The Man With Two Left Feet

But somebody’s always taking the joy out of life. I ought to have remembered that the most metropolitan thing in the metropolis is a rustic who’s putting in a week there. We weren’t thinking on the same plane, Charlie and me. The way I had been feeling all day, what I wanted to talk about was last season’s crops. The subject he fancied was this season’s chorus-girls. Our souls didn’t touch by a mile and a half.

‘This is the life!’ he said.

There’s always a point when that sort of man says that.

‘I suppose you come here quite a lot?’ he said.

‘Pretty often.’

I didn’t tell him that I came there every night, and that I came because I was paid for it. If you’re a professional dancer at Geisenheimer’s, you aren’t supposed to advertise the fact. The management thinks that if you did it might send the public away thinking too hard when they saw you win the Great Contest for the Love-r-ly Silver Cup which they offer later in the evening. Say, that Love-r-ly Cup’s a joke. I win it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Mabel Francis wins it on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It’s all perfectly fair and square, of course. It’s purely a matter of merit who wins the Love-r-ly Cup. Anybody could win it. Only somehow they don’t. And the coincidence of the fact that Mabel and I always do has kind of got on the management’s nerves, and they don’t like us to tell people we’re employed there. They prefer us to blush unseen.

‘It’s a great place,’ said Mr Ferris, ‘and New York’s a great place. I’d like to live in New York.’

‘The loss is ours. Why don’t you?’

‘Some city! But dad’s dead now, and I’ve got the drugstore, you know.’

He spoke as if I ought to remember reading about it in the papers.

‘And I’m making good with it, what’s more. I’ve got push and ideas. Say, I got married since I saw you last.’

‘You did, did you?’ I said. ‘Then what are you doing, may I ask, dancing on Broadway like a gay bachelor? I suppose you have left your wife at Hicks’ Corners, singing “Where is my wandering boy tonight”?’

‘Not Hicks’ Corners. Ashley, Maine. That’s where I live. My wife comes from Rodney…. Pardon me, I’m afraid I stepped on your foot.’

‘My fault,’ I said; ‘I lost step. Well, I wonder you aren’t ashamed even to think of your wife, when you’ve left her all alone out there while you come whooping it up in New York. Haven’t you got any conscience?’

‘But I haven’t left her. She’s here.’

‘In New York?’

‘In this restaurant. That’s her up there.’

I looked up at the balcony. There was a face hanging over the red plush rail. It looked to me as if it had some hidden sorrow. I’d noticed it before, when we were dancing around, and I had wondered what the trouble was. Now I began to see.

‘Why aren’t you dancing with her and giving her a good time, then?’ I said.

‘Oh, she’s having a good time.’

‘She doesn’t look it. She looks as if she would like to be down here, treading the measure.’

‘She doesn’t dance much.’

‘Don’t you have dances at Ashley?’

‘It’s different at home. She dances well enough for Ashley, but—well, this isn’t Ashley.’

‘I see. But you’re not like that?’

He gave a kind of smirk.

‘Oh, I’ve been in New York before.’

I could have bitten him, the sawn-off little rube! It made me mad. He was ashamed to dance in public with his wife—didn’t think her good enough for him. So he had dumped her in a chair, given her a lemonade, and told her to be good, and then gone off to have a good time. They could have had me arrested for what I was thinking just then.

The band began to play something else.

‘This is the life!’ said Mr Ferris. ‘Let’s do it again.’

‘Let somebody else do it,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. I’ll introduce you to some friends of mine.’

So I took him off, and whisked him on to some girls I knew at one of the tables.

‘Shake hands with my friend Mr Ferris,’ I said. ‘He wants to show you the latest steps. He does most of them on your feet.’

I could have betted on Charlie, the Debonair Pride of Ashley. Guess what he said? He said, ‘This is the life!’

And I left him, and went up to the balcony.

She was leaning with her elbows on the red plush, looking down on the dancing-floor. They had just started another tune, and hubby was moving around with one of the girls I’d introduced him to. She didn’t have to prove to me that she came from the country. I knew it. She was a little bit of a thing, old-fashioned looking. She was dressed in grey, with white muslin collar and cuffs, and her hair done simple. She had a black hat.

I kind of hovered for awhile. It isn’t the best thing I do, being shy; as a general thing I’m more or less there with the nerve; but somehow I sort of hesitated to charge in.

Then I braced up, and made for the vacant chair.

‘I’ll sit here, if you don’t mind,’ I said.

She turned in a startled way. I could see she was wondering who I was, and what right I had there, but wasn’t certain whether it might not be city etiquette for strangers to come and dump themselves down and start chatting. ‘I’ve just been dancing with your husband,’ I said, to ease things along.

‘I saw you.’

She fixed me with a pair of big brown eyes. I took one look at them, and then I had to tell myself that it might be pleasant, and a relief to my feelings, to take something solid and heavy and drop it over the rail on to hubby, but the management wouldn’t like it. That was how I felt about him just then. The poor kid was doing everything with those eyes except crying. She looked like a dog that’s been kicked.

She looked away, and fiddled with the string of the electric light. There was a hatpin lying on the table. She picked it up, and began to dig at the red plush.

‘Ah, come on sis,’ I said; ‘tell me all about it.’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You can’t fool me. Tell me your troubles.’

‘I don’t know you.’

‘You don’t have to know a person to tell her your troubles. I sometimes tell mine to the cat that camps out on the wall opposite my room. What did you want to leave the country for, with summer coming on?’

She didn’t answer, but I could see it coming, so I sat still and waited. And presently she seemed to make up her mind that, even if it was no business of mine, it would be a relief to talk about it.

‘We’re on our honeymoon. Charlie wanted to come to New York. I didn’t want to, but he was set on it. He’s been here before.’

‘So he told me.’

‘He’s wild about New York.’

‘But you’re not.’

‘I hate it.’

‘Why?’

She dug away at the red plush with the hatpin, picking out little bits and dropping them over the edge. I could see she was bracing herself to put me wise to the whole trouble. There’s a time comes when things aren’t going right, and you’ve had all you can stand, when you have got to tell somebody about it, no matter who it is.

‘I hate New York,’ she said getting it out at last with a rush. ‘I’m scared of it. It—it isn’t fair Charlie bringing me here. I didn’t want to come. I knew what would happen. I felt it all along.’

‘What do you think will happen, then?’

She must have picked away at least an inch of the red plush before she answered. It’s lucky Jimmy, the balcony waiter, didn’t see her; it would have broken his heart; he’s as proud of that red plush as if he had paid for it himself.

‘When I first went to live at Rodney,’ she said, ‘two years ago—we moved there from Illinois—there was a man there named Tyson—Jack Tyson. He lived all alone and didn’t seem to want to know anyone. I couldn’t understand it till somebody told me all about him. I can understand it now. Jack Tyson married a Rodney girl, and they came to New York for their honeymoon, just like us. And when they got there I guess she got to comparing him with the fellows she saw, and comparing the city with Rodney, and when she got home she just couldn’t settle down.’

‘Well?’

‘After they had been back in Rodney for a little while she ran away. Back to the city, I guess.’

‘I suppose he got a divorce?’

‘No, he didn’t. He still thinks she may come back to him.’

‘He still thinks she will come back?’ I said. ‘After she has been away three years!’

‘Yes. He keeps her things just the same as she left them when she went away, everything just the same.’

‘But isn’t he angry with her for what she did? If I was a man and a girl treated me that way, I’d be apt to murder her if she tried to show up again.’

‘He wouldn’t. Nor would I, if—if anything like that happened to me; I’d wait and wait, and go on hoping all the time. And I’d go down to the station to meet the train every afternoon, just like Jack Tyson.’

Something splashed on the tablecloth. It made me jump.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, ‘what’s your trouble? Brace up. I know it’s a sad story, but it’s not your funeral.’

‘It is. It is. The same thing’s going to happen to me.’

‘Take a hold on yourself. Don’t cry like that.’

‘I can’t help it. Oh! I knew it would happen. It’s happening right now. Look—look at him.’

I glanced over the rail, and I saw what she meant. There was her Charlie, dancing about all over the floor as if he had just discovered that he hadn’t lived till then. I saw him say something to the girl he was dancing with. I wasn’t near enough to hear it, but I bet it was ‘This is the life!’ If I had been his wife, in the same position as this kid, I guess I’d have felt as bad as she did, for if ever a man exhibited all the symptoms of incurable Newyorkitis, it was this Charlie Ferris.

‘I’m not like these New York girls,’ she choked. ‘I can’t be smart. I don’t want to be. I just want to live at home and be happy. I knew it would happen if we came to the city. He doesn’t think me good enough for him. He looks down on me.’

‘Pull yourself together.’

‘And I do love him so!’

Goodness knows what I should have said if I could have thought of anything to say. But just then the music stopped, and somebody on the floor below began to speak.

‘Ladeez ‘n’ gemmen,’ he said, ‘there will now take place our great Numbah Contest. This gen-u-ine sporting contest—’

It was Izzy Baermann making his nightly speech, introducing the Love-r-ly Cup; and it meant that, for me, duty called. From where I sat I could see Izzy looking about the room, and I knew he was looking for me. It’s the management’s nightmare that one of these evenings Mabel or I won’t show up, and somebody else will get away with the Love-r-ly Cup.

‘Sorry I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘I have to be in this.’

And then suddenly I had the great idea. It came to me like a flash, I looked at her, crying there, and I looked over the rail at Charlie the Boy Wonder, and I knew that this was where I got a stranglehold on my place in the Hall of Fame, along with the great thinkers of the age.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Come along. Stop crying and powder your nose and get a move on. You’re going to dance this.’

‘But Charlie doesn’t want to dance with me.’

‘It may have escaped your notice,’ I said, ‘but your Charlie is not the only man in New York, or even in this restaurant. I’m going to dance with Charlie myself, and I’ll introduce you to someone who can go through the movements. Listen!’

‘The lady of each couple’—this was Izzy, getting it off his diaphragm—’will receive a ticket containing a num-bah. The dance will then proceed, and the num-bahs will be eliminated one by one, those called out by the judge kindly returning to their seats as their num-bah is called. The num-bah finally remaining is the winning num-bah. The contest is a genuine sporting contest, decided purely by the skill of the holders of the various num-bahs.’ (Izzy stopped blushing at the age of six.) ‘Will ladies now kindly step forward and receive their num-bahs. The winner, the holder of the num-bah left on the floor when the other num-bahs have been eliminated’ (I could see Izzy getting more and more uneasy, wondering where on earth I’d got to), ‘will receive this Love-r-ly Silver Cup, presented by the management. Ladies will now kindly step forward and receive their num-bahs.’

I turned to Mrs Charlie. ‘There,’ I said, ‘don’t you want to win a Love-r-ly Silver Cup?’

‘But I couldn’t.’

‘You never know your luck.’

‘But it isn’t luck. Didn’t you hear him say it’s a contest decided purely by skill?’

‘Well, try your skill, then.’ I felt as if I could have shaken her. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, ‘show a little grit. Aren’t you going to stir a finger to keep your Charlie? Suppose you win, think what it will mean. He will look up to you for the rest of your life. When he starts talking about New York, all you will have to say is, “New York? Ah, yes, that was the town I won that Love-r-ly Silver Cup in, was it not?” and he’ll drop as if you had hit him behind the ear with a sandbag. Pull yourself together and try.’

I saw those brown eyes of hers flash, and she said, ‘I’ll try.’

‘Good for you,’ I said. ‘Now you get those tears dried, and fix yourself up, and I’ll go down and get the tickets.’

Izzy was mighty relieved when I bore down on him.

‘Gee!’ he said, ‘I thought you had run away, or was sick or something. Here’s your ticket.’

‘I want two, Izzy. One’s for a friend of mine. And I say, Izzy, I’d take it as a personal favour if you would let her stop on the floor as one of the last two couples. There’s a reason. She’s a kid from the country, and she wants to make a hit.’

‘Sure, that’ll be all right. Here are the tickets. Yours is thirty-six, hers is ten.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Don’t go mixing them.’

I went back to the balcony. On the way I got hold of Charlie.

‘We’re dancing this together,’ I said.

He grinned all across his face.

I found Mrs Charlie looking as if she had never shed a tear in her life. She certainly had pluck, that kid.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Stick to your ticket like wax and watch your step.’

I guess you’ve seen these sporting contests at Geisenheimer’s. Or, if you haven’t seen them at Geisenheimer’s, you’ve seen them somewhere else. They’re all the same.

When we began, the floor was so crowded that there was hardly elbow-room. Don’t tell me there aren’t any optimists nowadays. Everyone was looking as if they were wondering whether to have the Love-r-ly Cup in the sitting-room or the bedroom. You never saw such a hopeful gang in your life.

Presently Izzy gave tongue. The management expects him to be humorous on these occasions, so he did his best.

‘Numbahs, seven, eleven, and twenty-one will kindly rejoin their sorrowing friends.’

This gave us a little more elbow-room, and the band started again.

A few minutes later, Izzy once more: ‘Numbahs thirteen, sixteen, and seventeen—good-bye.’

Off we went again.

‘Num-bah twelve, we hate to part with you, but—back to your table!’

A plump girl in a red hat, who had been dancing with a kind smile, as if she were doing it to amuse the children, left the floor.

‘Numbahs six, fifteen, and twenty, thumbs down!’

And pretty soon the only couples left were Charlie and me, Mrs Charlie and the fellow I’d introduced her to, and a bald-headed man and a girl in a white hat. He was one of your stick-at-it performers. He had been dancing all the evening. I had noticed him from the balcony. He looked like a hard-boiled egg from up there.

He was a trier all right, that fellow, and had things been otherwise, so to speak, I’d have been glad to see him win. But it was not to be. Ah, no!

‘Num-bah nineteen, you’re getting all flushed. Take a rest.’

So there it was, a straight contest between me and Charlie and Mrs Charlie and her man. Every nerve in my system was tingling with suspense and excitement, was it not? It was not.

Charlie, as I’ve already hinted, was not a dancer who took much of his attention off his feet while in action. He was there to do his durnedest, not to inspect objects of interest by the wayside. The correspondence college he’d attended doesn’t guarantee to teach you to do two things at once. It won’t bind itself to teach you to look round the room while you’re dancing. So Charlie hadn’t the least suspicion of the state of the drama. He was breathing heavily down my neck in a determined sort of way, with his eyes glued to the floor. All he knew was that the competition had thinned out a bit, and the honour of Ashley, Maine, was in his hands.

You know how the public begins to sit up and take notice when these dance-contests have been narrowed down to two couples. There are evenings when I quite forget myself, when I’m one of the last two left in, and get all excited. There’s a sort of hum in the air, and, as you go round the room, people at the tables start applauding. Why, if you didn’t know about the inner workings of the thing, you’d be all of a twitter.

It didn’t take my practised ear long to discover that it wasn’t me and Charlie that the great public was cheering for. We would go round the floor without getting a hand, and every time Mrs Charlie and her guy got to a corner there was a noise like election night. She sure had made a hit.

I took a look at her across the floor, and I didn’t wonder. She was a different kid from what she’d been upstairs. I never saw anybody look so happy and pleased with herself. Her eyes were like lamps, and her cheeks all pink, and she was going at it like a champion. I knew what had made a hit with the people. It was the look of her. She made you think of fresh milk and new-laid eggs and birds singing. To see her was like getting away to the country in August. It’s funny about people who live in the city. They chuck out their chests, and talk about little old New York being good enough for them, and there’s a street in heaven they call Broadway, and all the rest of it; but it seems to me that what they really live for is that three weeks in the summer when they get away into the country. I knew exactly why they were cheering so hard for Mrs Charlie. She made them think of their holidays which were coming along, when they would go and board at the farm and drink out of the old oaken bucket, and call the cows by their first names.

Gee! I felt just like that myself. All day the country had been tugging at me, and now it tugged worse than ever.

I could have smelled the new-mown hay if it wasn’t that when you’re in Geisenheimer’s you have to smell Geisenheimer’s, because it leaves no chance for competition.

‘Keep working,’ I said to Charlie. ‘It looks to me as if we are going back in the betting.’

‘Uh, huh!’ he says, too busy to blink.

‘Do some of those fancy steps of yours. We need them in our business.’

And the way that boy worked—it was astonishing!

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Izzy Baermann, and he wasn’t looking happy. He was nerving himself for one of those quick referee’s decisions—the sort you make and then duck under the ropes, and run five miles, to avoid the incensed populace. It was this kind of thing happening every now and then that prevented his job being perfect. Mabel Francis told me that one night when Izzy declared her the winner of the great sporting contest, it was such raw work that she thought there’d have been a riot. It looked pretty much as if he was afraid the same thing was going to happen now. There wasn’t a doubt which of us two couples was the one that the customers wanted to see win that Love-r-ly Silver Cup. It was a walk-over for Mrs Charlie, and Charlie and I were simply among those present.

But Izzy had his duty to do, and drew a salary for doing it, so he moistened his lips, looked round to see that his strategic railways weren’t blocked, swallowed twice, and said in a husky voice:

‘Num-bah ten, please re-tiah!’

I stopped at once.

‘Come along,’ said I to Charlie. ‘That’s our exit cue.’

And we walked off the floor amidst applause.

‘Well,’ says Charlie, taking out his handkerchief and attending to his brow, which was like the village blacksmith’s, ‘we didn’t do so bad, did we? We didn’t do so bad, I guess! We—’

And he looked up at the balcony, expecting to see the dear little wife, draped over the rail, worshipping him; when, just as his eye is moving up, it gets caught by the sight of her a whole heap lower down than he had expected—on the floor, in fact.

She wasn’t doing much in the worshipping line just at that moment. She was too busy.

It was a regular triumphal progress for the kid. She and her partner were doing one or two rounds now for exhibition purposes, like the winning couple always do at Geisenheimer’s, and the room was fairly rising at them. You’d have thought from the way they were clapping that they had been betting all their spare cash on her.

Charlie gets her well focused, then he lets his jaw drop, till he pretty near bumped it against the floor.

‘But—but—but—’ he begins.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘It begins to look as if she could dance well enough for the city after all. It begins to look as if she had sort of put one over on somebody, don’t it? It begins to look as if it were a pity you didn’t think of dancing with her yourself.’

‘I—I—I—’

‘You come along and have a nice cold drink,’ I said, ‘and you’ll soon pick up.’

He tottered after me to a table, looking as if he had been hit by a street-car. He had got his.

I was so busy looking after Charlie, flapping the towel and working on him with the oxygen, that, if you’ll believe me, it wasn’t for quite a time that I thought of glancing around to see how the thing had struck Izzy Baermann.

If you can imagine a fond father whose only son has hit him with a brick, jumped on his stomach, and then gone off with all his money, you have a pretty good notion of how poor old Izzy looked. He was staring at me across the room, and talking to himself and jerking his hands about. Whether he thought he was talking to me, or whether he was rehearsing the scene where he broke it to the boss that a mere stranger had got away with his Love-r-ly Silver Cup, I don’t know. Whichever it was, he was being mighty eloquent.

I gave him a nod, as much as to say that it would all come right in the future, and then I turned to Charlie again. He was beginning to pick up.

‘She won the cup!’ he said in a dazed voice, looking at me as if I could do something about it.

‘You bet she did!’

‘But—well, what do you know about that?’

I saw that the moment had come to put it straight to him. ‘I’ll tell you what I know about it,’ I said. ‘If you take my advice, you’ll hustle that kid straight back to Ashley—or wherever it is that you said you poison the natives by making up the wrong prescriptions—before she gets New York into her system. When I was talking to her upstairs, she was telling me about a fellow in her village who got it in the neck just the same as you’re apt to do.’

He started. ‘She was telling you about Jack Tyson?’

‘That was his name—Jack Tyson. He lost his wife through letting her have too much New York. Don’t you think it’s funny she should have mentioned him if she hadn’t had some idea that she might act just the same as his wife did?’

He turned quite green.

‘You don’t think she would do that?’

‘Well, if you’d heard her—She couldn’t talk of anything except this Tyson, and what his wife did to him. She talked of it sort of sad, kind of regretful, as if she was sorry, but felt that it had to be. I could see she had been thinking about it a whole lot.’

Charlie stiffened in his seat, and then began to melt with pure fright. He took up his empty glass with a shaking hand and drank a long drink out of it. It didn’t take much observation to see that he had had the jolt he wanted, and was going to be a whole heap less jaunty and metropolitan from now on. In fact, the way he looked, I should say he had finished with metropolitan jauntiness for the rest of his life.

‘I’ll take her home tomorrow,’ he said. ‘But—will she come?’

‘That’s up to you. If you can persuade her—Here she is now. I should start at once.’

Mrs Charlie, carrying the cup, came to the table. I was wondering what would be the first thing she would say. If it had been Charlie, of course he’d have said, ‘This is the life!’ but I looked for something snappier from her. If I had been in her place there were at least ten things I could have thought of to say, each nastier than the other.

She sat down and put the cup on the table. Then she gave the cup a long look. Then she drew a deep breath. Then she looked at Charlie.

‘Oh, Charlie, dear,’ she said, ‘I do wish I’d been dancing with you!’

Well, I’m not sure that that wasn’t just as good as anything I would have said. Charlie got right off the mark. After what I had told him, he wasn’t wasting any time.

‘Darling,’ he said, humbly, ‘you’re a wonder! What will they say about this at home?’ He did pause here for a moment, for it took nerve to say it; but then he went right on. ‘Mary, how would it be if we went home right away—first train tomorrow, and showed it to them?’

‘Oh, Charlie!’ she said.

His face lit up as if somebody had pulled a switch.

‘You will? You don’t want to stop on? You aren’t wild about New York?’

‘If there was a train,’ she said, ‘I’d start tonight. But I thought you loved the city so, Charlie?’

He gave a kind of shiver. ‘I never want to see it again in my life!’ he said.

‘You’ll excuse me,’ I said, getting up, ‘I think there’s a friend of mine wants to speak to me.’

And I crossed over to where Izzy had been standing for the last five minutes, making signals to me with his eyebrows.

You couldn’t have called Izzy coherent at first. He certainly had trouble with his vocal chords, poor fellow. There was one of those African explorer men used to come to Geisenheimer’s a lot when he was home from roaming the trackless desert, and he used to tell me about tribes he had met who didn’t use real words at all, but talked to one another in clicks and gurgles. He imitated some of their chatter one night to amuse me, and, believe me, Izzy Baermann started talking the same language now. Only he didn’t do it to amuse me.

He was like one of those gramophone records when it’s getting into its stride.

‘Be calm, Isadore,’ I said. ‘Something is troubling you. Tell me all about it.’

He clicked some more, and then he got it out.

‘Say, are you crazy? What did you do it for? Didn’t I tell you as plain as I could; didn’t I say it twenty times, when you came for the tickets, that yours was thirty-six?’

‘Didn’t you say my friend’s was thirty-six?’

‘Are you deaf? I said hers was ten.’

‘Then,’ I said handsomely, ‘say no more. The mistake was mine. It begins to look as if I must have got them mixed.’

He did a few Swedish exercises.

‘Say no more? That’s good! That’s great! You’ve got nerve. I’ll say that.’

‘It was a lucky mistake, Izzy. It saved your life. The people would have lynched you if you had given me the cup. They were solid for her.’

‘What’s the boss going to say when I tell him?’

‘Never mind what the boss will say. Haven’t you any romance in your system, Izzy? Look at those two sitting there with their heads together. Isn’t it worth a silver cup to have made them happy for life? They are on their honeymoon, Isadore. Tell the boss exactly how it happened, and say that I thought it was up to Geisenheimer’s to give them a wedding-present.’

He clicked for a spell.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Ah! now you’ve done it! Now you’ve given yourself away! You did it on purpose. You mixed those tickets on purpose. I thought as much. Say, who do you think you are, doing this sort of thing? Don’t you know that professional dancers are three for ten cents? I could go out right now and whistle, and get a dozen girls for your job. The boss’ll sack you just one minute after I tell him.’

‘No, he won’t, Izzy, because I’m going to resign.’

‘You’d better!’

‘That’s what I think. I’m sick of this place, Izzy. I’m sick of dancing. I’m sick of New York. I’m sick of everything. I’m going back to the country. I thought I had got the pigs and chickens clear out of my system, but I hadn’t. I’ve suspected it for a long, long time, and tonight I know it. Tell the boss, with my love, that I’m sorry, but it had to be done. And if he wants to talk back, he must do it by letter: Mrs John Tyson, Rodney, Maine, is the address.’

THE MAKING OF MAC’S

Mac’s Restaurant—nobody calls it MacFarland’s—is a mystery. It is off the beaten track. It is not smart. It does not advertise. It provides nothing nearer to an orchestra than a solitary piano, yet, with all these things against it, it is a success. In theatrical circles especially it holds a position which might turn the white lights of many a supper-palace green with envy.

This is mysterious. You do not expect Soho to compete with and even eclipse Piccadilly in this way. And when Soho does so compete, there is generally romance of some kind somewhere in the background.

Somebody happened to mention to me casually that Henry, the old waiter, had been at Mac’s since its foundation.

‘Me?’ said Henry, questioned during a slack spell in the afternoon. ‘Rather!’

‘Then can you tell me what it was that first gave the place the impetus which started it on its upward course? What causes should you say were responsible for its phenomenal prosperity? What—’

‘What gave it a leg-up? Is that what you’re trying to get at?’

‘Exactly. What gave it a leg-up? Can you tell me?’

‘Me?’ said Henry. ‘Rather!’

And he told me this chapter from the unwritten history of the London whose day begins when Nature’s finishes.

Old Mr MacFarland (_said Henry_) started the place fifteen years ago. He was a widower with one son and what you might call half a daughter. That’s to say, he had adopted her. Katie was her name, and she was the child of a dead friend of his. The son’s name was Andy. A little freckled nipper he was when I first knew him—one of those silent kids that don’t say much and have as much obstinacy in them as if they were mules. Many’s the time, in them days, I’ve clumped him on the head and told him to do something; and he didn’t run yelling to his pa, same as most kids would have done, but just said nothing and went on not doing whatever it was I had told him to do. That was the sort of disposition Andy had, and it grew on him. Why, when he came back from Oxford College the time the old man sent for him—what I’m going to tell you about soon—he had a jaw on him like the ram of a battleship. Katie was the kid for my money. I liked Katie. We all liked Katie.

Old MacFarland started out with two big advantages. One was Jules, and the Other was me. Jules came from Paris, and he was the greatest cook you ever seen. And me—well, I was just come from ten years as waiter at the Guelph, and I won’t conceal it from you that I gave the place a tone. I gave Soho something to think about over its chop, believe me. It was a come-down in the world for me, maybe, after the Guelph, but what I said to myself was that, when you get a tip in Soho, it may be only tuppence, but you keep it; whereas at the Guelph about ninety-nine hundredths of it goes to helping to maintain some blooming head waiter in the style to which he has been accustomed. It was through my kind of harping on that fact that me and the Guelph parted company. The head waiter complained to the management the day I called him a fat-headed vampire.

Well, what with me and what with Jules, MacFarland’s—it wasn’t Mac’s in them days—began to get a move on. Old MacFarland, who knew a good man when he saw one and always treated me more like a brother than anything else, used to say to me, ‘Henry, if this keeps up, I’ll be able to send the boy to Oxford College’; until one day he changed it to, ‘Henry, I’m going to send the boy to Oxford College’; and next year, sure enough, off he went.

Katie was sixteen then, and she had just been given the cashier job, as a treat. She wanted to do something to help the old man, so he put her on a high chair behind a wire cage with a hole in it, and she gave the customers their change. And let me tell you, mister, that a man that wasn’t satisfied after he’d had me serve him a dinner cooked by Jules and then had a chat with Katie through the wire cage would have groused at Paradise. For she was pretty, was Katie, and getting prettier every day. I spoke to the boss about it. I said it was putting temptation in the girl’s way to set her up there right in the public eye, as it were. And he told me to hop it. So I hopped it.

Katie was wild about dancing. Nobody knew it till later, but all this while, it turned out, she was attending regular one of them schools. That was where she went to in the afternoons, when we all thought she was visiting girl friends. It all come out after, but she fooled us then. Girls are like monkeys when it comes to artfulness. She called me Uncle Bill, because she said the name Henry always reminded her of cold mutton. If it had been young Andy that had said it I’d have clumped him one; but he never said anything like that. Come to think of it, he never said anything much at all. He just thought a heap without opening his face.

So young Andy went off to college, and I said to him, ‘Now then, you young devil, you be a credit to us, or I’ll fetch you a clip when you come home.’ And Katie said, ‘Oh, Andy, I shall miss you.’ And Andy didn’t say nothing to me, and he didn’t say nothing to Katie, but he gave her a look, and later in the day I found her crying, and she said she’d got toothache, and I went round the corner to the chemist’s and brought her something for it.

It was in the middle of Andy’s second year at college that the old man had the stroke which put him out of business. He went down under it as if he’d been hit with an axe, and the doctor tells him he’ll never be able to leave his bed again.

So they sent for Andy, and he quit his college, and come back to London to look after the restaurant.

I was sorry for the kid. I told him so in a fatherly kind of way. And he just looked at me and says, ‘Thanks very much, Henry.’

‘What must be must be,’ I says. ‘Maybe, it’s all for the best. Maybe it’s better you’re here than in among all those young devils in your Oxford school what might be leading you astray.’

‘If you would think less of me and more of your work, Henry,’ he says, ‘perhaps that gentleman over there wouldn’t have to shout sixteen times for the waiter.’

Which, on looking into it, I found to be the case, and he went away without giving me no tip, which shows what you lose in a hard world by being sympathetic.

I’m bound to say that young Andy showed us all jolly quick that he hadn’t come home just to be an ornament about the place. There was exactly one boss in the restaurant, and it was him. It come a little hard at first to have to be respectful to a kid whose head you had spent many a happy hour clumping for his own good in the past; but he pretty soon showed me I could do it if I tried, and I done it. As for Jules and the two young fellers that had been taken on to help me owing to increase of business, they would jump through hoops and roll over if he just looked at them. He was a boy who liked his own way, was Andy, and, believe me, at MacFarland’s Restaurant he got it.

And then, when things had settled down into a steady jog, Katie took the bit in her teeth.

She done it quite quiet and unexpected one afternoon when there was only me and her and Andy in the place. And I don’t think either of them knew I was there, for I was taking an easy on a chair at the back, reading an evening paper.

She said, kind of quiet, ‘Oh, Andy.’

‘Yes, darling,’ he said.

And that was the first I knew that there was anything between them.

‘Andy, I’ve something to tell you.’

‘What is it?’

She kind of hesitated.

‘Andy, dear, I shan’t be able to help any more in the restaurant.’

He looked at her, sort of surprised.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m—I’m going on the stage.’

I put down my paper. What do you mean? Did I listen? Of course I listened. What do you take me for?

From where I sat I could see young Andy’s face, and I didn’t need any more to tell me there was going to be trouble. That jaw of his was right out. I forgot to tell you that the old man had died, poor old feller, maybe six months before, so that now Andy was the real boss instead of just acting boss; and what’s more, in the nature of things, he was, in a manner of speaking, Katie’s guardian, with power to tell her what she could do and what she couldn’t. And I felt that Katie wasn’t going to have any smooth passage with this stage business which she was giving him. Andy didn’t hold with the stage—not with any girl he was fond of being on it anyway. And when Andy didn’t like a thing he said so.

He said so now.

‘You aren’t going to do anything of the sort.’

‘Don’t be horrid about it, Andy dear. I’ve got a big chance. Why should you be horrid about it?’

‘I’m not going to argue about it. You don’t go.’

‘But it’s such a big chance. And I’ve been working for it for years.’

‘How do you mean working for it?’

And then it came out about this dancing-school she’d been attending regular.

When she’d finished telling him about it, he just shoved out his jaw another inch.

‘You aren’t going on the stage.’

‘But it’s such a chance. I saw Mr Mandelbaum yesterday, and he saw me dance, and he was very pleased, and said he would give me a solo dance to do in this new piece he’s putting on.’

‘You aren’t going on the stage.’

What I always say is, you can’t beat tact. If you’re smooth and tactful you can get folks to do anything you want; but if you just shove your jaw out at them, and order them about, why, then they get their backs up and sauce you. I knew Katie well enough to know that she would do anything for Andy, if he asked her properly; but she wasn’t going to stand this sort of thing. But you couldn’t drive that into the head of a feller like young Andy with a steam-hammer.

She flared up, quick, as if she couldn’t hold herself in no longer.

‘I certainly am,’ she said.

‘You know what it means?’

‘What does it mean?’

‘The end of—everything.’

She kind of blinked as if he’d hit her, then she chucks her chin up.

‘Very well,’ she says. ‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye,’ says Andy, the pig-headed young mule; and she walks out one way and he walks out another.

I don’t follow the drama much as a general rule, but seeing that it was now, so to speak, in the family, I did keep an eye open for the newspaper notices of ‘The Rose Girl’, which was the name of the piece which Mr Mandelbaum was letting Katie do a solo dance in; and while some of them cussed the play considerable, they all gave Katie a nice word. One feller said that she was like cold water on the morning after, which is high praise coming from a newspaper man.

There wasn’t a doubt about it. She was a success. You see, she was something new, and London always sits up and takes notice when you give it that.

There were pictures of her in the papers, and one evening paper had a piece about ‘How I Preserve My Youth’ signed by her. I cut it out and showed it to Andy.

He gave it a look. Then he gave me a look, and I didn’t like his eye.

‘Well?’ he says.

‘Pardon,’ I says.

‘What about it?’ he says.

‘I don’t know,’ I says.

‘Get back to your work,’ he says.

So I got back.

It was that same night that the queer thing happened.

We didn’t do much in the supper line at MacFarland’s as a rule in them days, but we kept open, of course, in case Soho should take it into its head to treat itself to a welsh rabbit before going to bed; so all hands was on deck, ready for the call if it should come, at half past eleven that night; but we weren’t what you might term sanguine.

Well, just on the half-hour, up drives a taxicab, and in comes a party of four. There was a nut, another nut, a girl, and another girl. And the second girl was Katie.

‘Hallo, Uncle Bill!’ she says.

‘Good evening, madam,’ I says dignified, being on duty.

‘Oh, stop it, Uncle Bill,’ she says. ‘Say “Hallo!” to a pal, and smile prettily, or I’ll tell them about the time you went to the White City.’

Well, there’s some bygones that are best left bygones, and the night at the White City what she was alluding to was one of them. I still maintain, as I always shall maintain, that the constable had no right to—but, there, it’s a story that wouldn’t interest you. And, anyway, I was glad to see Katie again, so I give her a smile.

‘Not so much of it,’ I says. ‘Not so much of it. I’m glad to see you, Katie.’

‘Three cheers! Jimmy, I want to introduce you to my friend, Uncle Bill. Ted, this is Uncle Bill. Violet, this is Uncle Bill.’

If wasn’t my place to fetch her one on the side of the head, but I’d of liked to have; for she was acting like she’d never used to act when I knew her—all tough and bold. Then it come to me that she was nervous. And natural, too, seeing young Andy might pop out any moment.

And sure enough out he popped from the back room at that very instant. Katie looked at him, and he looked at Katie, and I seen his face get kind of hard; but he didn’t say a word. And presently he went out again.

I heard Katie breathe sort of deep.

‘He’s looking well, Uncle Bill, ain’t he?’ she says to me, very soft.

‘Pretty fair,’ I says. ‘Well, kid, I been reading the pieces in the papers. You’ve knocked ‘em.’

‘Ah, don’t Bill,’ she says, as if I’d hurt her. And me meaning only to say the civil thing. Girls are rum.

When the party had paid their bill and give me a tip which made me think I was back at the Guelph again—only there weren’t any Dick Turpin of a head waiter standing by for his share—they hopped it. But Katie hung back and had a word with me.

‘He was looking well, wasn’t he, Uncle Bill?’

‘Rather!’

‘Does—does he ever speak of me?’

‘I ain’t heard him.’

‘I suppose he’s still pretty angry with me, isn’t he, Uncle Bill? You’re sure you’ve never heard him speak of me?’

So, to cheer her up, I tells her about the piece in the paper I showed him; but it didn’t seem to cheer her up any. And she goes out.

The very next night in she come again for supper, but with different nuts and different girls. There was six of them this time, counting her. And they’d hardly sat down at their table, when in come the fellers she had called Jimmy and Ted with two girls. And they sat eating of their suppers and chaffing one another across the floor, all as pleasant and sociable as you please.

‘I say, Katie,’ I heard one of the nuts say, ‘you were right. He’s worth the price of admission.’

I don’t know who they meant, but they all laughed. And every now and again I’d hear them praising the food, which I don’t wonder at, for Jules had certainly done himself proud. All artistic temperament, these Frenchmen are. The moment I told him we had company, so to speak, he blossomed like a flower does when you put it in water.

‘Ah, see, at last!’ he says, trying to grab me and kiss me. ‘Our fame has gone abroad in the world which amuses himself, ain’t it? For a good supper connexion I have always prayed, and he has arrived.’

Well, it did begin to look as if he was right. Ten high-class supper-folk in an evening was pretty hot stuff for MacFarland’s. I’m bound to say I got excited myself. I can’t deny that I missed the Guelph at times.

On the fifth night, when the place was fairly packed and looked for all the world like Oddy’s or Romano’s, and me and the two young fellers helping me was working double tides, I suddenly understood, and I went up to Katie and, bending over her very respectful with a bottle, I whispers, ‘Hot stuff, kid. This is a jolly fine boom you’re working for the old place.’ And by the way she smiled back at me, I seen I had guessed right.

Andy was hanging round, keeping an eye on things, as he always done, and I says to him, when I was passing, ‘She’s doing us proud, bucking up the old place, ain’t she?’ And he says, ‘Get on with your work.’ And I got on.

Katie hung back at the door, when she was on her way out, and had a word with me.

‘Has he said anything about me, Uncle Bill?’

‘Not a word,’ I says.

And she goes out.

You’ve probably noticed about London, mister, that a flock of sheep isn’t in it with the nuts, the way they all troop on each other’s heels to supper-places. One month they’re all going to one place, next month to another. Someone in the push starts the cry that he’s found a new place, and off they all go to try it. The trouble with most of the places is that once they’ve got the custom they think it’s going to keep on coming and all they’ve got to do is to lean back and watch it come. Popularity comes in at the door, and good food and good service flies out at the window. We wasn’t going to have any of that at MacFarland’s. Even if it hadn’t been that Andy would have come down like half a ton of bricks on the first sign of slackness, Jules and me both of us had our professional reputations to keep up. I didn’t give myself no airs when I seen things coming our way. I worked all the harder, and I seen to it that the four young fellers under me—there was four now—didn’t lose no time fetching of the orders.

The consequence was that the difference between us and most popular restaurants was that we kept our popularity. We fed them well, and we served them well; and once the thing had started rolling it didn’t stop. Soho isn’t so very far away from the centre of things, when you come to look at it, and they didn’t mind the extra step, seeing that there was something good at the end of it. So we got our popularity, and we kept our popularity; and we’ve got it to this day. That’s how MacFarland’s came to be what it is, mister.

With the air of one who has told a well-rounded tale, Henry ceased, and observed that it was wonderful the way Mr Woodward, of Chelsea, preserved his skill in spite of his advanced years.

I stared at him.

‘But, heavens, man!’ I cried, ‘you surely don’t think you’ve finished? What about Katie and Andy? What happened to them? Did they ever come together again?’

‘Oh, ah,’ said Henry, ‘I was forgetting!’

And he resumed.

As time went on, I begin to get pretty fed up with young Andy. He was making a fortune as fast as any feller could out of the sudden boom in the supper-custom, and he knowing perfectly well that if it hadn’t of been for Katie there wouldn’t of been any supper-custom at all; and you’d of thought that anyone claiming to be a human being would have had the gratitood to forgive and forget and go over and say a civil word to Katie when she come in. But no, he just hung round looking black at all of them; and one night he goes and fairly does it.

The place was full that night, and Katie was there, and the piano going, and everybody enjoying themselves, when the young feller at the piano struck up the tune what Katie danced to in the show. Catchy tune it was. ‘Lum-tum-tum, tiddle-iddle-um.’ Something like that it went. Well, the young feller struck up with it, and everybody begin clapping and hammering on the tables and hollering to Katie to get up and dance; which she done, in an open space in the middle, and she hadn’t hardly started when along come young Andy.

He goes up to her, all jaw, and I seen something that wanted dusting on the table next to ‘em, so I went up and began dusting it, so by good luck I happened to hear the whole thing.

He says to her, very quiet, ‘You can’t do that here. What do you think this place is?’

And she says to him, ‘Oh, Andy!’

‘I’m very much obliged to you,’ he says, ‘for all the trouble you seem to be taking, but it isn’t necessary. MacFarland’s got on very well before your well-meant efforts to turn it into a bear-garden.’

And him coining the money from the supper-custom! Sometimes I think gratitood’s a thing of the past and this world not fit for a self-respecting rattlesnake to live in.

‘Andy!’ she says.

‘That’s all. We needn’t argue about it. If you want to come here and have supper, I can’t stop you. But I’m not going to have the place turned into a night-club.’

I don’t know when I’ve heard anything like it. If it hadn’t of been that I hadn’t of got the nerve, I’d have give him a look.

Katie didn’t say another word, but just went back to her table.

But the episode, as they say, wasn’t conclooded. As soon as the party she was with seen that she was through dancing, they begin to kick up a row; and one young nut with about an inch and a quarter of forehead and the same amount of chin kicked it up especial.

‘No, I say! I say, you know!’ he hollered. ‘That’s too bad, you know. Encore! Don’t stop. Encore!’

Andy goes up to him.

‘I must ask you, please, not to make so much noise,’ he says, quite respectful. ‘You are disturbing people.’

‘Disturbing be damned! Why shouldn’t she—’

‘One moment. You can make all the noise you please out in the street, but as long as you stay in here you’ll be quiet. Do you understand?’

Up jumps the nut. He’d had quite enough to drink. I know, because I’d been serving him.

‘Who the devil are you?’ he says.

‘Sit down,’ says Andy.

And the young feller took a smack at him. And the next moment Andy had him by the collar and was chucking him out in a way that would have done credit to a real professional down Whitechapel way. He dumped him on the pavement as neat as you please.

That broke up the party.

You can never tell with restaurants. What kills one makes another. I’ve no doubt that if we had chucked out a good customer from the Guelph that would have been the end of the place. But it only seemed to do MacFarland’s good. I guess it gave just that touch to the place which made the nuts think that this was real Bohemia. Come to think of it, it does give a kind of charm to a place, if you feel that at any moment the feller at the next table to you may be gathered up by the slack of his trousers and slung into the street.

Anyhow, that’s the way our supper-custom seemed to look at it; and after that you had to book a table in advance if you wanted to eat with us. They fairly flocked to the place.

But Katie didn’t. She didn’t flock. She stayed away. And no wonder, after Andy behaving so bad. I’d of spoke to him about it, only he wasn’t the kind of feller you do speak to about things.

One day I says to him to cheer him up, ‘What price this restaurant now, Mr Andy?’

‘Curse the restaurant,’ he says.

And him with all that supper-custom! It’s a rum world!

Mister, have you ever had a real shock—something that came out of nowhere and just knocked you flat? I have, and I’m going to tell you about it.

When a man gets to be my age, and has a job of work which keeps him busy till it’s time for him to go to bed, he gets into the habit of not doing much worrying about anything that ain’t shoved right under his nose. That’s why, about now, Katie had kind of slipped my mind. It wasn’t that I wasn’t fond of the kid, but I’d got so much to think about, what with having four young fellers under me and things being in such a rush at the restaurant that, if I thought of her at all, I just took it for granted that she was getting along all right, and didn’t bother. To be sure we hadn’t seen nothing of her at MacFarland’s since the night when Andy bounced her pal with the small size in foreheads, but that didn’t worry me. If I’d been her, I’d have stopped away the same as she done, seeing that young Andy still had his hump. I took it for granted, as I’m telling you, that she was all right, and that the reason we didn’t see nothing of her was that she was taking her patronage elsewhere.

And then, one evening, which happened to be my evening off, I got a letter, and for ten minutes after I read it I was knocked flat.

You get to believe in fate when you get to be my age, and fate certainly had taken a hand in this game. If it hadn’t of been my evening off, don’t you see, I wouldn’t have got home till one o’clock or past that in the morning, being on duty. Whereas, seeing it was my evening off, I was back at half past eight.

I was living at the same boarding-house in Bloomsbury what I’d lived at for the past ten years, and when I got there I find her letter shoved half under my door.

I can tell you every word of it. This is how it went:

Darling Uncle Bill,

Don’t be too sorry when you read this. It is nobody’s fault, but I am just tired of everything, and I want to end it all. You have been such a dear to me always that I want you to be good to me now. I should not like Andy to know the truth, so I want you to make it seem as if it had happened naturally. You will do this for me, won’t you? It will be quite easy. By the time you get this, it will be one, and it will all be over, and you can just come up and open the window and let the gas out and then everyone will think I just died naturally. It will be quite easy. I am leaving the door unlocked so that you can get in. I am in the room just above yours. I took it yesterday, so as to be near you. Good-bye, Uncle Bill. You will do it for me, won’t you? I don’t want Andy to know what it really was.

KATIE

That was it, mister, and I tell you it floored me. And then it come to me, kind of as a new idea, that I’d best do something pretty soon, and up the stairs I went quick.

There she was, on the bed, with her eyes closed, and the gas just beginning to get bad.

As I come in, she jumped up, and stood staring at me. I went to the tap, and turned the flow off, and then I gives her a look.

‘Now then,’ I says.

‘How did you get here?’

‘Never mind how I got here. What have you got to say for yourself?’

She just began to cry, same as she used to when she was a kid and someone had hurt her.

‘Here,’ I says, ‘let’s get along out of here, and go where there’s some air to breathe. Don’t you take on so. You come along out and tell me all about it.’

She started to walk to where I was, and suddenly I seen she was limping. So I gave her a hand down to my room, and set her on a chair.

‘Now then,’ I says again.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Uncle Bill,’ she says.

And she looks at me so pitiful that I goes up to her and puts my arm round her and pats her on the back.

‘Don’t you worry, dearie,’ I says, ‘nobody ain’t going to be angry with you. But, for goodness’ sake,’ I says, ‘tell a man why in the name of goodness you ever took and acted so foolish.’

‘I wanted to end it all.’

‘But why?’

She burst out a-crying again, like a kid.

‘Didn’t you read about it in the paper, Uncle Bill?’

‘Read about what in the paper?’

‘My accident. I broke my ankle at rehearsal ever so long ago, practising my new dance. The doctors say it will never be right again. I shall never be able to dance any more. I shall always limp. I shan’t even be able to walk properly. And when I thought of that … and Andy … and everything … I….’

I got on to my feet.

‘Well, well, well,’ I says. ‘Well, well, well! I don’t know as I blame you. But don’t you do it. It’s a mug’s game. Look here, if I leave you alone for half an hour, you won’t go trying it on again? Promise.’

‘Very well, Uncle Bill. Where are you going?’

‘Oh, just out. I’ll be back soon. You sit there and rest yourself.’

It didn’t take me ten minutes to get to the restaurant in a cab. I found Andy in the back room.

‘What’s the matter, Henry?’ he says.

‘Take a look at this,’ I says.

There’s always this risk, mister, in being the Andy type of feller what must have his own way and goes straight ahead and has it; and that is that when trouble does come to him, it comes with a rush. It sometimes seems to me that in this life we’ve all got to have trouble sooner or later, and some of us gets it bit by bit, spread out thin, so to speak, and a few of us gets it in a lump—_biff_! And that was what happened to Andy, and what I knew was going to happen when I showed him that letter. I nearly says to him, ‘Brace up, young feller, because this is where you get it.’

I don’t often go to the theatre, but when I do I like one of those plays with some ginger in them which the papers generally cuss. The papers say that real human beings don’t carry on in that way. Take it from me, mister, they do. I seen a feller on the stage read a letter once which didn’t just suit him; and he gasped and rolled his eyes and tried to say something and couldn’t, and had to get a hold on a chair to keep him from falling. There was a piece in the paper saying that this was all wrong, and that he wouldn’t of done them things in real life. Believe me, the paper was wrong. There wasn’t a thing that feller did that Andy didn’t do when he read that letter.

‘God!’ he says. ‘Is she … She isn’t…. Were you in time?’ he says.

And he looks at me, and I seen that he had got it in the neck, right enough.

‘If you mean is she dead,’ I says, ‘no, she ain’t dead.’

‘Thank God!’

‘Not yet,’ I says.

And the next moment we was out of that room and in the cab and moving quick.

He was never much of a talker, wasn’t Andy, and he didn’t chat in that cab. He didn’t say a word till we was going up the stairs.

‘Where?’ he says.

‘Here,’ I says.

And I opens the door.

Katie was standing looking out of the window. She turned as the door opened, and then she saw Andy. Her lips parted, as if she was going to say something, but she didn’t say nothing. And Andy, he didn’t say nothing, neither. He just looked, and she just looked.

And then he sort of stumbles across the room, and goes down on his knees, and gets his arms around her.

‘Oh, my kid’ he says.

And I seen I wasn’t wanted, so I shut the door, and I hopped it. I went and saw the last half of a music-hall. But, I don’t know, it didn’t kind of have no fascination for me. You’ve got to give your mind to it to appreciate good music-hall turns.

ONE TOUCH OF NATURE

The feelings of Mr J. Wilmot Birdsey, as he stood wedged in the crowd that moved inch by inch towards the gates of the Chelsea Football Ground, rather resembled those of a starving man who has just been given a meal but realizes that he is not likely to get another for many days. He was full and happy. He bubbled over with the joy of living and a warm affection for his fellow-man. At the back of his mind there lurked the black shadow of future privations, but for the moment he did not allow it to disturb him. On this maddest, merriest day of all the glad New Year he was content to revel in the present and allow the future to take care of itself.

Mr Birdsey had been doing something which he had not done since he left New York five years ago. He had been watching a game of baseball.

New York lost a great baseball fan when Hugo Percy de Wynter Framlinghame, sixth Earl of Carricksteed, married Mae Elinor, only daughter of Mr and Mrs J. Wilmot Birdsey of East Seventy-Third Street; for scarcely had that internationally important event taken place when Mrs Birdsey, announcing that for the future the home would be in England as near as possible to dear Mae and dear Hugo, scooped J. Wilmot out of his comfortable morris chair as if he had been a clam, corked him up in a swift taxicab, and decanted him into a Deck B stateroom on the Olympic. And there he was, an exile.

Mr Birdsey submitted to the worst bit of kidnapping since the days of the old press gang with that delightful amiability which made him so popular among his fellows and such a cypher in his home. At an early date in his married life his position had been clearly defined beyond possibility of mistake. It was his business to make money, and, when called upon, to jump through hoops and sham dead at the bidding of his wife and daughter Mae. These duties he had been performing conscientiously for a matter of twenty years.

It was only occasionally that his humble role jarred upon him, for he loved his wife and idolized his daughter. The international alliance had been one of these occasions. He had no objection to Hugo Percy, sixth Earl of Carricksteed. The crushing blow had been the sentence of exile. He loved baseball with a love passing the love of women, and the prospect of never seeing a game again in his life appalled him.

And then, one morning, like a voice from another world, had come the news that the White Sox and the Giants were to give an exhibition in London at the Chelsea Football Ground. He had counted the days like a child before Christmas.

There had been obstacles to overcome before he could attend the game, but he had overcome them, and had been seated in the front row when the two teams lined up before King George.

And now he was moving slowly from the ground with the rest of the spectators. Fate had been very good to him. It had given him a great game, even unto two home-runs. But its crowning benevolence had been to allot the seats on either side of him to two men of his own mettle, two god-like beings who knew every move on the board, and howled like wolves when they did not see eye to eye with the umpire. Long before the ninth innings he was feeling towards them the affection of a shipwrecked mariner who meets a couple of boyhood’s chums on a desert island.

As he shouldered his way towards the gate he was aware of these two men, one on either side of him. He looked at them fondly, trying to make up his mind which of them he liked best. It was sad to think that they must soon go out of his life again for ever.

He came to a sudden resolution. He would postpone the parting. He would ask them to dinner. Over the best that the Savoy Hotel could provide they would fight the afternoon’s battle over again. He did not know who they were or anything about them, but what did that matter? They were brother-fans. That was enough for him.

The man on his right was young, clean-shaven, and of a somewhat vulturine cast of countenance. His face was cold and impassive now, almost forbiddingly so; but only half an hour before it had been a battle-field of conflicting emotions, and his hat still showed the dent where he had banged it against the edge of his seat on the occasion of Mr Daly’s home-run. A worthy guest!

The man on Mr Birdsey’s left belonged to another species of fan. Though there had been times during the game when he had howled, for the most part he had watched in silence so hungrily tense that a less experienced observer than Mr Birdsey might have attributed his immobility to boredom. But one glance at his set jaw and gleaming eyes told him that here also was a man and a brother.

This man’s eyes were still gleaming, and under their curiously deep tan his bearded cheeks were pale. He was staring straight in front of him with an unseeing gaze.

Mr Birdsey tapped the young man on the shoulder.

‘Some game!’ he said.

The young man looked at him and smiled.

‘You bet,’ he said.

‘I haven’t seen a ball-game in five years.’

‘The last one I saw was two years ago next June.’

‘Come and have some dinner at my hotel and talk it over,’ said Mr Birdsey impulsively.

‘Sure!’ said the young man.

Mr Birdsey turned and tapped the shoulder of the man on his left.

The result was a little unexpected. The man gave a start that was almost a leap, and the pallor of his face became a sickly white. His eyes, as he swung round, met Mr Birdsey’s for an instant before they dropped, and there was panic fear in them. His breath whistled softly through clenched teeth.

Mr Birdsey was taken aback. The cordiality of the clean-shaven young man had not prepared him for the possibility of such a reception. He felt chilled. He was on the point of apologizing with some murmur about a mistake, when the man reassured him by smiling. It was rather a painful smile, but it was enough for Mr Birdsey. This man might be of a nervous temperament, but his heart was in the right place.

He, too, smiled. He was a small, stout, red-faced little man, and he possessed a smile that rarely failed to set strangers at their ease. Many strenuous years on the New York Stock Exchange had not destroyed a certain childlike amiability in Mr Birdsey, and it shone out when he smiled at you.

‘I’m afraid I startled you,’ he said soothingly. ‘I wanted to ask you if you would let a perfect stranger, who also happens to be an exile, offer you dinner tonight.’

The man winced. ‘Exile?’

‘An exiled fan. Don’t you feel that the Polo Grounds are a good long way away? This gentleman is joining me. I have a suite at the Savoy Hotel, and I thought we might all have a quiet little dinner there and talk about the game. I haven’t seen a ball-game in five years.’

‘Nor have I.’

‘Then you must come. You really must. We fans ought to stick to one another in a strange land. Do come.’

‘Thank you,’ said the bearded man; ‘I will.’

When three men, all strangers, sit down to dinner together, conversation, even if they happen to have a mutual passion for baseball, is apt to be for a while a little difficult. The first fine frenzy in which Mr Birdsey had issued his invitations had begun to ebb by the time the soup was served, and he was conscious of a feeling of embarrassment.

There was some subtle hitch in the orderly progress of affairs. He sensed it in the air. Both of his guests were disposed to silence, and the clean-shaven young man had developed a trick of staring at the man with the beard, which was obviously distressing that sensitive person.

‘Wine,’ murmured Mr Birdsey to the waiter. ‘Wine, wine!’

He spoke with the earnestness of a general calling up his reserves for the grand attack. The success of this little dinner mattered enormously to him. There were circumstances which were going to make it an oasis in his life. He wanted it to be an occasion to which, in grey days to come, he could look back and be consoled. He could not let it be a failure.

He was about to speak when the young man anticipated him. Leaning forward, he addressed the bearded man, who was crumbling bread with an absent look in his eyes.

‘Surely we have met before?’ he said. ‘I’m sure I remember your face.’

The effect of these words on the other was as curious as the effect of Mr Birdsey’s tap on the shoulder had been. He looked up like a hunted animal.

He shook his head without speaking.

‘Curious,’ said the young man. ‘I could have sworn to it, and I am positive that it was somewhere in New York. Do you come from New York?’

‘Yes.’

‘It seems to me,’ said Mr Birdsey, ‘that we ought to introduce ourselves. Funny it didn’t strike any of us before. My name is Birdsey, J. Wilmot Birdsey. I come from New York.’

‘My name is Waterall,’ said the young man. ‘I come from New York.’

The bearded man hesitated.

‘My name is Johnson. I—used to live in New York.’

‘Where do you live now, Mr Johnson?’ asked Waterall.

The bearded man hesitated again. ‘Algiers,’ he said.

Mr Birdsey was inspired to help matters along with small-talk.

‘Algiers,’ he said. ‘I have never been there, but I understand that it is quite a place. Are you in business there, Mr Johnson?’

‘I live there for my health.’

‘Have you been there some time?’ inquired Waterall.

‘Five years.’

‘Then it must have been in New York that I saw you, for I have never been to Algiers, and I’m certain I have seen you somewhere. I’m afraid you will think me a bore for sticking to the point like this, but the fact is, the one thing I pride myself on is my memory for faces. It’s a hobby of mine. If I think I remember a face, and can’t place it, I worry myself into insomnia. It’s partly sheer vanity, and partly because in my job a good memory for faces is a mighty fine asset. It has helped me a hundred times.’

Mr Birdsey was an intelligent man, and he could see that Waterall’s table-talk was for some reason getting upon Johnson’s nerves. Like a good host, he endeavoured to cut in and make things smooth.

‘I’ve heard great accounts of Algiers,’ he said helpfully. ‘A friend of mine was there in his yacht last year. It must be a delightful spot.’

‘It’s a hell on earth,’ snapped Johnson, and slew the conversation on the spot.

Through a grim silence an angel in human form fluttered in—a waiter bearing a bottle. The pop of the cork was more than music to Mr Birdsey’s ears. It was the booming of the guns of the relieving army.

The first glass, as first glasses will, thawed the bearded man, to the extent of inducing him to try and pick up the fragments of the conversation which he had shattered.

‘I am afraid you will have thought me abrupt, Mr Birdsey,’ he said awkwardly; ‘but then you haven’t lived in Algiers for five years, and I have.’

Mr Birdsey chirruped sympathetically.

‘I liked it at first. It looked mighty good to me. But five years of it, and nothing else to look forward to till you die….’

He stopped, and emptied his glass. Mr Birdsey was still perturbed. True, conversation was proceeding in a sort of way, but it had taken a distinctly gloomy turn. Slightly flushed with the excellent champagne which he had selected for this important dinner, he endeavoured to lighten it.

‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘which of us three fans had the greatest difficulty in getting to the bleachers today. I guess none of us found it too easy.’

The young man shook his head.

‘Don’t count on me to contribute a romantic story to this Arabian Night’s Entertainment. My difficulty would have been to stop away. My name’s Waterall, and I’m the London correspondent of the New York Chronicle. I had to be there this afternoon in the way of business.’

Mr Birdsey giggled self-consciously, but not without a certain impish pride.

‘The laugh will be on me when you hear my confession. My daughter married an English earl, and my wife brought me over here to mix with his crowd. There was a big dinner-party tonight, at which the whole gang were to be present, and it was as much as my life was worth to side-step it. But when you get the Giants and the White Sox playing ball within fifty miles of you—Well, I packed a grip and sneaked out the back way, and got to the station and caught the fast train to London. And what is going on back there at this moment I don’t like to think. About now,’ said Mr Birdsey, looking at his watch, ‘I guess they’ll be pronging the hors d’oeuvres and gazing at the empty chair. It was a shame to do it, but, for the love of Mike, what else could I have done?’

He looked at the bearded man.

‘Did you have any adventures, Mr Johnson?’

‘No. I—I just came.’

The young man Waterall leaned forward. His manner was quiet, but his eyes were glittering.

‘Wasn’t that enough of an adventure for you?’ he said.

Their eyes met across the table. Seated between them, Mr Birdsey looked from one to the other, vaguely disturbed. Something was happening, a drama was going on, and he had not the key to it.

Johnson’s face was pale, and the tablecloth crumpled into a crooked ridge under his fingers, but his voice was steady as he replied:

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Will you understand if I give you your right name, Mr Benyon?’

‘What’s all this?’ said Mr Birdsey feebly.

Waterall turned to him, the vulturine cast of his face more noticeable than ever. Mr Birdsey was conscious of a sudden distaste for this young man.

‘It’s quite simple, Mr Birdsey. If you have not been entertaining angels unawares, you have at least been giving a dinner to a celebrity. I told you I was sure I had seen this gentleman before. I have just remembered where, and when. This is Mr John Benyon, and I last saw him five years ago when I was a reporter in New York, and covered his trial.’

‘His trial?’

‘He robbed the New Asiatic Bank of a hundred thousand dollars, jumped his bail, and was never heard of again.’

‘For the love of Mike!’

Mr Birdsey stared at his guest with eyes that grew momently wider. He was amazed to find that deep down in him there was an unmistakable feeling of elation. He had made up his mind, when he left home that morning, that this was to be a day of days. Well, nobody could call this an anti-climax.

‘So that’s why you have been living in Algiers?’

Benyon did not reply. Outside, the Strand traffic sent a faint murmur into the warm, comfortable room.

Waterall spoke. ‘What on earth induced you, Benyon, to run the risk of coming to London, where every second man you meet is a New Yorker, I can’t understand. The chances were two to one that you would be recognized. You made a pretty big splash with that little affair of yours five years ago.’

Benyon raised his head. His hands were trembling.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said with a kind of savage force, which hurt kindly little Mr Birdsey like a blow. ‘It was because I was a dead man, and saw a chance of coming to life for a day; because I was sick of the damned tomb I’ve been living in for five centuries; because I’ve been aching for New York ever since I’ve left it—and here was a chance of being back there for a few hours. I knew there was a risk. I took a chance on it. Well?’

Mr Birdsey’s heart was almost too full for words. He had found him at last, the Super-Fan, the man who would go through fire and water for a sight of a game of baseball. Till that moment he had been regarding himself as the nearest approach to that dizzy eminence. He had braved great perils to see this game. Even in this moment his mind would not wholly detach itself from speculation as to what his wife would say to him when he slunk back into the fold. But what had he risked compared with this man Benyon? Mr Birdsey glowed. He could not restrain his sympathy and admiration. True, the man was a criminal. He had robbed a bank of a hundred thousand dollars. But, after all, what was that? They would probably have wasted the money in foolishness. And, anyway, a bank which couldn’t take care of its money deserved to lose it.

Mr Birdsey felt almost a righteous glow of indignation against the New Asiatic Bank.

He broke the silence which had followed Benyon’s words with a peculiarly immoral remark:

‘Well, it’s lucky it’s only us that’s recognized you,’ he said.

Waterall stared. ‘Are you proposing that we should hush this thing up, Mr Birdsey?’ he said coldly.

‘Oh, well—’

Waterall rose and went to the telephone.

‘What ate you going to do?’

‘Call up Scotland Yard, of course. What did you think?’

Undoubtedly the young man was doing his duty as a citizen, yet it is to be recorded that Mr Birdsey eyed him with unmixed horror.

‘You can’t! You mustn’t!’ he cried.

‘I certainly shall.’

‘But—but—this fellow came all that way to see the ball-game.’

It seemed incredible to Mr Birdsey that this aspect of the affair should not be the one to strike everybody to the exclusion of all other aspects.

‘You can’t give him up. It’s too raw.’

‘He’s a convicted criminal.’

‘He’s a fan. Why, say, he’s the fan.’

Waterall shrugged his shoulders, and walked to the telephone. Benyon spoke.

‘One moment.’

Waterall turned, and found himself looking into the muzzle of a small pistol. He laughed.

‘I expected that. Wave it about all you want’

Benyon rested his shaking hand on the edge of the table.

‘I’ll shoot if you move.’

‘You won’t. You haven’t the nerve. There’s nothing to you. You’re just a cheap crook, and that’s all. You wouldn’t find the nerve to pull that trigger in a million years.’

He took off the receiver.

‘Give me Scotland Yard,’ he said.

He had turned his back to Benyon. Benyon sat motionless. Then, with a thud, the pistol fell to the ground. The next moment Benyon had broken down. His face was buried in his arms, and he was a wreck of a man, sobbing like a hurt child.

Mr Birdsey was profoundly distressed. He sat tingling and helpless. This was a nightmare.

Waterall’s level voice spoke at the telephone.

‘Is this Scotland Yard? I am Waterall, of the New York Chronicle. Is Inspector Jarvis there? Ask him to come to the phone…. Is that you, Jarvis? This is Waterall. I’m speaking from the Savoy, Mr Birdsey’s rooms. Birdsey. Listen, Jarvis. There’s a man here that’s wanted by the American police. Send someone here and get him. Benyon. Robbed the New Asiatic Bank in New York. Yes, you’ve a warrant out for him, five years old…. All right.’

He hung up the receiver. Benyon sprang to his feet. He stood, shaking, a pitiable sight. Mr Birdsey had risen with him. They stood looking at Waterall.

‘You—skunk!’ said Mr Birdsey.

‘I’m an American citizen,’ said Waterall, ‘and I happen to have some idea of a citizen’s duties. What is more, I’m a newspaper man, and I have some idea of my duty to my paper. Call me what you like, you won’t alter that.’

Mr Birdsey snorted.

‘You’re suffering from ingrowing sentimentality, Mr Birdsey. That’s what’s the matter with you. Just because this man has escaped justice for five years, you think he ought to be considered quit of the whole thing.’

‘But—but—’

‘I don’t.’

He took out his cigarette case. He was feeling a great deal more strung-up and nervous than he would have had the others suspect. He had had a moment of very swift thinking before he had decided to treat that ugly little pistol in a spirit of contempt. Its production had given him a decided shock, and now he was suffering from reaction. As a consequence, because his nerves were strained, he lit his cigarette very languidly, very carefully, and with an offensive superiority which was to Mr Birdsey the last straw.

These things are matters of an instant. Only an infinitesimal fraction of time elapsed between the spectacle of Mr Birdsey, indignant but inactive, and Mr Birdsey berserk, seeing red, frankly and undisguisedly running amok. The transformation took place in the space of time required for the lighting of a match.

Even as the match gave out its flame, Mr Birdsey sprang.

Aeons before, when the young blood ran swiftly in his veins and life was all before him, Mr Birdsey had played football. Once a footballer, always a potential footballer, even to the grave. Time had removed the flying tackle as a factor in Mr Birdsey’s life. Wrath brought it back. He dived at young Mr Waterall’s neatly trousered legs as he had dived at other legs, less neatly trousered, thirty years ago. They crashed to the floor together; and with the crash came Mr Birdsey’s shout:

‘Run! Run, you fool! Run!’

And, even as he clung to his man, breathless, bruised, feeling as if all the world had dissolved in one vast explosion of dynamite, the door opened, banged to, and feet fled down the passage.

Mr Birdsey disentangled himself, and rose painfully. The shock had brought him to himself. He was no longer berserk. He was a middle-aged gentleman of high respectability who had been behaving in a very peculiar way.

Waterall, flushed and dishevelled, glared at him speechlessly. He gulped. ‘Are you crazy?’

Mr Birdsey tested gingerly the mechanism of a leg which lay under suspicion of being broken. Relieved, he put his foot to the ground again. He shook his head at Waterall. He was slightly crumpled, but he achieved a manner of dignified reproof.

‘You shouldn’t have done it, young man. It was raw work. Oh, yes, I know all about that duty-of-a-citizen stuff. It doesn’t go. There are exceptions to every rule, and this was one of them. When a man risks his liberty to come and root at a ball-game, you’ve got to hand it to him. He isn’t a crook. He’s a fan. And we exiled fans have got to stick together.’

Waterall was quivering with fury, disappointment, and the peculiar unpleasantness of being treated by an elderly gentleman like a sack of coals. He stammered with rage.

‘You damned old fool, do you realize what you’ve done? The police will be here in another minute.’

‘Let them come.’

‘But what am I to say to them? What explanation can I give? What story can I tell them? Can’t you see what a hole you’ve put me in?’

Something seemed to click inside Mr Birdsey’s soul. It was the berserk mood vanishing and reason leaping back on to her throne. He was able now to think calmly, and what he thought about filled him with a sudden gloom.

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘don’t worry yourself. You’ve got a cinch. You’ve only got to hand a story to the police. Any old tale will do for them. I’m the man with the really difficult job—I’ve got to square myself with my wife!’

BLACK FOR LUCK

He was black, but comely. Obviously in reduced circumstances, he had nevertheless contrived to retain a certain smartness, a certain air—what the French call the tournure. Nor had poverty killed in him the aristocrat’s instinct of personal cleanliness; for even as Elizabeth caught sight of him he began to wash himself.

At the sound of her step he looked up. He did not move, but there was suspicion in his attitude. The muscles of his back contracted, his eyes glowed like yellow lamps against black velvet, his tail switched a little, warningly.

Elizabeth looked at him. He looked at Elizabeth. There was a pause, while he summed her up. Then he stalked towards her, and, suddenly lowering his head, drove it vigorously against her dress. He permitted her to pick him up and carry him into the hall-way, where Francis, the janitor, stood.

‘Francis,’ said Elizabeth, ‘does this cat belong to anyone here?’

‘No, miss. That cat’s a stray, that cat is. I been trying to locate that cat’s owner for days.’

Francis spent his time trying to locate things. It was the one recreation of his eventless life. Sometimes it was a noise, sometimes a lost letter, sometimes a piece of ice which had gone astray in the dumb-waiter—whatever it was, Francis tried to locate it.

‘Has he been round here long, then?’

‘I seen him snooping about a considerable time.’

‘I shall keep him.’

‘Black cats bring luck,’ said Francis sententiously.

‘I certainly shan’t object to that,’ said Elizabeth. She was feeling that morning that a little luck would be a pleasing novelty. Things had not been going very well with her of late. It was not so much that the usual proportion of her manuscripts had come back with editorial compliments from the magazine to which they had been sent—she accepted that as part of the game; what she did consider scurvy treatment at the hands of fate was the fact that her own pet magazine, the one to which she had been accustomed to fly for refuge, almost sure of a welcome—when coldly treated by all the others—had suddenly expired with a low gurgle for want of public support. It was like losing a kind and open-handed relative, and it made the addition of a black cat to the household almost a necessity.

In her flat, the door closed, she watched her new ally with some anxiety. He had behaved admirably on the journey upstairs, but she would not have been surprised, though it would have pained her, if he had now proceeded to try to escape through the ceiling. Cats were so emotional. However, he remained calm, and, after padding silently about the room for awhile, raised his head and uttered a crooning cry.

‘That’s right,’ said Elizabeth, cordially. ‘If you don’t see what you want, ask for it. The place is yours.’

She went to the ice-box, and produced milk and sardines. There was nothing finicky or affected about her guest. He was a good trencherman, and he did not care who knew it. He concentrated himself on the restoration of his tissues with the purposeful air of one whose last meal is a dim memory. Elizabeth, brooding over him like a Providence, wrinkled her forehead in thought.

‘Joseph,’ she said at last, brightening; ‘that’s your name. Now settle down, and start being a mascot.’

Joseph settled down amazingly. By the end of the second day he was conveying the impression that he was the real owner of the apartment, and that it was due to his good nature that Elizabeth was allowed the run of the place. Like most of his species, he was an autocrat. He waited a day to ascertain which was Elizabeth’s favourite chair, then appropriated it for his own. If Elizabeth closed a door while he was in a room, he wanted it opened so that he might go out; if she closed it while he was outside, he wanted it opened so that he might come in; if she left it open, he fussed about the draught. But the best of us have our faults, and Elizabeth adored him in spite of his.

It was astonishing what a difference he made in her life. She was a friendly soul, and until Joseph’s arrival she had had to depend for company mainly on the footsteps of the man in the flat across the way. Moreover, the building was an old one, and it creaked at night. There was a loose board in the passage which made burglar noises in the dark behind you when you stepped on it on the way to bed; and there were funny scratching sounds which made you jump and hold your breath. Joseph soon put a stop to all that. With Joseph around, a loose board became a loose board, nothing more, and a scratching noise just a plain scratching noise.

And then one afternoon he disappeared.

Having searched the flat without finding him, Elizabeth went to the window, with the intention of making a bird’s-eye survey of the street. She was not hopeful, for she had just come from the street, and there had been no sign of him then.

Outside the window was a broad ledge, running the width of the building. It terminated on the left, in a shallow balcony belonging to the flat whose front door faced hers—the flat of the young man whose footsteps she sometimes heard. She knew he was a young man, because Francis had told her so. His name, James Renshaw Boyd, she had learned from the same source.

On this shallow balcony, licking his fur with the tip of a crimson tongue and generally behaving as if he were in his own backyard, sat Joseph.

‘Jo-seph!’ cried Elizabeth—surprise, joy, and reproach combining to give her voice an almost melodramatic quiver.

He looked at her coldly. Worse, he looked at her as if she had been an utter stranger. Bulging with her meat and drink, he cut her dead; and, having done so, turned and walked into the next flat.

Elizabeth was a girl of spirit. Joseph might look at her as if she were a saucerful of tainted milk, but he was her cat, and she meant to get him back. She went out and rang the bell of Mr James Renshaw Boyd’s flat.

The door was opened by a shirt-sleeved young man. He was by no means an unsightly young man. Indeed, of his type—the rough-haired, clean-shaven, square-jawed type—he was a distinctly good-looking young man. Even though she was regarding him at the moment purely in the light of a machine for returning strayed cats, Elizabeth noticed that.

She smiled upon him. It was not the fault of this nice-looking young man that his sitting-room window was open; or that Joseph was an ungrateful little beast who should have no fish that night.

‘Would you mind letting me have my cat, please?’ she said pleasantly. ‘He has gone into your sitting-room through the window.’

He looked faintly surprised.

‘Your cat?’

‘My black cat, Joseph. He is in your sitting-room.’

‘I’m afraid you have come to the wrong place. I’ve just left my sitting-room, and the only cat there is my black cat, Reginald.’

‘But I saw Joseph go in only a minute ago.’

‘That was Reginald.’

For the first time, as one who examining a fair shrub abruptly discovers that it is a stinging-nettle, Elizabeth realized the truth. This was no innocent young man who stood before her, but the blackest criminal known to criminologists—a stealer of other people’s cats. Her manner shot down to zero.

‘May I ask how long you have had your Reginald?’

‘Since four o’clock this afternoon.’

‘Did he come in through the window?’

‘Why, yes. Now you mention it, he did.’

‘I must ask you to be good enough to give me back my cat,’ said Elizabeth, icily.

He regarded her defensively.

‘Assuming,’ he said, ‘purely for the purposes of academic argument, that your Joseph is my Reginald, couldn’t we come to an agreement of some sort? Let me buy you another cat. A dozen cats.’

‘I don’t want a dozen cats. I want Joseph.’

‘Fine, fat, soft cats,’ he went on persuasively. ‘Lovely, affectionate Persians and Angoras, and—’

‘Of course, if you intend to steal Joseph—’

‘These are harsh words. Any lawyer will tell you that there are special statutes regarding cats. To retain a stray cat is not a tort or a misdemeanour. In the celebrated test-case of Wiggins v. Bluebody it was established—’

‘Will you please give me back my cat?’

She stood facing him, her chin in the air and her eyes shining, and the young man suddenly fell a victim to conscience.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’ll throw myself on your mercy. I admit the cat is your cat, and that I have no right to it, and that I am just a common sneak-thief. But consider. I had just come back from the first rehearsal of my first play; and as I walked in at the door that cat walked in at the window. I’m as superstitious as a coon, and I felt that to give him up would be equivalent to killing the play before ever it was produced. I know it will sound absurd to you. You have no idiotic superstitions. You are sane and practical. But, in the circumstances, if you could see your way to waiving your rights—’

Before the wistfulness of his eye Elizabeth capitulated. She felt quite overcome by the revulsion of feeling which swept through her. How she had misjudged him! She had taken him for an ordinary soulless purloiner of cats, a snapper-up of cats at random and without reason; and all the time he had been reluctantly compelled to the act by this deep and praiseworthy motive. All the unselfishness and love of sacrifice innate in good women stirred within her.

‘Why, of course you mustn’t let him go! It would mean awful bad luck.’

‘But how about you—’

‘Never mind about me. Think of all the people who are dependent on your play being a success.’

The young man blinked.

‘This is overwhelming,’ he said.

‘I had no notion why you wanted him. He was nothing to me—at least, nothing much—that is to say—well, I suppose I was rather fond of him—but he was not—not—’

‘Vital?’

‘That’s just the word I wanted. He was just company, you know.’

‘Haven’t you many friends?’

‘I haven’t any friends.’

‘You haven’t any friends! That settles it. You must take him back.’

‘I couldn’t think of it.’

‘Of course you must take him back at once.’

‘I really couldn’t.’

‘You must.’

‘I won’t.’

‘But, good gracious, how do you suppose I should feel, knowing that you were all alone and that I had sneaked your—your ewe lamb, as it were?’

‘And how do you suppose I should feel if your play failed simply for lack of a black cat?’

He started, and ran his fingers through his rough hair in an overwrought manner.

‘Solomon couldn’t have solved this problem,’ he said. ‘How would it be—it seems the only possible way out—if you were to retain a sort of managerial right in him? Couldn’t you sometimes step across and chat with him—and me, incidentally—over here? I’m very nearly as lonesome as you are. Chicago is my home. I hardly know a soul in New York.’

Her solitary life in the big city had forced upon Elizabeth the ability to form instantaneous judgements on the men she met. She flashed a glance at the young man and decided in his favour.

‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘I should love to. I want to hear all about your play. I write myself, you know, in a very small way, so a successful playwright is Someone to me.’

‘I wish I were a successful playwright.’

‘Well, you are having the first play you have ever written produced on Broadway. That’s pretty wonderful.’

”M—yes,’ said the young man. It seemed to Elizabeth that he spoke doubtfully, and this modesty consolidated the favourable impression she had formed.

The gods are just. For every ill which they inflict they also supply a compensation. It seems good to them that individuals in big cities shall be lonely, but they have so arranged that, if one of these individuals does at last contrive to seek out and form a friendship with another, that friendship shall grow more swiftly than the tepid acquaintanceships of those on whom the icy touch of loneliness has never fallen. Within a week Elizabeth was feeling that she had known this James Renshaw Boyd all her life.

And yet there was a tantalizing incompleteness about his personal reminiscences. Elizabeth was one of those persons who like to begin a friendship with a full statement of their position, their previous life, and the causes which led up to their being in this particular spot at this particular time. At their next meeting, before he had had time to say much on his own account, she had told him of her life in the small Canadian town where she had passed the early part of her life; of the rich and unexpected aunt who had sent her to college for no particular reason that anyone could ascertain except that she enjoyed being unexpected; of the legacy from this same aunt, far smaller than might have been hoped for, but sufficient to send a grateful Elizabeth to New York, to try her luck there; of editors, magazines, manuscripts refused or accepted, plots for stories; of life in general, as lived down where the Arch spans Fifth Avenue and the lighted cross of the Judson shines by night on Washington Square.

Ceasing eventually, she waited for him to begin; and he did not begin—not, that is to say, in the sense the word conveyed to Elizabeth. He spoke briefly of college, still more briefly of Chicago—which city he appeared to regard with a distaste that made Lot’s attitude towards the Cities of the Plain almost kindly by comparison. Then, as if he had fulfilled the demands of the most exacting inquisitor in the matter of personal reminiscence, he began to speak of the play.

The only facts concerning him to which Elizabeth could really have sworn with a clear conscience at the end of the second week of their acquaintance were that he was very poor, and that this play meant everything to him.

The statement that it meant everything to him insinuated itself so frequently into his conversation that it weighed on Elizabeth’s mind like a burden, and by degrees she found herself giving the play place of honour in her thoughts over and above her own little ventures. With this stupendous thing hanging in the balance, it seemed almost wicked of her to devote a moment to wondering whether the editor of an evening paper, who had half promised to give her the entrancing post of Adviser to the Lovelorn on his journal, would fulfil that half-promise.

At an early stage in their friendship the young man had told her the plot of the piece; and if he had not unfortunately forgotten several important episodes and had to leap back to them across a gulf of one or two acts, and if he had referred to his characters by name instead of by such descriptions as ‘the fellow who’s in love with the girl—not what’s-his-name but the other chap’—she would no doubt have got that mental half-Nelson on it which is such a help towards the proper understanding of a four-act comedy. As it was, his precis had left her a little vague; but she said it was perfectly splendid, and he said did she really think so. And she said yes, she did, and they were both happy.

Rehearsals seemed to prey on his spirits a good deal. He attended them with the pathetic regularity of the young dramatist, but they appeared to bring him little balm. Elizabeth generally found him steeped in gloom, and then she would postpone the recital, to which she had been looking forward, of whatever little triumph she might have happened to win, and devote herself to the task of cheering him up. If women were wonderful in no other way, they would be wonderful for their genius for listening to shop instead of talking it.

Elizabeth was feeling more than a little proud of the way in which her judgement of this young man was being justified. Life in Bohemian New York had left her decidedly wary of strange young men, not formally introduced; her faith in human nature had had to undergo much straining. Wolves in sheep’s clothing were common objects of the wayside in her unprotected life; and perhaps her chief reason for appreciating this friendship was the feeling of safety which it gave her.

Their relations, she told herself, were so splendidly unsentimental. There was no need for that silent defensiveness which had come to seem almost an inevitable accompaniment to dealings with the opposite sex. James Boyd, she felt, she could trust; and it was wonderful how soothing the reflexion was.

And that was why, when the thing happened, it so shocked and frightened her.

It had been one of their quiet evenings. Of late they had fallen into the habit of sitting for long periods together without speaking. But it had differed from other quiet evenings through the fact that Elizabeth’s silence hid a slight but well-defined feeling of injury. Usually she sat happy with her thoughts, but tonight she was ruffled. She had a grievance.

That afternoon the editor of the evening paper, whose angelic status not even a bald head and an absence of wings and harp could conceal, had definitely informed her that the man who had conducted the column hitherto having resigned, the post of Heloise Milton, official adviser to readers troubled with affairs of the heart, was hers; and he looked to her to justify the daring experiment of letting a woman handle so responsible a job. Imagine how Napoleon felt after Austerlitz, picture Colonel Goethale contemplating the last spadeful of dirt from the Panama Canal, try to visualize a suburban householder who sees a flower emerging from the soil in which he has inserted a packet of guaranteed seeds, and you will have some faint conception how Elizabeth felt as those golden words proceeded from that editor’s lips. For the moment Ambition was sated. The years, rolling by, might perchance open out other vistas; but for the moment she was content.

Into James Boyd’s apartment she had walked, stepping on fleecy clouds of rapture, to tell him the great news.

She told him the great news.

He said, ‘Ah!’

There are many ways of saying ‘Ah!’ You can put joy, amazement, rapture into it; you can also make it sound as if it were a reply to a remark on the weather. James Boyd made it sound just like that. His hair was rumpled, his brow contracted, and his manner absent. The impression he gave Elizabeth was that he had barely heard her. The next moment he was deep in a recital of the misdemeanours of the actors now rehearsing for his four-act comedy. The star had done this, the leading woman that, the juvenile something else. For the first time Elizabeth listened unsympathetically.

The time came when speech failed James Boyd, and he sat back in his chair, brooding. Elizabeth, cross and wounded, sat in hers, nursing Joseph. And so, in a dim light, time flowed by.

Just how it happened she never knew. One moment, peace; the next chaos. One moment stillness; the next, Joseph hurtling through the air, all claws and expletives, and herself caught in a clasp which shook the breath from her.

One can dimly reconstruct James’s train of thought. He is in despair; things are going badly at the theatre, and life has lost its savour. His eye, as he sits, is caught by Elizabeth’s profile. It is a pretty—above all, a soothing—profile. An almost painful sentimentality sweeps over James Boyd. There she sits, his only friend in this cruel city. If you argue that there is no necessity to spring at your only friend and nearly choke her, you argue soundly; the point is well taken. But James Boyd was beyond the reach of sound argument. Much rehearsing had frayed his nerves to ribbons. One may say that he was not responsible for his actions.

That is the case for James. Elizabeth, naturally, was not in a position to take a wide and understanding view of it. All she knew was that James had played her false, abused her trust in him. For a moment, such was the shock of the surprise, she was not conscious of indignation—or, indeed, of any sensation except the purely physical one of semi-strangulation. Then, flushed, and more bitterly angry than she could ever have imagined herself capable of being, she began to struggle. She tore herself away from him. Coming on top of her grievance, this thing filled her with a sudden, very vivid hatred of James. At the back of her anger, feeding it, was the humiliating thought that it was all her own fault, that by her presence there she had invited this.

She groped her way to the door. Something was writhing and struggling inside her, blinding her eyes, and robbing her of speech. She was only conscious of a desire to be alone, to be back and safe in her own home. She was aware that he was speaking, but the words did not reach her. She found the door, and pulled it open. She felt a hand on her arm, but she shook it off. And then she was back behind her own door, alone and at liberty to contemplate at leisure the ruins of that little temple of friendship which she had built up so carefully and in which she had been so happy.

The broad fact that she would never forgive him was for a while her only coherent thought. To this succeeded the determination that she would never forgive herself. And having thus placed beyond the pale the only two friends she had in New York, she was free to devote herself without hindrance to the task of feeling thoroughly lonely and wretched.

The shadows deepened. Across the street a sort of bubbling explosion, followed by a jerky glare that shot athwart the room, announced the lighting of the big arc-lamp on the opposite sidewalk. She resented it, being in the mood for undiluted gloom; but she had not the energy to pull down the shade and shut it out. She sat where she was, thinking thoughts that hurt.

The door of the apartment opposite opened. There was a single ring at her bell. She did not answer it. There came another. She sat where she was, motionless. The door closed again.

The days dragged by. Elizabeth lost count of time. Each day had its duties, which ended when you went to bed; that was all she knew—except that life had become very grey and very lonely, far lonelier even than in the time when James Boyd was nothing to her but an occasional sound of footsteps.

Of James she saw nothing. It is not difficult to avoid anyone in New York, even when you live just across the way.

It was Elizabeth’s first act each morning, immediately on awaking, to open her front door and gather in whatever lay outside it. Sometimes there would be mail; and always, unless Francis, as he sometimes did, got mixed and absent-minded, the morning milk and the morning paper.

One morning, some two weeks after that evening of which she tried not to think, Elizabeth, opening the door, found immediately outside it a folded scrap of paper. She unfolded it.

I am just off to the theatre. Won’t you wish me luck? I feel sure it is going to be a hit. Joseph is purring like a dynamo.—J.R.B.

In the early morning the brain works sluggishly. For an instant Elizabeth stood looking at the words uncomprehendingly; then, with a leaping of the heart, their meaning came home to her. He must have left this at her door on the previous night. The play had been produced! And somewhere in the folded interior of the morning paper at her feet must be the opinion of ‘One in Authority’ concerning it!

Dramatic criticisms have this peculiarity, that if you are looking for them, they burrow and hide like rabbits. They dodge behind murders; they duck behind baseball scores; they lie up snugly behind the Wall Street news. It was a full minute before Elizabeth found what she sought, and the first words she read smote her like a blow.

In that vein of delightful facetiousness which so endears him to all followers and perpetrators of the drama, the ‘One in Authority’ rent and tore James Boyd’s play. He knocked James Boyd’s play down, and kicked it; he jumped on it with large feet; he poured cold water on it, and chopped it into little bits. He merrily disembowelled James Boyd’s play.

Elizabeth quivered from head to foot. She caught at the door-post to steady herself. In a flash all her resentment had gone, wiped away and annihilated like a mist before the sun. She loved him, and she knew now that she had always loved him.

It took her two seconds to realize that the ‘One in Authority’ was a miserable incompetent, incapable of recognizing merit when it was displayed before him. It took her five minutes to dress. It took her a minute to run downstairs and out to the news-stand on the corner of the street. Here, with a lavishness which charmed and exhilarated the proprietor, she bought all the other papers which he could supply.

Moments of tragedy are best described briefly. Each of the papers noticed the play, and each of them damned it with uncompromising heartiness. The criticisms varied only in tone. One cursed with relish and gusto; another with a certain pity; a third with a kind of wounded superiority, as of one compelled against his will to speak of something unspeakable; but the meaning of all was the same. James Boyd’s play was a hideous failure.

Back to the house sped Elizabeth, leaving the organs of a free people to be gathered up, smoothed, and replaced on the stand by the now more than ever charmed proprietor. Up the stairs she sped, and arriving breathlessly at James’s door rang the bell.

Heavy footsteps came down the passage; crushed, disheartened footsteps; footsteps that sent a chill to Elizabeth’s heart. The door opened. James Boyd stood before her, heavy-eyed and haggard. In his eyes was despair, and on his chin the blue growth of beard of the man from whom the mailed fist of Fate has smitten the energy to perform his morning shave.

Behind him, littering the floor, were the morning papers; and at the sight of them Elizabeth broke down.

‘Oh, Jimmy, darling!’ she cried; and the next moment she was in his arms, and for a space time stood still.

How long afterwards it was she never knew; but eventually James Boyd spoke.

‘If you’ll marry me,’ he said hoarsely, ‘I don’t care a hang.’

‘Jimmy, darling!’ said Elizabeth, ‘of course I will.’

Past them, as they stood there, a black streak shot silently, and disappeared out of the door. Joseph was leaving the sinking ship.

‘Let him go, the fraud,’ said Elizabeth bitterly. ‘I shall never believe in black cats again.’

But James was not of this opinion.

‘Joseph has brought me all the luck I need.’

‘But the play meant everything to you.’

‘It did then.’

Elizabeth hesitated.

‘Jimmy, dear, it’s all right, you know. I know you will make a fortune out of your next play, and I’ve heaps for us both to live on till you make good. We can manage splendidly on my salary from the Evening Chronicle.’

‘What! Have you got a job on a New York paper?’

‘Yes, I told you about it. I am doing Heloise Milton. Why, what’s the matter?’

He groaned hollowly.

‘And I was thinking that you would come back to Chicago with me!’

‘But I will. Of course I will. What did you think I meant to do?’

‘What! Give up a real job in New York!’ He blinked. ‘This isn’t really happening. I’m dreaming.’

‘But, Jimmy, are you sure you can get work in Chicago? Wouldn’t it be better to stay on here, where all the managers are, and—’

He shook his head.

‘I think it’s time I told you about myself,’ he said. ‘Am I sure I can get work in Chicago? I am, worse luck. Darling, have you in your more material moments ever toyed with a Boyd’s Premier Breakfast-Sausage or kept body and soul together with a slice off a Boyd’s Excelsior Home-Cured Ham? My father makes them, and the tragedy of my life is that he wants me to help him at it. This was my position. I loathed the family business as much as dad loved it. I had a notion—a fool notion, as it has turned out—that I could make good in the literary line. I’ve scribbled in a sort of way ever since I was in college. When the time came for me to join the firm, I put it to dad straight. I said, “Give me a chance, one good, square chance, to see if the divine fire is really there, or if somebody has just turned on the alarm as a practical joke.” And we made a bargain. I had written this play, and we made it a test-case. We fixed it up that dad should put up the money to give it a Broadway production. If it succeeded, all right; I’m the young Gus Thomas, and may go ahead in the literary game. If it’s a fizzle, off goes my coat, and I abandon pipe-dreams of literary triumphs and start in as the guy who put the Co. in Boyd & Co. Well, events have proved that I am the guy, and now I’m going to keep my part of the bargain just as squarely as dad kept his. I know quite well that if I refused to play fair and chose to stick on here in New York and try again, dad would go on staking me. That’s the sort of man he is. But I wouldn’t do it for a million Broadway successes. I’ve had my chance, and I’ve foozled; and now I’m going back to make him happy by being a real live member of the firm. And the queer thing about it is that last night I hated the idea, and this morning, now that I’ve got you, I almost look forward to it.’

He gave a little shiver.

‘And yet—I don’t know. There’s something rather gruesome still to my near-artist soul in living in luxury on murdered piggies. Have you ever seen them persuading a pig to play the stellar role in a Boyd Premier Breakfast-Sausage? It’s pretty ghastly. They string them up by their hind legs, and—b-r-r-r-r!’

‘Never mind,’ said Elizabeth soothingly. ‘Perhaps they don’t mind it really.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said James Boyd, doubtfully. ‘I’ve watched them at it, and I’m bound to say they didn’t seem any too well pleased.’

‘Try not to think of it.’

‘Very well,’ said James dutifully.

There came a sudden shout from the floor above, and on the heels of it a shock-haired youth in pyjamas burst into the apartment.

‘Now what?’ said James. ‘By the way, Miss Herrold, my fiancee; Mr Briggs—Paul Axworthy Briggs, sometimes known as the Boy Novelist. What’s troubling you, Paul?’

Mr Briggs was stammering with excitement.

‘Jimmy,’ cried the Boy Novelist, ‘what do you think has happened! A black cat has just come into my apartment. I heard him mewing outside the door, and opened it, and he streaked in. And I started my new novel last night! Say, you do believe this thing of black cats bringing luck, don’t you?’

‘Luck! My lad, grapple that cat to your soul with hoops of steel. He’s the greatest little luck-bringer in New York. He was boarding with me till this morning.’

‘Then—by Jove! I nearly forgot to ask—your play was a hit? I haven’t seen the papers yet’

‘Well, when you see them, don’t read the notices. It was the worst frost Broadway has seen since Columbus’s time.’

‘But—I don’t understand.’

‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to. Go back and fill that cat with fish, or she’ll be leaving you. I suppose you left the door open?’

‘My God!’ said the Boy Novelist, paling, and dashed for the door.

‘Do you think Joseph will bring him luck?’ said Elizabeth, thoughtfully.

‘It depends what sort of luck you mean. Joseph seems to work in devious ways. If I know Joseph’s methods, Briggs’s new novel will be rejected by every publisher in the city; and then, when he is sitting in his apartment, wondering which of his razors to end himself with, there will be a ring at the bell, and in will come the most beautiful girl in the world, and then—well, then, take it from me, he will be all right.’

‘He won’t mind about the novel?’

‘Not in the least.’

‘Not even if it means that he will have to go away and kill pigs and things.’

‘About the pig business, dear. I’ve noticed a slight tendency in you to let yourself get rather morbid about it. I know they string them up by the hind-legs, and all that sort of thing; but you must remember that a pig looks at these things from a different standpoint. My belief is that the pigs like it. Try not to think of it.’

‘Very well,’ said Elizabeth, dutifully.

THE ROMANCE OF AN UGLY POLICEMAN

Crossing the Thames by Chelsea Bridge, the wanderer through London finds himself in pleasant Battersea. Rounding the Park, where the female of the species wanders with its young by the ornamental water where the wild-fowl are, he comes upon a vast road. One side of this is given up to Nature, the other to Intellect. On the right, green trees stretch into the middle distance; on the left, endless blocks of residential flats. It is Battersea Park Road, the home of the cliff-dwellers.

Police-constable Plimmer’s beat embraced the first quarter of a mile of the cliffs. It was his duty to pace in the measured fashion of the London policeman along the front of them, turn to the right, turn to the left, and come back along the road which ran behind them. In this way he was enabled to keep the king’s peace over no fewer than four blocks of mansions.

It did not require a deal of keeping. Battersea may have its tough citizens, but they do not live in Battersea Park Road. Battersea Park Road’s speciality is Brain, not Crime. Authors, musicians, newspaper men, actors, and artists are the inhabitants of these mansions. A child could control them. They assault and batter nothing but pianos; they steal nothing but ideas; they murder nobody except Chopin and Beethoven. Not through these shall an ambitious young constable achieve promotion.

At this conclusion Edward Plimmer arrived within forty-eight hours of his installation. He recognized the flats for what they were—just so many layers of big-brained blamelessness. And there was not even the chance of a burglary. No burglar wastes his time burgling authors. Constable Plimmer reconciled his mind to the fact that his term in Battersea must be looked on as something in the nature of a vacation.

He was not altogether sorry. At first, indeed, he found the new atmosphere soothing. His last beat had been in the heart of tempestuous Whitechapel, where his arms had ached from the incessant hauling of wiry inebriates to the station, and his shins had revolted at the kicks showered upon them by haughty spirits impatient of restraint. Also, one Saturday night, three friends of a gentleman whom he was trying to induce not to murder his wife had so wrought upon him that, when he came out of hospital, his already homely appearance was further marred by a nose which resembled the gnarled root of a tree. All these things had taken from the charm of Whitechapel, and the cloistral peace of Battersea Park Road was grateful and comforting.

And just when the unbroken calm had begun to lose its attraction and dreams of action were once more troubling him, a new interest entered his life; and with its coming he ceased to wish to be removed from Battersea. He fell in love.

It happened at the back of York Mansions. Anything that ever happened, happened there; for it is at the back of these blocks of flats that the real life is. At the front you never see anything, except an occasional tousle-headed young man smoking a pipe; but at the back, where the cooks come out to parley with the tradesmen, there is at certain hours of the day quite a respectable activity. Pointed dialogues about yesterday’s eggs and the toughness of Saturday’s meat are conducted fortissimo between cheerful youths in the road and satirical young women in print dresses, who come out of their kitchen doors on to little balconies. The whole thing has a pleasing Romeo and Juliet touch. Romeo rattles up in his cart. ‘Sixty-four!’ he cries. ‘Sixty-fower, sixty-fower, sixty-fow—’ The kitchen door opens, and Juliet emerges. She eyes Romeo without any great show of affection. ‘Are you Perkins and Blissett?’ she inquires coldly. Romeo admits it. ‘Two of them yesterday’s eggs was bad.’ Romeo protests. He defends his eggs. They were fresh from the hen; he stood over her while she laid them. Juliet listens frigidly. ‘I don’t think,’ she says. ‘Well, half of sugar, one marmalade, and two of breakfast bacon,’ she adds, and ends the argument. There is a rattling as of a steamer weighing anchor; the goods go up in the tradesman’s lift; Juliet collects them, and exits, banging the door. The little drama is over.

Such is life at the back of York Mansions—a busy, throbbing thing.

The peace of afternoon had fallen upon the world one day towards the end of Constable Plimmer’s second week of the simple life, when his attention was attracted by a whistle. It was followed by a musical ‘Hi!’

Constable Plimmer looked up. On the kitchen balcony of a second-floor flat a girl was standing. As he took her in with a slow and exhaustive gaze, he was aware of strange thrills. There was something about this girl which excited Constable Plimmer. I do not say that she was a beauty; I do not claim that you or I would have raved about her; I merely say that Constable Plimmer thought she was All Right.

‘Miss?’ he said.

‘Got the time about you?’ said the girl. ‘All the clocks have stopped.’

‘The time,’ said Constable Plimmer, consulting his watch, ‘wants exactly ten minutes to four.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Not at all, miss.’

The girl was inclined for conversation. It was that gracious hour of the day when you have cleared lunch and haven’t got to think of dinner yet, and have a bit of time to draw a breath or two. She leaned over the balcony and smiled pleasantly.

‘If you want to know the time, ask a pleeceman,’ she said. ‘You been on this beat long?’

‘Just short of two weeks, miss.’

‘I been here three days.’

‘I hope you like it, miss.’

‘So-so. The milkman’s a nice boy.’

Constable Plimmer did not reply. He was busy silently hating the milkman. He knew him—one of those good-looking blighters; one of those oiled and curled perishers; one of those blooming fascinators who go about the world making things hard for ugly, honest men with loving hearts. Oh, yes, he knew the milkman.

‘He’s a rare one with his jokes,’ said the girl.

Constable Plimmer went on not replying. He was perfectly aware that the milkman was a rare one with his jokes. He had heard him. The way girls fell for anyone with the gift of the gab—that was what embittered Constable Plimmer.

‘He—’ she giggled. ‘He calls me Little Pansy-Face.’

‘If you’ll excuse me, miss,’ said Constable Plimmer coldly, ‘I’ll have to be getting along on my beat.’

Little Pansy-Face! And you couldn’t arrest him for it! What a world! Constable Plimmer paced upon his way, a blue-clad volcano.

It is a terrible thing to be obsessed by a milkman. To Constable Plimmer’s disordered imagination it seemed that, dating from this interview, the world became one solid milkman. Wherever he went, he seemed to run into this milkman. If he was in the front road, this milkman—Alf Brooks, it appeared, was his loathsome name—came rattling past with his jingling cans as if he were Apollo driving his chariot. If he was round at the back, there was Alf, his damned tenor doing duets with the balconies. And all this in defiance of the known law of natural history that milkmen do not come out after five in the morning. This irritated Constable Plimmer. You talk of a man ‘going home with the milk’ when you mean that he sneaks in in the small hours of the morning. If all milkmen were like Alf Brooks the phrase was meaningless.

He brooded. The unfairness of Fate was souring him. A man expects trouble in his affairs of the heart from soldiers and sailors, and to be cut out by even a postman is to fall before a worthy foe; but milkmen—no! Only grocers’ assistants and telegraph-boys were intended by Providence to fear milkmen.

Yet here was Alf Brooks, contrary to all rules, the established pet of the mansions. Bright eyes shone from balconies when his ‘Milk—oo—oo’ sounded. Golden voices giggled delightedly at his bellowed chaff. And Ellen Brown, whom he called Little Pansy-Face, was definitely in love with him.

They were keeping company. They were walking out. This crushing truth Edward Plimmer learned from Ellen herself.

She had slipped out to mail a letter at the pillar-box on the corner, and she reached it just as the policeman arrived there in the course of his patrol.

Nervousness impelled Constable Plimmer to be arch.

”Ullo, ‘ullo, ‘ullo,’ he said. ‘Posting love-letters?’

‘What, me? This is to the Police Commissioner, telling him you’re no good.’

‘I’ll give it to him. Him and me are taking supper tonight.’

Nature had never intended Constable Plimmer to be playful. He was at his worst when he rollicked. He snatched at the letter with what was meant to be a debonair gaiety, and only succeeded in looking like an angry gorilla. The girl uttered a startled squeak.

The letter was addressed to Mr A. Brooks.

Playfulness, after this, was at a discount. The girl was frightened and angry, and he was scowling with mingled jealousy and dismay.

‘Ho!’ he said. ‘Ho! Mr A. Brooks!’

Ellen Brown was a nice girl, but she had a temper, and there were moments when her manners lacked rather noticeably the repose which stamps the caste of Vere de Vere.

‘Well, what about it?’ she cried. ‘Can’t one write to the young gentleman one’s keeping company with, without having to get permission from every—’ She paused to marshal her forces from the assault. ‘Without having to get permission from every great, ugly, red-faced copper with big feet and a broken nose in London?’

Constable Plimmer’s wrath faded into a dull unhappiness. Yes, she was right. That was the correct description. That was how an impartial Scotland Yard would be compelled to describe him, if ever he got lost. ‘Missing. A great, ugly, red-faced copper with big feet and a broken nose.’ They would never find him otherwise.

‘Perhaps you object to my walking out with Alf? Perhaps you’ve got something against him? I suppose you’re jealous!’

She threw in the last suggestion entirely in a sporting spirit. She loved battle, and she had a feeling that this one was going to finish far too quickly. To prolong it, she gave him this opening. There were a dozen ways in which he might answer, each more insulting than the last; and then, when he had finished, she could begin again. These little encounters, she held, sharpened the wits, stimulated the circulation, and kept one out in the open air.

‘Yes,’ said Constable Plimmer.

It was the one reply she was not expecting. For direct abuse, for sarcasm, for dignity, for almost any speech beginning, ‘What I Jealous of you. Why—’ she was prepared. But this was incredible. It disabled her, as the wild thrust of an unskilled fencer will disable a master of the rapier. She searched in her mind and found that she had nothing to say.

There was a tense moment in which she found him, looking her in the eyes, strangely less ugly than she had supposed, and then he was gone, rolling along on his beat with that air which all policemen must achieve, of having no feelings at all, and—as long as it behaves itself—no interest in the human race.

Ellen posted her letter. She dropped it into the box thoughtfully, and thoughtfully returned to the flat. She looked over her shoulder, but Constable Plimmer was out of sight.

Peaceful Battersea began to vex Constable Plimmer. To a man crossed in love, action is the one anodyne; and Battersea gave no scope for action. He dreamed now of the old Whitechapel days as a man dreams of the joys of his childhood. He reflected bitterly that a fellow never knows when he is well off in this world. Any one of those myriad drunk and disorderlies would have been as balm to him now. He was like a man who has run through a fortune and in poverty eats the bread of regret. Amazedly he recollected that in those happy days he had grumbled at his lot. He remembered confiding to a friend in the station-house, as he rubbed with liniment the spot on his right shin where the well-shod foot of a joyous costermonger had got home, that this sort of thing—meaning militant costermongers—was ‘a bit too thick’. A bit too thick! Why, he would pay one to kick him now. And as for the three loyal friends of the would-be wife-murderer who had broken his nose, if he saw them coming round the corner he would welcome them as brothers.

And Battersea Park Road dozed on—calm, intellectual, law-abiding.

A friend of his told him that there had once been a murder in one of these flats. He did not believe it. If any of these white-corpuscled clams ever swatted a fly, it was much as they could do. The thing was ridiculous on the face of it. If they were capable of murder, they would have murdered Alf Brooks.

He stood in the road, and looked up at the placid buildings resentfully.

‘Grr-rr-rr!’ he growled, and kicked the sidewalk.

And, even as he spoke, on the balcony of a second-floor flat there appeared a woman, an elderly, sharp-faced woman, who waved her arms and screamed, ‘Policeman! Officer! Come up here! Come up here at once!’

Up the stone stairs went Constable Plimmer at the run. His mind was alert and questioning. Murder? Hardly murder, perhaps. If it had been that, the woman would have said so. She did not look the sort of woman who would be reticent about a thing like that. Well, anyway, it was something; and Edward Plimmer had been long enough in Battersea to be thankful for small favours. An intoxicated husband would be better than nothing. At least he would be something that a fellow could get his hands on to and throw about a bit.

The sharp-faced woman was waiting for him at the door. He followed her into the flat.

‘What is it, ma’am?’

‘Theft! Our cook has been stealing!’

She seemed sufficiently excited about it, but Constable Plimmer felt only depression and disappointment. A stout admirer of the sex, he hated arresting women. Moreover, to a man in the mood to tackle anarchists with bombs, to be confronted with petty theft is galling. But duty was duty. He produced his notebook.

‘She is in her room. I locked her in. I know she has taken my brooch. We have missed money. You must search her.’

‘Can’t do that, ma’am. Female searcher at the station.’

‘Well, you can search her box.’

A little, bald, nervous man in spectacles appeared as if out of a trap. As a matter of fact, he had been there all the time, standing by the bookcase; but he was one of those men you do not notice till they move and speak.

‘Er—Jane.’

‘Well, Henry?’

The little man seemed to swallow something.

‘I—I think that you may possibly be wronging Ellen. It is just possible, as regards the money—’ He smiled in a ghastly manner and turned to the policeman. ‘Er—officer, I ought to tell you that my wife—ah—holds the purse-strings of our little home; and it is just possible that in an absent-minded moment I may have—’

‘Do you mean to tell me, Henry, that you have been taking my money?’

‘My dear, it is just possible that in the abs—’

‘How often?’

He wavered perceptibly. Conscience was beginning to lose its grip.

‘Oh, not often.’

‘How often? More than once?’

Conscience had shot its bolt. The little man gave up the Struggle.

‘No, no, not more than once. Certainly not more than once.’

‘You ought not to have done it at all. We will talk about that later. It doesn’t alter the fact that Ellen is a thief. I have missed money half a dozen times. Besides that, there’s the brooch. Step this way, officer.’

Constable Plimmer stepped that way—his face a mask. He knew who was waiting for them behind the locked door at the end of the passage. But it was his duty to look as if he were stuffed, and he did so.

She was sitting on her bed, dressed for the street. It was her afternoon out, the sharp-faced woman had informed Constable Plimmer, attributing the fact that she had discovered the loss of the brooch in time to stop her a direct interposition of Providence. She was pale, and there was a hunted look in her eyes.

‘You wicked girl, where is my brooch?’

She held it out without a word. She had been holding it in her hand.

‘You see, officer!’

‘I wasn’t stealing of it. I ‘adn’t but borrowed it. I was going to put it back.’

‘Stuff and nonsense! Borrow it, indeed! What for?’

‘I—I wanted to look nice.’

The woman gave a short laugh. Constable Plimmer’s face was a mere block of wood, expressionless.

‘And what about the money I’ve been missing? I suppose you’ll say you only borrowed that?’

‘I never took no money.’

‘Well, it’s gone, and money doesn’t go by itself. Take her to the police-station, officer.’

Constable Plimmer raised heavy eyes.

‘You make a charge, ma’am?’

‘Bless the man! Of course I make a charge. What did you think I asked you to step in for?’

‘Will you come along, miss?’ said Constable Plimmer.

Out in the street the sun shone gaily down on peaceful Battersea. It was the hour when children walk abroad with their nurses; and from the green depths of the Park came the sound of happy voices. A cat stretched itself in the sunshine and eyed the two as they passed with lazy content.

They walked in silence. Constable Plimmer was a man with a rigid sense of what was and what was not fitting behaviour in a policeman on duty: he aimed always at a machine-like impersonality. There were times when it came hard, but he did his best. He strode on, his chin up and his eyes averted. And beside him—

Well, she was not crying. That was something.

Round the corner, beautiful in light flannel, gay at both ends with a new straw hat and the yellowest shoes in South-West London, scented, curled, a prince among young men, stood Alf Brooks. He was feeling piqued. When he said three o’clock, he meant three o’clock. It was now three-fifteen, and she had not appeared. Alf Brooks swore an impatient oath, and the thought crossed his mind, as it had sometimes crossed it before, that Ellen Brown was not the only girl in the world.

‘Give her another five min—’

Ellen Brown, with escort, at that moment turned the corner.

Rage was the first emotion which the spectacle aroused in Alf Brooks. Girls who kept a fellow waiting about while they fooled around with policemen were no girls for him. They could understand once and for all that he was a man who could pick and choose.

And then an electric shock set the world dancing mistily before his eyes. This policeman was wearing his belt; he was on duty. And Ellen’s face was not the face of a girl strolling with the Force for pleasure.

His heart stopped, and then began to race. His cheeks flushed a dusky crimson. His jaw fell, and a prickly warmth glowed in the parts about his spine.

‘Goo’!’

His fingers sought his collar.

‘Crumbs!’

He was hot all over.

‘Goo’ Lor’! She’s been pinched!’

He tugged at his collar. It was choking him.

Alf Brooks did not show up well in the first real crisis which life had forced upon him. That must be admitted. Later, when it was over, and he had leisure for self-examination, he admitted it to himself. But even then he excused himself by asking Space in a blustering manner what else he could ha’ done. And if the question did not bring much balm to his soul at the first time of asking, it proved wonderfully soothing on constant repetition. He repeated it at intervals for the next two days, and by the end of that time his cure was complete. On the third morning his ‘Milk—oo—oo’ had regained its customary carefree ring, and he was feeling that he had acted in difficult circumstances in the only possible manner.

Consider. He was Alf Brooks, well known and respected in the neighbourhood; a singer in the choir on Sundays; owner of a milk-walk in the most fashionable part of Battersea; to all practical purposes a public man. Was he to recognize, in broad daylight and in open street, a girl who walked with a policeman because she had to, a malefactor, a girl who had been pinched?

Ellen, Constable Plimmer woodenly at her side, came towards him. She was ten yards off—seven—five—three—Alf Brooks tilted his hat over his eyes and walked past her, unseeing, a stranger.

He hurried on. He was conscious of a curious feeling that somebody was just going to kick him, but he dared not look round.

Constable Plimmer eyed the middle distance with an earnest gaze. His face was redder than ever. Beneath his blue tunic strange emotions were at work. Something seemed to be filling his throat. He tried to swallow it.

He stopped in his stride. The girl glanced up at him in a kind of dull, questioning way. Their eyes met for the first time that afternoon, and it seemed to Constable Plimmer that whatever it was that was interfering with the inside of his throat had grown larger, and more unmanageable.

There was the misery of the stricken animal in her gaze. He had seen women look like that in Whitechapel. The woman to whom, indirectly, he owed his broken nose had looked like that. As his hand had fallen on the collar of the man who was kicking her to death, he had seen her eyes. They were Ellen’s eyes, as she stood there now—tortured, crushed, yet uncomplaining.

Constable Plimmer looked at Ellen, and Ellen looked at Constable Plimmer. Down the street some children were playing with a dog. In one of the flats a woman began to sing.

‘Hop it,’ said Constable Plimmer.

He spoke gruffly. He found speech difficult.

The girl started.

‘What say?’

‘Hop it. Get along. Run away.’

‘What do you mean?’

Constable Plimmer scowled. His face was scarlet. His jaw protruded like a granite break-water.

‘Go on,’ he growled. ‘Hop it. Tell him it was all a joke. I’ll explain at the station.’

Understanding seemed to come to her slowly.

‘Do you mean I’m to go?’

‘Yes.’

‘What do you mean? You aren’t going to take me to the station?’

‘No.’

She stared at him. Then, suddenly, she broke down,

‘He wouldn’t look at me. He was ashamed of me. He pretended not to see me.’

She leaned against the wall, her back shaking.

‘Well, run after him, and tell him it was all—’

‘No, no, no.’

Constable Plimmer looked morosely at the sidewalk. He kicked it

She turned. Her eyes were red, but she was no longer crying. Her chin had a brave tilt.

‘I couldn’t—not after what he did. Let’s go along. I—I don’t care.’

She looked at him curiously.

‘Were you really going to have let me go?’

Constable Plimmer nodded. He was aware of her eyes searching his face, but he did not meet them.

‘Why?’

He did not answer.

‘What would have happened to you, if you had have done?’

Constable Plimmer’s scowl was of the stuff of which nightmares are made. He kicked the unoffending sidewalk with an increased viciousness.

‘Dismissed the Force,’ he said curtly.

‘And sent to prison, too, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Maybe.’

He heard her draw a deep breath, and silence fell upon them again. The dog down the road had stopped barking. The woman in the flat had stopped singing. They were curiously alone.

‘Would you have done all that for me?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I don’t think you ever did it. Stole that money, I mean. Nor the brooch, neither.’

‘Was that all?’

‘What do you mean—all?’

‘Was that the only reason?’

He swung round on her, almost threateningly.

‘No,’ he said hoarsely. ‘No, it wasn’t, and you know it wasn’t. Well, if you want it, you can have it. It was because I love you. There! Now I’ve said it, and now you can go on and laugh at me as much as you want.’

‘I’m not laughing,’ she said soberly.

‘You think I’m a fool!’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I’m nothing to you. He’s the fellow you’re stuck on.’

She gave a little shudder.

‘No.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve changed.’ She paused. ‘I think I shall have changed more by the time I come out.’

‘Come out?’

‘Come out of prison.’

‘You’re not going to prison.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I won’t take you.’

‘Yes, you will. Think I’m going to let you get yourself in trouble like that, to get me out of a fix? Not much.’

‘You hop it, like a good girl.’

‘Not me.’

He stood looking at her like a puzzled bear.

‘They can’t eat me.’

‘They’ll cut off all of your hair.’

‘D’you like my hair?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’ll grow again.’

‘Don’t stand talking. Hop it.’

‘I won’t. Where’s the station?’

‘Next street.’

‘Well, come along, then.’

The blue glass lamp of the police-station came into sight, and for an instant she stopped. Then she was walking on again, her chin tilted. But her voice shook a little as she spoke.

‘Nearly there. Next stop, Battersea. All change! I say, mister—I don’t know your name.’

‘Plimmer’s my name, miss. Edward Plimmer.’

‘I wonder if—I mean it’ll be pretty lonely where I’m going—I wonder if—What I mean is, it would be rather a lark, when I come out, if I was to find a pal waiting for me to say “Hallo”.’

Constable Plimmer braced his ample feet against the stones, and turned purple.

‘Miss,’ he said, ‘I’ll be there, if I have to sit up all night. The first thing you’ll see when they open the doors is a great, ugly, red-faced copper with big feet and a broken nose. And if you’ll say “Hallo” to him when he says “Hallo” to you, he’ll be as pleased as Punch and as proud as a duke. And, miss’—he clenched his hands till the nails hurt the leathern flesh—’and, miss, there’s just one thing more I’d like to say. You’ll be having a good deal of time to yourself for awhile; you’ll be able to do a good bit of thinking without anyone to disturb you; and what I’d like you to give your mind to, if you don’t object, is just to think whether you can’t forget that narrow-chested, God-forsaken blighter who treated you so mean, and get half-way fond of someone who knows jolly well you’re the only girl there is.’

She looked past him at the lamp which hung, blue and forbidding, over the station door.

‘How long’ll I get?’ she said. ‘What will they give me? Thirty days?’

He nodded.

‘It won’t take me as long as that,’ she said. ‘I say, what do people call you?—people who are fond of you, I mean?—Eddie or Ted?’

A SEA OF TROUBLES

Mr Meggs’s mind was made up. He was going to commit suicide.

There had been moments, in the interval which had elapsed between the first inception of the idea and his present state of fixed determination, when he had wavered. In these moments he had debated, with Hamlet, the question whether it was nobler in the mind to suffer, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. But all that was over now. He was resolved.

Mr Meggs’s point, the main plank, as it were, in his suicidal platform, was that with him it was beside the question whether or not it was nobler to suffer in the mind. The mind hardly entered into it at all. What he had to decide was whether it was worth while putting up any longer with the perfectly infernal pain in his stomach. For Mr Meggs was a martyr to indigestion. As he was also devoted to the pleasures of the table, life had become for him one long battle, in which, whatever happened, he always got the worst of it.

He was sick of it. He looked back down the vista of the years, and found therein no hope for the future. One after the other all the patent medicines in creation had failed him. Smith’s Supreme Digestive Pellets—he had given them a more than fair trial. Blenkinsop’s Liquid Life-Giver—he had drunk enough of it to float a ship. Perkins’s Premier Pain-Preventer, strongly recommended by the sword-swallowing lady at Barnum and Bailey’s—he had wallowed in it. And so on down the list. His interior organism had simply sneered at the lot of them.

‘Death, where is thy sting?’ thought Mr Meggs, and forthwith began to make his preparations.

Those who have studied the matter say that the tendency to commit suicide is greatest among those who have passed their fifty-fifth year, and that the rate is twice as great for unoccupied males as for occupied males. Unhappy Mr Meggs, accordingly, got it, so to speak, with both barrels. He was fifty-six, and he was perhaps the most unoccupied adult to be found in the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. He toiled not, neither did he spin. Twenty years before, an unexpected legacy had placed him in a position to indulge a natural taste for idleness to the utmost. He was at that time, as regards his professional life, a clerk in a rather obscure shipping firm. Out of office hours he had a mild fondness for letters, which took the form of meaning to read right through the hundred best books one day, but actually contenting himself with the daily paper and an occasional magazine.

Such was Mr Meggs at thirty-six. The necessity for working for a living and a salary too small to permit of self-indulgence among the more expensive and deleterious dishes on the bill of fare had up to that time kept his digestion within reasonable bounds. Sometimes he had twinges; more often he had none.

Then came the legacy, and with it Mr Meggs let himself go. He left London and retired to his native village, where, with a French cook and a series of secretaries to whom he dictated at long intervals occasional paragraphs of a book on British Butterflies on which he imagined himself to be at work, he passed the next twenty years. He could afford to do himself well, and he did himself extremely well. Nobody urged him to take exercise, so he took no exercise. Nobody warned him of the perils of lobster and welsh rabbits to a man of sedentary habits, for it was nobody’s business to warn him. On the contrary, people rather encouraged the lobster side of his character, for he was a hospitable soul and liked to have his friends dine with him. The result was that Nature, as is her wont, laid for him, and got him. It seemed to Mr Meggs that he woke one morning to find himself a chronic dyspeptic. That was one of the hardships of his position, to his mind. The thing seemed to hit him suddenly out of a blue sky. One moment, all appeared to be peace and joy; the next, a lively and irritable wild-cat with red-hot claws seemed somehow to have introduced itself into his interior.

So Mr Meggs decided to end it.

In this crisis of his life the old methodical habits of his youth returned to him. A man cannot be a clerk in even an obscure firm of shippers for a great length of time without acquiring system, and Mr Meggs made his preparations calmly and with a forethought worthy of a better cause.

And so we find him, one glorious June morning, seated at his desk, ready for the end.

Outside, the sun beat down upon the orderly streets of the village. Dogs dozed in the warm dust. Men who had to work went about their toil moistly, their minds far away in shady public-houses.

But Mr Meggs, in his study, was cool both in mind and body.

Before him, on the desk, lay six little slips of paper. They were bank-notes, and they represented, with the exception of a few pounds, his entire worldly wealth. Beside them were six letters, six envelopes, and six postage stamps. Mr Meggs surveyed them calmly.

He would not have admitted it, but he had had a lot of fun writing those letters. The deliberation as to who should be his heirs had occupied him pleasantly for several days, and, indeed, had taken his mind off his internal pains at times so thoroughly that he had frequently surprised himself in an almost cheerful mood. Yes, he would have denied it, but it had been great sport sitting in his arm-chair, thinking whom he should pick out from England’s teeming millions to make happy with his money. All sorts of schemes had passed through his mind. He had a sense of power which the mere possession of the money had never given him. He began to understand why millionaires make freak wills. At one time he had toyed with the idea of selecting someone at random from the London Directory and bestowing on him all he had to bequeath. He had only abandoned the scheme when it occurred to him that he himself would not be in a position to witness the recipient’s stunned delight. And what was the good of starting a thing like that, if you were not to be in at the finish?

Sentiment succeeded whimsicality. His old friends of the office—those were the men to benefit. What good fellows they had been! Some were dead, but he still kept intermittently in touch with half a dozen of them. And—an important point—he knew their present addresses.

This point was important, because Mr Meggs had decided not to leave a will, but to send the money direct to the beneficiaries. He knew what wills were. Even in quite straightforward circumstances they often made trouble. There had been some slight complication about his own legacy twenty years ago. Somebody had contested the will, and before the thing was satisfactorily settled the lawyers had got away with about twenty per cent of the whole. No, no wills. If he made one, and then killed himself, it might be upset on a plea of insanity. He knew of no relative who might consider himself entitled to the money, but there was the chance that some remote cousin existed; and then the comrades of his youth might fail to collect after all.

He declined to run the risk. Quietly and by degrees he had sold out the stocks and shares in which his fortune was invested, and deposited the money in his London bank. Six piles of large notes, dividing the total into six equal parts; six letters couched in a strain of reminiscent pathos and manly resignation; six envelopes, legibly addressed; six postage-stamps; and that part of his preparations was complete. He licked the stamps and placed them on the envelopes; took the notes and inserted them in the letters; folded the letters and thrust them into the envelopes; sealed the envelopes; and unlocking the drawer of his desk produced a small, black, ugly-looking bottle.

He opened the bottle and poured the contents into a medicine-glass.

It had not been without considerable thought that Mr Meggs had decided upon the method of his suicide. The knife, the pistol, the rope—they had all presented their charms to him. He had further examined the merits of drowning and of leaping to destruction from a height.

There were flaws in each. Either they were painful, or else they were messy. Mr Meggs had a tidy soul, and he revolted from the thought of spoiling his figure, as he would most certainly do if he drowned himself; or the carpet, as he would if he used the pistol; or the pavement—and possibly some innocent pedestrian, as must infallibly occur should he leap off the Monument. The knife was out of the question. Instinct told him that it would hurt like the very dickens.

No; poison was the thing. Easy to take, quick to work, and on the whole rather agreeable than otherwise.

Mr Meggs hid the glass behind the inkpot and rang the bell.

‘Has Miss Pillenger arrived?’ he inquired of the servant.

‘She has just come, sir.’

‘Tell her that I am waiting for her here.’

Jane Pillenger was an institution. Her official position was that of private secretary and typist to Mr Meggs. That is to say, on the rare occasions when Mr Meggs’s conscience overcame his indolence to the extent of forcing him to resume work on his British Butterflies, it was to Miss Pillenger that he addressed the few rambling and incoherent remarks which constituted his idea of a regular hard, slogging spell of literary composition. When he sank back in his chair, speechless and exhausted like a Marathon runner who has started his sprint a mile or two too soon, it was Miss Pillenger’s task to unscramble her shorthand notes, type them neatly, and place them in their special drawer in the desk.

Miss Pillenger was a wary spinster of austere views, uncertain age, and a deep-rooted suspicion of men—a suspicion which, to do an abused sex justice, they had done nothing to foster. Men had always been almost coldly correct in their dealings with Miss Pillenger. In her twenty years of experience as a typist and secretary she had never had to refuse with scorn and indignation so much as a box of chocolates from any of her employers. Nevertheless, she continued to be icily on her guard. The clenched fist of her dignity was always drawn back, ready to swing on the first male who dared to step beyond the bounds of professional civility.

Such was Miss Pillenger. She was the last of a long line of unprotected English girlhood which had been compelled by straitened circumstances to listen for hire to the appallingly dreary nonsense which Mr Meggs had to impart on the subject of British Butterflies. Girls had come, and girls had gone, blondes, ex-blondes, brunettes, ex-brunettes, near-blondes, near-brunettes; they had come buoyant, full of hope and life, tempted by the lavish salary which Mr Meggs had found himself after a while compelled to pay; and they had dropped off, one after another, like exhausted bivalves, unable to endure the crushing boredom of life in the village which had given Mr Meggs to the world. For Mr Meggs’s home-town was no City of Pleasure. Remove the Vicar’s magic-lantern and the try-your-weight machine opposite the post office, and you practically eliminated the temptations to tread the primrose path. The only young men in the place were silent, gaping youths, at whom lunacy commissioners looked sharply and suspiciously when they met. The tango was unknown, and the one-step. The only form of dance extant—and that only at the rarest intervals—was a sort of polka not unlike the movements of a slightly inebriated boxing kangaroo. Mr Meggs’s secretaries and typists gave the town one startled, horrified glance, and stampeded for London like frightened ponies.

Not so Miss Pillenger. She remained. She was a business woman, and it was enough for her that she received a good salary. For five pounds a week she would have undertaken a post as secretary and typist to a Polar Expedition. For six years she had been with Mr Meggs, and doubtless she looked forward to being with him at least six years more.

Perhaps it was the pathos of this thought which touched Mr Meggs, as she sailed, notebook in hand, through the doorway of the study. Here, he told himself, was a confiding girl, all unconscious of impending doom, relying on him as a daughter relies on her father. He was glad that he had not forgotten Miss Pillenger when he was making his preparations.

He had certainly not forgotten Miss Pillenger. On his desk beside the letters lay a little pile of notes, amounting in all to five hundred pounds—her legacy.

Miss Pillenger was always business-like. She sat down in her chair, opened her notebook, moistened her pencil, and waited expectantly for Mr Meggs to dear his throat and begin work on the butterflies. She was surprised when, instead of frowning, as was his invariable practice when bracing himself for composition, he bestowed upon her a sweet, slow smile.

All that was maidenly and defensive in Miss Pillenger leaped to arms under that smile. It ran in and out among her nerve-centres. It had been long in arriving, this moment of crisis, but here it undoubtedly was at last. After twenty years an employer was going to court disaster by trying to flirt with her.

Mr Meggs went on smiling. You cannot classify smiles. Nothing lends itself so much to a variety of interpretations as a smile. Mr Meggs thought he was smiling the sad, tender smile of a man who, knowing himself to be on the brink of the tomb, bids farewell to a faithful employee. Miss Pillenger’s view was that he was smiling like an abandoned old rip who ought to have been ashamed of himself.

‘No, Miss Pillenger,’ said Mr Meggs, ‘I shall not work this morning. I shall want you, if you will be so good, to post these six letters for me.’

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 for ever 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 home-town 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 wild-cat 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 folk-lore 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 Encyclopaedia 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 instalments on the Encyclopaedia 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 Encyclopaedia 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 Encyclopaedia 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 Bonnie 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 Encyclopaedia. 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.’

There was no doubt or hesitation about the date this time. It was grappled to his memory by hoops of steel owing to the singular coincidence of it being also his telephone number. He gave it out with a roll, and the girl’s eyes widened.

‘What an awful lot you know!’

‘Oh, no,’ said Henry, modestly. ‘I read a great deal.’

‘It must be splendid to know a lot,’ she said, wistfully. ‘I’ve never had time for reading. I’ve always wanted to. I think you’re wonderful!’

Henry’s soul was expanding like a flower and purring like a well-tickled cat. Never in his life had he been admired by a woman. The sensation was intoxicating.

Silence fell upon them. They started to walk back to the farm, warned by the distant ringing of a bell that supper was about to materialize. It was not a musical bell, but distance and the magic of this unusual moment lent it charm. The sun was setting. It threw a crimson carpet across the silvery lake. The air was very still. The creatures, unclassified by science, who might have been mistaken for mosquitoes had their presence been possible at Ye Bonnie Briar-Bush Farm, were biting harder than ever. But Henry heeded them not. He did not even slap at them. They drank their fill of his blood and went away to put their friends on to this good thing; but for Henry they did not exist. Strange things were happening to him. And, lying awake that night in bed, he recognized the truth. He was in love.

After that, for the remainder of his stay, they were always together. They walked in the woods, they sat by the silvery lake. He poured out the treasures of his learning for her, and she looked at him with reverent eyes, uttering from time to time a soft ‘Yes’ or a musical ‘Gee!’

In due season Henry went back to New York.

‘You’re dead wrong about love, Mills,’ said his sentimental fellow-cashier, shortly after his return. ‘You ought to get married.’

‘I’m going to,’ replied Henry, briskly. ‘Week tomorrow.’

Which stunned the other so thoroughly that he gave a customer who entered at that moment fifteen dollars for a ten-dollar cheque, and had to do some excited telephoning after the bank had closed.

Henry’s first year as a married man was the happiest of his life. He had always heard this period described as the most perilous of matrimony. He had braced himself for clashings of tastes, painful adjustments of character, sudden and unavoidable quarrels. Nothing of the kind happened. From the very beginning they settled down in perfect harmony. She merged with his life as smoothly as one river joins another. He did not even have to alter his habits. Every morning he had his breakfast at eight, smoked a cigarette, and walked to the Underground. At five he left the bank, and at six he arrived home, for it was his practice to walk the first two miles of the way, breathing deeply and regularly. Then dinner. Then the quiet evening. Sometimes the moving-pictures, but generally the quiet evening, he reading the Encyclopaedia—aloud now—Minnie darning his socks, but never ceasing to listen.

Each day brought the same sense of grateful amazement that he should be so wonderfully happy, so extraordinarily peaceful. Everything was as perfect as it could be. Minnie was looking a different girl. She had lost her drawn look. She was filling out.

Sometimes he would suspend his reading for a moment, and look across at her. At first he would see only her soft hair, as she bent over her sewing. Then, wondering at the silence, she would look up, and he would meet her big eyes. And then Henry would gurgle with happiness, and demand of himself, silently:

‘Can you beat it!’

It was the anniversary of their wedding. They celebrated it in fitting style. They dined at a crowded and exhilarating Italian restaurant on a street off Seventh Avenue, where red wine was included in the bill, and excitable people, probably extremely clever, sat round at small tables and talked all together at the top of their voices. After dinner they saw a musical comedy. And then—the great event of the night—they went on to supper at a glittering restaurant near Times Square.

There was something about supper at an expensive restaurant which had always appealed to Henry’s imagination. Earnest devourer as he was of the solids of literature, he had tasted from time to time its lighter face—those novels which begin with the hero supping in the midst of the glittering throng and having his attention attracted to a distinguished-looking elderly man with a grey imperial who is entering with a girl so strikingly beautiful that the revellers turn, as she passes, to look after her. And then, as he sits and smokes, a waiter comes up to the hero and, with a soft ‘Pardon, m’sieu!‘ hands him a note.

The atmosphere of Geisenheimer’s suggested all that sort of thing to Henry. They had finished supper, and he was smoking a cigar—his second that day. He leaned back in his chair and surveyed the scene. He felt braced up, adventurous. He had that feeling, which comes to all quiet men who like to sit at home and read, that this was the sort of atmosphere in which he really belonged. The brightness of it all—the dazzling lights, the music, the hubbub, in which the deep-throated gurgle of the wine-agent surprised while drinking soup blended with the shriller note of the chorus-girl calling to her mate—these things got Henry. He was thirty-six next birthday, but he felt a youngish twenty-one.

A voice spoke at his side. Henry looked up, to perceive Sidney Mercer.

The passage of a year, which had turned Henry into a married man, had turned Sidney Mercer into something so magnificent that the spectacle for a moment deprived Henry of speech. Faultless evening dress clung with loving closeness to Sidney’s lissom form. Gleaming shoes of perfect patent leather covered his feet. His light hair was brushed back into a smooth sleekness on which the electric lights shone like stars on some beautiful pool. His practically chinless face beamed amiably over a spotless collar.

Henry wore blue serge.

‘What are you doing here, Henry, old top?’ said the vision. ‘I didn’t know you ever came among the bright lights.’

His eyes wandered off to Minnie. There was admiration in them, for Minnie was looking her prettiest.

‘Wife,’ said Henry, recovering speech. And to Minnie: ‘Mr Mercer. Old friend.’

‘So you’re married? Wish you luck. How’s the bank?’

Henry said the bank was doing as well as could be expected.

‘You still on the stage?’

Mr Mercer shook his head importantly.

‘Got better job. Professional dancer at this show. Rolling in money. Why aren’t you dancing?’

The words struck a jarring note. The lights and the music until that moment had had a subtle psychological effect on Henry, enabling him to hypnotize himself into a feeling that it was not inability to dance that kept him in his seat, but that he had had so much of that sort of thing that he really preferred to sit quietly and look on for a change. Sidney’s question changed all that. It made him face the truth.

‘I don’t dance.’

‘For the love of Mike! I bet Mrs Mills does. Would you care for a turn, Mrs Mills?’

‘No, thank you, really.’

But remorse was now at work on Henry. He perceived that he had been standing in the way of Minnie’s pleasure. Of course she wanted to dance. All women did. She was only refusing for his sake.

‘Nonsense, Min. Go to it.’

Minnie looked doubtful.

‘Of course you must dance, Min. I shall be all right. I’ll sit here and smoke.’

The next moment Minnie and Sidney were treading the complicated measure; and simultaneously Henry ceased to be a youngish twenty-one and was even conscious of a fleeting doubt as to whether he was really only thirty-five.

Boil the whole question of old age down, and what it amounts to is that a man is young as long as he can dance without getting lumbago, and, if he cannot dance, he is never young at all. This was the truth that forced itself upon Henry Wallace Mills, as he sat watching his wife moving over the floor in the arms of Sidney Mercer. Even he could see that Minnie danced well. He thrilled at the sight of her gracefulness; and for the first time since his marriage he became introspective. It had never struck him before how much younger Minnie was than himself. When she had signed the paper at the City Hall on the occasion of the purchase of the marriage licence, she had given her age, he remembered now, as twenty-six. It had made no impression on him at the time. Now, however, he perceived clearly that between twenty-six and thirty-five there was a gap of nine years; and a chill sensation came upon him of being old and stodgy. How dull it must be for poor little Minnie to be cooped up night after night with such an old fogy? Other men took their wives out and gave them a good time, dancing half the night with them. All he could do was to sit at home and read Minnie dull stuff from the Encyclopaedia. What a life for the poor child! Suddenly, he felt acutely jealous of the rubber-jointed Sidney Mercer, a man whom hitherto he had always heartily despised.

The music stopped. They came back to the table, Minnie with a pink glow on her face that made her younger than ever; Sidney, the insufferable ass, grinning and smirking and pretending to be eighteen. They looked like a couple of children—Henry, catching sight of himself in a mirror, was surprised to find that his hair was not white.

Half an hour later, in the cab going home, Minnie, half asleep, was aroused by a sudden stiffening of the arm that encircled her waist and a sudden snort dose to her ear.

It was Henry Wallace Mills resolving that he would learn to dance.

Being of a literary turn of mind and also economical, Henry’s first step towards his new ambition was to buy a fifty-cent book entitled The ABC of Modern Dancing, by ‘Tango’. It would, he felt—not without reason—be simpler and less expensive if he should learn the steps by the aid of this treatise than by the more customary method of taking lessons. But quite early in the proceedings he was faced by complications. In the first place, it was his intention to keep what he was doing a secret from Minnie, in order to be able to give her a pleasant surprise on her birthday, which would be coming round in a few weeks. In the second place, The ABC of Modern Dancing proved on investigation far more complex than its title suggested.

These two facts were the ruin of the literary method, for, while it was possible to study the text and the plates at the bank, the home was the only place in which he could attempt to put the instructions into practice. You cannot move the right foot along dotted line A B and bring the left foot round curve C D in a paying-cashier’s cage in a bank, nor, if you are at all sensitive to public opinion, on the pavement going home. And while he was trying to do it in the parlour of the flat one night when he imagined that Minnie was in the kitchen cooking supper, she came in unexpectedly to ask how he wanted the steak cooked. He explained that he had had a sudden touch of cramp, but the incident shook his nerve.

After this he decided that he must have lessons.

Complications did not cease with this resolve. Indeed, they became more acute. It was not that there was any difficulty about finding an instructor. The papers were full of their advertisements. He selected a Mme Gavarni because she lived in a convenient spot. Her house was in a side street, with a station within easy reach. The real problem was when to find time for the lessons. His life was run on such a regular schedule that he could hardly alter so important a moment in it as the hour of his arrival home without exciting comment. Only deceit could provide a solution.

‘Min, dear,’ he said at breakfast

‘Yes, Henry?’

Henry turned mauve. He had never lied to her before.

‘I’m not getting enough exercise.’

‘Why you look so well.’

‘I get a kind of heavy feeling sometimes. I think I’ll put on another mile or so to my walk on my way home. So—so I’ll be back a little later in future.’

‘Very well, dear.’

It made him feel like a particularly low type of criminal, but, by abandoning his walk, he was now in a position to devote an hour a day to the lessons; and Mme Gavarni had said that that would be ample.

‘Sure, Bill,’ she had said. She was a breezy old lady with a military moustache and an unconventional manner with her clientele. ‘You come to me an hour a day, and, if you haven’t two left feet, we’ll make you the pet of society in a month.’

‘Is that so?’

‘It sure is. I never had a failure yet with a pupe, except one. And that wasn’t my fault.’

‘Had he two left feet?’

‘Hadn’t any feet at all. Fell off of a roof after the second lesson, and had to have ‘em cut off him. At that, I could have learned him to tango with wooden legs, only he got kind of discouraged. Well, see you Monday, Bill. Be good.’

And the kindly old soul, retrieving her chewing gum from the panel of the door where she had placed it to facilitate conversation, dismissed him.

And now began what, in later years, Henry unhesitatingly considered the most miserable period of his existence. There may be times when a man who is past his first youth feels more unhappy and ridiculous than when he is taking a course of lessons in the modern dance, but it is not easy to think of them. Physically, his new experience caused Henry acute pain. Muscles whose existence he had never suspected came into being for—apparently—the sole purpose of aching. Mentally he suffered even more.

This was partly due to the peculiar method of instruction in vogue at Mme Gavarni’s, and partly to the fact that, when it came to the actual lessons, a sudden niece was produced from a back room to give them. She was a blonde young lady with laughing blue eyes, and Henry never clasped her trim waist without feeling a black-hearted traitor to his absent Minnie. Conscience racked him. Add to this the sensation of being a strange, jointless creature with abnormally large hands and feet, and the fact that it was Mme Gavarni’s custom to stand in a corner of the room during the hour of tuition, chewing gum and making comments, and it is not surprising that Henry became wan and thin.

Mme Gavarni had the trying habit of endeavouring to stimulate Henry by frequently comparing his performance and progress with that of a cripple whom she claimed to have taught at some previous time.

She and the niece would have spirited arguments in his presence as to whether or not the cripple had one-stepped better after his third lesson than Henry after his fifth. The niece said no. As well, perhaps, but not better. Mme Gavarni said that the niece was forgetting the way the cripple had slid his feet. The niece said yes, that was so, maybe she was. Henry said nothing. He merely perspired.

He made progress slowly. This could not be blamed upon his instructress, however. She did all that one woman could to speed him up. Sometimes she would even pursue him into the street in order to show him on the sidewalk a means of doing away with some of his numerous errors of technique, the elimination of which would help to make him definitely the cripple’s superior. The misery of embracing her indoors was as nothing to the misery of embracing her on the sidewalk.

Nevertheless, having paid for his course of lessons in advance, and being a determined man, he did make progress. One day, to his surprise, he found his feet going through the motions without any definite exercise of will-power on his part—almost as if they were endowed with an intelligence of their own. It was the turning-point. It filled him with a singular pride such as he had not felt since his first rise of salary at the bank.

Mme Gavarni was moved to dignified praise.

‘Some speed, kid!’ she observed. ‘Some speed!’

Henry blushed modestly. It was the accolade.

Every day, as his skill at the dance became more manifest, Henry found occasion to bless the moment when he had decided to take lessons. He shuddered sometimes at the narrowness of his escape from disaster. Every day now it became more apparent to him, as he watched Minnie, that she was chafing at the monotony of her life. That fatal supper had wrecked the peace of their little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight settled on the home.

Little by little Minnie and he were growing almost formal towards each other. She had lost her taste for being read to in the evenings and had developed a habit of pleading a headache and going early to bed. Sometimes, catching her eye when she was not expecting it, he surprised an enigmatic look in it. It was a look, however, which he was able to read. It meant that she was bored.

It might have been expected that this state of affairs would have distressed Henry. It gave him, on the contrary, a pleasurable thrill. It made him feel that it had been worth it, going through the torments of learning to dance. The more bored she was now the greater her delight when he revealed himself dramatically. If she had been contented with the life which he could offer her as a non-dancer, what was the sense of losing weight and money in order to learn the steps? He enjoyed the silent, uneasy evenings which had supplanted those cheery ones of the first year of their marriage. The more uncomfortable they were now, the more they would appreciate their happiness later on. Henry belonged to the large circle of human beings who consider that there is acuter pleasure in being suddenly cured of toothache than in never having toothache at all.

He merely chuckled inwardly, therefore, when, on the morning of her birthday, having presented her with a purse which he knew she had long coveted, he found himself thanked in a perfunctory and mechanical way.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ he said.

Minnie looked at the purse without enthusiasm.

‘It’s just what I wanted,’ she said, listlessly.

‘Well, I must be going. I’ll get the tickets for the theatre while I’m in town.’

Minnie hesitated for a moment.

‘I don’t believe I want to go to the theatre much tonight, Henry.’

‘Nonsense. We must have a party on your birthday. We’ll go to the theatre and then we’ll have supper at Geisenheimer’s again. I may be working after hours at the bank today, so I guess I won’t come home. I’ll meet you at that Italian place at six.’