HILARY VANCE FINDS A CONFIDANTE
That afternoon, when Pollyooly was helping him pack his portmanteau for
his journey to Buda-Pesth, the Honourable John Ruffin told her of the
arrangement he had made with Hilary Vance, that she and the Lump should
spend the time till his return at the studio at Chelsea.
Pollyooly's face brightened; and there was something of the joy which
warriors feel in foemen worthy of their steel in the tone in which she
said:
"Thank you, sir. I shall like that. It will be a change for the Lump;
and I've always wanted to know what that studio would look like if once
it were properly cleaned. That Mrs. Thomas who works for Mr. Vance
does let it get so dirty."
"Yes; I told Mr. Vance that I was sure that you'd get the place really
clean for him," said the Honourable John Ruffin with a chuckle.
"Oh, yes; I will," said Pollyooly firmly.
The Honourable John Ruffin chuckled again, and said:
"Mr. Vance is going to have the spring cleaning of a lifetime."
"Yes, sir. It's not quite summer-time yet," said Pollyooly.
The next morning before taking the train to Buda-Pesth, he despatched
her, the Lump, and the brown tin box which contained their clothes, to
Chelsea in a taxicab. Hilary Vance welcomed them with the most cordial
exuberance, led the way to his spare bedroom, and with an entire
unconsciousness of that bedroom's amazing resemblance to a
long-forgotten dust-bin, invited Pollyooly to unpack the box and make
herself at home.
Pollyooly gazed slowly round the room, and then she looked at her host
in some discomfort. She was a well-mannered child, and careful of the
feelings of a host. Then she said in a hesitating voice:
"I think I should like to--to--dust out the room before I unpack,
please."
"By all means--by all means," said Hilary Vance cheerfully; and he went
back to his work.
Owing to his absorption in it he failed to perceive the curious
measures Pollyooly took to dust out the bedroom. She put on an apron,
fastened up her hair and covered it with a large cotton handkerchief,
rolled up her sleeves, and carried a broom, two pails of hot water from
the kitchen, a scrubbing-brush, and a very large piece of soap into the
room she proposed to dust. She shut herself in, took the counterpane
off the bed, shook it with furious vigour, and even more vigourously
still banged it against the end of the bedstead. When she had finished
with it the counterpane was hardly white, but the room was dustier than
ever. She covered up the bed again, took down the pictures and again
made the room dustier. Then she swept the ceiling and the walls.
After doing so she shook the counterpane again. And the room was still
dusty; but the dust was nearly all on the floor, or on the black face
of Pollyooly. She swept it up. Then she went quietly out into the
street with the strips of carpet and banged them against the railings
of the house; this time it was the street that was dustier than ever;
and Pollyooly appeared to have come from the lower Congo. For the next
half-hour, had he not been absorbed in his work, Hilary Vance might
have heard a steady and sustained rasp of a scrubbing-brush.
Pollyooly came to the laying of the lunch with her angel face deeply
flushed; but she wore a very cheerful air. Also she displayed an
excellent appetite. In the middle of lunch she said in dreamy
reminiscence, apropos of nothing in particular:
"I got this place clean once."
"Isn't it clean now?" said Hilary Vance in a tone of anxious surprise.
"It depends on what you call clean," said Pollyooly politely.
After lunch she brought the drawers from the chest of drawers in the
bedroom into the kitchen and washed them and dried them in the sun.
Then, at last, she unpacked the brown tin box and put away their
clothes.
After that she took the Lump for an hour's walk on the embankment. She
preferred it to the embankment below the Temple; it seemed to her
airier. She returned to tea, and had a little struggle with the
teaspoons. They enjoyed, after the lapse of months, the experience of
shining. After tea Hilary Vance told her regretfully that he would not
be able to come home to supper, but that she would find provisions in
the cupboard, and advising them to go to bed early, bade them an
affectionate good-night and went out in a northeasterly direction to
talk about Art.
When the door closed behind him Pollyooly heaved a faint sigh of
satisfaction and looked round the studio with the light of battle in
her eye. Then she took the canvases, which were set against the wall
three and four deep, into the street and brushed them. The dust in the
street had been a tedious grey; in front of the house of Hilary Vance
it became a warm black.
Then she put the Lump, with the toys she had brought with her, into the
clean bedroom, and fell upon the studio. By the time she had brushed
the pictures and the walls and the ceiling its floor had become very
dusty indeed, and she was once more black. She swept it, and then she
was an hour scrubbing it. When it was done she gave the Lump his
supper and put him to bed. After supper she dealt faithfully with the
windows. The skylight gave her trouble; it was so high. But she tied
a wet cloth round the top of a broom, and by standing on the table
reached it. It made her arms ache, but slowly the panes assumed a
transparency to which they had long been unused. When she had cleaned
them from the inside she considered thoughtfully the possibility of
sitting astride the roof and cleaning their outside surfaces. But
there was no way of getting on to the roof. Then she had a hot bath;
she needed it.
Mrs. Thomas had been apprised of her coming and greeted her amiably.
It is only fair to say that she gave the studio the cleaning it
generally received without observing that anything whatever had
happened to it.
Hilary Vance, who was of that rare, but happy, disposition, came to
breakfast in splendid spirits. He also did not observe that anything
had happened to the studio. But when he got to his work he kept
looking up from it with a puzzled air.
At last he said:
"It's odd--very odd. Lately I've been thinking that my sight was
beginning to weaken. But this morning I can see quite clearly. Yet it
isn't a very bright morning."
"Perhaps if you had the skylight cleaned on the outside, too, you'd see
clearer still," said Pollyooly in the tone of one throwing out a
careless suggestion.
Hilary Vance looked round the studio more earnestly:
"By Jove! You've cleaned it again!" he cried. "You are a brick,
Pollyooly. But all the same you're my guest here; and it's not the
function of a guest to clean her host's house. I ought to have
remembered it and had it cleaned before you came."
"But I liked doing it. I did, really," said Pollyooly.
"You are undoubtedly a brick--a splendid brick," he said
enthusiastically.
Hilary Vance was one of those great-hearted men of thirty who crave for
sympathy; he must unbosom himself. Pollyooly was not quite the
confidante of his ideal; but his mentor, James, the novelist (not
Henry), was in Scotland; and the salt sea flowed between him and the
Honourable John Ruffin. Pollyooly was at hand, and she was
intelligent. No later than the next morning he began to talk to her of
Flossie--her beauty, her charm, her sympathetic nature, her
womanliness, and her intelligence.
Pollyooly received his confidences with the utmost politeness. She
could not, indeed, follow him in his higher, finer flights; but she
succeeded in keeping on her angel face an expression of sufficient
appreciation to satisfy his unexacting mind. It is to be feared that
she did not really appreciate the splendour of the passion he displayed
before her; it is even to be feared that she regarded it as no more
than a further eccentricity in an eccentric nature. She grew curious,
however, to see the lady who had so enthralled him, and was, therefore,
pleased when she suggested that she should relieve Mrs. Thomas of the
housekeeping, that he accepted the suggestion and told her to procure,
among other things, some flowers for the studio.
She found Flossie to be a fair, fluffy-haired, plump and pretty girl of
twenty, entirely pleased with herself and the world. It seemed to
Pollyooly that she gave herself airs. She came away with the flowers,
finding the ecstasies of Mr. Hilary Vance as inexplicable as ever. But
she did not puzzle over the matter at all, for it was none of her
business; Mr. Vance was like that.
Having once begun, Hilary Vance fell into the way of confiding to her
from day to day his hopes and fears, the varying fortunes of his suit.
Some days the skies of his heaven were fair and serene; some days they
were livid with the darkest kind of cloud. Pollyooly, by dint of
hearing so much about it, began to get some understanding of the
matter, and consequently to take a greater interest in it. Always she
made an excellent listener. Her intercourse with the Honourable John
Ruffin had taught her that a comprehension of the matter under
discussion was by no means a necessary qualification of the excellent
listener; and Hilary Vance grew entirely satisfied with his confidante.
The affair was pursuing the usual course of his affairs of the heart:
one day he was well up in the seventh heaven, talking joyfully of an
early proposal and an immediate marriage; another he was well down in
the seventh hell. Pollyooly was always ready with the kind of
sympathy, chiefly facial, the changing occasion demanded.
Then one day her host had gone out to lunch with an editor and she was
taking hers with the Lump, when there came a rather hurried knocking at
the front door. She opened it, and to her surprise found Flossie
standing without. She was at once stricken with admiration of
Flossie's hat, which was very large and apparently loaded with the
contents of several beds of flowers. But Flossie herself looked to be
in a state of considerable perturbation.
"Is Mr. Vance in?" she said somewhat breathlessly.
She seemed to have been hurrying, and the hat was a little on one side.
Pollyooly eyed her with some disfavour, and said coldly: "No, he isn't."
"Will he be in soon?" said Flossie anxiously.
"I don't know," said Pollyooly yet more coldly.
Flossie gazed up and down the street with a helpless air; then she said:
"Then I'd better come In and write a note for him and leave it." And
she walked down the passage and into the studio.
Still wearing an air of disapproval, Pollyooly found paper and pencil
for her; and she sat down and began to write. She wrote a few words,
stopped, and bit the end of the pencil.
"It's dreadful when gentlemen will quarrel about you," she said in a
tone and with an air in which gratified vanity forced itself firmly
through the affectation of distress.
"What gentlemen?" said Pollyooly.
"Mr. Vance and my fiongsay, Mr. Reginald Butterwick," said Flossie. "I
don't know how he found out that Mr. Vance is friendly with me; and I'm
sure there's nothing in it--I told him so. But he's that jealous when
there's a gentleman in the case that he can't believe a word I say. It
isn't that he doesn't try; but he can't. He says he can't. He's got a
passionate nature; he says he has. And he can't do anything with it.
It runs away with him; he says it does. And now it's Mr. Vance. How
he found out I can't think--unless it was something I let slip by
accident about his taking me to the Chelsea Empire. He's so quick at
taking you up--Reginald is; and before you know where you are, there he
is--making a fuss. And what's going to happen I don't know."
Her effort to look properly distressed failed.
Pollyooly was somewhat taken aback by the flood of information suddenly
gushed upon her; but she said calmly:
"But what's he going to do?"
"He's going to knock the stuffing out of Mr. Vance--he said he would.
And he'll do it, too--I know he will. He's done it before. There was
a gentleman friend of mine who lives in the same street as me in
Hammersmith; and he got to know about him--not that there was anything
to know, mind you--but he thought there was. And he blacked his eyes
and made his nose bleed. You see, Reginald's a splendid boxer; he
boxes at the Chiswick Polytechnic. And if he goes for Mr. Vance he'll
half kill him--I know he will. Reginald's simply a terror when his
blood's up."
"But Mr. Vance is very big," said Pollyooly in a doubting tone.
"But that makes no difference; bigness is nothing to a good boxer,"
said Flossie with an air of superior knowledge. "Mr. Butterwick says
he doesn't mind taking on the biggest man in England, if he's not a
boxer. And he knows that Mr. Vance isn't a boxer, because I asked him
about boxing--knowing Reginald put it into my head--and he told me he
didn't know a thing about it. And he'd have no chance at all against
Reginald. And I let it out when I was telling Reginald that Mr. Vance
was a friend of mine--only just a friend of mine--and he mustn't hurt
him, and there was nothing to make a fuss about."
"I don't see why you wanted to tell him about Mr. Vance at all for, if
you knew he'd make a fuss," said Pollyooly in a tone of disapproval.
"I told you it slipped out when I wasn't thinking," said Flossie, in a
tone which carried no conviction; and she bent hastily to the note and
added a couple of lines.
Then she broke out again in the same high-pitched, excited tone:
"And I came round here as soon as I could get away, because there
wasn't any time to be lost. Reginald says he doesn't believe in losing
time in anything. And he's going to take an afternoon off and come
round and knock the stuffing out of Mr. Vance this very day. He can
always get an afternoon off, for he's with Messrs. Mercer & Topping,
and the firm has the greatest confidence in him; he says they have."
She finished the note and folded it, saying with the air which
Pollyooly found hypocritical:
"It's really dreadful when gentlemen will quarrel about one so. But
what am I to do? There's no way of stopping them. You'll know what it
is when you get to my age--at least you would if you hadn't got red
hair."
With this almost brilliantly tactful remark, she rose, gave Pollyooly
the note, and adjured her to give it to Mr. Hilary Vance the moment he
came in.
"What time will Mr. Butterwick get here?" said Pollyooly anxiously.
"There's no saying," said Flossie cheerfully. "But he'll get here as
soon as the firm can spare him. He never loses time--Reginald doesn't."
Again she adjured Pollyooly to give Hilary Vance the note as soon as he
returned, and hurried down the street to the florist's shop.