The Man With Two Left Feet
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P. G. Wodehouse >> The Man With Two Left Feet
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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 clear 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.
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