She stopped me.
“Car-don’t!”
“Well, that’s what they’d have had to say-isn’t it? The Lymington smash takes a bit of living down, my dear. Lymington’s secretary wasn’t exactly in demand. One man told me that if I wasn’t a knave, I must be about the biggest fool in the British Empire, and whichever I was, he hadn’t any use for me.”
She made a sound without any words. I knew I’d hurt her, but I was feeling savage and I wanted to hurt. In a way, it brought her nearer. For three years she’d been as far away as if I’d been dead. It made me feel alive again when she showed that I’d hurt her.
“You see I wasn’t a very marketable article,” I said. “Shorthand nil-typing nil-languages English public school- in fact, commercially speaking, a wash-out. You can’t walk into a man’s office and say, ‘I’m a decent shot, and fair to average at polo and racquets’ ”-I broke off with a laugh-“and that was about the best my best pal could have said for me. I can type now, and I grind out shorthand, but any bright lad from a secondary school has probably got me beat at both.”
“You didn’t give any of us a chance,” she said. “I’m not talking about jobs-I’m talking about being friends. When I’m-” She hesitated, and then said, “down-I want my friends all the more.”
I looked at her for a moment because I couldn’t help it. Then I was afraid to go on looking. There was such a beautiful eager kindness in her eyes, and I thought I saw her lip tremble. That was when I was afraid to go on looking.
“People soon get over wanting you when you’re down in the world,” I said.
“That’s pride,” said Isobel steadily.
I laughed again.
“No, my dear-experience. Do you remember Jimmy Buckley? No, you wouldn’t-he was before your time. Well, it’s a very instructive story. Jimmy went smash, and all Jimmy’s pals rallied round, and pressed fivers into his hand, and hunted jobs for him. And when Jimmy didn’t keep the jobs, they hunted more, but not quite so enthusiastically, and they stopped pressing fivers on him. And when they stopped, Jimmy started asking, and the last I heard of him was that he’d settled down to a permanent job of writing begging letters-very systematic and regular. He’d work through all his relations, and then get on to his pals-only by that time they weren’t pals any more, and he was ‘that damned fellow Buckley,’ or ‘Jimmy, poor devil.’ And that’s that. Jimmy, my dear, is an awful warning. See?”
“There might be something between sponging on your friends and cutting them dead.”
“Facilis descensus!” I said.
She put out her hand, but I stepped back from it.
“There’s your uncle, Car-why wouldn’t you let him help you? I know he wanted to-he said so-he said he’d offered you the agency.”
I laughed.
“With conditions! Did he tell you what they were?”
She said “No,” quickly and as if I’d hurt her again. I supposed I spoke roughly, for she looked timid, and I felt a brute.
“You couldn’t accept the conditions?” she said in a soft, hesitating way.
I shook my head. I wonder what she would have said if I’d told her that one of the conditions was marriage. What a fool I am! It wouldn’t be anything to her one way or another-it wouldn’t ever have been anything. If I had come to heel, licked my uncle’s hand, taken his bone, and married Anna Lang, she’d have sent me a wedding present and wished me joy. It’s an odd world. Anna wanted me, and I wanted Isobel, and so here I am in the gutter. Why, I never even liked Anna. I remember telling her so at a franker age. I suppose I was about fourteen, and she the same-all bones and eyes. I remember I told her straight out how jolly glad I was that she was only Uncle John’s niece and not my cousin, and how she argued that if she was his niece, she was bound to be my cousin. And she finished up by flying into a most almighty rage and scratching my face. I told Uncle John the cat had done it, and the little spitfire burst into tears of pure rage and said, no, she’d done it herself because I didn’t love her, and she’d do it again-and again-until I did.
All this went through my head in a sort of confusion. I think I tried to stop myself saying anything. When I found I couldn’t, I said good-by, but I’m afraid my voice gave me away.
I said good-by, and Isobel said,
“Will you come and see me, Car?”
And I said, “No, my dear, I won’t,” and I lifted my hat and walked on.
I walked as far as I could, and I didn’t take very much notice of where I was going, but after a bit I got hold of myself and started to go home. I ought to have been thinking what I was going to do next, and what I was going to say to Mrs. Bell, and what I was going to tell Fay, but I couldn’t think of anything or any one but Isobel. I was blundering along pretty fast, and I’d got within half a dozen blocks of the house, when some one pushed something into my hand. This is where the queer thing begins, and I want to put everything down very exactly. If I hadn’t been wool-gathering, I should have seen the man’s face as he came up to me. As it was, I just came out of the clouds to find a paper in my hand, and the man who had shoved it there shooting across the road diagonally with his back towards me and no more to be seen of him than a shabby suit of clothes, a greasy bowler hat, and a sheaf of handbills under his arm.
I looked down at the paper in my hand. It was the size of a handbill. But it wasn’t a handbill; it was a blank sheet of paper with what looked like a newspaper cutting pasted on to the middle of it. I should have dropped a handbill in the gutter. When you’re job-hunting, newspaper cuttings rather rivet your attention. I read this one. And here it is, word for word:
Do you want £500? If you do, and are willing to earn it, write to Box Z. 10, International Employment Exchange, 187 Falcon Street, N.W.
I looked up from the paper and saw the man with the greasy bowler on the other side of the road. He thrust a handbill upon a girl in a sleeveless cotton frock and turned the corner. I hesitated for a moment, and then made after him at a good pace. When I reached the corner, he wasn’t anywhere in sight. There are one or two shops, and about fifty yards down there’s a public house. From the look of him he might have turned in there. I certainly hadn’t any intention of following him. As I stood there, I saw one of his handbills lying half on the curb, where some one must have thrown it down-that is, I saw what at first sight I took to be one of his handbills. After a second glance I picked the paper up. It was of the same size and shape as my own, but instead of being a blank sheet with a newspaper cutting stuck on to it, it had typed across it the words, “Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”
I threw the paper down again and retraced my steps. There was a second handbill lying on the pavement a yard or two from where I had seen the man give one to the girl with the bare arms. I couldn’t swear that it was the paper she had taken and then dropped, but there it lay, quite clean, and therefore newly dropped by some one; and, like the one I had picked up round the corner, it bore a typed exhortation to “Eat More Fruit and Encourage the Empire.”
I stood with the thing in my hand, and then after a bit I came back here and tried to think what it might mean. You see, it’s odd-whatever way you look at it, it’s odd. Here’s a fellow distributing handbills about Eating More Fruit and Encouraging the Empire, and right in the middle of these blameless tracts he’s got a newspaper cutting stuck on a blank sheet, and he shoves it off on me. Why me? That’s what I want to know. Is it because it’s me, or just because the thing was there by accident and some one was bound to get it? And if me-why? Of course you may say it’s obvious that I could do with £500. Why, a fiver would be a godsend.
II