WHAT THEY SAID
In the dressing-room, where Miss Robinson was rinsing out the sooty basin
before washing her hands in it, Miss Holt “smarming” her hair-net down
over her little brown chocolate of a head, and Miss Smith tearing yet
another leaf out of the inevitable book of _papiers poudrés_, the silence
that met me was quite as death-like as if the girls had just been pulled
up by Mr. Dundonald’s “_Talk_-ing, ladies!”
Talking? I didn’t need to be told that, _from_ the moment they’d seen,
out of the landing window, the last of that taxi in which the Governor
and his private clerk had driven off, _to_ the moment they had heard my
returning footstep on the stairs, they had done nothing _but_ talk about
me and my incredible, my epic lunch.
As I drew the hat-pins from the admired new hat, I prepared for a
hurricane of comments and questions.
None came. Not one of the girls seemed to have a word to say to me!
Perhaps they thought they would hear more by seeming not too eager.
(That’s rather Miss Robinson’s style of “drawing out” her companions.)
Perhaps they considered the subject too vast for immediate discussion.
Perhaps, for they are all good-natured girls, they had come to the
conclusion that it wasn’t fair to “rag” me about it—that I might be
feeling too utterly nervous and flurried over the unexpected (?) event.
They didn’t even ask me whether I had enjoyed myself! I even saw them,
distinctly, avoid looking at me.
Only Miss Holt’s eyes seemed drawn, as if in spite of herself, to the
flowers I was taking out of my coat to put in water in the grimy jam-jar
on the dressing-table that so often holds Smithie’s bunch of violets; and
it was Miss Holt who breathed an involuntary—
“I say, what lovely carnations!”
“Do have some,” I said, as a matter of course, dividing the cluster and
holding out half to her.
“Oh, no. I wouldn’t deprive you for the world, Miss Trant,” murmured Miss
Holt, stiffly drawing back.
I realized from her tone that she considered I had made a mistake.
Of course! Those flowers ought to have been thought “too precious” to
share with anybody. Smithie would never think of giving one of her
“boy’s” violets away. Dear me, I thought, what an added bore, having to
remember to keep up the correctly sentimental attitude about every trifle
of this kind.... _Ah!_
I broke off what I was thinking at that moment with quite a sudden start.
For, just as she turned away, I had caught Miss Smith’s glance at that
cluster of fresh, crimson carnations. It might have been a bunch of
withered wall-flowers that had been left too long in water, for the
disgusted wrinkle that lifted the prettiest typist’s small, powdered nose.
“_I_ wouldn’t touch them,” it seemed to say.
“Not _those_ flowers.” ...
And at last I saw why.
The reason my three colleagues had forborne to question, or chaff, or
even look at me when I came in from that expedition with the Governor was
_not_ because they were too considerate, too puzzled, or too wily.
It was merely because they were shocked—scandalized!
They were thinking worse things of me than I thought I saw behind Lady
Vandeleur’s lifted lorgnette. I found myself suspected—probably more
than suspected!—of having run counter to the standards of a class which
is perhaps more innately virtuous than Lady Vandeleur’s and my own and
Cicely’s, and certainly more rigid in its judgments. I remembered gossip
about typists and their employers, gossip from the days when I was taking
my training at Pitman’s. And out of this I could imagine for myself the
tone of the talk about me that had passed across that marble-topped table
in the “Den of Lyons” at lunch-time.
“Well, Still Waters have been running deep, with a vengeance! This is the
meaning of her taking down his letters for a whole fortnight—_without any
complaints_, girls! We might have seen there was something funny in that!”
“She’s been pretty artful, too, not letting on that there was anything
at all, until to-day!—And there must have been some sort of beginning. A
girl’s boss doesn’t take her out to a swagger lunch, with flowers and a
new hat and all, without there’s been some sort of a leading up to it!”
Perhaps Miss Robinson might suggest—“Well, I should never have thought
she’d been that kind of girl. Fact of the matter is, I suppose she funked
losing her job if she didn’t.”
But Smithie and Miss Holt would chorus vehemently, “She ought to have
lost her job, first! I would!—And chance it!”
Yes; according to this jury of maidens, I was already pronounced
“_Guilty_.”
And, innocent as I was of anything they would have thought “mattered” in
the least—for I don’t think the keeping-up of a false engagement would
have outraged their conventions at all in comparison—I felt myself turn
hot and cold with shame over the false position.
I was even thankful not to have to stay in the same room with these
other girls that afternoon—thankful to be able to beat a retreat to the
large, light office where I took down letters from the Governor’s rapid
dictation as if my whole life depended on it—thankful that he did make
such claims on the whole of my attention and capabilities; thankful that
the boring “dinner-partner,” who had allowed a glimpse of a slightly
more human personality in the cab when he’d discussed the difference
between frocks and furs, had been entirely swallowed up again in the
business-employer.
* * * * *
As he was leaving, he gave me the last of his orders for the following
day.
“I should be glad if you would have lunch with me again to-morrow.”
“Very well, Mr. Waters.”
That means another ordeal in the dressing-room, where the ill-ventilated
atmosphere will again be set simmering with the unspoken—and the
unspeakable. I never did think that this ten pounds a week was going
to be exactly easy to earn. But I hadn’t bargained for this—This is
outrageous! It makes me hate everybody: Mr. Waters, to begin with, for
making the proposal; Jack next, for making it necessary for me to accept
it; the girls at the office here, for so hideously misconstruing the
position!
My ordinary work, which had for two or three hours pushed my complicated
“supernumerary duties” to the back of my mind, has come to an end, and
the other thing looms well into the foreground again. I’ve walked nearly
all the way back to Battersea, but that hasn’t worked off my simmering
indignation even yet.
I shall spend the evening ironing out washing-ribbon and oddments in our
tiny kitchen; I can’t stay with Cicely—I should only snap at her, and she
would wonder why.
The one relief that I have been able to give to my feelings was when,
in crossing the bridge, I tore those glorious crimson carnations (which
I wouldn’t leave at the Near Oriental!) out of my coat again, and flung
them far, far down into the sluggish brown waters of the river below me.
How soon they were out of sight! How I wish that I could put them and
everything connected with them, out of mind!
* * * * *
To-day, the day of my second lunch with Mr. Waters, has been one
that I don’t think I shall ever forget, even when I’m a white-haired
maiden-lady, with no one to lunch with but a parrot or a tabby-cat, and
no man’s “appointments” to consult but those of the individual who has to
pay me over my Old Age Pension!
Silence—a silence that ought to have rejoiced the heart of Mr. Dundonald,
reigned throughout the whole long morning. I knew that the girls meant me
to realize that Miss Trant, for outraging the code of the self-respecting
business-girl, had been “sent to Coventry.”
This was what helped me to that stiffness of spine, that Suffragette-like
defiance of eye, and that unnatural clearness of diction which I felt
myself assuming at one o’clock in the dressing-room as I announced, “I
think it is at the Savoy that I am lunching with Mr. Waters to-day.” For
I flung it down like a gauntlet.
It was Miss Robinson who accepted the challenge with a particularly icy
“Gracious!”
The two others stared hard; while Miss Robinson, clearing her throat,
fixed her shrewd eyes on me and plucked up courage to add what Smithie
and Miss Holt were probably thinking.
“Miss Trant! D’you mind me asking you if you’re going out with Mr. Waters
because you like it, or because you can’t say ‘No’?”
“Who would say ‘No’”—I fenced flippantly—“to a Savoy lunch?”
“Some girls might,” murmured Miss Smith. Miss Robinson, answering not my
words, but my tone, said, “Of course it’s none of my business—except
that while you’re here you are supposed to be one of us. And I can’t
say——”
“Can’t say what?” I demanded, meeting her shrewd eyes squarely with my
defiant ones. She flushed a little, and I was glad. But she stuck to her
guns.
“I can’t say that it looks any too well! A man in his position, and a
girl in yours! Under those circumstances——”
“You know nothing,” I said, deliberately and coldly, “about the
circumstances.”
Still more deliberately I tossed a glance into the inevitably
soap-splashed mirror at the set of my hat. Then, without another word, I
turned out of the open door and walked to the lift, humming a tune just
loud enough for them all to hear.
This time I didn’t trouble to glance up from the entrance, where my
employer joined me, to the landing window. The girls would not be
watching me off this time.
* * * * *
“Savoy!”
The taxi-driver touched his peaked cap with a quite unusual suggestion of
deference. I suppose he had found Savoy luncheon-escorts were generous
tippers. I wondered if he had ever before driven a couple in quite these
“circumstances.”
Miss Robinson’s sincerely-meant reproof, “_It doesn’t look any too well!
A girl in your position. A man in his!_” echoed in my ears louder than
the whirring of the wheels and the noise of the traffic. It rankled
poisonously throughout the drive, throughout the whole luncheon.
We lunched outside, which Mr. Waters said laconically would be
“more amusing for me than inside.” Personally I felt that nothing
would ever amuse me less than this duty-lunch with its hateful
obbligato-accompaniment of what those other girls were thinking, what
they were saying.
Oh, it’s all very well to quote that French axiom—
“_They say—What do they say?—Let them say!_” The average person will
always find that a counsel of perfection.—Especially the average girl.
The impulse _not_ to let them “say” if we can help it is nearly as
strong in us as the instinct of self-preservation, and of touching our
hair when we pass a mirror. So that there must be some really important
basic reason for it. I do wish I knew what would happen if that suddenly
crumbled away ...?
But it isn’t “away” yet: it spoiled every trace of amusement that I
might otherwise have enjoyed in the lunch and the people that passed.
I’ve merely a vague impression of cab-whistles, of taxis whirling
up beyond the trellis of the low balustrade, of obviously American
figures appearing and disappearing among the evergreens; of a small,
unhappy-looking face with dark eyes that stared resentfully at me out of
the bowls of spoons, and of a voice that said half-absently, “I’m afraid
you’ve made a very poor lunch, Miss Trant.”
“Oh, not at all.”
“Perhaps you are tired?”
“Oh, not in the least, thank you.”
“Not too tired to come on somewhere? I thought if you didn’t mind”—this
always preludes an order—“we’d drive to Gemmer’s in Bond Street, and
choose that ring for you.”
“Ring?” I repeated vaguely, as I put on my gloves.
“You will have to have one, you know. An engagement ring, as the outward
and visible sign of the new conditions,” he said nonchalantly, as we
rose. “Must have a ring to clinch the effect!”
Yes, I thought resentfully, that “clinches” it—for him. He doesn’t think
of my side of the affair at all! He doesn’t see that his accurately
mapped-out time-table includes any unpleasantness—just because _he_
doesn’t choose to admit it!
I turned to him as we sat in the cab. I felt like “the turning worm” as I
pulled myself together for what I meant to say.