“And my being seen with you may compromise your respectability or undermine your nerve?” He sprawled imperturbably in his place, crossing again, in another sense, his long black legs and showing, above his low shoes, an absurd reach of parti-coloured sock. “I take your point well enough, but mayn’t you be after all quite wrong? If you can’t do anything for me couldn’t you at least do something with me? If it comes to that, I’m clever and amusing and charming too! I’ve been such an ass that you don’t appreciate me. But people like me—I assure you they do. They usually don’t know what an ass I’ve been; they only see the surface, which”—and he stretched himself afresh as she looked him up and down—”you CAN imagine them, can’t you, rather taken with? I’M ‘what I am’ too; nothing less and nothing more. That’s true of us as a family, you see. We ARE a crew!” He delivered himself serenely. His voice was soft and flat, his pleasant eyes, his simple tones tending to the solemn, achieved at moments that effect of quaintness which is, in certain connexions, socially so known and enjoyed. “English people have quite a weakness for me—more than any others. I get on with them beautifully. I’ve always been with them abroad. They think me,” the young man explained, “diabolically American.”
“You!” Such stupidity drew from her a sigh of compassion.
Her companion apparently quite understood it. “Are you homesick, Mamie?” he asked, with wondering irrelevance.
The manner of the question made her, for some reason, in spite of her preoccupations, break into a laugh. A shade of indulgence, a sense of other things, came back to her. “You are funny, Scott!”
“Well,” remarked Scott, “that’s just what I claim. But ARE you so homesick?” he spaciously inquired, not as to a practical end, but from an easy play of intelligence.
“I’m just dying of it!” said Mamie Cutter.
“Why so am I!” Her visitor had a sweetness of concurrence.
“We’re the only decent people,” Miss Cutter declared. “And I know. You don’t—you can’t; and I can’t explain. Come in,” she continued with a return of her impatience and an increase of her decision, “at seven sharp.”
She had quitted her seat some time before, and now, to get him into motion, hovered before him while, still motionless, he looked up at her. Something intimate, in the silence, appeared to pass between them—a community of fatigue and failure and, after all, of intelligence. There was a final cynical humour in it. It determined him, in any case, at last, and he slowly rose, taking in again as he stood there the testimony of the room. He might have been counting the photographs, but he looked at the flowers with detachment. “Who’s coming?”
“Mrs. Medwin.”
“American?”
“Dear no!”
“Then what are you doing for her?”
“I work for every one,” she promptly returned.
“For every one who pays? So I suppose. Yet isn’t it only we who do pay?”
There was a drollery, not lost on her, in the way his queer presence lent itself to his emphasised plural.
“Do you consider that YOU do?”
“At this, with his deliberation, he came back to his charming idea. “Only try me, and see if I can’t be MADE to. Work me in.” On her sharply presenting her back he stared a little at the clock. “If I come at seven may I stay to dinner?”
It brought her round again. “Impossible. I’m dining out.”
“With whom?”
She had to think. “With Lord Considine.”
“Oh my eye!” Scott exclaimed.
She looked at him gloomily. “Is THAT sort of tone what makes you pay? I think you might understand,” she went on, “that if you’re to sponge on me successfully you mustn’t ruin me. I must have SOME remote resemblance to a lady.”
“Yes? But why must I?” Her exasperated silence was full of answers, of which however his inimitable manner took no account. “You don’t understand my real strength; I doubt if you even understand your own. You’re clever, Mamie, but you’re not so clever as I supposed. However,” he pursued, “it’s out of Mrs. Medwin that you’ll get it.”
“Get what?”
“Why the cheque that will enable you to assist me.”
On this, for a moment, she met his eyes. “If you’ll come back at seven sharp—not a minute before, and not a minute after, I’ll give you two five-pound notes.”
He thought it over. “Whom are you expecting a minute after?”
It sent her to the window with a groan almost of anguish, and she answered nothing till she had looked at the street. “If you injure me, you know, Scott, you’ll be sorry.”
“I wouldn’t injure you for the world. What I want to do in fact is really to help you, and I promise you that I won’t leave you—by which I mean won’t leave London—till I’ve effected something really pleasant for you. I like you, Mamie, because I like pluck; I like you much more than you like me. I like you very, VERY much.” He had at last with this reached the door and opened it, but he remained with his hand on the latch. “What does Mrs. Medwin want of you?” he thus brought out.
She had come round to see him disappear, and in the relief of this prospect she again just indulged him.
“The impossible.”
He waited another minute. “And you’re going to do it?”
“I’m going to do it,” said Mamie Cutter.
“Well then that ought to be a haul. Call it THREE fivers!” he laughed. “At seven sharp.” And at last he left her alone.
CHAPTER II
Miss Cutter waited till she heard the house-door close; after which, in a sightless mechanical way, she moved about the room readjusting various objects he had not touched. It was as if his mere voice and accent had spoiled her form. But she was not left too long to reckon with these things, for Mrs. Medwin was promptly announced. This lady was not, more than her hostess, in the first flush of her youth; her appearance—the scattered remains of beauty manipulated by taste—resembled one of the light repasts in which the fragments of yesterday’s dinner figure with a conscious ease that makes up for the want of presence. She was perhaps of an effect still too immediate to be called interesting, but she was candid, gentle and surprised—not fatiguingly surprised, only just in the right degree; and her white face—it was too white—with the fixed eyes, the somewhat touzled hair and the Louis Seize hat, might at the end of the very long neck have suggested the head of a princess carried on a pike in a revolution. She immediately took up the business that had brought her, with the air however of drawing from the omens then discernible less confidence than she had hoped. The complication lay in the fact that if it was Mamie’s part to present the omens, that lady yet had so to colour them as to make her own service large. She perhaps over-coloured; for her friend gave way to momentary despair.
“What you mean is then that it’s simply impossible?”
“Oh no,” said Mamie with a qualified emphasis. “It’s POSSIBLE.”
“But disgustingly difficult?”
“As difficult as you like.”
“Then what can I do that I haven’t done?”
“You can only wait a little longer.”
“But that’s just what I HAVE done. I’ve done nothing else. I’m always waiting a little longer!”
Miss Cutter retained, in spite of this pathos, her grasp of the subject. “THE thing, as I’ve told you, is for you first to be seen.”
“But if people won’t look at me?”
“They will.”
“They WILL?” Mrs. Medwin was eager.
“They shall,” her hostess went on. “It’s their only having heard— without having seen.”’
“But if they stare straight the other way?” Mrs. Medwin continued to object. “You can’t simply go up to them and twist their heads about.”
“It’s just what I can,” said Mamie Cutter.
But her charming visitor, heedless for the moment of this attenuation, had found the way to put it. “It’s the old story. You can’t go into the water till you swim, and you can’t swim till you go into the water. I can’t be spoken to till I’m seen, but I can’t be seen till I’m spoken to.”