Jocantha Bessbury was in the mood to be serenely and graciously happy.
Her world was a pleasant place, and it was wearing one of its pleasantest
aspects. Gregory had managed to get home for a hurried lunch and a smoke
afterwards in the little snuggery; the lunch had been a good one, and
there was just time to do justice to the coffee and cigarettes. Both
were excellent in their way, and Gregory was, in his way, an excellent
husband. Jocantha rather suspected herself of making him a very charming
wife, and more than suspected herself of having a first-rate dressmaker.
“I don’t suppose a more thoroughly contented personality is to be found
in all Chelsea,” observed Jocantha in allusion to herself; “except
perhaps Attab,” she continued, glancing towards the large tabby-marked
cat that lay in considerable ease in a corner of the divan. “He lies
there, purring and dreaming, shifting his limbs now and then in an
ecstasy of cushioned comfort. He seems the incarnation of everything
soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a
dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep; and then, as evening
draws on, he goes out into the garden with a red glint in his eyes and
slays a drowsy sparrow.”
“As every pair of sparrows hatches out ten or more young ones in the
year, while their food supply remains stationary, it is just as well that
the Attabs of the community should have that idea of how to pass an
amusing afternoon,” said Gregory. Having delivered himself of this sage
comment he lit another cigarette, bade Jocantha a playfully affectionate
good-bye, and departed into the outer world.
“Remember, dinner’s a wee bit earlier to-night, as we’re going to the
Haymarket,” she called after him.
Left to herself, Jocantha continued the process of looking at her life
with placid, introspective eyes. If she had not everything she wanted in
this world, at least she was very well pleased with what she had got.
She was very well pleased, for instance, with the snuggery, which
contrived somehow to be cosy and dainty and expensive all at once. The
porcelain was rare and beautiful, the Chinese enamels took on wonderful
tints in the firelight, the rugs and hangings led the eye through
sumptuous harmonies of colouring. It was a room in which one might have
suitably entertained an ambassador or an archbishop, but it was also a
room in which one could cut out pictures for a scrap-book without feeling
that one was scandalising the deities of the place with one’s litter.
And as with the snuggery, so with the rest of the house, and as with the
house, so with the other departments of Jocantha’s life; she really had
good reason for being one of the most contented women in Chelsea.
From being in a mood of simmering satisfaction with her lot she passed to
the phase of being generously commiserating for those thousands around
her whose lives and circumstances were dull, cheap, pleasureless, and
empty. Work girls, shop assistants and so forth, the class that have
neither the happy-go-lucky freedom of the poor nor the leisured freedom
of the rich, came specially within the range of her sympathy. It was sad
to think that there were young people who, after a long day’s work, had
to sit alone in chill, dreary bedrooms because they could not afford the
price of a cup of coffee and a sandwich in a restaurant, still less a
shilling for a theatre gallery.
Jocantha’s mind was still dwelling on this theme when she started forth
on an afternoon campaign of desultory shopping; it would be rather a
comforting thing, she told herself, if she could do something, on the
spur of the moment, to bring a gleam of pleasure and interest into the
life of even one or two wistful-hearted, empty-pocketed workers; it would
add a good deal to her sense of enjoyment at the theatre that night. She
would get two upper circle tickets for a popular play, make her way into
some cheap tea-shop, and present the tickets to the first couple of
interesting work girls with whom she could casually drop into
conversation. She could explain matters by saying that she was unable to
use the tickets herself and did not want them to be wasted, and, on the
other hand, did not want the trouble of sending them back. On further
reflection she decided that it might be better to get only one ticket and
give it to some lonely-looking girl sitting eating her frugal meal by
herself; the girl might scrape acquaintance with her next-seat neighbour
at the theatre and lay the foundations of a lasting friendship.
With the Fairy Godmother impulse strong upon her, Jocantha marched into a
ticket agency and selected with immense care an upper circle seat for the
“Yellow Peacock,” a play that was attracting a considerable amount of
discussion and criticism. Then she went forth in search of a tea-shop
and philanthropic adventure, at about the same time that Attab sauntered
into the garden with a mind attuned to sparrow stalking. In a corner of
an A.B.C. shop she found an unoccupied table, whereat she promptly
installed herself, impelled by the fact that at the next table was
sitting a young girl, rather plain of feature, with tired, listless eyes,
and a general air of uncomplaining forlornness. Her dress was of poor
material, but aimed at being in the fashion, her hair was pretty, and her
complexion bad; she was finishing a modest meal of tea and scone, and she
was not very different in her way from thousands of other girls who were
finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas in London tea-shops at
that exact moment. The odds were enormously in favour of the supposition
that she had never seen the “Yellow Peacock”; obviously she supplied
excellent material for Jocantha’s first experiment in haphazard
benefaction.
Jocantha ordered some tea and a muffin, and then turned a friendly
scrutiny on her neighbour with a view to catching her eye. At that
precise moment the girl’s face lit up with sudden pleasure, her eyes
sparkled, a flush came into her cheeks, and she looked almost pretty. A
young man, whom she greeted with an affectionate “Hullo, Bertie,” came up
to her table and took his seat in a chair facing her. Jocantha looked
hard at the new-comer; he was in appearance a few years younger than
herself, very much better looking than Gregory, rather better looking, in
fact, than any of the young men of her set. She guessed him to be a
well-mannered young clerk in some wholesale warehouse, existing and
amusing himself as best he might on a tiny salary, and commanding a
holiday of about two weeks in the year. He was aware, of course, of his
good looks, but with the shy self-consciousness of the Anglo-Saxon, not
the blatant complacency of the Latin or Semite. He was obviously on
terms of friendly intimacy with the girl he was talking to, probably they
were drifting towards a formal engagement. Jocantha pictured the boy’s
home, in a rather narrow circle, with a tiresome mother who always wanted
to know how and where he spent his evenings. He would exchange that
humdrum thraldom in due course for a home of his own, dominated by a
chronic scarcity of pounds, shillings, and pence, and a dearth of most of
the things that made life attractive or comfortable. Jocantha felt
extremely sorry for him. She wondered if he had seen the “Yellow
Peacock”; the odds were enormously in favour of the supposition that he
had not. The girl had finished her tea and would shortly be going back
to her work; when the boy was alone it would be quite easy for Jocantha
to say: “My husband has made other arrangements for me this evening;
would you care to make use of this ticket, which would otherwise be
wasted?” Then she could come there again one afternoon for tea, and, if
she saw him, ask him how he liked the play. If he was a nice boy and
improved on acquaintance he could be given more theatre tickets, and
perhaps asked to come one Sunday to tea at Chelsea. Jocantha made up her
mind that he would improve on acquaintance, and that Gregory would like
him, and that the Fairy Godmother business would prove far more
entertaining than she had originally anticipated. The boy was distinctly
presentable; he knew how to brush his hair, which was possibly an
imitative faculty; he knew what colour of tie suited him, which might be
intuition; he was exactly the type that Jocantha admired, which of course
was accident. Altogether she was rather pleased when the girl looked at
the clock and bade a friendly but hurried farewell to her companion.
Bertie nodded “good-bye,” gulped down a mouthful of tea, and then
produced from his overcoat pocket a paper-covered book, bearing the title
“Sepoy and Sahib, a tale of the great Mutiny.”
The laws of tea-shop etiquette forbid that you should offer theatre
tickets to a stranger without having first caught the stranger’s eye. It
is even better if you can ask to have a sugar basin passed to you, having
previously concealed the fact that you have a large and well-filled sugar
basin on your own table; this is not difficult to manage, as the printed
menu is generally nearly as large as the table, and can be made to stand
on end. Jocantha set to work hopefully; she had a long and rather
high-pitched discussion with the waitress concerning alleged defects in
an altogether blameless muffin, she made loud and plaintive inquiries
about the tube service to some impossibly remote suburb, she talked with
brilliant insincerity to the tea-shop kitten, and as a last resort she
upset a milk-jug and swore at it daintily. Altogether she attracted a
good deal of attention, but never for a moment did she attract the
attention of the boy with the beautifully-brushed hair, who was some
thousands of miles away in the baking plains of Hindostan, amid deserted
bungalows, seething bazaars, and riotous barrack squares, listening to
the throbbing of tom-toms and the distant rattle of musketry.
Jocantha went back to her house in Chelsea, which struck her for the
first time as looking dull and over-furnished. She had a resentful
conviction that Gregory would be uninteresting at dinner, and that the
play would be stupid after dinner. On the whole her frame of mind showed
a marked divergence from the purring complacency of Attab, who was again
curled up in his corner of the divan with a great peace radiating from
every curve of his body.
But then he had killed his sparrow.