Short Fiction P. G. Wodehouse (good books to read in english .txt) 📖

understand. And, if the customer was an observant man, he would notice that her replies at that juncture became somewhat absent, her smile a little mechanical.

Jealousy, according to an eminent authority, is the “hydra of calamities, the sevenfold death.” Arthur Welsh’s was all that and a bit over. It was a constant shadow on Maud’s happiness. No fair-minded girl objects to a certain tinge of jealousy. Kept within proper bounds, it is a compliment; it makes for piquancy; it is the gin in the ginger-beer of devotion. But it should be a condiment, not a fluid.

It was the unfairness of the thing which hurt Maud. Her conscience was clear. She knew girls⁠—several girls⁠—who gave the young men with whom they walked out ample excuse for being perfect Othellos. If she had ever flirted on the open beach with the baritone of the troupe of pierrots, like Jane Oddy, she could have excused Arthur’s attitude. If, like Pauline Dicey, she had roller-skated for a solid hour with a black-moustached stranger while her fiancé floundered in Mug’s Alley she could have understood his frowning disapprovingly. But she was not like Pauline. She scorned the coquetries of Jane. Arthur was the centre of her world, and he knew it. Ever since the rainy evening when he had sheltered her under his umbrella to her Tube station, he had known perfectly well how things were with her. And yet just because, in a strictly businesslike way, she was civil to her customers, he must scowl and bite his lip and behave generally as if it had been brought to his notice that he had been nurturing a serpent in his bosom. It was worse than wicked⁠—it was unprofessional.

She remonstrated with him.

“It isn’t fair,” she said, one morning when the rush of customers had ceased and they had the shop to themselves.

Matters had been worse than usual that morning. After days of rain and greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had included the customers. During the last few days they had taken their seats in moist gloom, and, brooding over the prospect of coming colds in the head, had had little that was pleasant to say to the divinity who was shaping their ends. But today it had been different. Warm and happy, they had bubbled over with gay small-talk.

“It isn’t fair,” she repeated.

Arthur, who was stropping a razor and whistling tunelessly, raised his eyebrows. His manner was frosty.

“I fail to understand your meaning,” he said.

“You know what I mean. Do you think I didn’t see you frowning when I was doing that gentleman’s nails?”

The allusion was to the client who had just left⁠—a jovial individual with a red face, who certainly had made Maud giggle a good deal. And why not? If a gentleman tells really funny stories, what harm is there in giggling? You had to be pleasant to people. If you snubbed customers, what happened? Why, sooner or later, it got round to the boss, and then where were you? Besides, it was not as if the red-faced customer had been rude. Write down on paper what he had said to her, and nobody could object to it. Write down on paper what she had said to him, and you couldn’t object to that either. It was just Arthur’s silliness.

She tossed her head.

“I am gratified,” said Arthur, ponderously⁠—in happier moments Maud had admired his gift of language; he read a great deal: encyclopedias and papers and things⁠—“I am gratified to find that you had time to bestow a glance on me. You appeared absorbed.”

Maud sniffed unhappily. She had meant to be cold and dignified throughout the conversation, but the sense of her wrongs was beginning to be too much for her. A large tear splashed on to her tray of orange-sticks. She wiped it away with the chamois leather.

“It isn’t fair,” she sobbed. “It isn’t. You know I can’t help it if gentlemen talk and joke with me. You know it’s all in the day’s work. I’m expected to be civil to gentlemen who come in to have their hands done. Silly I should look sitting as if I’d swallowed a poker. I do think you might understand, Arthur, you being in the profession yourself.”

He coughed.

“It isn’t so much that you talk to them as that you seem to like⁠—”

He stopped. Maud’s dignity had melted completely. Her face was buried in her arms. She did not care if a million customers came in, all at the same time.

“Maud!”

She heard him moving towards her, but she did not look up. The next moment his arms were round her, and he was babbling.

And a customer, pushing open the door unnoticed two minutes later, retired hurriedly to get shaved elsewhere, doubting whether Arthur’s mind was on his job.

For a time this little thunderstorm undoubtedly cleared the air. For a day or two Maud was happier than she ever remembered to have been. Arthur’s behaviour was unexceptionable. He bought her a wristwatch⁠—light brown leather, very smart. He gave her some chocolates to eat in the Tube. He entertained her with amazing statistics, culled from the weekly paper which he bought on Tuesdays. He was, in short, the perfect lover. On the second day the red-faced man came in again. Arthur joined in the laughter at his stories. Everything seemed ideal.

It could not last. Gradually things slipped back into the old routine. Maud, looking up from her work, would see the frown and the bitten lip. She began again to feel uncomfortable and self-conscious as she worked. Sometimes their conversation on the way to the Tube was almost formal.

It was useless to say anything. She had a wholesome horror of being one of those women who nagged; and she felt that to complain again would amount to nagging. She tried to put the thing out of her mind,