" I don't think I ought to describe myself as cultured,'' she objected, finally.
"But you are."
"Oh, Maxine! I'm not—strictly speaking. I'm just reasonably well educated. A very different thing."
"Strictly speaking!" echoed her sister scornfully. "Who speaks strictly in an advertisement, I should like to know? And who is going to make a frantic grab at a companion who describes herself as reasonably well educated?''
"I think it sounds rather nice and honest," murmured Harriet.
But she was immediately overborne by her sister.
"Dear, you're the sweetest thing, when it does come to niceness and honesty and all that. But take it from me, you just don't know how to dress your shop window well. You're probably twice as cul—all right, then, well educated as I am, you have a nicer disposition, are at least as hardworking, and nearly as pretty. But who looks at you, when I'm around?"
Harriet had lived with Maxine's devastating candor for twenty-one years and was used to it. Besides—Maxine was right. She was not being conceited or offensive. She was merely being accurate. And, if such accuracy is usually kept
by other people for their inmost thoughts, Maxine somehow took the sting out of her utterances by being just as ready to criticize herself where criticism was aue. In any case, all her cheerful judgments were delivered with such a good-natured lack of malice and such an enchanting smile, that it was difficult to feel hurt and usually impossible to feel offended.
In actual age, there was only a little more than a year between the two sisters, but in disposition and outlook, Maxine might have had ten, rather than one, years' advantage.
In her, the smooth dark hair and curiously greenish-gray eyes which distinguished them both, had been exploited to the point where she became an extremely striking and arresting girl. Both of them had good figures, but Harriet was slightly taller—and, where she gave an impression of charm and quiet dignity and—as Maxine had asserted, in another of her bursts of candor—essential good breeding, Maxine contrived somehow to turn her lack of inches into something that made people refer to her as a provocative and engaging little creature.
Clever makeup, eyebrow shaping, and dressing—not to mention hairstyles that would have made most girls look absurd—had transformed Maxine into someone whom one could not possibly overlook, and of whom most people immediately wanted to know more.
She was quite right. No one would have bothered to look at Harriet while she was nearby. And no one ever did.
Inevitably, Maxine—who knew exactly what she wanted—had gravitated to the stage, as soon as there was any question of her earning her own living. She was not the stuff of which great stars are made. But she was a reasonably successful small-part actress, an invaluable "extra" in films. She could dance well, sing prettily and wear clothes admirably. She could also get on with almost anyone, and was the kind of girl who was so popular with both sexes that, if there were six people of more or less equal merit available for a job, Maxine was chosen because someone knew her or liked her or recognized that she would fit into a difficult group with less friction than almost anyone else.
She would never make an enormous salary. But no one-least of all Maxine herself—ever imagined her unable to
make her way in the world. And everyone—most of all Maxine herself—confidently expected that she would marry rather well one day.
With Harriet, life was painted in much more pastel colors.
As inevitably as Maxine's her pattern of life had also been laid down. She stayed at home to look after, and keep house for, their invalid mother, in the small country town where the girls had been born. Their father had died when they were still at school, and their mother's small annuity had been stretched to breaking point before Maxine found her first stage job and earned, not only enough to support herself, but to send a little home occasionally.
After that, with care and economy, Harriet and her mother had lived quietly but comfortably until, at the end of the previous year, Mrs. Denby had died—and her annuity with her.
The simple affairs of the family had been settled, and it was found that there remained a little under a hundred pounds in the Post Office Savings Bank, and the furniture of the small house that Harriet and her mother had rented.
The most pressing necessity was, of course, that Harriet should begin to earn her own living forthwith. And, to this end, Maxine pressed her—with affectionate sincerity—to join her in what she called "her tiny apartment'* in London.
So Harriet had stored the furniture—because she could not bear the idea of finally parting with all that remained of her dear and familiar home—and, for the first time in her life, had journeyed to London.
Here she found that the tiny apartment consisted of one charming but extraordinarily crowded room, and a small, dark landing that had been—very cleverly, if the truth must be told—converted into a kitchenette. Two neighbors, who appeared to live equally crowded andisqually cheerful lives, snared a bathroom with Maxine.
To Maxine, this was a perfectly natural and rather enjoyable way of living. To Harriet, it was frankly horrible.
She was used to quiet, privacy, and even a certain amount of space. She knew it was extraordinarily kind of her sister to buy a folding bed specially for her, clear—by dint of heroic efforts—about a third of a small wardrobe for her,
and invite her, with all warmth and sincerity, to "make herself at home."
But she felt stifled by the ghastly nearness of every inaminate object, and shy of the numbers of people who managed to squeeze into the hospitable confines of Max-ine's room for frequent parties or gossip or just casual visits.
She used to lie awake afterward—even though, inevitably, bedtime had probably been already postponed three hours beyond her usual custom—shutting her eyes tightly in what she told herself was an effort to sleep, but which was—she knew, not so very far down in her heart—a struggle against tears.
"You'll find a job of your own, darling," Maxine assured her. "Don't look so serious! I shouldn't Be a bit surprised if Monty finds you a place in his office—or Gregory gets you some work as an 'extra'—or something comes of that conversation with Tubby.''
But Harriet knew perfectly well that it was not in her to drop casually in and out of jobs with the Monties and Gregories and Tubbies. If she had a good, solid training for something, then she knew she would hold down a job with the best. But Maxine was so positive that it was "unnecessary to go through all that expensive grind first" that she had agreed to wait a few weeks, in a Micawberish mood quite foreign to her, and see what turned up.
"When you get something," Maxine explained blithely, "you'll be able to have a little place of your own like this." Harriet refrained from saying how little such a prospect pleased her. "Of course, I know it's a bit of a squeeze for two, but it's ideal for one. You'll see for yourself, if I go away on a tour. You'll be able to have the whole place to yourself and spread."
Judging from her tone, she might have been offering Harriet the echoing spaces of the Albert Hall. But she so obviously thought that no one could wish for more, that Harriet would not, for the world, have had her know how wholeheartedly she detested this dreadful new life.
Only after two or three weeks of what even Maxine was beginning to recognize as an arrangement that had its drawbacks, did Harriet firmly insist on directing her own life, instead of having it directed for her.
"I'm going to advertise for a post, Maxine," she had said
on this particular evening—a Sunday evening, which was the only one Maxine had completely free.
"It might be an idea." Maxine, with her mouth full of pins, and her hands full of sewing, had somehow managed to reply quite intelligibly. Then, having suddenly recognizee! this as an occasion when Harriet—who was dear but dumb, to her way of thinking—would require her assistance, she removed all the pins and added, *'What will you advertise as? A private secretary to a businessman?"
"Maxine! I haven't the
slightest qualification for that!"
"Of course you have! You're very presentable and dress in just that sort of quiet, yet elegant way, and you're an expert typist—"
*'Dear, I'm nothing of the sort!" Harriet protested. "I can type—which is an entirely different thing. But I 've never done more than type out articles and sermons for old canon Troubridge, at my own pace."
"Well, you can always quicken up your pace. You'd get heaps of practice in an office. And you were always so good at school—it wouldn't take you any time to pick up shorthand—"
Maxine stopped and raised her thin, dramatic eyebrows inquiringly, because Harriet had laughed with genuine amusement.
"Maxie, if you were a harassed businessman, with little time to spare, would you choose to have a secretary who was 'picking up' shorthand?"
"If she were cheerful and willing and intelligent—yes," Maxine asserted stoutly. "At least—Oh, well, I suppose it just isn't in you to pretend you have accomplishments which you haven't, or to sidetrack people when they sense any inadequacies. You can't bluff, to save your life, and you haven't a grain of good-natured impudence, which is what carries one along on nothing."
"I'm afraid not," Harriet agreed, with a smile and a slight shake of her head. "I can't pretend to qualifications which aren't there. I simply must find something where the qualifications which I do possess are required. I can cook, I can run a house, do a certain amount of nursing, handle children, type a little, and make myself generally useful and agreeable, i shall advertise for a post as working companion, where there are either chil—"
"Oh, my dear! *' Maxine looked appalled. "You'd loathe it.'VShe meant, of course, that she would loathe it. "Companions have neither the rights of servants, nor the privileges of the family. And there's always either someone very old or someone very young to live on their vitality. And it s underpaid. And you'd have to live in someone else's house—possibly in the grisly depths of the country."
Harriet listened unmoved by this harrowing catalog.
"I know you would hate it, Maxie," she said mildly. "But I shouldn't, you know. First of all, I prefer the country. Secondly, I don't at all mind living in someone else's house, for a time at any rate. So—so long as it is a house. I don't think I'm exactly cut out for apartment life." She would not express herself more forcibly. "Thirdly, unless my employers are quite astonishingly unreasonable and unpleasant, I think I am capable of doing my work in a way that will safeguard a reasonable amount of 'rights' or even privileges. And, finally, as to the Question of someone living on my energy—I have plenty of that, and, after all, I do expect to do something in exchange for a home and salary, however small."
"And small it will be," Maxine assured her pessimistically, though she had listened attentively to Harriet's categorical disposal of her objections.
"All rignt" Harriet remained unmoved. "But a home and work and a small salary are not bad returns for what are, frankly, not particularly skilled attainments. If I can get such a post, I shall consider myself lucky. My only fear is that it doesn't exist."
"Oh, my dear, there must be hundreds of people longing for just such a jewel as you in the house," Maxine cried. "The whole thing hinges on the wording of your advertisement. You've got to sell yourself well. At least—I mean, of course, that you 've got to sell the idea. Now, this is right up my street." Dropping her sewing, she reached enthusiastically for a pencil and a piece of paper. "I'll draft the advertisement for you, so that you'll have millions of replies."
There followed a characteristic, but perfectly good-natured, dispute between the two girls.
Maxine's first draft, according to Harriet, made her sound like a cross between a professional entertainer and a
domestic treasure of quite impossible attainments. While Maxine declared that Harriet's suggested way of describing herself would warn off even a desperate mother with two sets of triplets.
Finally they arrived at the compromise, which they were now examining.
"It's almost depressingly truthful," Maxine declared, "but it has a certain attraction of phrase—" she was referring, of course, to the phrases that she herself had contributed " —which might well arrest attention.''
"It still deviates from the truth in a few optimistic details," retorted Harriet, laughing, "but perhaps one has to make allowances for that."
"Anyway, I should try it on the Evening Echo and the Morning Message if I were you," Maxine said, "and I shall be surprised if you don't have several replies.to choose from.'^
Harriet secretly thought Maxine stood a good chance of being surprised. But, as she regarded reasonable optimism as a form of strength, and persistent pessimism as merely a cowardly insurance against being wrong, she firmly kept any doubts to herself, and felt better in the knowledge that at least she was doing something active at last toward the solution of her problem.
One slight alteration, however, she did make in the drafted advertisement, before taking it to the newspaper office. She withdrew what she considered to be the rattier offensive claim to "culture" and substituted "not afraid of hard work."
Maxine, on seeing the amended advertisement in print, declared that this vital alteration had spoiled the whole thing. But her incurable optimism still led her to expect a sheaf of replies.
It was perhaps as well that Harriet herself had not pitched her hopes so high. At any rate, for days on end, neither the Evening Echo nor the Morning Message forwarded any eager bids for Harriet's services, and she grew sick with combatting the waves of hope that the postman's knock aroused, followed by the depths of disappointment to which she was dashed by Maxine s deliberately casual and cheerful, "Nothing for you yet, I'm afraid, pet."
"They'll probably wait until they have a whole bundle of
replies to send on," was Maxine*s explanation, for some days. Then this was succeeded by: "They're so dreadfully careless in these newspaper offices—'* Maxine had no experience of such offices whatever "—I bet there are a whole lot of replies waiting under your box number. I should give them a few days longer and then go personally to inquire."
"I should give them a few days longer" was, Harriet knew, a concession to Maxine's reluctantly admitted doubt that perhaps, after all, the scheme was not destined for inevitable success.
A few days more, and Harriet herself had reached the end of both her patience and her power to endure waiting in doubt any longer. Plucking up her courage she visited the offices of both the Evening Echo and the Morning Message, to ask whether there had, by any chance, been a reply that had been overlooked.
At the Evening Echo, they seemed astonished and even faintly supercilious at the idea that they should run their affairs so mefficiently as to have overlooked any unimportant reply to her unimportant advertisement. But, at the offices of the Morning Message, Harriet's inquiry was dealt with by a bright-faced girl who seemed to understand immediately that a reply to any advertisement might be of vital importance to the anxious advertiser.
*'It would be most unusual for any reply to be lost or overlooked," she assured Harriet, *'but I'll go and look at once."
She went away, leaving Harriet with the feeling that, even if there were nothing for her, the disappointment would be faintly blunted by this girl's manner.
When the girl returned, however—oh, wonder of happy wonders!—she was holding a letter in her hand.
"It hadn't been overlooked," she explained. "Funnily enough, it had only just come up in the correspondence tray five minutes ago. I do hope it's somethmg nice and helpful."
"Oh, thank you so much!"
Harriet accepted both the letter and the friendly gesture with gratitude, and went out into the cold, spurious brightness of the February afternoon.
She was trembling a little, with hope and the fear of a yet more complete disappointment and, feeling that she must
sit down somewhere by herself before putting the matter to the painful test, she went into Lincoln's Inn Fields, and found an empty bench. Her only companion
s, as she nervously slit open the envelope, were a few bold, hungry sparrows, who hopped about and "tweeted" expectantly, in the evident hope of discovering that she had some crumbs for them.
Both the envelope and the writing-paper were of good quality, Harriet noticed subconsciously, and the address embossed at the head of the sheet read/*Fourways, Nr. Barndale, Middleshire.''
Rather more than a hundred miles from London, Harriet reckoned quickly, and the house is important enough to need no address except its proximity to a fair-sized town.
The letter was handwritten, in firm, sloping, rather old-fashioned characters and signed with a flourish that did not, however, in any degree affect the legibility of the signature, "Sophia Mayhew.'
Harriet's services were required, it seemed, by Mrs. Mayhew herself, who was, according to her own description, somewhat incapacitated by arthritis. There was no question of actual nursing, she explained. Nor did she require anything in the nature of a housekeeper.
"Fourways is rather an isolated house," the letter continued, "and I need^as the expression * working companion' denotes—a companion who knows all about the running of a house, and wno would be able to turn her hand to most things, as and when required. I see you mention that you are willing to help with Children. In the ordinary way, that would not be required of you. But sometimes my daughter visits me and brings her three children with her.'
Harriet reached this point in the letter without feeling that there was much brightening of the scene. Mrs. Mayhew sounded as though she considered the duties of a working companion to have the accent on the first word, rather than the last. However, the letter, having mentioned a salary that was reasonable without being munificent, concluded with a touch of dry humor which, to Harriet, redeemed it entirely.
"I suggest," Mrs. Mayhew wrote, "that if you wish to accept the post, you come here on a month's trial. A month should be long enough for us to find out how wholeheartedly we can like or dislike each other.''
Harriet laughed out loud then she reached that sentence, so that an indignant sparrow gave a more than usually energetic hop, and finally flew away. And then, seized with the panic-stricken fear that Mrs. Mayhew might have written just such a letter in answer to half a dozen other applicants, she hurried home to write her eager acceptance of the position and send it off by return mail.
Harlequin Omnibus: Take Me with You, Choose What You Will, Meant for Each Other Page 21
