SPRING IN BOND STREET
The visit to London was part of an evolution of both body and mind to
Rosalie Anstruthers. In one of the wonderful modern hotels a suite of
rooms was engaged for them. The luxury which surrounded them was not of
the order Rosalie had vaguely connected with hotels. Hotel-keepers had
apparently learned many things during the years of her seclusion.
Vanderpoels, at least, could so establish themselves as not to greatly
feel the hotel atmosphere. Carefully chosen colours textures, and
appointments formed the background of their days, the food they ate
was a thing produced by art, the servants who attended them were
completely-trained mechanisms. To sit by a window and watch the
kaleidoscopic human tide passing by on its way to its pleasure, to reach
its work, to spend its money in unending shops, to show itself and its
equipage in the park, was a wonderful thing to Lady Anstruthers. It all
seemed to be a part of the life and quality of Betty, little Betty,
whom she had remembered only as a child, and who had come to her a tall,
strong young beauty, who had--it was resplendently clear--never known
a fear in her life, and whose mere personality had the effect of making
fears seem unreal.
She was taken out in a luxurious little brougham to shops whose varied
allurements were placed eagerly at her disposal. Respectful persons,
obedient to her most faintly-expressed desire, displayed garments as
wonderful as those the New York trunks had revealed. She was besought
to consider the fitness of articles whose exquisiteness she was almost
afraid to look at. Her thin little body was wonderfully fitted, managed,
encouraged to make the most of its long-ignored outlines.
“Her ladyship's slenderness is a great advantage,” said the wisely
inciting ones. “There is no such advantage as delicacy of line.”
Summing up the character of their customer with the saleswoman's
eye, they realised the discretion of turning to Miss Vanderpoel for
encouragement, though she was the younger of the two, and bore no title.
They were aware of the existence of persons of rank who were not lavish
patrons, but the name of Vanderpoel held most promising suggestions. To
an English shopkeeper the American has, of late years, represented
the spender--the type which, whatsoever its rank and resources, has,
mysteriously, always money to hand over counters in exchange for things
it chances to desire to possess. Each year surges across the Atlantic a
horde of these fortunate persons, who, to the sober, commercial British
mind, appear to be free to devote their existences to travel and
expenditure. This contingent appears shopping in the various shopping
thoroughfares; it buys clothes, jewels, miscellaneous attractive things,
making its purchases of articles useful or decorative with a freedom
from anxiety in its enjoyment which does not mark the mood of the
ordinary shopper. In the everyday purchaser one is accustomed to take
for granted, as a factor in his expenditure, a certain deliberation and
uncertainty; to the travelling American in Europe, shopping appears to
be part of the holiday which is being made the most of. Surely, all the
neat, smart young persons who buy frocks and blouses, hats and coats,
hosiery and chains, cannot be the possessors of large incomes; there
must be, even in America, a middle class of middle-class resources, yet
these young persons, male and female, and most frequently unaccompanied
by older persons--seeing what they want, greet it with expressions of
pleasure, waste no time in appropriating and paying for it, and go away
as in relief and triumph--not as in that sober joy which is clouded by
afterthought. The sales people are sometimes even vaguely cheered by their
gay lack of any doubt as to the wisdom of their getting what they admire,
and rejoicing in it. If America always buys in this holiday mood, it
must be an enviable thing to be a shopkeeper in their New York or Boston
or San Francisco. Who would not make a fortune among them? They want
what they want, and not something which seems to them less desirable,
but they open their purses and--frequently with some amused uncertainty
as to the differences between sovereigns and half-sovereigns, florins
and half-crowns--they pay their bills with something almost like glee.
They are remarkably prompt about bills--which is an excellent thing, as
they are nearly always just going somewhere else, to France or Germany
or Italy or Scotland or Siberia. Those of us who are shopkeepers, or
their salesmen, do not dream that some of them have incomes no larger
than our own, that they work for their livings, that they are teachers
journalists, small writers or illustrators of papers or magazines that
they are unimportant soldiers of fortune, but, with their queer American
insistence on exploration, and the ignoring of limitations, they have,
somehow, managed to make this exultant dash for a few daring weeks or
months of freedom and new experience. If we knew this, we should
regard them from our conservative standpoint of provident decorum as
improvident lunatics, being ourselves unable to calculate with their odd
courage and their cheerful belief in themselves. What we do know is that
they spend, and we are far from disdaining their patronage, though most
of them have an odd little familiarity of address and are not stamped
with that distinction which causes us to realise the enormous difference
between the patron and the tradesman, and makes us feel the worm
we remotely like to feel ourselves, though we would not for worlds
acknowledge the fact. Mentally, and in our speech, both among our equals
and our superiors, we condescend to and patronise them a little, though
that, of course, is the fine old insular attitude it would be un-British
to discourage. But, if we are not in the least definite concerning the
position and resources of these spenders as a mass, we are quite sure of
a select number. There is mention of them in the newspapers, of the
town houses, the castles, moors, and salmon fishings they rent, of
their yachts, their presentations actually at our own courts, of their
presence at great balls, at Ascot and Goodwood, at the opera on gala
nights. One staggers sometimes before the public summing-up of the
amount of their fortunes. These people who have neither blood nor rank,
these men who labour in their business offices, are richer than our
great dukes, at the realising of whose wealth and possessions we have at
times almost turned pale.
“Them!” chaffed a costermonger over his barrow. “Blimme, if some o' them
blokes won't buy Buckin'am Pallis an' the 'ole R'yal Fambly some mornin'
when they're out shoppin'.”
The subservient attendants in more than one fashionable shop Betty and
her sister visit, know that Miss Vanderpoel is of the circle, though her
father has not as yet bought or hired any great estate, and his daughter
has not been seen in London.
“Its queer we've never heard of her being presented,” one shopgirl says
to another. “Just you look at her.”
She evidently knows what her ladyship ought to buy--what can be trusted
not to overpower her faded fragility. The saleswomen, even if they had
not been devoured by alert curiosity, could not have avoided seeing that
her ladyship did not seem to know what should be bought, and that Miss
Vanderpoel did, though she did not direct her sister's selection,
but merely seemed to suggest with delicate restraint. Her taste was
wonderfully perceptive. The things bought were exquisite, but a little
colourless woman could wear them all with advantage to her restrictions
of type.
As the brougham drove down Bond Street, Betty called Lady Anstruthers'
attention to more than one passer-by.
“Look, Rosy,” she said. “There is Mrs. Treat Hilyar in the second
carriage to the right. You remember Josie Treat Hilyar married Lord
Varick's son.”
In the landau designated an elderly woman with wonderfully-dressed
white hair sat smiling and bowing to friends who were walking. Lady
Anstruthers, despite her eagerness, shrank back a little, hoping to
escape being seen.
“Oh, it is the Lows she is speaking to--Tom and Alice--I did not know
they had sailed yet.”
The tall, well-groomed young man, with the nice, ugly face, was showing
white teeth in a gay smile of recognition, and his pretty wife was
lightly waving a slim hand in a grey suede glove.
“How cheerful and nice-tempered they look,” said Rosy. “Tom was only
twenty when I saw him last. Whom did he marry?”
“An English girl. Such a love. A Devonshire gentleman's daughter. In New
York his friends called her Devonshire Cream and Roses. She is one of
the pretty, flushy, pink ones.”
“How nice Bond Street is on a spring morning like this,” said Lady
Anstruthers. “You may laugh at me for saying it, Betty, but somehow it
seems to me more spring-like than the country.”
“How clever of you!” laughed Betty. “There is so much truth in it.”
The people walking in the sunshine were all full of spring thoughts and
plans. The colours they wore, the flowers in the women's hats and the
men's buttonholes belonged to the season. The cheerful crowds of people
and carriages had a sort of rushing stir of movement which suggested
freshness. Later in the year everything looks more tired. Now things
were beginning and everyone was rather inclined to believe that this
year would be better than last. “Look at the shop windows,” said Betty,
“full of whites and pinks and yellows and blues--the colours of hyacinth
and daffodil beds. It seems as if they insist that there never has been
a winter and never will be one. They insist that there never was and
never will be anything but spring.”
“It's in the air.” Lady Anstruthers' sigh was actually a happy one. “It
is just what I used to feel in April when we drove down Fifth Avenue.”
Among the crowds of freshly-dressed passers-by, women with flowery hats
and light frocks and parasols, men with touches of flower-colour on the
lapels of their coats, and the holiday look in their faces, she noted so
many of a familiar type that she began to look for and try to pick them
out with quite excited interest.
“I believe that woman is an American,” she would say. “That girl looks
as if she were a New Yorker,” again. “That man's face looks as if it
belonged to Broadway. Oh, Betty! do you think I am right? I should say
those girls getting out of the hansom to go into Burnham & Staples' came
from out West and are going to buy thousands of things. Don't they look
like it?”
She began to lean forward and look on at things with an interest so
unlike her Stornham listlessness that Betty's heart was moved.
Her face looked alive, and little waves of colour rose under her skin.
Several times she laughed the natural little laugh of her girlhood which
it had seemed almost too much to expect to hear again. The first of
these laughs came when she counted her tenth American, a tall Westerner
of the cartoon type, sauntering along with an expression of speculative
enjoyment on his odd face, and evidently, though furtively, chewing
tobacco.
“I absolutely love him, Betty,” she cried. “You couldn't mistake him for
anything else.”
“No,” answered Betty, feeling that she loved him herself, “not if you
found him embalmed in the Pyramids.”
They pleased themselves immensely, trying to guess what he would buy
and take home to his wife and girls in his Western town--though Western
towns were very grand and amazing in these days, Betty explained, and
knew they could give points to New York. He would not buy the things
he would have bought fifteen years ago. Perhaps, in fact, his wife and
daughters had come with him to London and stayed at the Metropole or
the Savoy, and were at this moment being fitted by tailors and modistes
patronised by Royalty.
“Rosy, look! Do you see who that is? Do you recognise her? It is
Mrs. Bellingham. She was little Mina Thalberg. She married Captain
Bellingham. He was quite poor, but very well born--a nephew of Lord
Dunholm's. He could not have married a poor girl--but they have been so
happy together that Mina is growing fat, and spends her days in taking
reducing treatments. She says she wouldn't care in the least, but Dicky
fell in love with her waist and shoulder line.”
The plump, pretty young woman getting out of her victoria before a
fashionable hairdresser's looked radiant enough. She had not yet lost
the waist and shoulder line, though her pink frock fitted her with
discreet tightness. She paused a moment to pat and fuss prettily over
the two blooming, curly children who were to remain under the care of
the nurse, who sat on the back seat, holding the baby on her lap.
“I should not have known her,” said Rosy. “She has grown pretty. She
wasn't a pretty child.”
“It's happiness--and the English climate--and Captain Dicky. They adore
each other, and laugh at everything like a pair of children. They were
immensely popular in New York last winter, when they visited Mina's
people.”
The effect of the morning upon Lady Anstruthers was what Betty had hoped
it might be. The curious drawing near of the two nations began to dawn
upon her as a truth. Immured in the country, not sufficiently interested
in life to read newspapers, she had heard rumours of some of the more
important marriages, but had known nothing of the thousand small details
which made for the weaving of the web. Mrs. Treat Hilyar driving in a
leisurely, accustomed fashion down Bond Street, and smiling casually at
her compatriots, whose “sailing” was as much part of the natural order
of their luxurious lives as their carriages, gave a definiteness to the
situation. Mina Thalberg, pulling down the embroidered frocks over the
round legs of her English-looking children, seemed to narrow the width
of the Atlantic Ocean between Liverpool and the docks on the Hudson
River.
She returned to the hotel with an appetite for lunch and a new
expression in her eyes which made Ughtred stare at her.
“Mother,” he said, “you look different. You look well. It isn't only
your new dress and your hair.”
The new style of her attire had certainly done much, and the maid who
had been engaged to attend her was a woman who knew her duties. She had
been called upon in her time to make the most of hair offering much
less assistance to her skill than was supplied by the fine, fair
colourlessness she had found dragged back from her new mistress's
forehead. It was not dragged back now, but had really been done wonders
with. Rosalie had smiled a little when she had looked at herself in the
glass after the first time it was so dressed.
“You are trying to make me look as I did when mother saw me last,
Betty,” she said. “I wonder if you possibly could.”
“Let us believe we can,” laughed Betty. “And wait and see.”
It seemed wise neither to make nor receive visits. The time for such
things had evidently not yet come. Even the mention of the Worthingtons
led to the revelation that Rosalie shrank from immediate contact with
people. When she felt stronger, when she became more accustomed to the
thought, she might feel differently, but just now, to be luxuriously one
with the enviable part of London, to look on, to drink in, to drive here
and there, doing the things she liked to do, ordering what was required
at Stornham, was like the creating for her of a new heaven and a new
earth.
When, one night, Betty took her with Ughtred to the theatre, it was to
see a play written by an American, played by American actors, produced
by an American manager. They had even engaged in theatrical enterprise,
it seemed, their actors played before London audiences, London actors
played in American theatres, vibrating almost yearly between the two
continents and reaping rich harvests. Hearing rumours of this in the
past, Lady Anstruthers had scarcely believed it entirely true. Now the
practical reality was brought before her. The French, who were only
separated from the English metropolis by a mere few miles of Channel,
did not exchange their actors year after year in increasing numbers,
making a mere friendly barter of each other's territory, as though each
land was common ground and not divided by leagues of ocean travel.
“It seems so wonderful,” Lady Anstruthers argued. “I have always felt as
if they hated each other.”
“They did once--but how could it last between those of the same
blood--of the same tongue? If we were really aliens we might be a
menace. But we are of their own.” Betty leaned forward on the edge of
the box, looking out over the crowded house, filled with almost as many
Americans as English faces. She smiled, reflecting. “We were children
put out to nurse and breathe new air in the country, and now we are
coming home, vigorous, and full-grown.”
She studied the audience for some minutes, and, as her glance wandered
over the stalls, it took in more than one marked variety of type.
Suddenly it fell on a face she delightedly recognised. It was that of
the nice, speculative-eyed Westerner they had seen enjoying himself in
Bond Street.
“Rosy,” she said, “there is the Western man we love. Near the end of the
fourth row.”
Lady Anstruthers looked for him with eagerness.
“Oh, I see him! Next to the big one with the reddish hair.”
Betty turned her attention to the man in question, whom she had not
chanced to notice. She uttered an exclamation of surprise and interest.
“The big man with the red hair. How lovely that they should chance to
sit side by side--the big one is Lord Mount Dunstan!”
The necessity of seeing his solicitors, who happened to be Messrs.
Townlinson & Sheppard, had brought Lord Mount Dunstan to town. After a
day devoted to business affairs, he had been attracted by the idea of
going to the theatre to see again a play he had already seen in New
York. It would interest him to observe its exact effect upon a London
audience. While he had been in New York, he had gone with something of
the same feeling to see a great English actor play to a crowded house.
The great actor had been one who had returned to the country for a third
or fourth time, and, in the enthusiasm he had felt in the atmosphere
about him, Mount Dunstan had seen not only pleasure and appreciation of
the man's perfect art, but--at certain tumultuous outbursts--an almost
emotional welcome. The Americans, he had said to himself, were creatures
of warmer blood than the English. The audience on that occasion had
been, in mass, American. The audience he made one of now, was made up of
both nationalities, and, in glancing over it, he realised how large was
the number of Americans who came yearly to London. As Lady Anstruthers
had done, he found himself selecting from the assemblage the types which
were manifestly American, and those obviously English. In the seat next
to himself sat a man of a type he felt he had learned by heart in
the days of his life as Jem Salter. At a short distance fluttered
brilliantly an English professional beauty, with her male and female
court about her. In the stage box, made sumptuous with flowers, was a
royal party.
As this party had entered, “God save the Queen” had been played, and, in
rising with the audience during the entry, he had recalled that the tune
was identical with that of an American national air. How unconsciously
inseparable--in spite of the lightness with which they regarded the
curious tie between them--the two countries were. The people upon the
stage were acting as if they knew their public, their bearing
suggesting no sense of any barrier beyond the footlights. It was the
unconsciousness and lightness of the mutual attitude which had struck
him of late. Punch had long jested about “Fair Americans,” who, in
their first introduction to its pages, used exotic and cryptic language,
beginning every sentence either with “I guess,” or “Say, Stranger”; its
male American had been of the Uncle Sam order and had invariably worn
a “goatee.” American witticisms had represented the Englishman in
plaid trousers, opening his remarks with “Chawley, deah fellah,” and
unfailingly missing the point of any joke. Each country had cherished
its type and good-naturedly derided it. In time this had modified itself
and the joke had changed in kind. Many other things had changed, but the
lightness of treatment still remained. And yet their blood was mingling
itself with that of England's noblest and oldest of name, their wealth
was making solid again towers and halls which had threatened to crumble.
Ancient family jewels glittered on slender, young American necks, and
above--sometimes somewhat careless--young American brows. And yet, so
far, one was casual in one's thought of it all, still. On his own part
he was obstinate Briton enough to rebel against and resent it. They
were intruders. He resented them as he had resented in his boyhood the
historical fact that, after all, an Englishman was a German--a savage
who, five hundred years after the birth of Christ, had swooped upon
Early Briton from his Engleland and Jutland, and ravaging with fire and
sword, had conquered and made the land his possession, ravishing its
very name from it and giving it his own. These people did not come with
fire and sword, but with cable and telephone, and bribes of gold and
fair women, but they were encroaching like the sea, which, in certain
parts of the coast, gained a few inches or so each year. He shook his
shoulders impatiently, and stiffened, feeling illogically antagonistic
towards the good-natured, lantern-jawed man at his side.
The lantern-jawed man looked good-natured because he was smiling, and
he was smiling because he saw something which pleased him in one of the
boxes.
His expression of unqualified approval naturally directed Mount
Dunstan's eye to the point in question, where it remained for some
moments. This was because he found it resting upon Miss Vanderpoel, who
sat before him in luminous white garments, and with a brilliant spark
of ornament in the dense shadow of her hair. His sensation at the
unexpected sight of her would, if it had expressed itself physically,
have taken the form of a slight start. The luminous quality did not
confine itself to the whiteness of her garments. He was aware of feeling
that she looked luminous herself--her eyes, her cheek, the smile she
bent upon the little woman who was her companion. She was a beautifully
living thing.
Naturally, she was being looked at by others than himself. She was one
of those towards whom glasses in a theatre turn themselves inevitably.
The sweep and lift of her black hair would have drawn them, even if she
had offered no other charm. Yes, he thought, here was another of them.
To whom was she bringing her good looks and her millions? There were men
enough who needed money, even if they must accept it under less alluring
conditions. In the box next to the one occupied by the royal party was a
man who was known to be waiting for the advent of some such opportunity.
His was a case of dire, if outwardly stately, need. He was young, but a
fool, and not noted for personal charms, yet he had, in one sense, great
things to offer. There were, of course, many chances that he might offer
them to her. If this happened, would she accept them? There was really
no objection to him but his dulness, consequently there seemed many
chances that she might. There was something akin to the pomp of royalty
in the power her father's wealth implied. She could scarcely make an
ordinary marriage. It would naturally be a sort of state affair.
There were few men who had enough to offer in exchange for Vanderpoel
millions, and of the few none had special attractions. The one in
the box next to the royal party was a decent enough fellow. As young
princesses were not infrequently called upon, by the mere exclusion of
royal blood, to become united to young or mature princes without charm,
so American young persons who were of royal possessions must find
themselves limited. If you felt free to pick and choose from among
young men in the Guards or young attaches in the Diplomatic Service with
twopence a year, you might get beauty or wit or temperament or all three
by good luck, but if you were of a royal house of New York or Chicago,
you would probably feel you must draw lines and choose only such
splendours as accorded with, even while differing from, your own.
Any possible connection of himself with such a case did not present
itself to him. If it had done so, he would have counted himself,
haughtily, as beyond the pale. It was for other men to do things of the
sort; a remote antagonism of his whole being warred against the mere
idea. It was bigoted prejudice, perhaps, but it was a strong thing.
A lovely shoulder and a brilliant head set on a long and slender neck
have no nationality which can prevent a man's glance turning naturally
towards them. His turned again during the last act of the play, and at a
moment when he saw something rather like the thing he had seen when
the Meridiana moved away from the dock and the exalted Miss Vanderpoel
leaning upon the rail had held out her arms towards the child who had
brought his toy to her as a farewell offering.
Sitting by her to-night was a boy with a crooked back--Mount Dunstan
remembered hearing that the Anstruthers had a deformed son--and she
was leaning towards him, her hand resting on his shoulder, explaining
something he had not quite grasped in the action of the play. The
absolute adoration in the boy's uplifted eyes was an interesting thing
to take in, and the radiant warmth of her bright look was as unconscious
of onlookers as it had been when he had seen it yearning towards the
child on the wharf. Hers was the temperament which gave--which gave. He
found himself restraining a smile because her look brought back to him
the actual sound of the New York youngster's voice.
“I wanted to kiss you, Betty, oh, I did so want to kiss you!”
Anstruthers' boy--poor little beggar--looked as if he, too, in the face
of actors and audience, and brilliance of light, wanted to kiss her.