Enchanted Autumn

by Mary Whistler

  “Don’t think I’m one of those miserable scrooges who demand their pound of flesh,” the American girl said. “But I do happen to pay you to work for me, don’t I, honey? And there’s a stack of work been piling up over the last few days! And one other thing I’d better mention while I’m on the subject.”

  “Yes?” Jane said, waiting for it.

  “This is a bit more awkward, honey,” surveying the tip of her freshly lighted cigarette. “But I am a guest here... Do you follow me? Rene invited me to stay here, and of course he knew I’d have to bring you along, too, but there’s such a thing as being tactful. You being tactful, I mean! And by that I mean, you don’t have to stick around in the evening - not all the time! I don’t expect you to dissolve into thin air when we want to have a little cosy chat, but you have got a nice bedroom, and some books and things. Mark always looking a bit peeved gets on my nerves, but you’re understanding. Am I being very clumsy?”

  “No, of course not,” Jane assured her. And that was one reason why she refused to permit her host to provide her with a hired horse, although she loved riding, and had done so from earliest childhood. And when difficulties arose over the spot where she was to work, because Madame Heloise looked upon the library as her own happy hunting-ground, she was the first to suggest that her own room would be perfectly comfortable, and that she could work very well there.

  But this was where Rene actively obstructed her. He knocked on her door one morning when she was halfway through a pile of letters she had started on directly after breakfast, and to her astonishment he actually and unmistakably glowered when he saw the surroundings amidst which she was labouring. He strode into the room wearing grey slacks and a white pullover, and uttered an exclamation as if he was rather more than annoyed.

  “But what in the world was Jeanne thinking of when she put you in here?” Jane, who had her typewriter on a table under the open window, looked round uncomprehendingly. “She had absolutely no right to put you in here!”

  Jane stood up. By contrast with her employer she always wore dresses, and this morning her appearance was particularly neat. She had a little round white collar and cuffs to her Wedgwood-blue linen dress, and there wasn’t a single hair of her smooth copper head out of place. Her big brown eyes were grave, surprised, under their fluttering eyelashes. “I can see nothing wrong with this room.”

  “No?” He came towards her. “Have you seen Sandra’s?”

  “Of course. It is the famous White Room - the one that is always reserved for your most important visitors. Feminine visitors of course, because I think a man would feel a little out of place in such a virginal atmosphere.”

  There was no relaxing of his features, and he stared hard at her. “Why did you disappear from the salon last night after dinner, and not return? You did that the night before, and the night before that you spent half an hour wandering in the garden with Mark Lanyard.”

  Her feathery eyebrows ascended. “Do you mean to tell me that I was actually being timed while I was in the garden?”

  “It might even have been a little longer than half an hour. But I was not watching the clock. I was conscious of your absence, and when I came to look for you it struck me that you and Lanyard have quite a lot in common.”

  “That’s not so very surprising, is it? We speak the same language.”

  “Precisely. But there is one language that is universal all over the world, and one doesn’t have to have textbooks to get to know and understand it.” He moved nearer still to her, and actually leaned on her desk. “You are a strange girl, Jane,” he commented. “Do you forget already those two days when there was no one here but you and I and the servants?”

  She stared straight back into his eyes, and golden-brown and night-dark depths seemed to have such a fascination for one another that even after several seconds neither of them could look away.

  “My memory is not as short as you perhaps imagine,” she told him. “But it was a Monsieur Etienne who passed a couple of days here, and who for reasons of his own preferred that I shouldn’t guess that he had any other name apart from that.”

  His gaze remained unwinking, unsmiling. “My name is Etienne,” he informed her. “Etienne Rene Delaroche. So you see, I was not deceiving you!”

  “It doesn’t greatly matter whether you were deceiving me or not,” she replied carelessly. “You have an absolute right to conceal your identity behind an incognito if you wish. But one thing I have wondered about is, where it was that you stayed during the two nights that I was alone here, when you might have occupied your own room. You have told me that Jeanne is an excellent chaperon, so did you, in spite of the pretence, occupy your own room?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “You really did walk through the woods that first night to some other house where you stayed?”‘

  “I did.”

  “Then I apologize, Monsieur Delaroche, for causing you inconvenience.”

  “There was no inconvenience,” he assured, her. “I would have visited the house in any case. And in order to prove to you that it really does exist I will take you to it sometime.”

  “There is no need to do that,” she said, and bent over her notebook. “Excuse me, monsieur, but I really must get on with these letters—”

  “I am not going to allow you to start behaving formally! You must call me Rene like all the rest!”

  She sighed. “Just as you please. But you’ll forgive me if I remind you that I have a job to do, and that the only reason I’m here at all is because Sandra employs me to get on with it. She’s not what one could honestly call a taskmaster, but she likes people to pull their weight, and I don’t want to lose the job.”

  “Is this one particular job so important to you?”

  “It is - very important. It has already brought me to France, and I’m hoping it will take me to America later on. Sandra is making a film in Hollywood when she’s through with her present commitments, and I’m hoping very much she’ll allow me to accompany her. Hollywood is the sort of place most people yearn to see once, and I’m no exception.”

  He straightened, and regarded her through narrowed eyes. “Are there any other things you yearn for?”

  “None that I can call to mind at the moment, save that I want to be left alone to get on—”

  Footsteps sounded in the corridor, and he waited until they passed the open door, and then called the owner of them back. “Clarri!”

  “Oui, monsieur?”

  Clarri appeared on the threshold of the room looking just a trifle agitated because of the peremptoriness of the summons.

  “This room is not in the least suited to Mademoiselle Arden and her requirements, Clarri,” her master informed her somewhat curtly. “You will see to it that she is accommodated elsewhere, in one of the more recently redecorated rooms. There is one at the end of the corridor, with a dressing-room adjoining, that could serve the purpose of an office.”

  “Oh, but that room is already occupied, monsieur,” Clarisse pointed out. “It is occupied by Monsieur Wade. And the one next to it is occupied by Monsieur Lanyard. All the other rooms on this floor are occupied, and there is only the old wing, and that is a little isolated, and the hot-water system is not to be counted upon there.”

  “Then we can’t remove Miss Arden to a room where the water-system is likely to fail.” But he looked down in a concerned way at Jane. “Why didn’t Jeanne put Miss Arden into one of the more suitable rooms in the beginning?”

  “I don’t know, monsieur,” Clarisse admitted. But she had a fairly shrewd idea that Jeanne had not welcomed the arrival of the young Englishwoman who had involved the master of the place in a quite unnecessary, if purely temporary, piece of deception. Unnecessary, that is, according to Jeanne, whom it had been inclined to upset.

  “Please don’t bother yourself about me and my room,” Jane requested. “As a matter of fact, I like it very much, and have no desire at all to be shifted. And I can
work very well here - when I am not disturbed!” her eyes said, as she raised them to the man’s face.

  But the next morning she found that her typewriter and all her impedimenta, had been shifted to the huge granary, and in a little room behind the main room, with its open-timber roof, which Rene himself employed as an office, measures had been taken to ensure her comfort. And not merely her comfort, but a great deal of comfort.

  There was a deep armchair for the moments when she wanted to relax, and a bookcase full of books - most of them modern English novels. There was a much lighter desk than the one Rene himself had used, and on it when she first saw the room there was a big bowl of flowers. Filing cabinets had been emptied for her files, and wire trays provided for her mail. There were water-colours on the walls, and a rich pile carpet on the floor. And in a little Empire cabinet there were some delicate tea-things and all the equipment for making herself a cup of tea whenever she wanted it, including a silver spirit-kettle.

  Jane looked about her with surprise and delight when she first entered the room, and Rene made his appearance from the colossal studio adjoining - there was another big Bechstein piano there, and she gathered it was where he did a lot of practising - and watched her enquiringly.

  “You like it?” he asked, in a quiet voice.

  “Oh, yes -I like it very much indeed! But why should you go to so much trouble for me?” She touched the bowl of mixed roses on the desk, and bent above them to inhale their perfume, and he could see that she had turned faintly pink with pleasure. “It was very good of you.”

  “Not at all.” He didn’t move any nearer to her; but he continued to watch her from the other side of the room. “You are pleased?”

  She turned suddenly, and couldn’t resist smiling at him. “Of course I’m pleased.”

  “Eh, bien!” he exclaimed softly. “Then I am satisfied.” His dark face expressed relief. “I wanted you to be pleased, Jane!”

  She felt, as if her heart turned over inside her - in fact, she felt as if it turned a complete somersault - and instead of just standing there and composedly thanking him, she knew an almost uncontrollable urge to rush across the carpeted space that separated them and catch hold of his arm and hug it. There was something in his very eagerness to please her that made him strangely vulnerable just then - ridiculously vulnerable when one paused to consider (as she did!) that he was the celebrated Rene Delaroche, with half Paris ready to acclaim him when he made a public appearance there, and enough women interested in him to turn the head of any man who knew he had but to lift a finger for any one of them to fall at his feet.

  But in those moments, when the remembrance of his kisses came back with such a disturbing rush that her heart started to beat wildly, and she had to exert all her will-power to prevent that remembrance from showing in her face, he simply stood there looking towards her with almost a pleading hopefulness on his face. Unless she imagined it. She told herself afterwards that she must have imagined it, because why should he look pleadingly at her?... It was his idea that they should snatch a brief interlude, and they had snatched it, and now it was over. And to prove that so far as she was concerned she understood perfectly, how very definitely it was over, she walked to the window and started to admire the picture of the sheltered rose-garden that it framed.

  “I think it was very clever of you to start a rose-garden here,” she said, speaking somewhat hurriedly. “Quite like an English rose-garden. What made you think of it?”

  “I didn’t think of it,” he admitted. “Someone else had already thought of it when I bought the house.”

  “But you’ve seen to it that it’s kept in beautiful order.” He came and stood beside her, and she felt suddenly acutely nervous. “You’ve probably added fresh varieties.”

  “I may do so one day, but at the moment it is much as it was when I took it over Jane! “ His voice was intensely quiet. “I want you to be happy working here in this room, and no one will have the slightest right to disturb you. If noises in the next room disturb you we’ll try to soft-pedal them during your working hours, but the partition is reasonably thick, and I don’t think you’ll be bothered very much. Piano music doesn’t normally penetrate in a way that can cause annoyance.”

  “Oh, but it wouldn’t annoy me in the very slightest!” she assured him hastily. And she nearly added: “And if it’s you who’s playing I shall drop everything and listen! And if only I can hear you singing sometimes!...”

  “I’d like to give you a set of my recordings,” he said. “You really meant it when you said you enjoyed listening to my records, Jane?”

  She looked at him in amazement. “Enjoy...?” But of course! I’m one of your fans!” She looked away quickly. ‘That sounds as if I’ll be asking for an autographed photograph next, doesn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t inflict that on you.”

  The door opened, and Sandra came in, dressed this morning in summery whiteness. She looked about her with wide-eyed appraisement.

  “Well, well!” she exclaimed. “So this is where Jane is to carry out her labours on my behalf! I looked for you in your room, Jane, and Clarri told me you were installed in the granary!” She smiled at Rene and did what Jane had felt such a compulsion to do, but had had to refrain from doing, and that was cross the room sinuously and slip a hand inside his arm. She even seemed to lean a little on the arm, as she looked up into his face. “I must say this is rather like spoiling my secretary, Rene, and putting yourself out! Are you sure you won’t need the room?”

  “Quite sure,” he answered.

  “And Jane won’t be a nuisance, typing away over here?”

  “She will be in no sense of the word a nuisance. And I am happy that she will be able to work in a certain measure of comfort.”

  Sandra made a faint shrugging movement with her shoulders.

  “Well, it’s considerate of you, Rene. But I do realize Jane can’t work in the library, as Madame Heloise is there and perhaps she was a bit cramped in her bedroom. And it might disturb other people if I wanted her to type late at night.”

  “She will disturb no one here,” he reiterated. “And you can’t expect a secretary to give good service if she is provided with the wrong background.”

  The telephone ringing in the next room caused him to make his exit, and Sandra looked across at Jane with a strange, thoughtful look on her face.

  “I’d be inclined to say there’s a certain amount of ‘love me, love my dog’ in this fortunate acquisition on your part of a cosy office to work in,” she observed. “I don’t want to undervalue you, honey, and I’m not even suggesting there are any dog-like qualities about you. But if you’ll follow my line of reasoning you’ll see what I mean. Rene, being extraordinarily sweet, wants to make everything run very smoothly for me, and as you’re an important part of my equipment he went in for this nice little gesture! And it really is a nice little gesture!”

  Then, as if she had other things on her mind, she started to pace up and down, her brow furrowed. “I saw Mark on my way over here just now,” she said, “and he’s in one of his most awkward moods! He simply will not understand that a career-girl is a career-girl first and foremost, and that other things just have to be put aside! I know he’s sweet, too - in fact, sometimes I wish he wasn’t quite so sweet - but this isn’t the time to try and impress the fact on me! I’m on holiday for one thing, and I’ll soon be working again at double pressure, so why can’t he leave me alone for the time being? Why can’t he be content with things as they are?”

  “Are we ever, any of us, content with things as they are?” Jane asked, with such soberness in her tone as she sat down at her typewriter that Sandra looked at her afresh.

  “Well, sweetie, at the moment, you ought to be feeling like a V.I.P. All this for a little secretary?” She went over to the Empire cabinet in the corner, and her eyebrows lifted at the sight of the spirit-kettle, and the shell-like china. “And afternoon tea thrown in! How like Rene not to overlook the idiosyncr
asies of the English!”

  CHAPTER IX

  That night they all drove to the nearest town and had dinner, and Jane tasted escargots for the first time in her life. She was persuaded to overcome a reluctance to do so by Sandra, who was in one of her gayest moods; and afterwards that same gay mood resulted in them rolling back the carpet in the salon, when they returned to La Cause Perdue, and dancing to the music of Paris radio. When the music ceased to be the sort of music they wanted, they put on gramophone records and danced.

  Jane recognised that she was not perhaps as modern as she might have been, for somehow beat music struck her as out of place in such a setting - just as Sandra’s extremely short shorts had struck her as out of place on the paths of the parterre. And she was glad when a sudden change of mood caused the rest of them to descend upon the piano, and Rene was persuaded to sing. He gave them some of his most popular numbers, some of his newest numbers, and some of the numbers that had not yet had a chance to become popular, but which were to help make up the appeal of the new film.

  The music and the lyrics had been composed by a new song-writer who expected to make a fortune out of them, and when Jane went up to bed at last, they kept running through her head. It was Rene’s method of putting them across, of course, that was already doing so much for them; and it couldn’t fail to bring him fresh laurels when the film was released.