Ladies and Gentlemen. Cobb Irvin Shrewsbury
wasn’t going to put temptation in the way of his own family or himself, either. I know lots of people are doing it on the sly – using a hose, too – but I can’t even have a little water in a sprinkling can for my poor withered flowers. Look at them out of that window there – just literally drying up. And we’re sending all the wash, even the flat pieces, to the Eagle Laundry. And Henry is going to his club in town for a bath every day, and I’m doing the best I can with the wash-basin and a sponge, and the way Nora – that’s my cook’s name – and Delia, the waitress – now that Olga has gone, Delia’s the only other girl we’ve got left – the way those two carry on and complain you’d think I was personally responsible for the fact that not a drop of rain has fallen in over two months. And the English being such great hands for their tubs and all, and Mr. Boyce-Upchurch being an Englishman and all, why, I’m honestly afraid, Miss Rena Belle, that he’ll be awfully put out.
“I dessay he’ll be able to accommodate himself to a condition over which none of us has any control,” stated Miss Titworthy. “He’ll arrive Wednesday afternoon on the five o’clock boat. He asked that he be met with a car. I dessay you’ll be wanting to give a little dinner to him Wednesday evening. I don’t know what he’ll want to do Thursday morning – be driven around, I imagine. And Thursday afternoon there’s the reception at the Woman’s Club, and his lecture is that night, and Friday he leaves for Trenton where he has his next date on Saturday. He did write something about preferring to be ridden over to Trenton.”
“I could take him over myself,” said Mrs. Gridley, her citadel undermined and she rapidly capitulating, “if he doesn’t mind going in a two-seated runabout.”
“There’ll be no trouble about the car,” stated Miss Titworthy. “I dessay someone will proffer the use of a touring car.”
“Well, that point is settled then,” agreed Mrs. Gridley, now entirely committed to the undertaking. “But I must get somebody in and broken in to take Olga’s place between now and Wednesday. Really that gives me only today and tomorrow, and help is so hard to get, you’ve no idea, Miss Titworthy! I suppose I’d better run into town this afternoon and go to the employment agencies. No, I can’t, – there’s my bridge lesson. And tomorrow is the Fergus’ tea. I can’t go then, either. I promised Mrs. Fergus I’d pour. I suppose I’ll have to get Henry or my brother Oliver to do it. But neither one of them would know how to pick out a girl, provided there’s any choice at the agencies to pick from – oh, dear!”
“Had you thought of a butler?” inquired Miss Titworthy.
“A butler?”
“Yes, instead of a maid. You’ll pardon the suggestion but I was thinking that Mr. Boyce-Upchurch being a foreigner and accustomed, of course, to butlers, and a butler giving a sort of air – a tone, as it were – to a household, that perhaps – well – ”
They had fallen on fertile ground, those seeds. They were sprouting, germinating. Before the massive shoulders of the Ingleglade Woman’s Club’s efficient recording secretary had vanished down the bowery and winding reaches of Edgecliff Avenue they were putting forth small green speculative shoots through Mrs. Gridley’s mind. Always and ever, from the very first days of her married life, Mrs. Gridley had cherished in the back of her mind a picture of an establishment in which the butler, a figure of dignity and poise and gray striped trousers in the daytime but full-dress by night, would be the chief of staff. As what woman has not? And now for the gratifying of that secret ambition she had an excuse and a reason.
Section Two of this narrative brings us to another conversation. At this stage the narrative seems somehow to fall naturally into sections, but one has a premonition that toward the last it will become a thing of cutbacks and close-ups and iris-ins and fade-outs, like a movie. It brings us to this other conversation, which passed over the telephone between Mrs. Gridley and her brother Mr. Oliver Braid.
“Well, Dumplings,” said that gentleman, speaking at noon of Tuesday from his office, “the hellish deed is done!”
“You got one then?” she answered eagerly.
“Got one? Madam, you wrong me and you low-rate him. I got the One and only One – the Original One. The only misleading thing about him is his name. Be prepared for a pleasant shock. It’s Launcelot Ditto. I ask you to let that soak into your tissues and be absorbed by the system. Only Ditto means more of the same and if I’m any judge, there aren’t any more at home like him and there never will be. But the Launcelot part fits like a union suit.
“Oh, girl, I’m telling you he’s got everything, including the adenoids. Not the puny domestic brand of our own faulty and deficient land, mind you, but the large, super-extra-fine export, golden-russet adenoid of that favored island whose boast is that Britons never shall be slaves except to catarrh. And he’s as solemn as a Masonic funeral. And he stepped right out of a book by way of the stage. He ought to be serving strawberries and Devonshire cream on the terrace to the curate of St. Ives and the dear old Dowager Duchess of What-you-may-call-’em, while the haw-haw blooms in the hedgerow. He ought to be coming on at the beginning of Act One to answer the telephone and pat the sofa pillows smooth and fold up ‘The Pink ’Un,’ and sigh deeply because the Young Marster is going to the dogs. He ought to be outlining the plot to a housekeeper in rustling black silk named Meadows.”
“Ollie Braid, are you delirious?”
“Not at all. I am dazed, dazzled, blinded, but I am not delirious. I can half shut my eyes and see him in his hours of ease sitting in our buttery perusing that sprightly volume with full-page illustrations entitled ‘The Stately Homes of Old England.’ Sounds pretty good, eh what? Good – hell! He’s perfect. He certainly ought to do a lot for us socially over there in Ingleglade. I can half shut ’em again and see the local peasantry turning a lovely pea-green with envy as he issues forth on the front lawn to set up the archery butts so that we may practice up on our butting. That’s another place where the buttery will come in handy.”
“He was willing to come out, then?”
“Well, at first he did balk a little on the idea of demeaning himself by accepting a position with the lower or commuting classes. The country, yes; the town, perhaps, but the environs – well, hardly. That was his attitude. But with my lilting love-song I won him, he-siren that I am. I told him Ingleglade was not really suburban but merely outlying, if one gets what one means. That wasn’t deception, that was diplomacy. Anyhow, haven’t we got some of the outlyingest real-estate dealers in the entire state of New Jersey? Do we not combine all the drawbacks of the city with few or none of the advantages of the country? I often sit and wonder whence comes this magic power of mine for bending strong natures to my will. The crowning stroke was when I told him Boyce-Upchurch was so shortly to honor us. That won him. He admires Boyce-Upchurch tremendously. Not his books – he hasn’t read ’em – but it seems he knows Boyce-Upchurch’s uncle, who’s an archduke or a belted earl or something well up among the face-cards.”
“You talk too much, Oliver. You think you’re funny and you aren’t.”
“Oh, but, madam – ”
“Shut up a minute! He has references, of course?”
“Fair lady, sweet dame, I plight you my solemn word that with the references he’s got from noble British families he could be our ambassador to the Court of St. James the day after he took out his naturalization papers. He’s temporarily unattached but that’s because he hasn’t been able to find anybody worthy of him. He’s only taking us on trial. Why hark ye, lass, he used to work for the ’Un’rable ’Urrible ’Ubbs. He’s got the documents to prove it.”
“The what?”
“I’m merely telling you what he said. It didn’t sound like a name to me, either, at first. But now it’s beginning to grow on me; I may make a song out of it.”
“When will he be out?”
“This very night. I’m chaperoning him personally. We are to meet at the ferry, and I’m to wear a primrose in my buttonhole in case he’s forgotten how I look. I’m reading up now on the history of the Norman Conquest. I want to be prepared to meet him on his own ground should