MRS. MEDWIN
CHAPTER I
"Well, we ARE a pair!" the poor lady's visitor broke out to her at
the end of her explanation in a manner disconcerting enough. The
poor lady was Miss Cutter, who lived in South Audley Street, where
she had an "upper half" so concise that it had to pass boldly for
convenient; and her visitor was her half-brother, whom she hadn't
seen for three years. She was remarkable for a maturity of which
every symptom might have been observed to be admirably controlled,
had not a tendency to stoutness just affirmed its independence.
Her present, no doubt, insisted too much on her past, but with the
excuse, sufficiently valid, that she must certainly once have been
prettier. She was clearly not contented with once--she wished to
be prettier again. She neglected nothing that could produce that
illusion, and, being both fair and fat, dressed almost wholly in
black. When she added a little colour it was not, at any rate, to
her drapery. Her small rooms had the peculiarity that everything
they contained appeared to testify with vividness to her position
in society, quite as if they had been furnished by the bounty of
admiring friends. They were adorned indeed almost exclusively with
objects that nobody buys, as had more than once been remarked by
spectators of her own sex, for herself, and would have been
luxurious if luxury consisted mainly in photographic portraits
slashed across with signatures, in baskets of flowers beribboned
with the cards of passing compatriots, and in a neat collection of
red volumes, blue volumes, alphabetical volumes, aids to London
lucidity, of every sort, devoted to addresses and engagements. To
be in Miss Cutter's tiny drawing-room, in short, even with Miss
Cutter alone--should you by any chance have found her so--was
somehow to be in the world and in a crowd. It was like an agency--
it bristled with particulars.
This was what the tall lean loose gentleman lounging there before
her might have appeared to read in the suggestive scene over which,
while she talked to him, his eyes moved without haste and without
rest. "Oh come, Mamie!" he occasionally threw off; and the words
were evidently connected with the impression thus absorbed. His
comparative youth spoke of waste even as her positive--her too
positive--spoke of economy. There was only one thing, that is, to
make up in him for everything he had lost, though it was distinct
enough indeed that this thing might sometimes serve. It consisted
in the perfection of an indifference, an indifference at the
present moment directed to the plea--a plea of inability, of pure
destitution--with which his sister had met him. Yet it had even
now a wider embrace, took in quite sufficiently all consequences of
queerness, confessed in advance to the false note that, in such a
setting, he almost excruciatingly constituted. He cared as little
that he looked at moments all his impudence as that he looked all
his shabbiness, all his cleverness, all his history. These
different things were written in him--in his premature baldness,
his seamed strained face, the lapse from bravery of his long tawny
moustache; above all in his easy friendly universally acquainted
eye, so much too sociable for mere conversation. What possible
relation with him could be natural enough to meet it? He wore a
scant rough Inverness cape and a pair of black trousers, wanting in
substance and marked with the sheen of time, that had presumably
once served for evening use. He spoke with the slowness helplessly
permitted to Americans--as something too slow to be stopped--and he
repeated that he found himself associated with Miss Cutter in a
harmony calling for wonder. She had been telling him not only that
she couldn't possibly give him ten pounds, but that his unexpected
arrival, should he insist on being much in view, might seriously
interfere with arrangements necessary to her own maintenance; on
which he had begun by replying that he of course knew she had long
ago spent her money, but that he looked to her now exactly because
she had, without the aid of that convenience, mastered the art of
life.
"I'd really go away with a fiver, my dear, if you'd only tell me
how you do it. It's no use saying only, as you've always said,
that 'people are very kind to you.' What the devil are they kind
to you FOR?"
"Well, one reason is precisely that no particular inconvenience has
hitherto been supposed to attach to me. I'm just what I am," said
Mamie Cutter; "nothing less and nothing more. It's awkward to have
to explain to you, which moreover I really needn't in the least.
I'm clever and amusing and charming." She was uneasy and even
frightened, but she kept her temper and met him with a grace of her
own. "I don't think you ought to ask me more questions than I ask
you."
"Ah my dear," said the odd young man, "I'VE no mysteries. Why in
the world, since it was what you came out for and have devoted so
much of your time to, haven't you pulled it off? Why haven't you
married?"
"Why haven't YOU?" she retorted. "Do you think that if I had it
would have been better for you?--that my husband would for a moment
have put up with you? Do you mind my asking you if you'll kindly
go NOW?" she went on after a glance at the clock. "I'm expecting a
friend, whom I must see alone, on a matter of great importance--"
"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.
