The Blower of Bubbles Part 26

Having done this, she rested her hands on her hips and sighed like a woman who knows she is overworked, but is resigned to her fate.

"Excuse me," said the airman politely, then turned to his companion, who had been staring in wide-eyed bewilderment at the activities of Mrs. Jacob Wilson.... Frowning heavily at his young pa.s.senger, he inserted his pipe into his mouth, and left the inn without another word, sauntering along the roadway, where hedges and meadow-larks and cosy thatched cottages were combining in the merriest of madrigals on the beauty of Old England.

Upstairs, in "The Plough and Crown," Pippa's toilet was being superintended by the estimable proprietress, whose hospitality, surmounting the difficulty of language, poured out in a stream of garrulity.

She described to her little guest how Mr. Jacob Wilson first appeared in kilts, causing her (Mrs. Jacob Wilson) to throw her ap.r.o.n over her face and bid her lord and master go upstairs and clothe himself in propriety. She further confessed that he was a poor correspondent (though a man of deep intellect, for he was given to long spasms of silence); but every time he wrote from the trenches, which was once a month (though one month he had written twice, but in September--or was it October?--he had not written at all)--at any rate, he always said that he had a cold in his head and would she send his medicine, which he had used for eight-and-twenty years, and which had never failed to cure him.

After this testimony to Mr. Jacob Wilson's recuperative powers, despite his susceptibility to colds, his wife became confidential, and told the girl of the adoration showered on her during her honeymoon by the aforesaid absent gentleman, together with other and romantic details which, being told in the strictest confidence, naturally have no place in these pages.

And the little girl from the Picardy mill-house listened. She may have understood that somewhere in the landlady's bountiful breast a n.o.ble heart was beating, that behind her cheerfulness lay the shadow of the trenches, and that any moment "The Plough and Crown" might be robbed of the good man who had marched away with the London Scottish.

She may have understood less than that--or more. Who knows?

Half-an-hour later the Airy Prince returned, and they sat down together to a breakfast served to the tune of chortling fowls and the neighing of a nearby horse, while the fire chuckled and crackled in enjoyment of some joke of its own.

"Well, Pippa," said the Black Cat, seizing a moment when Mrs. Jacob Wilson had absented herself from the room, "and what do you think of the English?"

The girl of the mill-house pictured the only two she had met.

"I think," she said timidly, "that you are--how say you it--great talkers, yes?"

"Bless my soul!" said he, cutting a loaf of bread with the melancholy of an executioner beheading an esteemed relative; "aren't we?"

VIII

The train for London came round the bend, and drew up, panting, beside the platform. The airman and his little companion glanced into four compartments which were completely filled, and, hearing the admonition of the guard, were forced to enter a first-cla.s.s carriage containing five occupants, who glared at the intruders with that triumph of rudeness found only on an English railroad.

"Sorry," murmured the airman, and added something unintelligible about the train being full. A fierce-looking gentleman looked up from the _Morning Post_ and lowered the window to its fullest extent. An anemic woman opposite sneezed and fixed a devastating stare on the fierce gentleman. A very young officer of the Guards felt his lip, and stroked that portion of it which was pregnant with promise of mustache, while his mind wandered into the future. Would he cut Lady Dazzrymple's beastly dance, and content himself with only three that evening? Or, dash it all! should he go the whole works? What a bore!... A young woman with a face of deep intensity read the _New Statesman_, every now and then looking up from its pages (as a horse drinking at a trough will raise its head between draughts), apparently defying any one to challenge her on anything.

With his hands lazily in his coat-pockets, an Australian captain leant back in his corner and took in the freshness and winsomeness of the French girl, with an admiring frankness that inspired sudden doubt in the airman's mind whether it was really desirable to maintain a huge Empire.

For ten minutes, in a funereal silence, the train hurried towards the Metropolis, while the temperature of the compartment, both actually and temperamentally, dropped to freezing-point. Once, as an unusually pretty meadow met her eye (and where are there such meadows as one sees in England?), Pippa emitted an exclamation of delight and clapped her hands.

A look of horror from the fierce gentleman caromed off the _Morning Post_ to the face of the offender. The anemic woman stopped blowing her nose, and concentrated all her energies on a disdainful sniff. The very young Guardsman brought his eyes out of the future, and stared right through the girl--rotten form, what! The intense young woman frowned and made a mental note that she would write an article on "The Girl of To-day"--or, perhaps, a letter to the _New Statesman_ would be more effective. One never knew, these degenerate times, if an author was writing from conviction or merely writing for a living.

The Australian smiled generously, and burrowed his hands deeper into his capacious pockets.

Very timidly the erring daughter of France s.h.i.+fted closer to her protector, and her hand reached appealingly for his, which caused all eyes but the Australian's to disappear like the legs of a troupe of j.a.panese acrobats from a cross-bar.

"Your Majesty----" she said.

"Hush, Pippa. You must call me just 'monsieur.'"

"But why?"

"Well--you see, a prince is very important, and----"

"Then that is why these people are so solemn? They know you are a prince, yes?"

The airman tapped the bridge of his nose meditatively. "N-not exactly,"

he said.

"But they are so sad."

"They are," he agreed; "but my countrymen sink to their greatest melancholy when they travel."

"But why, monsieur?"

"That," he said, "I cannot tell you. Perhaps traveling on a train reminds them of the brief journey of life itself. At any rate, all really well-bred people who travel resent others doing the same thing."

"What are well-bred people?"

He gazed at an advertis.e.m.e.nt for pyjamas.

"Well-bred people," he said sententiously, "are those who base their superiority on such intangible things that they leave nothing on which one can contest it. Do you understand me?"

"No," said Pippa frankly; "but I like your voice."

"Thank you, little one. It was one of the first things I learned at Harrow--to say something well rather than something worth hearing."

"I wonder if Louis had his breakfast," said she, at a tangent.

"I think so," he said, with a man's vagueness towards domestic economy; "but, to finish my definition of well-bred people----"

"Louis will be angry at my leaving him," she said musingly.

"Pippa, you must listen to me," he said gravely.

"But may I not talk as well?"

"Really charming women only listen."

"_Tiens!_ What a droll country! Do these people understand what we say?"

"I don't think so, youngster. Most Britishers look on foreign languages as immoral."

The fierce gentleman, who had been growing bluer with cold every minute, suddenly endeavored to suppress a sneeze by smothering his face in a large handkerchief, with the result that he produced a combustive cohesion of sounds, which caused a gurgle of delight from the miller's niece. Violently blowing his nose, the irate one resumed his newspaper, first turning his coat-collar about his ears as the bracing April air blew full against him, and looking as genuinely bad-tempered as his somewhat immobile features would permit.

"But he is amusing, is he not?" cried the little French girl, then shrank back as the New Statesmanist fixed her with a look of ineffable and disapproving intellectuality. "Monsieur, why is it she looks at me so?"

The aviator transferred his scrutiny from pyjamas to a picture of Canterbury Cathedral.

"She is the New Woman," he said; "and all New Women resent the Old."

"I am old?--but no!"

He lowered his eyes from the cathedral to her happy, flushed face.