Read Ebook: Torwood's trust by Everett Green Evelyn

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Ebook has 1717 lines and 58840 words, and 35 pages

"I'm longing to try it on," I said as I tore at the outer wrappings.

"Well, I orter say it isn't the one you told me to get," interposed Elizabeth.

I paused in unwrapping the parcel, assailed by sudden misgivings. "Isn't this the jumper, then?"

"Not that pertickler one. You see, it was like this: there was a great 'orse of a woman just in front o' me an' I couldn't move ahead of 'er no'ow, try as I would. It was a case o' bulk, if you know what I mean, an' elbows wasn't no good. An' 'ang me if she wasn't goin' in for that there very tricky jumper you wanted! I put up a good fight for it, 'm, I did indeed. We both reached it at the same time, got 'old of it together, an'--an'--when it gave way at the seams I let 'er 'ave it," said Elizabeth, concluding her simple narrative. It sounded convincing enough. I had no reason to doubt it at the moment.

"The beast!" I said in the bitterness of my heart. "Is it possible a woman could so far forget herself as to behave like that, Elizabeth?"

"But there's no need for you to be disappointed, as I got a jumper for you arter all," she continued. She took the final wrappings off the parcel and drew out a garment. "There!" she remarked proudly, holding it aloft.

The Old Masters, we are told, discovered the secret of colour, but the colour of that jumper should have been kept a secret--it never ought to have been allowed to leak out. It was one of those flaming pinks that cannot be regarded by the naked eye for any length of time, owing to the strain it puts on the delicate optic nerve. Bands of purple finished off this Bolshevist creation.

"How dare you ask me to wear that?" I broke out when I had partially recovered from the shock.

"Why, wot's wrong with it? You said you wanted a pink tricky one. It's pink, isn't it?"

"An' it's far trickier nor wot the other was."

"You had better keep the jumper for yourself," I said crossly. "No doubt it will suit you better than it would me."

I was pondering on whether this was intended as a compliment or an insult when she spoke again.

"I shan't 'arf cut a dash," she murmured as she drifted to the door; "an' it might be the means o' bringin' it off this time."

"Bringing what off, Elizabeth?"

Nothing is said of their third dimensions.

A REMARKABLE COINCIDENCE.

But it is only fair to his Royal Highness to say that he has other qualifications as well.

From the recent debate on "Doctors and Secrecy":--

We trust that the speaker mixes his medicines more discreetly than his metaphors.

ON WITH THE DANCE.

I have been to a dance; or rather I have been to a fashionable restaurant where dancing is done. I was not invited to a dance--there are very good reasons for that; I was invited to dinner. But many of my fellow-guests have invested a lot of money in dancing. That is to say, they keep on paying dancing-instructors to teach them new tricks; and the dancing- instructors, who know their business, keep on inventing new tricks. As soon as they have taught everybody a new step they say it is unfashionable and invent a new one.

This is all very well from their point of view, but it means that, in order to keep up with them and get your money's worth out of the last trick you learned, it is necessary during its brief life of respectability to dance at every available opportunity. You dance as many nights a week as is physically possible; you dance on week-days and you dance on Sundays; you begin dancing in the afternoon and you dance during tea in the coffee-rooms of expensive restaurants, whirling your precarious way through littered and abandoned tea-tables; and at dinner-time you leap up madly before the fish and dance like variety artistes in a highly-polished arena before a crowd of complete strangers eating their food; or, as if seized with an uncontrollable craving for the dance, you fling out after the joint for one wild gallop in an outer room, from which you return, perspiring and dyspeptic, to the consumption of an ice-pudding, before dashing forth to the final orgy at a picture-gallery, where the walls are appropriately covered with pictures of barbaric women dressed for the hot weather.

That is what happened at this dinner. As soon as you had started a nice conversation with a lady a sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly." This went on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and looked at the little victims getting their money's worth.

From the door of the room where the dancing was done a confused uproar overflowed, as if several men of powerful physique were banging a number of pokers against a number of saucepans, and blowing whistles, and occasional catcalls, and now and then beating a drum and several sets of huge cymbals, and ceaselessly twanging at innumerable banjoes, and at the same time singing in a foreign language, and shouting curses or exhortations or street cries, or imitating hunting-calls and the cry of the hyena, or uniting suddenly in the war-whoop of some pitiless Sudan tribe.

It was a really terrible noise. It hit you like the back-blast of an explosion as you entered the room. There was no distinguishable tune. It was simply an enormous noise. But there was a kind of savage rhythm about it which made one think immediately of Indians and fierce men and the native camps one used to visit at the Earl's Court Exhibition. And this was not surprising. For the musicians included one genuine negro and three men with their faces blacked; and the noise and the rhythm were the authentic music of a negro village in South America, and the words which some genius had once set to the noise were an exhortation to go to the place where the negroes dwelt.

To judge by their movements, many of the dancers had in fact been there, and had carefully studied the best indigenous models. They were doing some quite extraordinary things. No two couples were doing quite the same thing for more than a few seconds, so that there was an endless variety of extraordinary postures. Some of them shuffled secretly along the edge of the room, their faces tense, their shoulders swaying like reeds in a light wind, their progress almost imperceptible; they did not rotate, they did not speak, but sometimes the tremor of a skirt or the slight stirring of a patent-leather shoe showed that they were indeed alive and in motion, though that motion was as the motion of a glacier, not to be measured in minutes or yards.

And some in a kind of fever rushed hither and thither among the thick crowd, avoiding disaster with marvellous dexterity; and sometimes they revolved slowly and sometimes quickly and sometimes spun giddily round for a moment like gyroscopic tops. Then they too would be seized with a kind of trance, or it may be with sheer shortness of breath, and hung motionless for a little in the centre of the room, while the mad throng jostled and flowed about them like the leaves in Autumn round a dead bird.

And some did not revolve at all, but charged straightly up and down; and some of these thrust their loves for ever before them, as the Prussians thrust the villagers in the face of the enemy, and some for ever navigated themselves backwards like moving breakwaters to protect their darlings from the precipitate seas.

Some of them kept themselves as upright as possible, swaying slightly like willows from the hips, and some of them contorted themselves into strange and angular shapes, now leaning perilously forward till they were practically lying upon their terrified partners, and now bending sideways as a man bends who has water in one ear after bathing. All of them clutched each other in a close and intimate manner, but some, as if by separation to intensify the joy of their union, or perhaps to secure greater freedom for some particularly spacious manoeuvre, would part suddenly in the middle of the room and, clinging distantly with their hands, execute a number of complicated side-steps in opposite directions, or aim a series of vicious kicks at each other, after which they would reunite in a passionate embrace and gallop in a frenzy round the room, or fall into a trance or simply fall down. If they fell down they lay still for a moment in the fearful expectation of death, as men lie who fall under a horse; and then they would creep on hands and knees to the wall through the whirling and indifferent crowd.

Watching them, you could not tell what any one couple would do next. The most placid and dignified among them might at any moment fling a leg out behind them and almost kneel in mutual adoration, and then, as if nothing unusual had happened, shuffle onward through the press; or, as though some electric mechanism had been set in motion, they would suddenly lift a foot sideways and stand on one leg. Poised pathetically, as if waiting for the happy signal when they might put the other leg down, these men looked very sad, and I wished that the Medusa's head might be smuggled somehow into the room for their attitudes to be imperishably recorded in cold stone; it would have been a valuable addition to modern sculpture.

Upon this whirlpool I embarked with the greatest misgiving and a strange young woman clinging to my person. The noise was deafening. The four black men were now all shouting at once and playing all their instruments at once, working up to the inconceivable uproar of the finale; and all the dancers began to dance with a last desperate fury. Bodies buffeted one from behind, and while one was yet looking round in apology or anger more bodies buffeted one from the flank. It was like swimming in a choppy sea, where there is no time to get the last wave out of your mouth before the next one hits you.

Close beside us a couple fell down with a great crash. I looked at them with concern, but no one else took any notice. On with the dance! Faster and faster the black men played. I was dimly aware now that they were standing on their chairs, bellowing, and fancied the end must be near. Then we were washed into a quiet backwater, in a corner, and from here I determined never to issue till the Last Banjo should indeed sound. Here I sidled vaguely about for a long time, hoping that I looked like a man preparing for some vast culminating feat, a side-step or a buzz or a double-Jazz-spin or an ordinary fall down.

The noise suddenly ceased; the four black men had exploded.

"Very good exercise," my partner said.

A.P.H.

Sir WILLIAM ORPEN is already at work, we understand, on a picture for next year's Academy, entitled "David defying the Thunderer."

VANISHED GLORY.

Time was I rocked the crowded tents With laughter loud and hearty, Librettist to the regiment's Diverting concert party; With choice of themes so very small The task was far from tiring; There really was no risk at all Of any joke misfiring.

And so I vowed on my demob. To shun the retrogression To any sort of office job; I'd jest as a profession And burst upon the world a new Satirical rebuker, Acquiring fame and maybe too A modicum of lucre.

In short, my hopes begin to fade; The yawning gulf has rent them Twixt finding subjects ready made And having to invent them. Shattered my foolish dreams recede And pass into the distance, And I must search for one in need Of clerical assistance.

You can only do this kind of thing with the refreshment-room variety.

This distressing complaint is the very reverse of "clergyman's sore throat."

We fear she is a flirt.

THE KING'S MESSENGER.

In Paris Geraldine's mother suggested that, as I was paying a visit to London, I could bring Geraldine out with me on the return journey. She also suggested that I might bring out a new hat for her at the same time. Though being in love neither with Geraldine's mother nor with Geraldine's mother's hat I had to take kindly to both, to further my dark designs with regard to Geraldine.

In London I inspected the hat, complete in box. It was immediately obvious that it and I could never make the journey to Paris together. The sight of me carrying a hat-box at the early hour of 8 A.M. on Victoria Station would have put Geraldine off. Geraldine is very pretty, but she is like that.

On reflection, the transport of the hat from London to Paris seemed to me to be a matter eminently suited to the machinery of our Foreign Office. Though the Foreign Officer is as formidable as a Bishop in his own cathedral, he is, to thorrington Torwood yourself!'

'How very interesting! Well, I have played the part often enough to feel quite at home in it. Produce your "Philip Debenham," and I will gladly abdicate in his favour. It will not be the first time we have changed names and situations.'

Mrs. Belassis grew more and more excited. It is very aggravating when we know we have got hold of the truth, not to have power to make it recognised and admitted by others.

'I am prepared to swear a good deal in the right place and at the right time,' answered Tor, with a steady look at Mrs. Belassis out of his great grey eyes, which was not agreeable to her. 'But to you I shall certainly decline to swear anything at all. You have thought fit to accuse and insult me in my own house, being fully aware that under the circumstances you could do so with impunity. You have, however, reached the extreme limit; and for your own sake I should advise you to be content with the answers you have already received. As I have said before, if you have any charge against me, you had better send it through the right channel--that of the law.'

Miss Marjory nodded her head approvingly; she admired Tor's high-handed way of carrying things, and could see that it quite took his enemy by surprise, and disquieted her somewhat; at the same time, she thought a little more diplomatic questioning would have been advisable before a declaration of open defiance had been made. They were quite ignorant as to the strength of the adversary's cause, and it was hardly politic, perhaps, to court the intervention of the law, although it was probably, in the present position of affairs, something of an idle threat.

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