Miss Million's Maid Part 1

Miss Million's Maid.

by Bertha Ruck and Mrs. Oliver Onions.

CHAPTER I

THE YOUNG MAN NEXT DOOR

MY story begins with an incident that is bound to happen some time in any household that boasts--or perhaps deplores--a high-spirited girl of twenty-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 are one exactly like the other, with the same green strip of lawn just not big enough for tennis, the same side borders gay with golden calceolaria, scarlet geranium, blue lobelia, and all the bright easy-to-grow London flowers. All the villas belonging to the gardens seem alike, too, with their green front doors, their white steps, their brightly polished door-knockers and their well-kept curtains.

From the look of these typically English, cheerful, middle-cla.s.s, not-too-well-off little homes you'd know just the sort of people who live in them. The plump, house-keeping mother, the season-ticket father, the tennis-playing sons, the girls in dainty blouses, who put their little newly whitened shoes to dry on the bathroom window-sill, and who call 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 their lives, these young people who make up such a large slice of the population of our great London. There's laughter and good-fellowship and enjoyment 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 gay times _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 people of the neighbourhood.

"They are not OUR kind," she said with her stately, rather thin grey-haired head in the air. "And though we may have come down in the world, we are still Lovelaces, as we were in the old days when your dear grandfather had Lovelace Court. Even if we do seem to have dropped out of OUR world, we need not a.s.sociate with any other. Better _no_ society than the wrong society."

So, since "our" world takes no further notice of us, we have no society at all. I can't _tell_ you how frightfully, increasingly, indescribably dull and lonely it all is!

I simply long for somebody fresh of my own age to talk to. And I see so many of them about here!

"It's like starving in the midst of plenty," I said to myself this evening as I was watering the pinks in the side borders. The girls at No. 46, to the right of our garden, were shrieking with laughter together on their lawn over some family joke or other--I listened enviously to their merriment.

I wondered which of them was getting teased, and whether it was the one with my own name, Beatrice--I know some of them by name as well as I know them by sight, the pretty, good-humoured-looking girls who live in this road, the cheery young men! And yet, in all these years, I've never been allowed to have a neighbour or an acquaintance. I've never exchanged a single----

"Good evening!" said a pleasant, man's voice into the midst of my reverie.

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 white flannel-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 would like 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 him now. I ought to have fixed a silent, Medusa-like glare upon the trellis. I ought then to have taken my battered little green watering-can to fill it for the fourteenth time at the scullery-tap.

Then I ought to have begun watering the Shirley poppies on the other side of the garden.

But how often the way one's been brought up contradicts what one feels like 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-brother Reggie's, far away in India!) took up quite quickly and eagerly: "Er--I say, 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 about thirty shillings.

He said: "Do have the 'lend' of our hose to do the rest of them, won't you?" And thereupon he stretched out a long, white-sleeved arm over the railings 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 walked off.

Unfortunately I only got as far as "Oh, thank you----" And then my fingers must have fumbled the tap on or something. Anyhow, a great spray of water immediately poured forth from out of the hose through the roses and the trellis, right on to the fair head and the face of the young man next door.

"Oh!" I cried, scarlet with embarra.s.sment. "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'd had for months! And then I trained the hose off him at last and on to our border, while the young man, watching me from over the palings, said quickly:

"I've been wanting to talk to you, do you know? I've been wanting to ask----"

Well, I suppose I shall never know now, what he wanted to ask. For that was the moment when there broke upon the peaceful evening air the sound of a voice from the back window of our drawing-room, calling in outraged accents:

"Beatrice! Bee--atrice!"

Immediately all the laughter went out of me.

"Y--yes, Aunt Anastasia," I called back. In my agitation I dropped the end of the hose on to the ground, where it began irrigating the turf and my four-and-elevenpenny shoes at the same time.