Number 70, Berlin: A Story of Britain's Peril. Le Queux William

nine o’clock that same evening, in a well-furnished drawing-room half-way up Fitzjohn’s Avenue, in Hampstead, a pretty, blue-eyed, fair-haired girl of twenty-one sat at the piano alone, playing a gay French chanson, to pass away the time.

      Dressed in a dainty little dinner-gown of carnation pink, and wearing in her well-dressed hair a touch of velvet to match, she presented a pretty picture beneath the shaded electric-light which fell over the instrument set in a corner.

      Her mother, Mrs Shearman, a charming, grey-haired lady, had just gone out, while her father, Daniel Shearman, a rich tool-manufacturer, whose works were outside Birmingham, was away at the factory, as was his habit three days each week.

      Elise Shearman was just a typical athletic English girl. In her early youth her parents were “making their way in the world,” but at fourteen she had been sent abroad to school, first to Lausanne, and afterwards to Dresden, where she had studied music, as so many English girls have done.

      On her return to Hampstead, whither her father had removed from the grime and toil of work-a-day Birmingham, she found her home very dull. Because the Shearmans were manufacturers, the snobbishness of Hampstead, with its “first Thursdays,” would have nothing to do with them; though, if the truth were told, Dan Shearman could have bought up most of his neighbours in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and was a sterling good Englishman into the bargain – which could not be said of some of those slippery, smooth-tongued City adventurers who resided behind the iron railings of that select thoroughfare.

      Running her slim white hands over the keys, she began the gay refrain of one of the chansonettes which she had learned in Paris – one of the gay songs of the boulevards, which was, perhaps, not very apropos for young ladies, but which she often sang because of its gay, blithe air – Belloche’s “L’Eventail Parisien.”

      In her sweet, musical treble she sang gaily —

      Dès qu’arrivent les grand’s chaleurs,

      À la terrass’ des brasseries

      Les éventails de tout’s couleurs

      Viennent bercer nos rêveries.

      Car, pour allécher le client,

      Le camelot toujours cocasse

      En s’éventant d’un air bonasse

      Envoi’ ce petit boniment:

      And then, with a swing and go, she sang the chorus —

              Ça va, ça vient,

      Ça donn’ de l’air, ça fait du bien.

      C’est vraiment magnifique.

      Quel instrument magique!

              Ça va, ça vient,

      Ca donn’ de l’air et du maintien

      Et ça ne coûte presque rien:

      Voici l’éventail parisien!

      Hardly had she concluded the final line when the door opened and a tall, dark-haired, good-looking young man entered, crossed to her, and, placing his hand upon her shoulder, bent and kissed her fondly.

      “Why, Jack, dear – you really are late!” the girl exclaimed. “Were you kept at the office?”

      “Yes, dearest,” was his answer. “Or rather I had some work that I particularly wanted to finish, so I stayed behind.”

      He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a pair of keen, merry brown eyes, a handsome face with high, intelligent brow, as yet unlined by care, a small, dark moustache, and a manner as courteous towards a woman as any diplomat accredited to the Court of St. James.

      Jack Sainsbury, though merely an employee of the Ochrida Copper Corporation, a man who went by “Tube” to the City each morning and returned each night to the modest little flat in Heath Street, at which his sister Jane acted as housekeeper for him, was an honest, upright Englishman who had, in the first month of the war, done his duty and gone to the recruiting office of the Honourable Artillery Company to enlist.

      A defective elbow-joint had prevented him passing the doctor. And though no one in the office knew he had tried to join the new army, he had returned to the City and continued his soul-killing avocation of adding figures and getting out totals.

      His meeting with Elise Shearman was not without its romantic side.

      One Sunday morning, two years before, he had been riding his motor-cycle up to Hatfield, as was his habit, to meet at the Red Lion – that old inn that is the rendezvous of all motor-cyclists – the men and women who come out there each Sunday morning, wet or fine, from London. Fine cars, driven by their owners, turn into the inn-yard all the morning, but the motor-cyclist ignores them. It is the meeting-place of the man on the cycle.

      One well-remembered Sunday morning Elise, who was advanced enough to put on a Burberry with a leather strap around her waist and sit astride on a motor-cycle, was careering up the North Road beyond Barnet when, of a sudden, she swerved to avoid a cart, and ran headlong into a ditch.

      At the moment Jack Sainsbury, who chanced to be behind her, stopped, sprang off, and went to her assistance.

      She lay in the ditch with her arm broken. Quickly he obtained medical aid, and eventually brought her home to Fitzjohn’s Avenue, where he had, with her father’s knowledge and consent, been a constant visitor ever since.

      Jack Sainsbury, whose father, and his family before him, had been gentlemen-farmers for two centuries in Leicestershire, was, above all, a thorough-going Englishman. He was no smug, get-on-at-all-hazards person of the consumptive type one meets at every turn in the City. On the contrary, he was a well-set-up, bold, straightforward, fearless fellow who, though but a clerk in a City office, was one of that clean-limbed, splendid type which any girl would have welcomed as her hero.

      What Jack Sainsbury said, he meant. His colleagues in the office knew that. They all regarded him as a man of high ideals, and as one whose heart had, ever since the war, been fired with a keen and intense spirit of patriotism.

      That Elise Shearman loved him could be seen at the first moment when he had opened the door and crossed the threshold. Her eyes brightened, and her full, red lips puckered sweetly as she returned his fond, passionate kisses.

      Yes, they loved each other. Elise’s parents knew that. Sometimes they were anxious, for Dan Shearman felt that it would not be altogether a brilliant match, as far as an alliance went. Yet Mrs Shearman, on her part, had so often pleaded, that no separation of the pair had, as yet, been demanded. Hence they found idyllic happiness in each other’s love.

      “You seem unusually thoughtful to-night, Jack!” exclaimed the girl, tenderly smoothing his hair as they stood together clasped in each other’s arms.

      “Do I?” he answered with a start. “I really didn’t know,” he laughed, aroused from his deep thoughts.

      “You are, Jack. Why?”

      “I – well, I’m really not – except perhaps – ”

      “Perhaps what?” asked Elise determinedly.

      “Well, I had rather a heavy day at the office,” was her lover’s hesitating reply. “And I’ve just remembered something.”

      “Oh! business. And that’s all?”

      “Yes, business, dearest,” was his reply. “I must apologise if my thoughts were, for the moment, far away,” he laughed.

      “You’re like father,” said the girl. “He sits by the fire sometimes for a quarter of an hour at a stretch staring into it, and thinking of his horrid business affairs. But of course business is an obsession with him.”

      “Perhaps when I’m your father’s age it will be an obsession with me,” replied Jack Sainsbury.

      “I sincerely hope it won’t,” she said, with a smile upon her pretty lips.

      “It won’t, if I’m able to make sufficient money to keep you properly, darling,”