“Oh, my dear, such an awful catastrophe!” wailed the voice of Cicely, while the willowy figure twisted itself into sitting up against our cheap flock cushions. “What do you think? When I went out to lunch this morning I managed to slip on a bit of banana-skin that some perfect pig had flung down at the crossing—No, Tots! it wasn’t those shoes I will wear, so you needn’t say that!—and I twisted my ankle and cut my head on the kerb, and I had to be brought home in a taxi, and the doctor’s been, and he says I’m to keep my foot up for a fortnight, and what—what on earth’s to become of my job?” wept Cicely. “Chérisette won’t take me on again, for there’s a girl waiting now for my place! A niece of somebody’s! She’ll snap it up! And what am I to do? Hurp, hurp!”
She could only sob, and I could only stroke her pretty, incompetent fingers.
“There’ll be that doctor to pay! And it’ll be the rent again in three weeks’ time! It’s always being the rent, in this place, Tots! It never was at home. And I haven’t got any money saved now that I’ve bought that bicycle for Saturday afternoons. Isn’t it perfectly awful? Hurp, hurp! Oh, girls at home who get doctors and dentists and washing and everything f-found for them, hurp! are so fond of envying girls who earn their own livings because it’s so free and independent—how can they? They wouldn’t want to earn their horrible livings if they only knew how ghastly it was as soon as you got ill and hadn’t anything but a few shillings between you and goodness knows!”
“‘Earned increment is sweet, but that unearned is sweeter,’” I quoted bitterly.
“Oh, you laugh at everything, Tots! This is serious. S-s-s-seven-and-sixpence! That’s all I’ve got left in the whole wide world! And you’ve nothing but your twenty-five bob a week!”
(Yes! I thought; and even that modest salary will be lost to me to-morrow. For when I tell the Governor that I find I can’t accept his offer, he’s pretty certain to sack me. After his allusion to my “work,” after Mr. Dundonald’s “warrrnings,” what else need I expect? But this wasn’t the moment to tell my poor, distracted chum my own bit of bad luck. Even if we were both out of work and on those rocks together, it must, for the present at least, be kept from her.)
“Now look here, don’t you worry,” I said, more cheerfully than I felt. “You know you’re no end of a ‘find’ as a mannequin, because you’ve got the voice that goes with the figure. It must be rather a shock when Madame’s clients ask something that looks like a young duchess in a dream of a gown ‘What did you say the price was?’ and get told in the accents of Whitechapel ‘Twenty-ite paounds, Madam!’ That’s the pull you’ve got, so you know you’re sure of another good place as soon as your foot’s right. Until then I—I can manage perfectly well for the two of us. What about something to eat? Mrs. Skinner coming back to cook to-night?”—Mrs. Skinner is supposed to “do” for us. I often think that, in another sense, she will!
“No. She’s off for the whole day to go to a funeral. You said she might, this morning.”
“So I did. I thought it was a week ago—it feels like it. Well, I’ll get supper.”
As I passed into our little dark cubby-hole of a kitchen, I saw something that I’d overlooked before—a letter left lying on the mat, as it had dropped through the letter-box. I picked it up. It was addressed to me. And at the sight of the thin foreign envelope and the South African stamp my heart sank even lower. I had a presentiment that I hadn’t come to the worst yet.