Aliens Part 6

She stepped briskly into the room, looked round and smiled.

"Three times," she declared as I a.s.sisted her to remove her jacket. "But I forgive you if you'll only play that won--derful thing again!"

In person Miss Fraenkel was of middle size, admirably proportioned and situated in tone on the borderland between the blonde and the brunette.

By which I mean that her hair was brown, her eye a warm hazel, and her skin of a satiny pallor that formed an effective background for a delightful flush that suffused her piquant features whenever her enthusiasm was roused. And her enthusiasm was continually being roused.

To us cold Britons the _abandon_ with which she, in common with her countrywomen, gave herself up to the enjoyment of a picture, a book, a landscape, or for that matter of a person, was a most fascinating spectacle. American women strongly resemble champagne. At a certain age they are incomparably stimulating, but intimacy with them involves a sort of "headiness" that demands discretion; a nervous energy emanates from them that tends to relax the critical faculty. There is, moreover, a tendency to turgescence in their speech that leads the unwary into a false estimate of their intellectual range.

It was some time before the conversation could be guided round to the subject which we three at any rate had at heart. Explosive cries of delight over Mac's last etching, Bill's new waist and a Chinese print I had recently acquired, were a matter of course. In deference to an unuttered request we adjourned to the studio upstairs, for Miss Fraenkel had been from the first candidly attracted by the suggestion of bohemianism in our _menage_. It was not her romantic view of an artist's life, however, that distinguished her from any other young and romantic lady, but her frankness and eloquence in acknowledging it. "It must be grand," she had told me in Lexington Avenue, "to be a _grisette_." We had admitted that it must, but had been unable to share her regret that she had not been a man "so that she could see _everything_." She was very charming as she was.

Of course she knew of the painter-cousin and indeed, as soon as she could think of it, gave us the needed opening.

"I saw a letter with an English postmark for you," she observed, examining the bottom of a piece of china that rested near her shoulder.

"Did you get it?"

"We want you to give us an opinion about it, Miss Fraenkel," said Bill, bringing out the letter and giving it to her. She accepted the packet in some uncertainty.

"I!" she said, "give an opinion? I don't get it, I'm afraid."

"Read it," said Bill.

And she did. We sat round her, as she sat on the broad flat box that Mac called a "throne," in a semicircle, and studied the varying expressions that crossed her face as her eyes travelled down the pages. It occurred to me after I had retired to my room that night, that an English girl of twenty-one would not have weathered the concentrated gaze of three strangers with such serenity of features. An observant and invisible critic might have imagined us to have been awaiting the decision of a young and charming Sibyl, so intently did we gaze and so neglectful was she of our regard. This apparent coldness was explained to me by Bill as a characteristic of the American woman. "They like to be admired," she told me. "And so they don't mind if you do stare at them."

Miss Fraenkel looked up with a smile of comprehension.

"What a perfectly lovely letter!" she exclaimed.

Bill took the sheets and thrust them into the envelope.

"He must be a very interesting man, don't you think?"

"Surely! Oh, I should give anything to see his home. You've described it to me, so I know all about it. Gainsborough landscape, and red tiles on the cottages!" She clasped her hands.

"I mean the man my cousin met," said Bill, gently. "Carville."

"Oh, him!" Miss Fraenkel looked at each of us for an instant to catch some inkling of our behaviour.

"Same name as----" and Mac jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Miss Fraenkel's face did not clear.

"We thought," I said heavily, "that this man in England, you know, might have----" I stopped, dismayed by her lack of appreciation. She seemed unable to grasp the simple links of our brilliant theory. We had omitted to calculate upon the indifference of the modern American temperament to names. A foul murder had been committed a short time back by a gambler named Fraenkel, yet she would have laughed at the suggestion that such a coincidence should cause her any annoyance.

"I don't get it," she said, smiling, and we saw plainly enough that she did not get it. We were crushed. I explained in more detail the reason for which we had ventured to connect the two stories. We could see her trying to understand.

"You mean--just as if it was a photo-play," she faltered.

It does not matter now, and I admit that this put me out of humour. And yet it was true. We were really no nearer an actual and _bona fide_ solution of Mrs. Carville's story than if we had simply tried to make, as Miss Fraenkel said, a photo-play. The others laughed at my downcast countenance.

"Well," I said, "you said Miss Fraenkel had tried them and found them guilty, Mac."

"What I meant was, Miss Fraenkel had formed her own opinion of the business."

"Yes," she said, "I have."

"Now we shall hear something," chirped Bill.

"Listen," said Miss Fraenkel. "It's very likely an a.s.sumed name."

It was our turn to look bewildered.

"Yes?" said Bill. "What then?"

"And----" went on Miss Fraenkel, making little motions with her hands as though she were trying to catch something that eluded her grasp.

"And--oh! he's being held for some game in New York. She's got away with it, you see."

Miss Fraenkel waited for this appalling development to sink into our minds. I don't think it was given to any of us at the moment to divine just what had happened to Miss Fraenkel. Even seven years in the country were not sufficient training in American psychology to realize it at once. We sat and looked at her, temporarily dazed by what we took to be a story built upon exclusive information. And she sat and looked at us, as pleased as a child at the success of her manoeuvre.

"Why," stammered Bill, blankly through her gla.s.ses, "how do you know?"

"I don't know," replied Miss Fraenkel. "I just made it up, same's you."

And she included us all in a brilliant flash of her hazel eyes.

We changed the subject after that. In self-defence we changed the subject, for it was plain that when it came to making photo-plays we held a very poor hand. Moreover, we saw that Miss Fraenkel did not and could not take our ponderous interest in Mrs. Carville seriously. To argue that she ought to was no better logic than to say that since she was crazy about Chinese prints, she ought to be friendly with the Chinese laundryman in Chestnut Street. We regarded the nations of Europe as repositories of splendid traditions, magnificent even in their decay.

Miss Fraenkel regarded them as rag-baskets from which the American Eagle was picking a heterogeneous ma.s.s of rubbish, rubbish that might possibly, after much screening, become worthy of civic privilege.

The wisdom of our action was proved by Miss Fraenkel herself, for not only did she make no further mention of Mrs. Carville before she rose to go, but even when I remarked (I escorted her to her home) pointing to the great lantern in the Metropolitan Tower, twenty miles away, shining like a star above the horizon, "that light shines on many things that are hidden from us," she failed to apply the sententious reflection to her own story, merely looking at me with an appreciative smile. She had forgotten our discussion utterly, and I was quite sure that unless we mentioned it, she would not refer to it again.

CHAPTER V

HE COMES

It was the evening of one of the most perfect days in an Indian summer of notable loveliness. In this refulgent weather, to quote Emerson, who knew well what he spoke of, "it was a luxury to draw the breath of life." Free equally from the enervating heat and insects of high summer, and the numbing rigour of the Eastern winter, the days pa.s.sed in dignified procession, calm and temperate, roseate with the blazing foliage of autumn, and gay with geraniums and marigolds. On our modest pergola there still clung a few ruby-coloured grapes, though the leaves were scattered, and in the beds about our verandah blue cornflowers and yellow nasturtiums enamelled the untidy carpet of coa.r.s.e gra.s.ses that were trying to choke them. Not far away, down by the Episcopal Church, men were playing tennis in flannels on the courts of yellow, hard-packed sand. The intense blue of an Italian sky lent a fact.i.tious transparency to the atmosphere, and the tiny irregular shadows that indicated the colossal architecture of New York seemed to float like bubbles in an azure bowl. Across the street, a vacant plot of land, neglected because of imperfect t.i.tle, was cut diagonally by a footpath leading down to Broad Street, where, out of sight but not of hearing, trolley-cars between Newark and Paterson thundered at uncertain intervals.

It was our custom, as we sat on our verandah during these afternoons, to watch the gradual appearance of familiar figures upon this path. We knew that a few moments after the whistle of the five-twenty had sounded at the grade-crossing down in the valley, certain neighbours who commuted to New York would infallibly rise into view on this path. There was Eckhardt, who lived at five hundred and nine, and spent the day on the fourteenth floor of the Flatiron Building. There was Williams, immaculate of costume, who designed automobile bodies and had an office on Broadway. There was Wederslen, the art-critic of the _New York Daily News_, a man whom all three of us held in peculiar abhorrence because he persisted in ignoring Mac's etchings. There was Arber, rather short of stature and rather long of lip, an Irishman who, miraculous to state, admired Burns. There was Confield, an Indianian from Logansport, who had been to Europe on a vacation tour (_No. 67 Series C., Inclusive Fare $450_) and invariably carried a grip plastered with hotel labels to prove it. We had met these men at tennis and at the Field Club, and in our English way esteemed them. They would come up, head-first, so to speak, out of the valley, revealing themselves step by step until they reached the street, when they would acknowledge our salutations by a lift of the hat and a wave of the evening paper, and pa.s.s on to their homes. They generally came, too, in the order in which I have given them. Eckhardt was always first, for he did not smoke, and the smoking-cars on the Erie Road were generally behind. And Confield, of course, was likely to be last, for he had his bag.

It was so on the day of which I speak. The deep bay of the locomotive came up on the still autumn air, and a cloud of dazzling white vapour rose like a balloon above the trees and drifted slowly into thin curls and feathers against the blue sky. It was, even in this trifling detail, a homelike landscape, for Bill had told us how, from the square hall window of High Wigborough, you could see the white puffs of invisible trains on the lonely little loopline from Wivenhoe to Brightlingsea.

A few moments, and one by one, and in the case of Wederslen and Williams arm-in-arm, our neighbours hove into view out of the valley, saluted and pa.s.sed. We noted the unusually friendly att.i.tude of the two. What was Williams up to? we wondered. We knew that Williams, the ign.o.ble designer of _tonneaux_, laboured under the delusion that he could paint. Of course he could not paint--we were all agreed upon that--but he had shown us various compositions done during vacation time--blood-red boulders and gla.s.s-green seas. Was it possible that he was convincing Wederslen that he could paint? We shuddered for Art as we thought of it.

Their wives were not friendly, though, so Bill a.s.serted. We placed our hopes for Art on that.

For some moments after they were gone, and Confield with his bag had pa.s.sed from view down the forest path, we tried to contemplate with stoical indifference the prospect of seeing Williams hailed by the servile and blandiloquent Wederslen as a genius. Had he not said of Hooker that "he was likely, at no distant date, to be seen in all the collections of note? His rare skill with the burin, his delicate feeling for nature----" and so on. Of course we all esteemed Hooker and were glad to see him make good; but really, as Bill remarked, "A man who said Hooker had a feeling for nature would say anything." It was like speaking of Antony Van Dyck's feeling for nature. Hooker's Dutch gardens and Italian ornamental waters, his cypresses like black spearheads, his eighteenth-century precisians with their flowered waistcoats and high insteps, were as far from nature as they could conveniently get. So much for Wederslen. We might have pursued the subject indefinitely had not our attention been drawn abruptly to the path.

He came uncertainly, this new figure, pausing when he was only half revealed, as though in doubt of his direction. He wore a Derby hat, and we saw over his arm a rubber mackintosh. Making up an obviously unsettled mind, he abjured the path and struck straight across towards us, with the evident intention of inquiring the way.