THE CHARM BEGINS TO WORK
"Bescheidenheit ist eine Zier',
Doch weiter kommt man ohne ihr."
Boche Proverbs.
"No woman can get me to call her pretty," enunciated Captain Ross,
"until I've seen her walk."
The fiat, delivered in that ice-ax voice of his, cut through the
polyglot murmur of the visitors gathered in the shining bare salon, all
mirrors and decorations of artificial iris. The voice continued to hold
forth.
"Feet first; then figure. That's how it comes with me. Then hair.
Fairrrr hairrr. Must be fair-to-golden. A woman who isn't bland"--this
is how he pronounced it, but his hearers assumed it to mean blonde--"a
woman who isn't bland is only half a woman to me."
This saying was given out on the evening of the day when the Charm had
fallen into the hands of Olwen Howel-Jones.
She was sitting there at the time, on a red plush sofa next to her
Uncle, at the edge of the group formed by Mrs. Cartwright (who wore a
tawny-golden tea-gown and was knitting a khaki sock), Mr. Awdas, the
young flying officer who looked so appropriately like an eagle with his
bold features and the head that was so narrow in comparison with his
wide, wing-like shoulders, and Captain Ross, the one-armed Staff
Captain, who was discoursing to them on the subject of Women, of whom
(as he had been known to remark) he was the finest judge in Europe.
Olwen's little jet-black head was buried in the current number of
"Femina," which she had picked up from the oval, crimson-covered table
in front of her, but she was devouring every word of the homily on
Women.
That Captain Ross should notice a girl's feet was glad news; her own
feet being not merely tiny, but of a gratifying shapeliness. But her
heart seemed to sink suddenly down into the slippers that shod them,
when she heard the further "demmannd" that Beauty must be fair-haired.
Ah, he would never look at _her_, then!
She never, apparently, looked at him. For, regarding this one man for
whom she would have given her eyes, the artless Welsh maiden had learnt
Mrs. Cartwright's art of seeing without seeming to do so.
What she seemed to see were those glazed full-page French
fashion-plates.
What she did see were every look and turn of the man at two arms-lengths
from her, lounging in the red plush chair with its ornate ecru mats.
What she saw can be seen by each girl in love; "the Heart-wish
Incarnate," a glamorous, radiant creature indeed!
And----What was really _there_?
Let us borrow the eyes of the others, who were not in Love with this
Captain Ross, to describe him.
Young Awdas, the flyer, would have told you, "_A top-hole fellow. Bucks
rather; but you get used to it. Capital chap._"
Professor Howel-Jones might have said, mildly, "_He has somewhat
definite opinions, even for a man of his youth; but we allow that to
those youngsters who have endured more in three years than we in
three-score._"
Mrs. Cartwright, in writing to her sisters at home descriptions of every
one staying at Les Pins, had set down:
"_Captain Ross. Special Reserve man. Keen soldier. Came over
from Canada to join in '14. Arm lost on the Somme. Shell-shock;
and gas--that's why he's here for his chest, which is bad
again._
"_About 30; looks more. Thick-set, dark. Scarlet tabs suit him.
Imagine Charles Hawtrey when young and two stone lighter;
imagine a handsome black Tom-cat with a woman's mouth, from
which issues a strong accent with the eternal 'Is that
so--o--oh?' punctuating its speech; well, there you are.
Sometimes he seems entirely Canadian; at other moments the
complete Scot with every R burring like a cockchafer on a
window-pane._
"_Right sleeve tucked into pocket. Amazingly quick and clever
at doing everything with left hand; getting notes out of case,
managing siphon, lighting cigar._
"_Eyes, hard brown, watchful as a robin's (I don't think they
see anything, but he hates me)._
"_Would not be good-looking but for the lower half of his face;
that mouth really beautiful, tenderly curved and sensitive, and
constantly showing an even row of the milkiest teeth in the
world._
"_Intensely sure of self (to put it kindly)._
"_Has the look that one recognizes as the trace of women's eyes
and lips upon his face, but nothing that counts up to now, I
think._"
The man thus unknowingly summed up brought out his cigarette-case with
that clever left hand of his and proffered it first to the woman who had
summed him up and then to Jack Awdas.
This was the tall blonde flyer, who was sitting beside her; a striking
young figure. A woman would have noticed first his eyes and the
changeful expressions that darted swift as racing planes across their
blueness. One was an eager, anticipatory look. "_What have you for me?_"
it demanded of Life. "_Will you be wonderful? Shall I be satisfied?_"
One was a look of joyous mastery. "_Love me_," it seemed to say to Fate
herself. "_Give me and tell me all that I ask, for I am impatient Youth,
and must be served._" One was a look less often seen; it was the
"yonderly" look, the glance of those favoured (or cursed) with a glimpse
now and then beyond the kindly curtains of the Flesh and of Everyday....
It seemed to question a surprised "_What? I can't quite see.... What?...
I heard something...._"
Needless to say that the youth himself was entirely ignorant that any of
these signals could be read. Generally, he was healthily unconscious
that there was anything to be signalled.
To the French people in that hotel he was known as Monsieur de l'Audace.
His observer, his squadron, and several enemy airmen could have told you
that he deserved the nickname, but no other decoration had been granted
to him. In that last ghastly dive from the clouds he had so nearly lost,
too, everything that was his; however, health and strength and full
power of limb were returning now, and youth, and sleep o' nights, and
careless gaiety. Quite often now his laugh rang out; it was still a
trifle husky, as was his boyish, nonchalant voice. (One of his many
wounds had been in his throat.)
"Go on, Ross," he jeered amicably. "Let's have some more of your
priceless pointers on the Sex. What was the one you gave me today going
along the sea-wall? Oh, yes; 'Never make love to a woman with a pink
chin; she's older than she looks.'"
"Why, that's quite true," put in the deep voice of Mrs. Cartwright,
mildly. She crossed one long, gold-draped leg over the other, and threw
an amused glance through the cigarette-haze at the finest judge of women
in Europe. "D'you mind if I put that into a book, Captain Ross?"
"You'd better not put anything I say into any book you write," the Staff
Captain advised her, with a short laugh (while Olwen, head still deep in
the journal, drank in every syllable of the assured voice). "Your public
wouldn't stand for it, Domestica."
"This would not be a 'Domestica' book," returned the writer, with a
little tilt of her brown head over her knitting. "This is a little book
I'm going to bring out seven years hence, for my own two boys. A sort of
manual to help them when they go courting. 'The Guide to the Girl,' I
shall call it."
"The title has one very all right sound," laughed Captain Ross. "But if
you'll pardon my saying so, Mrs. Cartwright, I guess I could compile
that book considerably better than what you could."
"Not you!" declared Mrs. Cartwright. "Most of those manuals are written
from the point of view of the man. That's where they fall short. _I_
should make the Girl herself do the advising. I should let her give the
'pointers,' as Mr. Awdas calls them. I should divide them into little
chapters: '_Of Proposing_,' '_Of Presents_,' '_Of In-Laws_,' '_Of
Caresses_'----"
"'_Of Caresses_,'" took up Captain Ross, with another laugh, "is going
to get you banned by the libraries."
"Not it. I," said Mrs. Cartwright, knitting, "shall not treat the
subject in--in that way."
"Then that manual of yours isn't going to help your boys a lot,"
affirmed Captain Ross in his most final tone. "For, see here----"
"Olwen _fach_," said the Professor, suddenly taking his pipe out of his
mouth and looking over the smudged black sheet of "La Patria," "isn't it
time for you to go to bed?"
"Uncle!" came indignantly from behind the fashion-plates: "It's only
half-past nine!"
A smile went round the little group of the English about that table; the
eyes of each turned upon Nineteen who was being treated as Ten years
old. She would have kept up the screen of her "Femina," but Mrs.
Cartwright, finishing off a row of her knitting, put it aside, and drew
nearer to the girl.
"May I look at them with you?" she said, pleasantly, and the two shared
the fashion-drawings, while the men watched; Captain Ross, with a curl
of the lip and a remark about Women and their fairrrrm conviction that,
because clothes are drawn one way in a picture that's the way they'll
look when they've gotten them on.
Mrs. Cartwright lifted her head quickly, but it was not to retort to
this. She had suddenly seen something (as usual, without looking at it)
that surprised her. Then she dropped her head again.
"My dear!" she murmured to Olwen in an amazed little laugh. "Did you
ever know such a thing? There! Coming in through the dining-room door,
now! You can see her in the mirror, behind those French children playing
draughts. It's the Hotel Spinster we were looking at, at lunch today,"
chattered Mrs. Cartwright in the soft stream that scarcely moved her
lips. "The woman I said had never had a man to look at her. Can I
believe my eyes? She's got a man with her now!"
"Miss Walsh?" exclaimed Olwen, gazing with all her eyes into the mirror
that showed her this group.
Miss Walsh, in a fur coat, had evidently just come in from the Forest;
she carried a bough of arbutus, and her cheeks were pink from walking in
the clear night air. Close beside her came the man--yes! the male,
masculine man who was her companion; the sturdy blue-clad French
sergeant who had been at the table d'hote. Across the intervening groups
of people he was seen to be all smiles and gestures, the traditional
gallantry of his nation spoke in the very bend of his back as he opened
the door, bowed again, clicked his spurred heels. Miss Walsh was holding
out her hand; her lips parted, obviously in one of her characteristic
"Oh's"--the pink upon her cheeks deepened as she took leave of this
cavalier. One could almost hear her struggling French. She looked back
again; another bow, another click of the heels from her escort. Then the
sergeant marched back down the room, beaming satisfaction painted upon
every line of his face, bold, swarthy, and somewhat bull-necked. He was
what his own family described as "beau garcon"; a fine figure of a man.
He disappeared, through the ante-room, towards that wing of the hotel
inhabited by the management; Monsieur Leroux (bald, amiable, the shape
of a captive balloon), his three pigtailed daughters of exquisite
manners, and his alert wife (who ran everything--including him--in the
hotel).
"Heavens!" ejaculated Mrs. Cartwright absently, as she took up her
knitting again, "that must have been Madame Leroux's nephew. Her
sister's son, the _artilleriste_. I heard all about him the other day.
Gustave Tronchet his name is. Madame told me that he was coming here _en
perme_ as her guest, seeing she had no son, and that he loved to eat
well and to be _bien_ generally. I suppose she is introducing him----!"
"Some romance!" laughed Captain Ross, jerking his head towards the door
through which the fur-clad form of the lonely traveller had disappeared.
This was the first remark of his to which Olwen had paid scant
attention. As suddenly as if some one had called her, she sprang up. She
had dropped a kiss on her Uncle's thistle-down locks, had given her hand
to Mrs. Cartwright, had launched a shy glance and a "good night" in the
direction of the others, and had darted away, a slim sprite in grey with
touches of black, almost before the two young men could rise to their
feet.
Mrs. Cartwright was still thinking of the stiletto-eyed French
manageress who had introduced her nephew to the occupant of the best
room in the hotel.
"What family spirit!" she admired. "What sense of possibilities! What
respect for Power--I mean money. What an admirable nation they are....
Will ours ever learn foresight and thrift from theirs?"
"Ours--that is, mine--has family loyalty very strongly too," the
Professor joined in. "The Welsh, my dear lady, are as clannish in that
way as the French; they'll do anything for 'my nephew.'"
"They've an eye skinned for the dollars as well," volunteered Captain
Ross, his robin-like eye twinkling as he took out a cigar. "What's that
saying--ah, yes, God made a Welshman, and God made a Jew, but thank God
he never made a Welsh Jew!"
The Professor stiffened a little; and Mrs. Cartwright, seeing this, drew
the conversation back to the worldly aspects of germinating Romance....
The drift of all these remarks would have been entirely lost upon Olwen
even had she stayed to hear them.
For she knew better. She knew that it was not Madame Leroux, the
manageress, who was responsible for the coming together of a travelling
spinster and of a French soldier on leave. She, Olwen, knew what was
responsible for those attentions, that talk, that interested,
deferential smile on the part of the man who had attached himself to her
new-made friend. Olwen knew what had attracted him where no man had ever
been attracted before. Yes! She knew! This was the work of the Charm
that she herself had seen hidden away so near to an unsought heart....
This nephew of a French hotel manageress ... of course he wasn't exactly
the sort of admirer who belonged in Granges with grounds full of
rhododendrons, but he was a _man_, triumphed Olwen. There'd be others,
people that Miss Agatha Walsh could think seriously about; but he was
the _beginning_! He'd shown the success of her experiment. The Charm
_could_ work. That letter was _not_ all nonsense! It was all true! And
since the Charm had worked for Miss Walsh, it would work for--well,
others! Joy, oh joy!
Bursting with joy, in fact, the girl darted out of the _salon_,
scampering upstairs in all haste to overtake Miss Walsh, and to hear
more of this.
She hoped to catch her up at her bedroom door, but already Miss Walsh
had gone in.
Olwen knocked; was asked, "Who's there?"
"Only me--Olwen!"
"Come in," was the muffled answer. It came from behind a handful of Miss
Walsh's hair, quite abundant and almost pretty, now that she had removed
the flattening net and taken it all down. The first glance showed Olwen
that it was not just "down" for the night. There was a side glass in
Miss Walsh's hand; a thick loop of her locks was coiled up at the back,
ready for the side "bits" to be drawn across in a simpler fashion than
the upholstery of puffs and curls. Yes! She was seeing how she looked
with her hair done a different way! Ah, sign of the times, that could
spell only one thing: M--A--N!
"I--I only came in to say good night to you," Olwen began (really
longing to ply with questions; how--how soon did IT work--what
happened----).
Miss Walsh turned a face as transfigured as Olwen's own above her
quilted dressing jacket.
She looked ten years younger. She held her head at almost the angle of
those who have _not_ been born with the saddle. All fluttered and
flushed she was, but delighted; a once bleak landscape that a sun-ray
lightens. For it is your lifelong teetotaller who, rescued from Death,
perks up at the first sip of restorative. It was the elder Miss Walsh's
cloistered companion who was responding to that tonic: masculine
attention. She turned a new smile upon Olwen.
"Oh, it's you," she exclaimed, with new notes in her voice. Then she
broke into the breathless talk which was to her as new a function as
shopping for herself.
"I've been out!" with a wave towards the arbutus-bough on her table.
"Oh, it is such a lovely night! Oh! You've no idea how glorious the
stars looked, peeping down between the branches of the pines! I've
_never_ seen them so wonderful, never. I went for a stroll in the Forest
after dinner, do you know----Oh! You saw me come in? Oh, I never saw
you. Yes; I--I went with somebody----" she babbled on. "That Monsieur
Tronchet, the French soldier. He is a sergeant ... but everybody in the
Army is anything just now, aren't they? He showed me the Avenue leading
out into the woods.... Was it very extraordinary of me to go out for a
walk with him? Oh, I don't think it matters, do you? Everything's so
different ... in France. He spoke to me at dinner; I believe I'd taken
his place by mistake--then we talked----"
"_Ah_," came softly from Olwen, standing there listening, listening to
her witness for the power of the Charm. It had forced this man to speak;
it had drawn him!... "Oh, and he's such a delightful person," Miss Walsh
poured out between gasps. "He has been telling me such a lot of the most
interesting things about himself and the War! He spoke slowly, when I
asked him. I could really understand most of it. He expresses himself so
wonderfully! The French all do, I suppose. But he finds the English so
sympathetic. Oh, and what do you think? You won't laugh, I know; you're
so sweet. I am going to be his _marraine_. God-mother, that is. They all
have them in the French Army, he tells me; somebody who just writes very
often and takes an interest. He told me he hadn't any. So I promised. We
are to write to each other when he gets back to the front. Oh, and
tomorrow--what do you think? He is going to take me across the lagoon in
the motor-boat!" breathed Miss Walsh, and her eyes were now those of a
child who has been promised a fairy treat. "I don't think any one has
ever taken me in a boat before. This is a wonderful place, isn't it? I
am so glad I came!--Oh, are you going to bed now? I shall see you
tomorrow. I feel as if I knew _such_ a lot of nice people already! Good
night!" and her door closed upon a very happy face.
Equally excited, and even happier, little Olwen sped up another flight
of stairs to her room. Stars danced in her eyes. It was true! It was all
true! she rejoiced. _Now----!_
Yes; now, Captain Ross, _en garde_! Stipulate as you choose for the
colour of Beauty's hair; swear that no woman is Woman to you except a
blonde. One little sooty-haired brunette is now no longer to be cast
down by your specifications. Say what you like; she has confidence in
what she is going to do.
* * * * *
She burst into her room, snapped on the lights, ran to the drawer,
snatched out work-basket, thimble, needle, silk; now the mauve ribbon!
Now the packet containing that so potent Charm!
Then down she sat again to work as she had worked that afternoon, but
in all certainty instead of doubt. Snip--snip--snip. Three lengths of
ribbon, and to each a sachet.
"I'll have to buy yards and yards and yards of this ribbon presently,"
thought Olwen feverishly as she stitched. "And I'll have to send to that
address for all the Charm that they can send me; all that there is in
the world!"
She rolled a sheet of note-paper into a little funnel; and through this
she filled--ah, so cautiously!--the sachets with the musky, seed-like
powder.
She sighed: "_What_ a pity that I've only got enough here for four of
us!"