‘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.