Essential Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

like that half-wit at the garage, they’re nothing to be stuck on. And you’ve met me.”
    I said it to her like that.
    “Oh,” says she. “It isn’t as bad as that yet.”
    It was cold in the office. She used to sit all day in her overcoat. She was a smart girl with a big friendly chin and a second one coming and her forehead and nose were covered with freckles. She had copper-coloured hair too. She got her shoes through the trade from Duke’s traveller and her clothes, too, off the Hollenborough mantle man. I told her I could do her better stockings than the ones she’d got on. She got a good reduction on everything. Twenty-five or thirty-three and a third. She had her expenses cut right back. I took her to the pictures that night in the car. I made Colin get the car out for me.
    “That boy wanted me to go on the back of his bike. On a night like this,” she said.
    “Oh,” she said, when we got to the pictures. “Two shillings’s too much. Let’s go into the one-and-sixes at the side and we can nip across into the two-shillings when the lights go down.”
    “Fancy your father being an undertaker,” she said in the middle of the show. And she started laughing as she had laughed before.
    She had her head screwed on all right. She said:
    “Some girls have no pride once the lights go down.”
    Every time I went to that town I took a box of something. Samples, mostly, they didn’t cost me anything.
    “Don’t thank me,” I said. “Thank the firm.”
    Every time I took her out I pulled the blinds in the back seat of the car to hide the samples. That chap Colin used to give us oil and petrol. He used to give me a funny look. Fishy sort of small eyes he’d got. Always looking miserable. Then we would go off. Sunday was her free day. Not that driving’s any holiday for me. And, of course, the firm paid. She used to take me down to see her family for the day. Start in the morning, and taking it you had dinner and tea there, a day’s outing cost us nothing. Her father was something on the railway, retired. He had a long stocking, somewhere, but her sister, the one that was married, had had her share already.
    He had a tumour after his wife died and they just played upon the old man’s feelings. It wasn’t right. She wouldn’t go near her sister and I don’t blame her, taking the money like that. Just played upon the old man’s feelings.
    Every time I was up there Colin used to come in looking for her.
    “Oh Colin,” I used to say. “Done my car yet?” He knew where he got off with me.
    “No, now, I can’t Colin. I tell you I’m going out with Mr. Humphrey,” she used to say to him. I heard her.
    “He keeps on badgering me,” she said to me.
    “You leave him to me,” I said.
    “No, he’s all right,” she said.
    “You let me know if there’s any trouble with Colin,” I said. “Seems to be a harum-scarum sort of half-wit to me,” I said.
    “And he spends every penny he makes,” she said.
    Well, we know that sort of thing is all right while it lasts, I told her, but the trouble is that it doesn’t last.
    We were always meeting Colin on the road. I took no notice of it first of all and then I grew suspicious and awkward at always meeting him. He had a new motor bicycle. It was an Indian, a scarlet thing that he used to fly over the moor with, flat out. Muriel and I used to go out over the moor to Ingley Wood in the firm’s Morris—I had a customer out that way.
    “May as well do a bit of business while you’re about it,” I said.
    “About what?” she said.
    “Ah ha!” I said.
    “That’s what Colin wants to know,” I said.
    Sure enough, coming back we’d hear him popping and backfiring close behind us, and I put out my hand to stop him and keep him following us, biting our dirt.
    “I see his little game,” I said. “Following us.”
    So I saw to it that he did follow. We could hear him banging away behind us and the traffic is thick on the Ingley road in the