There was no need to hurry over the business of getting to Clanborough
House. In fact, Mame had intended to walk, but the new shoes were so
tight that she hailed the first taxi she saw. Instead, however, of
giving the sublime address, she prudently said Selfridge’s. She had
been over the line of route already. Clanborough House was an easy five
minutes on foot from that famous store; it would cost less and consume
a certain amount of time, of which there was more than enough, if she
walked the remainder of the distance. A gentle stroll, moreover, would
help her to get on terms with her fashionable self.
At Selfridge’s she discharged her taxi. Then growing more collected
every yard, in spite of the pinching of her shoes, she quietly
sauntered through a series of by-streets until she turned a corner and
came upon the sign Clanborough Street W.1.
Here she was. At once she descried an awning in the middle distance.
The awning was striped red and white. It stretched from the kerb,
across the pavement, beyond the railings, along a kind of paved
courtyard, and finally merged in the sombre stonework of a gloomy
building, a sort of cross between a workhouse and a penitentiary,
which since the year of grace 1709 had borne the name of Clanborough
House.
Beneath the awning’s entire length ran a red carpet. Mame was so
early, it was hardly likely that the first guests would be back from
the church within the next half hour. That was her own calculation,
which she was careful to verify by the watch on her wrist and also
by the clock on the adjacent church tower of St. Sepulchre. But the
wedding-going public had assembled already; not merely in twos and
threes but in fair-sized battalions. The Metropolitan police had
assembled also; not in twos and threes either, but a round thirty or
so good-humoured and efficient men, who, subject to their own little
vagaries, as Mame was in a position to bear witness, were yet past
masters in handling clotted masses of the British cit.
This pleasant afternoon of early spring they were all out to do their
job with grace and skill. They had drawn a cordon round Clanborough
House and its environs. As Mame came up she observed that privileged
beings armed with cameras were in the middle of the road. This caused
her some slight regret that she had not driven up to the awning in
style and had the door opened by a policeman. It was reasonably certain
that she would have been the first guest to arrive and would therefore
have been a good subject for the camera. With a bit of luck the new hat
and fox might have found their way into the New York papers.
It seemed a pity to have missed that chance. Life, however, still
held one or two agreeable things. One of these was the fact that the
first policeman to challenge her progress, when in order to dissociate
herself from the crowd she stepped off the sidewalk and took to the
roadway, was no less than that identical young cop whom she had met the
previous evening in Hyde Park.
Life is full of gay surprises. For Mame at this moment it was a
delicious affair. To be stopped by that veritable baby in the broad
light of day, to be accosted before the multitude, and to be politely
requested not to walk in the road was about as good a thing as could
have happened to her. The sight of the dour but well-cut features, of
the sandy hair and the unsmiling face filled her at once with the joy
that warriors feel.
Now that the big moment had come she was no longer cuckoo. Like any
other American citizeness she was reacting just naturally to the
occasion. The sight of that policeman, the sound of his voice, removed
the last trace of stage fright.
“Ye can’t walk along hair, miss.”
“Why not?”
“Unless ye’ve a ticket for the r-r-reception.”
Torn between an ambition to behave like a peeress and a powerful desire
to put one over on the constable, the wearer of the new hat and fox
opened her vanity bag and haughtily produced her invite.
The young bobby, at the sight of that magic bit of pasteboard and with
the eyes of many superior officers upon him, drew himself to his full
height and saluted the new hat and fox as only a Scots policeman could
have done.
Coolly and with fixity of mind, Mame went through some warlike
evolutions with her tortoise-shell folders. A whole series of
evolutions. She seemed to detect all about her a sudden joyous clicking
of cameras. Her picture was going to be in the New York papers after
all.
It was the proudest moment life so far had given her. But she was equal
to it. Now that she was fairly in at the deep end, the springs of being
seemed automatically to tighten up. She was going to swim. And she was
going to swim all the better for having so recently distrusted the
power of her breast stroke and the freedom of her leg action.
The eyes of the world were upon the tortoise-shell folders. In Paula
Wyse Ling’s opinion there was nothing like them. Paula was right as
usual. Mame was conscious of the gaze of the _Daily Lyre_-consuming
public growing rounder and rounder. She could almost hear the suckers
asking, Which Little Nob Is This?