Miss Pillenger took the letters. Mr. Meggs surveyed her tenderly.
‘Miss Pillenger, you have been with me a long time now. Six years, is it not? Six years. Well, well. I don’t think I have ever made you a little present, have I?’
‘You give me a good salary.’
‘Yes, but I want to give you something more. Six years is a long time. I have come to regard you with a different feeling from that which the ordinary employer feels for his secretary. You and I have worked together for six long years. Surely I may be permitted to give you some token of my appreciation of your fidelity.’ He took the pile of notes. ‘These are for you, Miss Pillenger.’
He rose and handed them to her. He eyed her for a moment with all the sentimentality of a man whose digestion has been out of order for over two decades. The pathos of the situation swept him away. He bent over Miss Pillenger, and kissed her on the forehead.
Smiles excepted, there is nothing so hard to classify as a kiss. Mr. Meggs’s notion was that he kissed Miss Pillenger much as some great general, wounded unto death, might have kissed his mother, his sister, or some particularly sympathetic aunt; Miss Pillenger’s view, differing substantially from this, may be outlined in her own words.
‘Ah!’ she cried, as, dealing Mr. Meggs’s conveniently placed jaw a blow which, had it landed an inch lower down, might have knocked him out, she sprang to her feet. ‘How dare you! I’ve been waiting for this Mr. Meggs. I have seen it in your eye. I have expected it. Let me tell you that I am not at all the sort of girl with whom it is safe to behave like that. I can protect myself. I am only a working-girl—’
Mr. Meggs, who had fallen back against the desk as a stricken pugilist falls on the ropes, pulled himself together to protest.
‘Miss Pillenger,’ he cried, aghast, ‘you misunderstand me. I had no intention—’
‘Misunderstand you? Bah! I am only a working-girl—’
‘Nothing was farther from my mind—’
‘Indeed! Nothing was farther from your mind! You give me money, you shower your vile kisses on me, but nothing was farther from your mind than the obvious interpretation of such behaviour!’ Before coming to Mr. Meggs, Miss Pillenger had been secretary to an Indiana novelist. She had learned style from the master. ‘Now that you have gone too far, you are frightened at what you have done. You well may be, Mr. Meggs. I am only a working-girl—’
‘Miss Pillenger, I implore you—’
‘Silence! I am only a working-girl—’
A wave of mad fury swept over Mr. Meggs. The shock of the blow and still more of the frightful ingratitude of this horrible woman nearly made him foam at the mouth.
‘Don’t keep on saying you’re only a working-girl,’ he bellowed. ‘You’ll drive me mad. Go. Go away from me. Get out. Go anywhere, but leave me alone!’
Miss Pillenger was not entirely sorry to obey the request. Mr. Meggs’s sudden fury had startled and frightened her. So long as she could end the scene victorious, she was anxious to withdraw.
‘Yes, I will go,’ she said, with dignity, as she opened the door. ‘Now that you have revealed yourself in your true colours, Mr. Meggs, this house is no fit place for a wor—’
She caught her employer’s eye, and vanished hastily.
Mr. Meggs paced the room in a ferment. He had been shaken to his core by the scene. He boiled with indignation. That his kind thoughts should have been so misinterpreted—it was too much. Of all ungrateful worlds, this world was the most—
He stopped suddenly in his stride, partly because his shin had struck a chair, partly because an idea had struck his mind.
Hopping madly, he added one more parallel between himself and Hamlet by soliloquizing aloud.
‘I’ll be hanged if I commit suicide,’ he yelled.
And as he spoke the words a curious peace fell on him, as on a man who has awakened from a nightmare. He sat down at the desk. What an idiot he had been ever to contemplate self-destruction. What could have induced him to do it? By his own hand to remove himself, merely in order that a pack of ungrateful brutes might wallow in his money—it was the scheme of a perfect fool.
He wouldn’t commit suicide. Not if he knew it. He would stick on and laugh at them. And if he did have an occasional pain inside, what of that? Napoleon had them, and look at him. He would be blowed if he committed suicide.
With the fire of a new resolve lighting up his eyes, he turned to seize the six letters and rifle them of their contents.
They were gone.
It took Mr. Meggs perhaps thirty seconds to recollect where they had gone to, and then it all came back to him. He had given them to the demon Pillenger, and, if he did not overtake her and get them back, she would mail them.
Of all the mixed thoughts which seethed in Mr. Meggs’s mind at that moment, easily the most prominent was the reflection that from his front door to the post office was a walk of less than five minutes.
Miss Pillenger walked down the sleepy street in the June sunshine, boiling, as Mr. Meggs had done, with indignation. She, too, had been shaken to the core. It was her intention to fulfil her duty by posting the letters which had been entrusted to her, and then to quit forever the service of one who, for six years a model employer, had at last forgotten himself and showed his true nature.
Her meditations were interrupted by a hoarse shout in her rear; and, turning, she perceived the model employer running rapidly towards her. His face was scarlet, his eyes wild, and he wore no hat.
Miss Pillenger’s mind worked swiftly. She took in the situation in a flash. Unrequited, guilty love had sapped Mr. Meggs’s reason, and she was to be the victim of his fury. She had read of scores of similar cases in the newspapers. How little she had ever imagined that she would be the heroine of one of these dramas of passion.
She looked for one brief instant up and down the street. Nobody was in sight. With a loud cry she began to run.
‘Stop!’
It was the fierce voice of her pursuer. Miss Pillenger increased to third speed. As she did so, she had a vision of headlines.
‘Stop!’ roared Mr. Meggs.
‘UNREQUITED PASSION MADE THIS MAN MURDERER,’ thought Miss Pillenger.
‘Stop!’
‘CRAZED WITH LOVE HE SLAYS BEAUTIFUL BLONDE,’ flashed out in letters of crimson on the back of Miss Pillenger’s mind.
‘Stop!’
‘SPURNED, HE STABS HER THRICE.’
To touch the ground at intervals of twenty yards or so—that was the ideal she strove after. She addressed herself to it with all the strength of her powerful mind.
In London, New York, Paris, and other cities where life is brisk, the spectacle of a hatless gentleman with a purple face pursuing his secretary through the streets at a rapid gallop would, of course, have excited little, if any, remark. But in Mr. Meggs’s hometown events were of rarer occurrence. The last milestone in the history of his native place had been the visit, two years before, of Bingley’s Stupendous Circus, which had paraded along the main street on its way to the next town, while zealous members of its staff visited the back premises of the houses and removed all the washing from the lines. Since then deep peace had reigned.
Gradually, therefore, as the chase warmed up, citizens of all shapes and sizes began to assemble. Miss Pillenger’s screams and the general appearance of Mr. Meggs gave food for thought. Having brooded over the situation, they decided at length to take a hand, with the result that as Mr. Meggs’s grasp fell upon Miss Pillenger the grasp of several of his fellow-townsmen fell upon him.
‘Save me!’ said Miss Pillenger.
Mr. Meggs pointed speechlessly to the letters, which she still grasped in her right hand. He had taken practically no exercise for twenty years, and the pace had told upon him.
Constable Gooch, guardian of the town’s welfare, tightened his hold on Mr. Meggs’s arm, and
desired explanations.
‘He—he was going to murder me,’ said Miss Pillenger.
‘Kill him,’ advised an austere bystander.
‘What do you mean you were going to murder the lady?’ inquired Constable Gooch.
Mr. Meggs found speech.
‘I—I—I—I only wanted those letters.’
‘What for?’
‘They’re mine.’
‘You charge her with stealing ’em?’
‘He gave them me to post with his own hands,’ cried Miss Pillenger.
‘I know I did, but I want them back.’
By this time the constable, though age had to some extent dimmed his sight, had recognized beneath the perspiration, features which, though they were distorted, were nevertheless those of one whom he respected as a leading citizen.
‘Why, Mr. Meggs!’ he said.
This identification by one in authority calmed, if it a little disappointed, the crowd. What it was they did not know, but, it was apparently not a murder, and they began to drift off.
‘Why don’t you give Mr. Meggs his letters when he asks you, ma’am?’ said the constable.
Miss Pillenger drew herself up haughtily.
‘Here are your letters, Mr. Meggs, I hope we shall never meet again.’
Mr. Meggs nodded. That was his view, too.
All things work together for good. The following morning Mr. Meggs awoke from a dreamless sleep with a feeling that some curious change had taken place in him. He was abominably stiff, and to move his limbs was pain, but down in the centre of his being there was a novel sensation of lightness. He could have declared that he was happy.
Wincing, he dragged himself out of bed and limped to the window. He threw it open. It was a perfect morning. A cool breeze smote his face, bringing with it pleasant scents and the soothing sound of God’s creatures beginning a new day.
An astounding thought struck him.
‘Why, I feel well!’
Then another.
‘It must be the exercise I took yesterday. By George, I’ll do it regularly.’
He drank in the air luxuriously. Inside him, the wildcat gave him a sudden claw, but it was a half-hearted effort, the effort of one who knows that he is beaten. Mr. Meggs was so absorbed in his thoughts that he did not even notice it.
‘London,’ he was saying to himself. ‘One of these physical culture places. . . . Comparatively young man. . . . Put myself in their hands. . . . Mild, regular exercise. . . .’
He limped to the bathroom.
The Man with Two Left Feet
Students of the folklore of the United States of America are no doubt familiar with the quaint old story of Clarence MacFadden. Clarence MacFadden, it seems, was ‘wishful to dance, but his feet wasn’t gaited that way. So he sought a professor and asked him his price, and said he was willing to pay. The professor’ (the legend goes on) ‘looked down with alarm at his feet and marked their enormous expanse; and he tacked on a five to his regular price for teaching MacFadden to dance.’
I have often been struck by the close similarity between the case of Clarence and that of Henry Wallace Mills. One difference alone presents itself. It would seem to have been mere vanity and ambition that stimulated the former; whereas the motive force which drove Henry Mills to defy nature and attempt dancing was the purer one of love. He did it to please his wife. Had he never gone to Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm, that popular holiday resort, and there met Minnie Hill, he would doubtless have continued to spend in peaceful reading the hours not given over to work at the New York bank at which he was employed as paying-cashier. For Henry was a voracious reader. His idea of a pleasant evening was to get back to his little flat, take off his coat, put on his slippers, light a pipe, and go on from the point where he had left off the night before in his perusal of the BIS-CAL volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica—making notes as he read in a stout notebook. He read the BIS-CAL volume because, after many days, he had finished the A-AND, AND-AUS, and the AUS-BIS. There was something admirable—and yet a little horrible—about Henry’s method of study. He went after Learning with the cold and dispassionate relentlessness of a stoat pursuing a rabbit. The ordinary man who is paying installments on the Encyclopedia Britannica is apt to get over-excited and to skip impatiently to Volume XXVIII (VET-ZYM) to see how it all comes out in the end. Not so Henry. His was not a frivolous mind. He intended to read the Encyclopedia through, and he was not going to spoil his pleasure by peeping ahead.
It would seem to be an inexorable law of nature that no man shall shine at both ends. If he has a high forehead and a thirst for wisdom, his fox-trotting (if any) shall be as the staggerings of the drunken; while, if he is a good dancer, he is nearly always petrified from the ears upward. No better examples of this law could have been found than Henry Mills and his fellow-cashier, Sidney Mercer. In New York banks paying-cashiers, like bears, tigers, lions, and other fauna, are always shut up in a cage in pairs, and are consequently dependent on each other for entertainment and social intercourse when business is slack. Henry Mills and Sidney simply could not find a subject in common. Sidney knew absolutely nothing of even such elementary things as Abana, Aberration, Abraham, or Acrogenae; while Henry, on his side, was scarcely aware that there had been any developments in the dance since the polka. It was a relief to Henry when Sidney threw up his job to join the chorus of a musical comedy, and was succeeded by a man who, though full of limitations, could at least converse intelligently on Bowls.
Such, then, was Henry Wallace Mills. He was in the middle thirties, temperate, studious, a moderate smoker, and—one would have said—a bachelor of the bachelors, armour-plated against Cupid’s well-meant but obsolete artillery. Sometimes Sidney Mercer’s successor in the teller’s cage, a sentimental young man, would broach the topic of Woman and Marriage. He would ask Henry if he ever intended to get married. On such occasions Henry would look at him in a manner which was a blend of scorn, amusement, and indignation; and would reply with a single word:
‘Me!’
It was the way he said it that impressed you.
But Henry had yet to experience the unmanning atmosphere of a lonely summer resort. He had only just reached the position in the bank where he was permitted to take his annual vacation in the summer. Hitherto he had always been released from his cage during the winter months, and had spent his ten days of freedom at his flat, with a book in his hand and his feet on the radiator. But the summer after Sidney Mercer’s departure they unleashed him in August.
It was meltingly warm in the city. Something in Henry cried out for the country. For a month before the beginning of his vacation he devoted much of the time that should have been given to the Encyclopedia Britannica in reading summer-resort literature. He decided at length upon Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm because the advertisements spoke so well of it.
Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm was a rather battered frame building many miles from anywhere. Its attractions included a Lovers’ Leap, a Grotto, golf-links—a five-hole course where the enthusiast found unusual hazards in the shape of a number of goats tethered at intervals between the holes—and a silvery lake, only portions of which were used as a dumping ground for tin cans and wooden boxes. It was all new and strange to Henry and caused him an odd exhilaration. Something of gaiety and reckless abandon began to creep into his veins. He had a curious feeling that in these romantic surroundings some adventure ought to happen to him.
At this juncture Minnie Hill arrived. She was a small, slim girl, thinner and paler than she should have been, with large eyes that seemed to Henry pathetic and stirred his chivalry. He began to think a good deal about Minnie Hill.
And then one evening he met her on the shores of the silvery lake. He was standing there, slapping at things that looked like mosquitoes, but could not have been, for the advertisements expressly stated that none were ever found in the neighbourhood of Ye B
onnie Briar-Bush Farm, when along she came. She walked slowly, as if she were tired. A strange thrill, half of pity, half of something else, ran through Henry. He looked at her. She looked at him.
‘Good evening,’ he said.
They were the first words he had spoken to her. She never contributed to the dialogue of the dining room, and he had been too shy to seek her out in the open.
She said ‘Good evening,’ too, tying the score. And there was silence for a moment.
Commiseration overcame Henry’s shyness.
‘You’re looking tired,’ he said.
‘I feel tired.’ She paused. ‘I overdid it in the city.’
‘It?’
‘Dancing.’
‘Oh, dancing. Did you dance much?’
‘Yes; a great deal.’
‘Ah!’
A promising, even a dashing start. But how to continue? For the first time Henry regretted the steady determination of his methods with the Encyclopedia. How pleasant if he could have been in a position to talk easily of Dancing. Then memory reminded him that, though he had not yet got up to Dancing, it was only a few weeks before that he had been reading of the Ballet.
‘I don’t dance myself,’ he said, ‘but I am fond of reading about it. Did you know that the word “ballet” incorporated three distinct modern words, “ballet,” “ball,” and “ballad,” and that ballet dancing was originally accompanied by singing?’
It hit her. It had her weak. She looked at him with awe in her eyes. One might almost say that she gaped at Henry.
‘I hardly know anything,’ she said.
‘The first descriptive ballet seen in London, England,’ said Henry, quietly, ‘was “The Tavern Bilkers,” which was played at Drury Lane in—in seventeen—something.’
‘Was it?’
‘And the earliest modern ballet on record was that given by—by someone to celebrate the marriage of the Duke of Milan in 1489.’