Miss Cayley"s Adventures.
by Grant Allen.
I
THE ADVENTURE OF THE CANTANKEROUS OLD LADY
On the day when I found myself with twopence in my pocket, I naturally made up my mind to go round the world.
It was my stepfather"s death that drove me to it. I had never seen my stepfather. Indeed, I never even thought of him as anything more than Colonel Watts-Morgan. I owed him nothing, except my poverty. He married my dear mother when I was a girl at school in Switzerland; and he proceeded to spend her little fortune, left at her sole disposal by my father"s will, in paying his gambling debts. After that, he carried my dear mother off to Burma; and when he and the climate between them had succeeded in killing her, he made up for his appropriations at the cheapest rate by allowing me just enough to send me to Girton. So, when the Colonel died, in the year I was leaving college, I did not think it necessary to go into mourning for him. Especially as he chose the precise moment when my allowance was due, and bequeathed me nothing but his consolidated liabilities.
"Of course you will teach," said Elsie Petheridge, when I explained my affairs to her. "There is a good demand just now for high-school teachers."
I looked at her, aghast. "_Teach!_ Elsie," I cried. (I had come up to town to settle her in at her unfurnished lodgings.) "Did you say _teach_? That"s just like you dear good schoolmistresses! You go to Cambridge, and get examined till the heart and life have been examined out of you; then you say to yourselves at the end of it all, "Let me see; what am I good for now? I"m just about fit to go away and examine other people!" That"s what our Princ.i.p.al would call "a vicious circle"--if one could ever admit there was anything vicious at all about _you_, dear. No, Elsie, I do _not_ propose to teach. Nature did not cut me out for a high-school teacher. I couldn"t swallow a poker if I tried for weeks. Pokers don"t agree with me. Between ourselves, I am a bit of a rebel."
"You are, Brownie," she answered, pausing in her papering, with her sleeves rolled up--they called me "Brownie," partly because of my dark complexion, but partly because they could never understand me. "We all knew that long ago."
I laid down the paste-brush and mused.
"Do you remember, Elsie," I said, staring hard at the paper-board," when I first went to Girton, how all you girls wore your hair quite straight, in neat smooth coils, plaited up at the back about the size of a pancake; and how of a sudden I burst in upon you, like a tropical hurricane, and demoralised you; and how, after three days of me, some of the dear innocents began with awe to cut themselves artless fringes, while others went out in fear and trembling and surrept.i.tiously purchased a pair of curling-tongs? I was a bomb-sh.e.l.l in your midst in those days; why, you yourself were almost afraid at first to speak to me."
"You see, you had a bicycle," Elsie put in, smoothing the half-papered wall; "and in those days, of course, ladies didn"t bicycle. You must admit, Brownie, dear, it _was_ a startling innovation. You terrified us so. And yet, after all, there isn"t much harm in you."
"I hope not," I said devoutly. "I was before my time, that was all; at present, even a curate"s wife may blamelessly bicycle."
"But if you don"t teach," Elsie went on, gazing at me with those wondering big blue eyes of hers, "whatever will you do, Brownie?" Her horizon was bounded by the scholastic circle.
"I haven"t the faintest idea," I answered, continuing to paste. "Only, as I can"t trespa.s.s upon your elegant hospitality for life, whatever I mean to do, I must begin doing this morning, when we"ve finished the papering. I couldn"t teach" (teaching, like mauve, is the refuge of the incompetent); "and I don"t, if possible, want to sell bonnets."
"As a milliner"s girl?" Elsie asked, with a face of red horror.
"As a milliner"s girl; why not? "Tis an honest calling. Earls" daughters do it now. But you needn"t look so shocked. I tell you, just at present, I am not contemplating it."
"Then what _do_ you contemplate?"
I paused and reflected. "I am here in London," I answered, gazing rapt at the ceiling; "London, whose streets are paved with gold--though it _looks_ at first sight like muddy flagstones; London, the greatest and richest city in the world, where an adventurous soul ought surely to find some loophole for an adventure. (That piece is hung crooked, dear; we shall have to take it down again.) I devise a Plan, therefore. I submit myself to fate; or, if you prefer it, I leave my future in the hands of Providence. I shall stroll out this morning, as soon as I"ve "cleaned myself," and embrace the first stray enterprise that offers.
Our Bagdad teems with enchanted carpets. Let one but float my way, and, hi, presto, I seize it. I go where glory or a modest competence waits me. I s.n.a.t.c.h at the first offer, the first hint of an opening."
Elsie stared at me, more aghast and more puzzled than ever. "But, how?"
she asked. "Where? When? You _are_ so strange! What will you do to find one?"
"Put on my hat and walk out," I answered. "Nothing could be simpler.
This city bursts with enterprises and surprises. Strangers from east and west hurry through it in all directions. Omnibuses traverse it from end to end--even, I am told, to Islington and Putney; within, folk sit face to face who never saw one another before in their lives, and who may never see one another again, or, on the contrary, may pa.s.s the rest of their days together."
I had a lovely harangue all pat in my head, in much the same strain, on the infinite possibilities of entertaining angels unawares, in cabs, on the Underground, in the aerated bread shops; but Elsie"s widening eyes of horror pulled me up short like a hansom in Piccadilly when the inexorable upturned hand of the policeman checks it. "Oh, Brownie," she cried, drawing back, "you _don"t_ mean to tell me you"re going to ask the first young man you meet in an omnibus to marry you?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: I AM GOING OUT, SIMPLY IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURE.]
I shrieked with laughter, "Elsie," I cried, kissing her dear yellow little head, "you are _impayable_. You never will learn what I mean. You don"t understand the language. No, no; I am going out, simply in search of adventure. What adventure may come, I have not at this moment the faintest conception. The fun lies in the search, the uncertainty, the toss-up of it. What is the good of being penniless--with the trifling exception of twopence--unless you are prepared to accept your position in the spirit of a masked ball at Covent Garden?"
"I have never been to one," Elsie put in.
"Gracious heavens, neither have I! What on earth do you take me for? But I mean to see where fate will lead me."
"I may go with you?" Elsie pleaded.
"Certainly _not_, my child," I answered--she was three years older than I, so I had the right to patronise her. "That would spoil all. Your dear little face would be quite enough to scare away a timid adventure." She knew what I meant. It was gentle and pensive, but it lacked initiative.
So, when we had finished that wall, I popped on my best hat, and popped out by myself into Kensington Gardens.
I am told I ought to have been terribly alarmed at the straits in which I found myself--a girl of twenty-one, alone in the world, and only twopence short of penniless, without a friend to protect, a relation to counsel her. (I don"t count Aunt Susan, who lurked in ladylike indigence at Blackheath, and whose counsel, like her tracts, was given away too profusely to everybody to allow of one"s placing any very high value upon it.) But, as a matter of fact, I must admit I was not in the least alarmed. Nature had endowed me with a profusion of crisp black hair, and plenty of high spirits. If my eyes had been like Elsie"s--that liquid blue which looks out upon life with mingled pity and amazement--I might have felt as a girl ought to feel under such conditions; but having large dark eyes, with a bit of a twinkle in them, and being as well able to pilot a bicycle as any girl of my acquaintance, I have inherited or acquired an outlook on the world which distinctly leans rather towards cheeriness than despondency. I croak with difficulty. So I accepted my plight as an amusing experience, affording full scope for the congenial exercise of courage and ingenuity.
How boundless are the opportunities of Kensington Gardens--the Round Pond, the winding Serpentine, the mysterious seclusion of the Dutch brick Palace! Genii swarm there. One jostles possibilities. It is a land of romance, bounded on the north by the Abyss of Bayswater, and on the south by the Amphitheatre of the Albert Hall. But for a centre of adventure I choose the Long Walk; it beckoned me somewhat as the North-West Pa.s.sage beckoned my seafaring ancestors--the buccaneering mariners of Elizabethan Devon. I sat down on a chair at the foot of an old elm with a poetic hollow, prosaically filled by a utilitarian plate of galvanised iron. Two ancient ladies were seated on the other side already--very grand-looking dames, with the haughty and exclusive ugliness of the English aristocracy in its later stages. For frank hideousness, commend me to the n.o.ble dowager. They were talking confidentially as I sat down; the trifling episode of my approach did not suffice to stem the full stream of their conversation. The great ignore the intrusion of their inferiors.
[Ill.u.s.tration: OUI, MADAME; MERCI BEAUCOUP, MADAME.]
"Yes, it"s a terrible nuisance," the eldest and ugliest of the two observed--she was a high-born lady, with a distinctly cantankerous cast of countenance. She had a Roman nose, and her skin was wrinkled like a wilted apple; she wore coffee-coloured point-lace in her bonnet, with a complexion to match. "But what could I do, my dear? I simply _couldn"t_ put up with such insolence. So I looked her straight back in the face--oh, she quailed, I can tell you; and I said to her, in my iciest voice--you know how icy I can be when occasion demands it"--the second old lady nodded an ungrudging a.s.sent, as if perfectly prepared to admit her friend"s rare gift of iciness--"I said to her, "Celestine, you can take your month"s wages, and half an hour to get out of this house." And she dropped me a deep reverence, and she answered: "_Oui, madame; merci beaucoup, madame; je ne desire pas mieux, madame._" And out she flounced. So there was the end of it."
"Still, you go to Schlangenbad on Monday?"
"That"s the point. On Monday. If it weren"t for the journey, I should have been glad enough to be rid of the minx. I"m glad as it is, indeed; for a more insolent, upstanding, independent, answer-you-back-again young woman, with a sneer of her own, _I_ never saw, Amelia--but I _must_ get to Schlangenbad. Now, there the difficulty comes in. On the one hand, if I engage a maid in London, I have the choice of two evils.
Either I must take a trapesing English girl--and I know by experience that an English girl on the Continent is a vast deal worse than no maid at all: _you_ have to wait upon _her_, instead of her waiting upon you; she gets seasick on the crossing, and when she reaches France or Germany, she hates the meals, and she detests the hotel servants, and she can"t speak the language, so that she"s always calling you in to interpret for her in her private differences with the _fille-de-chambre_ and the landlord; or else I must pick up a French maid in London, and I know equally by experience that the French maids one engages in London are invariably dishonest--more dishonest than the rest even; they"ve come here because they have no character to speak of elsewhere, and they think you aren"t likely to write and enquire of their last mistress in Toulouse or St. Petersburg. Then, again, on the other hand, I can"t wait to get a Gretchen, an unsophisticated little Gretchen of the Taunus at Schlangenbad-- I suppose there _are_ unsophisticated girls in Germany still--made in Germany--they don"t make "em any longer in England, I"m sure--like everything else, the trade in rustic innocence has been driven from the country. I can"t wait to get a Gretchen, as I should like to do, of course, because I simply _daren"t_ undertake to cross the Channel alone and go all that long journey by Ostend or Calais, Brussels and Cologne, to Schlangenbad."
"You could get a temporary maid," her friend suggested, in a lull of the tornado.
The Cantankerous Old Lady flared up. "Yes, and have my jewel-case stolen! Or find she was an English girl without one word of German. Or nurse her on the boat when I want to give my undivided attention to my own misfortunes. No, Amelia, I call it positively unkind of you to suggest such a thing. You"re _so_ unsympathetic! I put my foot down there. I will _not_ take any temporary person."
I saw my chance. This was a delightful idea. Why not start for Schlangenbad with the Cantankerous Old Lady?
Of course, I had not the slightest intention of taking a lady"s-maid"s place for a permanency. Nor even, if it comes to that, as a pa.s.sing expedient. But _if_ I wanted to go round the world, how could I do better than set out by the Rhine country? The Rhine leads you on to the Danube, the Danube to the Black Sea, the Black Sea to Asia; and so, by way of India, China, and j.a.pan, you reach the Pacific and San Francisco; whence one returns quite easily by New York and the White Star Liners. I began to feel like a globe-trotter already; the Cantankerous Old Lady was the thin end of the wedge--the first rung of the ladder! I proceeded to put my foot on it.
[Ill.u.s.tration: EXCUSE ME, I SAID, BUT I THINK I SEE A WAY OUT OF YOUR DIFFICULTY.]
I leaned around the corner of the tree and spoke. "Excuse me," I said, in my suavest voice, "but I think I see a way out of your difficulty."
My first impression was that the Cantankerous Old Lady would go off in a fit of apoplexy. She grew purple in the face with indignation and astonishment, that a casual outsider should venture to address her; so much so, indeed, that for a second I almost regretted my well-meant interposition. Then she scanned me up and down, as if I were a girl in a mantle shop, and she contemplated buying either me or the mantle. At last, catching my eye, she thought better of it, and burst out laughing.
"What do you mean by this eavesdropping?" she asked.
I flushed up in turn. "This is a public place," I replied, with dignity; "and you spoke in a tone which was hardly designed for the strictest privacy. If you don"t wish to be overheard, you oughtn"t to shout.
Besides, I desired to do you a service."
The Cantankerous Old Lady regarded me once more from head to foot. I did not quail. Then she turned to her companion. "The girl has spirit," she remarked, in an encouraging tone, as if she were discussing some absent person. "Upon my word, Amelia, I rather like the look of her. Well, my good woman, what do you want to suggest to me?"
"Merely this," I replied, bridling up and crushing her. "I am a Girton girl, an officer"s daughter, no more a good woman than most others of my cla.s.s; and I have nothing in particular to do for the moment. I don"t object to going to Schlangenbad. I would convoy you over, as companion, or lady-help, or anything else you choose to call it; I would remain with you there for a week, till you could arrange with your Gretchen, presumably unsophisticated; and then I would leave you. Salary is unimportant; my fare suffices. I accept the chance as a cheap opportunity of attaining Schlangenbad."
The yellow-faced old lady put up her long-handled tortoise-sh.e.l.l eyegla.s.ses and inspected me all over again. "Well, I declare," she murmured. "What are girls coming to, I wonder? Girton, you say; Girton!