I looked at the address; it was the Albemarle, evidently a hotel or an
apartment house, then there was the name of a street, and Yonkers. A
shiver passed through me as though someone had walked over my grave.
During the years that had passed I had sometimes thought of Rosie, but
of late I had said to myself that she must surely be dead. I was puzzled
for a moment by the name. Why Iggulden and not Kemp? Then it occurred to
me that they had taken this name, a Kentish one too, when they fled from
England. My first impulse was to make an excuse not to see her; I am
always shy of seeing again people I have not seen for a long time; but
then I was seized with curiosity. I wanted to see what she was like and
to hear what had happened to her. I was going down to Dobbs Ferry for
the week-end, to reach which I had to pass through Yonkers, and so
answered that I would come at about four on the following Saturday.
The Albemarle was a huge block of apartments, comparatively new, and it
looked as though it were inhabited by persons in easy circumstances. My
name was telephoned up by a Negro porter in uniform and I was taken up
in the elevator by another. I felt uncommonly nervous. The door was
opened for me by a coloured maid.
“Come right in,” she said. “Mrs. Iggulden’s expecting you.”
I was ushered into a living room that served also as dining room, for at
one end of it was a square table of heavily carved oak, a dresser, and
four chairs of the kind that the manufacturers in Grand Rapids would
certainly describe as Jacobean. But the other end was furnished with a
Louis XV suite, gilt and upholstered in pale blue damask; there were a
great many small tables, richly carved and gilt, on which stood Sèvres
vases with ormolu decorations and nude bronze ladies with draperies
flowing as though in a howling gale that artfully concealed those parts
of their bodies that decency required; and each one held at the end of a
playfully outstretched arm an electric lamp. The gramophone was the
grandest thing I had ever seen out of a shop window, all gilt and shaped
like a sedan chair and painted with Watteau courtiers and their ladies.
After I had waited for about five minutes a door was opened and Rosie
came briskly in. She gave me both her hands.
“Well, this is a surprise,” she said. “I hate to think how many years it
is since we met. Excuse me one moment.” She went to the door and called:
“Jessie, you can bring the tea in. Mind the water’s boiling properly.”
Then, coming back: “The trouble I’ve had to teach that girl to make tea
properly, you’d never believe.”
Rosie was at least seventy. She was wearing a very smart sleeveless
frock of green chiffon, heavily _diamanté_, cut square at the neck and
very short; it fitted like a bursting glove. By her shape I gathered
that she wore rubber corsets. Her nails were blood-coloured and her
eyebrows plucked. She was stout, and she had a double chin; the skin of
her bosom, although she had powdered it freely, was red, and her face
was red too. But she looked well and healthy and full of beans. Her hair
was still abundant, but it was quite white, shingled and permanently
waved. As a young woman she had had soft, naturally waving hair and
these stiff undulations, as though she had just come out of a
hairdresser’s, seemed more than anything else to change her. The only
thing that remained was her smile, which had still its old childlike and
mischievous sweetness. Her teeth had never been very good, irregular and
of bad shape; but these now were replaced by a set of perfect evenness
and snowy brilliance; they were obviously the best money could buy.
The coloured maid brought in an elaborate tea with _pâté_ sandwiches and
cookies and candy and little knives and forks and tiny napkins. It was
all very neat and smart.
“That’s one thing I’ve never been able to do without—my tea,” said
Rosie, helping herself to a hot buttered scone. “It’s my best meal,
really, though I know I shouldn’t eat it. My doctor keeps on saying to
me: ‘Mrs. Iggulden, you can’t expect to get your weight down if you will
eat half a dozen cookies at tea.’” She gave me a smile, and I had a
sudden inkling that, notwithstanding the marcelled hair and the powder
and the fat, Rosie was the same as ever. “But what I say is: A little of
what you fancy does you good.”
I had always found her easy to talk to. Soon we were chatting away as
though it were only a few weeks since we had last seen one another.
“Were you surprised to get my letter? I put Driffield so as you should
know who it was from. We took the name of Iggulden when we came to
America. George had a little unpleasantness when he left Blackstable,
perhaps you heard about it, and he thought in a new country he’d better
start with a new name, if you understand what I mean.”