Short Fiction - P. G. Wodehouse (top ten ebook reader txt) 📗

He sat up. Somebody helped him to his feet. He was aware of Sidney Mercer at his side.

“Do it again,” said Sidney, all grin and sleek immaculateness. “It went down big, but lots of them didn’t see it.”

The place was full of demon laughter.

“Min!” said Henry.

They were in the parlour of their little flat. Her back was towards him, and he could not see her face. She did not answer. She preserved the silence which she had maintained since they had left the restaurant. Not once during the journey home had she spoken.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked on. Outside an Elevated train rumbled by. Voices came from the street.

“Min, I’m sorry.”

Silence.

“I thought I could do it. Oh, Lord!” Misery was in every note of Henry’s voice. “I’ve been taking lessons every day since that night we went to that place first. It’s no good⁠—I guess it’s like the old woman said. I’ve got two left feet, and it’s no use my ever trying to do it. I kept it secret from you, what I was doing. I wanted it to be a wonderful surprise for you on your birthday. I knew how sick and tired you were getting of being married to a man who never took you out, because he couldn’t dance. I thought it was up to me to learn, and give you a good time, like other men’s wives. I⁠—”

“Henry!”

She had turned, and with a dull amazement he saw that her whole face had altered. Her eyes were shining with a radiant happiness.

“Henry! Was that why you went to that house⁠—to take dancing lessons?”

He stared at her without speaking. She came to him, laughing.

“So that was why you pretended you were still doing your walks?”

“You knew!”

“I saw you come out of that house. I was just going to the station at the end of the street, and I saw you. There was a girl with you, a girl with yellow hair. You hugged her!”

Henry licked his dry lips.

“Min,” he said huskily. “You won’t believe it, but she was trying to teach me the Jelly Roll.”

She held him by the lapels of his coat.

“Of course I believe it. I understand it all now. I thought at the time that you were just saying goodbye to her! Oh, Henry, why ever didn’t you tell me what you were doing? Oh, yes, I know you wanted it to be a surprise for me on my birthday, but you must have seen there was something wrong. You must have seen that I thought something. Surely you noticed how I’ve been these last weeks?”

“I thought it was just that you were finding it dull.”

“Dull! Here, with you!”

“It was after you danced that night with Sidney Mercer. I thought the whole thing out. You’re so much younger than I, Min. It didn’t seem right for you to have to spend your life being read to by a fellow like me.”

“But I loved it!”

“You had to dance. Every girl has to. Women can’t do without it.”

“This one can. Henry, listen! You remember how ill and worn out I was when you met me first at that farm? Do you know why it was? It was because I had been slaving away for years at one of those places where you go in and pay five cents to dance with the lady instructresses. I was a lady instructress. Henry! Just think what I went through! Every day having to drag a million heavy men with large feet round a big room. I tell you, you are a professional compared with some of them! They trod on my feet and leaned their two hundred pounds on me and nearly killed me. Now perhaps you can understand why I’m not crazy about dancing! Believe me, Henry, the kindest thing you can do to me is to tell me I must never dance again.”

“You⁠—you⁠—” he gulped. “Do you really mean that you can⁠—can stand the sort of life we’re living here? You really don’t find it dull?”

“Dull!”

She ran to the bookshelf, and came back with a large volume.

“Read to me, Henry, dear. Read me something now. It seems ages and ages since you used to. Read me something out of the Encyclopaedia!”

Henry was looking at the book in his hand. In the midst of a joy that almost overwhelmed him, his orderly mind was conscious of something wrong.

“But this is the Med⁠–⁠Mum volume, darling.”

“Is it? Well, that’ll be all right. Read me all about ‘Mum.’ ”

“But we’re only in the Cal⁠–⁠Cha⁠—” He wavered. “Oh, well⁠—I” he went on, recklessly. “I don’t care. Do you?”

“No. Sit down here, dear, and I’ll sit on the floor.”

Henry cleared his throat.

“ ‘Milicz, or Militsch (d. 1374), Bohemian divine, was the most influential among those preachers and writers in Moravia and Bohemia who, during the fourteenth century, in a certain sense paved the way for the reforming activity of Huss.’ ”

He looked down. Minnie’s soft hair was resting against his knee. He put out a hand and stroked it. She turned and looked up, and he met her big eyes.

“Can you beat it?” said Henry, silently, to himself.

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