and observant that they had made him alive to a circumstance which had altogether escaped Staff’s notice – a trifling incident that took place just as they were on the point of parting.
While still they were standing in the doorway, a motor-cab, plunging down Haymarket, had swooped in a wide curve as if meaning to pull in at the curb in front of the steamship company’s office. The cab carried a solitary passenger – a remarkably pretty young woman – and on its roof a remarkably large and ornate bandbox.
It was, in fact, the bandbox which had first fixed the interest of Mr. Iff. Only an introspective vision, indeed, such as that of the imaginative and thoughtful Mr. Staff, could have overlooked the approach of a bandbox so big and upstanding, so profusely beflowered and so prominently displayed.
Now before the cab could stop, its fare, who had been bending forward and peering out of the window as if anxious to recognise her destination, started still farther forward, seized the speaking-tube and spoke into its mouthpiece in a manner of sharp urgency. And promptly the driver swerved out from the curb and swung his car away down Pall Mall.
If it was mere inquisitiveness that held Mr. Iff rooted to the spot, gaping at that uninteresting window show, it served to discover him in the guise of an admirably patient person. Fully fifteen minutes elapsed before the return of the motor-cab was signalled unmistakably by the blatant bandbox bobbing back high above the press of traffic. And when this happened, Mr. Iff found some further business with the steamship company, and quietly and unobtrusively slipped back into the booking-office.
As he did so the cab stopped at the curb and the pretty young woman jumped out and followed Mr. Iff across the threshold – noticing him no more than had Mr. Staff, to begin with.
II
THE BANDBOX
In the playhouses of France, a hammering on the stage alone heralds the rising of the curtain to disclose illusory realms of romance. Precisely so with Mr. Staff, upon the door of whose lodging, at nine o’clock the next morning, a knocking announced the first overt move against his peace of mind.
At that time, Staff, all unconscious of his honourable peril, was standing in the middle of the floor of the inner room (his lodgings comprised two) and likewise in the approximate geographical centre of a chaotic assemblage of assorted wearing apparel and other personal impedimenta.
He was wondering, confusedly, how in thunderation he was to manage to cram all that confounded truck into the limited amount of trunk space at his command. He was also wondering, resentfully in the names of a dozen familiar spirits, where he had put his pipe: it’s simply maddening, the way a fellow’s pipe will persist in getting lost at such critical times as when he’s packing up to catch a train with not a minute to spare… In short, so preoccupied was Staff that the knocking had to be repeated before he became objectively alive to it.
Then, confidentially, he said: “What the devil now?”
In louder tones calculated to convey an impression of intense impatience, he cried: “Come in!”
He heard the outer door open, and immediately, upon an impulse esoteric even in his own understanding, he chose to pretend to be extravagantly busy – as busy as by rights he should have been. For a minute or longer he acted most vividly the part of a man madly bent on catching his train though he were to perish of the attempt. And this despite a suspicion that he played to a limited audience of one, and that one unappreciative of the finer phases of everyday histrionic impersonation: an audience answering to the name of Milly, whose lowly station of life was that of housemaid-in-lodgings and whose imagination was as ill-nourished and sluggish as might be expected of one whose wages were two-and-six a week.
Remembering this in time, the novelty of make-believe palled on Staff. Not that alone, but he could hear Milly insisting in accents not in the least apologetic: “Beg pardon, sir …”
He paused in well-feigned surprise and looked enquiringly over his shoulder, as though to verify a surmise that somebody had spoken. Such proving to be the case, he turned round to confront Milly – Milly true to type, wearing a grimy matutinal apron, an expression half sleepy, half sullen, and a horrid soot smudge on her ripe, red, right cheek.
In this guise (so sedulously does life itself ape the conventions of its literature and drama) Milly looked as lifelike as though viewed through the illusion of footlights. Otherwise, as Staff never failed to be gratified to observe, she differed radically from the stock article of our stage. For one thing, she refrained from dropping her aitches and stumbling over them on her first entrance in order merely to win a laugh and so lift her little rôle from the common rut of “lines” to the dignity of “a bit.” For another, she seldom if ever brandished that age-honoured wand of her office, a bedraggled feather-duster. Nor was she by any means in love with the tenant of the fust-floor-front.
But though Staff was grateful for Milly because of this strong and unconventional individuality of hers, he wasn’t at all pleased to be interrupted, and he made nothing whatever of the ostensible excuse for the interruption; the latter being a very large and brilliantly illuminated bandbox, which Milly was offering him in pantomime.
“It have just come,” said Milly calmly, in response to his enquiring stare. “Where would you wish me to put it, sir?”
“Put what?”
Milly gesticulated eloquently with the bandbox.
“That thing?” said Staff with scorn.
“Yessir.”
“I don’t want you to put it anywhere. Take it away.”
“But it’s for you, sir.”
“Impossible. Some mistake. Please don’t bother – just take it away. There’s a good girl.”
Milly’s disdain of this blandishment was plainly visible in the added elevation of her already sufficiently tucked-up nose.
“Beg pardon, sir,” she persisted coldly, “but it’s got your nime on it, and the boy as left it just now asked if you lived here.”
Staff’s frown portrayed indignation, incredulity and impatience.
“Mistake, I tell you. I haven’t been buying any millinery. Absurd!”
“Beg pardon, sir, but you can see as it’s addressed to you.”
It was: the box being held out for examination, Staff saw plainly that it was tagged with a card inscribed in fashionably slapdash feminine handwriting with what was unquestionably the name and local address of Benjamin Staff, Esq.
Because of this, he felt called upon to subject the box to more minute inspection.
It was nothing more nor less than the everyday milliners’ hat-box of commerce: a capacious edifice of stout pasteboard neatly plastered with wall-paper in whose design narrow stripes of white alternated with aggressive stripes of brown, the whole effectively setting off an abundance of purple blossoms counterfeiting no flower known to botanists. And one gibbous side was further decorated with bold black script advertising the establishment of its origin.
“Maison Lucille, New Bond Street, West,” Staff read aloud, completely bewildered. “But I never heard of the d – the place!”
Helplessly he sought Milly’s eyes, and helpfully Milly rose to the occasion.
“Nossir,” said she; and that was all.
“I
