Hitherto it had not been worth complaining about, but now, if she really was coming to live in this room, something would have to be done. What it was that would have to be done—well, she would ask Cosimo.
II
THE SURPRISE PARTY
“Glenerne,” the boarding-house between Brook Green and Goldhawk Road in which Amory lived with her aunt, was really two large houses thrown into one; and, besides sheltering its twenty-odd guests, it served as a sort of academy for the teaching of English to foreign waiters. These came—German, Swiss, Danish, Belgian, even Turkish—without a word of our tongue, gave their services for several months in return for their food, and a year or so later were to be found in the restaurants of Frith and Old Compton Streets and the brasseries of Leicester Square, as English as you please. Perhaps in the manner of food they came off better than did the guests themselves, for, while the establishment provided four set meals a day, you had to sit down to all of these unless you would go slightly hungry. Miss one and you never quite caught up again.
But you forgot this slight nearness to the knuckle in the fullness with which Miss Addams’s advertisement in The Shepherd’s Bush Times—the one that began “Young Musical Society”—was redeemed. Every night there was something “on”; if it was not a whist drive or singing it was an impromptu dance in the large double drawing-room on the first floor, or charades, or a semi-private rehearsal by the Glenerne contingent of the Goldhawk Amateur Dramatic Society. The esprit de pension was very strong; it was as if a vow of loyalty to Miss Addams’s cruets had been taken.
The walls of the drawing-room were trophied with the photographs of former guests; these stood, framed or unframed, in groves on the mantelpiece (indeed, when Christmas came round with its cards, it was impossible to open a door without bringing whole castles of photographs and pasteboard greetings down into the fender); and, ranged on one special little whatnot between the Nottingham lace curtains and Millais’s framed and glazed supplement of “Little Miss Muffet,” were Miss Addams’s “grand-children”—the offspring of the three or four gentlemen or ladies who, at one time and another, had left the boarding-house to get married. About these translated ones something of the legendary, even of the grandiose, had grown up; and one particular chair in the dining-room, that on Miss Addams’s right hand, was still known as “Mr. Wellcome’s chair.”
At half-past eight on the evening of the day on which Amory had told Dorothy of her aunt’s engagement a suppressed gaiety pervaded the whole boarding-house. Dinner was over, and in the little greenhouse that prolonged the hall at the expense of the narrow back garden a few of the men were still smoking; but the drawing-room upstairs was filled with a twittering of anticipation of the guests knew not what. Except that it was to be in honour of Miss Towers’s engagement, Miss Addams had refused to tell what the evening’s entertainment was to be. But even those who had missed dinner had been told that that night Mr. Massey had been promoted to Mr. Wellcome’s chair, vice Mr. Edmondson, Glenerne’s youngest gentleman, who hitherto had occupied it in order to settle a disputed point of precedence between Mr. Rainbow and Mr. Massey himself.
So, until Miss Addams should deign to declare herself, it seemed as if whist or dancing might break out at any moment. Mr. Sandys, of the Lille Road Branch of the East Midlands Bank, seemed loaded with song on a hair-trigger, and had already cleared his throat once or twice; little Mrs. Deschamps, who played the accompaniments, needed but a look to remove her rings, set them in a neat row along the piano-top, give the stool a twirl, and ask Mr. Geake, the Estate Agent, to turn over for her; and young Mr. Edmondson, who was a booking-clerk, moved here and there, humorously complaining that it was a bit thick, his being ousted from Mr. Wellcome’s chair like that. He did not cease to pester Miss Addams to tell her little mystery. Miss Addams, huge and pyramidal in her black satin, only smiled over her tatting (she smiled frequently—the expression caused her slight moustache to pass for the shadow of a dimple), and told him to wait and see.
“You know how you can get your place back again—after July,” she said demurely.
Miss Geraldine Towers and Mr. Massey were not in the room, and their absence had already given rise to several of the rallies of wit that were characteristic of Glenerne. For instance, when the little widow, Mrs. Deschamps, had asked Amory with an air of great innocence where her aunt was, and Amory had replied that she thought she was writing letters, a ventriloquial voice, that might or might not have been that of Mr. Sandys, had been heard to ask whether Mr. Massey was licking the stamps; and again, when Mrs. Deschamps had asked Mr. Geake whether he would be so good as to fetch her book for her (it was on the chair by the aquarium), Mr. Geake had given the widow an intelligent look and had replied that he rather thought the corner by the aquarium was No Thoroughfare. Mrs. Deschamps had given a little apologetic cough and had said, How stupid of her! and young Mr. Edmondson, whose conversation was frequently a good deal beyond his years, had raised a laugh by stroking his smooth lip and saying that he supposed it was only Human Nature after all.