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.