XI
“Rather beg than work, wouldn’t he? I call him Micawber because he’s always waiting for something to turn up.”
Joan wheeled round. To hear a stranger’s voice in a place that was peculiarly hers and Martin’s amazed and offended her. It was unbelievable.
A girl was sitting in the long grass, hatless, with her hands clasped round her knees. The sun lit up her bobbed hair that shone like brass and had touched her white skin with a warm finger. Wistful and elfish, sitting like Puck on a toadstool, she might have slipped out of some mossy corner of the woods to taste the breeze and speculate about life. She wore a butter-colored sport shirt wide open at the neck and brown cord riding breeches and puttees. Slight and small boned and rather thin she could easily have passed for a delicate boy or, except for something at the back of her eyes that showed that she had not always lived among trees, for Peter Pan’s brother of whom the world had never heard.
Few people would have recognized in this spring maid the Tootles of Broadway and that rabbit warren in West Forty-sixth Street. The dew of the country had washed her face and lips, and the choir voices of Martin’s big cathedral had put peace and gentleness into her expression.
She ran her eyes with frank admiration over the unself-consciously patrician Joan in her immaculate town clothes and let them rest finally on a face that seemed to her to be the most attractive that she had ever seen, for all that its expression made her want to scramble to her feet and take to her heels. But she controlled herself and sat tight, summoned her native impertinence to the rescue and gave a friendly nod. After all, it was a free country. There were no princesses knocking about.
“You don’t look as if you were a pal of squirrels,” she said.
Joan’s resentment at the unexpected presence of this interloper only lasted a moment. It gave way almost immediately before interest and curiosity and liking,—even, for a vague reason, sympathy.
“I’ve known this one all his life,” she said. “His father and mother were among my most intimate friends and, what’s more, his grandfather and grandmother relied on me to help them out in bad times.”
The duet of laughter echoed among the trees.
With a total lack of dignity the squirrel retired and stood, with erect tail, behind a tuft of coarse grass, wondering what had happened.
“It’s a gift to be country and look town,” said Tootles, with unconcealed flattery. “It’s having as many ancestors as the squirrels, I suppose. According to the rules I ought to feel awkward, oughtn’t I?”
“Why?”
“Well, I’m trespassing. I saw it in your eyes. ‘Pon my soul it never occurred to me before. Shall I try and make a conventional exit or may I stay if I promise not to pinch the hill? This view is better than face massage. It rubs out all the lines. My word, but it’s good to be alive up here!”
The mixture of cool cheek and ecstasy, given forth in the patois of the London suburbs, amused Joan. Here was a funny, whimsical, pathetic, pretty little thing, she thought—queerly wise, too, and with all about her a curious appeal for friendship and kindness. “Stay, of course,” she said. “I’m very glad you like my hill. Use it as often as you can.” She sat down on the flat-topped piece of rock that she had so often shared with Martin. There was a sense of humanity about this girl that had the effect of a magnet. She inspired confidence, as Martin did.
“Thanks most awfully,” said Tootles. “You’re kinder than you think to let me stay here. And I’m glad you’re going to sit down for a bit. I like you, and I don’t mind who knows it.”
“And I like you,” said Joan.
And they both laughed again, feeling like children. It was a characteristic trick of Fate’s to bring about this meeting.
“I don’t mind telling you now,” went on Tootles, all barriers down, “that I’ve come up here every evening for a week. It’s a thousand years since I’ve seen the sun go to bed and watched the angels light the stars. It’s making me religious. The Broadway electrics have always been between me and the sky.... Gee, but it’s goin’ to be great this evening.” She settled herself more comfortably, leaned back against the stump of a tree and began to smile like a child at the Hippodrome in expectation of one of the “colossal effects.”
Joan’s curiosity was more and more piqued, but it was rather to know what than who this amazingly natural little person was. For all her youth there were lines round her mouth that were eloquent of a story begun early. Somehow, with Martin away and giving no sign, Joan was glad, and in a way comforted, to have stumbled on some one, young like herself, who had obviously faced uncertainty and stood at the crossroads. “I’d like to ask you hundreds of questions,” she said impulsively. “Do you mind?”
“No, dearie. Fire away. I shan’t have to tell you any fables to keep you interested. I broke through the paper hoop into the big ring when I was ten. Look! See those ducks flyin’ home? The first time I saw them I thought it was a V-shaped bit of smoke running away from one of the factories round Newark.”
She had told Martin that. His laugh seemed still to be in the air.
“Are you married?” asked Joan suddenly.
“Not exactly, dearie,” replied Tootles, without choosing her words. But a look at the young, eager, sweet face bent towards her made her decide to use camouflage. “What I mean is, no, I’m not. Men don’t marry me when it isn’t absolutely necessary. I’m a small part chorus lady, if you get my point.”
Joan was not quite sure that she did. Her sophistication had not gone farther up than Sixty-seventh Street or farther down than Sherry’s, and it was bounded by Park Avenue on the one side and Fifth Avenue on the other. “But would you like to have been married?” All her thoughts just then were about marriage and Marty.
Tootles shook her head and gave a downward gesture with an open hand that hardly needed to be amplified. “No, not up to a few weeks ago. I’ve lived by the stage, you see, and that means that the men I’ve come across have not been men but theatricals. Very different. You may take my word. When I met my first man I didn’t believe it. I thought he was the same kind of fake. But when I knew that he was a man alright,—well, I wanted to be married as much as a battered fishing smack wants to get into harbor.” She was thinking of Marty too, although not of marriage any more.
“And are you going to be?”
“No, dearie. He’s got a wife, it turns out. It was a bit o’ cheek ever to dream of hitting a streak of such luck as that. All the same, I’ve won something that I shall treasure all the days of my life.... Look. Here come some of the mourners.” She pointed to three crows that flapped across a sky all hung with red and gold.
Joan was puzzled. “Mourners?”
“Why, yes. Isn’t this the death bed of a day?”
“I never thought of it in that way,” said Joan.
“No,” said Tootles, running her eyes again over Joan’s well-groomed young body. “That’s easy to see. You will, though, if ever you want every day to last a year. You’re married, anyway.”
“Not exactly,” said Joan, unconsciously repeating the other girl’s expression.
Tootles looked at Martin’s ring. “What about that, then?”
Joan looked at it too, with a curious gravity. It stood for so much more than she had ever supposed that it would. “But I don’t know whether it’s going to bind us, or not.”
“And you so awfully young!”
“I was,” said Joan.
The girl who had never had any luck darted a keen, examining glance at the girl who had all the appearance of having been born lucky. Married, as pretty as a picture, everything out of the smartest shops, the owner, probably, of this hill and those woods, and the old house that she had peeped at all among that lovely garden—she couldn’t have come up against life’s sharp elbow, surely? She hoped not, most awfully she hoped not.
Joan caught the look and smiled back. There was kindness here, and comradeship. “I’ve nothing to tell,” she said, “yet. I’m just beginning to think, that’s the truth, only just. I’ve been very young and thoughtless, but I’m better now and I’m waiting to make up for it. I’m not unhappy, only a little anxious. Everything will come right though, because my man’s a man, too.”
Tootles made a long arm and put her hand on Joan’s. “In that case, make up for it bigly, dearie,” she said earnestly. “Don’t be afraid to give. There are precious few real men about and lots of women to make a snatch at them. It isn’t being young that matters. Most troubles are brought about, at your time of life, by not knowing when to stop being young. Good luck, Lady-bird. I hope you never have anything to tell. Oh, just look, just look!”
Joan followed the pointing finger, but held the kind hand. And they sat in silence watching “the fair frail palaces, the fading Alps and archipelagoes, and great cloud-continents of sunset seas.” And as she sat, enthralled, the whole earth hushed and still, shadows lurking towards the east, the evening air holding its breath, the night ready behind the horizon for its allotted work, God’s hand on everything, it was of Marty that Joan thought, Marty whom she must have hurt so deeply and who had gone away without a word or a sign, believing that she was still a kid. Yes, she WOULD make up for it, bigly, bigly, and he should be happy, this boy-man who was a knight.
And it was of Martin that Tootles, poor, little, unlucky Tootles, thought also. All her life she would have something to which to look back, something precious and beautiful, and his name, stamped upon her heart, would go down with her to the grave.
And they stayed there, in silence, holding hands, until the last touch of color had gone out of the sky and the evening air sighed and moved on and the night climbed slowly over the dim horizon. They might have been sisters.
And then Joan rose in a sort of panic. “I must go,” she said nervously, forgetting that she had grown up. “Good night, Fairy.”
Tootles stood up too. “Good night, Lady-bird. Make everything come right,” and held out her hand.
Joan took it again and went forward and kissed the odd little girl who was her friend.
And a moment later Tootles saw her disappearing into the wood, like a spirit. When she looked up at the watching star and waved her hand, it seemed all misty.