Chapter Seven
Felicity Comes to Town
“Marcia wants me to go and stay with her in town,’ said Felicity, waving a letter in the air.
“We must bear in mind, Felicity,” said Lady Montague firmly, “that you are yet in the schoolroom.”
Felicity stopped waving the letter.
“I’m sixteen,” she said with dignity.
“The fact remains,” said Felicity’s aunt crushingly, “that you have not yet come out.”
“I know,” said Felicity, swinging herself up lightly upon the table, “but nowadays it doesn’t matter. I mean nowadays you don’t come out with a bang like you used to. You unfold gradually like a flower. It’s much more poetical. I read somewhere the other day that nowadays girls begin to go out to dinner when they’re fifteen, and when they’re sixteen they begin to go to dances and night clubs and drink cocktails, and when they’re seventeen they do all those things till they’re simply sick of them, and when they’re eighteen someone gives a dance to mark the fact that life has no further experiences to offer them.”
“Felicity,” said Lady Montague, “I can hardly believe my ears. You should not know the meaning of such a word as cocktail!”
“Oh, but don’t you think I should, aunt?” said Felicity earnestly. “I mean, how can I spurn it with lofty scorn when someone offers it to me if I don’t know the difference between it and lemonade. I know a cocktail quite well. It has a little stick in it with a cherry on the end.”
“I am glad to say,” said Lady Montague, with dignity, “that—er—the beverage we are discussing has never passed my lips.”
Felicity tossed her red-gold head.
“It hasn’t mine either, aunt,” she said, and added hopefully—“yet.”
Marcia was Felicity’s married sister. Every August Felicity went away to the seaside with Marcia and her family because August was the Parliamentary vacation, and Matthew, Marcia’s husband, who was a Cabinet Minister, and a very important personage, sent his secretary away for his holiday then, and played at being a private individual. This year, however, he had to stay in town to attend some important meetings, so his family arranged to stay with him. Marcia thought it would be a nice change for Felicity to stay with them in town. So did Felicity. Lady Montague, however, was not quite so sure. She disapproved of any excitement for Felicity, and she disapproved of London.
“I’ll speak to your grandfather about the invitation, Felicity,” she said, “and we will abide by his decision.”
She found Sir Digby Harborough in a very bad mood indeed. Lady Montague always bowed before Sir Digby’s storms like a willow in the wind.
“If the child wants to go, let her go,” roared Sir Digby, “let her go—let her go!”
“Certainly,” said Lady Montague hastily. “I was not purposing to put any obstacle in the way. Only she is young and headstrong and—–”
“Let her go!” roared Sir Digby, suddenly turning purple in the face.
“Exactly what I was suggesting,” said Lady Montague, retiring as precipitately as was compatible with her dignity.
The muffled sounds of Sir Digby’s growling pursued her down the corridors.
Sir Digby could and did growl threateningly for hours on end on his bad days.
Felicity ran into the drawing-room. Rosemary was there writing a letter at the writing-table. Rosemary was on one of her rare visits to her grandfather’s home. She looked, as usual, beautiful and haughty with something of bitterness and weariness behind the hauteur and oddly at variance with her youth. But her glance softened as it rested on Felicity.
“Rosemary darling,” said Felicity, “isn’t it fun! I’m going to London to stay with Marcia.”
“Goodness! Is Aunt Marcella letting you? I thought she didn’t approve of London for the young.”
“She doesn’t, but grandfather was in a good temper and said I might. Won’t it be fun?”
“When are you going?”
“Next week.”
“I shall be putting in a few days with Marcia then,” said Rosemary, frowning meditatively. “So we may meet there.”
“If we do, darling,” said Felicity, pleading, “you won’t boss me, will you? Promise.”
Rosemary smiled. She didn’t smile very often, but she had a very beautiful smile.
“I promise,” she said.
Felicity went into the library where Franklin sat writing.
“I’m going to London! I’m going to London! I’m going to London!” she chanted. “I’m going to London to lead the fast life. I’m going to drink cocktails and go to night clubs and smoke cigarettes. Won’t it be fun!”
“Don’t, Pins; you’re making me dizzy! Stay still a second. When are you going and where are you going and why are you going?”
“I’m going next week and I’m going to London to Marcia’s. Rosemary’s going to be there part of the time.”
“Oh, well,” said Franklin, trying not very successfully to speak casually, as he always did when Rosemary was mentioned. “I suppose she’ll keep you in order.”
“No, she won’t!” said Felicity triumphantly. “She’s promised not to.”
Felicity arrived at Marcia’s and Matthew’s house in Westminster at the end of the week.
Marcia was nice. So were Marcia’s children, Micky and Primula. Marcia’s husband, Matthew, too, was nice, in spite of his being a very important personage.
Felicity spent the first evening in the nursery playing with Micky and Primula. Primula had an electric train with stations, and Felicity, despite her sixteen years, enjoyed playing with trains. She sat cross-legged on the carpet, and made the train’s more exciting noises, and had brilliant ideas about fashioning stations out of cardboard boxes and little extra passengers out of rags and matches. She even made little tickets, which Primula and Micky had never thought of, and a little thing to punch them with made out of a pin. Micky and Primula loved her dearly. They called her “Auntifisty” all in one word.
“Perhaps you’d rather they didn’t call you aunt,” said Marcia. “It’s more fashionable not to, I believe.” Felicity threw back her glorious plait and raised her blue eyes from the miniature train tickets.
“Oh no,” she said, “do let them call me ‘aunt.’ I love it. It makes me feel so old.”
Matthew (who was tall and thin and slightly bald and always wore eyeglasses and a buttonhole) took his duties as Felicity’s host very seriously.
“Is there anything you’d like to do to-day, Pins?” he said to her, somewhat apprehensively, at lunch.
“Yes,” said Felicity firmly, “I’d like to go out somewhere. Somewhere fast. I’ve never been fast, and I want to try being it.”
He gave a resigned sigh. “A night club, I suppose?” he said. “Very well, I’ll do my best.”
He did his best. He arranged to take her to a night club directly after dinner. The whole onus of the undertaking was to fall upon him, because Marcia had another engagement so could not go with them. Felicity kept him waiting for some time, and when she appeared she took away his breath. Over her plain white georgette dress she wore a gorgeous silver tissue cloak of Marcia’s. Her red-gold hair was taken up and massed in plaits at the back of her shapely little head.
“By Jove!” he said, beneath his breath, because he hadn’t realised before quite how lovely Felicity was.
Marcia laughed.
“What would Aunt Marcella say?” she said.
“She wouldn’t say anything,” said Felicity, “she’d just curl up and die.”
It was a very gorgeous room. People were dancing in the middle of it and round the sides people sat at little tables.
“What shall we do first?” said Matthew.
A cocktail first,” said Felicity very firmly.
He ordered a cocktail. People were looking at Felicity with interest. Although she wasn’t a stunning beauty like Rosemary, still you wouldn’t see anything much prettier than Felicity in a week’s journey. Felic
ity soon disposed of the male starers. At the glance they received from her blue eyes, they looked hastily and sheepishly away again. Felicity had plenty of spirit and disliked being stared at.
“Well?” said Matthew, when she had finished the cocktail.
“I didn’t like the taste much,” said Felicity critically,” and I think it’s given me a headache. I’ll try a cigarette now.”
In silence he handed her his cigarette case. Felicity took one and looked at it closely.
“Does it matter much which end you light?” she said.
“It’s usual to have the cork end in your mouth,” said Matthew.
He lit it for her.
“Do they all taste like this?” said Felicity. She spoke in a disillusioned tone of voice.
“More or less,” said Matthew.
“I’d thought it was different, somehow,” sighed Felicity.
“Well, we’re getting on with it, aren’t we?” she said, as she finished it, in the tone of one whose dogged determination is carrying her through a herculean task.
“With what?” said her brother-in-law.
“With the fast life,” said Felicity. “Shall we dance now?”
*
When Marcia entered the nursery the next morning she found Felicity sitting on the floor with Micky and Primula. They had made a drink consisting of the juices of an orange and a lemon, with the addition of some sherbet and plenty of sugar and were drinking it with relish.
“It’s lovely,” said Felicity, “it’s heaps nicer than the cocktail.”
“How did you enjoy last night, darling?” said Marcia, who had been out when they came home and had breakfasted in bed.
“I didn’t,” said Felicity with great conviction. “Cocktails are just like medicine, and cigarettes are like a Channel crossing. I like myself much better this morning. We’re frightfully busy getting ready a hospital because there’s been a most horrible accident on the line, and hundreds and thousands of the passengers are wounded.”
“Here’s a stretcher, Auntifisty,” said Primula, solemnly.
“Oh, by the way, Rosemary’s coming to-day,” said Marcia.
“Is she?” said Felicity, looking up with interest from her cardboard hospital. “What fun. Or rather, I don’t suppose we shall see much of her, shall we? We never do.”
“Someone else is coming, too,” said Marcia, “a Mr. Markson.”
“Who’s he?” said Felicity, skilfully fashioning a bed out of a matchbox and some matches.
“Well, an old school friend of Matthew’s wrote and asked Matthew to invite him. He’s an American, and he’s writing a book on English Parliamentary institutions, or something of the sort. It’s to be a sort of standard reference book, and I suppose he thought that Matthew might help him.”
“I don’t suppose he’ll do much writing of standard reference books while Rosemary’s about,” said Felicity wisely. “People don’t, you know.”
“One of dem’s killed dead, Auntifisty,” said Micky solemnly. “The twain went over his tummy.”
“Oh, we’ll have a funeral, then,” said Felicity in her most businesslike fashion.
Rosemary arrived just before Mr. Markson.
She greeted Felicity casually. “How’s the family?” she said.
“Splendid!” said Felicity cheerfully. “Aunt Marcella’s got a cold and so hasn’t been up to see us since Sunday. It’s an ill wind. . . . Grandfather’s got an awfully bad attack this morning. Even in the distance he sounds like a pack of lions. And Frankie says—–”
Rosemary raised her eyebrows. “Frankie?”
“Mr. Franklin,” said Felicity impatiently. “This morning he—–”
“I’m afraid I’m not interested in Mr. Franklin,” said Rosemary.
And just then Mr. Markson came.
Mr. Markson was middle-aged and handsome in a florid style, with a very slight foreign accent, which he said was the result of long sojourn in foreign countries. No one seemed to like him very much. He was pathetically grateful to Matthew for offering him hospitality. He said that he’d tried to work in hotels and rooms and boarding-houses and couldn’t. He wanted, he said, to make his book an eternal monument to the excellence of English Parliamentary Institutions.
Like most men he seemed restless when Rosemary was anywhere in his neighbourhood. In spite of her completely ignoring him he constantly and languishingly fixed his large flashing dark eyes upon her.
The first evening of his visit Matthew took them all to the theatre. Aunt Marcella’s ideas of How a Young Girl should be Brought Up did not include visits to the theatre, and so Felicity had seen very few plays. This one turned out to be a play that Rosemary dismissed contemptuously as “tripe,” Marcia as “slush,” and Mr. Markson as “perhaps a little tee-dious.” Matthew slept peacefully from the beginning of the first scene to the end of the last, so his opinion does not count. Felicity, however, was thrilled by it. Its heroine was very beautiful, and very proud and very haughty. She was in love with the hero, but in the power of the villain, because of some indiscreet letters she had once written to him. So the heroine’s young sister determined to secure the letters for her and visited the villain’s bedroom to get them. Of course the villain came in while she was searching for them, but she slipped behind the window curtain. Then the villain foolishly stepped into a large cupboard in the wall where he kept his clothes and the young sister boldly and bravely slammed the door of it and turned the key. Then a lot of things happened. Other people came in and someone shot someone and it was all very confusing and exciting, but in the end the proud heroine was left in the arms of the handsome hero while the young sister smiled serenely and beneficently upon the reward of her bravery.
Felicity was so thrilled that she could scarcely attend to anything anyone said at the supper afterwards. At first she saw herself as the haughty heroine and emulated her in speech and manner to her own complete satisfaction till Marcia said:
“What’s the matter, dear?”
Felicity blushed. “Nothing. Why?”
“I thought perhaps you’d got toothache or a headache or something,” said Marcia solicitously.
“Oh, no,” said Felicity, slightly annoyed. “I’m quite all right.”
This discouraged her as far as the heroine was concerned. But the role of the young sister was left.
For the next few days, as she played with Micky and Primula in the nursery, or went about with Marcia and Rosemary and Matthew, she lived through all the thrilling scenes in imagination. She entered the bedrooms of villains a dozen times a day in search of letters written to them by Rosemary. For Rosemary, beautiful and cold and remote, was in every way a most satisfactory heroine.
Then quite suddenly the situation she had dealt with so often and so satisfactorily in imagination occurred.
She was passing the drawing-room door one day, on her way to the nursery, when she heard Rosemary’s voice, saying:
“Please give them back to me.”
And Mr. Markson:
“Certainly not.”
Felicity’s heart leapt. Mr. Markson, of course, had some compromising letters of Rosemary’s and was refusing to return them. It was the only explanation of the words. The scene was laid. It only remained for her to creep into Mr. Markson’s room and extract the letters from—from wherever he kept them (that part might be rather difficult, of course) . . . and lock him up in his cupboard if he interrupted her in the middle. There was a large cupboard made into the wall in his room. Felicity’s spirits rose at the thought. Everything seemed to fit in beautifully. But, of course, she must choose a moment when he was not in the house, and that at first seemed an almost insuperable difficulty. For Mr. Markson seemed never to be out of the house. He spent all the day alone in the library writing his book and in the evening discussed with Matthew the Parliamentary Institutions of Great Britain. Matthew had said that if he stayed much longer he, Matthew, would be driven to blow up the Houses of Parliament or do something really
drastic to upset the Parliamentary Institutions of Great Britain, because they were getting on his nerves. It was rather a relief to everyone when Mr. Markson announced that day at lunch that he must go home on Saturday.
Felicity decided that there was no time to be lost. She must get the letters at once, even at the risk of his interrupting her. She could always lock him into his cupboard, of course . . .
She crept upstairs to the bedroom landing. No one was there. Rosemary was out. Marcia was lying down; the children were in the nursery. She opened Mr. Markson’s bedroom door and slipped into the room with beating heart. She looked round fearfully. Where on earth did one begin looking for letters? She’d no idea, but she must do something quickly. He might come in any minute. She opened a few drawers—collars and shirts and handkerchiefs and things. She began seriously to doubt the wisdom of having come in at all. But still—now that she’d come she wasn’t going away till she’d got them. She opened his trunk. It was empty. She opened a small wooden box. It was empty. She was just going to close it when a sound outside startled her and she stumbled, falling forward into the box with her hands outspread. Her heart began to race violently as she stood up, her eyes fixed on the door. But the sound had died away. It had only been a maid coming to shut the landing window. Felicity looked down at the box and her eyes opened wide with surprise. In her fall she had touched some spring and half of the bottom of the box was rolling away, revealing a small secret recess in the false bottom.
And there were the letters.
Felicity grabbed them and went quickly out of the room, closing the door very silently behind her. The landing was empty. Clutching the papers tightly she flitted down the great wide staircase. And there at the bottom was Rosemary, just coming in at the front door, looking very beautiful in her dark hat and furs. Felicity handed her the bundle of papers.
“There!” she said dramatically.
In the play the heroine had flung herself into the young sister’s arms with sobs of gratitude. But Rosemary didn’t. She stared at Felicity and then said:
Felicity - Stands By Page 12
