by Berta Ruck
CHAPTER I
THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR
MY story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time inany household that boasts--or perhaps deplores--a high-spirited girl oftwenty-three in it.
It begins with "a row" about a young man.
My story begins, too, where the first woman's story began--in a garden.
It was the back garden of our red-roofed villa in that suburban street,Laburnum Grove, Putney, S.W.
Now all those eighty-five neat gardens up and down the leafy road areone exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn justnot big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with goldencalceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the brighteasy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardensseem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, theirbrightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.
From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-class,not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people wholive in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father,the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put theirlittle newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and whocall laughing remarks to each other out of the window.
"I say, Gladys! don't forget it's the theatre to-night!"
"Oh, rather not! See you up at the Tennis Club presently?"
"No; I'm meeting Vera to shop and have lunch in Oxford Street."
"Dissipated rakes! '_We don't have much money, but we do see life_,'eh?"
Yes! From what I see of them, they do get heaps of fun out of theirlives, these young people who make up such a large slice of thepopulation of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship andenjoyment going on all up and down our road.
Except here. No laughter and parties and tennis club appointments at No.45, where I, Beatrice Lovelace, live with my Aunt Anastasia. No gaytimes _here_!
When we came here six years ago (I was eighteen) Aunt Anastasia was_rigidly_ firm about our having absolutely nothing to do with the peopleof the neighbourhood.
"They are not OUR kind," she said with her stately, rather thingrey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in theworld, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your deargrandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped outof OUR world, we need not associate with any other. Better _no_ societythan the wrong society."
So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no societyat all. I can't _tell_ you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribablydull and lonely it all is!
I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see somany of them about here!
"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself thisevening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls atNo. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughtertogether on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listenedenviously to their merriment.
I wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the onewith my own name, Beatrice--I know some of them by name as well as Iknow them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live inthis road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've neverbeen allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've neverexchanged a single----
"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of myreverie.
Startled, I glanced up.
The voice came over the palings between our garden and that of No. 44.Through the green trellis that my aunt had had set up over the palings("so that we should be more private") I beheld a gleam of whiteflannel-clad shoulders and of smooth, fair hair.
It was the young man who's lately come to live next door.
I've always thought he looked rather nice, and rather as if he wouldlike to say good morning or something whenever I've met him going by.
I suppose I ought not to have noticed even that? And, of course,according to my upbringing, I ought certainly not to have noticed himnow. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon thetrellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little greenwatering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap.Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the otherside of the garden.
But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feelslike doing! And alas! How very often the second factor wins the day!
It won the evening, that time.
I said: "Good evening."
And I thought that would be the end of it, but no.
The frank and boyish voice (quite as nice a voice as my soldier-brotherReggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--Isay, isn't it rather a long job watering the garden that way?"
It was, of course. But we couldn't afford a hose. Why, they cost aboutthirty shillings.
He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won'tyou?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over therailings and put the end of the hose straight into my hand.
"Oh, thank you; but I will not trouble you. Good evening."
Of course, that would have been the thing to say, icily, before I walkedoff.
Unfortunately I only got as far as "Oh, thank you----" And then myfingers must have fumbled the tap on or something. Anyhow, a great sprayof water immediately poured forth from out of the hose through theroses and the trellis, right on to the fair head and the face of theyoung man next door.
"Oh!" I cried, scarlet with embarrassment. "I beg your pardon----"
"It's quite all right, thanks," he said. "Most refreshing!"
Here I realised that I was still giving him a shower-bath all the time.
Then we both laughed heartily together. It was the first good laugh I'dhad for months! And then I trained the hose off him at last and on toour border, while the young man, watching me from over the palings, saidquickly:
"I've been wanting to talk to you, do you know? I've been wanting toask----"
Well, I suppose I shall never know now, what he wanted to ask. For thatwas the moment when there broke upon the peaceful evening air the soundof a voice from the back window of our drawing-room, calling in outragedaccents:
"Beatrice! Bee--atrice!"
Immediately all the laughter went out of me.
"Y--yes, Aunt Anastasia," I called back. In my agitation I dropped theend of the hose on to the ground, where it began irrigating the turf andmy four-and-elevenpenny shoes at the same time.
"Beatrice, come in here instantly," called my aunt in a voice there wasno gainsaying.
So, leaving the hose where it lay, and without another glance at thetrellis, in I dashed through the French window into our drawing-room.
A queer mixture of a room it is. So like us; so typical of ourcircumstances! A threadbare carpet and the cheapest bamboo easy-chairslive cheek-by-jowl with a priceless Chippendale cabinet from LovelaceCourt, holding a few pieces of china that represent the light of otherdays. Upon the faded cheap wallpaper there hangs the pride of our home,the Gainsborough portrait of one chestnut-haired, slim-throatedancestress, Lady Anastasia Lovelace, in white muslin and a blue sash,painted on the terrace steps at Lovelace Court.
This was the background to the figure of my Aunt Anastasia, who stood,holding herself as stiff as a poker (she is very nearly as slim, eventhough she's fifty-three) in her three-year-old grey alpaca gown withthe little eightpence-three-farthings white collar fastened by her pearlbrooch with granny's hair in it.
Her face told me what to expect. A heated flush, and no lips. One ofAuntie's worst tempers!
"Beatrice!" she exclaimed in a low, agitated tone. "I am ashamed of you.I am ashamed of you." She could not have said it more fervently if I'dbeen found forging cheques. "After all my care! To see you hobnobbinglike a housemaid with these people!"
Aunt Anastasia always mentions the people here as who should say "thewo
rms in the flower-beds" or "the blight upon the rambler-roses."
"I wasn't hobnobbing, Auntie," I defended myself. "Er--he only offeredme the hose to----"
"The thinnest of excuses," put in my aunt, curling what was leftvisible of her lips. "You need not have taken the hose."
"He put it right into my hand."
"Insufferable young bounder," exclaimed Aunt Anastasia, still morebitterly.
I felt myself flushing hotly.
"Auntie, why do you always call everybody that who is not ourselves?" Iventured. "'Honour bright,' the young man didn't do it in a bounder-yway at all. I'm sure he only meant to be nice and neighbourly and----"
"That will do, Beatrice. That will do," said my Aunt majestically. "I amextremely displeased with you. After all that I have said to you on thesubject of having nothing to do with the class of person among which weare compelled to live, you choose to forget yourself over--over a gardenwall, and a hose, forsooth.
"For the future, kindly remember that you are my niece"--(impressively)--"that you are your poor father's child"--(moreimpressively)--"and that you are Lady Anastasia's great-granddaughter"--(this most impressively of all, with a stately gesture towards theGainsborough portrait hanging over the most rickety of bamboo tables)."Our circumstances may be straitened now. We may be banished to anodious little hovel in the suburbs among people whom we cannot possiblyknow, even if the walls are so thin that we can hear them cleaning theirteeth next door. There is no disgrace in being poor, Beatrice. Thedisgrace lies in behaving as if you did not still belong to our family!"
Aunt Anastasia always pronounces these last two words as if they werewritten in capital letters, and as if she were uttering them in church.
"I am going to the library now to change my books," she concluded withmuch dignity. "During my absence you will occupy yourself by making thesalad for supper."
"Yes, Auntie," I said in the resigned tone that so often covers seethingrebellion. Then a sudden thought struck me, and I suggested: "Hadn'tI--hadn't I better return that hose? It is simply pouring itself out allover the lawn still----"
"I will return the hose," said my aunt, in the tragic tones of Mrs.Siddons playing Lady Macbeth and saying "Give me the dagger!"
She stepped towards the back window.
I didn't feel equal to seeing the encounter between Aunt Anastasia inher most icily formal mood and the young man with the nice voice, ofwhom I caught white-and-gold glimpses hovering about on the other sideof the green trellis.
I knew she'd be rude to him, as only "our families" can be rude to thosewhom they consider "bounders." He's nothing to me. I've never spoken tohim before this evening. I oughtn't to mind what he thinks about thoseweird people who live at No. 45. I oughtn't to wonder what it was he wasjust going to say to me.
So I fled out of the bamboo and heirloom furnished drawing-room, downthe narrow little oil-clothed passage, and into the kitchen with itsheartening smell of hot gooseberry tart and the cheerful society ofMillion, our little maid-of-all-work. It's the custom of our family tocall the maid by her surname.
(At the same time I couldn't help wondering what that young man had beengoing to say.)