Myra Lynd was born Myra Smith, in a caravan attached to a small circus. Her gipsy father, Rube Smith, who combined the jobs of first tent hand and drum player, had cut himself off from his own people when he had married a gajo. Her mother, a disheartened creature, was the daughter of a small farmer who had lost all her background by her marriage. When she was not having a baby she did odd jobs, taking the door money, and selling photographs. There were innumerable small Smiths, combining in various ways the flaxen hair and china-blue eyes of their mother and the swarthy colouring of their father. Myra, called after the bareback rider who had acted as midwife at her birth, was entirely gipsy outwardly, but inwardly had much in her of her mother’s family. Somehow she possessed a love of decency, law, and order, she disliked the filth and squalor in which they lived, she knew there were better things somewhere, and she meant to find them. Habit might have blunted her sensibilities, but fate helped her, she developed a singing voice. Her talent was soon discovered by the circus people, always on the look-out for means of making the children profitable, and they did their best to ruin any chances her voice might have had, by putting her into the ring at the age of eight to yell ballads over the blare of the small, but very noisy, band. However, just before her ninth birthday the circus came to Cornwall and played for a night near an artist community. The artists, bored by bad weather which had stopped them working, came in a body bringing with them such guests as they had staying at the time. Among the guests was Gerald Lynd. Gerald had inherited a fortune from an energetic grandfather, it had been made in rubies and then invested over half Europe. He had no particular interest in rubies, so made no effort to find any more, but instead spent the money on music which he loved. He heard Myra sing, and without a word to his party went to the back of the circus, and learning that her father was the man with the drum, waited until he was free and made an offer of fifty pounds for her. He did not mention her voice, and heaven alone knows for what purpose her parents supposed they were selling her when later the same evening they agreed to part with her outright for a hundred pounds cash. Naturally Gerald had not that much money on him, but he raised it by loans from the community, and a cheque cashed at the public-house, and early the next morning the circus and all her family moved out of Myra’s life for ever. She watched them depart from the window of an attic bedroom in the house of one of the artists, and as the last wagon lurched out of sight she gave a sharp sigh of happiness. She remained that summer with the artists, and when she was not being used as a model, spent her time in the sea, and she filled out a little, and became even browner than usual, and very merry. When the winter came Gerald took her up to his house in Mount Street, and got her a governess, and himself gave her lessons in the theory of music. She was not allowed to sing a note. She proved quick and receptive, and she was a hard worker, for she was conscious from the beginning that the continuation of this glorious change in her fortunes depended on her voice. Gerald never grew fond of her as a person, but devoted to her from a musician’s angle. He grew ambitious for her. “I must take Myra to Germany,” he said to his friend Cyril who was acting as his secretary. “Could you bear to live in Germany for a bit?” Cyril could bear to live anywhere where he lived free, so later the three of them made their headquarters in Leipzig where Myra had a German governess and was allowed to speak only her language, and from where, every week or two, they motored to other towns for the opera or a concert which she had to criticise with intelligence, in German. A year later they moved to Paris. “That’s enough of Germany for a bit,” Gerald said. “Myra will come back later to study. It’s time she spoke French.” They stayed in France two years, and Myra had a French governess and life was exactly as it had been in Germany except that she spoke nothing but French except on Sundays when she spoke only German. Paris is not a place in which you can live without being seen, and Myra by now being thirteen, Gerald’s friends came back to England and talked. “I saw Gerald in Paris with that little girl he’s adopted. Extraordinary ménage!” “Something ought to be done about that child Gerald’s got hold of; most unsuitable!” “Well, she’s safe enough with those two!” “Safe! But what ideas is she picking up?” The gossip grew and finally reached the ears of Gerald’s aunt. Up to that moment all that needed excusing about Gerald had been excused on the ground that he was a musician. “Artists always are queer.” But the aunt thought this last talk a bit much. Little girls indeed! She wrote a tactful letter suggesting that a girl of fourteen would be better in a school. Gerald replied that Myra was thirteen, not fourteen, and that he was educating her too divinely. However, he was tired of Paris and wanted to reopen his London house, and above all he was sick to death of Cyril and needed an excuse to shake him off, so he packed Myra off to a convent outside Milan, stipulating that she still keep up her French and German, and he gave Cyril a nice lump sum as a parting present, and took a new secretary called Tony. Cyril cried a good deal, otherwise everybody was pleased. At sixteen Myra went back to Germany and started her training; she had an unusual-shaped throat, and it produced a magnificent contralto voice which in smooth passages made you think of cream coming out of a churn. When she had been training for a year, Gerald came over to hear her, and was moved to tears, and went home and made a will leaving her all his personal money; the bulk of the ruby fortune was entailed, or he would have left her that too. Two years later she made her first appearance in England: it was at a party given by immensely rich and influential musical Jews. She left the audience gasping, Gerald had not prepared them for how beautiful the voice was, he thought it better that there should be an element of surprise. The excitement was greater than he had hoped, his hand was nearly wrung off, his shoulders sore from pats, and he and Felix, who had replaced Tony as his secretary, took Myra home in triumph, and they had a little party when they got in, and lived again every moment of the evening, the expression on so-and-so’s face, the jealousy of somebody else, then they drank Myra’s health and kissed her hands and packed her off to bed. That was July, and Gerald said that Myra must have a holiday until September and that she should choose how it should be spent. Her choice was the Mediterranean. Gerald groaned. It would, he said, be terribly hot; still, she should have her way, he’d charter a small yacht and since they were going to be in the Mediterranean they would have a look at Greece as she should be Felix’s spiritual home. Ashore for the day at Samos, they all caught diphtheria. They lay in their cabins supposing at first they had Mediterranean throats, and by the time Gerald’s man, who was acting nurse, realised they had something worse and sent ashore for a doctor, Felix was dead, Gerald dying, and only Myra with her sturdy gipsy blood could be saved. She and three members of the crew who had caught the disease, were rushed ashore to the isolation hospital, where, just in time, they operated on Myra’s throat. In operating they ruined her vocal chords. It was Gerald’s aunt who came to her rescue. Not only did she fetch the girl back from Greece, but showed her how to make the best of what was left of her voice. Her unfailing flair for things social told her that Myra should make the most of her gipsy stock, dress in exaggerated colours, and hang herself with beads. Then, too, she should take Gerald’s name, just now the tragedy was fresh in people’s memories; later, without the constant reminder, they might forget who she was. “Now, my dear,” she said, “you are a figure of interest in musical London, snatch at your opportunity, let it be known you will, at a price, take pupils.” The result was greater than could be hoped. Myra made no effort to catch the real singer, but fixed her eye on those who wished to shine in musical comedy. In time she held a remarkable position, she discovered in herself a real flair for teaching and still more a real flair for spreading helpful gossip in the right quarters. Bizarre, racy, amusing, and very knowledgeable, she was a great figure in London.
Flossie was one of a long string of little nobodies with ghastly accents and a bit of voice who had been given to Myra to make something of. She was sitting at the piano when the girl was shown in to her studio. She had become fat, she was wearing a purple dress, she had a cerise shawl thrown round her shoulders, long ear-rings swung from her ears, and half a dozen rows of beads from her neck, her brown hands glittered with rings.
“Oh my!” thought Flossie. “A gyppo.”
Myra’s tired, worldly, amusement-glutted eyes travelled over Flossie, and she recalled her tenting days, a wet spring, and one morning seeing a laburnum exquisitely gold, shining through a fog. She struck three soft chords, a wordless tribute to perfection.
“Come here,” she said gently. She played a scale. “Sing that.” She listened and squirmed. “My good child, you have a roof to your mouth, spare your throat. Say ah, ay, ee, oh, eu.” Flossie said them. “Tra la la la,” Myra sang. Years of teaching had made it a habit with her to express herself with a few notes, “Cockney prunes and prisms! Take off your hat and coat. Me, me, me, me, me. Now stand there. You’re going to work as you never worked before.”
“Lightly, Flossie, lightly, don’t let me hear your feet. Now a Pas de Basque. One two. One two. And again, Connie dear. And again.”
Madame herself came in to watch the classes.
“Mus’ work, Flossie. Mus’ work. Mus’ work.”
Muriel, knowing of the chance to be given to Flossie, tried to identify herself with her. Technique up to a point she could give to anyone. But that something more. She must try and pass that on. There could never be success for herself such as she had once dreamed of, but success could come through her labour. “Don’t you think, dear,” she said daily, “that you’ll stay as good as you are now without working. You’ll never be able to miss a day’s practice. You’re improved, I don’t deny it, and you’ll stay improved just so long as you work. Now let’s have those pirouettes once more. Neat finish. That’s better. And again, Connie dear. And again.”
“I do wish I might go to the pictures some night instead of to the theatre, I’m tired of seeing all this acting.”
“L.L. thinks listening to the voices good for you.”
“My goodness! I’d say I heard enough of listening to voices with Miss Lynd ah-ay-eeing. Aren’t you taking me?”
“No. Miss Brown is. Why that face? She’s a very nice girl.”
“I suppose so, as secretaries go. But she’s dull. Never talks about really interesting things. Wouldn’t you think working for a man like L.L. she’d have heaps to say; he’s supposed to have carried on with I don’t know who.”
“He has. You need to watch your step with him.”
“Not very nice, is it? But I suppose he wouldn’t try it on with a young girl like me.”
Mouse laughed.
“If he did, I’d say you could look after yourself.”
“That’s right. I’ll never be one to allow fellows to take liberties.”
“Not ‘fellows,’ my lamb. You better go and change, dinner won’t be long.”
Flossie got up, she collected her hat and bag. She looked aggravatingly at Mouse.
“I suppose you aren’t taking me because that gentleman friend of yours is coming again.”
Mouse raised her eyebrows.
“Never ‘gentleman,’ my sweet, the word suggests that you think you have social superiors, you have to learn you have none. That shouldn’t be difficult to you. Jim Menton’s coming, I suppose that’s the man you’re talking about. I didn’t know you’d seen him.”
“I haven’t, but I knew somebody’d been, I saw the end of a cigar one day, and most nights when I come in, there’ve been two glasses used. Not very nice a gentleman, I mean a man, visiting a single lady.”
“All my remarks about ‘gentlemen’ concern ‘ladies,’ there are none unless you happen to be referring to the aged. As regards Jim visiting me, my dear Watson, I shouldn’t worry if I were you, he’s been coming to see me so long that it’s become respectable by habit. Anyway, I’m almost at the parrot-and-black-cat stage of spinsterdom, so I think I can take care of myself. Now do go and dress.”
Flossie looked at her knowingly.
“In a hurry to be rid of me, aren’t you?”
Jim rang the bell. Mrs. Hodge had gone, so Mouse opened the door.
“Hullo, sweet. How was Leeds? The Virgin Queen says it isn’t nice your visiting what she describes as ‘a single lady.’”
Jim poured out two whiskies.
“Little tick. How’s she progressing?”
“Marvellously. The girl’s a human chameleon, literally she changes with her background. If you put her down in Buckingham Palace she’d have all the etiquette in a couple of days, and be telling the ladies-in-waiting what to do next.”
“Liking her any better?”
“No. She’s an inhuman little toad. But I take off my hat to her, it’s no joke being shoved down in a strange flat with a strange woman, everything different to everything she knows, and me correcting her every time she opens her mouth. She’s keeping her end up marvellously. You should hear her with Mrs. Hodge, none of the familiarity there is between Mrs. Hodge and me; to Flossie she’s a servant and nothing else, and she never lets her forget it. I shock her terribly. She reproved me yesterday and told me that those beneath us need keeping in their places.”
“How’s L.L. behaving?”
“Perfectly. He never gets a chance to do anything else, and, mind you, if he did make a pass at her, I’m sure he’d have no luck, she’s terribly respectable.”
“Takes after Nonconformist Pa.”
“I won’t have you laugh at Mr. Elk, he’s a darling, and he’s asked me to come and see his allotment near Cheshunt. When he came to see the flat, he brought me apples he’d grown himself, he’s the only man I know who does that for me.”
“I seem to remember baskets of figs and grapes, and a melon or two.”
“Grown by you? Tell me another funny story.”
Jim came over to the sofa.
“Move up and make room.” He lay down beside her. “Enough of the Virgin Elk and Father Elk, and all the Elks. Oh, Mouse, I did hate Leeds and I was wanting you so terribly.”
“Were you, my sweet?” Her head wriggled into his neck. “Oddly enough I missed you. Five days is a hell of a time.”
L.L. called a conference at his office, Ferdie Carme, Mouse, Myra, and Madame, who arrived late, with an astounding velvet toque popped rakishly on her wig, and her ballet shoes replaced by buff kid button boots.
“I’ve got to put up the notice for ‘Love in Spring,’” L.L. explained. “I thought it might weather August, but it won’t. That means ‘Looby’ for about the third week in September. What do you all think of the girl?”
There was a pause. Ferdie Carme, who had been gazing at the ceiling, looked round at them all. He was a small man with a yellow face, he never smiled, he made the worst of himself by living in pullovers of shades guaranteed to accentuate the biliousness of his colouring.
“You can speak up,” he prompted, “you’re among friends.”
“Tra la la la la la la la,” sang Myra, “shell do. Mediocre talents, but a face like spring.”
L.L. turned to Madame.
“What do you say?”
“Sharp chil’, sharp chil’, sharp chil’. She’ll do, she’ll do, she’ll do.”
L.L. collected eyes. “Let’s say it’s fixed then. She plays ‘Looby.’ Now what about her name? Miss Shane lunched with me to-day and gave me an idea, and I’d like to know how it strikes all of you. It seems she’s nicknamed her ‘The Virgin Queen,’ so I thought just one name, ‘Virginia.’ Just the one word, what do you think?”
“All innocence and dew,” Mouse explained.
“Hey nonny nonny nonny,” Myra chirruped, “what could be sweeter for a young girl.”
Ferdie helped himself to a cigar from a box on the desk.
“First time I ever heard of virginity being advertised as an attraction. Still it might be a novelty.”
“Sing hey. Sing ho. Sing—I’ve an idea,” Myra beamed at them. “I’ll spread one of my little stories. L.L. found the child in a convent, she’s never seen anything but a nun.”
Ferdie shook his head.
“How’d L.L. get in a convent?”
“How did Flossie get there if it comes to that?” asked Mouse.
“Virginia,” L.L. expostulated. “Must try and remember to call her that.”
“Pom de doodle. Pom de doodle,” Myra conducted herself with one finger. “I’ve got it. A little royal mistake.”
Ferdie sighed.
“What sort of royalty? Very few left. Easy to become personal.”
“She can’t speak any languages,” Mouse pointed out. “Better be careful.”
“Well, I don’t know that that matters.” Ferdie laid some ash on the carpet. “Can’t really speak English, if she comes to that.”
Myra was thinking ahead.
“Me, me, me, me, me. We’ll never say which royalty. I’ll just whisper it around that L.L. has found somebody with a terribly interesting history and the nuns say that there was a crown embroidered on her baby clothes.”
Ferdie groaned.
“That ‘found in the basket on the convent steps’ gag has been worked to death.”
L.L. stretched out his legs and looked in a satisfied way at them all.
“It’ll work again. With a kid looking like that, anything’d work.” He turned to Mouse. “Could you coach her up to a few royal touches, do you think? Not too much, you know the sort of thing.”
“And she might teach her that she’s a virgin,” Ferdie suggested.
Mouse giggled.
“Don’t worry about that, Ferdie, she is. As for the royalty stuff, she’ll be so royal in a couple of days, she’ll have you all getting up when she comes into a room, and me doing a curtsy. But in Myra’s beautiful story there’s one flaw you’ve all overlooked. She’s got a real father and mother.”
“Oh God!” Ferdie moaned. “It’s the silliest thing why these girls never think to be orphans.”
“Ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah.”
“Let’s have this one without music,” Ferdie suggested. “Got an idea, darling?”
“Yes.” Myra’s ear-rings shook with excitement. “The parents are old retainers, who always loved the child, and they took her to the convent for safety.”
Ferdie gave Mouse a sorrowful wink.
“What language do the old retainers speak, Myra?”
Mouse lit a cigarette.
“There are a few more dear old stories we have not yet exhumed. Deaf and dumb peasants with their tongues cut out because they wouldn’t betray their royal masters, for instance. Now do listen to your Aunty Mouse, a minute. Let Myra put over any story she likes, she’ll have no difficulty with Flossie—Virginia, I mean—she’d drop her parents to-day if anyone told her it would be a good thing to do. But the parents won’t be so easy. She’s got a rather silly mother who worships her, and a divine Nonconformist father who is determined to save her immortal soul.”
“So are we,” Ferdie argued; “aren’t we calling her Virginia to show the sort of girl we think she is?”
“Do do do do do do do do,” Myra paused at the top of the scale. “When the girl learns she needs to get rid of her parents she’ll do it herself. She’s got no heart.”
“Tha’s ri’. Tha’s ri’. Tha’s ri’,” Madame agreed.
L.L. disliked the turn the conference had taken. His finds were always flawless until such time as he found their cracks for himself. He got up.
“I needn’t keep any of you then. Everything’s fixed. We’ll begin rehearsals in about three weeks, and meanwhile Myra will start her story round, and Mouse’ll get the girl put up to it.”
“And L.L. will find out if the name’s a mistake or not,” Ferdie whispered to Mouse.