THE COMPLETE JIM MAITLAND SERIES. H. C. McNeile / Sapper
in that place. He spoke to her with a kind of savage intensity as she tripped along at his side, and I thought she answered him back. Anyway, a sudden snarl showed on MacTavert's face, and he caught her roughly by the arm, only to pull himself together at once and regain his oily obsequiousness as he reached our table.
"This is Colette, sir," he said, pinching the girl's cheek playfully, and she promptly smacked his face.
"Splendid!" said Jim lazily. "Do it again."
For a moment I thought MacTavert would murder the girl. His great hands shot out towards her, and she shrank back terrified. And then Jim spoke again.
"I ordered whisky, barman."
MacTavert swung round.
"Who the hell are you calling barman?" he snarled. "I'm the owner."
"Are you?" drawled Jim. "How fearfully jolly for all concerned! But it doesn't alter the fact that I ordered whisky."
The veins stood out on MacTavert's neck like whipcord, and his face turned to an ugly red. There was no mistaking the utter contempt in Jim's voice, and MacTavert was not accustomed to contempt. But he found, as others had found before him, that there was something about this tall, perfectly-dressed individual, with his quite unnecessary eyeglass, which lent force to the old saw concerning discretion being the better part of valour. And after a moment or two he swung round on his heel and slouched over to the bar to get the required drink, while Colette sat down, and Jim laughed.
"He wanted me to make you order champagne," she said, "and I wouldn't. Oh, thank God you've come! It terrifies me, this place—more and more every moment."
With a scowl on his face, MacTavert lurched over to the table and banged down the whisky.
"Four dollars," he grunted.
"Think again," said Jim quietly. "I'm not buying your beastly saloon: merely two glasses of whisky."
"If you don't like the price you can clear out," snarled MacTavert.
"I shall clear out exactly when I please," returned Jim. "In the meantime, there's a dollar for the whisky. And if you don't like the price you can take your poison away and throw it down the sink."
And once again MacTavert retired muttering, with, the dollar bill in his great mottled hand. He was being beaten all along the line, and he knew it. He was up against something he couldn't understand—something that left him vaguely frightened, though no power on earth would have extracted such an admission from him.
Drunken sailors, mere strength in any form, he could cope with— had coped with successfully for the whole of his life. But in Jim he had encountered something new, and like most ill-educated men, anything new made him uneasy. It was outside his experience to be calmly and superciliously browbeaten in his own saloon. He relapsed into dark mutterings behind his bar, assuring himself with frequent repetition that if he had any further lip from this damned toff he personally would throw him into the street.
And in the meantime the toff was smiling across the table at a very frightened girl into whose face the colour was slowly coming back.
"My name is Jim," he said quietly, "and his is Dick. So now we all know one another, Colette. And what we want to know is how you came into this unpleasant place. Then, after we've heard that, we must see how we can get you out."
The girl looked at him with shining eyes; to her he seemed the most wonderful man she had ever seen.
"You'll think me such a little fool when I tell you," she whispered miserably; and Jim smiled again.
"We've all of us made idiots of ourselves at one time or another. Tell me, Colette—you're not French, are you—like your name?"
The girl laughed. "No; I'm English." Her voice faltered for a moment. "I come from Sussex; from a little village lying under the South Downs."
Her eyes had filled with tears, and suddenly Jim leant across the table.
"Steady, kid, don't cry. I want to talk to you about that little village. I want to find out how you came to leave it."
And then, little by little, we heard the whole pitiful tale— not new to those who listen, but bitterly, tragically new to each one who tells. And as we heard it, told falteringly with many a pause, my only coherent wish was to have the throats of some of the men involved between my hands. I left MacTavert to Jim, who was staring at that gentleman with smouldering eyes.
She had run away from home, had the girl who was called Colette. It was dull, and a gentleman had assured her that she would be able to earn big money in London. On the stage, he said—pretty clothes, and jewels and lots of dancing and amusement. So she'd stolen out of the house one night, and gone up to London to an address he had told her of. She had never seen her mother and father again—and for a time, as she came to that part of her story, she fell silent. The automatic piano thumped on in MacTavert's bar, the haze of tobacco smoke grew denser, but all Colette could see was a little cottage, way back in Sussex, with honeysuckle climbing round the windows and a kitchen spotlessly clean. Just home—that's all...
The Dago she had been dancing with lurched by with a snarl, which effaced itself as he caught Jim's eyes fixed on him, and with a little start Colette came back to reality. She was telling us her story—that new and original story—little dreaming how well we knew every line before she spoke it. For the main theme is always the same—only the details differ.
The address in London to which she had gone so hopefully turned out to be a theatrical agency. And there an oily gentleman had taken stock of her, and offered her a job on the spot with a company that was to go on tour in South America. He had assured her that all she required was experience, and that on her return he, personally, would get her an engagement at a West-End theatre. And she swallowed it whole, as hundreds of other unfortunate girls have swallowed it.
Then came the awakening. The company had played for a week in a fifth- rate hall in Valparaiso to find last Saturday night that the manager had decamped with what money there was. They were stranded—penniless, or practically so in a foreign town, with not a soul to turn to for assistance. The rest we knew already; the woman with the kindly offer of assistance—the woman in MacTavert's pay.
"She seemed so nice," said Colette, miserably, "and then I found myself here."
Once again the poor child's eyes filled with tears; she was paying a big price for her one mistake of foolish vanity in England. And Jim's eyes were very gentle as he looked at her.
"I see, Colette," he said quietly. "I understand. I'm thinking it was very lucky you saw us today."
For a moment he looked at me; how lucky it was I don't think the girl quite realised. A good deal of the innocence of that little Sussex village still remained to Colette.
"And so now," continued Jill cheerfully, "the only thing that remains is to get you away. I don't think we'll bother about your box and things tonight; I'll fix up about them tomorrow morning. We'll just walk out, and I'll find you a room at some hotel."
He smiled as he saw the look of amazed hope on the girl's face—a look which faded almost as quickly as it had come.
"Well—what's troubling you now?" he said.
"I can't, Jim," she cried. "It's wonderful of you to have thought of it—but I can't."
"Why not?" His voice was a little stern.
"There was a missionary here last night," she said, at length. "And he took one of the girls away. And that brute MacTavert's got two men he keeps here. And they threw him into the docks and nearly drowned him."
For a moment Jim look puzzled; then with ostentatious deliberation he lit a cigarette.
"And you're afraid, Colette, that they will do that to me?" She nodded. "I couldn't have you hurt for me," she answered. "I'm not worth it."
And Jim was polishing his eyeglass, which had suddenly become a bit misty.
"Thank you, little girl," he said quietly, after a while. "That's