Something New, P. G. Wodehouse [best desktop ebook reader .TXT] 📗

concerned, had her in its grip. Moreover, the excitement of the scheme began to attract her.

“But, Joan,” she said, “you know it’s simply ridiculous. You could never pass as a lady’s maid. The other servants would find you out. I expect there are all sorts of things a lady’s maid has got to do and not do.”

“My dear Aline, I know them all. You can’t stump me on below-stairs etiquette. I’ve been a lady’s maid!”

“Joan!”

“It’s quite true⁠—three years ago, when I was more than usually impecunious. The wolf was glued to the door like a postage stamp; so I answered an advertisement and became a lady’s maid.”

“You seem to have done everything.”

“I have⁠—pretty nearly. It’s all right for you idle rich, Aline⁠—you can sit still and contemplate life; but we poor working girls have got to hustle.”

Aline laughed.

“You know, you always could make me do anything you wanted in the old days, Joan. I suppose I have got to look on this as quite settled now?”

“Absolutely settled! Oh, Aline, there’s one thing you must remember: Don’t call me Joan when I’m down at the castle. You must call me Valentine.”

She paused. The recollection of the Honorable Freddie had come to her. No; Valentine would not do!

“No; not Valentine,” she went on⁠—“it’s too jaunty. I used it once years ago, but it never sounded just right. I want something more respectable, more suited to my position. Can’t you suggest something?”

Aline pondered.

“Simpson?”

“Simpson! It’s exactly right. You must practice it. Simpson! Say it kindly and yet distantly, as though I were a worm, but a worm for whom you felt a mild liking. Roll it round your tongue.”

“Simpson.”

“Splendid! Now once again⁠—a little more haughtily.”

“Simpson⁠—Simpson⁠—Simpson.”

Joan regarded her with affectionate approval.

“It’s wonderful!” she said. “You might have been doing it all your life.”

“What are you laughing at?” asked Aline.

“Nothing,” said Joan. “I was just thinking of something. There’s a young man who lives on the floor above this, and I was lecturing him yesterday on enterprise. I told him to go and find something exciting to do. I wonder what he would say if he knew how thoroughly I am going to practice what I preach!”

IV

In the morning following Aline’s visit to Joan Valentine, Ashe sat in his room, the Morning Post on the table before him. The heady influence of Joan had not yet ceased to work within him; and he proposed, in pursuance of his promise to her, to go carefully through the columns of advertisements, however pessimistic he might feel concerning the utility of that action.

His first glance assured him that the vast fortunes of the philanthropists, whose acquaintance he had already made in print, were not yet exhausted. Brian MacNeill still dangled his gold before the public; so did Angus Bruce; so did Duncan Macfarlane and Wallace Mackintosh and Donald MacNab. They still had the money and they still wanted to give it away.

Ashe was reading listlessly down the column when, from the mass of advertisements, one of an unusual sort detached itself.

Wanted: Young Man of good appearance, who is poor and reckless, to undertake a delicate and dangerous enterprise. Good pay for the right man. Apply between the hours of ten and twelve at offices of Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole, 3, Denvers Street, Strand.

And as he read it, half past ten struck on the little clock on his mantelpiece. It was probably this fact that decided Ashe. If he had been compelled to postpone his visit to the offices of Messrs. Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole until the afternoon, it is possible that barriers of laziness might have reared themselves in the path of adventure; for Ashe, an adventurer at heart, was also uncommonly lazy. As it was, however, he could make an immediate start.

Pausing but to put on his shoes, and having satisfied himself by a glance in the mirror that his appearance was reasonably good, he seized his hat, shot out of the narrow mouth of Arundell Street like a shell, and scrambled into a taxicab, with the feeling that⁠—short of murder⁠—they could not make it too delicate and dangerous for him.

He was conscious of strange thrills. This, he told himself, was the only possible mode of life with spring in the air. He had always been partial to those historical novels in which the characters are perpetually vaulting on chargers and riding across country on perilous errands. This leaping into taxicabs to answer stimulating advertisements in the Morning Post was very much the same sort of thing. It was with fine fervor animating him that he entered the gloomy offices of Mainprice, Mainprice & Boole. His brain was afire and he felt ready for anything.

“I have come in ans⁠—” he began, to the diminutive office boy, who seemed to be the nearest thing visible to a Mainprice or a Boole.

“Siddown. Gottatakeyerturn,” said the office boy; and for the first time Ashe perceived that the anteroom in which he stood was crowded to overflowing.

This, in the circumstances, was something of a damper. He had pictured himself, during his ride in the cab, striding into the office and saying. “The delicate and dangerous enterprise. Lead me to it!” He had not realized until now that he was not the only man in London who read the advertisement columns of the Morning Post, and for an instant his heart sank at the sight of all this competition. A second and more comprehensive glance at his rivals gave him confidence.

The Wanted column of the morning paper is a sort of dredger, which churns up strange creatures from the mud of London’s underworld. Only in response to the dredger’s operations do they come to the surface in such numbers as to be noticeable, for as a rule they are of a solitary habit and shun company; but when they do come they bring with them something of the horror of the depths.

It is the saddest spectacle in the world⁠—that of the crowd collected by a Wanted advertisement.