Part 24 (1/2)
”Wouldn't what?” asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping attire.
Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her reflection in the looking-gla.s.s:
”You wouldn't see him. Like the flea in the American story, when you've got your finger on him is the time he isn't there.”
”But he is there for you?”
Bingo shook his head, holding the candle near the gla.s.s and regarding his leading feature with interest.
”Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker! if I go on brownin'
and chippin' at this rate, I shall do for the Etruscan Antiquity Room at the British Museum. Piff, what a smell of burning! It's the hair-thing hangin' on the lookin'-gla.s.s.”
Male Society began to practise the shedding of its final g's, you will remember, about the time that Female Society took to wearing transformation coiffures. Lady Hannah, her active little figure rustling in the thinnest of silk drapery, jumped nimbly out of bed, and rushed to save her property.
”Idiot!” she shrieked.
”Frightfully sorry! But you're lumps prettier without,” said Bingo.
”Don't pile insult on injury.”
”Couldn't flatter for nuts!”
”I'll forgive you if you'll tell me how _he_ manages--to attain invisibility?”
Bingo struck an att.i.tude and began to declaim:
”As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the beleaguered town of Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a mysterious bearded stranger in grey reach-me-downs and a felt slouch might have been observed directin' its steps from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets posted on the veld ...”
”Once for all, I decline to believe such theatrical rubbis.h.!.+ A beard, indeed! Why not a paper nose and a Pierrot's cap?”
”Why not?” acquiesced placid Bingo, getting into bed. But the eye concealed by the pillow winked; for he had told her the absolute truth; and woman-like, that was just what she wouldn't swallow, as he said to Beauvayse next morning.
XXII
”The Town Guard,” according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts'
Journal, one s.h.i.+lling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance, was ”a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore like a Kaffir sow.”
Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.
The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W.
Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing looking-gla.s.s that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs.
Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin part.i.tion.
Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was hara.s.sed by the demands of her resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size, might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.
The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale young c.o.c.kney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by standing the small swing looking-gla.s.s on the floor, and tilting it excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road--one develops acuteness of observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle, the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London _Half-penny Herald_, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow chest grew hollower, and he developed a ”corf.” The physician in charge of the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there, said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his best feature, and the steams.h.i.+ps were advertising ten-pound third-cla.s.s single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses ”over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery,” sniffled a little when he called to say good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.
”I shan't never see you no more, William.”
”Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!” William's step cousin 'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said; and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane,--Lobster, who was six foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in 'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays and holidays before Lobster came along.... How William loved Lobster now!