THAT GIRL
There was a scraping of wooden chair-legs on the tiled kitchen floor as I
came in, and the men rose.
Mrs. Waters introduced “Our friend Monsieur Charrier and his
daughter”—and the stout gentleman, who wore pale-hued boots shaped like
the blades of oars, bowed until I could see the rolls of fat beneath
his collar behind, then shot at me out of eyes like two black currants
a glance that made me feel utterly disapproved-of and “found wanting.”
The girl gave me a look less frankly measuring, while the whitest teeth
in the world flashed in her little face, oval and smoothly olive as the
shell of one of those eggs on the table.
She was very lovely....
She held out her hand and gave mine the violent shake that foreigners
seem to think so truly English; and then I slipped into the empty place
next to Blanche, feeling thankful for the tea which Mrs. Waters handed to
me in a large cup decorated with a group of Welsh women in the costume
never seen except on china.
I drank it in a kind of thirsty dream; I couldn’t have talked to save
anyone’s life just then; but the talk was buzzing on all around.
“—planned to go to-morrow; but shall you be here?”
“—since we find ourselves in such charming neighbourhood, we could
prolong our sojourn——”
“Oh, yes, _do_ prolong it! So ripping for Blanche and me to have Odette
to go about with! Of course, we never _see_ Billy and Nancy here!”
“Don’t believe her, Odette!” he was laughing quite naturally.
“—can’t call your shore your own, this year! _You_ don’t know what it is
to have an engaged couple in the place!”
“No? It is not agreeable?” The pretty French girl turned to smile at him
again. “You do not encourage me to come, so!”
“I’m writing a book about it——”
“Theo dear, finish your tea and don’t talk so much!”
“‘The Complete Gooseberry’ it’s called, if you know what that means.”
“Ah! Place where you find the little babies! Yes?”
“No! not place! People! Unengaged ones like us and you and everybody but
_Them_.”
“—Enchanted, madame!”
“—with rules like this: ‘_Don’t cough outside doors; they hate it. Far
better not go in_!’”
“—More hot water, please, Blodwen——”
“—_Don’t stalk them with a camera. You never get anything worth
printing!_”
“—And will I bring a two more fress negg, mam?”
“_If one of them’s away, don’t ask who’s got the ink!_”
“—No, but do you remember the bathing at Dinard?”
“—Next year, perhaps——”
“—start before lunch——”
“—if the tide’s right——”
“—But Monsieur Charrier, as you were saying——”
“—icy!”
“—as warm as warm!”
“How was it to-day, Nancy?”
“Nancy, I believe you stayed in too long, dear,” murmured Mrs. Waters
gently to me as she passed my cup down again.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said vaguely, trying to smile at her. She was
the only one of the party to whom I felt I could turn in my utter fatigue
and bewilderment. For in that party I felt myself as a sort of plain and
neglected little nursery-governess. It seemed impossible that anyone
should ever have admired _me_—that Major Montresor had ever paid me
compliments—or Sydney wanted to marry me!—or that, for at least a moment,
my employer had found me attractive enough to flirt with. I hadn’t looked
at him, but I knew he hadn’t glanced once at me. His attention was
entirely divided between Monsieur Charrier, to whom he listened with a
deference new to me, and that pretty French fashion-plate in white and
cream and tango-colour, who laughed whenever her host said anything at
all.
Yes! She was very lovely. She made me feel dowdy and drab and _gauche_
beyond words. Even at my best I should have felt that she outshone me;
even if I did possess longer eyelashes and a flush of pink and a dimple,
what were these compared with the finished _chic_ of the way she wore
hair and clothes—to her scintillating vivacity? No wonder the man beside
her was so obviously lost in admiration of her!
Men adore a girl who’s “_bright_,” who amuses them while she saves them
the trouble of thinking what to say. I believe that somewhere at the back
of every man’s mind there’s a fancy portrait of himself, in a sultan’s
turban, applauding condescendingly while some fair dancing-girl postures
and performs for his pleasure.
_Men!_ Even the ones who have seemed “whitest,” as Jack calls it, turn
out to be cads in the end. Trying to flirt with the girl to whom you’re
nominally engaged, and whom you’ll never marry, is the sort of “joke”
that appeals to a masculine sense of humour. Yes, even when the possessor
happens to be really attracted by quite another girl. For it didn’t take
me many seconds of silent looking-on to see what game was being played
between my employer and that girl.
“Odette, are these your gloves?”
He picked them up from the floor when at last we all rose.
“_Your_ gloves, Billy,” retorted Mademoiselle Charrier gaily. “Still a
pair from the beautiful great box you bought me. You remember, yes?”
“Ah, the box you won from me at that flying-meeting. Of course I
remember.”
And I too remembered hearing of those gloves and this bet, ages ago—the
afternoon after I had been out to lunch for the first time with my
official _fiancé_.
So this was the young French girl he’d told me about! And as I watched
them standing chatting together, a little apart from the group round the
motor outside, I suddenly gave a quick guess at something else he might
have had to tell me about her if he’d chosen.
_This very girl had something to do with his official engagement to me!_
Somehow or other, she was his “reason” for appearing to have a _fiancée_
at all—a _fiancée_ upon whom he’d been so particular to impress that
“this affair would never end in marriage!” Possibly my employer and that
girl were already secretly—but really, not nominally—betrothed to one
another?
It looked like it. It looked uncommonly like it.
At something he said she blushed quite rosily. Oh, and they mustn’t think
I didn’t notice her shake of the head and her quick little silencing
frown at my official _fiancé_ when her father, in a tea-coloured alpaca
dust-coat, at last left off fussing over his engines and asked them if
they—calling them “_mes enfans_”—were ready to start?
“Oh—but are you going too, then, Billy?” his mother put in quickly.
Monsieur Charrier answered with a flow of French about “_affaires_,” and
documents which he had left at his hotel in Holyhead, which it would be
so much, so much better if Mr. Waters would spare but a little half-hour
to investigate.
“Very good of you to give me the opportunity, sir,” said Mr. Waters. “I
can get a train back, mother.”
“Ah, but no, but no! The auto will be again at your service as soon as
we have dined at that dog of an hotel,” declared the stout Frenchman.
“I will bring your son home quite safely, madame, to you and”—with a
particularly hollow show of politeness—“to mademoiselle!”
Here his daughter murmured something about the four seats in the auto,
plenty of space for mademoiselle his _fiancée_ if she would deign to
accompany——
I expect Mademoiselle Charrier knew well enough how safe it was to issue
that invitation! So did my employer, when he struck in with “Ah, that’s
very nice of you,” then turned and addressed me directly for the first
time since we had walked up from the beach together.
“Yes! That would be a good idea, wouldn’t it? You’ll come along too,
won’t you, Nancy? We could get a trap back.”
I excused myself as naturally as I could manage it, with something about
being rather tired. It was true enough.
As that cherry-coloured car panted, jerked, then whizzed off down the
stone-wall-bordered Holyhead road, with its trio of passengers, I felt
almost as if it had driven straight over me.
And I felt as if I shouldn’t have cared very much one way or the other if
it had!