Red Masquerade Part 13

This was a person whom Sofia had quite overlooked after one glance had cla.s.sified and pigeon-holed him. A single glance had been enough. They do some things better in England; a man cast for any particular role in life, for example, is apt to conform himself, mentally, physically, and even as to his outer habiliments, so nicely to the mould that he is forever unmistakably what he is even to the most casual observer. So this man was a butler, he had been born and bred a butler, he lived by b.u.t.tling, a butler he would die; not a pompous, turkeyc.o.c.k butler, such as the American stage will offer you when it takes up English fashionable life in a serious way, but a mild-mannered, decent body, with plain side-whiskers, chopped short on a line with the lobes of his ears, otherwise clean-shaven, his hair pathetically dyed, a colourless cast of countenance, eyes meek and mild.

He was soberly dressed in black coat and waistcoat, the latter showing a white triangle of hard-polished shirt and a black bow tie, with indefinite gray trousers and square-toed boots by no means new. His middle was crossed by a thick silver watch-chain, and curious, old-fashioned b.u.t.tons of agate set in square frames of gold fastened his round stiff cuffs of yesterday.

He carried a well-brushed bowler as unfashionable as unseasonable.

When Mr. Karslake entered, the polished pattern of a young gentleman of means, slenderly well set-up in an exquisitely tailored brown lounge suit, wearing a boater and carrying a slender malacca stick in one chamois-gloved hand, the butler stood up at his table, quietly acknowledged his greeting--"Ah, Nogam! you here already?"--and waited for the younger man to be seated before resuming his own chair: a stoop-shouldered symbol of self-respecting respectability, not too intelligent, subdued by definite and unresentful acceptance of "his place."

Their table was the one immediately beyond the buffet; and the cafe was very quiet, with only three other patrons, two of whom were playing chess while the third was reading an old issue of the Echo de Paris. So Sofia could, if she had cared to eavesdrop, have overheard everything that pa.s.sed between Mr. Karslake and the man Nogam. But she didn't; their first few speeches failed to excite her curiosity in the least.

She heard Mr. Karslake, who was becomingly affable to one of inferior station, express the perfunctory hope that he hadn't kept Nogam waiting long, and Nogam reply to the simple effect of "Oh, not at all, sir." To this he added that he 'oped there had been no 'itch, he was most heager to be installed in his new situation, and would do his best to give satisfaction. Karslake replied airily that he was sure Nogam would do famously, and Nogam said "Thank you, sir." Then Karslake announced they must bustle along, because they were expected by some person unnamed, but just the same he meant to have a drink before he budged a foot. And he called a waiter and requested a whiskey and soda for himself and some beer for Nogam.... And Sofia turned her attention to other things.

The murmur of their talk meant nothing to her after that, and she forgot them entirely till they got up to leave, and then wasted only a moment in wondering why Mr. Karslake, if he were, as he seemed to be, engaging a butler for some friend or employer, should have arranged to meet the man in a cafe of Soho. But it didn't matter, and she dismissed the incident from her mind.

What did matter was that she was to-day more than ever galled by the deadly circ.u.mstances of her existence. If they were to continue to obtain, she felt, life would grow simply unendurable, and she would to do something reckless to get a little relief from the tedium and the ugliness of it all.

She was fed up with everything, the shrewishness of Mama Therese, the drunkenness of Papa Dupont, the hideous dullness of the cafe, the smell of food, the fumes of tobacco, the reek of wines.

She was fed up with the leers of Papa Dupont, the scowls of Mama Therese, the grimaces of waiters, the stares of customers, the very sight of herself in the mirror across the room.

She was fed up with being fed up, she wanted to do something lunatic, she wanted to kick and scream and drum on the floor with her heels.

And all the while, beyond the threshold, life in the street was flowing by, a restless stream, and the voice of it was a siren call to her hungry heart, whispering of freedom, laughing low of love, roaring robustly of brave adventures.

And she sat there with folded hands, mutinous yet impotent, afraid, a useless thing with sullen eyes ... wasted ...

As was her custom, between six and seven, before the busy hours of the evening, she had her dinner fetched to a table near by.

Somebody had left a copy of a morning paper on the wall-seat. Sofia glanced through it without much interest. None the less, when she had finished, she took the sheet back to the caisse with her and intermittently, as occasion offered, read s.n.a.t.c.hes of it quite openly, so bored that she didn't care if Mama Therese did catch her at this forbidden practice; a good row would be almost welcome ... anything to break the monotony....

When she had digested without edification every item of news, she devoured the advertis.e.m.e.nts of the shops, then turned to the Agony Column, which she had saved up for a savoury.

She read the appeal of the widow of the English army officer who wanted some kind-hearted and soft-headed person to finance her in setting up an establishment for "paying guests."

She read the card of the young gentleman of good family but impoverished means who admitted that he had every grace and talent heart could desire and who, in frantic effort to escape going to work for his living, threw himself bodily upon the generosity of an unknown, and as yet non-existent, benefactor, hinting darkly at suicide if nothing came of this last attempt to get himself luxuriously maintained in indolence.

She read the advertis.e.m.e.nts of money-lenders who yearned to advance fabulous sums to the n.o.bility and gentry on their simple notes of hand.

She read the thinly disguised professional cards of lonely ladies whose unhappy lot could be mitigated only by congenial male companionship.

She read the ingenuous matrimonial bids.

She read the announcement of the lady of (deleted) t.i.tle who was willing, for a substantial consideration, to introduce gentlefolk of means and their daughters to the most exclusive social circles.

She read the nave solicitation of the alleged ex-officer of the B.E.F., who had won through the war with every known decoration except the Double Cross of the Order of St. Gall and with nothing of his anatomy left whole except his cheek, begging some great-hearted soul to buy him a barrel organ to play in the streets.

And then her eye was arrested by the appearance of her own name in the text of a brief advertis.e.m.e.nt, which she read naturally, with heightened interest:

IF MICHAEL LANYARD will communicate privately he will hear news of Sofia his daughter. Address Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C. 3

IV

MUTINY

Sofia had never heard the name of Michael Lanyard. Neither did the firm style of Messrs. Secretan & Sypher, Solicitors, mean anything to her.

Notwithstanding, she wasted more time than she knew trying to picture to herself a man who looked like Michael Lanyard sounded, and wishing (no matter what his looks might be) that she were his long-lost daughter Sofia, and that he would see the advertis.e.m.e.nt, and communicate privately as requested, and hear news of her, and come speeding in a Rolls-Royce to the Cafe des Exiles, and walk in and humble Papa Dupont with a look of hauteur and confound Mama Therese with a peremptory word, and take Sofia by the hand and lead her out and induct her into such an environment as suited her rightful station: said environment necessarily comprising a town house if not on Park Lane at least nearly adjacent to it, and a country house sitting, in the mellowed beauty of its Seventeenth Century architecture, amid lordly acres of velvet lawn and private park.

She hoped the country house would be within sight of the sea, and that the family garage would run to a comfortable little town-car for her personal use when she went shopping in Bond Street, or to pay calls or leave cards, or to concerts and matinees....

At about this stage her chateaux en Espagne began to rock upon their foundations; a seismic phenomenon due to the appearance of Mama Therese and Papa Dupont, coming from zinc and kitchen for their dinner, which meal they habitually consumed in the cafe when the evening rush was over, the tables undressed, and the establishment had settled down to drowse away the dull hours till closing time.

Thus reminded that it was nine o'clock or thereabouts of a stuffy evening in a stodgy world where nothing ever happened that hadn't wearily happened the day before and the day before that and so back to the beginning of Time, and wasn't scheduled tediously to continue happening to-morrow and the day after and so on to the end of Eternity, Sofia sighed and shook herself and put away the vanity of dreams.

But her beauty, as she sat brooding, was as sultry as the night.

In the rear of the room Mama Therese and Papa Dupont wrangled sourly over their food; not with impa.s.sioned rancour but in the natural order of things--as others might discuss the book of the moment or the play of the year or scandal or Charlie Chaplin or the thundering fiasco of Versailles--these two discussed each other's failings with utmost candour and freedom of expression: handling their subjects without gloves; never hesitating to touch upon topics not commonly mentioned in civil intercourse or to use the apt, unprintable word; never dreaming of politely terming a d.a.m.ned old hoe a spade; tossing the ball of recrimination to and fro with masterly ease.

Their preoccupation with this pastime was so thoroughgoing that Mama Therese even failed to notice the pa.s.sage of the postman on his last round of the day. Ordinarily, for reasons best known to herself and which Sofia had never thought to question, Mama Therese preferred personally to receive all letters and contrived to be on hand at the postman's customary hours of call. But to-night she only realized that he had come and gone when, happening to glance toward the caisse, she saw Sofia shuffling the half-dozen envelopes which had been left with her.

Immediately Mama Therese pushed back the table and got up, wiping chin and moustache with her napkin as she rolled toward the desk.

But she was too late. Already Sofia had sorted out and was staring in blank wonder at an envelope addressed to Mama Therese and bearing in its upper left-hand corner the imprint of its origin:

_Secretan & Sypher Solicitors Lincoln's Inn Fields London, W.C. 3._

As yet she was simply startled by the coincidence, her brain had not had time to absorb its full significance--that Mama Therese should receive a communication from these distinctively named solicitors on the evening of the very day on which they advertised concerning a young woman named Sofia!--when the letter was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of her hand, a torrent of objurgation was loosed upon her devoted head, and she looked into the black scowl of the Frenchwoman.

"Sneak! Spying little cat! How dare you pry into my letters?"

"But, Mama Therese--!"

"Be still, you! Has one asked you to speak? Give me those others"--Mama Therese with a vast show of violence appropriated them from Sofia's unresisting grasp--"and after this keep your nose of a mouchard out of what doesn't concern you!"

"But, Mama Therese!--"

"Hold your tongue. I wish to hear nothing from you, I hear too much--yes, and see too much, too! Oh, don't flatter yourself I am like that fat dolt of a Dupont, to be taken in by a pair of round eyes and innocent ways. I know your sort, I know _you_, mam'selle, too well! Me, I am n.o.body's fool, least of all yours, young woman. What goes on under my nose, I see; and if you imagine otherwise you are a bigger simpleton that you take me for."

She snapped her fingers viciously in Sofia's crimsoned face, uttered a contemptuous "_Zut_!" and waddled off, shaking her head and growling to herself.

Sofia felt stunned. The offensive had been launched so swiftly, she was conscious of having done so little to invite it, she had been taken unprepared, thrown into confusion, her feeble objections silenced and overwhelmed by that deluge of abuse, publicly disgraced....

Her face was burning, and tears started in her eyes; but she winked them back, she would not let them fall. Conscious of the grins of the handful of patrons, and the leers of the waiters, she steeled herself to suppress every betrayal of the mortification in which her soul was writhing, she made no sign but stared on stonily at the blackness of the night that peered in at the open doors.

Then indignation came to her rescue, the flaming colour ebbed from her face and left it unnaturally white, the mists before her eyes dissipated and their look grew fixed and hard, even her lips took on a grim, unyielding set. Beneath the desk her hands clenched into small fists. But she did not move.

The sensation stirred up by the outbreak of Mama Therese subsided, the domino players resumed their game, the old gentleman reading Le Rire turned a page and read on with a knowing smile, lovers returned to their low-voiced love-making, waiters yawned behind their hands, all was as it had been save that, at their table (Sofia could see by the mirror, without looking directly) Mama Therese and Papa Dupont seemed to have declared an armistice and were gobbling down the rest of their meal in silence and indecorous haste.

Presently they got up and sought their living quarters. To do this they had to pa.s.s the caisse and through the green baize door. Mama Therese marched ahead with forbidding frown and quivering chins, with the militant carriage of misprized and affronted rect.i.tude. To her, it was obvious, Sofia for the time being did not exist. At her heels Papa Dupont shambled uneasily, hanging the head of deep thoughtfulness, avoiding Sofia's gaze. It was his part to pretend that all was well and always would be; only he lacked the effrontery, just then, for his usual smirk.