Very agile, was it not? Like some creature of the wild struggling to escape from a trap or snare. You see now how right I was?"
"You're always right."
"I wonder."
"That's very modest of you. What makes you doubtful?"
"Well, you see, I thought...I had an idea...There was a time, if you remember, when I thought it might be possible that you would marry me. But, of course, after what has occurred...after this loathsome exhibition I've just been making of myself ...now that you realize that I'm the sort of man who—"
"—takes advantage of a helpless girl?"
"Exactly! Did you notice? I grabbed you—hugged you—"
"—kissed me."
"Yes," cried Joss, his voice vibrating with indignation and abhorrence, "and kissed you. What a cad! What a hound! We don't want anything more to do with J. P. Weatherby after that."
"What does the P. stand for?"
"Parmalee."
"How frightful!"
"Named after a godfather, and not a penny to show for it.
No," said Joss, resuming his remarks, " that will be about all we shall require from J. P. Weatherby, I fancy. We wash him out.
We dismiss him."
"So you can be wrong after all."
"What do you mean?"
"If you don't know what I mean-"
"I do know what you mean, but I don't see how you can mean it. Sally, will your—"
"Parmalee, I will."
He clasped her in his arms and went into his routine. Practice makes perfect. It was some time before he spoke again.
"This," he said, "is heaven!"
"Is it?"
"Yes," said Joss, "I do not mince my words. It's heaven." He paused. " Heaven," he repeated. " And yet—"
"—you wish it hadn't happened?"
"No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," said Joss with all the emphasis at his disposal. "What I was about to say was— And yet I am weighed down by a sense of unworthiness."
"I thought you thought rather highly of J. P. Weatherby."
"I do. I do. A splendid fellow. Nevertheless, I have this crushing sense of unworthiness. If someone came along at this moment and said, 'Tell me, Weatherby, to settle a bet, what have you done to deserve this?' I should be nonplussed. I shouldn't know what to answer. I should just go all red and shuffle my feet. Because we've got to face it, I'm not fit to button your shoes."
"They lace."
''I've put up a front. Probably I have struck you as, if anything, a little on the brash side. But really I'm a crawling, creeping chunk of humility. I look at you and I look at myself, and I feel like a swineherd in a fairy story who finds himself loved by a princess.
What you see in me I can't imagine."
"Why, your looks. Your character. Your bright future."
"Is my future bright?"
"Glittering. You're going to take that portrait to Mr Duff and get your job back."
"Better than that. It was a rotten job. All right for a young bachelor, but we men who are planning to marry and settle down have got to look ahead. I intend to stand out for being made head of the art department. Those are my terms," said Joss, and his voice was strong and resolute. "If J. B. won't meet them not a smell of this portrait does he get."
"Oh, Joss, are you sure?"
"Sure?"
"That he wants it as much as that? It would be awful to spoil everything by asking too much."
"You wait. He'll come across. I know J. B. He's one of those men whose legs you have to count to be sure they aren't mules.
When he gets an idea into his head you couldn't dig it out with a chisel. He has set his heart on having this portrait, and the thing has become an obsession."
Sally was looking thoughtful.
"Something on your mind?" asked Joss.
"I was thinking that I ought to go and see him."
"Instead of me?"
"Yes. I can do it much better than you. You're not very tactful."
"Me? Not tactful?"
"You might throw him out of the room or something."
"But you don't understand. This is a very intricate business deal, and I doubt if a slip of a girl is capable of handling it. It isn't only a question of my end of the thing. I represent a syndicate whose interests must be borne in mind throughout the negotiations."
"I don't understand."
"I told you you didn't. Can you keep a secret?"
"I don't think so."
"Well, try to keep this one. Money, and substantial money, has got to pass between J. B. Duff and self. Mr Steptoe needs his little bit. He wants to return to Hollywood and resume what appears to have been a highly promising career in the pictures."
"I didn't know he was in pictures."
"Extra work till just at the end, and then he was in one where he had three good speeches. Get him to tell you about it sometime.
And then...I wish I knew how good you were at giving an imitation of the silent tomb."
"Why?"
"Because what I am about to say must go no further, if that.
Mrs Chavender."
"What about her?"
"She wants her cut."
Mrs Chavender? But she has all the money there is."
"No. She had but hasn't any longer. Lemme, as J. B. would say, tell you a little story."
"Have you heard him say that?"
"Dozens of times."
"He said it to me that day in his office."
"Oh. Well, to get back to it, lemme."
He held his audience. There was no question about that. Sally listened, absorbed, as the story of Mrs Chavender's unfortunate circumstances unfolded itself.
"The poor old thing!"
"'Poor' is the exact word."
"I see what she means. If Mrs Steptoe knew she would trample all over her."
"With spiked shoes."
"Of course she must have her money. I'll be very firm with Mr Duff."
"You're sure you can manage it? You won't weaken?"
Of course not.
"Very well. Here's the portrait. Tuck it into your little shirt front, and be very careful not to let anyone get you into a game of strip poker. Are you going to the Rose and Crown in your car?"
"Yes. I'll be back in no time."
"It will seem like hours. Where do we meet?"
"At the gate?"
"Right. Skin off your nose, Sally."
"Skin off yours, Joss.
The door closed. Joss sank into a chair. He drew up a small table and put his feet on it. He took out his pipe and lit it. This wonderful thing that had happened to him demanded quiet, steady meditation. He had to go over all that had occurred since he had met Sally, taking each moment by itself and savouring it like the leaf of an artichoke before going on to the next.
And he had just reached the point where he had found her in his arms and was in the process of dwelling on this phase of their relationship with a tender, reminiscent smile when his attention was attracted by a noise in his rear like the explosion of an ammunition dump, and he looked round to see Mrs Steptoe. Like J. B. Duff on a similar occasion, equally historic, she was standing in the doorway, spellbound.
Although in Joss's demeanour, as he rose, an observer would have noted only a rather charming, old-world courtliness, he was not without a certain apprehensiveness, a sort of nebulous feeling that this was not so good and that the going in the immediate future promised to be sticky. He had just discovered-or rediscovered-with so many other things to think about it had temporarily slipped his mind-that this room in which he had been enjoying his reverie was Mrs Steptoe's bedroom. Hard words, he feared, might be spoken and black looks be looked.
Nor had his intuition deceived him. If Fate had wished to cement a lasting friendship between this woman and himself it could hardly have brought them together under less favourable conditions.
Even before opening the door Mrs Steptoe had been feeling a little edgy. The rain had ruined her garden party. She had ha
d to spend the afternoon cooped up in a stuffy drawing room with some of the dullest people she had ever met. The pimpled baronet, laughing amusedly like one telling a good story which he knows is sure to be well received, had just revealed to her that her Howard had been yielding to his lower instincts and trying to take money off his guests at craps. And the more messengers she dispatched to fetch wrist watches for her the fewer wrist watches did she get.
It just needed the sight of her husband's valet in her bedroom, wreathed in tobacco smoke, with his feet on the table, to complete her day.
"Well!" she said.
There is really very little that a man can do at a moment like this, but something, Joss felt, might be accomplished by an apologetic smile. He released one accordingly, and his companion quivered from head to foot as if he had struck her with a sandbag.
There are certain situations, one of which had now arisen in Mrs Steptoe's life, when a smile, however apologetic, seems to a woman the ultimate · pay-off.
"Grinning!" she said in a strangled voice, not getting the spirit behind the smile at all. "I find him in my bedroom," she went on more loudly, as if confiding her grievances to a slightly deaf friend on whose sympathy she knew she could rely. "I find him right plumb spang in the middle of my bedroom...smoking a pipe...his feet on the table...and he ger-RINS!"
"I assure you, madam—"
"GRINS!" said Mrs Steptoe. "Like a half-witted ape," she added, specifying more exactly.
There seemed to Joss nothing to do in the circumstances but make wounded noises. He made them.
"Listen!" said Mrs Steptoe, having probably picked up the expression from her mate.
She began to speak again, and now her voice, which at first had been hushed as if by a sort of awe, rang out like a clarion. And for some time Joss listened with bowed head as she touched on the numerous aspects of his character which did not appeal to her.
Exactly when he began to feel that this nuisance must cease he could not have said. But when the thought did come it took root.
"Madam," he said, taking advantage of the fact that even an angry woman has sometimes to pause for breath. "I should be glad if you would accept my resignation. Dating from tomorrow."
"Resignation my foot!" said Mrs Steptoe, a puff of flame coming from her nostrils. "You're fired. Dating from today."
"Very good, madam. And now," said Joss, "if you will excuse me, I must be leaving you. I have an appointment."
Time, what with his thoughts and Mrs Steptoe's conversation, had passed on such fleeting wings that he anticipated, as he made his way down the drive, that he might have to wait some little while at the tryst before Sally made her appearance. To his surprise she was already there.
She seemed agitated.
"What a time you've been!"
''I'm sorry. I was chatting with Mrs Steptoe. Difficult to get away. Well, everything all straight?"
"Joss, an awful thing has happened!"
"Eh?"
"I saw Mr Duff."
"Well?"
"Joss, he doesn't want the portrait!"
"What!"
"He told me to take it back," said Sally, her voice rising to a wail.
Her stout heart failed her. She burst into tears.
Chapter XVII
It is not the easiest of tasks to scoop a crying girl out from behind a steering wheel and hoist her over the side and fold her in your arms and staunch her tears, but Joss managed it at length. The sobs became gurgles. The gurgles faded into silence.
"Now, then," he said. "Tell me all."
Sally gulped.
"I'm sorry. I was a fool."
"No, no. Nothing like a good cry. What seems to be the trouble?"
"I told you. He doesn't-"
"Yes, but there must be some mistake. You probably misunderstood him."
"1 didn't. It was quite simple, really, I suppose."
"Not to me."
"I mean, now that he's going to marry Mrs Chavender-"
"What!"
'"Yes. She went to see him at the inn this morning, and they arranged it then. He's been in love with her for years. Didn't he tell you?"
"No, he didn't mention that."
_
"And now that they are going to be married of course he doesn't need her portrait. He only wanted it when he thought he had lost her forever, so that he could have something to remember her by.
I'm surprised he didn't tell you."
"Probably slipped his mind."
"But why did you think he wanted it?"
"Wouldn't anyone want a genuine Weatherby? But let's begin at the beginning. You arrived at the Rose and Crown and found him—"
"Sitting in the lounge. He looked very ill. Apparently he ate something that disagreed with him and had a bad attack of indigestion last night."
'"Ah!'"
He told me he thought he was going to die. And this morning Mrs Chavender came to see him."
"I'm beginning to understand. There he was, weak and wan after his night of suffering, and in walks Mrs Chavender and gives aid and comfort. Is that right?"
"Yes. He says she was like a ministering angel."
"He swiped that from me. I once wrote a poem about woman being not so hot in our hours of ease but coming across in a big way when pain and anguish rack the brow. I suppose he got hold of a copy. Yes, I begin to follow the continuity. Mrs Chavender comes into the sickroom and starts being the ministering angel. He thinks of the old days and what might have been. She places a cool hand on his fevered forehead, and he takes it in his and says : 'Why did we ever part? Why, when we were onto a good thing, did we not push it along? Can we not make a new start?' She thinks the idea sound, and they fix it up. Something on those lines was what happened, I imagine."
"I suppose so."
"Indigestion is an amazing thing. It softens the toughest."
"But he had always loved her."
"I was forgetting that."
"It s sweet, of course."
"Oh, most sweet."
"But rather awkward for us."
"Yes, one was rather relying on delivery of that portrait to solve our little perplexities. Did you touch on me and my job?''
"Of course. I told him we were engaged."
"How did he seem to take it?"
"He said I was crazy and advised me to break it off."
"The lovable old gentleman!"
"He said he had understood that I wanted to marry George and that he had been thinking it over and had decided that he had misjudged George all these years. He said there was a lot of good in him."
"He must have been on an absolute toot last night. No ordinary attack of indigestion would sap the brain to that extent."
"He has given George his money."
"That's splendid news. I was worrying myself sick about George.
And my job?"
"No."
"Off?''
"Yes. He said he had been thinking—"
"He thinks too much."
"—and he had come to the conclusion that it was having you around that gave him indigestion. He said he couldn't explain, but you did something to him."
"The old devil. I saved his life."
"Yes, I reminded him of that, and he said that he had put up with you for two years and he considered that that squared it.
Did you make him drink brandy yesterday?"
"I didn't make him. I offered it, and he lapped it up. Why?"
"He said it was that that upset him. It seemed to rankle, rather."
"The mind of a man like J. B. Duff is unfathomable. I think that long association with hams must have unhinged his reason.
Well, if he won't give me my job back I'm afraid we may have to wait a little before we get married. I have nothing against love in a cottage, but just at the moment I don't see how it would even run to that. My capital is about fifteen pounds, and I am asking myself . a little dubiously how it is to be augmented. Who wants an artist?"