RGL e-Book Cover
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.
RGL e-Book Cover
Based on an image created with Microsoft Bing software
BEFORE the Aquarium, where a concert party performed thrice daily was a poster of a little girl, with half a yard of lace flouncing for skirt, two yards of broad ribbon in her butterfly hair-bow, and a violin locked under her chin.
LITTLE MARJORIE SMITH—THE CHILD VIOLINIST.
The heavy grey-blue heat of the morning had broken in a torrential storm which drove Edgar Choat and Wallace Sterne into the Aquarium. The morning performance was in progress, and on a dusty platform, decked with consumptive palms, Marjorie Smith was striving valiantly to be heard above the battery of the rain on the streaming glass roof and the incessant, scuffling of trippers at the far end of the building.
As Wallace piloted his friend to a chair near the platform he thought he had never before witnessed a more sordid travesty of holiday enjoyment. His own idea of vacation was miles of wet empty shingle. But the air of this especial health resort had been ordered for Choat, whose number was up.
The pair formed a striking contrast. Wallace was husky and heavy-chinned with the truculent eye of a fighter, while Choat was a wasted, merry little man, with plenty of money, and half a lung... He glanced at his programme and then suddenly began to grin.
'Marjorie Smith—the child violinist... Wallace, I've heard this little lady before. Up in the north, five years ago. She was about the same age then. A trifle older if anything.'
The boredom vanished from Wallace's eyes as he looked at the performer. She was daintily pink and white as hawthorn bloom, with long flaxen curls, a button of a mouth, and large, blue, infantile eyes. She wore a very short jumper-dress of knitted lemon silk, which showed her bare arms and legs to be innocent of the tan of happier seaside children. Her pretty face was composed and expressionless as that of an expensive doll. Choat continued to chuckle.
'Marjorie Smith. Nice plain name which no one would remember. And wide gaps between the towns she works, you bet! I should say the fair Marjorie conducts her own census. How many hundred times would you say she'd played that piece?'
The child was playing an intricate sonata, not only with absolute facility, but with the abstraction of complete mastery.
'A brilliant performance for an infant. But if she dropped a few tucks in her skirt and picked up a few birthdays, it's hardly a show we should do poojah to. Why are you looking so down in the mouth, Wally?'
'Thinking of Talbot. Know him? Fine cellist and couldn't fill a bill anywhere this summer. Frozen out by this kind of vampy fraud, who puts on bare legs and socks and monkeys with her birth certificate, just to kick a decent, chap into hell... Choat, if I can land her, she's for it.'
He was in that state of chafed inaction which engenders the instinct 'to go out and kill something.'
The solo was ended, and Marjorie, heedless of applause, bounded down the platform steps into the arms of a stout, middle-aged woman, who wore Paris clothes and a heavy moustache with feminine courage. That spontaneous rush—that of a child hailing release—made Wallace doubtful of Choat's statement. He watched her closely as she put on her outdoor things, and noticed, with a thrill of interest, that she pulled her hat well on the back of her head, before she tilted it over her eyes.
'A kid puts the elastic under its chin first. She's had her hair up some time in her life.'
He turned to Choat.
'All right for a bit, old man? If so, I'm going to try to dodge the duenna and scrape acquaintance with the fair Marjorie. I want to find out how much experience she has garnered in her brief span of years.'
WHEN Wallace left the Aquarium the wind was blowing blue rifts
between the purple-black clouds, and by the time he had finished
the purchase of a doll in the Arcade the sun was again, shining
on, a glistening and repopulated parade. He was about to
re-enter the Aquarium when, to his surprise, he saw Marjorie
Smith alone, on one of the seats on the green, staring at the
water-logged geraniums with blank eyes.
'You'll catch cold sitting there,' he said involuntarily. 'Where's the—the lady who looks after you?'
'Aunty? I gave her the slip. And I don't care, if I do catch cold. I'm fed up.'
Her defiant voice was a high, childish prattle. He looked at her closely. Under the little, mushroom hat her face looked younger than her admitted years. There was a velvety bloom on the cheeks and a fatness round the corners of the lips which were very convincing.
She frowned as he spread his waterproof on the seat.
'Aunty doesn't let me talk to strangers. Go away!'
He drew a shot at a venture.
'Nonsense! You're a woman, and you know how to discriminate.'
He had expected a glance of swift suspicion. To his surprise, a light of sudden pleasure flickered in her blank, blue eyes as though a starving intelligence had snatched at a scrap of nourishment.
'You see, you are a woman in miniature,' he went on. 'In fact, I expect you know quite as much as any woman of—Dr—nineteen.'
'Guess I know more... I'm still at lessons.'
'Dates—and all that. Know your own date?'
'Course!'
But—this time—the glance she shot him held a furtive, quality.
He unwrapped his parcel.
'Do you like dolls?'
'Rather! Why, she's like me. Isn't she cunning?'
'That's because your playing gave me so much pleasure,' said Wallace. 'When did you first learn the violin?'
'Can't remember. Aunty says I played in my cradle.'
'Who taught you?' Wallace intended to write to that professor for information. But even a twopenny stamp is insufficient postage to heaven.
'Daddy. He's dead.'
For a full hour he sat and talked, white the sun dried the battered geraniums and sequinned the emerald waves with golden points of fire. But none of Wallace's questions—and he grew more adroit with practice—were successful in drawing any compromising admissions.
Moreover he became filled with a conviction that he was really up against a blank wall of ignorance, which could be nothing else than the mind of a child totally unacquainted with the current topics of the day.
Presently he tapped out his pipe and rose.
'Lunch time. Hungry?'
'No; it's only mutton and milk pudding. I've such a crave for really nice things to eat.'
'Never mind, little woman. One of these nights I'll stand you a proper grown-up supper. Hang this pipe! It won't draw—Good morning.
He looked after the retreating form with bewildered eyes. For the moment before he had noticed that her hands had flown to her curls in instinctive search for a hairpin.
'I'd give something to know your real age,' he mused.
IF it be only the happy hours which count, Marjorie Smith was very, very young; by the calendar she was grown-up.
As she walked along the parade towards her rooms, the wind whipped her lemon frock above her knees, she had to pass a cinema which displayed the portrait of Mary Pickford. Mary Pickford—the World's Sweetheart—with curls flowing loose and in the short frocks of a child. The film was very old. It was new when she had last seen the poster, seven years ago, on a black, streaming night, outside the pier gates of a seaside town. She remembered every detail of the scene; the coloured lights which outlined the entrance, the waterproofed crowd ticking through the turnstile; the oily swell of water which sucked round the staging of the pier.
As she crouched in the shelter she kept easting furtive, hunted glances at that vague foam-flecked darkness, which rose and fell—rose and fell.
Marjorie Lambert had put up her hair at a very early age. For two years she had fiddled for her supper and given music lessons at starvation prices—not always paid. She had never had dinner and, usually, only a travesty of breakfast.
That night there was only a litter of bully beef cans in her room and the landlady's ejection notice. So she had crept down to the sea-wall—just to watch the water. Light-headed with hunger and half-sobbing with self-pity, she was creeping, across the parade when she was arrested by the smile of the World's Sweetheart. She was Life incarnate—happy, triumphant Life—calling to Youth. Marjorie caught her breath sharply. If a woman who was older than herself could sustain the merciless ordeal of photography and yet live in the hearts of millions as the Eternal Child, it was possible that she could support a similar imposture. She knew that her face was round and infantile, while her frame was ill-nourished by under-feeding.
That was how it had begun. After the lean time had come the era of milk and honey. And then gradually Marjorie had awakened to the bitter truth. For two years she had half-starred for bread and butter.
But ever, since she had wholly starved for what really mattered—her woman's heritage.
The rooms in which they were staying were the beat in the town. From the first Miss Horn had played, for absolute safety, and her charge—apart from her public appearances—was jealously guarded. This precaution deprived the girl of any life or gaiety and threw her upon the sole companionship of the elder woman.
When Marjorie had first confided to Agatha Horn her mad project the woman, who was herself an ill-nourished harpy, had got her claws into the campaign and worked it with relentless thoroughness. The girl was sapless from lack of nourishment, and glad enough to relinquish the struggle. On the evidence of the birth certificate of a niece of Agatha Born—the child of a sister who would have sold the sun for a guinea—Marjorie Lambert became Marjorie Smith.
After the struggle it was good to drift. She made a charming child, whose talent met with swift reception. Plenty to eat, pretty clothes to wear, nothing to do. She was not allowed to work at her music, lest she played too well. A safe, comfortable mediocrity was their goal.
Agatha Horn taught her the commandments of her new life. They were two—to learn, and to forget.
'You must forget everything you've known. You must learn to look like a child, to speak like a child, to think like a child! Otherwise one unguarded word might betray us both! Never read a book—never read a newspaper, Forget!'
It was not until each successive birth-day brought only a toll of continual youth, that she began to realise dimly her arrested growth. Her mind had lain fallow for so long that it was difficult for her to estimate fully the situation. But her least hint of rebellion brought her up against a powerful personality which, imperceptibly, had dwarfed and swamped her own.
Agatha Horn turned the key on the womanhood for which she was beginning to crave.
MARJORIE ran into the apartment drawing-room, where Miss
Horn was knitting a silken jumper.
'For the love of Mike, give me a cigarette,' she panted.
Miss Horn swung her stout legs from the velvet couch and sat facing her.
'Don't be a silly girl. You know you're not to smoke. One of the maids might see and have suspicions.'
'I don't care. I'm fed up.'
Agatha Horn's beady eye held her so that she laid down the match unlighted.
'Where's the paper? I must know what's going on. Such a nice man was talking to me this morning and I felt a perfect fool.'
Miss Horn's bushy eyebrows met.
'I've warned you of the consequences of talking to strangers. No one can be everlastingly on guard. You may dodge folks' curiosity for years, but you'll get caught in the long run.'
'The long run! Dear heart! Hasn't it been long enough already?' Marjorie buried her face on her outstretched arms and began to sob.
Miss Horn looked down on the bowed, flaxen head with alarm. For some years life had been one well-fed, padded to-day, darkened by no fear of tomorrow. She had moulded Marjorie to her will until she believed her incapable of resistance. The safety campaign had achieved a second objective in deliberately weakening the girl's mentality. In another year or so she would be little better than a performing doll.
She played her trump card of working upon the girl's ignorant fears of unknown penalties.
'All right! Throw up the sponge. Go back to where you started! What were yon doing then?'
'Starving.'
'Then I can give you one crumb of comfort. You won't be allowed to starve—in prison.'
'Oh, no. Oh, don't.'
As Marjorie began to sob hysterically, Miss Horn laid a powerful hand upon her curls.
'Don't cry! Horny'll keep you safe. Be a good girl and trust Horny. Did the man give you the doll? Good! Shows he doesn't suspect. What sort of a man was he?'
'Nicest I've ever met.'
Together they went down to luncheon. Spiced, sophisticated food for Agatha Horn—nursery fare for Marjorie. The system was complete down to the least detail. Marjorie glowered at the custard pudding with eyes of hatred. It was for this that she had sold herself. Merely food.
After the meal she went to her accustomed nook in the window-seat.
'Horny,' she asked presently, 'are you sending to town for my new frocks?'
'Yes, you vanity. There's the letter.'
'Then I'll enclose a note. I want some really good clothes for my new doll.'
Agatha Horn took up her knitting, feeling that the crisis was over. Well for her peace of mind that she could not read the riddle of Marjorie's placid eyes as she gazed down on the parade. Children passed. Real, normal children, walking onward into their future—each day a step further on their journey. She looked at them with envy.
Men passed. She thought of the stranger of the morning, and a vivid interest surged into her eyes—the first awakening of a newly-created Eve. But, chiefly, she brooded over the groups of girls, radiant with youth and health, in the first flush of womanhood.
'HOT milk. Night-light. Sleeping-suit. Yes. It's all here. Sure you don't mind my leaving you?'
It was some days later. Agatha Horn—resplendent in evening, dress, for she was going to a whist drive at the Majestic—spoke rather loudly, for the benefit of the apartments housemaid, who was on the landing. Nobody but herself was allowed to maid Marjorie.
'Oh no, aunty, I hope you will win the first prize.'
Marjorie's wish might have been prompted by a sense of the law of compensation. For even then the biggest prize of her life was slipping between Agatha Horn's splay fingers.
With a smacking kiss the woman rustled off.
Marjorie remained in the middle of the room, a little smile playing round the corner of her childish mouth Then, in a sudden fit of excitement, she tore off her lace frock and rose sash and stamped upon them.
Under her frill pillow-case was concealed the packet of 'dolls clothes'. With eager fingers, she unfastened the parcel and drew out the first adult garment she had ordered for years.
Presently she looked at herself in the mirror. She gave a cry. Instead of the familiar reflection, she saw, a slip of a woman, fair and frail as a wind-flower. The black silky frock was ankle-length—unfashionably long—and gave her added height.
'I'm grown-up!' she exulted.
But the loose curls around her face reminded her of someone she had grown to hate—a fair headed eternal child—so she tied them tightly over her temples with a headache band, and drew on the small pull-on satin hat.
Her transformation was complete. She through out her arms in welcome to the beloved stranger.
'You are Marjorie Lambert. And you are free!'
Her voice ran up in a weak little squeak. She was vaguely aware that her knees shook, and her head felt strangely light, like a blown egg-shell.
Throwing on her black satin cloak she looked around the room for the last time.
An uncharted region of romance seemed to stretch all around her—a purple vagueness studded with golden jewels. The banal seaside town was transformed by the magic of night. She mingled with crowd in a delirium of ecstasy. She felt as light as a soap bubble and floated along without the effort of walking. She was going if she could to meet the nicest man she had ever known.
He had promised her a supper. She knew now that she was ravenously hungry, and she began to gloat over thought of unaccustomed food—carpet-bag steaks filled with oysters, prawns in aspic, and bubbling wine.
She floated on and on, blown by the light breeze, until she was stopped by the rough stone wall, which bounded the far end of the parade.
Presently her thoughts, which were a confused jumble of food, star-dust, and romance, were shattered by the sound of footsteps. She looked up to see Wallace Sterne.
For the last two days Wallace had been acutely worried over the remnants of Choat's lung. It was nearly eleven when he left his friend's room in order to get a mouthful of air.
He soon left the crowd and rounded the shoulder of the cliff, where the parade was only lit by an occasional flickering lamp, and the sea made muted thunder as it broke over the rocks. He reached the wall at the end and stood for a few minutes, cap in hand, facing the wind and gazing down on the boil of surf. In the darkness he believed himself to be alone, until a girl detached herself from the shadow and leaned over the parapet.
'Isn't life—wonderful?' She spoke with such absolute simplicity that he answered involuntarily.
'It is. If one could only buy it for those one cares for!'
'Is—is anyone ill?'
'Dying. My best friend.'
'Ah! I haven't one single friend.'
'Then the fault must be with you.'
Marjorie's mind had been for so long the pawn of Agatha Horn's mentality that she meekly accepted his blame. Wallace suddenly awoke to the fact that he was exchanging confidences with a strange young female, which was contrary to both his custom and his taste. Yet there was a note in the fluting voice which stirred him strangely: and caused his heart to beat faster—that quick-silver bead of instinctive affinity which causes two strangers in a crowd to pass with racing pulses.
He strained his eyes to see her more closely, but could only distinguish features of pale elfin charm.
'Have we met before?' he asked. His anxiety had completely driven away all memory of Marjorie Smith. His brief detective spasm had had its birth merely in the boredom of a wet morning combined with ill-temper.
'No' she said. 'I'm free to-night for the first time for ever so long. I've been seven years in prison.'
'Prison?'
'Yes. Inside myself.'
His lips hardened slightly. He had no heart to pander to a woman's hysterical desire for self dissection while his best friend was strangling from the reality of a. punctured lung.
'That so? Very interesting. Good-night.'
'Don't go. I've something to tell you.' Her voice became triumphant. 'I'm Marjorie Lambert and I'm grown-up.'
'And now, I suppose, you want to know my name?'
'Oh no. Have you one? How funny! Won't you take me out to supper?'
He relit his pipe, with the object of seeing her face. A throb of disappointment went through him as he noticed the painted cheeks and lips of a definite type.
'Very sorry. I'm afraid I must get back to my friend.'
Marjorie's head began to swim as a sick faintness again stole over her.
'You promised!'
'Pardon me! I certainly never did.'
'And I'm so hungry.'
'In a satin frock? Look here, my girl, you'd better go home, you're only wasting your time.'
'I haven't a home. I've nowhere.'
'Nonsense! Where are you staying?'
The girl mechanically named the best apartments in the town. To rid his mind of the last qualm, Wallace fished out a few coins. 'If you're really hungry this will buy some supper.'
She dashed the money down into the boiling surf.'
'No, no. I sold myself for food seven years ago. And it wasn't worth it.'
The sound of his retreating footsteps was her last conscious recollection. She had some dim sense of wandering in the darkness that fringed the sea and presently of creeping into some shelter, before she dropped into the deep of utter exhaustion.
SHE awoke before the dawn and stared around her with
incredulous eyes. She was lying on ribbed sand, while above her
was the pent roof of shell encrusted rocks. The air was pungent
with the smell of sea. As she raised herself on one elbow a pain
shot through her below her shoulder. She scarcely noticed it as
she stared at her long black skirt.
Slowly the films cleared from her brain. She washed her face in a pool of sea water and then zig-zagged into the open. As she stood, spellbound in the immensity, her knees gave way under her, and she sank down in the shelter of a boulder and watched the cloud-bank split in a thin red line. The marvel seemed to blend into a wondrous secret she bore in her heart.'
'I'm myself!'
She whispered it over and over, until her exaltation passed into a drowsy rapture and her lids fell. The sun, gathering strength, steeped her chilled frame in a glow of physical well-being. She dozed and half-woke, only to dose again. Presently, she opened her eyes and looked around her. The beach, which she had last seen as a smooth glistening waste, was pitted with holes and craters, and littered with rubbish. Nearly all the visitors had gone to lunch, and only a few trippers ate from their nose-bags.
A breeze blew towards her a paper. It was a police bill, bearing a blurred and villainous portrait of little Marjorie Smith—the child violinist—and offering a large reward for her recovery. Marjorie's teeth chattered as she was gripped with fear of the beady-eyed black-lipped woman who had dominated her destiny. With the hunted animal's instinct to hide, she crept back to her cave.
When Agatha Horn returned from the Majestic and found her charge vanished, she lost her head completely, and telephoned immediately to the police. She was interviewed by pressmen the same night.
CHOAT—his shrunken figure in a jazz sleeping suit,
chuckled over the morning paper, as he lay in bed, propped up by
pillows.
'Listen, Wally! The little lady is probably dressed in her underclothing, as none of her dresses are missing. Nice, inconspicuous costume to be promenading the town. It says she has no money, so she must be in the neighbourhood.'
Wallace grimaced.
'I believe the beach is black with hopeful folks waiting for the tide to return the body.
'Let 'am wait! Pity you let the reward slip between your fingers, though.'
'I?'
'What about the little painted lady you met last night, St Anthony? If ever I die—which I doubt—a famous detective will die with me. It's clear as mud. Remember what I told you about that girl's age? Some poor little starving devil, putting her head into the noose and then trying to escape from the clutches of that she-vamp who ran her!'
Wallace's pipe slipped from his fingers as he remembered scrap after scrap of the mysterious maiden's confidences.
'My Grief, Choat, I believe you've got it. It all fits in. Same address.... remember, I promised the poor kid a supper.... And—I let her go—God knows where!'
THE sun was once again a blood-orange in a grey haze—setting as it rose—when Marjorie opened her eyes, and stared around her. Despite the 'beating in her head her mins was now quite lucid. At last she was free.
What came afterwards?
She lifted her land and the effort showed her extreme weakness. She believed she would soon die of exhaustion, but it did not seem to matter very much.
'Awake, little girl?'
As the words pierced her coma she realised that she was not alone in the cave. She looked around her fearfully. But she saw only Wallace Sterne, his face pale and scored with anxiety. A great wonder dawned in her eyes.
'You!'
'Yes. I've been out all day, searching for Marjorie Smith...'
'You'll never find her!'
'I know. I've found Marjorie Lambert instead, thank God! She's all the girl I want.'
She tried to stagger to her feet, but he caught her in his arms.
'I'm going to carry you right back.'
'You can't. I'm not a baby. I'm grown up... But I feel—safe, now. You won't let her get me again?'
'Not till never. I promise.'
'Indian Giver? You promised me supper.'
'I know. To-night as ever is. Lobster and game pie and beef steak—'
He knew he was talking nonsense in a case of semi-starvation. Yet her little pinched face lost its greyness as she shook her head—smiling.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.