THE FIRST LUNCH TOGETHER
“To the Carlton,” ordered Mr. Waters; and off we drove.
I hadn’t been inside the Carlton since the days before the “smash”—the
days when I was a young lady of leisure, without an idea that I should
presently be toiling in the grimy typists’ room at the Near Oriental from
nine o’clock until six, wearing home-made delaine shirts, and trembling
lest I might lose my hard-earned twenty-five shillings a week!
The last time I’d been taken there to tea, after a matinée, by my brother
Jack and Sydney Vandeleur, who had ordered roses of a very special pink
to match the frock I’d worn then, and had sent a message to the band to
play my favourite waltzes. Yes, as Jack said, Sydney would do anything
for me, always. I expect Jack thought that the hundred pounds which saved
his name came, as he suggested, from the Vandeleurs. Well, I couldn’t
possibly “give away” the truth about the anomalous position his sister
accepted in order to earn the money!
Thank goodness, the Vandeleurs were at the other end of the world, and
wouldn’t be home for a year, thought I. By then my time would be up, and
they needn’t know of my make-believe “engagement”—except that it was
“broken off”!
“I telephoned for a table,” said Mr. Waters, as we left the ordinary
work-a-day world of hurrying people and crowded, petrol-breathing
motor-buses in the Haymarket, and entered the restaurant—warm, perfumed,
bright with dainty clothes and pretty faces that smiled above the little
tables.
Ours was in a delightfully cosy corner, next to an empty table reserved
for three persons. The decorations were of pink hothouse roses, almost
the same as Sydney’s! How very different from that marble-topped table in
the crowded “Den of Lyons” above which Miss Robinson, Smithie and little
Miss Holt were probably even now gossiping excitedly over this event; but
_how_ much rather I would have been with them!
“Now, Miss Trant, what do you prefer for lunch?”
(_My_ only variation of lunch for the last year having been from “Bovril
and a baked apple” to “Poached-egg-on-toast, with a glass of hot milk.”)
“I don’t mind at all.”
“Then I’ll order.”
And very delicious were the things he did order. Apparently even a
machine liked perfect _bisque de homard_, and crisp whitebait—his one
touch of nature, in fact.
I longed for Cicely—who does love nice food, poor child!—to be there to
help me enjoy this. In fact, I wished that Cicely and I could have had
the lunch to our two gossiping selves. How we should have enjoyed all
the luxuries, from the pretty glass to the freedom to chat, softly but
unrestrainedly, about everyone we noticed in the place. I have heard it
said that “Women would rather talk to other _women_ than to _men_, even
when they would rather talk to a _man_ than to a _woman_.” I don’t think
I’ve often met any single man I’d rather talk to than to a fairly amusing
member of my own sex. You have to say most things twice to men, and then
they don’t really understand....
Still Waters, of course (as his typists explain to each other at least
four times in a morning), isn’t what you could call a man. Somehow, in
surroundings that used to be more familiar to me than offices and City
streets, I lost a little of that awe-struck nervousness of my employer.
For a time I could almost forget he was that. He became—Well! he made me
feel as I did in the old days when I had got someone very heavy-in-hand
to take me in to dinner, or as if I were sitting out a dance with some
rather hopeless partner. I mean that was about as far as any conversation
between us went—a few stilted, distrait remarks, punctuating long
stretches of silence.
Meanwhile, I glanced round the big place at the other luncheon-parties,
people laughing and chatting together—out evidently for amusement, not
“business”!
Several times I caught glances directed at our own table. I wondered
what the people were thinking of us—of the enormously tall, fair young
man with “City” stamped all over him, from his smooth head to his glossy
boots, and the small, dark-eyed girl in the black velours hat which
looked so very much more expensive and stylish than her neatly-cut but
ancient serge costume would lead them to expect.
Perhaps they thought that the big young man with the face as
expressionless as a fireproof curtain was slightly bored by taking his
country cousin round the sights of London? Perhaps they thought we were
really engaged? It didn’t matter. There was no one in the restaurant
who knew either of us. Idly I wondered who would come in and take the
“reserved” table close to us.
“Miss Trant, you took good care that the other typists knew for a fact
with whom you were coming out?”
“Oh, yes. They were all looking out of the landing window as we drove
off.”
“Good!” said Still Waters.
And again I almost fancied that I caught that flash of something like
humour in his granite-grey eyes, as I’d fancied it before, when he spoke
about my “intelligence” and my work. But again it was gone before I could
make sure. I was glad. One doesn’t want a machine to have any sense of
humour. And I shouldn’t find it so easy and unembarrassing to be on terms
of “official fiancéedom” with anything but a machine.
“I shall take you out to lunch two or three times this week,” he
announced, in his orders-for-the-day voice, “and perhaps to tea. On
Saturday I shall ask you to come with me to a matinée that you can talk
about, and so on, to the others.”
“Very well, Mr. Waters,” I said meekly.
“And now that we’ve led up to it in this way, I see no point in waiting.
So next week, Miss Trant, the ‘engagement’ had better be announced.”
“Certainly,” I agreed, again picturing to myself the stupefaction of
everybody at the Near Oriental, from Mr. Dundonald (a pity the shock
can’t incapacitate him for life!) down to Harold.
At home there’d be Cicely. I’m fond of her, but I dread this. She
takes such an _exasperating_ interest in anything that can be called a
love-affair. I myself can’t see what there is so thrilling about “Who is
going to marry whom, and why?”
But Cicely positively “collects,” just as some people collect
book-plates, all she can find out on this hackneyed subject. I know
she’ll insist on treating this arrangement between my employer and myself
as a real, romantic “_affaire de cœur_.” Well, I suppose I shall _have_
to keep from slapping her!
Then there’ll be Mr. Waters’ friends, whoever they are, to whom I shall
have to be introduced as the girl he’s going to marry. (Oh, _lor’!_ as
Mrs. Skinner puts it.)
“After which,” pursued the Governor, “I think I shall have to ask you
to——What is it, Miss Trant? Just seen somebody you know?”
“Yes,” I managed to murmur; “I know the lady who has just come in—at the
next table.”
For at the table which had been reserved for three, two of the party had
just turned up.
One was a fair-haired young girl, expensively frocked in blue velvet, but
still looking like school-room tea. The other—how well I knew the slim,
well-preserved silhouette of her figure, the carefully-graded bloom of
her face!
It was Lady Vandeleur, whom I’d imagined to be in Japan!
She is a charming woman, but she has two faults. One is that, with a son
of thirty-two, she insists on remaining twenty-five. The other is that,
unlike dear old Sydney, to whom the downfall of the Trant fortunes made
absolutely no difference, she’s never really liked me since the “smash.”
Before that, she was quite eager to explain that I was “already” like
a young daughter to her. But it’s two years since I heard the tone of
effusive affection with which Sydney’s mother was speaking to the girl
beside her.
“My dear child, aren’t you _starving_? I vote we begin. That naughty boy
of mine is so late. We really can’t wait for Sydney!”
“For Sydney!” Goodness! Then presently Sydney himself would join them. He
would take the chair that faced our table—to which his mother sat with
her back turned. He would see me—he’d be sure to come across and speak!
My mind was in a whirl of wondering what Sydney Vandeleur would think
when he saw the girl he admired lunching _tête-à-tête_ at the Carlton
with that big, imperturbable stranger. And then Sydney himself came in.
I was in the middle of a particularly ambrosial _pêche Melba_, and anyone
would have thought I didn’t raise my eyes from it. But thank goodness,
my eyelashes are long enough for the purpose they’re given a girl—to be
looked up through, without a man seeing. In a flash I’d taken in all
of Sydney that one could see; his general appearance of a Cavalier’s
portrait; his look at the girl, his mood, a slightly different way he’d
had his hair (longish) and his little Vandyke beard trimmed since I saw
him last, the clothes he was wearing....
Of course nine girls out of ten never notice a man’s ordinary clothes.
Evening-dress they recognize; and, of course, flannels, because those are
white, and allow the man (especially after a hard game) to look a decent
shape if he is one. Anything else is lost on them. But I’m the tenth
girl. As Major Montresor once said, when he was huffy with me for telling
him his new Norfolk jacket was “too undergraduatey” for him, “Little
Monica notices like a valet!”
Sydney’s clothes one couldn’t _help_ noticing; he’s so well-turned-out,
but never in a stereotyped style; in fact, he refuses to be dressed, as
he calls it, “through a stencil.” I’m sure he’d rather put on a false
nose and walk down St. James’s Street in it than appear in that hideous
conventional “rig” of the Governor’s. To-day, for the Carlton, Sydney
wore grey of such an exquisite soft stuff that it was hard to believe it
came from any ordinary man’s tailor; the tie below his bare throat was
dove-colour shot with heliotrope, and his silk socks and the line in his
shirt with its soft collar matched it exactly. There was one dark Russian
violet in his button-hole.
All these details were familiar to me before Sydney so much as cast a
glance at our table. Then, in a lull, when I refused coffee, he seemed
to prick up his ears. With a quick turn from the girl in blue velvet, he
looked straight across and saw me at last.
“_Monica——!_”
I heard the quick, delighted, recognizing exclamation break from my old
admirer’s lips. (I _know_ he admires me, so why not say so?)
For the life of me, I couldn’t help raising my eyes and meeting his own
fixed upon me.
He half rose. Then his glance fell upon my companion. Mr. Waters was then
in the act of putting money down upon the little tray the waiter handed.
And then I saw the expression of eager delight on Sydney’s dark, rather
dreamy-looking, face give place to a hurt surprise, as he sat back again
in his chair.
At the same moment Lady Vandeleur turned quickly, fixing her own gaze
upon our table.
Immediately the gaze became a blank stare, while her
exquisitely-pencilled eyebrows rose almost to the edge of her costly
“transformation.” She’d recognized me, of course. But stony displeasure
and outraged convention gleamed in the eyes that she instantly averted.
You see, in her world a girl of my age is not supposed to lunch at the
Carlton without a chaperon of some sort, and with an unspecified young
man.
Up to this occasion I, Colonel Trant’s daughter, had been of that world,
of those conventions. The Vandeleurs were evidently shocked at the lapse.
Dear old Sydney, old-fashionedly chivalrous towards women, was also
old-fashionedly strict; and his mother—well! she was merely glad of the
excuse to cut me.
Under the circumstances I need not have minded. But one is not
consistent. I minded horribly the idea of what they might be thinking
about me—that I had become horrid, forward, fast.
Something that seemed as hard and hot as a baked paving-stone seemed to
settle between my chest and my throat as I fumbled at the last button of
my long white gloves, and, in answer to Mr. Waters’ business-like “Ready,
Miss Trant?” I rose to follow him out.
Lady Vandeleur’s tortoiseshell-handled lorgnette rose also. I saw her
turn a searching scrutiny upon my blond, glossily-groomed, well-to-do
looking escort.
Again a horrible hint of what she might be thinking of me passed through
my mind. She knew I worked now in the City; she would think—Sydney would
think—I had made it an excuse for “picking up” the attentions of a
wealthy business-man, perhaps my employer. From every point of view it is
considered “bad form” for the head of a firm to have anything to say to
his typist out of business-hours.
All this she would say to Sydney, and to that girl. No, I couldn’t stand
that! There seemed only one thing in the world for me to do. “I’m forced
into it,” I thought rapidly, “so here goes.”
I touched Mr. Waters’s sleeve, murmuring:
“Please wait a moment.”
He stopped, looking down at me inquiringly. I turned, smiling, to that
slim, expensively-gowned figure of outraged propriety at the other table.
I accosted her as if I thought she had not seen me.
“Lady Vandeleur, don’t you know me?”
My own voice sounded strangely artificial in my ears, but, thank
goodness, it was steady enough, with every syllable distinct.
“Will you allow me to introduce Mr. Waters, my fiancé?”
There! It was said!
Transformation scene upon that carefully-preserved face at the table!
Gone, vanished, was the icy displeasure. A radiant smile, a gracious bow
to the imperturbable Mr. Waters met my announcement. An effusive clasp of
both my own hands.
“My dear child, what surprising, what delightful news! How glad I am for
you,” cooed Lady Vandeleur.
How glad she was for herself—glad to think that a hopelessly ineligible
girl, for whom Sydney had always displayed a regrettable weakness, was
now safely out of harm’s way—and his!
Her gratification at this made her quite as affectionate as she had been
in the days when the Trant family was still worth marrying into.
“So long since we heard anything of you, you naughty child! But this
quite makes up. Yes, we _were_ away; but there were alterations in our
plans”—with a quick gesture, a quick glance, towards the pretty débutante
opposite to her, evidently her latest “plan” for Sydney. “Now we are back
in town for the season. The old address, you know, in Belgrave Square.
Wednesday is my afternoon. Now, promise you will come and see us. A
‘soon’ Wednesday, mind! Do bring your _fiancé_!”
“I shall be delighted.” It was the Governor’s imperturbable voice that
answered her. At that moment I could not have spoken.
For as Sydney was murmuring conventional congratulations I had caught
sight of the look in his eyes. They are handsome eyes, deep and brown
and soft, like the eyes of some spaniels; and just then they looked so
bitterly hurt that I felt as if I had been cruel to some nice dog or some
helpless child. Perhaps Sydney cared more than I had ever imagined.
I felt quite miserable when at last the purring farewells and the “so
very glad, dear childs” were left behind us, and we passed out of the
restaurant, through the wheeling glass doors into the Haymarket once more.
As we walked up to Piccadilly Circus I turned to the Governor with the
apologies I felt I owed him.
“I’m so very sorry, Mr. Waters! There seemed nothing else to be done.
Those people—they were old friends of my father’s; they would have
thought it so odd for me to be lunching alone with you.”
“Oh, quite so, quite so!” put in the Governor, matter-of-fact and
reassuring. “I quite realized the situation.”
Did he?
Not all of it! Poor Sydney! I have never felt nearer the possibility
of falling in love with Sydney in my life. But the Governor was still
speaking.
“In fact, I was not at all sorry that the occasion happened to come up.
It means, of course, that the announcement will have to be made rather
earlier.”
“Oh, yes,” I agreed, with the usual sinking of the heart.
We had reached the Circus now, and before I knew what he was going to do,
Mr. Waters had stepped quickly across to those sailor-hatted, shawled
flower-women, whose baskets make such a gorgeous splash of colour against
the stone background of the fountain.
Back he came with a cluster of great red, fragrant carnations, which he
handed to me.
“Oh, but really you should not have——” I was beginning, when I realized
that this also was part of the business—that never had flowers been
offered from man to maid under quite such unromantic circumstances
before, and that I had better take Still Waters’ gift as ostentatiously
as I could.
I tucked the sweet crimson blooms into the breast of my blue serge coat.
As we whizzed citywards in a taxi, the Governor spoke again.
“Now, Miss Trant, there is another suggestion I have to make to you,” he
began. “To begin with, if I may say so, I like the way you dress.”
Crisp, concise, business-like syllables; no girl could have interpreted
them into a _compliment_!
“I like the way you go to business—always neat, always ladylike. No
ear-rings, no dingle-dangles and low necks like some of them; always
a very clean collar and a quiet tie, I notice—just the thing for the
office. But when I take you out rather more, I suppose you will have to
have one or two rather special evening gowns and afternoon frocks, and
theatre-wraps, and so on. I don’t know what they’re called. No doubt
you know the kind of thing to order. All part of the arrangement, you
understand. I’ll get a friend of mine in the City, whose wife runs a
really first-class dressmaking business, to let me have the address; and
then you will go to her—”
All cut-and-dried, like all his other schemes! But this was something
different—very different as well.
—“have yourself fitted out with all that is necessary, and send in the
bills to me.”
“Please, no. Not that,” I heard myself say quickly.
My employer turned upon me a face with some of the imperturbability quite
jerked out of it by surprise.
“What’s that?”
“If you don’t mind, I can’t—I would rather not do so as you suggest
about that,” said I, holding my head very high, but feeling myself turn
as crimson as the flowers in my coat, and speaking rather shakily, for
this was the first time I had ever asserted my own feelings in even the
mildest way before him. “I—I know it seems like straining at a gnat after
all the camels that I am preparing to swallow. Of course I will _get_ the
frocks and things. Only—please, you must allow me to pay for them out of
my allowance—my salary.”
He looked at me doubtfully.
“That seems scarcely fair—to you. It means paying out your own money on
things, that—well! I thought that would obviously come out as ‘_business
expenses_.’”
I said, feeling miserably uncomfortable, “Don’t you see that I can’t
possibly allow you to pay for—to give me _frocks_?”
“But—don’t you understand that—in the way of business, you will have to
allow me to give you other things?”
“Other things? What?”
“Why, presents. I don’t know what, exactly. You will probably have to
come round the shops with me yourself, and tell me. You are the best
judge of what a girl would like to show, as gifts, keepsakes, what-nots,
from the man to whom she is, presumably, engaged. It is part of this
affair!” explained Mr. Waters, a little impatiently, as the taxi was held
up at a crossing and waited panting for the signal to get on. “It would
‘look odd,’ as you yourself expressed it once, if I did _not_ offer you
presents.”
“Presents,” I said, feeling really indignant with him for being so
obtuse, “are very different. For one thing, I should not have to keep
_them_ always. They would go back to you at the end of the year, as soon
as that paper I signed for you is torn up. But—girls don’t take _clothes_
as presents, _ever_!”
“I don’t see why not,” he said obstinately. “Besides—don’t they! A cousin
of my own, a girl” (fancy his having a girl-cousin!) “who was staying
with us last winter used to wear a magnificent stole and a muff of
leopard-skin—the leopards had been shot by her _fiancé_.”
“Those were _furs_,” I explained. “Furs are different.”
“A great many things would seem to be ‘different’ from what I imagined,”
he said, in a tone of voice that was almost petulant. I felt inclined
to say, “Yes! _You_ imagined that because you’re as infallible as a
tape-machine in business-hours, you can’t make mistakes outside the
office!”
Whereas Sydney Vandeleur, who has no “business” outside his amateur art
criticism, with an occasional design for hand-wrought jewellery, would
never have made the _faux pas_ this man had done. It was so absurdly
ignorant and _gauche_ of him not to see it. And even now he seemed
inclined to dispute the point.
“Feathers, now,” he said a little satirically. “Might not a girl wear
a couple of really good, expensive ostrich plumes, or whatever you
call them—the things that hang down the back like a sort of Niagara of
fluff—if they were sent to her by a man with facilities for buying direct
from South Africa?”
“Oh, yes,” I said readily, feeling as if I were an editress answering
“_Queries on Etiquette_.” “Feathers are _quite_ as permissible as furs.”
“Even supposing them to be very costly? Worth as much, say, as five times
the amount of the rest of the lady’s wardrobe?”
“It’s nothing to do with the cost,” I explained patiently. “A
twenty-guinea fox stole a girl _might_ accept from a man. A four-pound
frock she _couldn’t_.”
“I confess I don’t understand these _nuances_,” said Mr. Waters, almost
absent-mindedly.
I said, “Any _girl_ would.”
“Possibly. I can’t help wondering what held good instead of the
fur-and-feathers edict in the days when they composed——What I was going
to say,” he broke off quickly, “was that I always imagined that young
French girls were brought up to be more strict in these matters than
English ones. Yet I know a French girl—”
(Surprising! He knows a girl!)
—“her father’s an old business acquaintance of mine—”
(Ah, that explains it.)
—“and neither her father nor the young lady seemed to find anything
curious about the matter, when, in payment of some bet made at a
flying-meeting, I bought her quite a large boxful of pairs of gloves.”
“Oh, gloves! Anybody can give gloves to anybody,” I told him. “_Gloves_
aren’t like clothes.”
“No, but I see some clothes about nowadays that are uncommonly like
gloves!”
_Could_ it have been the Governor who muttered this _sotto voce_ to
himself?
No! It must have been the comment that flashed through my own mind, and
that I imagined spoken aloud as the burly policeman whose back I had been
studying during this interlude dropped his hand and allowed our taxi to
whizz forward into the writhing tangle of traffic.
There was no further stopping or talking until at last we reached the
imposing entrance of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency offices.
I noticed that the Governor’s level eyebrows rose a trifle as he looked
at the indicator of the fares before paying the driver. Yes, I am sure
that many fifteen shillings’ worth of taxi-drive haven’t seemed as long.
I only hope this florin’s worth was as endless to him as it was to me!
Then, just as I was turning away, my employer surprised me by saying
brusquely but quite nicely, “Miss Trant, you must do just as you like in
the matter of—of which we’ve been speaking. I didn’t mean to hurt your
feelings. I am sorry if I did—You understand that?”
“Oh, of course,” I said, all meekness again.
And then I set my teeth before I ran up the stairs into the typists’
dressing-room and prepared to face the eyes of my three friends, Miss
Robinson, Miss Holt and Miss Smith.