and launched his most audacious bit of nonsense yet.
He said, softly laughing: "Ah! You know well enough why I'm here. It's to be near you, child."
What a good thing it is that I know exactly how to take this laughing, blarneying, incorrigible Irishman! What a blessing that I am not as poor little Miss Million was, who was utterly taken in by any blatantly insincere compliment that this young—well, I can say no worse than "this young Celt" chose to toss off!
So I just said lightly, "Too flattered!" and hurried away to hand the callers their wraps and umbrellas in the hall.
I'm glad I was in time to witness another rather priceless scene.
Namely, the entrance of Miss Vi Vassity into the hall with the other ladies, and her recognition of the big young man in the laurel-green livery, with the handsome face so stolidly set under the peaked chauffeur's cap.
"Jim!" exclaimed the comedienne, in a piercing treble. "Well, whatever next? If it isn't my pal Jim Burke!"
"Just the sort of person one would expect her to have for a 'pal,' as she calls it," came in a not-too-soft aside from the owner of the car, then, haughtily, "Home, Burke."
"Yes, Miss," said the new chauffeur, as respectfully as I could have said it myself, and he touched his peaked cap to his mistress with a kind of side-effect of "Cheery O, Vi," to the brilliant figure standing gasping with astonishment upon the top step.