Part 11

“Not at all,” said Danby. “Any little thing like that.... Good day!”

“Good day!” she said.

But Danby did not move. The girl’s kind heart was reflected in her blue eyes. Never in his life had he needed sympathy and companionship so desperately. He felt that even his long-lost appetite would return if she were to invite him to eat with her.

She too was lonely, although her indomitable courage did not permit her to own it, even to herself. There was, too, something about the little man that was very attractive, something which made her feel sorry for him. She wished that he would ask her if he might join her and bring his own food. What was it about him which reminded her of some one she had seen before?

“Rather nice here, isn’t it?” she said.

He replied quickly, eagerly.

“Charming!” he said. “So sylvan.”

“So whater?”

“Sylvan. French for rustic.”

“Oh, French!”

“Yes; I beg your pardon.”

“Good day!” she said.

“Good day!” he replied.

He returned reluctantly to his pitch. He felt that he deserved his dismissal. It was a very foolish thing to have shown that he was something of a scholar. Evidently she considered that he was putting on side.

He sat down and made a sandwich. He felt that he could eat it with some enjoyment if he were seated on the other side of her square of newspaper. As it was....

The girl gave a short laugh.

“I’m afraid I’m a great nuisance,” she began apologetically.

“Not at all. Far from it.” There was another chance, then.

“You haven’t got such a thing as a touch of mustard, I suppose?”

“Oh yes, I have. Almost quite fresh.”

He got up again, and carried a little cold-cream pot with him.

“Oh, thank you!” She took the pot and gazed at its label, with raised eyebrows.

“It’s a has-been,” he said hastily. “I’m a bit of an engineer. Everything comes in useful.”

“Oh—thanks frightfully.” She helped herself.

“Honoured and delighted.” He remained standing over her.

She looked up.

“Anything I can do for you, now?”

“Yes, if you would. When you came here you said something about Carlton Hotel.”

“Oh, that was a poor attempt at wit.”

Danby’s hand went up to his tie. It was extraordinary how nervous he felt these days.

“Don’t think me intrusive, but suppose we imagine that this is the Carlton Hotel, and that all the tables are full except one.”

“Well?”

“Well, in that case, as you and I both wish to lunch, it would be very natural for us to be put at the same table, wouldn’t it? Do you take me?”

The girl laughed heartily.

“Come on, then. Two’s company.”

“How kind you are!” said Danby. “It will give me an appetite for the first time for months.” He hurried to his belongings and brought them back. “I know this is very irregular, our not having been introduced, but I don’t think under the circumstances it will cause a scandal in high life.”

“No, nor a paragraph in the weeklies.”

Danby respread his napkin and arranged his things on it. A sudden unexpected sensation of high spirits infected him.

He adopted what he considered to be the manner of a man of the world.

“Waitah, waitah!” he called, shooting his cuffs. “Great heaven, where’s that waitah! I shall really have to lodge a complaint with the manager. Hi! you in last week’s shirt, her ladyship and I have been waiting here for five minutes and no one’s been near us. It’s a disgrace. Don’t stand gaping there, sir, with a Swiss grin. Alley-vous ang. Gettey-vous gone toute suite, and bringey moi le menu. Verfluchtes, geschweinhund!” He waved the imaginary waiter away. “Pray pardon my heat, Lady Susan.”

The girl was intensely amused.

“Oh, certainly, Lord Edmund,” she replied, assuming an elaborately refined accent.

Danby kept it up.

“Do you find the glare of the electric light too much for you? Shall I complain about the orchestra?”

“One must endure these things in these places, your lordship. Were you riding in the Row this morning?”

“Yaas.” Danby twirled an imaginary moustache. “I had a canter. My mare cast a shoe—sixteen buttons. I rode her so hard that she strained her hemlock. She’s a good little mare. Has fourteen hands, and plenty of action. She’s a bit of a roarer, but then her mother was ridden by a Cabinet Minister.”

“You haven’t taken to a car, then?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve got one Fit and two Damlers. The annoying thing is, I’ve just lost my chauffeur.”

“Oh, really? How?”

“He dropped an oath into the petrol-tank and was seen no more.”

“What an absurdly careless person!”

Danby dropped acting, and eyed the girl keenly.

“I say,” he exclaimed, “that was good!”

“So’s that ham,” said the girl involuntarily.

Instantly Danby’s fork prodded the best piece.

“Have some. Do!”

“Sure you can spare it?”

“It would be a pity to waste it. I can’t tackle more than one slice.”

The girl held out a slice of bread.

“Haven’t seen ham for ten days,” she said simply. “It’s an awfully odd thing.”

“What? The ham?”

“No; your face.”

Danby laughed.

“You’re not the first who’s thought so.”

“And your voice is familiar, too,” said the girl.

Danby pretended to misunderstand. She had provided him with a chance he simply could not resist.

“Familiar? Oh, don’t say that. I thought I was behaving like an undoubted gentleman—one of the old régime.”

The girl examined the little man with a sudden touch of excitement.

“Look here,” she said. “Tell me the truth. Haven’t you been a picture-postcard?”

“Yes,” said Danby bitterly, “oh dear, yes! A year ago I was to be found in all the shops, between Hackenschmidt and the German Emperor.”

“I’ve got it!” she cried. “I know you.”

“No, you don’t,” said Danby.

“I do. I recognise you.”

“I think not. No one could recognise _me_ now.”

“But I do. You’re Dick Danby—_the_ Dick Danby. The famous Dick Danby. The Dick Danby who used to set all London laughing, who played Widow Twankey at Drury Lane, and topped the bill at the Tivoli and the Pav.”

The little man’s thin pale hands went up to his face.

“Oh, don’t!” he said, bursting into tears. “I can’t bear it.”

For a moment the girl was not sure whether this unexpected emotion was not part of the celebrated funny man’s comic method. She was about to laugh, when she found that Danby’s shoulders were shaking with very real and very terrible sobs. She was intensely surprised and upset and touched. She had never seen a man cry before. She put a soft hand on his arm.

“Oh, Mr. Danby,” she said, “what is it—what’s the matter?”

“Haven’t you heard? Dick Danby’s done for—gone under—gone _phut_. Dick Danby that was; Dick Danby that is no more. Dick Danby, that used to make ’em laugh, is a broken man. Oh, my God!”

“Oh, don’t go on like that!” said the girl brokenly. “You’ll make me cry if you do. What’s happened, Mr. Danby?”

The little man shook himself angrily. He was ashamed of himself. He didn’t know that he had become so weak, so unstrung, so little master of himself.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve never cried before. It was your recognising me. I didn’t think any one could recognise me as I am now. It was overwork, overstrain, three halls a night—I couldn’t stand it. I tried to struggle on, but it was no use. I earned my living as a funny man. Can you imagine what it means to a funny man to find that his jokes don’t go? Can you imagine what it meant for me to stand waiting in the wings for my number to go up, trembling all over with fear and fright, and then to face the public that used to roar with delight, and get a few scattered hands? Oh, those awful nights! The crowd, no longer my friends, who struck matches and talked. The look of pity on the face of the conductor, and the few words from the stage door when I crept away: ‘Never mind, Mr. Danby; can’t always expect to knock ’em, y’know.’ Do you wonder that I fretted myself into an illness? Do you wonder that I’ve been creeping about the country, afraid to face the managers? I’m done. I’m a funny man gone unfunny. I’m the Dick Danby that can’t get his laughs.”

The girl listened to this painful confession with intense sympathy. She too had earned a hard living on the music-hall stage. She too knew what it was to fail in her anxious endeavour to win applause. She too was at that moment tramping to London in search of work, with only a few shillings between the lodging-house and the Salvation Army shelter. There was something very different between her case and Richard Danby’s. She was an insignificant member of a large army of music-hall artistes whose place was always at the very beginning or the very end of the programme. When she had the good fortune to be in work, her salary was a bare living wage, and it was only by stinting herself of the few luxuries of life that she could put by a few pounds for a rainy day. Dick Danby’s case was utterly—almost ludicrously—different. His salary for years had been large enough to take her breath away. He had earned more in a week than she had earned in a year. His health had broken down, and his nerves and confidence had left him, but, at any rate, he was not faced, or likely to be faced, with starvation and the Embankment, and other terrors that were unmentionable.

“Don’t take it to heart, Mr. Danby,” she said cheerily. “You’ll get better, never fear, and knock ’em again. And, until then, you can be a country gentleman, and enjoy yourself. Think of all the money you’ve made!”

Danby gave a curious little laugh.

“And spent,” he said. “Money? Oh, yes, I made money—money to burn—and I burnt it—in the usual way. I thought my day would go on for ever, but, like other thoughtless fools, I made a mistake. It came to a sudden end.”

“But—but you don’t mean to tell me that you haven’t saved, Mr. Danby?”

“Saved?” Danby laughed again. “Have you ever heard that the word ‘save’ isn’t in the dictionary of the men who earn their living behind the footlights? I’ve got just enough left to keep me on the road till the end of the summer.”

“And then?”

“And then—the workhouse or the prison.”

“Never, never!” cried the girl. “Never!”

A great thrill ran through the little man’s veins. The emphatic cry was the best thing he had heard for many long, depressing months. The fact that it came from a shabby girl who might be in a worse plight than himself did not seem to matter.

“But what am I to do?” he asked.

The girl did not hesitate.

“Go back to the halls with new and better turns,” she said strongly.

Danby shuddered, and went back, snail-like, into his shell.

“I couldn’t. I couldn’t face ’em. Who’d have me now?”

“The Coliseum; the Hippodrome.”

“They’d never look at me. _Me?_ They only want good stuff—first-rate stuff—all stars.”

“But you are a star!”

“A fallen star. No; it’s the workhouse for me. I’m a ‘has-been,’ a waster.”

“Who will be again,” said the girl. “Mr. Danby, I know _you_, and what you’re capable of. _I’ve_ been in the same bill with you, and you haven’t _begun_ to show ’em what you can do yet.”

Danby looked at this girl, whose young voice quivered with confidence, with a new interest.

“_You_ in the same bill with _me_!”

“Yes. You’ve never heard of the Sisters Ives?”

Danby wrinkled up his forehead.

“The Sisters Ives? Fanny and Emily Ives?”

“I’m Fanny. Emily’s dead. We did pretty well together, but somehow—I dunno, I don’t seem to catch on alone. I’m tramping back to London.” She was unable to keep her resolutely cheerful voice quite steady, or prevent her smiling mouth from trembling.

Danby bent forward and caught Fanny’s hand, and held it warmly.

“Oh, my dear,” he said. “My dear.”

There was no longer any need for society manners between these two, nor introductions nor small-talk. They had become brother and sister—two human beings on the same hard road.

“So we’re both of us lame dogs, eh?” he said.

“Yes,” said Fanny, “but not too lame to give each other a hand over the stile. _I’m_ not going to give up barking, and you’re not, either.”

“I’ve got no bark left in me,” said Danby sadly. “Not even a growl.”

The girl sprang to her feet. Her young body seemed to be alight with energy.

“Don’t talk nonsense, Mr. Danby!” she said. “Cock up your tail, go springy on your feet, and come back to London, and give ’em a bit of the old. D’you mean to tell me that you can’t remember the knack you had of doing the blear-eyed major?”

Danby was beginning to feel horribly excited. His depression seemed to be lifting like a mist.

“I can remember nothing,” he said irritably. “I tell you I’m no good. I’ve lost my pluck!” He said these things merely in the hope that they might be denied.

“Go on. Pluck! You only want a shove. I’m not going to have any of that sort of thing, believe me. You’ve got to wake up, you have. You’ve got to be brought in from grass and stuck into harness again. Now, no nonsense. I’m the great B. P., I am, for the time being. Now, then, on you come. The blear-eyed major, quick. We’ll take the song for sung. Come to the patter!”

Danby’s fingers twitched, and already he had flung out his chest and squared his shoulders.

“I—I can’t,” he said.

“You shall!” said Fanny.

“But—but what about make-up?”

Fanny nearly gave a shout of triumph. It had got as far as make-up. She was winning!

“Make-up!” she scoffed. “A great artiste wants no make-up!”

“But I must have a moustache. I never did the major without something to twirl.”

Fanny’s quick hands were up to her hair.

“Here you are,” she said, holding out a curl. “Bit of my extra. Go on now. Get it up.”

Danby caught it, and laughed. He was shaking with excitement.

“You—you inspire me,” he said. “You—fill me with new life. How can I stick it on? I know. Mustard!”

He rushed to the cold-cream pot, put his fingers into it, rubbed the thick yellow stuff on his upper lip, and stuck on the curl. Then he seized his hat, cocked it on at an angle of forty-five, buttoned up his coat, and strutted about like an irascible bantam cock.

“Armay? Armay? My dear lady, we have no Armay! It was taken over by a lawyer as a hobby. It’s a joke, a bad joke, at which nobody laughs. When you ask about the Armay you go back to the days of my youth, when I was in the 45th—a deuce of a feller too, I give you my word. We officers of Her Majesty’s British Armay were fine fellows, handsome dorgs, my dear lady; and I think I may say I am the last of the fruitay old barkers who could make love as well as they could fight. Oh, l’amour, l’amour! Do you kiss?”

There was in this rapidly touched-in sketch something of portraiture which was not spoilt by the banality of the patter. It was, perhaps, the portrait of the stage-major, but it was the portrait of a man who might conceivably have lived even for the strong note of caricature.

Fanny danced with delight, and clapped her hands until they smarted.

“Hot stuff, Mr. Danby; very hot stuff!”

“No; it’s rotten. Hopeless. You’d better give me up!” Danby, still afraid to believe in himself, took off the impromptu moustache and unbuttoned his coat.

“Give you up! I’ll see you further. Now, then. The woman turn. Quick. You were a scream as a woman, Mr. Danby dear.”

“The woman! How can I?” He looked round for his properties—wig, bonnet, dress, umbrella, little dog. His hands fluttered impotently.

Fanny was ready for him—ready for anything. She was playing the angel, the Florence Nightingale. She was bringing back a human being to life, to a sense of responsibility, to a realisation of power, putting him on his feet again. She intended to win.

“Here you are,” she said. “Get into this.”

With quick, deft fingers she undid her belt and some hooks, slipped her skirt down, stepped out of it, and threw it at him. In her short, striped petticoat she looked younger and prettier and more honest than ever.

Danby gave a gurgle of excitement.

“Oh!” he said. “Oh, Miss Ives, you—you beat me, you——” He got into the skirt.

“That’s the notion,” she said. “Now get into this.” She had whipped off her hat and held it out.

Danby took it. If Pippard had caught sight of him as he stood among the stubble in a skirt beneath his coat he would have fallen into what might turn out to be a dangerous fit of laughter.

“But how about hair?” asked Danby. “Oh, I know.”

It was an inspiration. He darted to the nearest rick, plucked out a handful of golden corn, twisted it into a sort of halo, put it on turbanwise, and placed the hat on top. The effect was excellent; but it was the expression of the little actor’s face which did more to put before his audience of one the garrulous, spiteful, prying woman than the skirt and hat put together.

He came forward with a life-like walk and smile.

“Oh, how do you do, my dear Mrs. Richmansworth?” he said. “I’m afraid I’m a little late, but I only just remembered that it’s the third Thursday. I see you’ve got a new knocker. It represents a gargoyle, or a Chinese god, does it not? Or is it a fancy portrait of your husband? How is dear Mr. Richmansworth? Better! Ah, I wish I could say the same for mine. _My_ husband.... But there; the least said the soonest mended. I see that you’ve been having some coal in to-day. Isn’t it dreadful how coal has risen? I don’t call it coal now—I call it yeast. My husband.... But let us talk of pleasant things. I see that you’ve lost your next-door neighbour. She was a good woman, and a great personal friend of mine; but I must say, in all fairness and in very truth, that she won’t be missed, for her tongue was bitter and her words poison. No, thank you! I will not take tea. I was foolish enough to drink a cup at Mrs. Snodgrass’s; and although I don’t wish to go into details, I might just as well have swallowed a cannon-ball. I’m that swollen, I could hardly put my gloves on. I think it’s called gastritis.”

Fanny roared with delight. The absurd patter was said with an unmistakable touch of humour which would have appealed irresistibly to any music-hall audience.

“Good old Dick Danby!” she cried. “It’s a case of six weeks at the Coliseum and fifteen on the road, with a star line on the bills. Give me my skirt.”

“I beg your pardon!” He got out of it quickly. “Oh, if only I dared! If only I had the pluck to face my friends in front again! ‘Return of Mr. Richard Danby,’ eh?”

“That’s it! It’s a cert.! It’s fine! You’re up to your best form. You only want a couple of good songs, and your face will gleam again in all the shop windows.”

Danby put his trembling hands on the girl’s shoulders.

“Oh, Miss Ives! Oh, Fanny, you’re better than all the medicine. You’re a lady doctor—a hospital of lady doctors. You’ve bucked me up. You’ve given me back my pluck. Come on—to London—to London!”

“Yes,” cried Fanny, “to London!”

Danby ran to his knapsack and began to pack it feverishly. The colour had returned to his face. His eyes were alight. He laughed as he packed. They both laughed; and when, a few minutes later, they faced each other again, ready for the road, they both looked as if a fairy had touched them with her wand.

“Your sister’s dead,” said Danby, “and you’re down on your luck. Join forces with me, and we’ll do a turn together—_this_ turn, _this_ story, just as we’ve done it here, and we’ll call it ‘Lame Dogs.’”

Fanny’s tears started to her eyes.

“Oh, Mr. Danby, do you mean that?”

Danby almost shouted with excitement.

“Mean it? I never meant anything so seriously in my life. Dick Danby and Fanny Ives at ten o’clock nightly. That’s what I mean, my dear. You’ve done it. You’ve helped a lame dog over a stile. In future, I won’t work only for myself. I’ll work for you too. Little Dick Danby’s on his feet again. Little Dick Danby’s believed in. He’s come face to face with Miss Fanny Hope Faith Charity Ives, and he won’t let her go. Is it a contract?”

Fanny tried to take the outstretched hand. She tried to speak, and failed. Danby bent down and put his lips on her sleeve. Then he led her to the stile, helped her over, and together they took the road which led to London.

The Silver Thaw

_By_ R. E. Vernede

_Rifle Brigade_

A silver thaw had set in. The icy rain fell so suddenly and so quickly that Masson felt his car skid on what had been a dry—almost a dusty—high-road before he was well aware of the cause. Two minutes later the imperative necessity of pulling up became apparent, and he came to a stop at the end of a hundred yards’ slide.

“If it had been downhill,” he thought to himself, “the depreciation on this particular four and a half horse-power de Dion would have been considerable. I suppose I’m in luck.”

The luck, on second thoughts, was of a very dubious kind. A mist, following on the break of the frost, had already obscured the beauty of the night; the roadway seemed absolutely deserted, and the nearest approach to a village was, as Masson guessed, some five miles off. His lamps, shining upon what might have been a frozen canal between two high hedges, showed that he could as well have been twenty miles from a village for all chance he had of getting there either on foot or on wheels. Pulling out his watch, he found the time to be ten o’clock. He had been about half an hour on the road. Calculating that he had done some twelve miles, and that there were fifty separating the place he had dined at from the place he had intended to reach, he was still thirty-eight miles from the latter.

“No London for me to-night,” he said, turning up his coat-collar. “This thaw may turn to rain and it may not. The point is, what am I to do if it doesn’t?” He stood up in the car to prospect.

An answer came in lights that glowed yellow through the mist, from some house evidently that stood a little off the road to the left. They had been hidden until that moment by the hedge, and seemed all the nearer now for their suddenness. They meant shelter from that icy drip, possibly a bed for the night. There was no resisting the prospect. Masson climbed gingerly down, commended the car to Providence, and made for a white gate in the hedge that seemed to indicate the entrance to the drive. His fingers were so numbed that he could scarcely unlatch it.

Any one who has tried the business of walking in what is called—romantically enough—a silver thaw will know that romance is the last thing that occupies the mind of a person so engaged. The constant striving to remain perpendicular, the grovelling with unseizable earth forced upon a man who has sat down upon it with an unexpectedness that is outside all experience, the doubts as to whether any material progress can be made except on all fours, combine to keep the attention fixed upon practical things. Add the darkness of a clouded winter sky, a gathering mist, and a path—if it could be called a path—at once barely visible and totally unknown, and it will be clear that a man encountering these difficulties will be justified in wishing romance to the deuce. Masson wished it further before he had done with it that night.

The only warning that he had before he was plunged into it, willy-nilly, was the sound of a whistle, as of some one expressing surprise, from the high-road he had left. He imagined that it proceeded from some yokel who had come upon the deserted de Dion, and he sincerely hoped that the yokel would not have the time or inclination to overhaul its machinery. For a moment, indeed, with some of the yearning instinct of the motorist for his car, he thought of returning to it and warning the yokel off. The very act of trying to come to a decision, however, made his heels go from under him, and when he had got them under control again the decision was formed. It was to reach the house—or congeal.

Another five minutes’ skidding and he reached it. The back of it apparently, for there was no door. The result of a polite hail was that a window was opened from overhead, and a voice—a girl’s voice—said:

“Is it you?” She said it in a whisper, only just audible.

“Who?” returned Masson, a little surprised.