Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 378
“If you press this place, just beside the electric lights switch,” she said, “the panel will slide back into the wall and let you right into the next room.”
“That would be rather a lark,” the major said. “Where did you say it exactly was?”
Miss Jenkins had turned back into the room and was going towards the little door. She looked back over her shoulder and said:
“It would let you into Miss Flossie Delamare’s room, sir.”
The major sank back into his arm-chair again. “Oh, heavens!” he exclaimed; “then don’t show me. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know anything about knobs and things. Go away. Go away quickly. It’s most improper your being here, and I wouldn’t mind betting half a crown that Olympia will be here in a minute or two.”
“Well, I’m glad you’ve thought of that at last, sir,” Miss Jenkins said.
“I don’t mind saying,” the major confessed, “that Miss Olympia is particularly jealous of attractive servants. We’re only going to have men when we are married.”
Miss Jenkins disappeared under the dark hangings, and again the major was perfectly certain that she said:
“Oh, poor fellow!”
CHAPTER V.
ONCE again the major was left to potter about his room and to think. And once more he exclaimed to himself that there, in a manner of speaking, they all were, only that the deuce of the matter was that he couldn’t in the least tell in any manner of speaking where in the world it was that they could be said to be, and he certainly hadn’t got any hot water, and he knew that he would go without it, for he was pretty certain that that young lady wouldn’t answer his bell again.
He was therefore just beginning to take off his coat when, with a little click, the electric lights went out, and he grumbled vigorously that it was only in a house tenanted by his aunt that you could be certain of having no water, and equally certain of having no light.
The fire had rather died down, so that it was pretty darkish as he strolled across the room in a brown study and stretched his hand towards the switch. He couldn’t for the life of him make up his mind whether Miss Jenkins was the second woman in the four hundred million, or whether she wasn’t, as he put it, something altogether too
preposterously impossible — that she could possibly be. It had affected him like something impossible, really as if he had seen a ghost.
He was looking at Miss Flossie Delamare. There wasn’t the least doubt that he was looking at Flossie. She was in a peignoir that was a foam of pink. She was standing with her back to a dressing-table that was covered with shining things. She was just saying good night to somebody who had just gone out of the room, and she looked exactly like a rather small Olivia out of the Vicar of Wakefield. The walls were all covered with a pink-flowered chintz, the hangings of the four-post bed were all of pink-flowered chintz, and so were the curtains and the valances over the long windows. It was an extraordinary effect, as if it had been sunlight; it was as if he had stepped right straight out of the gloom of the seventeenth century bang into the eighteenth. The panel had just gone; noiselessly upon its castors it had disappeared, and Major Edward Brent Foster found himself explaining to himself that now he could understand why Mary Savylle treasured her house enough to leave her own maid behind her when it contained such perfect treasures of old rooms, for over the high white mantelpiece there was an undoubted Gainsborough — a gentleman in a bright red coat pointing his finger to distant cannon fire.
But he hadn’t the least hesitation about advancing into the room and exclaiming:
“Here, I say, for goodness’ sake, Flossie, lend me one of your candles and let me find that blessed knob again.”
Miss Delamare’s eyes became rather wide, and she exclaimed:
“Teddy Brent, by all that’s wonderful!”
“Oh!” the major exclaimed. “Why don’t you say ‘Teddy Brent, by all that’s damnable?’ You’ve got to remember that my respectable name is Foster now, and that I am a reformed character.”
“Well, I didn’t ask you to come into my bedroom, Teddy,” Miss Delamare said, with a slightly injured air. “I don’t object to your being here. But I didn’t ask you. Your aunt’s just gone. I’ve been sitting talking to her, or goodness knows what dreadful things you mightn’t have seen.”
“Well, lend me a candle,” the major said.
“But what’s it all about?” Miss Delamare asked. “You don’t surely come into a lady’s room at a quarter past twelve and ask her for a candle?”
“I do,” the major exclaimed. “Don’t you understand there’s a sliding panel between these rooms? And I touched the knob by accident, and I can’t get it shut.” And the major disappeared once more and began to fumble with the frame of the picture.
Miss Delamare came delicately across the room bearing one of her candles, and looked in upon the major.
She said maliciously: “I say, Teddy, aren’t you going to admire my new dressing-gown? Aren’t you going to kiss me, or anything? Don’t you remember Simla and the pukka drives?” The major recoiled from the frame, and his shadow went dancing all over the walls and the ceiling of his room. “Don’t you come into this room!” he said. “Don’t you dare to!”
“Teddy” Miss Delamare said, “what’s the matter with you?”
“The matter with me,” the major said grimly, “is that I’m engaged to Olympia Peabody.”
“Oh, Teddy,” she said woefully, “I knew you were going to marry someone pretty awful — but that old mummy! Oh, Teddy, that’s playing it too low down.”
The major said: “Well, I’m not proud of it. But I’ve got to get this panel shut.”
“Well, it doesn’t look as if you could, Teddy,” Miss Delamare said amiably. “You’d better let me come in and try. Men aren’t a bit of good at that sort of thing.” And she came into his room and set the candle down on his dressing-table.
The major moved away from the frame as if he were afraid of her.
“I don’t believe you can do anything,” he said gloomily. “And what will poor Olympia say if she hears it’s found open in the morning?”
“Oh, I guess she’ll have some pretty sweet things to say,” Miss Delamare said, with her back to him and slightly abstractedly, because she was feeling along the heavily carved frame for the knob. The frame was perhaps a foot and a half broad, of carved wood representing an inextricable tangle of bunches of grapes, roses, and thistles.
“The servant said,” the major continued, “that it was just beside the light switch.”
The picture was there in its place. Noiselessly, and as if in a procession they had been drawn along on a car, the three fierce men, the three bare-shouldered, mild, blonde women and the children, occupied their places and looked dim in the light of Miss Delamare’s candle.
“Well, it isn’t,” Miss Delamare said; “it’s a full foot above the switch.”
The major, who had sprung back at the ghostly arrival of the panel, now sprang forward.
“Hang on to it!” he exclaimed. “For goodness’ sake hang on to it, or we shall be caught like rats in a trap. That thing is the very devil!”
“All right, I’m hanging on,” Miss Delamare said, appearing as if she were nailed to the wall by one white, raised hand. “But it really isn’t necessary. It’s this knobby thistle thing that does the trick.”
“Then for goodness’ sake,” the major repeated, “do the trick and get back to your room and shut it after you, and let’s have a night’s rest.”
“All right, Teddy,” Miss Delamare repeated in her turn; “but you might give me a minute or two, I do think.”
“Not a minute, not a second,” the major answered hotly. “It’s too dangerous. We can talk to-morrow.”
“No we can’t, Teddy,” she answered. “Your Olympia — you should just have seen her face when your aunt introduced me to her as your very oldest, dearest, darlingest friend — your Olympia will jolly well see to that. No more talks for us.”
“But it would give my aunt her death if you were found here,” the major pleaded.
“I don’t believe it would,” she said. “Your aunt’s too sensible for that. But I’ll go, if it’s for her sake. I’m hanged if I would if you’d mentioned the other woman again!” She moved her wrist on the frame.
“By Jove, Teddy,” she said, “I’m wiggling the button thing up and down for all I am worth, and the old panel thing don’t move a step.”
The major stepped agitatedly towards her, and she continued: “It isn’t a thing you press; you click it up and down like a switch. Here, you have a try.”
With a face full of a sort of awe the major began clicking the thistle-like knob, interjecting from time to time: “Oh, hell!” And with the awe intensified he looked round upon Miss Delamare.
“It — won’t — move,” he exclaimed slowly.
Miss Delamare seated herself comfortably in his arm-chair and kicked off her shoes. She extended her stockings to the fire.
“Oh, go on wiggling, I can wait,” she said.
The major set his face to the wall, first on one side of the knob and then on the other. He pulled out his penknife, tried to remove what he thought might be some dirt from the workings of the thistle shank.
“I believe the clockwork’s run down,” Miss Delamare said. “It must work by a spring, or it couldn’t be so quiet. Don’t you be too violent or you’ll break the whole blessed thing, and then we shall be in the cart.”
The major tried pressing and tried pulling. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, and then he ran his nails along the edge of the picture itself.
“You can kiss me if you like, Teddy,” Miss Delamare’s voice came to him mockingly. “Then it would be quite like old times.”
The major repeated: “Oh, hell!”
“No, I didn’t say anything so nasty,” Miss Delamare continued to mock him. “I said you could kiss me. Don’t you remember Simla?”
The major was fumbling in his kit-bag for a little oil-can he always carried with him.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m not going to.” He paused to recover his breath. “Look here. There’s no cause to open that panel again. You just get out of my room by the usual way.” And at a very slight shake of Miss Delamare’s head he went on: “I’ll give you a pearl necklace if you’ll go quietly — one I bought for poor Olympia.”
Again Miss Delamare shook her head.
“I’d like to do that Yankee in the eye,” she ejaculated. “But if you think, Major Edward Brent Foster, late of His Majesty’s 126th Regiment, that I’m going to walk all along these old corridors in the dark and black-beetles...”
“Oh, rot!” the major said. “You used to walk all over Simla in the dark.”
“But not black-beetles, Teddy,” Miss Delamare exclaimed.
“Up the Bazaar and along the Chota Hazri Drive and King William Street — everywhere.”
“You’re remembering Simla now, Teddy,” Miss Delamare said softly.
“I don’t want to, but I’ve got to,” the major conceded, “for the sake of argument....”
And then Miss Delamare said, softly and astonishingly: “Poor fellow!”
The major really jumped.
“Don’t say that!” he ejaculated. “That’s what Nancy’s housemaid said.”
“Well, you are a poor, poor fellow,” Miss Delamare corroborated. “Did ums want its old friend out of its little bedroom?”
“Yes, I do,” the major said frankly. “Look here, Flossie, do the decent thing and quit. I don’t believe I’m very well. I’ve had a sort of message from — from Mary Savylle. You heard me speak of her in Simla.”
“Oh, I don’t remember Simla!” Miss Delamare said, with a toss of her head. “And so this Mary Savylle?”
“I don’t know,” the major said. “She hasn’t married.... But just trot away, there’s a good chap. I’ll kiss you and give you the pearl necklace too.”
Miss Delamare jumped out of her chair and faced him in her stockinged feet.
“Who wants your old kisses and who wants your pearl necklaces?” she exclaimed. “Keep them for Olympia Peabody and joy go with them.”
She moved towards the door and then turned to say:
“I was never the one to come between a man and his fair and blushing bride. I don’t want to spoil sport. I wish you all the joy you can get. ALL!” She paused, and then she added: “But you may kiss me if you want to, Teddy.”
The major looked at her and then at the fire.
“I don’t really think I want to, Flossie,” he said slowly. “I don’t — I don’t believe I can be very well.”
“Oh well, Teddy,” she said, with a remonstrating voice, “don’t talk to me as if you were sea-sick and I were a pork chop. Just say you’ve seen the girl you really like again. Don’t put it as if I didn’t look good to kiss. That would damage my professional chances. The other’s only a matter of my heart.”
“Oh, Lord, no,” the major said. “You’re a sweet good brick — a lump of nougat — and the prettiest girl — the prettiest girl — only — I just want to get a chance to think...”
Miss Delamare said “Poor fellow!” again, and the major said:
“Don’t say that, I don’t like it,” again in a really appealing voice; and he added: “Go away as quietly as you can.”
“All right, Teddy,” she answered. “I’m in my stockinged feet and I shan’t ring a fire-bell.
I don’t in the least know whether I can find my way, but I guess I’ll get in somewhere all right.” For the third time the major fell into his armchair, but this time he exclaimed:
“No, I can’t see — even though Flossie doesn’t add anything to the problem at all — I can’t see in any imaginable manner of speaking where we all...”
CHAPTER VI.
THERE came a knock upon his door — quite a loud knock — and he started forward in his low chair and sat listening, with his right hand almost on the floor.
“That’ll be Olympia! If she’s seen Flossie going...” The knocking was repeated more determinedly, and he called, “Come in,” because he imagined that Olympia would not really care to come into his room. Mrs. Kerr Howe came in.
She was in a purple Japanese kimono with a swallow worked in gold thread over each breast, and a great roll and bow at the back, her maid having learned how to put kimonos on in Tokio. She tripped in — and her smallness gave a certain Japanese air of littleness, resignation, and obedience — and remarked:
“I said we must have an explanation before to-morrow morning. I’ve come for it.” And she sat herself down on the edge of the arm-chair facing the major’s and looked at him. The contrast between her appearance and her mental attitude always surprised the major so much — he was always expecting some sort of soft fluffiness to
come out somewhere — that he simply gave up the situation. He let drop any attempt to understand and to control it with the words:
“I’m simply too flabbergasted to be able to try to explain anything. I couldn’t explain the theory of lateral strains in bridges. And there seem to be ten or a dozen women determined to go after me here. I never knew such a place. It’s like being mad.” And suddenly he really felt a sort of glad madness — he couldn’t imagine that he was not at least going to get some fun out of it. Mrs. Kerr Howe said:
“Well, I’m glad you feel some remorse.”
“Oh, it’s not exactly remorse,” he answered almost gaily. “It’s like having indigestion very badly. So that you can’t eat with ten dishes that you’d like to eat very much just under your poor nose.”
Mrs. Kerr Howe said contemptuously:
“I suppose you think that I am one of the ten or a dozen. It’s like you to regard yourself as the Grand Turk!”
“It’s like you, Juliana,” the major said, “to say polygamous things of that sort. I wish I just felt like that.”
“No doubt you do,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said, with an even deeper note of determination. “But I’m going to have my explanation. There was not time in the train because I wanted to get my play settled about. And from what I’ve seen of Miss Peabody — your aunt introduced me to her as your oldest, best, and most affectionate friend, so she’s prepared for what’s coming — from what I’ve seen of the lady I don’t imagine she will leave us much time together to-morrow. So it has got to be now.”
“But, my dear Juliana,” the major said, “you’ve got really to remember that I’m a reformed character!”
“I don’t in the least understand you,” Mrs. Kerr Howe said; “I haven’t asked you to do anything but your simple duty.”
“It’s really all I can do to understand myself,” the major laughed. “I can only tell you that I vowed to reform the moment I crossed my aunt’s threshold. I’m bound to say that, from what I can make of it, she does not seem anxious that I should. But still, that’s my job — a difficult one, but I’m doing my best.”
Mrs. Kerr Howe pointed to Miss Delamare’s slippers that were in the fender.
“You’ve been having someone to help you,” she said amiably. But the major had noticed her eye on them by the speech before the last.
“Oh, those?” he said; “that’s a little present I brought for poor Olympia. She’s so liable to cold that I was airing them a little. But I do wish you’d go.”
And then Mrs. Kerr Howe remarked: “Poor fellow!”
The major started energetically forward in his chair.
“Look here,” he shouted, “don’t you say that. I can stand anything but that. There’s nothing the matter with me. I don’t want pity.” Mrs. Kerr Howe was looking down into the fender with what she meant to be an expression of meditative cruelty. “Do you always give people second-hand hearts — and presents?” she asked. “These slippers have been worn, I see.”
“Why of course, Juliana,” the major answered, with an engaging air of candour, “I always have presents worn when I bring them from abroad. It saves the customs duty.”
“I see,” she said slowly, as if she were working out a riddle; “you get Flossie Delamare to wear them before you present them to your fiancée. That’s what’s called standing in another woman’s shoes, isn’t it? And to save you the trouble of lying any more — I hid in a doorway as she left this room; I had enough decency not to want to be seen. She did not seem to mind.”
