AN UNUSUAL SORT OF BEGGAR
"I GUESS it's not any different 'business' from what I have told you,
coming along in the car, Miss Smith," said the young American simply.
"Don't quit on my account."
"No, nor on mine neither," said Miss Million, turning quite anxiously to
me. "You stop on and hear the end of this, so that me and you can talk
it over like, later.
"Now, then," turning to her cousin again, "what's it all about?"
"To cut a long story short," said the young American, in that earnest
way of his that is really rather lovable. "You see before you, Cousin
Nellie, a man who is"--he paused impressively before he brought out half
a dozen pregnant words--"very badly in want of money!"
"Gracious! I must say I should not have thought it," ejaculated Million,
with a note of the native shrewdness which I had suspected her of having
left behind in our Putney kitchen. "If you are poor"--here her bright
grey eyes travelled up her cousin's appearance from his quite
new-looking American shoes to his well-kept thick and glossy hair--"if
you are poor, all I can say is your looks don't pity you!"
"I need not point out to you that looks are a very poor proposition to
go by when you are starting in on summing up a person's status," said
the young American easily. "I may not look it, but money is a thing that
I am desperate for."
A sequence of emotions passed each other over Million's little face. As
I watched there were disbelief, impatience, helplessness, and the first
symptoms of yielding. She said: "Well, I don't know how it is that since
I have come into uncle's money I have been meeting people one after the
other who keep offering to show me what to do with it. You know, Smith,"
turning to me. "Haven't I had a fair bushel of begging letters from one
person and another who is in need of cash? Some of them was real enough
to draw tears from the eyes of a stone! Do you remember that one, Smith,
about the poor woman with the two babies, and the operation, and I don't
know what all? Well! She dried up quick since I suggested calling round
to see the babies! A fine take-in that was, I expect"--this to me, with
her eye on the well-set-up young man sitting before her. "Still"--this
was where the yielding began to come in--"you are my cousin, when all is
said. And so, I suppose, I have got to remember that blood is thicker
than water, and----"
She turned to me.
"Did you bring my cheque-book down, Smith, in my dressing-bag?"
"Yes, Miss, I did," I said gravely enough, though I was laughing
ruefully within myself.
"Well, just pop upstairs and get it for me," said Miss Million. Then,
again turning to her cousin, she said: "I can't say that I myself would
have cared particularly to start borrowing money off some one the first
time I set eyes on them, cousin or no cousin! Unusual sort of begging I
call it! Still, I daresay I could spare you" (here I saw her making a
rapid mental calculation) "five pounds, if that is of any good to you."
Here, at the very door, I stopped. I had been checked by the hearty
laugh of real boyish amusement that broke from Mr. Hiram P. Jessop at
her last words.
"Five pounds!" he echoed in his crisp, un-English accent. "Five? Any
good to me? My dear cousin Nellie, that's no more good to me than a
tissue-paper sunshade would be under a waterspout. No, five pounds would
be most emphatically not any good to me. Nor ten pounds. Nor twenty
pounds. I am not asking for a day's carfare and luncheon ticket. I tell
you, my dear little girl, it is _money_ I want!"
Miss Million stared at him rather indignantly this time. I didn't dream
of leaving her at this juncture.
I waited and I watched, without troubling to conceal my interest from
these two young people. I felt I had to listen to what would happen
next.
"Money?" repeated Miss Million, the heiress. "However much do you want,
then?"
"Thousands of dollars," announced the young American in his grave, sober
voice.
There came into the bright grey eyes of Miss Nellie Million an angry
look that I had once seen there when an unwise milk-boy had tried to
convince our thrifty little maid-of-all-work that he had given her
sixpennyworth instead of the bare threepennyworth that filled the
little cardboard vessel which she held in her hand! For I believe that
at the bottom of her heart "little Million" is still as thrifty, still
as careful, still as determined that she won't be "done"!
In the matter of clothes she has, of course, allowed herself for once to
loose her firmly screwed-on little dark head.
But now that the trousseau of new clothes is bought the brief madness
had left her. She is again the same Million who once said to me at home:
"Extravagant! That is a thing I could never be!"
In a voice of the old Million she demanded sharply of the quite
prosperous-looking, well-dressed and well-fed young man in front of her:
"Whatever in the wide world would you do with all that money, supposing
you had it?"
"Well, I should not waste it, I guess," retorted the young man. "In
fact, it would be put to a considerably bigger purpose than what it
would if you had kept it, to buy yourself candies and hair-ribbon and
whatever you girls do with money when it gets into your little hands. I
want that money," here his voice grew more serious than before, "for an
Object!"
"I want that money for an object," repeated Miss Million's American
cousin. And then he went on, at last, to tell us what "the object" was.
It took a long time. It was very complicated. It was full of technical
terms that were absolute Greek to me, as well as to Million. There she
sat in the big basket-chair, with the coloured cushions behind her dark
head; her grey eyes wide open, and fixed, defensively, upon the face of
this young man with a story to tell.
To cut it short, it was this. About a year ago Mr. Hiram P. Jessop had
left off being manager of the pork factory belonging to the late Samuel
Million because of his other work. He was, he said, "no factory boss by
nature." He was an inventor. He had invented a machine--yes! This was
where the technical terms began raining thick and fast upon our
bewildered ears--a machine for dropping bombs from aeroplanes----
"Bombs? Good heavens alive!" interrupted Miss Million, with a look of
real horror on her little face. "D'you mean them things that go off?"
"Why, I guess I hope they'd go off," returned the young man with the
shrewd and courteous smile. "Certainly that would be the idea of
them--to go off! Why, yes!"
"Then--are you," said Million, gazing reproachfully upon him, "one of
these here anarchists?"
He shook his mouse-coloured head.
"Do I look like one, Cousin Nellie? Nothing further from my thoughts
than anarchy. The last thing I'd stand for."
"Then whatever in the wide world d'you want to go dropping bombs for?"
retorted my young mistress. "Dropping 'em on who, I should like to
know?"
"On the enemy, I guess."
"Enemy?"
"Sure thing. I wouldn't want to be dropping them on our own folks now,
would I?" said the young American in his pleasant, reasonable voice;
while I, too, gazed at him in wonder at the unexpected things that came
from his firm, clean-shaven lips.
He began again to explain.
"Now you see, Cousin Nellie and Miss Smith, I am taking the aeroplane as
it will be. Absolutely one of the most important factors in modern
warfare----"
"But who's talking about war?" asked the bewildered Million.
"I am," said the young American.
"War?" repeated his cousin. "But gracious alive! Where is there any,
nowadays?"
The glimpse of English landscape outside the window seemed to echo her
question.
There seemed to be no memory of such a terrible and strenuous thing as
war among those gently sloping Sussex Downs, where the white chalk
showed in patches through the close turf, and where the summer haze,
dancing above that chalk, made all the distances deceptive.
From the top of those downs the country, I knew, must look flat as
coloured maps. They lay spread out, those squares and oblongs of
pearl-grey chalk, of green corn, of golden hay, with "the King's peace
over all, dear boys, the King's peace over all," as Kipling said.
The whole country seemed as if the events that had come and gone since
the reign, say, of King John had left no more impression upon it than
the cloud shadows that had rolled and passed, rolled and passed. As it
was in the beginning, so it was in the late June of Nineteen Fourteen.
And so it looked as if it must ever remain.
Yet----Here was an extraordinarily unexpected young man bringing into
the midst of all this sun-lit peace the talk of war! War as it had never
yet been waged; war not only on the land and under the waves, but war
that dropped death from the very clouds themselves!
"I think you're talking silly," said Miss Million severely. "No doubt
there's always a certain amount of warring and fighting going on in
India, where poor dad was. Out-of-the-way places like that, where there
aren't any only black people to fight with, anyhow.... But any other
sort of fighting came to an end with the Bo'r War, where dad was outed.
"And I don't see what it's got to do with you, or why you should think
it so fearfully important to go inventing your bomb-droppers and
what-nots for things what--what aren't going to happen!"
The young American smiled in a distant sort of way.
"So you're one of the people that think war isn't going to happen again?
Well! I guess you aren't lonely. Plenty think as you do," he told his
cousin. "Others think as I do. They calculate that sooner or later it's
bound to come. And that if it comes fortune will favour those that have
prepared for the idea of it. Aren't you a soldier's daughter, Cousin
Nellie?"
The little dark head of Sergeant Million's orphan went up proudly.
"Rather!"
"Well, then, you'll take a real live interest," said her cousin, "in
something that might make all the difference in the world to your
country, supposing she did come to grips with another country. That's
the difference that would be made by machines like mine. Not that there
is another machine just like my own, I guess. Let me tell you about
her----"
Again he went on talking about his new bomb-dropper in words that I
don't pretend to understand.
I understood the tone, though.
That was unmistakable. It was the rapt and utterly serious tone which a
person speaks in of something that fills his whole heart. I suppose a
painter would speak thus of his beloved art, or a violinist of his
music, or a mother of her adored and only baby boy. I saw the young
American's face light up until it was even as something inspired.
This machine of his, for dropping bombs from the clouds upon the heads
of some enemy that existed if only in his imagination was "his subject."
This was his all. This he lived for. Yes, that was plain to both of us.
I saw Miss Million give an understanding nod of her little dark head as
she said: "Yes, you haven't half set your mind on this thing, have you?"
"I guess you've hit it," said the American. Then Miss Million asked:
"And where does the money part of it come in?"
Then he explained to us that, having invented the thing (it was all a
pure joy apparently), now began the hard work. He had to sell the
machine! He had to get it "taken up," to have it experimented with. All
this would run him into more money than he had got.
He concluded simply: "That's where the Million dollars would come in so
useful! And, Cousin Nellie, I am simply bound to try and get them!"
I watched my mistress's face as he made this announcement. Miss Million,
I saw, was so interested that for the moment she had forgotten her own
obsession, her infatuation for the Honourable Jim Burke. As well as the
interest, though, there was "fight" in the grey eyes of the soldier's
orphan who used to wear a blue-print uniform frock and a black straw hat
with a scarlet ribbon about it.
She said: "I see what you mean. Me give you my money to play with! And
what if I don't hold with investing any of uncle's money in this
harum-scarum idea of yours? I am none so sure that I do hold----"
"Maybe I might have to do a little of the holding myself, Cousin
Nellie," broke in the quiet, firm voice of her American cousin. "See
here! What if I were to put up a tussle to get all that money away from
you, whether you wanted to give it up to me to play with it or not?"
And then he began quickly to explain to her what he had explained to me
coming down in the car. He went over the possibilities of his contesting
Mr. Samuel Million's will.
I don't think I shall ever forget that funny little scene in the
bungalow-furnished room with all those theatrical photographs papering
the walls, and with the windows opening on to the Sussex garden where
the bees boomed in the roses, and the lazy sound mingled with the
chirping of the starlings, and with the shriller chatter of two of the
"Refuge" girls lying in deck-chairs in the shadow of the lilacs.
Inside, these two cousins, young American and young Englishwoman, who
might be going to fight for a fortune, stared at each other with a
measuring glance that was not at all unfriendly. In the eyes of both I
read the same question.
"Now, what are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about
it?"
After a pause Miss Million said: "Well, this'll mean a lot of worry and
noosance, I suppose. Going to Lawr! Never thought I should come to that
sort of thing. Courts, and lawyers, an' all that----"
She looked straight at the young American, who nodded.
"Yes, I guess that's what fighting this thing out will mean," he agreed.
Miss Million knit her brows.
"Lawr," she said reflectively, voicing the sentiment of our whole sex on
this vexed subject. "Lawr always seems to be ser _silly_! It lets a
whole lot o' things go on that you'd think ought to 'a' been stopped
hundreds of years ago by Ack of Parliament. Then again, it drops on you
like one o' them bombs of yours for something that doesn't make
twopennyworth of difference to anybody, and there you are with forty
shillings fine, at least. An' as for getting anything done with going to
Lawr about it, well, it's like I used to say to the butcher's boy at
Putney when he used to ask me to give him time to get that joint
brought round: 'Time! It isn't time you want, it's Eternity!'
"Going to Lawr! What does it mean? Paying away pots o' money to a lot o'
good-for-nothing people for talking to you till you're silly, and
writing letters to you that you can't make head nor tail of, and then
nothing settled until you're old and grey. If then!"
"That's quite an accurate description of my own feelings towards the
business," said the other candidate for Miss Million's fortune. "I'm not
breaking my neck or straining myself any to hand over to the lawyers any
of the precious dollars that I want for the wedding-portion of my
machine."
"Go to law----No, that's not a thing I want to do," repeated the present
owner of the precious dollars. "Same time, I'm not going to lose any of
the money that's mine by right if I can possibly keep hold on it--that's
only sense, that is!"
And she turned to me, while again I felt as if I were a referee. "What
do you say, Smith?"
I was deadly puzzled.
I ventured: "But if you've both made up your minds you must have the
money, there doesn't seem anything for it but to go to law, does there?"
"Wait awhile," said the young American slowly. "There does appear to me
to be an alternative. Now, see here----"
He leant towards Miss Million. He held out his hand, as if to point out
the alternative. He said: "There is another way of fixing it, I guess.
We needn't fight. I'd feel real mean, fighting a dear little girl like
you----"
"You won't get round me," said Miss Million, quite as defensively as if
she were addressing a tradesman's boy on a doorstep. "No getting round
me with soft soap, young man!"
"I wasn't meaning it that way," he said, "The way I meant would let us
share the money and yet let's both have the dollars and the glory of the
invention and everything else!"
"I don't know how you mean," declared Miss Million.
I, sitting there in my corner, had seen what was coming.
But I really believe Miss Million herself received the surprise of her
life when her cousin gave his quiet reply.
"Supposing," he said, "supposing we two were to get married?"
"Marry?" cried Miss Million in her shrillest Putney-kitchen voice. "Me?
You?"
She flung up her little, dark head and let loose a shriek of
laughter--half-indignant laughter at that.
Then, recovering herself, she turned upon the young man who had proposed
to her in this quite unconventional fashion and began to--well! there's
no expression for it but one of her own. She began to "go for him."
"I don't call it very funny," she declared sharply, "to go making a joke
of a subject like that to a young lady you haven't known above a half an
hour hardly."
"I wasn't thinking about the humourousness of the proposition, Cousin
Nellie!" protested Mr. Hiram P. Jessop steadily. "I meant it perfectly
seriously."
Miss Million gazed at him from the chair opposite.
Her cousin met that challenging, distrustful gaze unflinchingly. And in
his own grey eyes I noticed a mixture of obstinacy and of quite
respectful admiration. Certainly the little thing was looking very
pretty and spirited.
Every woman has her "day." It's too bad that this generally happens at a
time when nobody calls and there's not a soul about to admire her at her
best. The next evening, when she's got to wear a low-cut frock and go
out somewhere, the chances are a hundred to one that it will be her "day
off," and that she will appear a perfect fright, all "salt-cellars" and
rebellious wisps of hair.
But to proceed with Miss Million, who was walking off with one man's
admiration by means of the added good looks she had acquired by being in
love with another man. Such is life.
"You mean it seriously?" she repeated.
"I do," he said, nodding emphatically. "I certainly do."
Miss Million said: "You must be barmy!"
"Barmy?" echoed her American cousin. "You mean----"
"Off your onion. Up the pole. Wrong in your 'ead--head," explained Miss
Million. "That's what you must be. Why, good gracious alive! The idea!
Proposing to marry a girl the first time you ever set eyes on her.
Smith, did you ever----"
"I never had to sit in the room before while another girl was being
proposed to," I put in uncomfortably. "If you don't mind, Miss, I think
I had better go now, and allow you and Mr. Jessop to talk this over
between yourselves."
"Nothing of the kind, Miss Smith, nothing of the kind," put in the
suitor, turning to me as I stood ready to flee to scenes less
embarrassing. "You're a nice, well-balanced, intell'gent sort of a young
lady yourself. I'd just like to have your point of view about this
affair of my cousin arranging to marry me----"
"I'm not arranging no such thing," cried Miss Million, "and don't mean
to!"
"See here; you'd far better," said Mr. Hiram P. Jessop, in his kindly,
reasonable, shrewd, young voice. "Look at the worry and discomfort and
argument and inconvenience about the money that she'd avoid"--again
turning to Miss Million's maid--"if she agreed to do so."
"Then, again," he went on, "what a much more comfortable situation for a
young lady of her age and appearance if she could go travelling around
with a husky-looking sort of husband, with a head on his shoulders,
rather than be trapesing about alone, with nothing but a young lady of a
lady's-maid no older or fitter to cope with the battles of life than she
is herself. A husband to keep away the sordid and disagreeable aspects
of life----"
Here I remembered suddenly the visit of that detective who wanted to
search Miss Million's boxes at the Cecil. I thought to myself: "Yes! if
we only had a husband. I mean if she had! It would be a handy sort of
thing to be able to call in next time we were suspected of having taken
anybody's rubies!"
And then I remembered with a shock that I hadn't yet had time to break
it to my mistress that we had been suspected--were probably still
suspected--by that awful Rattenheimer person!
Meanwhile Miss Million's cousin and would-be husband was going on
expatiating on the many advantages, to a young lady in her position, of
having a real man to look after her interests----
"All very true. But I don't know as I'm exactly hard up for a husband,"
retorted Miss Million, with a little simper and a blush that I knew was
called up by the memory of the blue, black-lashed eyes of a certain
Irish scamp and scaramouch who ought to be put in the stocks at Charing
Cross as an example to all nice girls of the kind of young man whom it
is desirable to avoid and to snub. Miss Million added: "I don't know
that I couldn't get married any time I wanted to."
"Sure thing," agreed her cousin gravely. "But the question is, how are
you going to know which man's just hunting you for the sake of Uncle
Sam's dollars? Making love to the girl, with his eyes on the pork
factory?"
"Well, I must say I think that comes well from you!" exclaimed Miss
Million. "You to talk about people wanting to marry me for my money,
when you've just said yourself that you've set your heart on those
dollars of Uncle Sam's for your old aeroplane machine! You're a nice
one!"
"I'm sincere," said the young American, in a voice that no one could
doubt. "I want the dollars. But I wouldn't have suggested marrying
them--if I hadn't liked the little girl that went with them. I told you
right away when I came into this room, Cousin Nellie, that I think
you're a little peach. As I said, I like your pretty little frank face
and the cunning way you fix yourself up. I like your honesty. No beating
about the bush."
He paused a second or so, and then went on.
"'You must be barmy,' says you. It appeared that way to you, and you
said it. That's my own point of view. If you mean a thing, say it out.
You do. I like that. I revere that. And in a charming little girl it's
rare," said the American simply. "I like your voice----"
Here I suppressed a gasp, just in time. He liked Million's voice! He
liked that appalling Cockney accent that has sounded so much more
ear-piercing and nerve-rasping since it has been associated with the
clothes that--well, ought to have such a very much prettier sort of tone
coming out of them!
He liked it. Oh, he must be in love at first sight--at first sound!
"Plenty of these young English girls talk as if it sprained them over
each syllable. You're brisk and peart and alive," he told her earnestly.
"I think you've a lovely way of talking."
Miss Million was taking it all in, as a girl does take in compliments,
whether they are from the right man or from the wrong one. That is, she
looked as if every word were cream to her. Only another woman could have
seen which remark she tossed aside in her own mind as "just what he
said," and which tribute she treasured.
I saw that what appealed to Miss Million was "the lovely way of talking"
and "the cunning way she'd fixed herself up." In fact, the two
compliments she deserved least.
Oh, how I wished she'd say "Yes, thank you," at once to a young man who
would certainly be the solution of all my doubts and difficulties as far
as my young mistress was concerned! He'd look after her. He'd spoil her,
as these Americans do spoil their adored womenkind!
All her little ways would be so "noo," as he calls it, to him, that he
wouldn't realise which of them were--were--were the kind of thing that
would set the teeth on edge of, say, the Honourable Jim Burke.
He--Mr. Hiram P. Jessop--would make an idol and a possession of his
little English wife. That conscienceless Celt would make a
banking-account of her--nothing else.
Oh, yes! How I wished she'd take her cousin and be thankful----
But here was Miss Million shaking her little dusky head against the
gay-coloured cushions.
"I'm sure it's very kind of you to say all this," she told him in a
rather mollified tone of voice, "but I'm afraid we can't arrange things
the way you'd like. A girl can't sort of make herself like people better
than other people, just because it might 'appen to be convenient."
"Other people," repeated the young American quickly. "Am I to take it
that there is some one else that you prefer, Cousin Nellie?"
His cousin Nellie's very vivid blush seemed to be enough answer for him.
He rose, saying slowly: "Why, that's a pity. That makes me feel real out
of it. Still----" He shrugged the broad shoulders under the light-grey
padded coat. "As you say, it can't be helped. I congratulate whoever it
is that----"
"Ow, stop! Gracious alive, there isn't any one to be congratulated yet,"
broke in Miss Million. "Me and--the gentleman haven't gone and
definitely made up our minds about anything, up to now; but--well. As
you say, it's better to have anything 'out.'"
"If you haven't definitely made up your mind," said the young American,
just as he took his leave, "I shan't definitely take 'No' for my own
answer."
And he's gone off now to put up at an hotel in Lewes, so that he can
come over to call at the "Refuge" each day of the week that Miss Million
says we are going to stay here. He thinks, I know, that after all he
will "get round her" to like him.
As if, poor fellow! he had any chance at all against a man like the
Honourable Jim!
Well! He'll soon see, that's all!