THE FIRST CALL
In spite of much lying-in-wait about the sands and the wide French
roads, Ted Urquhart didn't, for the rest of the morning, catch
another glimpse of his golden Enigma. Disappointed, but nursing an
increasing determination that the afternoon should be less of a
blank, he went in to the _table d'hôte_ déjeuner at the Hotel de la
Plage. One fish course succeeded another. Then, in the midst of a
dessert of tiny black grapes (grown on the white backyard wall of the
Hotel), and of little sponge biscuits which it appeared to be the
custom of the country to dip into one's glass of very thin red wine
and then suck, there appeared before Ted Urquhart the "Madame" of the
hotel in her tight black gown and architectural hair, who smilingly
informed him that these English demoiselles from the Atelier were all
in the hall, desirous of speaking to the English Monsieur.
"Ah!--Good," said Ted Urquhart eagerly.
He strode out into the bare, shady, stone-paved hall, where a knot of
girlish figures, in heterogeneous seaside "get-up," were clustered,
like bees on a head of teazle, in one corner. A buzzing chorus of
talk stopped on a staccato note as the young man appeared in the
doorway. For a second he hesitated, glancing from the one black coat
with furs to the coloured blouses.
Then one figure, the tallest, dressed in white, separated itself from
the others, and came sedately towards him.
"Oh," she began demurely, in a voice very different from the
whispering, giggling voices of the other girls, "good-afternoon,
Mr.----"
And she--the girl of this morning; "his" girl!--paused. It was to
give him an opportunity to slip in the name by which she must thank
him.
Ted Urquhart, realising this well enough, didn't give any.
"Not yet; no, not yet!" he was saying to himself. And he forced
himself away from the growing temptation to stare.
He noticed how her hair, the wonderful blonde hair that had rippled
down far below her waist, and had been so hastily shaken back from
her face, was well out of the way now,--plaited into a rope thicker
than that which had been let down over the cliff's edge, wound round
her head, and hidden away under a very wide-brimmed hat of
exquisitely-woven white.
In his quick glance at the girl, Ted Urquhart did not overlook that
Panama hat.
For he knew it.
"I come on behalf of these young ladies," the pretty voice was
saying, half-deprecatingly, half-mischievously. "We--they all want
to thank you so much for your ... well, I don't know quite what to
call it----!"
"Heroism, Miss, dear!" prompted the voice of the funereally-clad
Jam-Hand. "Like the Surrey," she added.
"Well," went on the girl in charge, "may we say 'heroism'--like the
Surrey?"
She met the young man's eyes, and they laughed together.
"Oh, please don't say anything of the kind!" Ted Urquhart implored
her, still laughing; his eyes, full of well-leashed admiration, again
upon the face under the Panama hat which he had sent, weeks ago, to
Eleanor.
The girl had trimmed his gift with a silken scarf, now faded to a
tender browny-pink not unlike the colour of those rose-leaves in that
letter which had brought him home on an impulse,--but he knew that
was the hat.
He knew that he had written in the accompanying letter a description
of how these fine hats were made, not of straw, but of the young
fronds of spreading palm-leaves, and how they are plaited under water
to keep them flexible, and how the little square piece in the crown
is the feature of the more elaborate of them. All this he knew: he
could almost see his own handwriting in that letter.
But what he did not know was, that Eleanor Urquhart, when she had
received that packet at The Court, had said, "Oh, look what a queer
sort of garden-hat Ted has sent me from South America! So kind of
him, but it's much too large for me--I never wear these immense shady
things. Rosamond, do you care to have it?"
"Oh, rather, my dear! Any contributions thankfully received for the
pauper's wardrobe!" Rosamond Fayre had laughed; "besides, this is a
lovely hat for the grounds, and I shall be able to wear it all the
time when we are by the sea."
And that was how it happened that she was wearing it now.
"Please don't dream of thanking me--I'm only so glad I happened to
turn up," Ted Urquhart was saying. And then the girl in charge,
prompted by another murmur from the group of--"About this afternoon,
Miss--you know!--you ask him!" went on sedately:
"Oh, yes! and I am deputed to ask you whether you can spare time to
come this afternoon and have tea with us all? We are at the Hostel,
that white house with the brilliant green shutters and the studio in
the garden. It's on the right of the road to Boulogne, at the other
end of the village from here, if you will come----"
If, indeed!
"Thanks most awfully," said Urquhart promptly, turning to the group
by the door and smiling again as he met the unabashed gaze of the
Principal Boy. "I shall be delighted to come!"
He meant it.
His plan, his excellent plan, was continuing to work out even better
than he had dreamed.
First the flying start of this morning's adventure. Now the entrée
to Eleanor's hospitality--and under such favourable circumstances!
Holiday-time; a jolly little holiday place without any stiffness or
formality about it. A foreign village, too; that meant an added
excuse for compatriots to be very friendly. Except for a couple of
Americans on their honeymoon at his Hotel, there seemed to be only
French people and the Hostel party in the village. Naturally the
only Englishman would soon find himself attached to the Hostel
party--they were genial, sympathetic souls, these Cockney girls. And
soon, the "party" also would split up into the immemorial grouping.
They--he and she--would grow to be friends--more than friends, as
quickly here as on board ship or on a desert-island. Everything was
conspiring to help on the courtship that was now about to begin.
He congratulated himself----
Meanwhile, Rosamond Fayre also was thinking: "Well, I suppose this
quite pleasant but slightly unconventional young man will now proceed
to introduce himself by name?"
Not he.
All he said was, "How soon--I mean when may I come?"
"Tea is at five," he was told. "Good-bye until then--er----"
Again a little pause into which Miss Fayre not unwarrantably imagined
that he might have slipped his name.
Ted Urquhart merely echoed courteously, "Until then!"
The bevy of English girls, with a bobbing of small, bright hats, a
swing of skirts, and a toss of one set of black furs, moved away from
the Hotel in a cloud of white French dust.
Then a clatter of tongues broke out.
"Miss, dear, isn't he handsome?"
"Tall, isn't he?"
"Talk about sun-burnt!"
"Funny kind of belt he'd got on; sort of cowboy-looking, wasn't it?
Isn't he like Lewis Waller in--"
"Oh, go on, Mabel Beading! It's always Lewis Waller, with her. Not
a bit like an actor, to my mind. More like a soldier!"
"Well, he couldn't look like anything better," said Miss Fayre, whose
motto from childhood had been, "_Ah, que j'aime les militaires_."
"I wonder what he does for a living?"
"I wonder how old he is? Twenty-seven, twenty-eight?"
"I wonder," contributed the Salvation Army Lassie, "if he's married?"
"Not him," declared the Principal Boy definitely.
"Now, Pansy, whatever's the good of saying that, when you don't
_know_?" retorted the Blouse-finisher rather pettishly. "How can you
possibly tell, with gentlemen? They aren't like us! _They_ don't
have to give the game away with a wedding-ring----"
"And a 'Keep-off-the-grass' expression," added the Jam-Hand, "and a
new name! Now, when a young girl's still single, she's----"
"Talking of names," said Pansy, quickly, "what's his? Anybody catch
it?"
No; nobody seemed to have caught it.
"Miss, dear," from the Jam-Hand, "didn't he say, when he was talking
to you?"
"No," said Rosamond Fayre; meditatively, perhaps. "He did not."
"Funny of him," complained the Typist. "You'd think it was the first
thing he'd mention!"
"Well, I wonder what it is? Shouldn't be surprised if it was
'Captain' Something," said the Blouse-finisher, "he'd got his hair
cut that way, and that little short military moustache. It'll be in
the book in the Hotel, anyway--we could always find out----"
"My _dear_ Mabel! indeed we couldn't!" remonstrated the vice-Head of
the Hostel, aghast. "If this--well, if he didn't choose to _tell_ it
to us, we couldn't very well go looking it up as if----"
"As if we was _after_ him!" the Jam-Hand came to the rescue. "Miss
is quite right. What's in a name?"
The Blouse-finisher persisted that it was queer, not knowing what
name you could so much as pass him a cup of tea by.
"And besides, I do want to know it. What am I to call him," asked
the Salvation Lassie simply, "in my prayers?"
"Probably he'll send in his card," suggested Miss Fayre, "when he
calls this afternoon."
Ted Urquhart, needless to say, did nothing of the kind.
Still full of the excellence of his schemes, he arrived just before
five, at the latticed porch of his unsuspecting _fiancée's_ Hostel.
About the base of that porch were planted clumps of ribbon-grass and
tuffets of golden-feather and straggles of canary-creeper; and the
lattice was gay with the monthly roses that grew from a big plaster
vase placed at one side of the entrance. The vase was held up by
three laughing Cupids, which had been modelled by the artist who had
owned the house. Miss Urquhart, when she transformed it into her
Hostel, would have had "those not very appropriate little statuettes"
removed. But Rosamond, fearing that the flowers might not bear
transplanting, had pleaded that the little, unabashed Loves should
stay as they were.
Urquhart's ring at the bell was answered by the old mahogany-faced,
snowy-capped Frenchwoman who cooked and cleaned and did the work of
three English servants about the place.
But before she could request Monsieur to enter, the slight figure of
Annie, the Salvation Lassie, slipped, greatly daring, before her.
Annie also had a scheme respecting names.
"Good-afternoon, Sir. I'm parlour-maid to-day," she informed the
tall visitor with a little giggle of nervousness; "so--_what name,
Sir_?"
Mr. Ted Urquhart was not to be caught out thus. What? Held up at
the door? Requested to stand and deliver?
He smiled down at the ingenuous little highway-woman.
"You don't remember me?" he said. "I am expected, I think."
Then he let her lead the way into what had been the artist's studio,
now transformed by Eleanor into the Girls' Refectory.
The place was long and cool and coloured like a blade of the
ribbon-grass outside. Green and white casement-cloth curtained the
tall windows, the floor was carpeted with green straw matting, the
white distempered walls were bare save for a framed copy of the
Hostel Rules and an Arundel print of S. Ursula with her Eleven
Thousand Virgins. (Rosamond considered that the small austere face
of the S. Ursula was not unlike that of Eleanor herself, and she
sometimes amused herself privately by seeking for likenesses in the
Eleven Thousand, to the factory-hands or music-hall supers under Miss
Urquhart's care.) A large green Brittany crock full of white
Bride-lilies with streamers of ribbon-grass stood in the centre of
the long table now laid for tea. At the head of it stood that supple
girl in white, with the big Panama hat hiding her glorious hair.
"So this is to be our first meal together," thought the visitor.
"Well, with luck! it won't be long before I shall contrive to get her
to come out to tea with me, somewhere; away from all these rather
alarming young women. Ah, Eleanor! Helen--Nell--Yes, that's your
name--my name for you. Nell, you little think that I'm the person
you'll have to be pouring out tea for every day, presently.
Presently you will be sitting at a table for two, perhaps calling me
by some name of your own, and----"
"Will you come and sit here," suggested his unconscious hostess,
thinking "if he prefers 'you' to any other form of address for the
present, so be it!"
And he sat down at her right hand, between her and the Principal Boy,
who immediately took most of the burden of entertaining the guest
upon her own plump shoulders. And she certainly broke the ice of a
situation where a young, well-bred, and good-looking (but curiously
nameless) man, the only representative of his sex, was being mutely
worshipped as a hero by a bevy of rather self-conscious girls.
"_I'll_ look after him," Pansy chattered, heaping Urquhart's plate,
putting the sugar into his cup of tea with her own fingers, all but
guiding the cup to his lips. "Oh, doesn't it begin to feel more sort
of natural with a man about the house again, instead of the
ever-lastin' hen-party? Pass those little cakes along, Mabel;
they're sort of tipsyfied. Babies-in-rum they called 'em, but I
daresay their bark's worse than their bite. Same as mine. He'll
like those.... Not at all! You never find me backward in coming
forward when there's boys--er--a _gentleman_ to look after.... I
don't," she concluded pointedly, "know what else to call him?"
Ted Urquhart chose to take this question as a mere statement of fact.
He helped himself to a _baba-au-rhum_, smiled at his neighbour, and
asked her, pleasantly, if she felt quite recovered after her little
fright of this morning.
"'Little fright'?" echoed Pansy, dramatically. "Oh, girls! Oh,
Miss, dear! If you'd only known my
feelings-not-to-mention-my-sensations, when me and young Annie was
hanging there on that cliff like the two Balancinis in that Trapeze
Act! 'What had we found wrong with the ground,' eh? Oh! Doesn't it
show you what's the fruits of getting up early because it's such a
lovely morning? Never again! 'Such a thing as early risin'
I--Don't--See!'" she sang. "Getting up? Well! Just as I was
thinking the 'bus-conductor would be passing some rude remark about
me ankles----"
The Typist blushed; the Blouse-finisher murmured something about not
the slightest use taking any notice--and the Pantomime Boy, devouring
criss-cross-patterned French cream-cakes, babbled on:
"Just as I was wondering who'd break the news to Mother, up comes
Lieutenant Daring the Cliffclimber, that is to say Mister----"
She broke off abruptly. There was a pause; the longest yet. Surely,
thought Rosamond Fayre behind the teapot, surely this nameless
knight-errant would proclaim his title now? No. The indefatigable
Pansy was forced to go on.
"Mister--Who? Myster--ee, I suppose. _I_ believe he's Royalty,
travelling _incog._--Alphonso! Lobengula! Oh, fancy having me life
saved by a Prince! Look well on the bills, won't it? Better than
having me jewels pinched! Oh, when he was grabbing on to that rope
with one hand and begging me to throw my arms round him, I said, 'Can
a duck swim?'"
At this revised version of what had happened on the cliff-ledge Ted
Urquhart put back his brown head and laughed infectiously.
Rosamond joined in with the other girls; she laughed, but she was
feeling thankful that Eleanor, safe in Paris, did not behold her
theatrical _protegée_ in her present mood. Pansy, who had been
budding out of the Hostel etiquette all the week, seemed about to
burst into full bloom this afternoon.
It was at the second addition of hot water to the teapot that Pansy
protested that all she wanted to make her perfectly happy again in
this God-forsaken spot, where they seemed to make their tobacco out
o' those bits of dry black seaweed that blew about the beach, was a
decent cigarette!
Smoking, in the Hostel, was strictly against rules, but ignorant of
this regulation of his betrothed's, Ted Urquhart, with some relief
that the name-motif appeared to be dying out of the conversation,
drew out his case--a thing of finely plaited straw something like
that of the Panama hat--and passed it, with a quick glance of
inquiry, to his hostess.
"I don't smoke, thanks," said Rosamond. Then, firmly, "Nobody
smokes."
A mutinous pout from Pansy. "Miss, dear, couldn't you look the other
way? Anyhow----"
With the word she took the cigarette-case and turned it upside down
beside her plate. A dozen or so of "Egyptians" rolled out on to the
table-cloth.
"Ow! Is that all you keep in it? Sold again!" disappointedly from
the Principal Boy. "_No cards, by request!_ All right. Is there a
spot more tea in the pot, Miss, dear, for his Royal Highness Prince
Mumm?"
Here Urquhart began to realise that the joke of a withheld name was
wearing a trifle thin. Why couldn't this rattle of a girl drop it
now? It was beginning to make him almost embarrassed before his
hostess, it would mean more awkwardness than he intended, when he
came, say, in a couple of days or so, to announcing himself by name.
He had thought one could slide more easily than that over the
situation.... It was the fault of these girls! She--Nell--hadn't
shown any curiosity. But all her charges--the little thing who'd
opened the door, the girl in glasses, the red-haired, and the
coster-y looking ones; they were asking now, with all their eyes,
what that impertinent theatrical minx presently put into so many
words.
"Haven't you _got_ a name, Mr. Man?"
"Come, Pansy, _Pansy_!" from the hostess.
"Well, there you are, you see! He's allowed to hear _mine_,"
complained the Principal Boy, loudly. "He knows I'm Pansy----"
"Yes; but Miss Pansy What?" fenced young Urquhart. "_I_ haven't been
allowed to hear your surname, after all."
"Want to hear it?"' retorted the girl petulantly.
"Not," said the young man quickly, "if you don't want to tell it to
me."
"Ah, that's meant for a nasty one, but our family don't take hints.
_I_ don't mind telling you," the Principal Boy announced. She
finished her cup of tea, glanced quickly at the disposal of the
tea-leaves at the bottom, muttered to herself, "_A short journey
across the sea, a quarrel, the wedding of a friend_," and then
vouchsafed, defiantly, "_My_ name is Hawkins."
"Oh, hark at _her_!" burst hoarsely from the Jam-Hand. "Oh, Pansy,
you're worse than awful! Where d'you think you'll go to? Hawkins!
Oh!" (An explosive giggle.) "Whatever next? Miss Hawkins!"
"It's not her name at all," explained the Blouse-finisher, bridling,
and the Typist added,
"Her name is Miss Vansittart."
"Yes," from the Jam-Hand. "And _that's_ only her stage-name!"
The Lassie ventured apologetically, "Her _reel_ name is very pretty,
I think; Pansy Price."
"Oh, then, you've got altogether too many names, you know. I
couldn't compete with you," said Ted Urquhart, smiling at the
handsome rebellious face of the girl beside him, and determined, as
Rosamond Fayre realised, to keep this skirmish in the enemy's own
country. "Besides," he said, "a lady's name isn't the same as a
man's----"
"How d'you mean, Mr.--Er----?"
"I mean that you'll all change yours very shortly, I expect. I shall
stick to mine--whatever it is."
"Evident!" said the flushed Pansy. "But--straight now"--she dropped
her voice to an insinuating aside--"What is it?"
"Don't tell her!" It was his hostess herself who intervened,
turning, half-annoyed, half-smiling, to the guest. "No; don't tell
her now. Leave it at that. They've been very rude to tease you
about it. Don't tell--anybody your name."
"You see? I am forbidden to tell you!" took up the anonymous knight,
with a little nod. "I'm sorry, but it's----"
"Your score. Chalk it up and I'll be round with the money in the
morning, Mr. Nought-nought-double-O-Dot," retorted the Principal Boy
quite good-naturedly. "Change the subject--seems to be the only
change a girl can get out of _you_!" Then she began to rattle on
again, this time about that bouquet of flowers on the table.
"Smell a treat, don't they? Whatever's that stripey stuff you've
stuck in with them, Annie?"
"That's ribbon-grass," the Lassie timidly showed off her knowledge
from the other side of the table. "At home they used to call it
'_Match-Me_' and play a game with it--seeing who could get two blades
striped just alike----"
"Oh, yes, we know those games!--If it isn't Match-Me it's Shy Widow
(I don't think!) or Postman's Knock," from Pansy. "Always end the
same way! Always finish in your finding yourself let in for a kiss
to the wrong young man!"
And she concluded audaciously to the only young man present, "Is this
where we start playing it now?"
"Isn't this where we all go down to the shore?" parried Urquhart,
smiling pleasantly at her, "and see if there's any phosphorescence on
the waves this fine evening?"
His quickness was rewarded by a quicker glance of half-amused
gratitude from the blue eyes of the girl at the head of the now
rifled tea-table--and then, with a pushing aside of chairs, and a
babble of--"while I get my new ta-ta on"--"Miss, dear, can I come out
as I am?"--"is it cowld?"--"no, you can't have my furs! Leave off!"
the girls disappeared out of the Refectory, where, in spite of
wide-thrown windows, the air seemed close and still vibrating with
clatter, to the upper rooms of the Hostel.
Ted Urquhart was left to wait for them in the cool garden outside,
where the round-limbed plaster Loves laughed under their burden of
roses, to smoke his deferred cigarette and to revise his impressions
of the girl who would soon, he found, be settling down very naturally
and rapidly to her appropriate place in her _fiancé's_ heart.
"Mischievous, though. Just brimful of mischief," he decided. "Every
bit as much so as the other hussy! Only hers--Nell's--isn't allowed
to bubble over. It's all tucked away--takes cover under that hat, I
suppose. Watch that mouth of hers when the girls she's shepherding
say something that she's simply got to appear shocked at----"
He gave a short laugh as he turned up the path again and flicked a
bit of ash off on to the broken shell that served for gravel.
"Mischief! It was all part of it--her writing to me, long ago, that
she hadn't a photograph, didn't bother to have herself taken, as she
always came out so badly. Badly? She was hoarding up her looks,
deliberately. Meant to spring a mine upon me, when I did come home,
with her beauty and--and herself!"
He glanced, as he walked past, at the striped cascade of Match-Me
grass beside the porch.
"And her little prunes-and-primsy letters! Jove? The first one of
all--'_My dear Ted--Father and I both think that it will be the best
thing for me to accept your kind offer_' (of marriage, forsooth), and
then the others, the seedsman's catalogue and the list of fixtures at
The Court, and the--she _must_ have been laughing to herself as she
wrote that letter! Now, I wonder what on earth sort of a
young-man-not-in-a-hurry she thought she was writing to? I wonder
what she thinks--whether she thinks anything at all yet, that is, of
_me_?"
Rosamond Fayre was at that moment in her bedroom, changing her
house-slippers (always to be worn indoors at the Hostel, Rule 8) for
her white canvas beach-shoes, and thinking quite busily about the
guest of the afternoon.
And her first impression of him was, frankly, that she liked him very
much indeed. Yes. For a number of reasons she considered him (in
the bald, but comprehensive summing-up of girlhood) "nice."
To begin with, of course, his looks. His build and make, his alert
movements, his graceful height, the breadth of his flat shoulders and
the way his rather small head was set upon them--these things pleased
Rosamond's eyes, and through them, her sense of what a man should be
as well as look. He was active and fit and hard as nails. Now _he_
looked the sort of young man, she thought, to rush up and down the
Andes, making no more of the castings upon his shoulder than a porter
carting a kit-bag upstairs, like that weird sort of a _fiancé_ of
Eleanor's--to whom, by the way, another letter would have to be sent
off in a couple of days. Only, keen as he seemed over his
engineering and his camp-life, Eleanor's _fiancé_ was obviously a
laggard in love. This young man, Rosamond decided, would not be
that. She liked the quick grey glance of his impatient
eyes--patience in a man being one of the quite numerous virtues which
Woman respects and loathes. She liked the "Service crop" of his
brown hair and the tan of his face and the short moustache that was
scarcely darker than that tan, and that hid nothing of the firm line
of his lips. Decidedly good to look at. Such a nice voice, too,
thought Rosamond, tying the white strings of her shoe.
The right sort of clothes, too. As old as the hills, but _built_.
He'd changed the blue blazer and waist-belt and white flannel bags of
this morning for grey tweed things with an unstiffened white collar
fastened by a plain gold safety-pin under a tie of deep-blue knitted
silk.
"I wonder if ... anybody ... knitted it?" she broke off.
And she liked the way he wore the clothes, also that leather strap
about his wrist, and the very old silk handkerchief that had faded to
the brown of an autumn leaf, and--several more of the little details,
the omission or achievement of which young women were noticing at the
time that young men fondly dreamt that they--the girls--were being
profoundly interested in what happened at the seventh hole, or in
Ulster; what a man like Lloyd George was actually driving at, or what
had been the policy of their particular firm, up to now--
If the youth had but known!
It doesn't matter now, of course, since there is now always the one
topic, the War, for maid and man....
This young man, besides being agreeable to look at and to listen to,
possessed that Something to which girls who are sisters pay tribute.
(In a two-edged remark which sometimes also means that they,
personally, find a young man hopelessly uninspiring!)
"The boys would like him."
Rosamond Fayre, remembering the brother dead in his early twenties,
thought, "Yes. My dear old boy would have liked him!"
How nice he--the visitor--had been at tea! Some young men might have
"taken advantage" in some tiny, imperceptible way of Pansy, who was
_rather_ appalling when she let her high spirits run away with her
like that. Rosamond was almost as grateful to him for his behaviour
this afternoon as for that of this morning.
How ripping and "on the spot" and dependable he'd been this morning!
Rosamond found that she utterly approved of everything she'd noticed,
so far, about--his name? What about that name of his? M--m, _well_!
Well, he'd missed his opportunity of getting it in at once, of
course. Afterwards, of _course_ he wasn't going to give away the
name at which such a dead set had been made by the girls! Serve them
right that he'd faced round and begun to tease them!
Rosamond was glad she'd interrupted, when he was just going to give
in. She was glad she'd said "_Don't_ tell anybody your name!"
"Because he'll know," she reflected, as she closed her bedroom door,
and ran downstairs to join the group in the porch, "he'll know that
when I said 'anybody' I meant 'anybody except me.' He'll have to
tell _me_ when we get down to the shore, of course!"