“Look here,” interrupted the intruder, incautiously releasing his grip on the door-knob, pitching forward and regaining his balance by an apparent miracle. “Look here—I say—I want to ask something.”
“Well?”
“If you see what I mean?”
“Not yet,” said the head-mistress, still more impatiently “Who sent you?”
“Oh, nobody,” said the intruder, very quickly. “I—I just came. I was a bit worried, you see. A bit windy.”
“A bit what?”
“A bit rattled, you know. A bit dithered.”
Miss Mulberry took a very loud, deep breath.
“My dear young man,” she said, “have you any idea what you’re talking about?”
“What?”
“Do you know where you are? Do you realise that this is St. Ethelburga’s school for girls?”
“Oh, Lord, yes. That’s why I’m here. That’s just the point. I say—have you heard anything?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Any news, I mean? Have you caught them?”
Miss Mulberry struck the big desk with her ruler, and the young man started as though she had struck him as well.
“Please pull yourself together,” she barked. “Talk sense if you can; and if you can’t, please leave my study. I’ve had quite enough interruption this afternoon, and I’ve a lot of work to get through. Now, then; is this your idea of a joke?”
“No, no. Oh, Lord, no, Miss Mul-mulberry. I’m deadly serious. I’ve come on purpose. I——”
“Why? What for?”
“To see you, of course, Miss Mulberry-berry. To find out if—I mean, where—I mean, whether—— Well, you know what I mean.”
Miss Mulberry gasped like a hot-water cistern.
“I don’t,” she snapped. “I don’t know who you are, or why you’re here, or what a word of all this gibberish means. Your behaviour in forcing your way into this room strikes me as impertinent and intolerable. I strongly suspect that you have been drinking.”
“Well, I haven’t,” said Beaky, indignantly. “I haven’t even had any proper lunch. I’ve come all the way from——”
“Ah, I thought so. You’ve come here to beg. Well, let me tell you——”
“I haven’t! And I didn’t force my way in, either. I came in because all the doors were open, and nobody answered your rotten bell.”
“Rubbish!”
“Well, where’s my sister, anyway? What have you done with her?”
“Your sister? What have I got to do with your sister? Whom do you think you’re speaking about?”
“Noodles, of course. You know, Miss Mumbleberry. The one who——”
“I don’t know!” shouted Miss Mulberry. “I don’t know anything about her, and I refuse to listen to you for another second. Do you hear me? Either you’re mad, or you’re trying to pull my leg. Noodles, indeed! I’ve had enough of this. Please go!”
“Yes, but——”
“Go!”
Miss Mulberry rose to her full height of five feet six inches, and shot out a fierce arm and a fiercely-extended forefinger. Not a man in England could have stood his ground when faced with an apparition like that, and Beaky stepped hastily backwards, bringing his person into violent collision with the edge of the door.
“Ow!” he yelped.
“Go!” thundered Miss Mulberry, finding a wild relief to all her accumulated irritation. “Go at once, or I’ll send for the gardeners and have you thrown out. Do you hear me? Go!”
“Yes, I know, but——”
Once more, and this time accompanied by a majestic movement which can hardly have been equalled since the original expulsion from Eden:
“Go!”
So Beaky went. He didn’t mean to run, but the action was forced on him by that invisible step in the darkest part of the corridor, and having once started he was incapable of stopping. He dashed through the empty entrance-hall, he bounded over the mammoth door-mat, he leapt from the wide stone steps, the gravel shot from beneath his feet as he raced down the little drive.
“Go!” added Miss Mulberry, reappearing at the bow-window in exactly the same attitude as before. But Beaky never heard her. The family curse, he was thinking, was working overtime to-day, and never had a dreaded interview proved more disastrous in its actual fulfilment. But Miss Mulberry had said that she knew nothing, and the wild-goose chase must start again. For, however he might choose to report the result of his inquiries to his relentless companion outside, it was quite obvious that there were no more clues to be picked up here.
“My hat, what a terror!” he panted. “I don’t care what anyone says, but I’m all on Noodles’s side after this. My gosh, what a gorgon! My aunt, what a frightful school!”
Curiously enough, his aunt—whom he had thus piously invoked—was at this moment indulging in very similar conclusions no further away than in the lounge of the Majestic Hotel, where she was having tea before deciding whether or not to drive back to London. But if her nephew’s prejudices had arisen very largely as the result of his own behaviour, then we think that St. Ethelburga can equally hope to survive those of Mrs. Millet. A woman who nearly forty years ago had, on her own confession, attempted educational arson might still preserve certain maggots about the value of such institutions.
Let St. Ethelburga be comforted, therefore, and let Miss Mulberry hold up her head. We shall not—we are glad to say—see either of them again, but we wish them nothing but peace and prosperity in their expensive and invaluable work. And now that Noodles and the last of her relations have finally left them, we see no reason why they shouldn’t continue to enjoy both.
Chapter X
Further misfortunes of Noodles—Reappearance of an awful character, who is as awful as ever—Progress of the Rescue-Party—An aerial survey, and a big, black cloud—Dramatic scene outside the Pavilion Chalet.
1
Noodles lunched off pork-pie, pickles and canned peaches of a strangely lurid tint, washed down—as the saying goes—with the chalky water from the Newcliff main. Miss Selbrook and Miss La Touche added to this simple repast a couple of black bottles with some dark, frothy stuff in them which the flies liked very much, and a number of cigarettes which the flies (and Noodles) didn’t like at all. As usual, they had spent far more of their salaries on shopping than they had wished or intended, and had received in exchange far less than they had hoped or desired. From these premises they deduced, repeatedly and wearisomely, that the Newcliff shopkeepers were thieves, though at the same time they kept hinting—and sometimes more than hinting—that it would be to Miss Brett’s advantage if she took over some of their stock at valuation.
Noodles found it all rather difficult. At first, apparently, she was supposed to agree that the articles were ruinous in cost and rotten in material, and then she was expected to be grateful for the opportunity of re-purchasing them. When she tried to escape from the subject by explaining that she hadn’t got any money, she was met with obscure reproaches. If she hadn’t got any money, then why was she so particular? And if she never spent anything, then why hadn’t she got any money? And if she didn’t need the money for spending, then why had she come along and done poor old Maisie out of her job? Did she realise that poor old Maisie had rejected a perfectly marvellous offer from the Crazy Crickets—who always played right through till October—and that she hadn’t got any rich friends or relations like some people? They wondered, they said, how Miss Brett could sit there and have the face to complain about everything, when girls who had had nearly twenty years’ experience were wondering where their next meal was to come from, and in the absence of other diet were eating their hearts out.
This picture naturally filled the puzzled listener with anxiety and dismay.
“But,” she protested, “Mr. Vaughan said that the other person had left on purpose. He never told me——”
“Oh, we know all about Lester,” interrupted Miss La Touche. “He’d say anything.”
> “And what if Maisie did walk out?” demanded Miss Selbrook, more bafflingly than ever. “She’s got her feelings, hasn’t she, and if a gentleman can’t make allowances for a lady, then what I say is he’s no right to be in management. It wasn’t her that started the row.”
“And if it was,” added Miss La Touche, “that doesn’t affect what I keep telling you.”
“That’s just what I say,” contributed Miss Selbrook.
“And what I told Maisie when I saw her, and she told me what I told you she said,” chimed in Miss La Touche.
Noodles’s large, startled eyes kept darting from one slightly congested countenance to the other, while every now and then she drew in a quick breath as she thought she saw a chance of repeating her innocence and regret. She had only just discovered that Mr. Vaughan hadn’t invented the name which he had forced on her, but if this knowledge horrified her because of the sense of unforgivable intrusion which it brought with it, she was still more horrified to learn that the rightful owner was apparently starving somewhere in this very town. She remembered now, which she had so stupidly forgotten before, how Mr. Vaughan had spoken of his banished comedienne as “Maisie” when she had met him up on the downs. She remembered also, and anybody else would have understood it all at once, how tattered and weatherworn were the numerous bills on which the list of Diamond Dominoes were set out. No wonder these women looked on her as an interloper. No wonder they hated having her here, when their real friend was in this awful situation. Oh, if only they would stop talking to each other, and just look at her for one moment, so that she could tell them how little she had realised what she was doing, and how she would speak to Mr. Vaughan the first second she saw him again about putting it right.
But they didn’t stop talking to each other, and they had quite given up looking at her. A genuine Domino would have flared up, and have burst into the conversation with dramatic passion which would have given a great deal of enjoyment to all concerned, and, in all probability, would have ended by a general agreement that Miss Dolores had got exactly what she deserved. The bone-laziness of the true Domino could appreciate a row so long as some one else took their fair share, and cared little or nothing for loyalty. But if this new girl merely gaped and stared like that, well, then, let’s talk of something that needs less effort and concentration. Let’s slide easily away from poor old Maisie—who touched one of us when we met her this morning for five bob which will certainly not be heard of again—and let’s drift along on a sea of Guinness and cigarette-smoke to the sort of dialogue which can look after itself.
“… so I said to him, ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you may call yourself a dancer,’ I said, ‘but, believe me, I’ve forgotten a great deal more than you’ve ever learnt.’ And I can tell you, my dear …”
Noodles continues to gape and stare.
“… at the Electric Palace, and we had to open the same night we got in. Well, I didn’t care. ‘You won’t worry me,’ I said, ‘because the people here love me. They eat my stuff,’ I said, ‘and …’”
Noodles feels that if she stays here any longer she will be hypnotised as well as suffocated. They won’t look at her. They won’t stop talking to each other. They don’t care that they have made her feel like the worst kind of cuckoo in some one else’s nest, and that when she offers her resignation this evening—as of course she must and will—she will be left without a place to go to, hideously in debt to Mr. Vaughan and these awful lodgings, and with only sevenpence, which doesn’t really belong to her, tied in the corner of her handkerchief.
And what’s more, she doesn’t want them to care. All she wants is to get away from them. To get outdoors, even if it means walking until she drops. To try, somehow, to find a little temporary world of her own, since she is now neither a ward, nor a schoolgirl, nor just a comedienne. Since she is nothing, and hates it. Since she has never felt so lonely in her life, and yet has never wished more overpoweringly to be alone.
Since everything, in fact, is Quite Awful.
Poor Noodles. A touch of weakness makes her look back just as she is leaving the stuffy little sitting-room, but nobody asks her where she is going, or, indeed, appears to notice that she is leaving. The smelly little passage outside no longer seems friendly and cosy, as it had been on that first adventurous afternoon. It dislikes her now quite as much as she dislikes it, and very nearly as much as she dislikes herself. She takes the school hat, which for two days has been without the school ribbon, from a peg on the revolting piece of furniture between the broken barometer and the ornamental drain-pipe which serves as an umbrella-stand. She pulls it over her short hair, and steps off the cracked linoleum on to the ragged door-mat. No harlequin could be more brightly coloured than she is, as the sunlight streams through the stained-glass panels of the front door, but equally no harlequin could look more mournful.
Then she opens it, and closes it behind her, and walks down the slimy brick path to the rusty iron gate. And opens that too, with a cry of agony from the hinges. And steps down on to the narrow pavement, and for no better reason than that she had turned to the left this morning, now wanders away to the right.
“By Jove!” cries a loud and cheery voice. “I say—what a bit of luck! I say—how perfectly topping! Miss Brett! Noodles!”
Noodles starts from her dreams, and smiles automatically—and, let us add, ravishingly—at the big man who is bawling at her. But the smile is frozen on her face, and her eyes become larger than ever, as she recognises that she has been greeted, and that her hand is being shaken, by no other than the red-faced and diabolical Fitzgibbon.
2
“Oh!” said Noodles, and Fitzgibbon beamed again.
“Splendid!” he said. “Now, what about it?”
What about what? He didn’t look the least ashamed of himself, or the least embarrassed, or the least as if he remembered the unspeakable occasion on which they had last met and parted. But his friendliness was almost more terrifying than if he had fallen on his knees and begged to be forgiven.
“You’re stopping here?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” said Noodles.
“By Jove! With old What’s-his-name?”
“Well, no. Not exactly. I’m—I’m more or less by myself.”
She wished she hadn’t said that, when she saw how the look of friendliness suddenly increased. But she certainly wasn’t going to explain everything to Fitzgibbon. And (Oh, Noodles!) it was something to be talking to somebody again, and as long as he didn’t say anything more about Pippingfold, he couldn’t really do much harm out here in the street. Though he was still rather awful.
“By yourself?” he repeated. “For long, eh?”
“Well, no. I don’t think so.”
Fitzgibbon laughed, and Noodles remembered how large his teeth were.
“By Jove!” he said. “You’re very mysterious, aren’t you? But you’ve not forgotten me. That’s something. I’m here till Monday, you know—for the racing.”
“Oh, yes?”
“Oh, yes,” said Fitzgibbon, and laughed again. “So what about it?”
“About the racing, you mean? I hadn’t heard. I—I hope you’ll have good luck.”
“By Jove, I hope, so, too. I think I shall, somehow. I mopped up a packet at Kempton last week. I tell you, I’m a man to know”
Noodles wasn’t so sure of this, but it was impossible not to congratulate him.
“Oh, I’m awfully glad,” she said. “And have you heard from your lawyer?”
“No kidding,” said Fitzgibbon, obscurely.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to be rude.”
“What? That’s all right. By Jove, what shall we do?”
(“We?” thought Noodles. “What on earth does he mean? He can’t think I’d want to do anything with him. Not after that awful business. Oh, I do wish I hadn’t seen him.”)
“Eh?” said Fitzgibbon, tapping his trouser-leg with his stick, as though they were a boot and a riding-crop. “Now, look here, Noodles—
you haven’t got a down on me, have you?”
“Oh, no,” said Noodles, with greater courtesy than truth.
“I admit,” said Fitzgibbon, generously, “that I lost my head at your place. But don’t tell me I’m the first fellow to do that.”
Noodles neither confirmed nor denied this assumption.
“I was in a devil of a hole at the time,” added Fitzgibbon, “and I may have acted like a bit of an outsider. We all do sometimes; don’t we?”
“Do we?”
“There you go; laughing at me again.”
“I don’t, Mr. Fitzgibbon. Really I don’t.”
“‘Fitz,’ please—if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, all right. But I promise you I wasn’t laughing, Fitz.”
“That’s better. I know you’re not the kind of girl to bear malice. Are you, now? No, of course you’re not. You’re a good sort. And if anybody got a raw deal out of it, it was me when I called on that old man. By Jove, he fairly let out at me. Told me you hadn’t got a penny, and never would have. By George——”
“He told you what?” interrupted Noodles. “But do you mean you went and asked him——”
“No, no. That’s all right.”
“But why did he——”
“That’s all right, I say. That’s finished with.”
“Oh,” said Noodles.
Of course she hadn’t got a penny, but surely she and Beaky were going to have something some day. What had Mr. Cottenham meant, and why should he tell Fitzgibbon when he’d never told her? She couldn’t understand it, but if it were true, then the future was even blacker and emptier and more ghastly than she had thought.
Oh, why had everything suddenly become so absolutely frightful?
Fitzgibbon was speaking. He was saying something about this evening. “Now, why not?” he was saying.
Belated perception suddenly revealed his earlier remarks.
“Oh, thanks awfully,” said Noodles. “But I’m afraid I can’t.”
“Eh? Why not?
“Well, I couldn’t anyhow—really—but I ve got to go somewhere. I can’t possibly get out of it.”
Another Part of the Wood Page 20