Cousin Cinderella

by Sara Jeanette Duncan

  The other young man was a Mr. Milliken, and to my astonishment he called Mrs. Jerome Jarvis “mummy.” So Mr. Jerome Jarvis had had a predecessor! I could not help wondering whether she had been as successful a character as Mrs. Milliken, or whether it had taken the two J’s to bring her out.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t bring your nice tall brother,” she told me. “It would be much better for him to be seeing London than sitting in the Strangers’ Gallery in the House. He could have read the debate in to-morrow’s Times. I always do, when any of my friends speak; and the House is full of my friends. It’s a great mistake to take things too seriously; I take the Times with my coffee, and get it over for the day. What do you do?”

  “I see that Graham gets it,” I said. “He says it’s compressed England. I read a smaller paper—just compressed news.”

  “What do you do, Billy Milliken?” asked Mrs. Jarvis.

  “Never see any of ’em, practically,” said Mr. Milliken. “They get to Oxford too late in the mornin’. There’s an afternoon rag published there I generally look at. An’ the Sportin’ and Dramatic, as a rule.”

  “You can say the ‘Pink Un,’ if you like. It won’t hurt my feelings, Billy,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “I believe in calling a spade a spade, and the ‘Pink Un’s’ the very ace of spades, isn’t it?”

  “Now you’re trying to get at me, mummy. As usual. I don’t bring it home, do I? It’s ripping good literature, the ‘Pink Un.’”

  Mr. Milliken was small and fair and ruddy, with a yellow moustache, and looked very knowing.

  “Are you studying at Oxford?” I asked him.

  “I’m up—yes,” he said.

  “Isn’t it thrilling, being at Oxford?” I asked. “My brother says it’s the greatest temptation of England—Oxford.”

  “I don’t know what he means by the greatest temptation. It’s a damp hole. What does he mean?”

  “I think he means that Oxford would tempt him to be an Englishman more than anything else over here. If a person could choose, of course. He isn’t an Englishman—no, he’s not an American either. He’s a Canadian, so, of course, it’s settled for him. But if he could choose. Do you know any of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford?”

  “Can’t say I actually know any of ’em. I’ve seen them about, of course. They’re not hard to pick out, by any means. But they’re getting broken in a bit now—they’re not so woolly as they were, really.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “They’re chaps with such extr’ordinary ideas, you know, and such remarkable clothes. I think myself it was a rippin’ good idea of old Rhodes’s—it only wants one thing to make it a success. The men ought to be forbidden to bring Colonial outfits—see? Then they’d get their kit in Oxford, an’ any tailor could put them on to what was worn in term. Pity he didn’t think of that, isn’t it?”

  “It is a pity. Great men are so often careless about clothes, aren’t they?”

  “That’s right. Of course it would take them longer to get into what might be called manners an’ customs. This is the sort of thing those chaps do. A lot of us were dining in Hall one night at the beginning of term, when in walked one of ’em, very raw. He took his seat, looked round, and ‘My name’s Goodge,’ says he, sort of bluff, you know, and hearty. Well, nobody says a word—what was there to say, you know? Nobody’d asked him what his silly name was. But after a minute the fellow opposite him—I forget who it was—looked him all over, and said: ‘Aow!’ Well, what else was there to say, you know?”

  “Poor Goodge!” I said.

  “Personally, I don’t mind them,” conceded Mr. Milliken. “I have no prejudices in the matter whatever. They simply haven’t happened to come my way.”

  “Is Billy telling you about Oxford?” asked Mrs. Jarvis. “Ask him, please, from me, if he sees any prospect of his degree this term. He finds Oxford so fascinating—nothing will induce him to leave it.”

  “Getting at me again,” responded Mr. Milliken calmly. “Fearful thing, the modern mother. Always getting at you. You’re fearfully modern, mummy. And it’s old-fashioned this year—quite out of date. Ain’t it, Pontex?”

  “I don’t know. You must ask my brother,” said Mr. Pontex. “Whenever I don’t know I always ask my brother.”

  “That’s his brother John,” said Mrs. Jarvis to me, “who wrote ‘The Anglo-Saxon,’ you know. A very clever man.”

  “Yes, John is a clever man,” said Mr. Guy Pontex; “a great deal cleverer than I am, as anybody can see. But he wrote a stupid book. I can’t read his stupid book, though my brother John wrote it.”

  “Cheer up, old man!” said Billy Milliken. “Neither can I.”

  “And I’ve only read about so much,” said Mrs. Jarvis reassuringly, measuring it off on her finger. “It’s much too clever for me, Guy.”

  “It’s too stupid for me,” said Guy, with a grave inclination.

  I remembered what Evelyn had said about his being “wanting,” and wondered why Mrs. Jarvis had asked him to dinner. However, it was not very noticeable so long as he only bowed after he had said something. But he sometimes did it in the pauses of the conversation, as if to contribute what little he could, and then one could only try not to see.

  “I hope you will tell Billy all about Canada,” said Mrs. Jerome to me. “You may take him back with you if you like. I have absolutely no further use for him.”

  Mrs. Jarvis did not explain what use she thought I could have for Billy, so I said: “Could he milk cows?”

  “What a practical question!” exclaimed Mrs. Jerome. “Say ‘Yes!’ Billy, at once. Miss Trent won’t look at you if you can’t milk cows!”

  “Can you milk cows, Guy, old man?” asked Billy; and poor Guy replied—it was agonising for me:

  “I don’t know. You must ask my brother John.”

  “Well, there is one thing Mr. Pontex can do,” Mrs. Jarvis assured me. “He can dance divinely—can’t you, Guy? And he is going on with us to-night when you will see, my little new friend from Canada, how well he dances.”

  “Am I bagged, too,” said Billy Milliken, “for a dance of Aunt Joan’s?”

  “Yes, Billy,” said his mother firmly. “I promised her faithfully. And I look to you, Miss Trent, to see that he fulfils his obligations. I leave him to you.”

  It was Billy’s opportunity to say something graceful; but he postponed it. He tried to look Jugubrious, but his moustache was so yellow and his face so round that it was impossible. We finished dinner while I was still wondering why I should be given such insistent charge of Billy. However, it was better than being made responsible for Mr. Pontex. That I should have managed, I think, to decline; but Billy was too absurd to object to.

  Mrs. Jarvis and I drove in her electric brougham, Mr. Pontex and Billy following in a cab. Mrs. Jarvis looked out once or twice to see whether they really were following.

  “It is coming behind, all right, the cab,” she said. “They won’t shake us off now.”

  “Don’t they want to come to the dance?” I asked in some surprise.

  “Oh, my dear, innocent child, what is a dance to young men in London? Just a great big bore; and as they don’t even pretend that it isn’t, why should we? I like being perfectly simple and candid, don’t you? I must say I sympathise with them to some extent. They know perfectly well what they are brought there for. I suppose in your beautiful Arcadian Canada you have no such thing as designing mammas?”

  “I don’t think there are many,” I said.

  “Oh, well, London swarms with them, and nobody is too young to be caught. Poor Billy himself was once well hooked, but luckily by a relation, so I could insist on his being put back.”

  “Put back where?” I asked.

  “In the pond,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “That is a little simile of mine. Do you know what a simile is? He was only twenty-one—too absurd. I do thank my Heavenly Father for having sent me in addition only Patricia. Not that I wouldn’t love a grown-up daughter, but in the meantime I must l
ook to Billy for that. What do you think of my Billy?”

  “I found him very entertaining indeed,” I said.

  “I’m so glad! Not clever, you know, in the sense of the word nowadays, but a heart of gold, dear old Billy. And so frank and straightforward—he takes after me there. No special prospects, you know. Never more, I’m afraid, than four or five hundred a year of his own—just a well-groomed, well-mannered young English gentleman. And there’s nothing like it in the world, is there? I mean, whatever you do, be on your guard against foreigners. What you may call the marrying foreigner is usually perfectly unscrupulous. I could tell you tales!”

  It is the kind of thing one is ashamed to write, but I must confess that I drew from Mrs. Jarvis at this moment the definite thrill of a new perception, something captivating and delicious. Suddenly, without Graham, without anybody, moving through the lovely, thronged, wet, lamplit London streets in Mrs. Jarvis’s electric brougham, I felt myself realised—realised in London, not only by the person who happened to be near me, but in a vague, delightful, potential sense by London. Realised, not a bit for what I was—that wouldn’t, I am afraid, have carried me very far—nor exactly for what I represented, but for something else, for what I might, under favourable circumstances, be made to represent. The odd part was that seeing it on this lower level made no difference to the thrill, which had its wonderful source in the fact that London should take one into account at all. It was even part of the thrill to know that one would be obliged, in a way, to hand oneself over. It was even a happier excitement to see that nothing in the matter was to be taken for granted, that I was only a possibility, a raw product, to be melted or hammered or woven into London, by my leave. And that was superb to experience, the solicitation, even tacit and involved, of London, the knowledge that one was taken as important enough, one was coloured by what one had or what one’s father had, as being important enough, to make suggestions to. I suppose it was a practical lesson in the consequence of having; but what I drew from it immediately, besides the joy itself, was a point of view. It was a point of view from which one could feel, looking out at the endless luxurious whirl of it, a kind of divine disdain of London, as if one had suddenly got behind the scenes with her, and no longer felt so prodigiously impressed. And that in itself was a sensation intensely worth having; but all this time Mrs. Jerome Jarvis was talking, talking.

  “I have quite fallen in love with your brother, you know,” she was saying. “Hopelessly in love with him.”

  “People nearly always do like Graham,” I replied calmly.

  “I think his nickname suits him beautifully.”

  “Has he got a nickname?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you know he was called ‘the Maple Prince’? Why, it was in the World of Society last week; didn’t you see the paragraph?”

  “Evelyn Dicey,” I reflected aloud, “must have started that.”

  “Oh, it was a charming paragraph!—a little about you, too—and it made you out the most enviable young people imaginable. And there was a little joke in it, too, about the Maple Prince being the only one in London at present who could point to his principality—a place called New Brunswick, isn’t it?”

  “Not the whole of it,” I remonstrated.

  “You must show me on the map. Well, I’ve always been in favour of drawing Colonial ties closer. You, of course, are a charming little person, with a very pretty style of your own—you don’t mind my speaking straight from the heart like this?—but I am one of those who think that he is perfectly possible, too.”

  “Perfectly possible!” I repeated. “Do you mean my brother?”

  “What I mean is this. You must have noticed that American men are very seldom absorbed in this country. American women, of course, go down like anything—we can’t swallow them fast enough; but the men, somehow—no. But with your nice brother it’s different. Colonial he certainly is, but only to the extent of a few mannerisms, which he would soon lose. Try to think of him as a country gentleman in England, and he’s quite in the picture, isn’t he? You and he together,” said Mrs. Jarvis impressively, “might do a great deal for Canada in this country.”

  “How?” I enquired.

  “Popularise it socially. Drag it out of history and geography,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “Nobody cares about history and geography, but plenty of people will care about the Maple Prince—and Princess.”

  “Well, if it involves Graham’s turning into an English country gentleman,” I said emphatically, “I’m afraid it won’t come off.”

  “Why not? I am sure he could do it. Very creditably after a bit.”

  “Because nothing,” I said, “would induce him to.”

  “Ah! We’ll see,” said Mrs. Jarvis. “He could turn into something much worse, you know. Here we are at Joan’s. And Billy and Guy, the angels, here they are, too!”

  CHAPTER X

  THE first person we saw when at last we got through to Mrs. Yilke’s ballroom was the Earl of Doleford dancing with Evelyn Dicey. Evelyn danced perfectly always; she got the last possible vibration of grace out of the movement and the music, and her partner suited her. They looked there in the twinkling perspective of Mrs. Yilke’s ballroom like two people doing something together, something more or less dictated that they should do together, and doing it rather well. The glimpse of it made me obscurely feel London again, or the great English world that flowers so supremely in London, the great auto-compulsive English world of London, suggesting that Lord Doleford should dance with Evelyn, and Evelyn with Lord Doleford, as the sum of all the proprieties and expediencies, the quickest, surest way of earning her indispensable blessing.

  “Are they engaged yet?” asked Mrs. Jarvis, as the two waltzed past us.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” I said.

  “The Countess and Barbara are simply dying for it. An American for Peter has been their only hope for years; but poor dear Lady Doleford has always wanted to pick her American. As if it mattered two straws! Now she has picked her American and la voila! Not so prodigiously rich as some of them, but with the right ideas about religious teaching in the schools; and that, with the dear Countess, was of the first importance. She was desperately afraid of what you might call a secular American.”

  “But how could Evelyn know what to think about the schools?” I exclaimed.

  “I don’t know; but she got hold of the right views somehow. Americans are so assimilating, I always think. It’s part of their success. Lady Doleford had her to stay for a week at Beaufort Gardens, and sounded her, I imagine, before she took her to her bosom; but now she is always there, and it all hangs on Peter.”

  “I see,” I said, as Billy came up for his dance.

  It was at once quite plain, Mrs. Jarvis’s wisdom in bringing Billy, who, to do him justice, did dance, very energetically, when once he was resigned to it. Mr. Pontex, too, in his stately way, took me round the room once or twice; but I did not find those perfections which Mrs. Jarvis had advertised. It was a little like dancing with a clock-tower, which kept the most accurate time, and bowed instead of striking the quarters. I preferred to bound like the antelope with Billy. But these two did dance, as I say; and Mrs. Jarvis had known they would. One was a schoolboy and the other very nearly an imbecile; but they did dance; and the room was black with young men who didn’t. I looked at them with great interest to try and discover what they were there for; it was certainly no form of exercise. The most active thing many of them did was to stand about and wear their clothes and caress their moustaches. They looked tolerant, well-disposed, inclined to be pleased if it was not too much trouble, and, above all things, beautifully taken care of, perfectly produced. They seemed in a way the achievements as well as the hopes of the women who sat about admiring them, and pathetically waiting for some attention from them. Other persons of course must have contributed—all sorts of trainers and tailors, and one was sorry for them that they couldn’t be there to take their humble part in the splendid result. Impassive
in appearance, they were conscious in fact, like prime creatures upon exhibition, and they had a tendency to move toward one another, with furtive glances, from which they seemed to derive mutual support. Speaking as a stranger, I was very pleased with them; but it was impossible not to wish that they wore their awards. Most of them, I think, would have obtained at least a “Highly Commended.” It seemed to me that they treated one another with a certain deference, as if each recognised in each something very special and supreme; and beside their lofty freedom poor Billy had all the air of a terrier on a string.

  As a rule I noticed that the younger ones had very little to say. The briefest exchange over folded arms seemed enough to indicate their acquiescence, as it were, in the occasion; and smiles were freely used as substitutes for anything more laborious. This was particularly true of those, in the very pink of conscious desirability, who were there upon their own divine bachelor sufferance, and a little oppressed, one could see, with the idea that it was weak of them to come. It was less and less characteristic as the bloom rubbed off, and fostering conditions perhaps began to be withdrawn; and among those with the look of being quite thrown upon their own resources were the few industrious dancers. I thought myself fairly certain of a dance when Billy introduced a bald gentleman, a Mr. Lane-Gwithers; but I was disappointed. He explained at once that it would be impossible; he could only ask me to sit out. He took the matter very seriously, and enlarged upon it.

  “It’s a curious thing, you know,” said Mr. Lane-Gwithers, “but as a matter of fact, I should be absolutely precluded from dancing with you to-night.”

  “Not lumbago, I hope,” I said.

  “Not lumbago. Oh, no! Something even more binding.”

  “What can it be?” I said. Whatever it was I could see it was very much on his mind.