The Observations of Henry | Page 5

missis. She's a clever one--she is. I did a good day's work when I
married her.
"You shave off that moustache of yours--it ain't an ornament," she says
to me, "and chance it. Don't get attempting the lingo. Keep to the
broken English, and put in a shrug or two. You can manage that all
right."
I followed her tip. Of course the manager saw through me, but I got in a
"Oui, monsieur" now and again, and they, being short handed at the
time, could not afford to be strict, I suppose. Anyhow I got took on, and
there I stopped for the whole season, and that was the making of me.
Well, as I was saying, in she comes to the supper rooms, and toffy
enough she looked in her diamonds and furs, and as for haughtiness
there wasn't a born Marchioness she couldn't have given points to. She
comes straight up to my table and sits down. Her husband was with her,
but he didn't seem to have much to say, except to repeat her orders. Of
course I looked as if I'd never set eyes on her before in all my life,
though all the time she was a-pecking at the mayonnaise and a-sipping

at the Giessler, I was thinking of the coffee-shop and of the ninepenny
haddick and the pint of cocoa.
"Go and fetch my cloak," she says to him after a while. "I am cold."
And up he gets and goes out.
She never moved her head, and spoke as though she was merely giving
me some order, and I stands behind her chair, respectful like, and
answers according to the same tip,
"Ever hear from 'Kipper'?" she says to me.
"I have had one or two letters from him, your ladyship," I answers.
"Oh, stow that," she says. "I am sick of 'your ladyship.' Talk English; I
don't hear much of it. How's he getting on?"
"Seems to be doing himself well," I says. "He's started an hotel, and is
regular raking it in, he tells me."
"Wish I was behind the bar with him!" says she.
"Why, don't it work then?" I asks.
"It's just like a funeral with the corpse left out," says she. "Serves me
jolly well right for being a fool!"
The Marquis, he comes back with her cloak at that moment, and I says:
"Certainement, madame," and gets clear.
I often used to see her there, and when a chance occurred she would
talk to me. It seemed to be a relief to her to use her own tongue, but it
made me nervous at times for fear someone would hear her.
Then one day I got a letter from "Kipper" to say he was over for a
holiday and was stopping at Morley's, and asking me to look him up.
He had not changed much except to get a bit fatter and more

prosperous- looking. Of course, we talked about her ladyship, and I told
him what she said.
"Rum things, women," he says; "never know their own minds."
"Oh, they know them all right when they get there," I says. "How could
she tell what being a Marchioness was like till she'd tried it?"
"Pity," he says, musing like. "I reckoned it the very thing she'd tumble
to. I only come over to get a sight of 'er, and to satisfy myself as she
was getting along all right. Seems I'd better a' stopped away."
"You ain't ever thought of marrying yourself?" I asks.
"Yes, I have," he says. "It's slow for a man over thirty with no wife and
kids to bustle him, you take it from me, and I ain't the talent for the Don
Juan fake."
"You're like me," I says, "a day's work, and then a pipe by your own
fireside with your slippers on. That's my swarry. You'll find someone
as will suit you before long."
"No I shan't," says he. "I've come across a few as might, if it 'adn't been
for 'er. It's like the toffs as come out our way. They've been brought up
on 'ris de veau a la financier,' and sich like, and it just spoils 'em for the
bacon and greens."
I give her the office the next time I see her, and they met accidental like
in Kensington Gardens early one morning. What they said to one
another I don't know, for he sailed that same evening, and, it being the
end of the season, I didn't see her ladyship again for a long while.
When I did it was at the Hotel Bristol in Paris, and she was in widow's
weeds, the Marquis having died eight months before. He never dropped
into that dukedom, the kid turning out healthier than was expected, and
hanging