Something New · Chapter 5 (1/6)

V

The four-fifteen express slid softly out of Paddington Station and Ashe Marson settled himself in the corner seat of his second-class compartment. Opposite him Joan Valentine had begun to read a magazine. Along the corridor, in a first-class smoking compartment, Mr. Peters was lighting a big black cigar. Still farther along the corridor, in a first-class non-smoking compartment, Aline Peters looked through the window and thought of many things.

In English trains the tipping classes travel first; valets, lady’s maids, footmen, nurses, and head stillroom maids, second; and housemaids, grooms, and minor and inferior stillroom maids, third. But for these social distinctions, the whole fabric of society would collapse and anarchy stalk naked through the land⁠—as in the United States.

Ashe was feeling remarkably lighthearted. He wished he had not bought Joan that magazine and thus deprived himself temporarily of the pleasure of her conversation; but that was the only flaw in his happiness. With the starting of the train, which might be considered the formal and official beginning of the delicate and dangerous enterprise on which he had embarked, he had definitely come to the conclusion that the life adventurous was the life for him. He had frequently suspected this to be the case, but it had required the actual experiment to bring certainty.

Almost more than physical courage, the ideal adventurer needs a certain lively inquisitiveness, the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs; and in Ashe this quality was highly developed. From boyhood up he had always been interested in things that were none of his business. And it is just that attribute which the modern young man, as a rule, so sadly lacks.

The modern young man may do adventurous things if they are thrust on him; but left to himself he will edge away uncomfortably and look in the other direction when the goddess of adventure smiles at him. Training and tradition alike pluck at his sleeve and urge him not to risk making himself ridiculous. And from sheer horror of laying himself open to the charge of not minding his own business he falls into a stolid disregard of all that is out of the ordinary and exciting. He tells himself that the shriek from the lonely house he passed just now was only the high note of some amateur songstress, and that the maiden in distress whom he saw pursued by the ruffian with a knife was merely earning the salary paid her by some motion-picture firm. And he proceeds on his way, looking neither to left nor right.

Ashe had none of this degenerate coyness toward adventure. Though born within easy distance of Boston and deposited by circumstances in London, he possessed, nevertheless, to a remarkable degree, that quality so essentially the property of the New Yorker⁠—the quality known, for want of a more polished word, as rubber. It is true that it had needed the eloquence of Joan Valentine to stir him from his groove; but that was because he was also lazy. He loved new sights and new experiences. Yes; he was happy. The rattle of the train shaped itself into a lively march. He told himself that he had found the right occupation for a young man in the spring.

Joan, meantime, intrenched behind her magazine, was also busy with her thoughts. She was not reading the magazine; she held it before her as a protection, knowing that if she laid it down Ashe would begin to talk. And just at present she had no desire for conversation. She, like Ashe, was contemplating the immediate future, but, unlike him, was not doing so with much pleasure. She was regretting heartily that she had not resisted the temptation to uplift this young man and wishing that she had left him to wallow in the slothful peace in which she had found him.

It is curious how frequently in this world our attempts to stimulate and uplift swoop back on us and smite us like boomerangs. Ashe’s presence was the direct outcome of her lecture on enterprise, and it added a complication to an already complicated venture.

She did her best to be fair to Ashe. It was not his fault that he was about to try to deprive her of five thousand dollars, which she looked on as her personal property; but illogically she found herself feeling a little hostile.

She glanced furtively at him over the magazine, choosing by ill chance a moment when he had just directed his gaze at her. Their eyes met and there was nothing for it but to talk; so she tucked away her hostility in a corner of her mind, where she could find it again when she wanted it, and prepared for the time being to be friendly. After all, except for the fact that he was her rival, this was a pleasant and amusing young man, and one for whom, until he made the announcement that had changed her whole attitude toward him, she had entertained a distinct feeling of friendship⁠—nothing warmer.

There was something about him that made her feel that she would have liked to stroke his hair in a motherly way and straighten his tie, and have cozy chats with him in darkened rooms by the light of open fires, and make him tell her his inmost thoughts, and stimulate him to do something really worth while with his life; but this, she held, was merely the instinct of a generous nature to be kind and helpful even to a comparative stranger.

“Well, Mr. Marson,” she said, “here we are!”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” said Ashe.

He was conscious of a marked increase in the exhilaration the starting of the expedition had brought to him. At the back of his mind he realized there had been all along a kind of wistful resentment at the change in this girl’s manner toward him. During the brief conversation when he had told her of his having secured his present situation, and later, only a few minutes back, on the platform of Paddington Station, he had sensed a coldness, a certain hostility⁠—so different from her pleasant friendliness at their first meeting.

She had returned now to her earlier manner and he was surprised at the difference it made. He felt somehow younger, more alive. The lilt of the train’s rattle changed to a gay ragtime. This was curious, because Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted⁠—yes; but one does not fall in love.

A moment’s reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

“Well, what do you think of it all, Mr. Marson?” said Joan. “Are you sorry or glad that you let me persuade you to do this perfectly mad thing? I feel responsible for you, you know. If it had not been for me you would have been comfortably in Arundell Street, writing your Wand of Death.”

“I’m glad.”

“You don’t feel any misgivings now that you are actually committed to domestic service?”

“Not one.”

Joan, against her will, smiled approval on this uncompromising attitude. This young man might be her rival, but his demeanor on the eve of perilous times appealed to her. That was the spirit she liked and admired⁠—that reckless acceptance of whatever might come. It was the spirit in which she herself had gone into the affair and she was pleased to find that it animated Ashe also⁠—though, to be sure, it had its drawbacks. It made his rivalry the more dangerous. This reflection injected a touch of the old hostility into her manner.

“I wonder whether you will continue to feel so brave.”

“What do you mean?”

Joan perceived that she was in danger of going too far. She had no wish to unmask Ashe at the expense of revealing her own secret. She must resist the temptation to hint that she had discovered his.

“I meant,” she said quickly, “that from what I have seen of him Mr. Peters seems likely to be a rather trying man to work for.”

Ashe’s face cleared. For a moment he had almost suspected that she had guessed his errand.

“Yes. I imagine he will be. He is what you might call quick-tempered. He has dyspepsia, you know.”

“I know.”

“What he wants is plenty of fresh air and no cigars, and a regular course of those Larsen Exercises that amused you so much.”

Joan laughed.

“Are you going to try and persuade Mr. Peters to twist himself about like that? Do let me see it if you do.”

“I wish I could.”

“Do suggest it to him.”

“Don’t you think he would resent it from a valet?”

“I keep forgetting that you are a valet. You look so unlike one.”

“Old Peters didn’t think so. He rather complimented me on my appearance. He said I was ordinary-looking.”

“I shouldn’t have called you that. You look so very strong and fit.”

“Surely there are muscular valets?”

“Well, yes; I suppose there are.”

Ashe looked at her. He was thinking that never in his life had he seen a girl so amazingly pretty. What it was that she had done to herself was beyond him; but something, some trick of dress, had given her a touch of the demure that made her irresistible. She was dressed in sober black, the ideal background for her fairness.

“While on the subject,” he said, “I suppose you know you don’t look in the least like a lady’s maid? You look like a disguised princess.”

She laughed.

“That’s very nice of you, Mr. Marson, but you’re quite wrong. Anyone could tell I was a lady’s maid, a mile away. You aren’t criticizing the dress, surely?”

“The dress is all right. It’s the general effect. I don’t think your expression is right. It’s⁠—it’s⁠—there’s too much attack in it. You aren’t meek enough.”

Joan’s eyes opened wide.

“Meek! Have you ever seen an English lady’s maid, Mr. Marson?”

“Why, no; now that I come to think of it, I don’t believe I have.”

“Well, let me tell you that meekness is her last quality. Why should she be meek? Doesn’t she go in after the groom of the chambers?”

“Go in? Go in where?”

“In to dinner.” She smiled at the sight of his bewildered face. “I’m afraid you don’t know much about the etiquette of the new world you have entered so rashly. Didn’t you know that the rules of precedence among the servants of a big house in England are more rigid and complicated than in English society?”

“You’re joking!”

“I’m not joking. You try going in to dinner out of your proper place when we get to Blandings and see what happens. A public rebuke from the butler is the least you could expect.”

A bead of perspiration appeared on Ashe’s forehead.

“Heavens!” he whispered. “If a butler publicly rebuked me I think I should commit suicide. I couldn’t survive it.”

He stared, with fallen jaw, into the abyss of horror into which he had leaped so lightheartedly. The servant problem, on this large scale, had been nonexistent for him until now. In the days of his youth, at Mayling, Massachusetts, his needs had been ministered to by a muscular Swede. Later, at Oxford, there had been his “scout” and his bed maker, harmless persons both, provided you locked up your whisky. And in London, his last phase, a succession of servitors of the type of the disheveled maid at Number Seven had tended him.

That, dotted about the land of his adoption, there were houses in which larger staffs of domestics were maintained, he had been vaguely aware. Indeed, in Gridley Quayle, Investigator; The Adventure of the Missing Marquis⁠—number four of the series⁠—he had drawn a picture of the home life of a duke, in which a butler and two powdered footmen had played their parts; but he had had no idea that rigid and complicated rules of etiquette swayed the private lives of these individuals. If he had given the matter a thought he had supposed that when the dinner hour arrived the butler and the two footmen would troop into the kitchen and squash in at the table wherever they found room.

“Tell me,” he said. “Tell me all you know. I feel as though I had escaped a frightful disaster.”

“You probably have. I don’t suppose there is anything so terrible as a snub from a butler.”

“If there is I can’t think of it. When I was at Oxford I used to go and stay with a friend of mine who had a butler that looked like a Roman emperor in swallowtails. He terrified me. I used to grovel to the man. Please give me all the pointers you can.”

“Well, as Mr. Peters’ valet, I suppose you will be rather a big man.”

“I shan’t feel it.”

“However large the house party is, Mr. Peters is sure to be the principal guest; so your standing will be correspondingly magnificent. You come after the butler, the housekeeper, the groom of the chambers, Lord Emsworth’s valet, Lady Ann Warblington’s lady’s maid⁠—”

“Who is she?”

“Lady Ann? Lord Emsworth’s sister. She has lived with him since his wife died. What was I saying? Oh, yes! After them come the honorable Frederick Threepwood’s valet and myself⁠—and then you.”

“I’m not so high up then, after all?”

“Yes, you are. There’s a whole crowd who come after you. It all depends on how many other guests there are besides Mr. Peters.”

“I suppose I charge in at the head of a drove of housemaids and scullery maids?”

“My dear Mr. Marson, if a housemaid or a scullery maid tried to get into the steward’s room and have her meals with us, she would be⁠—”

“Rebuked by the butler?”

“Lynched, I should think. Kitchen maids and scullery maids eat in the kitchen. Chauffeurs, footmen, under-butler, pantry boys, hall boy, odd man and steward’s-room footman take their meals in the servants’ hall, waited on by the hall boy. The stillroom maids have breakfast and tea in the stillroom, and dinner and supper in the hall. The housemaids and nursery maids have breakfast and tea in the housemaid’s sitting-room, and dinner and supper in the hall. The head housemaid ranks next to the head stillroom maid. The laundry maids have a place of their own near the laundry, and the head laundry maid ranks above the head housemaid. The chef has his meals in a room of his own near the kitchen. Is there anything else I can tell you, Mr. Marson?”

Ashe was staring at her with vacant eyes. He shook his head dumbly.

“We stop at Swindon in half an hour,” said Joan softly. “Don’t you think you would be wise to get out there and go straight back to London, Mr. Marson? Think of all you would avoid!”

Ashe found speech.

“It’s a nightmare!”

“You would be far happier in Arundell Street. Why don’t you get out at Swindon and go back?”

Ashe shook his head.

“I can’t. There’s⁠—there’s a reason.”

Joan picked up her magazine again. Hostility had come out from the corner into which she had tucked it away and was once more filling her mind. She knew it was illogical, but she could not help it. For a moment, during her revelations of servants’ etiquette, she had allowed herself to hope that she had frightened her rival out of the field, and the disappointment made her feel irritable. She buried herself in a short story, and countered Ashe’s attempts at renewing the conversation with cold monosyllables, until he ceased his efforts and fell into a moody silence.

He was feeling hurt and angry. Her sudden coldness, following on the friendliness with which she had talked so long, puzzled and infuriated him. He felt as though he had been snubbed, and for no reason.

He resented the defensive magazine, though he had bought it for her himself. He resented her attitude of having ceased to recognize his existence. A sadness, a filmy melancholy, crept over him. He brooded on the unutterable silliness of humanity, especially the female portion of it, in erecting artificial barriers to friendship. It was so unreasonable.