The Observations of Henry | Page 3

he knew me in a moment, and held out his hand.
"What, 'Enery!" he says, "you've moved on, then!"
"Yes," I says, shaking hands with him, "and I could move on again from this shop without feeling sad. But you've got on a bit?" I says.
"So-so," he says, "I'm a journalist."
"Oh," I says, "what sort?" for I'd seen a good many of that lot during six months I'd spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn't sumptuousness about it, so to speak. "Kipper's" rig-out must have totted up to a tidy little sum. He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.
"Well," he answers, "I don't wind out the confidential advice to old Beaky, and that sort of thing. I do the tips, yer know. 'Cap'n Kit,' that's my name."
"What, the Captain Kit?" I says. O' course I'd heard of him.
"Be'old!" he says.
"Oh, it's easy enough," he goes on. "Some of 'em's bound to come out right, and when one does, you take it from me, our paper mentions the fact. And when it is a wrong 'un--well, a man can't always be shouting about himself, can 'e?"
He ordered a cup of coffee. He said he was waiting for someone, and we got to chatting about old times.
"How's Carrots?" I asked.
"Miss Caroline Trevelyan," he answered, "is doing well."
"Oh," I says, "you've found out her fam'ly name, then?"
"We've found out one or two things about that lidy," he replies. "D'yer remember 'er dancing?"
"I have seen her flinging her petticoats about outside the shop, when the copper wasn't by, if that's what you mean," I says.
"That's what I mean," he answers. "That's all the rage now, 'skirt-dancing' they calls it. She's a-coming out at the Oxford to-morrow. It's 'er I'm waiting for. She's a-coming on, I tell you she is," he says.
"Shouldn't wonder," says I; "that was her disposition."
"And there's another thing we've found out about 'er," he says. He leant over the table, and whispered it, as if he was afraid that anybody else might hear: "she's got a voice."
"Yes," I says, "some women have."
"Ah," he says, "but 'er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen to."
"Oh," I says, "that's its speciality, is it?"
"That's it, sonny," he replies.
She came in a little later. I'd a' known her anywhere for her eyes, and her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your dinner out of her hand. And as for her clothes! Well, I've mixed a good deal with the toffs in my time, and I've seen duchesses dressed more showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a framework to show her up. She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and it's not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did see her, like flies round an open jam tart.
Before three months were up she was the rage of London--leastways of the music-hall part of it--with her portrait in all the shop windows, and interviews with her in half the newspapers. It seems she was the daughter of an officer who had died in India when she was a baby, and the niece of a bishop somewhere in Australia. He was dead too. There didn't seem to be any of her ancestry as wasn't dead, but they had all been swells. She had been educated privately, she had, by a relative; and had early displayed an aptitude for dancing, though her friends at first had much opposed her going upon the stage. There was a lot more of it--you know the sort of thing. Of course, she was a connection of one of our best known judges--they all are--and she merely acted in order to support a grandmother, or an invalid sister, I forget which. A wonderful talent for swallowing, these newspaper chaps has, some of 'em!
"Kipper" never touched a penny of her money, but if he had been her agent at twenty-five per cent. he couldn't have worked harder, and he just kept up the hum about her, till if you didn't want to hear anything more about Caroline Trevelyan, your only chance would have been to lie in bed, and never look at a newspaper. It was Caroline Trevelyan at Home, Caroline Trevelyan at Brighton, Caroline Trevelyan and the Shah of Persia, Caroline Trevelyan and the Old Apple-woman. When it wasn't Caroline Trevelyan herself it would be Caroline Trevelyan's dog as would be doing something out of the common, getting himself lost or summoned or drowned--it didn't matter much what.
I moved from Oxford Street to the new "Horseshoe" that year--it had just been rebuilt--and there I saw a good deal of them, for they came in to lunch there