Read Ebook: The Young Enchanted: A Romantic Story by Walpole Hugh

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Ebook has 2171 lines and 119429 words, and 44 pages

Henry followed.

Around Wardour Street they hung all the shabby and tattered traditions of the poor degraded costume romance, but in its actual physical furniture there are not even trappings. There is nothing but Cinema offices, public houses, barber shops, clothes shops and shops with windows so dirty that you cannot tell what their trade may be. It is a romantic street in no sense of the word; it is not a kindly street nor a hospitable, angry words are forever echoing from wall to wall and women scream behind shuttered windows.

Henry had no time to consider whether it were a romantic street or no. The feather waved in front of him and he followed. He had by now forgotten that he was hatless and dirty. A strangely wistful eagerness urged him as though his heart were saying with every beat: "Don't count too much on this. I know you expect a great deal. Don't be taken in."

He did expect a great deal; with every step excitement beat higher. Their sudden reappearance when he had thought that he had lost them seemed to him the most wonderful omen. He believed in omens, always throwing salt over his left shoulder when he spilt it , never walking under ladders and of course never lighting three cigarettes with one match.

Some way up Wardour Street on the left as you go towards Oxford Street there is a public house with the happy country sign of the Intrepid Fox. No one knows how long the Intrepid Fox has charmed the inhabitants of Wardour Street into its dark and intricate recesses--Tom Jones may have known it and Pamela passed by it and Humphrey Clinker laughed in its doorway--no one now dare tell you and no history book records its name. Only Henry will never until he dies forget it and for him it will always be one of the most romantic buildings in the world.

It stood at the corner of Wardour Street and a little thoroughfare called Peter Street. Henry reached the Intrepid Fox just as the Flaming Feather vanished beyond the rows of flower and vegetable stalls that thronged the roadway. Peter Street it seemed was the market of the district; beneath the lovely blue of the evening the things on the stall are picturesque and touching, even old clothes, battered hats, boots with gaping toes and down-trodden heels, and the barrow of all sorts with dirty sheets of music and old paper-covered novels and tin trays and cheap flower-painted vases. In between these booths the feather waved. Henry pursuing stumbled over the wooden stands of the barrows, nearly upset an old watery-eyed woman from her chair--and arrived just in time to see the three pursued vanish through a high faded green door that had the shabby number in dingy red paint of Number Seven.

Number Seven was, as he at once perceived, strangely situated. At its right was the grimy thick-set exterior of "The City of London" public house, on its left there was a yard roofed in by a wooden balcony like the balcony of a country inn, old and rather pathetic with some flower-pots ranged along it and three windows behind it; the yard and the balcony seemed to belong to another and simpler world than the grim ugliness of the "City of London" and her companions. The street was full of business and no one had time to consider Henry. In this neighbourhood the facts that he was without a hat and needed a wash were neither so unusual nor so humorous as to demand comment.

He stood and looked. This was the time for him to go home. His romantic adventure was now logically at an end. Did he ring the bell of Number Seven he had nothing whatever to say if the door were opened.

The neighbourhood was not suited to his romantic soul. The shop opposite to him declaring itself in large white letters to be the "Paris Fish Dinner" and announcing that it could provide at any moment "Fish fried in the best dripping" was the sort of shop that destroyed all Henry's illusions. He should, at this point, have gone home. He did not. He crossed the road. The black yard, smelling of dogs and harness, invited him in. He stumbled in the dusk against a bench and some boxes but no human being seemed to be there. As his eyes grew accustomed to the half light he saw at the back of the yard a wooden staircase that vanished into blackness. Still moving as though ordered by some commanding Providence he walked across to this and started to climb. It turned a corner and his head struck sharply a wooden surface that suddenly, lifting with his pressure a little, revealed itself as a trap-door. Henry pushed upwards and found himself, as Mrs. Radcliffe would say "in a gloomy passage down which the wind blew with gusty vehemence."

In truth the wind was not blowing nor was anything stirring. The trap-door fell back with a heavy swaying motion and a creaking sigh as though some one quite close at hand had suddenly fainted. Henry walked down the passage and found that it led to a dusky thick-paned window that overlooked a square just behind the yard through which he had come. This was a very small and dirty square, grimy houses overlooking it and one thin clothes-line cutting the light evening sky now light topaz with one star and a cherry-coloured baby moon. To the right of this window was another heavily curtained and serving no purpose as it looked out only upon the passage. Beside this window Henry paused. It was formed by two long glass partitions and these were not quite fastened. From the room beyond came voices, feminine voices, one raised in violent anger. A pause--from below in the yard some one called. A step was ascending the stair.

From within voices again and then a sound not to be mistaken. Some one was slapping somebody's face and slapping it with satisfaction. A sharp cry--and Henry pushing back the window, stepped forward, became entangled in curtains of some heavy clinging stuff, flung out his arms to save himself and fell for the second time within an hour and on this occasion into the heart of a company that was most certainly not expecting him.

He had fallen on his knees and when he stumbled to his feet his left heel was still entangled with the curtain. He nearly fell again, but saved himself with a kind of staggering, suddenly asserted dignity, a dignity none the easier because he heard the curtain tear behind him as he pulled himself to his feet.

When he was standing once more and able to look about him the scene that he slowly collected for himself was a simple one--a very ugly room dressed entirely it seemed at first sight in bright salmon pink, the walls covered with photographs of ladies and gentlemen for the most part in evening dress. There were two large pink pots with palms, an upright piano swathed in pink silk, a bamboo bookcase, a sofa with pink cushions, a table on which tea was laid, the Pomeranian and--three human beings.

The three human beings were in various attitudes of transfigured astonishment exactly as though they had been lent for this special occasion by Madame Tussaud. There was the lady with the green dress, the girl with the flaming feather and the third figure was a woman, immensely stout and hung with bracelets, pendants, chains and lockets so that when her bosom heaved the noise that she made resembled those Japanese glass toys that you hang in the window for the wind to make tinkling music with them. The only sounds in the room were this deep breathing and this rattling, twitting, tittering agitation.

Even the Pomeranian was transfixed. Henry felt it his duty to speak and he would have spoken had he not been staring at the girl as though his eyes would never be able to leave her face again. It was plain enough that it was she who had been slapped a moment ago. There was a red mark on her cheek and there were tears in her eyes.

To Henry she was simply the most beautiful creature ever made in heaven and sent down to this sinful earth by a loving and kindly God. He had thought of her as a child when he first saw her, he thought of her as a child again now, a child who had, only last night, put up her hair--under the hat with the flaming feather, that hair of a vivid shining gold was trying to escape into many rebellious directions. The slapping may have had something to do with that. It was obvious at the first glance that she was not English--Scandinavian perhaps with the yellow hair, the bright blue eyes and the clear pink-and-white skin. Her dress of some mole-coloured corduroy, very simple, her little dark hat, set off her vivid colour exquisitely. She shone in that garish vulgar room with the light and purity of some almost ghostly innocence and simplicity. She was looking at Henry and he fancied that in spite of the tears that were still in her eyes a smile hovered at the corners of her mouth.

"Well, sir?" said the lady in green. She was not really angry Henry at once perceived and afterwards he flattered himself because he had from the very first discovered one of the principal features of that lady's "case"--namely, that she would never feel either anger or disapproval--at any member of the masculine gender entering any place whatever, in any manner whatever, where she might happen to be. No, it was not anger she showed, nor even curiosity--rather a determination to turn this incident, bizarre and sudden though it might be, to the very best and most profitable advantage.

"You see," said Henry, "I was in the passage outside and thought I heard some one call out. I did really."

"I'm really very sorry," said Henry. "I've never done such a thing before. It must seem very rude."

"Well it is rude," said the green lady. "If you were to ask me to be as polite as possible and not to hurt anybody's feelings, I couldn't say anything but that. All the same there's no offence taken as I see there was none meant!"

She smiled; the gleam of a distant gold tooth flashed through the air.

"If there's anything I can do to apologize," said Henry, encouraged by the smile, but hating the smile more than ever.

As she spoke she smiled at Henry more and more affectionately. Had it not been for the girl he would have fled long before; as it was, with a horrible sickening sensation that in another moment she would stretch out a fat arm and draw him towards her, he held his ground.

"What about a cup of tea?" she said. At that word the room seemed to spring to life. Mrs. Armstrong moved heavily to the table and sat down with the contented abandonment of a cow safe at last in its manger. The girl also sat down at the opposite end of the table from her mother.

"It's very good of you," said Henry, hesitating. "The fact is that I'm not very clean. I had an accident in Piccadilly and lost my hat."

"That's nothing," said Mrs. Tenssen, as though falling down in Piccadilly were part of every one's daily programme.

"Come along now and make yourself at home."

He drew towards her, fascinated against his will by the shrill green of her dress, the red of her cheeks and the strangely intimate and confident stare with which her eyes, slightly green, enveloped him. As he had horribly anticipated her fat boneless fingers closed upon his arm.

He sat down.

There was a large green teapot painted with crimson roses. The tea was very strong and had been obviously standing for a long time.

Conversation of a very bright kind began between Mrs. Tenssen and Mrs. Armstrong.

"I'm sure you'll understand," said Mrs. Tenssen, smiling with a rich and expensive glitter, "that Mrs. Armstrong is my oldest friend. My oldest and my best. What I always say is that others may misunderstand me, but Ruby Armstrong never. If there's one alive who knows me through and through it's Mrs. Armstrong."

"Yes," said Henry.

"You mustn't believe all the kind things she says about me. One's partial to a friend of a lifetime, of course, but what I always say is if one isn't partial to a friend, who is one going to be partial to?"

Mrs. Armstrong spoke, and Henry almost jumped from his chair so unexpectedly base and masculine was her voice.

"Ada expresses my feelings exactly," she said.

"I'm sure that some," went on Mrs. Tenssen, "would say that it's strange, if not familiar, asking a man to take tea with one when one doesn't even know his name, and his entrance into one's family was so peculiar; but what I always say is that life's short and there's no time to waste."

"My name's Henry Trenchard," said Henry, blushing.

"I had a friend once" , "a Mr. William Trenchard. He came from Beckenham. You remember him, Ruby?"

"I do," said Mrs. Armstrong. "And how good you were to him too! No one will ever know but myself how truly good you were to that man, Ada. Your kind heart led you astray there, as it has done often enough before."

Mrs. Tenssen nodded her head reminiscently. "He wasn't all he should have been," she said. "But there, one can't go on regretting all the actions of the past, or where would one be?"

She regarded Henry appreciatively. "He's a nice boy," she said to Mrs. Armstrong. "I like his face. I'm a terrible woman for first impressions, and deceived though I've been, I still believe in them."

"He's got kind eyes," said Mrs. Armstrong, blowing on her tea to cool it.

"Yes, they're what I'd call thinking eyes. I should say he's clever."

"Yes, he looks clever," said Mrs. Armstrong.

"And I like his smile," said Mrs. Tenssen.

"Good-natured I should say," replied Mrs. Armstrong.

This direct and personal comment floating quite naturally over his self-conscious head embarrassed Henry terribly. He had never been discussed before in his own presence as though he didn't really exist. He didn't like it; it made him extremely uneasy. He longed to interrupt and direct the conversation into a safer channel, but every topic of interest that occurred to him seemed unsuitable. The weather, the theatres, politics, Bolshevism, high prices, food, house decoration, literature and the Arts--all these occurred to him but were dismissed at once as unlikely to succeed. Moreover, he was passionately occupied with his endeavour to catch the glimpses of the girl at the end of the table. He did not wish to look at her deliberately lest that should embarrass her. He would not, for the world bring her into any kind of trouble. The two women whom he hated with increasing vehemence with every moment that passed were watching like vultures waiting for their prey. The glimpses that he did catch of the soft cheek, the untidy curls, the bend of the head and the curve of the neck fired his heart to a heroism, a purity of purpose, a Quixotism that was like wine in his head, so that he could scarcely hear or see. He would have liked to have the power to at that very instant jump up, catch her in his arms and vanish through the window. As it was he gulped down his tea and crumbled a little pink cake.

As the meal proceeded the air of the little room became very hot and stuffy. The two ladies soon fell into a very absorbing conversation about a gentleman named Herbert whose salient features were that he had a double chin and was careless about keeping engagements. The conversation passed on then to other gentlemen, all of whom seemed in one way or another to have their faults and drawbacks, and to all of whom Mrs. Tenssen had been, according to Mrs. Armstrong, quite marvellously good and kind.

The fool that Henry felt!

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