II
As Hamilton Beamish, some quarter of an hour later, climbed in a series of efficient movements up the stairs of the green omnibus which was waiting in Washington Square, the summer afternoon had reached its best and sweetest. A red-blooded, one hundred percent American sun still shone warmly down from a sky of gleaming azure, but there had stolen into the air a hint of the cool of evening. It was the sort of day when Tin Pan Alley lyric-writers suddenly realise that “love” rhymes with “skies above,” and rush off, snorting, to turn out the song-hit of a lifetime. Sentimentality was abroad: and gradually, without his being aware of it, its seeds began to plant themselves in the stony and uncompromising soil of Hamilton Beamish’s bosom.
Yes, little by little, as the omnibus rolled on up the Avenue, there began to burgeon in Hamilton Beamish a mood of gentle tolerance for his species. He no longer blamed so wholeheartedly the disposition of his fellow-men to entertain towards the opposite sex on short acquaintance a warmth of emotion which could be scientifically justified only by a long and intimate knowledge of character. For the first time he began to debate within himself whether there was not something to be said for a man who was, like George Finch, plunged headlong into love with a girl to whom he had never even spoken.
And it was at this precise moment—just, dramatically enough, when the bus was passing Twenty-Ninth Street with its pretty and suggestive glimpse of the Little Church Round the Corner—that he noticed for the first time the girl in the seat across the way.
She was a girl of chic and élan. One may go still further—a girl of espièglerie and je ne sais quoi. She was dressed, as Hamilton Beamish’s experienced eye noted in one swift glance, in a delightful two-piece suit composed of a smart coat in fine quality repp, lined throughout with crêpe-de-chine, over a dainty long-sleeved frock of figured Marocain prettily pleated at the sides and finished at the neck with a small collar and kilted frill: a dress which, as every schoolboy knows, can be had in beige, grey, mid-grey, opal, snuff, powder, burnt wood, puce, brown, bottle, almond, navy, black and dark Saxe. Her colour was dark Saxe.
Another glance enabled Hamilton Beamish to take in her hat. It was, he perceived, a becoming hat in Yedda Visca straw, trimmed and bound with silk petersham ribbon, individual without being conspicuous, artistic in line and exquisite in style: and from beneath it there strayed a single curl of about the colour of a good Pekingese dog. Judging the rest of her hair by the light of this curl, Hamilton Beamish deduced that, when combing and dressing it, she just moistened the brush with a little scalpoline, thus producing a gleamy mass, sparkling with life and possessing that incomparable softness, freshness and luxuriance, at the same time toning each single hair to grow thick, long and strong. No doubt she had read advertisements of the tonic in the papers and now, having bought a bottle, was seeing how healthy and youthful her hair appeared after this delightful, refreshing dressing.
Her shoes were of black patent-leather, her stockings of steel-grey. She had that schoolgirl complexion and the skin you love to touch.
All these things the trained eye of Hamilton Beamish noted, swivelling rapidly sideways and swivelling rapidly back again. But it was her face that he noted most particularly. It was just the sort of face which, if he had not had his policy of Sane Love all carefully mapped out, would have exercised the most disturbing effect on his emotions. Even as it was, this strong, competent man could not check, as he alighted from the bus at Seventy-Ninth Street, a twinge of that wistful melancholy which men feel when they are letting a good thing get away from them.
Sad, reflected Hamilton Beamish, as he stood upon the steps of Number 16 and prepared to ring the bell, that he would never see this girl again. Naturally, a man of his stamp was not in love at first sight, but nevertheless he did not conceal it from himself that nothing would suit him better than to make her acquaintance and, after careful study of her character and disposition, possibly discover in a year or two that it was she whom Nature had intended for his mate.
It was at this point in his reflections that he perceived her standing at his elbow.
There are moments when even the coolest-headed efficiency expert finds it hard to maintain his poise. Hamilton Beamish was definitely taken aback: and, had he been a lesser man, one would have said that he became for an instant definitely pop-eyed. Apart from the fact that he had been thinking of her and thinking of her tenderly, there was the embarrassment of standing side by side with a strange girl on a doorstep. In such a crisis it is very difficult for a man to know precisely how to behave. Should he endeavour to create the illusion that he is not aware of her presence? Or should he make some chatty remark? And, if a chatty remark, what chatty remark?
Hamilton Beamish was still grappling with this problem, when the girl solved it for him. Suddenly screwing up a face which looked even more attractive at point-blank range than it had appeared in profile, she uttered the exclamation “Oo!”
“Oo!” said this girl.
For a moment, all Hamilton Beamish felt was that almost ecstatic relief which comes over the man of sensibility when he finds that a pretty girl has an attractive voice. Too many times in his career he had admired girls from afar, only to discover, when they spoke, that they had voices like peacocks calling up the rain. The next instant, however, he had recognised that his companion was suffering, and his heart was filled with a blend of compassion and zeal. Her pain aroused simultaneously the pity of the man and the efficiency of the efficiency expert.
“You have something in your eye?” he said.
“A bit of dust or something.”
“Permit me,” said Hamilton Beamish.
One of the most difficult tasks that can confront the ordinary man is the extraction of foreign bodies from the eye of a perfect stranger of the opposite sex. But Hamilton Beamish was not an ordinary man. Barely ten seconds later, he was replacing his handkerchief in his pocket and the girl was blinking at him gratefully.
“Thank you ever so much,” she said.
“Not at all,” said Hamilton Beamish.
“A doctor couldn’t have done it more neatly.”
“It’s just a knack.”
“Why is it,” asked the girl, “that, when you get a speck of dust in your eye the size of a pinpoint, it seems as big as all outdoors?”
Hamilton Beamish could answer that. The subject was one he had studied.
“The conjunctiva, a layer of mucous membrane which lines the back of the eyelids and is reflected on the front of the globe, this reflection forming the fornix, is extremely sensitive. This is especially so at the point where the tarsal plates of fibrous tissue are attached to the orbital margin by the superior and inferior palpebral ligaments.”
“I see,” said the girl.
There was a pause.
“Are you calling on Mrs. Waddington?” asked the girl.
“On Miss Waddington.”
“I’ve never met her.”
“You don’t know the whole family, then?”
“No. Only Mrs. Waddington. Would you mind ringing the bell?”
Hamilton Beamish pressed the button.
“I saw you on the omnibus,” he said.
“Did you?”
“Yes. I was sitting in the next seat.”
“How odd!”
“It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful.”
“The sun.”
“Yes.”
“The sky.”
“Yes.”
“I like the summer.”
“So do I.”
“When it’s not too hot.”
“Yes.”
“Though, as a matter of fact,” said Hamilton Beamish, “I always say that what one objects to is not the heat but the humidity.”
Which simply goes to prove that even efficiency experts, when they fall in love at first sight, can babble like any man of inferior intellect in the same circumstances. Strange and violent emotions were racking Hamilton Beamish’s bosom: and, casting away the principles of a lifetime, he recognised without a trace of shame that love had come to him at last—not creeping scientifically into his soul, as he had supposed it would, but elbowing its way in with the Berserk rush of a commuter charging into the five-fifteen. Yes, he was in love. And it is proof of the completeness with which passion had blunted his intellectual faculties that he was under the impression that in the recent exchange of remarks he had been talking rather well.
The door opened. Ferris appeared. He looked at the girl, not with the cold distaste which he had exhibited earlier in the day towards George Finch, but with a certain paternal affection. Ferris measured forty-six round the waist, but Beauty still had its appeal for him.
“Mrs. Waddington desired me to say, miss,” he said, “that an appointment of an urgent nature has called her elsewhere, rendering it impossible for her to see you this afternoon.”
“She might have phoned me,” the girl complained.
Ferris allowed one eyebrow to flicker momentarily, conveying the idea, that, while he sympathised, a spirit of loyalty forbade him to join in criticism of his employer.
“Mrs. Waddington wished to know if it would be convenient to you, miss, if she called upon you tomorrow at five o’clock?”
“All right.”
“Thank you, miss. Miss Waddington is expecting you, sir.”
Hamilton Beamish continued to stare after the girl, who, with a friendly nod in his direction, had begun to walk light-heartedly out of his life along the street.
“Who is that young lady, Ferris?” he asked.
“I could not say, sir.”
“Why couldn’t you? You seemed to know her just now.”
“No, sir. I had never seen the young lady before. Mrs. Waddington, however, had mentioned that she would be calling at this hour and instructed me to give the message which I delivered.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Waddington say who was calling?”
“Yes, sir. The young lady.”
“Ass!” said Hamilton Beamish. But even he was not strong man enough to say it aloud. “I mean, didn’t she tell you the young lady’s name?”
“No, sir. If you will step this way, sir, I will conduct you to Miss Waddington, who is in the library.”
“It seems funny that Mrs. Waddington did not tell you the young lady’s name,” brooded Hamilton Beamish.
“Very humorous, sir,” agreed the butler indulgently.