“I will put the name down in her little book,” said the she kindly.
“Thank you,” I tried not to say bitterly. To ring some one up on impulse
and then have your impulse perpetuated in a Little Book!
“Mrs. Storm is not in town,” said the she.
“Oh, I see,” I said. It is a detestable habit some people have of saying
“in town” or “out of town.” What town? There can’t, honestly, be any
real harm in saying London....
“Is there any message? I always take her messages.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “Thank you very much. Good-b----”
“This is Mrs. Oden speaking.”
“Oh,” I said. “Mrs. Oden?”
“Yes?” said Mrs. Oden.
“Well, thank you very much,” I said. “Good-b----”
“She never is, you know,” complained Mrs. Oden. Now that was a
loquacious lady. I do not wish to be belittling any one else, but I am
sure that she talked more in the next few minutes than any other person
of the same chest-expansion in England. She seemed to have been
suffering from silence all that morning until my ring. I learnt later
that Mrs. Oden had once been Iris’s governess, that there was always a
floor reserved for Iris in her house in Montpellier Square, which house
Mr. and Mrs. Oden owed entirely to Iris’s generosity.
“She went off to Paris the other day,” complained Mrs. Oden, “at a
_moment’s_ notice. Here to-day and gone to-morrow. It is too bad of her,
when we never see anything of her. She is too vague, I always tell her.
I suppose she had made some arrangement with you, Mr. er, has forgotten
to put you off, and now you are disappointed?”
“Oh,” I said. “Yes, certainly.”
“Well, I expect her back any day, but how long she will stay this time I
have not the faintest idea. Really it is too bad, she gets vaguer every
year. And here has her aunt Lady Eve Chalice been wanting her address in
Paris, and I have not the faintest idea of anything! What did you say
the name was? Oh, yes, of course, I have it down. She will see it as
_soon_ as she returns, I promise you. Yes, yes. Good-bye, good-bye.”
It was five days later that there came to my hand a large box labelled
from _Edouard Apel et Cie._, _rue de la Paix_, _Paris_ and stamped “By
Air.” Within the large box were several smaller flat boxes, and within
these were reams upon reams of finest white notepaper, but good, manly
stuff, stamped with my new address; and if that notepaper had its way I
never would have another address, for there was enough in those small
flat boxes to last a reasonably reticent man for all time. No note came
with them. I searched. Then, across the top sheet of the third box that
I opened, I found scrawled in pencil in an absurd, schoolgirl hand:
“That one day you may write to me to say that you have forgiven me for
the only dignity I have left: the dignity of the....”
I could not make out that last word for several days. It was scrawled
right across the foot of the sheet, a long squiggle with one eye looking
out from the middle of it which might have been an a. At last I thought
it was “unaware.”
Much later Iris told me that it was “unaware.” She said: “I picked out
the phrase from a book I was reading, and sent it to you like a
flower.”