THE REGRETTABLE WEDNESDAY
"What a very singular thing," said the Mayor, meeting the witch towards three o'clock in the afternoon, as she came down the Broad Walk towards Kensington, having slept invisibly among the daffodils for nearly twelve hours. "A really very singular thing. 'Tisn't once in five years I visit these parts, and now I'm here I meet the very person I was thinkin' about." He winked.
"It's almost like magic, isn't it," said the witch, winking busily in return.
"Well, I've done what you told me to," said the Mayor.
"What was that?"
"You will 'ave your joke," he retorted indulgently. "Pretending not to know, indeed. I've done what you told me the other day when you came to that committee with your cat. I thought it over—I'm not a proud man, never above takin' a hint,—and I admitted to meself that what you said was fair about makin' money. Some'ow I never thought but what money was the first thing to make in business. To tell you the truth, I always thought it rather a feather in my cap that I never took advantage of Brown Borough customers in selling adulterated goods, for—Lawdy—they'd swallow anythink. It's different with your business, bein' in an 'igher-class locality. 'Igh prices, I thought, was only natural. Make 'ay while the sun shines was my motter, and I says to meself there was no reason why this war should make everyone un'appy. As for lookin' at the grocery business as a trust from God, like you said, I never dremp of such a thing, although I've bin to Chapel regular for ten years. But I see now there was a lot in what you said, and when I come to think of it, there was no need to make such a terrible lot of extra hay, 'owever much the sun might be shinin'. When you put it like that, I couldn't say why I was so set on more money, 'aving quite enough. Well, I says to meself, after shutting meself up to think it out, like you said, 'ere am I giving up all my life an' all my jolly days an' 'olidays, an' I'm damned if I know what for. For money,—just money stewin' in its own juice in a bank,—not money I can use. Well, everybody's trained so, I'm thinkin'. Anyway I took it friendly of you to put it so delicate, so fanciful as you did, so as them charity ladies didn't smell a rat. I appreciated that, an' thought the more of what you said. I'm not a proud man."
"You're just proud enough," said the witch. "You're a darling. If ever I can help you in a business way, let me know. If you want to start a side line, for instance, in Happiness, I can give you a tip where to get it wholesale, within limits. It'd go like wildfire in the Brown Borough, if you put in an ounce or two, gratis of course, with every order."
"You will 'ave your joke," murmured the Mayor. "But I like it in you. I'm a man that never takes a joke amiss. Let's go for a walk together."
"No," said the witch. "I am so hungry that my ribs are beginning to bend inwards. I must go and have sausages and mash and two apple dumplings."
They found themselves presently seated at the marble-topped table of an A.B.C. After an interval that could hardly be accurately described as presently, sausages and mash dawned on the horizon, and the witch waved her fork rudely at it as it approached.
"Mashed is splendid stuff to sculp with," she said, roughing in a ground plan upon her plate with the sure carelessness of the artist. "This is going to be an ivory castle built upon a rock in a glassy sea. The sausage is the dragon guarding it, and this little crumb of bread is the emprisoned princess, a dull but sterling creature——"
"Look 'ere, Miss Watkins," interrupted the Mayor. "I'm not as a rule an impulsive man, and I don't want to startle you——"
"How d'you mean startle me?" asked the witch. "You haven't startled me at all. But the fact is, I never have been much of a person for getting married, thank you very much. I'm an awful bad house-keeper. And I do so much enjoy having no money."
"Well, I'm blessed," exclaimed the Mayor. "You're a perfect witch, I declare." He laid a large meat-like hand upon hers. "But you know, you can't put the lid on me so easy as that. Ever since you came into that old committee room I saw there was something particular about you, something that you an' me 'ad in common. I'm not speakin' so much of us bein' in the same line of business. Some'ow—oh, 'ang it all, let's get out of this and take a taxi. I'm not a kissing man, but——"
He seemed very persistent in applying negatived adjectives to himself. It was not his fault if the world failed to grasp exactly what he was, or rather exactly what he was not.
"I have often wondered," interrupted the witch, "talking of kissing—what would happen if two snipes wanted to kiss each other? It would have to be at such awfully long range, wouldn't it. Or——"
"Come off it," ordered the Mayor irritably. "What about gettin' out of this and——"
"Don't you think this is becoming rather a tiresome scene?" said the witch. "Somehow over luscious, don't you think? I wish those apple dumplings would hurry up."
"'Ere, miss," said the Mayor ungraciously to a passing whirlwind. "'Urry them dumplings."
"'Urry them dumplings," echoed the whirlwind to a little hole in the wall.
The witch had a silly vision of two distressed dumplings, like dilatory chorus girls, mad with the nightmare feeling of not being dressed in time, hearing their cue called in a heartless voice from the inexorable sky, desperately applying the last dab of flour to their imperfect complexions. But the witch found no fault with them when they came. She gave them her whole attention for some minutes.
"Well, well," she said, laying down her fork and spoon, "that's good. I feel awfully grown-up, having had a proposal. When real girls ask me now how many I've had, I shall be able to say One. But I met a girl the other day who had had six. She had six photographs, but she called them scalps. If you would give me your photograph I could label it A Scalp, and hang it in the Shop. That would be very grown-up, wouldn't it?"
"You will 'ave your joke," said the Mayor in a hollow voice. "I never met such a gurl as you for a bit of fun. I don't believe you've got any 'eart."
There, of course, he was right. A heart is a sort of degree conferred by Providence on those who have passed a certain examination. Magic people are only freshmen in our college, and it is useless for us—secure in the possession of many learned letters after our names—to despise them. They will become sophisticated in due course.
"How d'you mean—heart?" asked the witch therefore. "I've still got an awful hunger inside me, if that's anything to do with it. I'll tell you what. It's Wednesday. Let's go and call on Miss Ford. She might have grassy sandwiches."
There was a most abrupt and disturbing draught in Miss Ford's sleek and decorous flat as the witch and the Mayor entered it. The serenity of the night and the morning had been suddenly obliterated, and Kensington suffered a gust or two of gritty wind which blew the babies home from the Gardens, and kept all the window-gazers in the High Street on the alert with their fingers on the triggers of their umbrellas.
But no rain fell. Rain cannot fall in this book of fine weather.
The draught that intruded into the flat ruffled the neat hair of five persons, Miss Ford herself, Lady Arabel Higgins, Miss Ivy MacBee, Mr. Bernard Tovey, and Mr. Darnby Frere.
Miss MacBee always seemed to be seated on tenterhooks, even in the most comfortable of chairs. Her Spartan spine never consented graciously to the curves of cushions. She had smooth padded hair and smooth padded manners, and her eyes were magnified by thick pince-nez to a cow-like size. Most people, especially most women, were instinctively sorry for her, because she always looked a little clever and very uncomfortable.
Mr. Bernard Tovey was a blunt-nosed beaming person. He leaned forward abruptly whenever he spoke, thereby swinging a lock of hair into his right eye. He agreed so heartily with everything that was said that people who addressed him were left with the happy impression that they had said something Rather Good. This habit, combined with the fact that he never launched an independent remark, had given him the reputation of being one of the best talkers in Kensington.
Mr. Darnby Frere was the editor of an advanced religious paper called I Wonder, but he never wondered really. He knew almost everything, and therefore, while despising the public for knowing so little, he encouraged it to continue wondering, so that he might continue despising and instructing it.
Now it was an almost unprecedented thing for two members of the small trades-man class to come into Miss Ford's drawing-room, especially on a Wednesday. The utmost social mingling of the classes that those walls had ever seen was the moment when Miss Ford asked the electric light man what he thought of the war. The electric light man's reply had been quoted in the dialect on two or three of the following Wednesdays, as a proof of Miss Ford's daring intimacy with men in Another Station of Life. Really it would have been simpler, though of course not so picturesque, to have quoted it direct from its original source, John Bull, the electric light man's Bible.
The entrance of the witch and the Mayor was to a certain extent a crisis, but Miss Ford kept her head, and her three friends, though grasping at once the extraordinary situation, did not give way to panic.
"Well, well, well," said the Mayor, looking round and breathing very loudly. "This is a cosy little nook you've got 'ere."
He was not at all at his ease, but being a business man, and being also blessed with a peculiarly inexpressive face, he was successfully dissembling his discomfort.
For it had happened that the lift had been one of those lifts that can do no wrong, the kind that the public is indulgently allowed to work by itself. And the Mayor, looking upon this fact as specially planned by a propitious god of love, had tried to kiss the witch as they shot up the darkened shaft. If I remind you that the witch was still accompanied by her broomstick, Harold, a creature of unreasoning fidelity, I need hardly describe the scene further. The Mayor stepped out of the lift with a tingling scraped face, and if he had possessed enough hair on his head, it would have been on end. As it was, when the lift stopped, he retrieved his hat from the floor with a frank oath, and, as the witch had at once rung the bell of Miss Ford's flat, he instinctively followed her across that threshold.
She looked round in the hall, and said with a friendly smile: "I'm afraid Harold gets a bit irritable sometimes. I often tell him to count ten before he lets himself go, but he forgets. Did he hurt you?"
I am afraid the angry Mayor did not give Harold credit for much initiative.
"Kissing is such a funny habit, isn't it," said the witch briskly as she shook Miss Ford's hand. "I wonder who decided in the first place which forms of contact should express which forms of emotion. I wonder——"
She interrupted herself as her eyes fell on some green sandwiches which were occupying the third floor of a wicker Eiffel Tower beside Miss Ford. "Oh how gorgeous," she said. "Do you know, I've only had two meals in the last two days."
Nobody present had ever been obliged to miss a meal, so this statement seemed to every one to be a message from another world.
"You must tell us about all your experiences, my dear Miss Watkins," said Miss Ford, leading the witch towards a chair by the fire. The witch sat down suddenly cross-legged on the hearth-rug, leaving her rather embarrassed hostess in the air, so to speak, towering rigidly above her.
"How d'you mean—experiences?" said the witch, after eating one sandwich in silent ecstasy. "I was up in the sky last night, talking to a German. Was that an experience?"
"The sky last night was surely no place for a lady," said Mr. Frere with rather sour joviality.
"Oh, I know what she means," said Miss MacBee earnestly. "I was up in the sky last night too——"
"Great Scott," exclaimed the witch. "But——"
"Yes, I was," persisted Miss MacBee. "I lay on the hammock which I have had slung in my cellar, and shut my eyes, and loosed my spirit, and it shot upward like a lark released. It detached itself from the common trammels of the body, yes, my spirit, in shining armour, fought with the false, cruel spirits of murderers."
"I hadn't got any shining armour," sighed the witch, who had been looking a little puzzled. "But I had the hell of a wrangle with a Boche witch who came over. We fought till we fell off our broomsticks, and then she quoted the Daily Mail at me, and then she fell through a hole and broke her back over the cross on St. Paul's."
It was Miss MacBee's turn to look puzzled, but she said to Miss Ford: "My dear, you have brought us a real mystic."
Mr. Frere, though emitting an applauding murmur, leaned back and fixed his face in the ambiguous expression of one who, while listening with interest to the conversation of liars, is determined not to appear deceived.
"How d'you mean—mystic?" asked the witch. "I don't think I can have made myself clear. Excuse me," she added to Miss Ford, "but this room smells awfully clever to any one coming in from outside. Do you mind if I dance a little, to move the air about?"
"We shall be delighted," said Miss Ford indulgently. "Shall I play for you?"
The witch did not answer; she rose, and as she rose she threw a little white paper packet into the fire. She danced round the sofa and the chairs. The floor shook a little, and all her watchers twisted their necks gravely, like lizards watching an active fly.
The parlour-maid, by appearing in the doorway with an inaudible announcement, diverted their attention, though she did not interrupt the witch's exercises.
A very respectable-looking man came in. Darnby Frere, who was a student of Henry James's works, and therefore constantly made elaborate guesses on matters that did not concern him, and then forgot them because—unlike Mr. James's guesses—they were always wrong, gave the newcomer credit for being perhaps a shopwalker, or perhaps a South-Eastern and Chatham ticket-collector, but surely a chapel-goer.
At any rate the stranger looked ill at ease, and especially disconcerted by the sight of the dancing witch.
Miss Ford realised by now that her Wednesday had for some reason gone mad. She had lost her hold on the reins of that usually dignified equipage; there was nothing now for her to do but to grip tight and keep her head.
She therefore concealed her ignorance of her newest guest's identity, she stiffened her lips and poured out another cup of tea with a nerveless hand. The stranger took the cup of tea with some relief, and said: "Thenk you, meddem."
The witch stopped dancing, and stood in front of the newcomer's chair.
"I think yours must be a discouraging job," she said to him. "Getting people punished for doing things you'd love to do yourself. Oh, awfully discouraging. And do tell me, there's a little problem that's been on my mind ever since the war started. I hear that Hindenburg says the German Army intends to march through London the moment it can brush away the obstacles in front of it. Have you considered what will happen to the traffic, because you know Germans on principle march on the wrong side of the street—indeed everybody in the world does, except the conscientious British. Think of the knotted convulsions of traffic at the Bank, with a hundred thousand Boches goose-stepping on the wrong side of the road—think of poor thin Fleet Street, and the dam that would occur in Piccadilly Circus. What do you policemen intend to do about it?"
"I don't know I'm sure, miss," said the newcomer coldly. "It's a long time since I was on point duty. I'm a plain clothes man, meddem," he added to Miss Ford. "I'm afraid I'm intruding on your tea-party, owing to your maid misunderstanding my business. But being 'ere, I 'ope you'll excuse me stating what I've come for."
"Oh certainly, certainly," said Miss Ford, who was staring vaguely into the fireplace. A rather fascinating thread of lilac smoke was spinning itself out of the ashes of the little white paper packet.
"The names of the Mayor of the Brown Borough, Miss Meter Mostyn Ford, and Lady A. 'Iggins—all of 'oom I understand from the maid are present—'ave been mentioned as being presoomably willing to give information likely to be 'elpful in the search for a suspicious cherecter 'oo is believed to 'ave intruded on a cheritable meeting, at which you were present last Seturday, in order to escape arrest, 'aving just perpetrated a petty theft from a baker, 'Ermann Schwab. The cherecter is charged now with a more important offence, being in possession of an armed flying machine, in defiance of the Defence of the Realm Act, and interfering with the work of 'Is Majesty's Forces during enemy attack. The cherecter is believed to be a man in female disguise, but enquiry up to date 'as failed to get any useful description. You ladies and gents, I understand, should be able to 'elp the Law in this metter."
There was a stunned silence in the room, broken only by the pastoral sound of the witch eating grassy sandwiches. After a moment Miss Ford, the Mayor, and Lady Arabel all began speaking at once, and each stopped with a look of relief on hearing that some one else was ready to take the responsibility of speaking.
Then the witch began with her mouth full: "You know——," but Lady Arabel interrupted her.
"Angela dear, be silent. This does not concern you. Of course, inspector, we're all only too dretfully anxious to do anything to help the Law, but you must specify the occasion more exactly. Our committee sees so many applicants."
"You are Lady A. 'Iggins, I believe," said the policeman impassively. "Well, my lady, may I ask you whether you are aware thet the cherecter in question was seen to leave your 'ouse last night, at nine forty-five P.M., after the warning of approaching enemy atteck was given, and to disappear in an easterly direction, on a miniature 'eavier than air machine, make and number unknown?"
The threads of curious smoke in the fireplace were increasing. They shivered as though with laughter, and flowed like crimped hair up the chimney.
"I had a dinner-party last night certainly," stammered Lady Arabel. A trembling seized the sock she was knitting. She had turned the heel some time ago, but in the present stress had forgotten all about the toe. The prolonged sock grew every minute more and more like a drain-pipe with a bend in it. "Why yes, of course I had a dinner-party; why shouldn't I? My son Rrchud, a private in the London Rifles, this young lady, Miss Angela—er—, and her friend—such a good quiet creature...."
"And 'oo else was in the 'ouse?" asked the policeman, glancing haughtily at the witch.
"Oh nobody, nobody. The servants all gave notice and left—too dretfully tahsome how they can't stand Rrchud and his ways. Of course there was the orchestra—twenty-five pieces—but so dependable."
"Dependable," said the witch, "is a mystery word to me. I can't think how it got into the English language without being right. Surely Depend-on-able——"
"Your son 'as peculiar ways, you say, my lady," interrupted the policeman.
"Oh, nothing to speak of," answered Lady Arabel, wincing. "Merely lighthearted ... too dretfully Bohemian ... ingenious, you know, in making experiments ... magnetism...."
"Experiments in Magnetism," spelt the policeman aloud into his notebook. "And 'oo left your 'ouse at nine forty-five P.M. last night?"
"I did," said the witch.
The policeman withered her once more with a glance.
"Lady 'Iggins, did you say your son left your 'ouse at nine forty-five P.M. last night?"
"Yes, but——"
"Thenk you, my lady."
"You seem to me dretfully impertinent," said Lady Arabel. "This is not a court of law. My son Rrchud left the house with me and our guest to seek shelter from the raid."
"Thenk you, my lady," repeated the policeman coldly, and turned to Miss Ford.
"Could you identify the cherecter 'oo came into your committee room last Seturday?" he asked of her.
"No," she replied.
"Couldn't you say whether it seemed like a male or a female in disguise? Couldn't you mention any physical pecooliarity that struck you?"
"No," said Miss Ford.
"'Ave you no memory of last Seturday night?"
"No," said Miss Ford.
"I have," said the witch.
The policeman bridled. "I was addressing this 'ere lady, Miss M.M. Ford. Can you at least tell me, meddem, 'ow long you and the 'Iggins family 'ave been acquainted?"
"No," said Miss Ford.
"Eighteen years," said Lady Arabel.
The fumes from the fireplace were very strong indeed, but nobody called attention to them.
"I'm sorry, ..." said Miss Ford presently, very slowly, "that ... I ... can't help you. I have ... been having ... nerve-storms ... since ... last ... Saturday...."
The policeman fixed his ominous gaze upon her for quite a minute before he wrote something in his notebook.
"Is Private Richard 'Iggins in town to-night?" he asked of Lady Arabel in a casual voice.
"I suppose so," she replied. "But he has such a dretful habit of disappearing...."
The policeman turned to the Mayor.
"Now, sir," he said. "Could you help me at all in——"
"Look here," said the witch, rising. "If you would only come along to my house in Mitten Island I can truly give you all the information you need. In fact, won't you come to supper with me? If some one will kindly lend me half-a-crown I will go on ahead and cook something."
Mr. Tovey mechanically produced a coin.
"Here, Harold," called the witch, and holding Harold's collar she stepped out on to the balcony, mounted, and flew away.
She left a room full of noise behind her.
The policeman, who was intoxicated with the strange fumes, said: "Hell. Hell. Hell."
Lady Arabel called in vain: "Angela, Angela, don't be so dretfully rash."
Mr. Tovey, now afflicted with a lock of hair in each eye, seized the policeman by the shoulder thinking to prevent him from jumping out of the window. "You fool," he shouted.
The Mayor slapped his thigh with a loud report. "Lawdy," he yelled. "She's a sport. She will 'ave 'er joke."
Miss MacBee laughed hysterically and very loudly.
Mr. Darnby Frere said "My word" rather cautiously several times, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He rather thought everybody was pulling his leg, but could not be sure.