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
