Sam in the Suburbs

CHAPTER II. KAY OF VALLEY FIELDS-2

“ A tramp steamer? Why?”

“ Well, it’s the sort of thing he does. Sort of thing I’d like to do too.”

“ You?” said Kay, amazed. Willoughby Braddock had always seemed to her a man to whose well-being the refinements—and even the luxuries—of civilisation were essential. One of her earliest recollections was of sitting in a tree and hurling juvenile insults at him, it having come to her ears through reliable channels that he habitually wore bed socks. “What nonsense, Willoughby! You would hate roughing it.”

“ I wouldn’t,” said Mr. Braddock stoutly. “I’d love a bit of adventure.”

“ Well, why don’t you have it? You’ve got plenty of money. You could be a pirate of the Spanish Main if you wanted.”

Mr. Braddock shook his head wistfully.

“ I can’t get away from Mrs. Lippett.”

Willoughby Braddock was one of those unfortunate bachelors who are doomed to live under the thrall of either a housekeeper or a valet. His particular cross in life was his housekeeper, his servitude being rendered all the more unescapable by the fact that Mrs. Lippett had been his nurse in the days of his childhood. There are men who can defy a woman. There are men who can cope with a faithful old retainer. But if there are men who can tackle a faithful old female retainer who has frequently smacked them with the back of a hairbrush, Willoughby Braddock was not one of them.

“ She would have a fit or go into a decline or something if I tried to break loose.”

“ Poor old Willoughby! Life can be very hard, can’t it? By the way, I met my uncle outside. He was complaining that you were not very chummy.”

“ No, was he?”

“ He said you just sat there looking at him like a goldfish.”

“ Oh, I say!” said Mr. Braddock remorsefully. “I’m awfully sorry. I mean, after he’s been so decent, putting me up and everything. I hope you explained to him that I was frightfully worried about this speech.”

“ Yes, I did. But I don’t see why you should be. It’s perfectly simple making a speech. Especially at an Old Boys’ dinner, where they won’t expect anything very much. If I were you, I should just get up and tell them one or two funny stories and sit down again.”

“ I’ve got one story,” said Mr. Braddock more hopefully. “It’s about an Irishman.”

“ Pat or Mike?”

“ I thought of calling him Pat. He’s in New York and he goes down to the dock and he sees a diver coming up out of the water—in a diving suit, you know—and he thinks the fellow—the diver, you understand—has walked across the Atlantic and wishes he had thought of doing the same himself, so as to have saved the fare, don’t you know.”

“ I see. One of those weak-minded Irishmen.”

“ Do you think it will amuse them?” asked Mr. Braddock anxiously.

“ I should think they would roll off their seats.”

“ No, really?” He broke off and stretched out a hand in alarm. “I say, you weren’t thinking of having one of those rock cakes, were you?”

“ I was. But I won’t if you don’t want me to. Aren’t they good?”

“ Good? My dear old soul,” said Mr. Braddock earnestly, “they are Clara’s worst effort—absolutely her very worst. I had to eat one because she came and stood over me and watched me do it. It beats me why you don’t sack that girl. She’s a rotten cook.”

“ Sack Claire?” Kay laughed. “You might just as well try to sack her mother.”

“ I suppose you’re right.”

“ You can’t sack a Lippett.”

“ No, I see what you mean. I wish she wasn’t so dashed familiar with a fellow, though.”

“ Well, she has known you almost as long as I have. Mrs. Lippett has always been a sort of mother to you, so I suppose Claire regards herself as a sort of sister.”

“ Yes, I suppose it can’t be helped,” said Mr. Braddock bravely. He glanced at his watch. “Ought to be going and dressing. I’ll find you out here before I leave?”

“ Oh, yes.”

“ Well, I’ll be pushing along. I say, you do think that story about the Irishman is all right?”

“ Best thing I ever heard,” said Kay loyally.

For some minutes after he had left her she sat back in her chair with her eyes closed, relaxing in the evening stillness of this pleasant garden.

“ Finished with the tea, Miss Kay?”

Kay opened her eyes. A solid little figure in a print dress was standing at her side. A jaunty maid’s cap surmounted this person’s tow-coloured hair. She had a perky nose and a wide, friendly mouth, and she beamed upon Kay devotedly.

“ Brought you these,” she said, dropping a rug, two cushions and a footstool, beneath the burden of which she had been staggering across the lawn like a small pack mule. “Make you nice and comfortable, and then you can get a nice nap. I can see you’re all tired out.”

“ That’s awfully good of you, Claire. But you shouldn’t have bothered.”

Claire Lippett, daughter of Willoughby Braddock’s autocratic housekeeper and cook and maid-of-all-work at San Rafael, was a survivor of the Midways epoch. She had entered the Derrick household at the age of twelve, her duties at that time being vague and leaving her plenty of leisure for surreptitious bird’s-nesting with Kay, then thirteen. On her eighteenth birthday she had been promoted to the post of Kay’s personal maid, and from that moment may be said formally to have taken charge. The Lippett motto was Fidelity, and not even the famous financial crash had been able to dislodge this worthy daughter of the clan. Resolutely following Kay into exile, she had become, as stated, Mr. Wrenn’s cook. And, as Mr. Braddock had justly remarked, a very bad cook too.

“ You oughtn’t to go getting yourself all tired, Miss Kay. You ought to be sitting at your ease.”

“ Well, so I am,” said Kay.

There were times when, like Mr. Braddock, she found the Lippett protectiveness a little cloying. She was a high-spirited girl and wanted to face the world with a defiant “Who cares?” and it was not easy to do this with Claire coddling her all the time as if she were a fragile and sensitive plant. Resistance, however, was useless. Nobody had ever yet succeeded in curbing the motherly spirit of the Lippetts, and probably nobody ever would.

“ Meantersay,” explained Claire, adjusting the footstool, “you ought not to be soiling your hands with work, that’s what I mean. It’s a shame you should be having to——”

She stopped abruptly. She had picked up the tea tray and made a wounding discovery.

“ You haven’t touched my rock cakes,” she said in a voice in which reproach and disappointment were nicely blended. “And I made them for you special.”

“ I didn’t want to spoil my dinner,” said Kay hastily. Claire was a temperamental girl, quick to resent slurs on her handiwork. “I’m sure you’ve got something nice.”

Claire considered the point.

“ Well, yes and no,” she said. “If you’re thinking of the pudding, I’m afraid that’s off. The kitten fell into the custard.”

“ No!”

“ She did. And when I’d fished her out there wasn’t hardly any left. Seemed to have soaked it into her like as if she was a sponge. Still, there ’ud be enough for you if Mr. Wrenn didn’t want any.”

“ No, it doesn’t matter, thanks,” said Kay earnestly.

“ Well, I’m trying a new soup, which’ll sort of make up for it. It’s one I read in a book. It’s called pottage ar lar princess. You’re sure you won’t have one of these rock cakes, Miss Kay? Put strength into you.”

“ No, thanks, really.”

“ Right-ho; just as you say.”

Miss Lippett crossed the lawn and disappeared, and a soothing peace fell upon the garden. A few minutes later, however, just as Kay’s head was beginning to nod, from an upper window there suddenly blared forth on the still air a loud and raucous voice, suggestive of costermongers advertising their Brussels sprouts or those who call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

“ I am reminded by a remark of our worthy president,” roared the voice, “of a little story which may be new to some of you present here to-night. It seems that a certain Irishman had gone down to New York—I mean, he was in New York and had gone down to the docks—and while there—while there——”

The voice trailed off. Apparently the lungs were willing but the memory was weak. Presently it broke out in another place.

“ For the school, gentlemen, our dear old school, occupies a place in our hearts—a place in our hearts—in the hearts of all of us—in all our hearts—in our hearts, gentlemen—which nothing else can fill. It forms, if I may put it that way, Mr. President and gentlemen—forms—forms—forms a link that links the generations. Whether we are fifty years old or forty or thirty or twenty, we are none the less all of us contemporaries. And why? Because, gentlemen, we are all—er—linked by that link.”

“ Jolly good!” murmured Kay, impressed.

“ That is why, Mr. President and gentlemen, though I am glad, delighted, pleased, happy and—er—overjoyed to see so many of you responding to the annual call of our dear old school, I am not surprised.”

From the kitchen door, a small knife in one hand and a half-peeled onion in the other, there emerged the stocky figure of Claire Lippett. She gazed up at the window wrathfully.

“ Hi!”

“ No, not surprised.”

“ Hi!”

“ And talking of being surprised, I am reminded of a little story which may be new to some of you present here to-night. It seems that a certain Irishman——”

From the days when their ancestresses had helped the menfolk of the tribe to make marauding Danes wish they had stayed in Denmark, the female members of Claire Lippett’s family had always been women of action. Having said “Hi!” twice, their twentieth-century descendant seemed to consider that she had done all that could reasonably be expected of her in the way of words. With a graceful swing of her right arm, she sent the onion shooting upward. And such was the never-failing efficiency of this masterly girl that it whizzed through the open window, from which, after a brief interval, there appeared, leaning out, the dress-shirted and white-tied upper portion of Mr. Willoughby Braddock. He was rubbing his ear.

“ Be quiet, can’t you?” said Miss Lippett.

Mr. Braddock gazed austerely into the depths. Except that the positions of the characters were inverted and the tone of the dialogue somewhat different, it might have been the big scene out of Romeo and Juliet .

“ What did you say?”

“ I said be quiet. Miss Kay wants to get a bit of sleep. How can she get a bit of sleep with that row going on?”