The Chauffeur and the Chaperon | Page 5

and buying a dress or two to suit the part.

It doesn't even depress me that Phil has selected hers with the air of
acquiring a serviceable shroud.
I've finished up three serials in as many days, killing off my villains
like flies, and creating a perfect epidemic of hastily made matches
among titled heroes and virtuous nursery governesses. Scarcely an
aristocratic house in England that wouldn't shake to its foundations if
fiction were fact; but then my fiction isn't of the kind that anything
short of a dislocated universe could possibly make fact.
Phyllis, with the face of a tragic Muse, has been writing letters to her
clients recommending another typist--quite a professional sort of
person, who was her understudy once, a year or so ago, when she
thoughtlessly allowed herself to come down with measles.
"Miss Brown never puts 'q' instead of 'a', or gets chapter titles on one
side; and she knows how to make the loveliest curlicues under her
headings. Nobody will ever want me to come back," the poor girl
wailed.
"All the better for them, if you're going to blow up, as you are
convinced you will," I strove to console her, as I tried on a
yachting-cap, reduced to two three-farthings from four shillings. But
she merely shuddered. And now, when at last we have shut up the flat,
turned the key upon our pasts, and got irrevocably on board the
"Batavier" boat, which will land us in Rotterdam, she has moaned more
than once, "I feel as if nothing would be the same with us ever, ever
again."
"So do I," I've answered unfeelingly. "And I'm glad."

II
This is the first time I have been on a sea-going ship since I crossed
from America with my mother, neither of us dreaming that she would
settle down and give me an Englishman for a stepfather. As for Phil,
she has no memories outside her native land--except early ones of

Paris--and, though she has a natural instinct for the preservation of her
young life, I don't doubt that every motion of the big boat in the night
made her realize how infinitely more decorous it would be to drown on
the "Batavier 4" than in a newfangled motor thing on an obscure
foreign canal.
The Thames we have seen before, in all its bigness and richness and
black ugliness; for on hot summer days we have embarked on certain
trips which would condemn us forever in the eyes of duchesses,
countesses, and other ladies of title I have known serially, in
instalments. But we (or rather, I) chose to reach Holland by water, as it
seems a more appropriate preface to our adventure; and I got Phyllis up
before five in the morning, not to miss by any chance the first sight of
the Low Lands.
We were only just in time, for we hadn't had our coffee and been
dressed many minutes before my eyes caught at a line of land as a
drowning person is supposed to catch at a straw.
"Holland!" said I; which was not particularly intelligent in me, as it
couldn't have been anything else.
There it lay, this stage set for our drama, comedy, tragedy--whatever it
may prove--of which we don't yet know the plot, although we are the
heroines; and now that I'm writing in a Rotterdam hotel the curtain may
be said to have rung up on the first act.
Just then it was lifted only far enough to show a long, low waste of
gray-green, with a tuft or two of trees and a few shadowy individuals,
which the stage-hands had evidently set in motion for the benefit of the
leading ladies.
"We might be the Two Orphans," I said, "only you're not blind,
Phil--except in your sense of humor; and I'm afraid there are no wicked
Dutch noblemen to kidnap me----"
"Oh dear, I'm sure I hope not!" exclaimed Phil, looking as if a new
feather had been heaped on her load of anxieties.

The line was no longer gray now, nor was it a waste. It was a bright
green, floating ribbon, brocaded with red flowers; and soon it was no
ribbon, but a stretch of grassy meadow, and the red flowers were roofs;
yet meadows and roofs were not just common meadows and roofs, for
they belonged to Holland; and everybody knows--even those who
haven't seen it yet--that Holland is like no country in the world, except
its queer, cozy, courageous, obstinate little self.
The sky was blue to welcome us, and housewifely Dutch angels were
beating up the fat, white cloud-pillows before tucking them under the
horizon out of sight. Even the air seemed to have been washed till it
glittered with crystalline clearness that brought each feature of the
landscape strangely