The Rose Garden (23 page)

“Sure and we are, then, Miss Williams. They can't get the people. Sure we all know that.”

“You've been misinformed, Mary. Any shortage that may have existed is gone, and there's no need for you to continue working yourself to death as you have been. It seems to me, and Mr. Sims is in full agreement with me, by the way, that there's work here, more than enough, for two pairs of hands.”

Mary turned from the mirror with a face full of truculent suspicion. Miss Williams smiled at her, disclosing a perfect set of tiny false teeth, seed pearls, as alike and as dainty as peas in a pod. The pod was Miss Williams's smile, her suave, ready smile of annihilation.

She continued, “In the six weeks that I've been here, I've been very much aware of your long hours, and of all that you do, Mary. This morning I had a talk with Mr. Sims about it. As a matter of fact, Mr. Sims and I have discussed you many times.”

Mary listened in fascinated silence.

“We've decided that you simply have to rest, Mary. That's all there is to it. It's absurd, all these long hours, every day of the week, week in, week out, year in, year out. So beginning on Monday, you'll divide your time with Mona Casey. And you'll take your full day off, Mary, and no ifs or buts.”

“I don't want that young strap in here with me, getting under my feet, annoying the people,” said Mary, with knots in her tongue. “Mr. Sims knows that, so he does.”

“Mr. Sims is well aware of how you feel, Mary. He knows you don't want anybody in here with you, and I know you don't want anybody, but you're going to have somebody whether you like it or not. For your own sake, Mary. Now you've got to be reasonable about this. You aren't as young as you once were, Mary. None of us are.”

That knocked the wind out of her, reflected Miss Williams, without regret. The direct approach, she thought, and this observation skimmed like a sweet bird across the sea of her composure.

“Mona, is it,” said the stunned Mary. “That one.”

And not even bothering to say pardon to Miss Williams, she made her way across the floor and dropped into her chair. When she began to come to herself a little, Miss Williams had gone. She was sitting alone in a rage. Her eyes wandered in disbelief, and she rocked slightly in agitation. In her cup, the cocoa had settled down into a dark puddle. It looked hard. Maybe the cold air from the window has frozen it, she thought, in a separate burst of pettishness, feeling the draft on her back. She dipped in a finger and it came away stained and sugary. She stuck the finger mechanically into her mouth, and just at that moment there was Miss Williams again, cool as a cucumber, nice as you please, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.

“Another thing, Mary,” she said smooth and fast, grasping the nettle again, “and this I sincerely regret, although I know that
you
will understand. It's the crowds, you know, the summer crowds from England and America, besides the regular people coming up for their holidays. Things are getting out of hand. Of course it means more money all round, more work and more money.

“To come to the point, I'm afraid you must give up your room. We'll have to start redecorating in a week at the latest, but I've a couple of very good addresses here, not too far away, very pleasant rooms, I'm told.

“I'm sorry about this, but now you've had your room longer than most, haven't you? Let me know what arrangements you make, and then we'll talk about hours and days off and get a timetable set up.”

She had disappeared again.

“They grudge me my bed,” said Mary aloud. “After all these years.”

Her friend Mrs. Bailey barged in, with her hair still sticking up where the earphone had untidied it.

“What's this, what's this I hear? I hear she's taken your room away from you.”

Mary nodded somberly, pursing her lips.

“Out of my room,” she said, “and out of a job, you might say.”

Mrs. Bailey leaned back against the washstand and gazed at the ceiling, treasuring this moment of astonishment. Then she bent expertly forward in an attitude of horrified disbelief.

“You don't mean it,” she bleated greedily.

“After all these years,” said Mary, rolling the calamity on her tongue. Mrs. Bailey's horror warmed her and brought her to herself. She looked her old friend straight in the eye.

“Mark you me, she didn't get off scot free,” she said, nodding her head menacingly with each word. “I cut the ground from under that lassie's feet. I turned her inside out. Inside out.”

Mrs. Bailey's surprise was over. A woman who had buried two
husbands and several children, she was past being swept off her feet for very long, even by such an event as this. Now she sank into the rhythm of the interchange with a knowing smile. She crossed her arms and settled her plump behind against the washstand with a mirthful nod.

“I'll warrant you did. She came out of here as though all the hounds in hell were after her. Tell us, what did you say to her ladyship, Mary?”

The glance they exchanged was palpitant with understanding, but Mary, in her new sensitive role as defendant, felt with dismay that something was missing. The glance had been used too often. This was a larger occasion. She thrust her head forward.

“You know I have a tongue, Bessie.”

She had that reputation.

“I told her what I thought of her, all right. She was a different lady going out of here than when she came in, I guarantee you that. I didn't spare her. I promise you. May God forgive me, the things I said. And Bessie, I told her what
you
said of her. I wish you could have seen the look on her ugly visage when I told her what you said. It would have done your heart good, Bessie.”

Bessie was electrified. She leaned away from the washstand as though she had been stung.

“Mother of God,” she gasped. “Are you trying to get me the sack, with your idle, malicious gab?”

Mary was not to be deflected from her path, and she proceeded with righteous tread. The scene was now charged with that high, hysterical emotion that she judged worthy of the occasion.

“That one'll rue the day she was born,” she hissed. “She'll be sorry she ever crossed Mary Ramsay's path.”

“What was it you told her about me, y' interfering old rip?” cried Bessie, and fled, unable to bear her anguish any longer.

Mary contemplated the retreat of her old friend without any
invasion of soft emotion. She knew the world well enough to know what they would all be saying behind her back, and Mrs. Bessie Bailey was no exception. Sitting among the ruins of her kingdom, she pondered.

She contemplated the future with a curdled eye. The walks to and from the rooming house—she looked dourly at the list of addresses Miss Williams had given her—the long and lonely hours in her room, while Mona—that strap—collected the tips that were rightfully hers. No trays, probably, either. It was easy to see which way the wind was blowing. And all the laughing and talking and finger pointing that would go on behind her back. She got up finally and made her way thoughtfully to Mr. Sims's office. She captured him at the newsstand, and he was amazed at the lack of fire in her eye.

“Poor old thing, she looks quite done in,” he thought.

Miss Williams, who might have been on guard, had flown on swift feet about her morning tour of inspection. Mary Ramsay followed Mr. Sims to his office, and the door closed respectfully behind them. It was an extraordinary occasion, although Mr. Sims did not realize it, because Mary was at last after all these years going to use her most cherished and deadliest weapon.

She felt calm with vengeance.

“Mr. Sims, I have no word of reproach for you. I have no complaint. I accept this cross that the Lord has seen fit to lay upon my shoulders, though it does seem a bit hard with my bad health and all. But before I go—Miss Williams as good as told me I'm not wanted here any longer—there are some things it's my duty to tell you. Things have been coming to a head around here for a long time now.”

She talked for an hour. She began with Mrs. Bailey and worked painstakingly down to the kitchen maids. Some of the secrets she betrayed were thirty years old. She told about her friend the doorman
and what had happened to the champagne—a gift of friends in London—that Mr. Sims was supposed to receive last Christmas. She told a few other things about the doorman too. She told about the young chap on the front lift and what he'd been up to in the storeroom on the top floor, and not with any of the maids, either. She told about the angelic little page boy, Mikey, little freckled Mikey, and his furtive pastimes. Mr. Sims listened, pinned to his chair by her cold wet voice.

“That Miss Williams is out to get your job too, Mr. Sims,” she said with conviction. “She's been talking against you to everybody in the place. She says you're easygoing and other things I couldn't repeat to you.”

Mr. Sims reflected bleakly that the remark had not been made Mary Ramsay wouldn't repeat. Every treasured bit of scandal, every scrap of information, every whisper that had ever been whispered in the Royal was trotted out and thrown down on his desk.

“And now, Mr. Sims, you have a better idea than you had an hour ago of who you can trust and who you can't, haven't you, now,” said Mary, sitting back and looking approvingly at him, settling herself for a chat. She was triumphant. She saw herself being offered Miss Williams's job.

“You can speak your mind to me, Mr. Sims,” she said with sly expectancy, but saw with surprise that he was on his feet, making for the door, so she collected herself out of the chair and followed him, smiling graciously.

“I may as well tell you, Miss Williams wants me to take my week off now, and I'll take it. I may as well be out of the way during the unpleasantness. It isn't as if I had to work, you know. I can be independent of the lot of you. I tell you that.

“And in a week or so you'll know where you stand, Mr. Sims. The air will be clear by that time. You'll be thankful I warned you
in time. But all I ask for is my old place back, just as it used to be. At my age you don't want changing about, Mr. Sims. Maybe you know about that yourself.”

“Quite right, Mary,” said Mr. Sims passionately.

He showed her out with ceremony. He was a dishonest man. He sent for Miss Williams, and she came in on the double, having left a trail of startled, delighted faces all the way down from the third floor.

“The woman's a lunatic, that's all there is to it,” he said crossly after a few minutes' talk. He felt like a fool.

Miss Williams sniffed with pleasure. She was as excited as she was ever likely to get.

“I might have known,” she said. “Indeed, I might have known.”

“Of course there's no question of her coming back now,” he said. He was nervous and very angry.

Having sowed her seeds, Mary took herself off. It wasn't until she received Miss Williams's letter, short and to the point, that she realized she had no way of going back, and then it was too late.

The Bohemians

M
r. Briscoe was an actor by profession. Mrs. Briscoe, who dyed her hair to keep it as near as possible to the rich dark red it used to be, taught music for a living. She was forty when she met him. He was forty-seven. They were a fine battered pair, marked for life by their ravenous hopes. They both had the glittering, exploring eyes of people who have never learned to control their dreams.

They met late one Saturday night, at an artistic sort of a party. Mr. Briscoe, a Londoner, had come from England the day before on the promise of a part with an English company playing a season at the Gaiety. The part had fallen through, and he was now stranded in Dublin, broke but unafraid. He came along to the party with an acquaintance he had run into in a pub. Mrs. Briscoe, then Miss Jane Rooney, had also come with an acquaintance, a Miss Finch, who played in the three-piece orchestra at the Dublin Art Theatre.

Jane was wearing a dress of dark-purple tweed, cut rather in the fashion of the Rossettis, and she had her thick, coarse red hair coiled low on her neck. She wore handmade silver jewelry of Irish design, set with amethysts. She was a tall, extremely thin woman, with a long slender nose and a very small mouth. Her tiny, dry
lips, overcome as they were by her long nose, seemed to deny all the desirous demands of her eyes. She was very brave. When left alone at a party—as she often was, because she was extravagantly artistic, and often, after a glass of something, provoked foolish, heartfelt arguments—she would rear back her large head of hair, reveal her minute, contemptuous smile, and dart her heated glance in all directions, in search of a more receptive audience. She was unattractive to men, and usually had to find her way home alone. This did not drive her, as it drove less exalted souls, to the weak expedient of slipping away quietly in the middle of the evening. On the contrary, she always stayed to the end, and walked away from the pairs and groups without a sign of discomfort.
This
had been happening to her all her life.