HANDMAID TO FAME

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 February 1939, Page 10

HANDMAID TO FAME

PUBLISHED BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT COPYRIGHT.

BY

BERTA RUCK.

CHAPTER I. Continued. The sound of a gong shattered her day-dream over her papers. ’And I haven’t even washed!” “You are Miss Grey? How do you do.” The Professor, coming forward in the oak-hall, addressed her quickly, peremptorily, seeming to lay down the law even about a girl’s own name. And where were his glasses? Where the scholar's stoop? The endearing dreaminess of Terry’s mental picture? Here was a man considerably younger than, her father, certainly not a day over forty, with impatient bright eyes, keen hawk-like features, a lean figure that seemed on springs. He seemed on incarnate hurry, movements, gestures, speech. “This is my sister, Miss Unity.” His sister was his feminine counterpart, slightly younger; she had her brother’s springy movements, his swift observant glance. No sooner was tea over than the Professor, who had not sat down but had walked about tea-cup in hand, silently frowning over his own thoughts, wheeled round upon her, told her that she would want to be put into the way of things, and that he would show her the study. The atmosphere of this room chilled Terry’s blood, everything, walls of books, shelves of files, two enormous knee-hole desks with drawers, seemed so inhuman. “This,.” the Professor informed her, “is your table, your typewriter, the drawers in which you’ keep your things.” “How —how extraordinarily tidy!”

Terry had always looked upon the way in which she kept her M.P.’s correspondence as a model of tidiness. But what was it compared with this antlike meticulosity? “Tidy?” took up the Professor with an edge, “Naturally, it is a first essential. I insist upon order. Books of reference here. Your first job of work will be this index. You see how it goes on? I shall not yet need you for dictation.”

It jvas not long before Terry discovered what crime she had committed in being four minutes late for tea on the day of arrival. Quite miserably the days went by. With each day the hand-maid-to-fame was made to feel more acutely that she was being criticised by her famous man, summed up, found wanting. At the end of the week she told Professor Unity that she was afraid she could not possibly hold down her job.

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said he with a quick frown. “Most inconvenient. You are giving up too soon. I’ve just begun to become accustomed to you. I believe I shall quite soon be able to train you properly.” The swift, exasperated glance swept over her bespectacled little face, flushed with the effort it had been to her to give in her notice; it swept the rather crushed figure in the tailored suit, the hands —Terry had pretty hands which were shaking a little. “I have formed the opinion that once you have become more organised and accustomed to my way of working, all will be well. You are not very quick on the uptake, so I shall probably have to give you another week.” Here Terry, the long-suffering, did something which no-one had seen her do since she had left school. That “not quick on the uptake” was the last straw. She completely lost her temper. Standing there with one little clenched hand on the meticulously neat desk, she held her head high and spoke out. “Thank you, Professor, but I don’t want to be given another week. The truth is I couldn’t stand another week of your post. It is inhuman. You speak to mean an unjustifiable manner. I do not pretend to be super” rushed on Terry, so quickly that she was not interrupted by even his rapid speech, “but I am not the slatternly moron which you make out. and you are altogether too exacting and inconsiderate. What you want is not a human girl but a machine. A robot with the temper of an angel and the patience of Job! That’s what you want, and that’s not me. I am sorry, but this is goodbye.” “Sorry you’re going, Miss” said the smart chauffeur when she tipped' him five shillings for taking her suitcases and herself to the station. “But I’m going myself next week; so’s Cook, so’s Ellen.” Long bottled up, the confidence escaped him —“Between you and I nobody stops longer than a month. It beats me, Miss, bow any of us brings ourselves to stop with those two more than ten minutes.”

At the offices of the Employment Agency, Philip Cotgrave asked: “Well, what are we going to do about you now, Terry? The M.P. is ‘suited,’ of course. But, as luck will have it, the film-star’s job is again open.” "Again?”

“Yes. Just half-an-hour before you came in he telephoned through, sounded at his wits’ end, and asked me to find somebody after all —practical, helpful, not too young, and experienced.”

“I’m glad to hear,” said Terry, with a flash of spirit, "that twenty-seven isn’t hamperingly young.” Philip glanced at his cousin. “Girl looks different today,” he thought. “That week in the country’s done her good. Or is it sticking up for herself? She’s the type it suits to be angry.” He added: “I shouldn’t begin to be touchy about your age yet, Terry. The man' only meant he didn’t want a nineteen-year-old. Helpful and experienced you ought to be. Stage and screen people are notoriously unpractical. I think you’ll strike it lucky here, provided—he broke off with a laugh. “Provided what?”

“Provided you don’t fall for the celebrated flappers’ idol, Valentine Lavery. Perhaps I’d better warn you,” Philip added, scribbling down the address, “he

happens to be engaged to be married to his leading lady of 'The Love planet,’ Miss Flower Armitage. Been ifi love with her for years, I understand.” “Roman'ces off and on the films mean just nothing to me,” said Terry, cheerfully. "I'm immune. Thank you so much, Philip. I’ll telephone you how I get on; I’m going straight there —” Leaving the bustling, strident Strand. Terry dived down an alley bordered by litle newspaper shops and chauffeurs eating places. Quite suddenly she was in a wide, quiet, gracious, quadrangle, with tall, ancient buildings on all four sides.

She entered an open doorway with black lettered names on a door. Mr Valentine Lavery was on the fourth floor. Lifts were not; only flights of shallow stone steps worn in the middle. Lavery’s door was opened to Terry by a man-servant, to whom she gave her name .saying, she’d called about the secretary’s post. “Oh, yes, Miss. If you will kindly wait in here.” Here was a pleasant, panelled, twowindowed sitting room, looking over the tree tops of the square. Furniture and pictures were in an agreeably masculine taste, but what Terry saw first of all was that the room was not empty. Three girls sat there with an air of tense expectancy. Three pretty girls. One was palely blonde, the accompanying brunette who sat next to her, blackhaired, almond-eyed, of a Spanish type which she accentuated b[y letting long drop earrings dangle against her olive cheeks was evidently her bosom friend. The third girl was a red head with every characteristic of that alluring and exasperating tribe. If you ladies wouldn’t mind waiting,” said the manservant, “Miss Armitage will see you in a moment.” He withdrew.

“Who’s Miss Armitage, when she's at home?” demanded the pert little redhead.

“I wouldn’t know,” said the blonde. “Maybe she’s the dragon he has to employ to 'keep his fans off with a stick.”'

“Or perhaps,” said the brunette, “he gets the ex-secretary to give the onceover to candidates because the last girl knows which is his type?” She stopped abruptly as a door opened at the other end of the room.

Enter one of the most beautiful girls that Terry had ever seen. She was a dazzling, agitating blonde, in a very Hollywood afternoon frock of frilled orchid organdie; and, at the sight of her both the pretty golden-haired girl and the black-haired near-Spaniard gasped audible “Ohs!” “Do they know this lovely vision?” Terry wondered, surprised. “Or was that merely a tribute to her loveliness?”

“Excuse me,” the little redhead broke out, “but aren’t you Miss Flower Armitage?” “I am,” replied the lovely vision with a gracious, rather practised-seeming smile. For she was indeed the leading lady opposite to whom Valentine Lavery had played in his last two pictures,’ and who, whilst making the last, had become engaged to him. “Are you the young ladies who have come to see Mr Lavery about the secretarial post?” At the chorus of “Yes’s” the gracious smile faded out. There was a very sharp glint in those wide blue eyes that glanced from the smooth-haired Carmen with the earrings to the redhead with the black velvet Juliet cap across which single coppery hairs had drifted out of a curl. Very white-skinned was this girl; very deep, her appealing dimple—but Miss Armitage’s look, taking in these points, did not approve of them, Terry noticed. Still less did she’ approve of her sister-blonde, one of the many cinema-minded London girls. Then the real Flower looked at Terry. Took in the suit of trim but unflattering cut. The string-coloured hair. The mauve flesh-tones given by the wrong face-powder. The general, reassuring aura of “No nonsense” about her.

It was to Terry that she spoke. “What is your name, please?” “Miss Grey. Teresa Grey.” "Yes,” said the Hollywood-orchid, obviously approving of this name. “Finding it appropriate,” thought Terry. “Grey; mousey, drab.” “Mr Lavery will see you now. Only one of you at a time, I mean,” she added, turning the practised smile on the other three candidates.

“The other people came here before I did,” explained Terry. Beautiful Flower Armitage did not seem to hear. She had turned to the door through which she came. She opened it. They heard her voice in the corridor.

“Vai. Listen, Vai. This is your new secretary. Miss -Grey. Miss Teresa Grey.”

Now Professor Charles Unity had accused Terry of not being quick at the uptake. But a slower eye than Terry’s could have seen what was happening here; Miss Flower Armitage, fiancee to a film-star, had insisted upon vetting any young woman that film-star meant to employ. The hand-maid to this famous man must not be too pretty. Flower Armitage was saying “I’ll tell the others, that they need not wait — This is Mr Lavery.” Terry had come forward into a room of the same size of the one in which she had waited, but far less tidy. It was littered with books, papers, a half unpacked suitcase, a clutter of masculine belongings. At a table heaped high with more papers, sat the famous film-star Valentine Lavery. Now he was a surprise—(To be Continued.)