Daphne in Fitzroy Street

Front matter

DAPHNE IN FITZROY STREET

BY

E. NESBIT

I : BIRTHDAY GIRL

IT WAS the fifth of April. Also it was a very fine day. Further, it was Daphne’s birthday—the eighteenth. Besides this, it was a Thursday, the jour de sortie, when all the girls who had friends and relations were taken away into the bosom of families. Daphne had no relations or friends in any of the tall, flat-faced, green-shuttered houses in the town, nor did any family of hers have its address at any of the white villas that slept in green gardens out among the orchards.

She was not the only one whom no mother called for, no white-capped, prim-lipped bonne escorted through the gay, interesting, alive streets. Inez de Mattos, her people owned a castle in Spain, and no visitors ever called to see her; Guilberte, her people were in Paris; Madeleine had no relations; and Columbine Pinsent’s grandfather was packing in far away Chicago the pork that should make her an heiress. And there were others.

Columbine was to leave at Midsummer, to cross the ocean and take up those honours wrung from protesting pigs. Little Inez would be at school for a long while yet. Madeleine was to be a nun someday, and Guilberte would only leave school to be married. Daphne—well, Daphne had always been at school, and she hated it, and loved it, and was bored by it, and interested in it, and felt for it all the ebb and flow of varied emotion which girls feel for their homes.

The sun shone with a clear sparkle on the ivy leaves that framed the refectory windows. Long, narrow horse-shoe tables, spread with coarse, unbleached linen, were outlined by a vivid, varying fringe of girls, mostly eating thin soup and wide slabs of pain de ménage. The English girls ate eggs and drank chocolate. The whole seventy-four were gesticulating like monkeys and chattering like parrots. For Thursday was a holiday. And on holidays one might talk at meal times without fear or restraint. On other days, if one talked, it had to be done without moving one’s lips, in a voice too low to be heard above the clatter of plate and spoon and the setting down of the yellow mug after drinking. Daphne had invented this way of talking, and in it she and Columbine were easily first.

“I’ve arranged everything,” said Columbine, breaking her eggs into her mug and mixing them with vinegar and salt. Usually it was Daphne who arranged everything, but this being her birthday, etiquette demanded a temporary abdication. “Marie Thibault’s to get her brother to go back to college to fetch a ball he’ll say he lost in the garden. And he can lower the things to us over the wall. It was thoughtful of those old chaps to build the boys’ school next to the girls’ school, wasn’t it?”

“It was all one convent once,” said Daphne, through a mouthful of toast. Those whom the cook loved had toast with their eggs – slices of toast as big as little tea-trays and very much thicker. “We’re going to have the loveliest feast,” she went on, stooping to the round-eyed, thin-faced child beside her, “because it’s your Daffy’s birthday.”

“I know that,” said the child, superior; “hasn’t my Daffy wondered what its Dormouse has been doing all her playtime in wonderful secrecy?”

“I’ve wondered till I haven’t been able to sleep for wondering. What was it, honey of my heart?”

“You don’t think,” said the child, “that I could tell you the secret of my life now, all in the middle of the bread-and-butter and soup? Afterward, when all the girls have been fetched. Just you and me, alone in the garden—and Columbine, because she helped. Just us three and the secret splendidness.”

“I don’t know how I shall bear to wait,” said Daphne, who had found it hard, during these last weeks, to avoid knowing every stitch of the secret splendidness ardently worked at and hidden on her approach under the child’s black cotton sarrau.

“I’ve got a present for you, too,” said Columbine, “if Doris will let me give it after hers.”

“You’ve remembered what I said?” said Daphne, turning on her friend with a threatening frown. “I won’t stand any nonsense, you know2”

“I’ve remembered. But it’s hard to be forbidden to spend more than two francs on the only girl one ever loved, when one is2”

“When one is rolling in money—yes, fling your hateful money in my penniless face! I’m glad you remembered the day, though.” Her china-blue eyes were soft and bright.

“It’s the kind of date one does forget, isn’t it—the day that brought into the world the dearest, prettiest, cleverest, nicest2”

“Mademoiselle Carrmichel,” said the cool, clear voice of Madame from the crown of the horseshoe, “will remain after the others. I have to speak to her.”

“Oh, Coreopsis!” sighed Daphne—“Oui, Madame—Oh, Coreopsis, what have I done now!”

“And on your birthday, too. What have you done?”

“I don’t know,” said Daphne, hopelessly.

“When I do naughtiness,” observed Doris, with pride, “I always know.”

“There’s no mistake about your naughtiness, is there, my cabbage?” said Daphne, as the seventy-three rattled and rustled, rose and filed out. “Now for it. Wish me luck, Columbine, or rather pray to St. Nicholas. He’s the one who looks after naughty children. My doom is fixed—all is indeed over. Farewell. I’ll come out to the terrace as soon as I’ve caught it.”

“Caught what?” asked Doris, eagerly. “Oh, will you show it to me when you’ve caught it?” “I’ve no doubt I shall show it,” said Daphne ruefully. “Red eyes—on one’s birthday, too. Here goes!”

The terrace is built on a cliff that goes down a sheer forty feet to the white road that follows the winding line of the river. This is why the pupils at the most select school in provincial France are allowed to walk there without surveillance, and to look out, from that safe height, on the dangers and temptations of the wicked world. And in safety. Little stray wavelets of the great sea of iniquity that surges outside school boundaries sometimes dash themselves against that tremendous fortification, but always in vain.

When an impressionable Polish artist, fired by the vision of cloudy blond hair and blue and white, the festival dress of an enfant de Marie, purchased a bow, and, winging his arrow with an impassioned billet addressed to La Belle Blonde, shot at the terrace, his shaft stuck in one of the clipped beech-trees of the terrace berceau, and the first person to see it was Madame.

“Hold!” she said, “what a droll of a bird! The gardener shall fetch it down tomorrow—with the ladder.”

And, on the morrow, by means of the ladder, the gardener did bring down an innocent arrow, winged with the blank sheet of an exercise book—because Daphne, adventurous, prompt, and alleging a finger cut in the sharpening of a pencil, had escaped from the afternoon drawing-class, her hand bound in a handkerchief where crimson lake and burnt sienna artfully simulated gore. She had run like a deer to the terrace, climbed the tree, disengaged the billet of adoration, replaced it by a folded blank paper, and got back to her sympathising class, when she had torn up and buried the amoristic effusion—less in the interest of school discipline than in that of the enfant de Marie. The adventure made her happy for a week. It satisfied that sense of personal competence to any crisis that the routine of school was inadequate to feed.

It was Daphne, too, who discovered the northwest passage. All along the top of that part of the old convent, which was now the modern girls’ school, ran a great garret, eighty or ninety feet long. It was next to the box-room where the trunks of pupils were kept, the trunks where clothes not in use were stored and books not judged suitable for school reading. The box-room was only visited under strictest supervision. At the back of it was a pile of old lumber—things cast out of use, but by some thrifty hand not cast out of house and home—dusty brown saddles, the tangled straps of broken harness; dressers and settles and chairs that no one wanted any more; the carved throne of a bishop, all Gothic tracery and tarnished gilding; the broken, heaped up, angular woodwork of the old chapel, and, God knows how it came into a convent, a squarely-knit oaken cradle.

It was Daphne who spied, beyond all, a light gleam through the shadows of this outworn usefulness, and longed to explore what she knew was a hole or a door in the corner of the partition wall. But surveillance was too keen. In the big garret, however, where the seed potatoes were kept, and the heaps of turnips and carrots and haricot beans, where the onions and the cobwebs hung from the rafters, there was no surveillance—because there was no right of entry. Everyone knew where the key of the grenier hung in the portress’s lodge, but it was Daphne who, light-footed and light-fingered, lifted it from its nail while the portress snored in the July afternoon quiet, stole up the many stairs three at a time, fleet as a climbing panther, opened the grenier door, and traversed, quiet and quick as any panther, its whole long length. The box-room was not forty feet long. There must be another room behind it. And there was. The partition did not reach to the outer wall—the rough ends of the laths stuck through the plaster toward the outer wall, but yet leaving a space where Daphne’s slimness might pass, did indeed, with a squeeze and a torn apron, pass unhurt. And now she was in a room lighted only by a skylight, the mate to the skylight in the grenier. and in front of her was the door in the wall and through it the mingled lines like broken scaffolding, of chair and table and heaped discarded furniture. She shifted a chair here, a table leg there—made a practicable tunnel through the heap, blocked it with old curtains; and henceforth everyone’s box and everyone’s confiscated literature was available at any hour and Daphne was the school heroine. The key that Marie Thibault’s brother had got made from a wax impression of the key that blinked in the sun on the wall of the portress’s lodge lay in Daphne’s deep under-pocket. And her heart was glad every time she felt its secret weight jog her knee.

Madame’s surveillance was strict; she thought that she knew everything in her girls’ lives. And, indeed, she did know most things till Daphne came to her kingdom—Daphne, whose father was a bookworm, whose grandfather was an explorer, whose great-grandfather was a lieutenant at Trafalgar.

Columbine and Doris went down through spring sunshine toward the terrace. The garden was covered with light veils of plum-blossom and little green new leaves, through which boughs and tree trunks still showed strongly black. The borders of the path were alight with anemones, early tulips, late daffodils, and the beginnings of the fallen sky of forget-me-nots. The high wall that lowered above the fruit trees bore a line of mingled fire and blood, wall-flowers red and brown and yellow. The larch by the old convent graveyard, away to the right, wore its new spring green studded with ruby buds. All about was the slender green promise of white lilac and the fat grey promise of flags. The beech alley was all grey stems touched with a million bright, hard buds.

“Like very sharp drawing-stumps, aren’t they?” said Columbine, as she and the child passed onto the shadow-netted stones of the terrace.

“Yes, just,” said the child, “and the trunks and the branches look as if they had been polished with black-lead. Have you got my present?”

“Next to my heart. Look!”

From the front of her dress she drew a little roll of pink tissue-paper, unrolled it, and showed the “secret splendidness”—a kettle-holder, bearing a kitten on a red cushion worked in Berlin wool, cross-stitched, grounded in blue, and lined and corded with crimson satin.

“It is like a dream of heaven,” said the child, in a hushed voice.

“It’s very, very beautiful,” said Columbine. “Mine’s not half so nice. And, mind you, don’t say mine’s nice or she won’t take it. Let’s play conquerors till she comes. There are lots here against the rose hedge.”

“We’ve played conquerors,” shouted Doris, as Daphne came quickly down the path, “for ever and ever, and I’ve won. Did she scold you very, very?”

Daphne reached them, a whirlwind of fluttered black pinafore and long red hair.

“Oh!” she cried, catching one in each arm. “Pinch me, both of you. Am I alive or am I dreaming? Am I the most wretched girl in the world or am I mad with joy? Pinch me, pinch me, and settle the question one way or the other.”

“What ever?” The three fell in a tumbled heap on the blue-green faded garden seat.

“Oh, my dears!” Daphne gasped. “We’re to go home tomorrow—Doris and me. I thought we never, never should, and I’m going to spend every penny I’ve got in a blow-out tonight. Madame goes to see her sister, and together they go to the Mayor’s ball. Course quite clear and I can get round old Claudine, and Miss Henney will be writing to her sweetheart. We’ll have the show of our lives. And then I shall never, never see you again, my Columbine!”

“Oh yes, you will,” said Columbine, aghast, but conscientiously consolatory. “I’ll come and see you the minute I leave school.”

“Oh no—I know you never will. Everything’s over forever, and I’m to put my hair up, so as to be respectable for travelling!”

II : BRIGAND CAPTAIN

UNDER the revolutionary rule of Daphne, secret revels had, before this, occurred. A masterly system of scouts, fleet and bare of foot, posted on commanding positions between the smallest dormitory and the mistresses’ salon, rendered the adventure so safe as to be hardly now an adventure at all.

But this last night of her school life Daphne meant to mark indelibly. It was to be something which should keep her memory green forever, so that to generation after generation of awed, admiring schoolgirls the tale should forever be whispered—and the name of Daphne, “une folle Anglaise capable de tout, mais bonne enfant,” should live always in the legends told at twilight. She caught Marie Thibault at the exact last minute before her exit; crammed a paper of instructions and all her money into Marie’s short, fat hand.

“It is for tonight,” she said, “thou wilt see. Forget nothing today, and tonight thou shalt see a fête that thou shalt never forget.”

This done, she borrowed a broom and a duster from old Claudine, the cook, and hid them till Madame should have been drawn away by two fat little piebald stallions in a dumpy waggonette to her sister’s country house.

Daphne was trusted by everyone—by her comrades, by the servants, by the mistresses, by Madame.

Her adventures were always too well arranged for detection to be possible, and her passionate energy was of the kind that makes days elastic and stretches them till they include all one’s duties as well as one’s pleasures. Her lessons were always done, and well done. It was she who organised the picnics, the presentations of flowers on birthdays, the dramatic scenes acted at prize-givings; gave out the seeds and plants for the girls’ gardens, helped backward children, petted the sad, and coaxed and encouraged the shy. If a favour was to be asked of anyone in authority, it was Daphne who did the asking. Madame praised her continually as a young girl well brought up; one who could be trusted to be as genteel when one had her not beneath the eye as the greater part of girls under the most careful surveillance. One could trust Daphne, she said, and thought. And Daphne, too, thought that she could be trusted. “I don’t do wrong things,” she told herself, “it’s so silly to do wrong.”—Because “of course,” she said, “little secret adventures are not wrong at all,” only natural and poignantly pleasant.

“If Madame knew we climbed trees and had feasts and all that, she’d have to stop it,” she said to Marie, on the first and last occasion when conscience reared its head at an apple-munching party. “It’s just an old tradition she’s got hold of—come down from the times when no one could do anything without being put into a secret dungeon in the Bastille for it. But just ask yourself. Is it wrong to eat apples? Is it wrong to climb trees? Is it wrong to have the things out of our boxes that our own relations meant us to have? Of course it isn’t. Well then!”

And the question was settled once and for all.

And now by ones and twos the girls were fetched by friends or maids or relations, and only the usual half a dozen remained. They sat on the terrace, and looked over the white and green of the valley, where the river ran under the beautiful stone bridges, ate sucre de pomme and matured their plans.

“Inez, Guilberte, Madeleine, Daphne, Doris, Columbine. How the rest will bless our names When they see the candle flames. And the splendid banquet hall Where the board is spread for all. How our names will be revered When from school we’ve disappeared. How the trump of fame will blow Our six names . . .”

“Speak French, then,” said Madeleine. “I understand hardly three words.”

“How do you make such lovely poetry?” said Columbine.

“She spins it out of her inside, like a spider. Inside her there is metres and metres and metres,” said Doris hitting her sister’s waist belt. “Isn’t it, chérie?”

“Metres and metres,” agreed Daphne. “Now do you all understand what you’ve got to do? Madeleine and Inez, get the broom and duster—they’re in my bed, under the mattress, and you’ll sweep and dust the secret chamber, and get a lot of red blankets off the beds and spread them for carpets. Columbine and my Dormouse look through all the boxes and get out every single thing that looks as though it would be good for dressing up. Don’t take anything of ours. Our trunks have got to be packed today. Then all four of you get out tables and benches—you can make them stand up all right with bricks, there are lots of bricks in the grenier. And put the bishop’s throne up, if you can move it. I’ll go to the Alée défendue and get the things from little Thibault. There’s an awful lot to do. We ought to get it done before déjeuner. Now, let’s arrange our substitutes.” She dragged a bundle of cloaks and jackets from under the seat—the garden wraps that hung in the vestibule for the girls to wear in cold weather. Then she drew out a bundle of umbrellas. You can make a wonderfully good dummy by sticking a hood on an umbrella, folding a heavy cloak round it and arranging it in a garden seat.

“That’s you, Colombe,” said Daphne, contemplating the hideous folding of serge and silk that twenty yards away looked like a human being. “Now you run. Keep behind the espaliers and keep low. Rendez-vous at your desk. You’re going to get your embroidery if you’re caught. Mina you get it. Lies are of the devil. Now I’ll do Madeleine.”

Daphne, born general, had arranged her group at the one point where a budding sycamore obscured ever so little the view from the corridor windows. She arranged another deceptive heap. “Run, Madeleine,” she said, “and see why Columbine is so long gone.”

Madeleine giggled and ran.

Soon a convincing group occupied the stone seat and the twisted beech-root beside it, and all the girls were gone.

“’Tis well,” whispered Daphne, as she and Doris crept along behind the pear-blossom, “the secret deed is done, and no human eye has marked our proceedings,”

Daphne was wrong. Two human eyes had marked, with tepid but quickly warming interest, the making of that group on the curved stone seat. Those eyes were grey, and they looked, from very far, through a particularly good pair of racing-glasses.

“Well,” said he whom the eyes served. “I really am! Little villains—I wonder what devilry that’s the screen for!”

He lowered the glasses. Yes; it was good work. Anyone could have said, glancing terraceward, “A group of school-girls reading and sewing.”

“Mighty clever,” said he.

Daphne had counted only on the vantage point of the school corridor windows. She had not imagined it possible that anyone could scale the wall of the college next door and thence look down with racing glasses on her little world of school intrigue and adventure. And now the peace of a great freedom lay over the school. The tall porte cochère had closed behind Madame, and her sister’s piebald steeds, neighing joyously, had carried her away to the sister’s bald-faced villa. The mistresses had gone, each to her own place, and the English governess, today on duty, was rejoicing in the trustworthiness of Daphne, the priceless quality that made it possible for a hard-driven English girl to sit at her open window that the pear-blossom crept round and nodded into, closely covering thin grey sheets of foreign note-paper, and every now and then pausing to look at her life’s hidden joy and pride, or to flutter the leaves of the dictionary to make quite sure how one spelt “judgment” or “embarrassed” or “unnecessary.” The really important words, “love,” “hope,” “dearest,” are fortunately easy, even when one is a half-educated girl of twenty earning hard bread in a foreign land.

The very sunlight, now warm as an English June’s, lay more peacefully upon the garden, and the shadows of trees and buildings were dark and strong. Up in the grenier Daphne’s lieutenants were carrying out her orders with a pathetic exactness taught by experience. And Daphne herself, crouched in a clump of white lilac in the allée défendue where the sun shone warmest and all the leaves were already out, was whistling with perfect accuracy the morning song of the blackbird. The song ended. From the other side of the wall should have come the answering twitter of a young linnet. But no sound came. The garden was very silent. A bee buzzed in the wall-flowers on the grey crumbling buttresses. The wall-flowers nodded, drenching the air with perfume. The blackbird’s note sounded again. And this time there was a reply. A very faint and not convincing representation of the April notes of the cuckoo.

“Silly to change the pass-word,” Daphne told herself. “French boys always think they know better than you do.”

She stood, her hands behind her, erect, alert, looking up at the top of the wall. Something showed there, something that moved. A crowded blue handkerchief knotted at the corners. It remained a moment balanced at the top and slowly began to crawl down the wall. It descended some ten feet, then hung a yard above her reach.

“Little idiot,” said Daphne, “he ought to know the proper length by now!”

She dared not call out. She could not reach the packet. There was only one thing to do, and Daphne did it. She awaited events, and again the blackbird’s song rang shrill and true. Horror! The blue bundle was slowly drawn up and hung just below the wall’s level for any fool to see. If she could climb the chestnut that pressed close to the wall she might, or might not, be able to reach the cord.

And Marie Thibault should be instructed how to teach her little brother not to play tricks on an English girl.

Daphne made a leap, caught at a bough, and with a swift swing of black ankles disappeared in rustling green. The tree was easy to climb—the only reason she had never climbed it before was that there had been no need, and recreations needing time, like tree-climbing, were best taken elsewhere than in the allée défendue. Sure-footed, strong-handed, she went from bough to bough, up and up, pushing through the resilient twigs. The change in the light told her when she had reached the level of the wall’s top; she trusted herself to a stout bough that had grown straight toward the wall, and, then, baffled, grown at right angles to it; parted the leaves with her arms, caught at the wall and leaned there panting, her head thrown back and her hands gripping the coping stone on its farther side.

Swift as ever hawk swooped on pigeon two heavy, strong hands fell on her wrists.

“All is well,” said a voice in French with an accent unmistakable, “resty tron keel.”

Daphne had sense enough even in the suddenness and completeness of that shock, to move not at all, save to tighten her grip on the wall. She tried to see, but the hands had come out of the thick of the tree where its green waves surged over the wall-top. She could see only the hands and the cuffs—white flannel. There was a dark signet ring on one of the hands.

“Let me go,” she said, and her voice was low and fierce. “Otez vos mains! allez-vous en!”

“Oh,” said the other voice, “you’re English. That’s all right. Are you safe? I’m sorry if I startled you. I thought if I spoke you’d be more startled still, and if you’d come face to face with me—you would have in another moment—you’d have been startled out of your wits.”

“It takes a good deal,” said Daphne, firing, “to startle me out of my wits. Take your hands away, please.”

“Half a moment. Why didn’t you take your bundle?”

“I couldn’t reach,” said Daphne. “Cord too short. Who are you?”

“English master at the college. Are you safe if I let go?”

“Of course I’m safe,” said Daphne, impatiently, but the hands on her wrists did not move. “Look here,” he said, “go down the tree a bit—and I’ll come down too. We must talk this business over. Do as I tell you—don’t be a silly child. It’s all right. Go on.”

Daphne went. There seemed to be nothing else to do. She could, of course, get down and fly the scene, leaving the English spy to complete his treachery as he chose. But it would be more amusing to stay and tell him what she thought about him. Horrid, interfering old thing! Also to show him that she was not a child. She went down till she found a convenient branch, and, bracing her feet on it, leaned against another, safely away from the tree-trunk by which he must descend. The tree shook and shivered to the weight of that descent, and out of the green above her came a young man in flannels. He came to a stay on a bough a little below hers and their eyes, level, met for the first time.

“Why,” she said, “you’re quite young! I did think you were old. That would have been some excuse for you.”

“And you,” he said, “are quite old. I did think you were a child. That would have been some excuse for you.”

“I don’t want excuses,” said Daphne.

“Neither do I,” he said.

There was a pause. Again their eyes met.

“What I want,” he said, sternly, “is explanations.”

“Then we want the same thing,” said Daphne, shortly.

“Is it quite safe?” he asked anxiously.

“Do you think I’m a baby, or a Frenchman, to tumble out of a tree?” Scorn barbed the inquiry.

“I didn’t mean that. I mean, won’t they be looking for you, and won’t you get into a row if they find me here?”

“Nobody’ll find me here—unless you’ve sent a note round already to tell them where to look for me—or for someone looking out for a blue bundle.”

“If you’re sure you’re safe,” he said, “I don’t mind beginning the explanations. Only, please remember that I’m quite as bewildered as you, and, I should judge, much more embarrassed.”

“You don’t look it,” she said, and the grey eyes of him looked at her so frankly that she began to wonder. Was it possible that—? Oh thought to be buried forever under mountains of oblivion! No, Daphne! the young man is not a fairy prince who has seen you from afar and has taken this romantic means of offering you his hand, heart, and sceptre. Listen, he is telling you who he is. Listen, never mind if your ears are crimson, he can’t possibly know what reddened them. He may think they are always crimson. Loathsome thought. No, don’t think about that either. Listen.

“And so,” the young man was saying, “when I saw young Emil staggering in under a camel’s load of provender, with his arms so full of parcels that they stuck up above the level of his long, long ears, and when he told me he had come back for a ball he had mislaid, I was naturally interested in his regrettable lapse from truth. So I took him into my room, locked the door on him, his parcels, and the Grand Inquisitor—myself, gracious lady—and the inquiry by torture began.”

“You didn’t?” said Daphne.

“If milder measures had failed,” said he, “who knows? For my strongest passion was aroused. Curiosity. But he melted like wax before the flame of a crafty generosity. In return for a stick of chocolate Menier and a promise of eternal secrecy, he told me all. I promised to see things through for him, and bade him return to the bosom of his family, and we parted with expressions of mutual confidence and regard.”

“Do you always talk like a book?” Daphne asked, raising her chin a contemptuous half-inch.