Mrs. Crasterton recovered on the morrow, and in the afternoon Mr. Hardy sent a cab for us and we went to meet him at the GREAT AUSTRALIAN PUBLISHER’S. People ran forward at sight of Mrs. Crasterton, and one after another conducted us through the lovely book store. Oh, the books! We went up stairs, with books everywhere, and pictures of celebrities, and entered a new kind of room to me. There were more books and pictures, but also lovely easy chairs and two desks. Goring Hardy was at one, and a terribly polite man at the other. The publisher man was away in Melbourne.
The polite man chatted to Mrs. Crasterton. Goring Hardy excused himself, something entailed cabling. Mrs. Crasterton and the Polite Man continued a conversation on family matters while I gazed about me. Oh, the books! Mrs. Crasterton had another engagement, and the Polite Man said she could leave the little lady in his charge, and he or Mr. Hardy would send her home safely in a cab. Mr. Hardy made many apologies and escorted Mrs. Crasterton down stairs with most knightly tenderness, making jokes and yarning. When he returned he dived into his papers again without taking any notice of me. The Polite Man talked to me a while and then began to shut drawers, got his stick and hat, straightened his waistcoat in the way which suggests it would be more comfortable to bone this garment unaffectedly like a bodice. Then he whispered that Mr. Hardy would soon be done, and departed.
Mr. Hardy, with his nose down, said that if anything urgent came in he would attend to it.
He continued quill driving until his colleague, with fussy good-byes, had withdrawn, when he flung the pen across the room to the fireplace and erected a placard with
OUT
on it, and said in an impelling tone, “Come!”
We went up a little stairway into a snuggery, which Mr. Hardy said was old Cunningham’s private lair.
“What do you think of that for a chair?” said he, backing me into a huge one while he sat across the arms so that I was imprisoned. “Now, we’ll enjoy ourselves.”
“About writing any more books,” I stammered, “I’ve decided not to. I shall have to earn my living. We’re poor.”
“We’re not going to think about books today,” he laughed.
“I mustn’t waste your time,” I said uneasily, trying to get out of the chair without touching him.
“I don’t let anyone waste my time, little one. I’ve manoeuvred this opportunity to have a talk free from the idiots one meets at dinners and things, who want to make a tin-pot lion out of the most innocent of us.”
“I couldn’t possibly waste your time,” I said again. I did not know how to cope with the grave breach of the conventions he was forcing upon me. I was so hurt about it that I was petrified.
“You must see these etchings,” he said in a manner surprising after the way he had ignored my waiting presence for more than an hour. “Old Cunningham has some stunning prints from London, and you shall be the first to see them.”
He went down stairs and came back with a vast book. He dawdled over every picture, but they came to an end at last and I rose again, longing to escape and murmuring about trespassing upon his time. He inquired point blank, “Don’t you like being here with me? Do I bore you?”
BORED! It would have been thrilling but for the wound to my sense of propriety. He wouldn’t do this to Edmée or any girl who knew the ropes, I felt.
He removed the sting by saying, “I had practically to kidnap you. There is a howling pack after you and another after me, and this was our only chance of enjoying ourselves simply. Mrs. Crasterton will know you are as safe as a church. I’ll send for afternoon tea.”
I sat down, but with an uneasiness which was partly genuine shyness.
“You really are more unsophisticated than I could have believed,” he said, and entertained ripe delightfully all the afternoon. Oh, the books! I was a duck reared in a desert seeing a pond for the first time. I gained ease, Mr. Hardy was now treating me delightfully. Time ran all too quickly, and I had to insist upon departure.
“It was lovely. Thank you for entertaining me.”
“Look here, we must take the law into our hands and escape to enjoy our own society, and keep it secret or we should soon be smoked out of cover. The rabble has no right to bore us to death.”
This was most flattering, and he took me home to Mrs. Crasterton himself.
Edmée questioned me, but was not too persistent, as she was dressing for a ball to which Mrs. Crasterton was chaperoning her, and from which my lack both of clothes and accomplishments shut me. I said that Mr. Hardy had been too busy to bother much with me, that I had looked at a lot of books.
“But why did you stay so long?”
“I had to wait till he could bring me home.”
Gaddy was to look after me for the evening, for which I was grateful in view of the danger of Big Ears turning up on the way to the ball. Gad collected children’s books, which seemed to me a peculiar hobby for an old bachelor. He read from them. I never had had any children’s books. Ma thought them trash and I don’t believe that Pa ever heard of them.
Gad and I got on famously till half past nine, when there was a ring. “If it’s Big Ears, don’t leave me alone with him for a single moment,” I pled.
“I promise, but why, what on earth...but it can wait.”
It was Big Ears. In response to Gad’s interrogations he said that he was bored to the spine with the dance, and why had Gad not been there?
“Why, with the beauteous Edmée, that is strange, did someone cut you out?” grinned Gad.
“Why did you neglect your duty, were you lame?” demanded Big Ears. “Derek disappeared after the first dance and left her on my hands.”
“I understood that you would be after me with a gun if I did not give way,” said Gad.
“Yes, and you are so persistent that the lady is worn out.”
They both laughed. I listened in amazement to the workings of male vanity in saving face.
I excused myself and left Gad to the guest. He went early. One more night safely past. But I had a habit of running down to the sea wall to watch the sun rise over the Harbor, and Big Ears had found this out. There he was waiting for me next morning. He insisted upon bringing me up to the scratch. I would as soon have married a moon calf, whatever that may be, and thought it like his insufferability to be squawking after Edmée one week and trying to fool me the next, but I said I could not be so wicked as to drag him down to my level. “I’m a free-thinker,” I said, piling it on a little. “It is as bad for a woman to be without religion as a flower to be without perfume. That is the companion piece of love being for men a thing apart, but for women their whole existence.”
Big Ears was commended as a remarkable young man who not only taught in Sunday School, but carried on the custom of his father in reading family prayers each morning to his household. “I would laugh out loud to see you reading prayers, you’d look so funny and young,” I added.
That should finish him, I thought, and raced up the terraces and into the house. Gad met me. “Hey,” he began, “what about Big Ears?”
“Gaddy, I can trust you like everything, can’t I?”
“That’s what I’m living for,” grinned he.
“Well, you see, Big Ears is trying to flirt with me, and it puts me in a fix as Edmée might think it was my fault. He is so dead gone on her.”
“Did the Actem tell you that?”
“Well, yes, but you’ll treat it confidentially?”
“And that put you off Big Ears—well, well, I never thought I’d be grateful to the Actem. I must give her a pair of gloves for this.”
I asked what he meant, but he only cackled and kept on saying, “So she dished Big Ears by that, God bless m’soul, ha! Ha!”
Mrs. Crasterton came in and wanted to hear the joke, but Gaddy winked at me and dived into his paper. Mr. Wilting’s paper had come and my article was in it. I was painfully self-conscious about it, but Mrs. Crasterton praised it kindly, and I was longing for the money. I telephoned to Mr. Wilting to thank him and to ask ho much I should be paid, hoping it would be enough for an evening dress.
“My dear little girl,” he said, “you wouldn’t get any money for that. I put it in out of my interest to keep you before the public.” My acute disappointment was equalled by the feeling that I had been vulgar and pushing in bringing myself to notice. How was I to make a few shillings for an evening dress? I had suffered the notice solely to that end.
I was called to the drawing-room to meet a young man who said he was a free lance, and by interviewing me could make a guinea. I said I nearly fainted each time I was mentioned in the papers, and was trying my very best to get out of sight and be forgotten, could he not interview some important person instead? He said he would be surer of the guinea if he wrote about me, and pled with me to be a good sport and help him. He was one of a number who had come with similar pleas and who were able to make a guinea by submitting me to the torture of fresh notice, but I couldn’t make a penny anywhere. The few shillings Ma had given me in pocket money were running out because people bullied me for copies of my book—said I must present one to the public library and to this and that—and I had to buy these at Cunningham and Bucklers. I felt pecked to death for lack of a few pounds. Hopes of an ev............