The Hireling (22 page)

‘So it was you,’ the woman said. ‘I knew it was you all along, you didn’t kid me___But why not wait and say it all to her?’

Leadbitter seemed a little crestfallen.

‘Oh, I dunno,’ he said. ‘I should feel a bit of a fool, spouting all that stuff. Not that I didn’t mean it, but - Oh, hell, you tell her. You know the kind of thing a woman wants to hear. If she saw me she might -‘

‘Yes,’ said a voice behind them, ‘she might, and what’s more, she would,’ They turned to meet Clarice’s eyes blazing up at them. ‘Now what possessed you, Mrs White,’ she stormed, ‘to let that man into the house? I tell you one thing: until he clears out, I won’t cross the threshold,’

‘Oh, Mrs Crowther,’ Mrs White said, ‘how can you be so hard?’

‘Hard?’ Clarice repeated. ‘Hard? Me hard? I like that. If I was made of flint I shouldn’t be hard enough. That man, Mrs White, has done me more harm than -‘

‘Oh, don’t be hasty, dear,’ the landlady put in. ‘Hear what he has to say. He was speaking about you so nicely just before you came. Don’t turn him away without giving him a hearing. You can’t expect a man to be a saint: we shouldn’t want it, should we? If he’s been awkward with you in the past, you should forgive him; we aren’t any of us perfect, and I’m sure he’s learnt his lesson: look how quietly he stands, and you flaring at him! It isn’t many men would be so patient, having their kind words thrown back in their teeth! Now do be sensible, and let him tell you what he’s just told me,’

Leadbitter, who had never heard anyone plead for him before, or felt the need of outside support, least of all a woman’s, stood sheepishly with all his strength gone out of him, looking hopefully towards his ally, and trying to seem as if he didn’t know that Clarice was there. Nor did Clarice, for her part, look at him; she addressed herself to the other woman.

‘You wouldn’t take his part if you knew what he was like! He hasn’t any use for a woman except to suck the juices out of her! Take yourself off, Steve Leadbitter, and never let me hear of you again!’

She burst into tears and under cover of her sobbing, Leadbitter regained his car. Routed, and by a woman too. But for once the self-starter refused to work. Each time he pressed the button it made a noise like someone imitating someone being sick. Finally he dismounted, got out the starting handle, and swung the engine with it. Leaving, he did not look at the two women arguing in the doorway, nor, though automatically avoiding the traffic, did he notice anything very much until at last he looked round with a seeing eye and found himself in Belgrave Square. Yielding to an impulse, he turned into South Halkin Street and slowly drove past Lady Franklin’s house.

From that moment Leadbitter took against his car. It had let him down, he almost felt, on purpose, prolonging his humiliation unbearably, and he could hardly wait to get rid of it. All the pride which he had taken in it, when it was first his own, and which returned to him at times, when he was cleaning it or when he saw it among meaner or less well-kept cars, evaporated; the familiarity that endears passed at one stride into the familiarity that breeds contempt. The very things he had most liked about it were now the things he most disliked. Neither emotionally nor physically could he feel at his ease in it; sitting, he developed a pain in his back which he had never had before; he didn’t like the feeling or the touch of it; sometimes after a couple of hours’ driving he found himself leaning forward, crouched over the wheel, unable to sit back, a symptom of nerves which many chauffeurs knew and dreaded. He couldn’t take any pleasure in polishing the car or pride in seeing it bright and shining; he didn’t want to handle it at all. He didn’t want to provide for its wants or remedy its defects; he grudged every penny he spent on it. The unclouded relationship he had with it - the happiest he had had with any object, animate or inanimate, except the telephone - was suddenly and hopelessly overcast. Towards other cars, cars that were not his own, he had sometimes felt indifference, but never the sour distaste he felt for this one.

He hadn’t realized how much it meant to him emotionally, until suddenly it fell into disgrace. The feeling in his nature, which he had always played down and refused to recognize, had now no outlet at all.

But it would have an outlet in a new car, and almost feverishly he set about looking for one. This would be a much grander car than its predecessor, Lady Franklin’s present; a car that even she would think twice before buying. When she saw it she would, perhaps, give a little gasp. ‘Surely this isn’t the car you used to have?’ ‘Well, no, my lady, it isn’t. The old one, well, it wasn’t good enough.’ ‘Not good enough?’ ‘Not good enough, my lady, for your wedding.’

That would be the tactful thing to say, and Leadbitter, when he rehearsed it and other sentences like it, thought he was being tactful: he smiled to himself, he had the right word for every customer. Yet what had put it into his mind originally, and why, when he started on his quest, did he think of Lady Franklin? She was seldom out of his mind. Did he mean the car to be a kind of offering to her, a sort of wedding present? He had to laugh at the idea, it was so absurd. ‘Give me a bite of your apple,’ one little boy had begged another. ‘No,’ ‘Then let me smell the core,’ All the present that Lady Franklin would get from Leadbitter would be a whiff of the core, a glance, an eyeful, to take away if she could. And yet more and more, as his excitement mounted over the choice and purchase of the car, did the thing he most looked forward to identify itself with the presentation, the formal presentation, the dedication of the car to Lady Franklin. That was to be the high spot of the whole experience.

Hughie wouldn’t have a car to give her, not even the smell of one. Hughie’s wedding present to her, so Leadbitter suspected, would be paid for by her. She would be giving him many things, no doubt. ‘The bride to the bridegroom’: Leadbitter tried to think. A fitted dressing case… A cheque … What else did the blighter want? A mistress! The bride to the bridegroom: a nice, useful mistress.

Forget about Hughie. Somehow, Leadbitter didn’t know how, for it was a balance struck in the domain of feeling, imponderable, invisible - the car would square his account with Lady Franklin. Not his material account, he wasn’t thinking of that. For a moment, as the owner of that costly adjunct, he would be her equal - well, not her equal, he didn’t want to be that, but on the same plane of glory with her. It was a spiritual affinity that he sought: to be spiritually, for a moment, in her class. Leadbitter was a poor man who associated with people richer, sometimes much richer, than himself. In the past, to keep his own end up with them, he had resorted in thought to various compensations: but they were all of a personal kind; his good looks, his punctuality, his efficiency, his tact. Man for man, he was a better specimen than ninety-nine per cent of his customers, yes, better than Hughie for all his face-fungus. In his own sphere he couldn’t be beaten. ‘They’ had to treat him with respect. But it was the sphere of poverty; as a poor man they could one and all look down on him, even Hughie could. But as the owner of this new car he would have something outside himself to impress them with, something that they would have to recognize: the power of money.

He wouldn’t actually be the owner, of course. Even by giving his own car in part exchange, and draining his bank balance, he would still have several hundred pounds to find before he could call himself the owner of a new one. He would have to buy the car on the h.p. Except that this would be a much better car, he would be financially back where he was when Lady Franklin came to his help, six weeks ago. He would be an ower, not an owner.

At first the prospect daunted him, then it became part of the intense excitement and exhilaration of the whole transaction - the exhilaration of the quest, the excitement of getting the deal done in time - in time for the wedding, the date of which he didn’t know and didn’t like to ask.

After so many frustrations, and efforts worse than wasted, it was intoxicating to be whole again, the master of his fate and of himself: to feel all his faculties straining out towards the attainment of a single end. The car! The car would be an answer to all his problems. In it would be manifested, for all to see, the pride he took in himself, the vital principle that had kept him, Leadbitter, going for five-and-thirty chequered years. That gleaming symphony of black and chrome, shaped to elude the wind’s embrace, would embody his achievement up till now. It would give him no trouble, or if it did, no trouble that he did not know how to deal with. It would be his friend, his wife, his mistress; he could lavish all his love on it without the fear that it would turn against him.

But though it would mean all this to him in the sphere of the emotions, he knew that he must drive a hard bargain to get it. If he paid a penny too much for it, it would give him a grievance and so lose its spell. Luckily for him, the excitement of the chase sharpened all his faculties, and most of all his business instinct; and though his heart and mind were set on it, he would not hurry over buying it. Many were the cars that he saw, inspected and rejected because their design did not altogether please him. It must be as perfect as his idea of it. He took time off, he even refused jobs, which he had never done when searching for Clarice. A score of times he was baffled, but never did he lose heart or doubt that he would find his ideal in the end.

It came, as such things do, if they ever do, when he was least expecting it: a car the make of which he had always known, of course, but which he hadn’t believed could ever be available at such short notice. It seemed to drop into his hand by a miracle; after all the pushing and straining the door appeared to open of itself and show him what he wanted. The moment brought a cessation of effort, a relaxing of all tensions, that was almost unbelievable; Leadbitter tasted the bliss the mystic feels on reaching his objective. He hadn’t a second’s doubt, he knew, almost before he saw it, that the car was the right one.

But he concealed this from the salesman. With the salesman he put on a critical air, and after he had marked down the object of his desire, he had a look at other cars the salesman had to show.

Perfection is not divisible into parts, it is a whole, and cannot be analysed. All the same, it is made up of separate desiderata, and one of these in Leadbitter’s view - and it was the one which more than any other single requirement made his search difficult - was that the car should be a limousine. Such cars were both expensive and scarce; even more scarce (if the two qualities can be compared) than they were expensive.

A limousine had a dividing wall of glass, a second windscreen. But such glass partitions were of different kinds. Those that could be wound up with a handle, were regulated by the persons sitting on the back seat. It depended on them where the partition should be open or closed: the driver had no say in the matter. But Leadbitter wanted to have a say. Increasingly, the conversation of his customers had got upon his nerves; he didn’t want to hear it, or the ‘dears’ and ‘darlings’ with which it was only too frequently interlarded, even if they didn’t mind him hearing. The glass wall was not for their convenience, it was for his; with it, unless they chose to have it open, he couldn’t hear them yammering and nattering, and unless they chose to have it open, they couldn’t tell him the right way to go - as many of them did, for there are few accomplishments which people are so fond of airing as their knowledge of the route.

And how would he have got into his present plight which, in spite of his mad elation, one part of him knew to be deplorable - how would he have got himself into this jam, and been made to feel so many things he didn’t want to feel, if he hadn’t overheard - been forced to overhear -things which he wasn’t meant to overhear - and behaved like a fool, an ass, a madman, as stupidly as a woman might have behaved?

The glass screen would be a protection against the possibility of this happening again, not a complete protection of course, and a very flimsy one if the customers had the means of working it under their sole control. But there was another type, such as taxis had, with two panels, one fixed, one sliding, the sliding one with metal handles on both sides of the glass, which he could use as well as they. What more natural, what more civil, what more considerate, than that he should close the panel from his side? - saying, in effect, ‘I’m sure you would rather talk without me listening in,’ but meaning for him, ‘Thank goodness I shan’t be able to hear the stream of imbecilities that you are pouring out,’ And when they wanted to listen to the wireless they still could, even with the partition closed, for it was relayed by an amplifier to the back. So he would remain shut off from them - shut off from their voices, shut off from their feelings, shut off from any interference they might make in his life. Shut off from the outside world - shut off … shut off.

The new car had these panels, which was one reason why he fell in love with it at sight.

When the bargaining was over, and Leadbitter had got the reduction that he wanted, he went out of the building, walking unsteadily. It wasn’t drink, it wasn’t the slight swagger which he occasionally allowed himself, it was pure fatigue. The exertions of the last few days, combined with lack of sleep, had drained his nervous energy; he felt lightheaded. He would have been thankful to hold on to something. A sensation of triumph such as he had never known, not even on a battlefield, possessed him. It was the undiluted essence of experience, incommunicable, even if he had had anyone to share it with; a draught of ecstasy as ravishing to the senses as the fulfilment of physical desire. His tired flesh could hardly contain the pressure of his spirit, yet it too rejoiced, trying, faithful servant that it was, to let him feel his stature towering upwards.

Aware of each footstep and the need to keep his balance he struggled on and bought an evening paper; then looked round for a pub. A pub was facing him the other side of the street, but so tired was he that even while he was looking at it he could not take in what it was, and when he recognized it he still didn’t know whether it would be open; his time sense had abandoned him.