FRIENDS
Often, when I’ve imagined something was going to be so easy and
delightful, it’s turned out to involve every kind of difficulty and
unpleasantness. Like earning my own living in the City. And then other
things, which I’ve foreseen as such odious and constant worries, have
proved to be not nearly so bad after all; in fact, quite amusing—that’s
like agreeing to be “friends—real chums” with my employer Mr. Waters.
He’s really quite—I don’t know how to put it—_different_.
I know he’s trying to be “decent” to me, and yet not trying hard enough
to make me feel it’s my duty to “play up” and to be unnaturally sweet in
return.
Instead, I am beginning to feel that I shall soon be able to like him
genuinely, just as I like Blanche and Theo, though perhaps not quite as
well as I like his mother, who seems more of a darling every day.
This morning after I came back from driving to the station with the
Governor, she called me, and I went into the little tiny room off the
drawing-room, which is furnished only with one deep chair and her
writing-table, but of which each wall is simply covered with framed
photographs of her children at every stage.
She was sitting at the writing-table, with a pile of letters to answer.
“Sit in the big chair, Nancy. I won’t keep you more than a minute,” she
said, turning to me, “but I wanted to speak to you. It’s about our summer
plans, dear.”
“Oh, yes,” I began. The fortnight which I’d arranged to spend at The
Lawn—and which seems about three months now!—is up to-morrow. I was just
going to remind her of this, when she said, “We all—not only Billy!—are
so anxious that you shall stay on, Nancy. You will, won’t you, if you
haven’t made other arrangements?”
“Oh! I’ve made none,” I said, hesitating both in my official and
unofficial capacities. I didn’t _mind_ staying on, now. Still—ought I to
do it?
“We have only a week or so,” said Mrs. Waters, “before we go away to the
sea. That is, the girls and I are off on Saturday week to Anglesey.”
“To Porth Cariad?” I said. “Isn’t that the place—he told me about?”
“Yes; Billy’s so fond of it! It’s just a tiny place with a station and a
post-office and a handful of cottages. We take the two cottages nearest
the sea, and let just the woman and her daughter ‘do’ for us. He likes
that so much better than going to a ‘resort’ with hotels and esplanades
and things.”
“Of course!”
Mrs. Waters gave me a pleased, girlish smile.
“Then, if you do too, you’ll come, won’t you? He didn’t seem sure
whether”—she laughed a little—“whether it mightn’t bore you rather; but
he made me promise to ask you. Will you come?”
“I should like it very much,” I said sincerely, for, since this revised
version of my relations with Mr. Waters, there’s an end of any more
complications for the present. It has been worth while sinking the
small satisfactions of being “cattish” and making two-edged remarks to
my employer. I seem, now, to have all the advantages of being engaged
to a quite friendly and easy-to-get-on-with young man, without the
horrible disadvantage of feeling it’s a permanency. Yes; I do like
having the freedom of a man’s conversation and society without _arrière
pensée_. And it seems to me that the only way to enjoy them is by being
officially—that is, _nominally_, engaged to the man! In any other sort of
acquaintanceship there looms the possibility of the “Real” engagement.
All the time that the girl and the man are having what might be a jolly
and unembarrassed conversation about really interesting things—not Love
and nonsense—that possibility is being conjugated between them by some
horrid form of Conscience or Self-consciousness. Something like this:
“_I might fall in love._”
“_Thou mightest fall in love._”
“_She might think I was falling in love._”
“_He might imagine I wanted him to fall in love._”
“_We might both fall in love._”
“_You might tease us about being in love._”
“_They might say we were actually engaged!_”
All this we—Mr. Waters and I—are spared. The feeling of it, which is
there like a brick wall between almost every unattached young man and
young woman, I know; I’ve felt it there between Sydney and myself, long,
long before I knew he admired me.
And this same wall—well, it’s not so much that it’s never been built, or
even that it’s been pulled down, as that it’s not _between_ Mr. Waters
and me, just because we’re sitting on the top of it and talking all the
more comfortably for having climbed it together!
Consequently, I really was pleased to accept Mrs. Waters’ invitation. And
when she said further, “Billy won’t be able to join us for a fortnight,
I’m afraid. Will you go back, dear, to this friend of yours you live
with in London, and come on later? Or—of course you know we should love
it!—could you come with Blanche and Theo and me?” I said, “Do let me come
with you and the girls.”
“That’s right,” said the Governor’s mother. “Then I shall write to Mrs.
Roberts at the cottages, and tell her to have the extra bedroom in _my_
cottage ready for you.”
“And I will write to Cicely Harradine—that’s the girl I live with,” said
I. “And I ought to go up one day this week to the flat, and see her and
collect a few things.”
“Go up on Saturday, dear,” suggested the Governor’s mother. “Then Billy
could motor you up; he would like that so much.”
She has so many plans of this kind for me, fostered by this delusion that
her son is always on the look-out for a chance to be alone with me.
Of course it’s not quite the same kind of delusion now that it was a week
ago.
The Governor’s “Good!” when he heard that I was going to spend the summer
holidays with them at that curiously-named place in Anglesey was quite as
sincere in its way, I do believe, as Theo’s “_Joy!_ Oh, it will be twice
as lovely as usual with Nancy there to show everything to!” He wasn’t
the least bored, either, when Mrs. Waters put forward the plan of his
motoring me up to town.
“Rather! A good idea,” he said briskly. “What about starting earlier
after lunch, and doing a matinée this afternoon? You’ve never been to the
theatre with me yet, Nancy, and—we talked about that one day.”
“So we did,” said I demurely, remembering that grisly occasion at the
Carlton.
“Well, would you care about it?”
“I should! Why! I haven’t been to the theatre for ages. I haven’t seen
anything; not even _Milestones_!”
“Care for that?”
“Anything, so long as it’s a play!”
“Then I’ll ’phone up now for seats.”
And as he spoke through the telephone that is fixed up in the den, I had
almost a start at what seemed to me the strangeness of my employer’s
voice. Yet that curt, metallic “_Hullo!_” used to be familiar enough to
me—the only tone of his voice, indeed, that I’d ever heard!
* * * * *
Passing the long waiting queue at the gallery entrance to the Royalty
this afternoon, I glanced idly towards all those people who had stood for
over an hour, probably, to get a shilling seat; the playgoers to whom I
myself belonged a couple of months ago. Yet I never felt I’d belonged to
them.... I suppose no woman, from a factory-hand to a viscountess, feels
that she really “belongs” to any but the life of luxury. I don’t believe
men feel that as strongly—and yet it’s they who are supposed to be the
more finished and civilized sex. I must ask Mr. Waters, now that I know
him well enough, what he thinks about this?
I was just wondering, when, out of that mosaic of black and coloured
pattern formed by the crowd, there turned with one movement three dabs
of colour, three cheap, effective little hats; and three girlish faces,
alight with amusement and recognition, were lifted towards us.
They nodded and smiled; and I, leaning forward out of the car, was just
in time to wave my hand to them.
“Friends of yours?” said my employer, glancing back as he raised his hat!
“Why, yes! Didn’t you know them?”
“No! Why should I?”
“Because you see them every day,” I laughed. “They were Miss Robinson,
Miss Holt and Miss Smith from your office.”
“No? By Jove,” said Mr. Waters, rather blankly. Which surprised me
rather, as I remembered his care that “the other typists should know for
a fact” with whom I was going out, that first time of all.
I was conscious, though I couldn’t see where they sat in the gallery,
that their three pairs of eyes must be glued to us in our front-row
stalls. Nothing could have been more conventional than our appearance—we
were absolutely the model of a prosperous young engaged couple up from
the suburbs; I, prettily dressed, with the inevitable box of chocolates
on my lap; he, good tempered and easy of manner, paying me all the
customary attentions of programme, helping me off with my coat, seeing
that I had opera-glasses, the best seat, and so on, and yet—apart from
the “official engagement” side of it, how _really_ unconventional was our
relation!
So much more satisfactory under the circumstances than a real engagement!
Or that pie-bald thing, an understanding! Or that other form of platonic
friendship which either the girl or the man is always hoping, or fearing,
may turn into something else!
The curtain went up to the soft strains of a tune which I, who have had
to play accompaniments to so many songs, didn’t know.... But beside us
and behind us there were old ladies who murmured, “Ah! ‘_She wore a
Wreath of Roses._’”
The play began, and I forgot everything else for a time.
In the first interval we amused ourselves by looking at the audience.
They were nearly _all_ elderly ladies! As the Governor remarked, “Nancy!
Yours and mine are the only heads for three rows of seats that aren’t
grey-haired or covered with bonnets!”
“They’ve come to catch echoes of their past,” I murmured flippantly as
those tunes from the _Mikado_ sent the curtain up on Act II.
That finished my flippancy for me.
In what seemed like hours afterwards I heard Mr. Waters’ voice, cool
and detached, saying something about good acting and soothing syrup and
the most sentimental public in the world, then breaking off suddenly,
anxiously to exclaim, “What is it, Nancy? Aren’t you well?”
“Of c-course I am! I’m only enjoying myself!” I sobbed quietly; tears
dripping down on to the pleated frill of my afternoon blouse. “I think
it’s p-perfectly lovely!” And I dabbed my face with the powder-puff
swathed in my handkerchief.
“Rum idea of enjoyment,” said the Governor doubtfully.
“Not a bit rum,” I argued, having steadied myself again. “You don’t know
much about girls—they’re mostly like that—ask any of them—ask any of the
other typists in your office!”
“I suppose I’ve never looked upon those as ‘girls,’” said he.
“They’re—machines! machines that eat cherries all day long and chuck the
stones all over the floor. Such inefficient ones, too; they——Why d’you
laugh, Nancy! I say, you know quite well I don’t mean——”
“Ssh!” came indignantly from under the bonnet—trimmed with squashed
heliotropes and doddering jet beads—on the other side of him, as the band
struck up the rollicking two-step that heralds the twentieth-century act.
I didn’t cry any more, though.
I believe I was actually less taken up with what was on the stage than
with the oddness of my having been behind two sets of scenes myself; with
those girls who “couldn’t possibly look upon Still Waters as ‘a man,’
exactly” and then with this man who never really considered typists as
“girls.” When had he left off considering me as just a typist? How soon
before that evening when we became friends?
Once more I felt grateful to that evening’s compact, as I followed the
tall figure with that slight dip from the broad shoulders in to the
waist—that line so painfully cultivated by Major Montresor!—and let it
make a path for me out of the theatre and to the waiting car.
I believe I’ve always really hated going about London alone, or with just
another girl!
* * * * *
“Now, then! Rumpelmayer’s, or the Piccadilly, or where, for tea, Nancy,
before I take you on to your friend’s?”
“I meant to have tea with her,” I explained. “I was going on in the bus,
and getting down to Sevenoaks afterwards by the dinner-train; saying
good-bye to you here.”
“Oh, were you! Why not take me along too?” he suggested, looking down at
me.
Well! Why shouldn’t he realize in what sort of places these machines
called working-girls live? He’d heard about the lawns and gardens, and so
forth, of my old home. Let him see the change I’d had before—well, before
that first interview in his office. Then there was Cicely. Yes, when I
left her she was still rather “difficult” about my engagement—rather
given to unspoken hopes that I wasn’t doing it for the money. Let her
see that my (official) _fiancé_ was quite a human sort of young man—the
sort that some girls really might get engaged to without a thought of his
income!
“My chum is a very pretty girl,” said I; “_she’s_ worth looking at——”
“Fair?”
“No, glorious red hair.”
“Well, take me along and let me look at it!” he urged boyishly; and
presently we were speeding along down the Embankment towards Marconi
Mansions.
I had my latch-key in my vanity-bag. I opened the door at the top of the
many stone steps and led the way into the passage, which seemed about as
light and wide as a good-sized drainpipe after that airy, tiled vestibule
at The Lawn. Meaning to take Cicely by surprise, I quietly walked into
our small front sitting-room.
But it was Cicely who took me by surprise.
She had, already, a visitor for tea.
Thick cigarette-smoke made a blue haze above the jumble of odd bits of
furniture which we’d picked up second-hand in the Old King’s Road, above
the tea-table with its Persian Rose pottery, its plate of Chelsea buns
and its green dish of cherries—I hoped there weren’t many stones on the
floor!—a haze that half obscured Cicely’s bright head and the figure that
reclined, opposite to her, in our comfiest basket-chair. I saw by the
unusual garments of it that it must be—yes! Sydney Vandeleur!
Really, I don’t know which of the four of us was least pleased to see the
others, while I introduced Mr. Waters to Cicely and said gaily to the
men, “I think you’ve met before” ... and forced myself to dissipate the
odious pause that followed the insincerely civil greetings by plunging
into some sort of conversation.
It was worst for me, I think. I was so utterly taken aback—first, by
finding Sydney there at all, and then by wondering what on earth the
Governor would think of his being there—_and in those clothes_!
For Sydney’s latest idea for not being slavishly got-up like every
other miserably conventional tailor’s dummy was, apparently, to have
his “things” more or less a copy, but an _édition de luxe_, of a French
fisher-boy’s _vareuse_-blouse and skirt-like trousers; those brown
corduroys were of corduroy-velvet at goodness knows what a yard, cut
by some master-hand in Savile Row; the very bagginess at the ankles,
above the leaf-brown silk socks, had been carefully studied. And the
Governor!—who’d once said:
“_After all, what’s unusual in dress is wrong, nine times out of ten.
Eight times, it’s also hideous._”
He must be positively flabbergasted at this spectacle! I’m more
accustomed to those ideas; but even I found it a relief to turn
my eyes upon his stereotyped grey suit after that fell and deadly
“_effectiveness_” of Sydney’s....
Posing in his dress like that! Posing, even more shamelessly, in his
manner!
For wouldn’t you have thought that anyone who’d been refused by a girl
and who then came unexpectedly face to face with that girl and the person
for whom he imagines she’s jilted him—_wouldn’t_ you suppose that he
would at least behave like a man? Take it without flinching, even if it
were fairly unpleasant, and carry it off as if nothing particular had
happened? _I_ shall never think the same of Sydney again for not doing
that.
Perhaps it served me right for the rather spiteful note I wrote to him
just before I went off to The Lawn, but—Need he have committed the
solecism of calling me, when I’ve never been anything but “Monica” to
him, “_Miss Trant_” in italics? It was trying! So was the pathetic
look which he saw fit to call up into his spanielly brown eyes as he
glanced from me to Mr. Waters. (Mask well down there, so I couldn’t
guess what _he_ made of this velvet-and-Vandyke apparition.) And the
worm-in-the-bud expression which Sydney let steal over the whole of his
dreamy, Cavalier’s face as he turned it, in a way that all but said “Ah!
You understand what I suffer!” to Cicely——
Cicely, too! _Cicely_, who’s shared ups and downs with me for the last
two years! Even she must needs forsake me, making matters worse by
creating a general atmosphere of blight even while she was bringing in
two more leadless-glaze cups and plates, and making fresh tea, and by
giving an accurate though unspoken impression of what she “understood.”
“Yes! I am the looker-on at this game. I see it all! The sensitive,
artistic soul—”
(This is what she thinks of Sydney.)
—“torn by the sight of this hopelessly stodgy, commonplace young man—”
(I know that this is how she sums up my friend Mr. Waters.)
—“being preferred to himself! Ah, Love is blind!”
(Meaning me.)
“And people never seem to recognize the right man until it’s too late.”
(Deluded little donkey!)
We had tea. What a meal!
“You do take sugar in it, don’t you, Tots?” plaintively from Cicely, with
a side-effect of, “She’s so deplorably altered in everything else, I
don’t know what any of her tastes may be now!”
“Does Mr. Waters take it?” (To _me_!)
“Not any, thanks,” from the Governor. “Only milk.”
Cicely’s glance commented silently, “Ah! Incompatibility latent here! An
unhappy marriage!”
Why, why hadn’t I said I’d like to go to Rumpelmayer’s, or Lyons’—or
Lockhart’s? Anything rather than this funereal feast, with Sydney
Vandeleur as the skeleton thereat! Even if he’d remained a voiceless
skeleton! But, cheered by all the subtle encouragement and moral support
from his pretty hostess—I must say Cicely was looking prettier than
ever!—Sydney began to recover a little, relaxed his first pose of open
broken-heartedness, and proceeded to _talk_.
Nobody else did. Mr. Waters looked as if nothing was going to force his
lips asunder again. I didn’t want to say anything. Cicely was quite happy
to listen. And Sydney held forth.
He began with—“Have you been to—” and “Haven’t you seen—” various
picture-galleries and pieces of an “advanced” type.
“What! Not seen ‘_The Keening of Deidre_,’ even? But why not?” he
protested to me, lolling back in that chair as if he didn’t possess a
spine. “Oh, it’s such a wonderful thing; so subtle and so brutal at the
same time. And one’s sure of seeing everyone one wants to see, in the
pit; a positive At Home of them. Better than the dear old palmy days
of the Sicilians. I have been three times. The whole effect is so—so
sculptured! You would love it! Oh, you must take her”—this to my official
_fiancé_, who sat silent and non-committal and very bolt-upright. “You
really must not miss it. It is coming off next week.”
“I’m going away next week,” said I.
“Oh, yes? To the country?”
“To Wales.”
“Ah, Wales! It used to be so wild and charming and remote—almost as good
as those perfectly untrodden tracts we still get in the West of Ireland.
But it’s frightfully overdone now,” complained Sydney. “One doesn’t know
if it’s the fault of Lloyd George, or the picture postcards, or that
appalling little railway up Snowdon, but Wales has become so _obvious_.
When I’m going over to Ballycool, do you know, I have to read all the
way in the train between Chester and Holyhead, in terror lest I should
inadvertently catch sight of any of the ‘scenery.’ I assure you”—to
Cicely—“that when you get that Snowdon Range, cut out in purple cardboard
jig-saws against what the dear tourists call ‘a glorious sunset’ it’s
almost exactly like a landscape in the Academy!”
“How _perfectly_ dreadful!” sympathized Cicely—little humbug! who, only
last year, used to mark her favourite pictures in the Academy Catalogue.
I do hate a girl’s tastes to be mere echoes of the man she’s with!
“And those ruined castles; they’re really almost too priceless to
be true,” enlarged Sydney. “Turrets like this”—he zig-zagged with a
finger in the air, while a gold curb bracelet chinked at his slim
wrist—“reflected, wherever possible, in water. Terrible! I mean, you
simply _have_ to laugh! You feel the landscape transforming itself into
wings and a drop-scene before your eyes! And the ‘Elephant Mountain’
that they insist on pointing out to you, because it really _is_ so like
an elephant’s back! (Such an attraction!). And then those _meaty_ pink
clouds that they always contrive to get so symmetrically posed _just_
behind the summit of Snowdon! Snowdon itself is so hopelessly banal
that it only just falls short of perfection. Excruciating! Cader Idris,
now, is a little better,” he went on kindly. “It is still possible to
introduce Cader to one’s friends. Cader, with that quaint lake they have
there, remains quite an attractive mountain, I think”—turning to Mr.
Waters, who still looked as if _he_ couldn’t think of anything to say to
this person who patted the Welsh mountains, so to speak, on the head.
“We aren’t going to be among the mountains,” he announced briefly. “My
people generally settle for six weeks or so in Anglesey.”
“Not really? How amusing—I mean, it’s really possible to ‘settle’
there?” said Sydney Vandeleur, lifting his dark Vandyke beard from his
tie—heavens, what a tie! I’d only just noticed that. “One had always
looked upon Anglesey as a sort of straight line leading to the North
Wall.”
“H’m,” said the Governor, who, having checked a “Can-such-things-be?”
start, was obviously trying to keep his eyes off that tie of Sydney’s: a
bunch of amber silk, patterned with blatant little splashes of scarlet,
black, magenta, emerald-green.... Futurist, I presume. How could I ever,
ever have dreamt that life, even in Ballycool Castle, could have been
tolerable with a man who wore ties like that? I should have left him
in a week. No! I’m sure I should never have been there to leave him. I
couldn’t....
Sydney lighted another cigarette, and the conversation languished.
_Nobody_ spoke.
In the middle of this sickening sag to the talk I had an inspiration!
I thought, since both these young men sing and one of them composes, that
it would be at this juncture a bright thought to introduce the subject of
music.
Why did I do it?
It was distinctly what Jack calls “a wash-out.” For Sydney Vandeleur at
once switched off on to Eleventh Century folk-songs. And Mr. Waters,
asked if he didn’t think they were too delicious, was “afraid the
Eleventh Century was out of his groove.”
And then Sydney hummed several only slightly more modern Celtic
dirges—one about “The Sweet Flowers, all gone to Decay!”
And Mr. Waters said he preferred his flowers _fresh_; adding bluntly that
he loathed all those miserable minor wails himself, and quite agreed with
that law which Queen Elizabeth passed for the Irish bards of her time,
sentencing them to death if they composed songs on any subject whatsoever
except in praise of the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty.
That brought back some of Sydney’s first pose. With a pained little smile
he turned to me, then, putting on just the expression of the bereaved
collie in Landseer’s “Shepherd’s Chief Mourner,” he asked me if I
_happened_ to have kept the MS. of that little thing he’d written for me
to that sonnet—“_Kissing her Hair, I sat against her Feet_.”
I felt myself flushing up to the roots of my own wretched hair that he’d
always so praised ... there was something about kissing of hair which
_he_ knew nothing of, and that I was only too thankful to let die a
natural death.... Rather shortly, I answered, “Oh, that song—yes; it’s
tucked away in some drawer or other here, I believe.”
“If it wouldn’t be troubling you too much, Miss Trant, to lend it to
me again? It was my only copy,” suggested Sydney softly (_con molto
espressione_).
“Of course,” said I. “I’ll find it for you now. Cicely, you might come
into my room and help me to hunt.”
Cicely followed me, leaving those two men to entertain each other. How
they proceeded to do so I suppose I shall never know!
“Well, Cis, how are you getting on?” I asked her, when the door was
closed between us and them. “Foot’s all right, I see, and you said you’d
gone back to work?”
“Yes, but not at Chérisette’s, you know; I’m working opposite in Bond
Street; Madame Lamaire’s. Mr. Vandeleur got me an introduction from his
married sister, who knows her; and I’m getting a better salary, and such
a much better time, there. He has been so awfully kind, Tots!”
“Has he? Have you—been seeing a good deal of him, then?”
“He’s been here several times, but”—reproachfully—“only to talk about
you!”
“Good of him,” I said.
Cicely looked more reproach. “Well, he says you’ve taken all the colour
out of his life and left ‘_gold tarnished and the grey above the green_.’”
“Drat him! And his colours!” I quoted Mrs. Skinner vulgarly and
vindictively. “He’d plenty of them left in his tie, anyhow.”
“I am afraid,” said Cecily aloofly and with a pointed comparison in her
face, “that you’ve scarcely _realized_ Mr. Vandeleur.”
“Haven’t I? Well, the sort of man who, when he’s turned down by one
girl, must needs rush and pour it all out into the shell-like ear of the
next——” But I broke off here.
What I suddenly did realize was that, for next to no reason, I was on the
brink of squabbling ridiculously with my chum.
So I hastily changed the subject to rent-money and the length of time
I should probably be away, caught up Sydney’s ever-to-be-hated song,
reassured Cicely that I was not going to be married until after the
summer—_long_ after! and told her I was glad she was getting on so well.
“Get Mr. Vandeleur, if he wants cheering up, to take you to ‘_The Keening
of Deidre_,’” said I. “Good-bye!”
* * * * *
It threatened to be a silent motor-drive back to Sevenoaks.
Again I felt that I should have to be the one to take the plunge into
conversation.
“Well?” I said. “Didn’t you think Miss Harradine a very pretty girl?”
“Beautiful hair,” said Mr. Waters, “hasn’t she?”
“Oh, lovely.”
Silence.
I saw that Mr. Waters hadn’t realized what I suspected: namely, that
Sydney was beginning to find my chum quite sufficiently “lovely” as a
girl, not merely as a confidante for his sorrows about “another,” who
was, as he imagined, “another’s.” But I was longing to hear some comment
on Sydney.
I should have been left longing, I suppose, if I hadn’t said straight
out, “What _did_ you think of Mr. Vandeleur?”
“Oh, come! What a question! How can one tell, after seeing a man for
half an hour? He seemed—clever, and all that,” fenced my companion. “Of
course he’s not the sort of man _I_ get thrown much with in that sordid,
detestable City of mine, as you call it. What does he do?”
“He doesn’t have to ‘do’ anything.”
“Rather lucky for him,” remarked Mr. Waters, in a tone I didn’t fathom.
I said, “But he does draw and design—and he writes dramatic
criticisms—and he composes.”
“Gifted sort of chap,” said Mr. Waters smoothly. “I suppose——”
And then stopped.
“You suppose what?” I urged. “No, do tell me,” as he looked obstinately
ahead and shut his lips into that line. “You _must_, Billy!” Then I found
myself laughing and colouring a little with surprise. For the first time
I’d used that absurd name in speaking directly to him.
He turned to me, smiling once more in quite a friendly way. But it was
not to answer my question. It was to ask another.
“Nancy, you know I shall expect you to write to me? When you’re at Porth
Cariad with my mother and the girls, I mean.... It’ll look funny if you
don’t.”
“Oh, of course. For the look of the thing,” said I, “I’ll write.”
“Sorry to trouble you. You can put a blank sheet into the envelope, you
know, if you like.”
“I hadn’t thought of that!” I laughed, glad to be once again on
comfortable terms of chatty friendship. “But—so I can.”
“Well, as long as you don’t forget to send _something_,” said Billy
Waters.
* * * * *
He reminded me of this once again, on Euston platform. For we—his mother,
his sisters, his official _fiancée_ and the little dog—left London at
eleven o’clock on the following Saturday morning.
That evening we were all among the sand-slopes and the gorse and the soft
calling of the waves at Porth Cariad.