The Complete Works of H. C. McNeile "Sapper". Sapper
door, and he had no intention of letting them escape if he could help it. He bowed obsequiously, showing his tobacco-stained teeth in an ingratiating smile, and Jim regarded him in silence.
"And what can I do for you gentlemen?" said MacTavert. "There is a good table unoccupied at the other end of the room, and I think I may say that my whisky is good. Or champagne, if you prefer it," he added, hopefully.
"Show us the table," said Jim curtly, and we followed MacTavert across the room.
"Now bring me some whisky," he continued, when we were seated.
"Certainly, sir," returned the other. "And if there is any lady," he continued, with an odious leer, "who takes your fancy—you have merely got to mention the matter to me."
"There is," said Jim quietly. "That girl over there dancing with that Dago. Tell her that my friend and I will be honoured if she will join us at our table."
MacTavert rubbed his hands together; things were progressing altogether to his fancy. Just as there was a special tariff for wines when consumed by visitors like ourselves, so also there was a special tariff for girls.
"Leave it all to me," he remarked, confidentially. "And if "— his voice sank to a whisper—"you would care to smoke a pipe, or possibly—" He paused meaningly.
"I don't go in for opium or coke or any other rotten dope," said Jim shortly. "Get my whisky."
For a moment MacTavert's eyes gleamed angrily; he was not used to being spoken to in such a way. But a second glance at Jim's face decided him that speech on his part would be not only superfluous but unwise, and with a further bow he left us.
We saw him approach the table where Colette was sitting, and speak to her. She rose instantly and followed MacTavert across the room, leaving her late dancing partner scowling furiously. But he said nothing: it was pretty evident that what MacTavert said went 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