The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories (10 page)

“I dare say Mr. Agg wouldn't mind,” suggested Widgeon heartily, “if you went with me to the pictures one of these afternoons.”

“He'd mind something awful. He's that jealous!”

“Then we'd better not,” Widgeon answered at once. “But don't you forget you've got a friend. You have a word with me when you feel downhearted, see, Mrs. Agg?”

“You don't care,” she sighed. “You don't even ask me what my name is.”

“Tell me then,” he said, giving her arm a squeeze.

“When I like people, I let them call me Veeolett,” replied Mrs. Agg archly. “It's so much nicer than plain Vi'let, don't you think?”

“It sounds sort of French to me,” objected Widgeon.

“It's not French, silly—it's Hollywood. Veeolett! There! You say it!”

“Well, Veeolett,” said Widgeon self-consciously.

“And what's your name?”

“You call me Widgeon. Just Widgeon,” he answered firmly.

“Your Christian name, I mean. I can't call you Widgeon. Widgeon!” she mocked him, imitating the accent of the employing class. “Ah, Widgeon, bring me a whiskeh and sodah, will yah?”

“Go on with you!” said Widgeon.

Encouraged by this flirtatiousness, he put his arm round her shoulders.

“What's your real name?” she asked, snuggling against him.

“Well, if you must know, it's Adolphus,” he said.

“Now you're making fun of me. What is it? Tell me true.”

“It's Adolphus, I tell you,” Widgeon answered, with the natural annoyance of a man who has had his darkest secret dragged out of him and then is not believed.

“I'll call you Dolf,” she said. “It suits you, like. “You're so strong.”

“Am I?” he asked.

He did not give himself credit for more than a healthy, stocky body. But since she said so, he supposed that he was, after all, considerably stronger than the average. At any rate, he thought, he could lift a trunk as well as Agg.

“H'm'mm,” she purred, nodding her head.

She slid lightly against him so that the arm which, all comradely, had been pressing to him a thin shoulder found itself suddenly contracted about more appealing softness.

“You didn't ought to have done that,” she murmured plaintively, opening fascinated blue eyes.

Her mouth quivered. Widgeon bent his head and kissed her. His conventional gesture—for it was hardly more—was seized upon, transmuted, returned, halted, renewed, and drawn out into a soft clinging of apparently innumerable lips.

“Dolf!” whispered Mrs. Agg. “You dear!”

Widgeon shifted his grip and devoured Violet's pale and dreaming face with kisses that were less artistic than that supreme effort in which she had played the active part, but thoroughly exciting to both parties.

Mrs. Agg gave a little shriek.

“Oh, look!” she cried. “You've torn my frock! What did you want to go and do that for, silly?”

“I'll show you what I did that for,” said Widgeon hoarsely.

But he was unaware of having torn it; indeed, so far as he was capable of noticing details, he was almost certain that it had been done by Violet herself in a spasmodic and virginal clutch at her breast.

Owing to street lamps, the ubiquity of Mr. Agg, and Widgeon's own scruples,—too weak to avoid her entirely but too strong to plot a definite time and place for privacy,—his relationship with Mrs. Agg remained sentimental and frustrated. If he had a word with the porter in the basement or the hall, she contrived to be there, holding him with sad ghosts of smiles from behind her husband's back—not in derision of Mr. Agg but yearningly as if to remind him that she suffered. If he left the building, she was drooping in his path on the way back.

Widgeon was busy from seven to nine, when Mr. Trimlake left for his office. He then had little to do till six in the evening when his gentleman usually, but not always, returned before going out to dine. It was understood that his time was his own so long as he took responsibility for all the domestic arrangements and remained in the flat from 6 pm onwards. If Mr. Trimlake unexpectedly returned in the middle of the day and found his manservant out, he had no objection; but if he returned at 2 am he expected service. Widgeon did the buying, paid the bills and even the rent. He was trusted as if he had been a wife—an Oriental wife, courteous, careful of the owner's comfort, always at hand when required.

With so much spare time, and Mrs. Agg on watch at the service entrance to the building, he was a haunted man. When Agg at last and deservedly got the sack, his first sensation was relief.

“Will you miss me?” she asked.

She stood submissively before him in the shadow of the mews. Her slender body drooped as if it found the weight of the brutal world too heavy.

“Of course I will, little woman,” he answered with gruff tenderness. “Still, we can't go on like this forever, can we?”

“Oh, Dolf! Do you want me that much?” she whispered.

It seemed to Widgeon that his remark had been misinterpreted. But he could not deny that he wanted her—immediately and urgently. She squirmed under his kisses, turning and twisting to avoid them, yet managing a continuous contact.

“I'm so glad you're in service, Dolf,” she said.

“Why's that, baby?”

“It's helped me not to do nothing wrong. And we couldn't ever meet downstairs with my hubby around all the time.”

Widgeon held her close.

“As soon as you get a home of your own,” he said, “I'm going to drop in for a cup of tea when you're alone.”

“No!” she panted. “No! No! Promise me you won't come, Dolf! Don't make me do what I didn't ought!”

“Aren't we going to see each other any more then?”

“Perhaps. But I don't know what'll become of us, Agg and me. I'll write to you soon. Oh, Dolf, what do you want to make me feel this way for?”

The departure of the Aggs did not leave Widgeon as contented as he expected. True, it was pleasant to stay as long as one liked at the Rising Sun without worrying whether Violet was catching cold on the corner—she had taken a perverse delight in waiting for him whenever it rained—and a relief to talk business to the porter without being distracted by a delicately sloped and heaving bosom—she had breathed swiftly and passionately whenever he came near her. Yet she excited his memory. Her shrinking and giving, her fluttering in and out of his passion like a moth round a lamp, had turned him also into a moth. She wanted making love to good and proper, he said to himself with a shade of brutality. Good and proper.

Widgeon never considered entertaining Violet Agg in his own room while Trimlake was away. He had the greatest horror of introducing a woman into his gentleman's house. It was more than a point of honor—it was a taboo. As for street corners and public gardens, they did not interest him; they offered sufficient opportunity to get what he wanted from the ordinary pick-up, but not from this damnably appealing Violet. She was so shrinking, drooping, tearful, and passionate that the preliminaries to her surrender tempted him much more than the surrender itself. And in parks and dark alleys preliminaries were necessarily short and coarse.

He found half a dozen excellent reasons why he should not continue to live under the same roof as his gentleman, without admitting to himself the true one. He did not even admit the strong attraction that was drawing him to Mrs. Agg. He cursed her, thrust her out of his mind, and was conscious only of a vague discontent.

“You ain't been yourself lately, Mr. Widgeon,” said Mrs. Hussey while he was in her kitchen polishing the silver.

He was on excellent terms with the maidservants of the other flats and seldom spent the allowance which Mr. Trimlake made him for his lunch, accepting the hospitality of Mrs. Hussey or some other friendly cook. None of the tenants had any objection to finding Widgeon in his or her kitchen. He was always willing to clean the silver, press a suit, or wait at table, and earned in his spare time an income from tips that averaged over ten shillings a week.

“Same as usual,” answered the manservant. “Same as usual. That's me.”

“Same as grandma!” declared Mrs. Hussey. “Bless you, Mr. Widgeon! I can tell 'ow you're feeling by the way you washes up the breakfast things. When there ain't a good 'earty clatter and the tap don't run free and easy like, I says to myself—there, I says, Mr. Widgeon got out the wrong side of bed this morning!”

Widgeon laughed. In spite of the formality with which they treated one another, he knew that Mrs. Hussey was just as fond of him as he of her.

“Well, there's something in what you say, Mrs. Hussey. The truth is, I've been thinking.”

“A—ah,” said the cook disapprovingly. “I knew there was summat.”

“There's times I fair hate service, Mrs. Hussey. It's not a man's life.”

“A nice obliging young fellow like you!” she reproached him. “The times I've 'eard that! There was the butler in an 'ouse where I was once,—Mr. Soames, 'is name was,—and every month, reg'lar as clockwork, 'e used to say to me: ‘Mrs. 'Ussey,' he said, ‘if something don't 'appen soon, I'm going to run away to sea.'”

“And did he?” asked Widgeon, interested.

He knew exactly what Mr. Soames had felt.

“Of course not! Why, 'e couldn't run unless it was to catch the boot boy. And Mr. Soames at sea! 'E was that fond of 'is comforts, 'e was!”

Mrs. Hussey's broad white apron front heaved up, seeming to fill the little tiled kitchen with such a wave of vital energy that Widgeon involuntarily stepped back. It was all the laugh that she ever allowed herself. One single heave—and then her body rested full and tranquil as the surface of a tidal river after the convulsion of the bore.

“All the same,” he said, “a man does want more freedom than he gets in this job.”

“You couldn't 'ardly 'ave more, Mr. Widgeon—meaning no offense. And you've got a nice room and no call to complain.”

“Nor they haven't in one of these modern jails,” answered Widgeon.

“You 'ave got it bad, and no mistake! But don't you go grumbling at service, Mr. Widgeon. There's them as looks down on it. But it takes all sorts to make a world—that's what I say.”

“It'd be all right if a man could live out,” he said.

“Live out!” exclaimed Mrs. Hussey, appalled by such extravagance. “'Ave you been listening to Mrs. Agg, Mr. Widgeon?” she added suspiciously.

Widgeon glared. Mrs. Agg had been hidden deep down under several layers of consciousness. Her image was dragged, dangling and naked, to the surface, tearing raggedly through all the inhibitions in its way.

“Mrs. Agg?” he asked, ferociously polishing a dessert spoon. “And what would she have to do with it?”

“Lor' bless you—'twas only a joke,” pattered Mrs. Hussey, alarmed. “We all says things for fun like, as we don't 'ardly mean.”

“That's all right,” Widgeon reassured her. “What did she say now, between friends?”

“Well, it weren't much,” the cook answered. “She no more than said she was surprised that a young fellow like you didn't 'ave a home of 'is own. Asking me a heap of questions, she was—whether you didn't 'ave a young lady and so on. I told her straight: ‘Mrs. Agg,' I says, ‘I've enough to do in my kitchen without watching of Mr. Widgeon.' She's a bad lot, she is. I wouldn't be in Agg's shoes for much, I wouldn't!”

“You've no call to say that, Mrs. Hussey,” replied Widgeon sharply. “I should have thought you'd be above all the gossip that goes on in this house.”

“And so I am!” answered the cook indignantly. “No one can say as I ever gossips, Mr. Widgeon. I knows what I knows and I keeps it to meself, and if a certain party comes to me and tells me she saw you and Mrs. Agg in the mews I 'aven't nothing to say against either of you, Mr. Widgeon. I just says it might be Mr. Widgeon or it might not and I've got nothing against Vi'let Agg, I says, though if I was to out with what I thought, I'd say if it weren't Mr. Widgeon it'd be another, I says, and we all know what men are, though what a man could see in a little milk-face what ain't 'ardly decently dressed and wouldn't say boo to a goose unless she'd seen it on the pictures, that's what I don't understand, I says. But gossip, Mr. Widgeon—I'll 'ave you know that not a word of gossip 'as ever passed my lips.”

Widgeon wiped the last batch of forks and laid them respectfully in their green baize nest, while Mrs. Hussey recovered her breath.

“Is there anything further I can do for you, Mrs. Hussey?” he asked with cold politeness.

“Not unless you'd care to 'ave a bite to eat with me,” said the cook, cheerfully refusing to take any notice of the sudden chill. “There's 'alf a game pie in the fridge what I've kept special for you, Mr. Widgeon.”

“Thank you. Another time, Mrs. Hussey,” he answered. “I have lunched.”

To Widgeon Mrs. Hussey's remarks were uncalled for and blasphemous. That his tender, virginal Violet should have become the butt of a dozen coarse old women just because of her frightened longing to escape from loneliness and a feckless, drunken husband aroused all the protective instincts in him. He no longer thought of her as an attractive creature to be cautiously avoided. He adored her. She was a defenseless flower dependent utterly on his care for her. Widgeon decided to take a room of his own and let the consequences be what they might.

Mr. Trimlake arrived home at six and announced his intention of dining in. As a rule Widgeon disliked cooking for his gentleman. It was not the preparation of food that offended him,—for though he only knew a few simple dishes he made them well and liked them to be enjoyed,—but the washing-up afterwards. Like most amateur cooks he dirtied twice as many pans, saucers, and spoons as the professional, and the more hints and tips he received from Mrs. Hussey and others, the worse was the subsequent mess. On this occasion, however, he was glad to be cook since he could ensure that his gentleman would enjoy a suave after-dinner mood. He had little fear that Trimlake would not agree to his living out. He knew that he was a necessity to his employer.