Marge Askinforit Part 8

"Yes," he said wearily. "I've heard it. But"--more brightly--"can you tell me why a Highland regiment was called 'The Black Watch'?"

"I can, Ma.s.sa Johnson. Because there's a 'b' in both."

"Wrong again. It's because there's an 'e' in each."

I gave him a half-nelson to the jaw and killed him, and the entire company then sung "Way down upon de Swannee Ribber," with harmonium accompaniment, thus bringing the afternoon performance to a close. The front seats were half empty, but then it was late in the season, and looked like rain, and--

Certainly, I can stop if you like. But you do see what I mean, don't you? The imagination is something that runs away with you. If I were to let mine get away with me, it would knock this old autobiography all to splinters.

But I do not appear to have the kind of imagination that makes me know what will hurt people's feelings. If I love people I always tell them what their worst faults are, and repeat what everybody says about them behind their back. That ought to make people say: "Thank you, Marge, for your kind words. They will help me to improve myself." It has not happened yet. It is my miraculous power of criticism that causes the trouble. Whenever I let it off the lead it seems to bite somebody; a muzzle has been suggested.

The other day I said to Popsie Bantam: "You're quite right to bob your hair, Popsie. When you have not got enough of anything, always try to persuade people that you want less. But your rouge-et-noir make-up is right off the map. If you could manage to get some of the colours in some of the right places, people would laugh less. And I can never quite decide whether it's your clothes that are all wrong, or if it's just your figure. I wish you'd tell me. Anyhow, you should try for a job at a photographer's--you're just the girl for a dark-room."

Really, that's all I said--just affectionate, lambent, helpful criticism, with a little Tarragon in it. Yet next day when I met her on the staircase she said she didn't want to talk to me any more. So I heaved her over the bal.u.s.trade and she had a forty-foot drop on to the marble below. I am too impulsive--I have always said so. Rather a pathetic touch was that she died just as the ambulance reached the hospital. I have lost quite a lot of nice friends in this way.

With the exception of a few teeny-weeny murders, I do not think I have done anything in my life that I regret. And even the murders--such as they were--were more the fault of my circ.u.mstances than of myself. If, as I have always wished, I had lived alone on a desert island, I should never have killed anybody at all. But when you go into the great world (bas.e.m.e.nt entrance) and have a bad night, or the flies are troublesome, you do get a feeling of pa.s.sionate economy; you realize that there are people you can do without, and you do without them. This is the whole truth about a little failing of which my detractors have made the most.

Calumny and exaggeration have been carried to such an extent that more than once I have been accused of being habitually irritable.

My revered model wrote that she had always been a collector "of letters, old photographs of the family, famous people and odds and ends." I have not gone quite as far as this.

I have collected odds, and almost every autumn I roam over the moors and fill a large basket with them, but I have never collected ends.

I do want to collect famous people, but for want of a little education I have not been able to do it. I simply do not know whether it is best to keep them in spirits of wine, or to have them stuffed in gla.s.s cases--like the canaries and the fish that you could not otherwise believe in. I have been told that really the best way is to press them between the leaves of some very heavy book, such as an autobiography, but I fancy they lose much of their natural brilliance when treated in this way.

Another difficulty is that the ordinary cyanide bottles that you buy at the naturalist's, though excellent for moths, are not really large enough to hold a full-sized celebrity. At the risk of being called a sentimentalist, I may say that I do not think I could kill famous people by any method that was not both quick and painless. If anything like cruelty were involved in their destruction, I would sooner not collect them at all, but just make a study of them in their wild state.

I am only a poor little girl, and I can find nothing whatever on the subject in any reference book in the public reading-room. I need expert advice. There is quite a nice collection of famous--and infamous--people near Baker Street Station, but I am told these are only simulacra. That would not suit me at all. I am far too genuine, downright, and truthful to put up with anything less than the real thing.

There must be some way of doing it. I should like to have a stuffed M.P.

in a gla.s.s case at each end of the mantelpiece in my little boudoir.

They need not be of the rarest and most expensive kinds. A pretty Labour Member with his mouth open and a rustic background, and a Coalitionist lightly poised on the fence, would please me.

It would be so interesting to display one's treasures when people came to tea.

"Never seen a real leader-writer?" I should say. "They're plentiful locally, but mostly come out at night, and so many people miss them. It is not of the least use to put treacle on the trees. The best way is to drive a taxi slowly down Fleet Street about one in the morning and look honest. That's how I got the big leader-writer in the hall. Just press his top waistcoat b.u.t.ton and he'll prove that the lost election was a moral victory.

"In the next case? Oh, they're just a couple of little Georgian poets.

They look wild, but they're quite tame really. Sprinkle an advance on account of royalties on the window-sill and they'll come for it. It used to be pretty to watch those two, pouring adulatory articles over each other. They sing chopped prose, and it seemed almost a pity to kill them; but there are plenty more.

"And that very pretty creature is an actress; if you drop an interviewer into the left hand corner of the dressing-room you will hear her say: 'I love a country life, and am never happier than when I am working in my little garden,'--insert here the photograph in the sun-bonnet--'I don't think the great public often realizes what a vast amount of----'"

But I am talking about collecting other people. I am wandering from my subject. I must collect myself.

At a very early age I caught the measles and a little later on the public eye. The latter I still hold. But I do not often lose anything except friends, and occasionally the last 'bus, and of course my situations. My great model says it is a positive punishment to her to be in one position for long at a time, and I must be something like that--I rarely keep a place much longer than a month. On the other hand, I still have quite a number of metal discs that formed the wheels of a toy railway train which I had when I was quite a child. I should have had them all, but I used some to get chocolates out of the automatic machines.

I should have liked to have appended here a list of my accomplishments, but I must positively keep room for my last chapter. So to save s.p.a.ce I will merely give a list of the accomplishments which I have not got, or have not got to perfection.

The E flat clarionet is not really my instrument, but I will give you three guesses what is.

I skate beautifully, but not so well as I dance. However, I am saving the I's out of my autobiography for further practice.

Some people perhaps have better memories. But that's no reason why they should write to the "Sunday Times" about it.

I cannot write Chinese as fluently as English, though I might conceivably write it more correctly.

I think I have mentioned everything in which I am not perfectly accomplished. Truth and modesty make me do it.

I would conclude this estimate of myself as follows. If I had to confess and expose one opinion of myself which would record what I believe to be my differentiation from other people, it would be the opinion that I am a law unto myself and a judgment to everybody else.

LATE EXTRA

TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE OF MARGE ASKINFORIT

I sometimes think that it must have been a sense of impending autobiography which made me seek employment in the Lightning Laundry.

After all, the autobiographist merely does in public what the laundry does in the decent seclusion of its works at Wandsworth or Balham.

The princ.i.p.al difference would appear to be that a respectable laundress does know where to draw the line.

But I admit that I had other motives in seeking a new career. My attempt to reclaim baronets in their dinner-hour had broken down completely; in spite of everything I could do, the dirty dogs would persist in eating their dinner at that time. Then again, the beautiful and imaginative essays which dear Casey wrote, under different names and with varying addresses, on my suitability for domestic service, had begun to attract too much attention; and a censorious world stigmatized as false and dishonest what was really poetical. I wanted too, a position of greater independence.

Of course, I had to learn the work. At first I was taught the leading principles of b.u.t.ton-removal. Then I went on to the rough-edging. This consists in putting a rough edge on starched collars and cuffs with a coa.r.s.e file. Afterwards I was promoted to the mixing department. This is where the completed articles are packed for delivery. It requires great quickness and a nice sense of humour. For instance, you take up a pair of socks and have to decide instantly whether you will send them both to an elderly unmarried lady, or divide them impartially between two men.

Our skill in creating odd socks and stockings was gratefully recognized by the Amalgamated Hosiers' Inst.i.tution, who paid the laundry an annual subsidy. A good memory was essential for the work. Every girl was required to memorize what size in collars each male client took, so that the fifteen-inch collars might be sent to the man with the seventeen-inch neck and vice-versa. As the manager said to me once: "What we are here for is to teach people self-control. The rest is merely incidental."

I did not remain very long in the mixing department. My head for figures soon earned me a place in the office. Much of it was routine work. Four times every year we had to send out the notices that owing to the increased cost of labour and materials we were reluctantly compelled to increase our prices 22- per cent. We made it 22- per cent. with the happy certainty that very few of our customers would be able to calculate the amount of the increase, and still fewer would take the trouble; this left a little room for the play of our fancy. As one of our directors--a man with a fine, scholarly head--once said to me: "Bring the larger vision into the addition of a customer's account. The only natural limit to the charge for washing a garment is the cost of the garment. Keep your eyes ever on the goal. Our present prices are but milestones on the road." He had a beautiful, ecclesiastical voice.

n.o.body would have guessed that he was an engineer and the inventor of the b.u.t.ton-pulper and Hem-render which have done so much to make our laundries what they are.

From the very first day that I took up my work in the office I became conscious that Hector, the manager, had his eye upon me. He would generally read a page or two of Keats or Sh.e.l.ley to us girls, before we began to make out the customers' accounts. This was all in accord with the far-seeing and generous policy of the laundry. The reading took a little time, but it filled us with the soaring spirit. It made pedantic precision and things-that-are repulsive to us. After I heard Hector read the "Ode to a Nightingale" I could not bring myself to say that two and two were four; nothing less than fourteen seemed to give me any satisfaction. Hector knew how quickly responsive and keenly sentient I was. A friend once told me that he had said of me that I made arithmetic a rhapsody. "This," I replied quietly, "means business."

It did. One Sat.u.r.day afternoon I had tea with him--not on the Terrace, as the A.B.C. shop in the High Street was so much nearer. He was very wonderful. He talked continuously for two hours, and would have gone on longer. But the waitress pointed out that the charge for a cup of tea and a scone did not include a twenty-one years' lease of the chair you sat on.

He was, of course, a man of great scientific attainments. His work on the use of acids in fabric-disintegration has a reputation throughout the laundries of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said that afternoon.

In reply to some remark of mine, he said with authority and conviction: "Marge, you really _are_."

And, indeed, I had to admit that very often I am.

He was saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: "In the ordeal by laundry the soft-fronted often outlasts the starched."

Later, I led him on to speak of ambition.

"I am ambitious. That is to say, I live not in the present, but in the future. At one time I had a bicycle, but in imagination I drove a second-hand Ford; and now I possess the Ford, and in imagination I have a Rolls-Royce. I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet Longfellow so wisely said--Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the heart of the ambitious are these words: 'And the next article?' At this present moment I am having a cup of tea with by far the most brilliant and beautiful girl of my acquaintance, but in imagination----"

And it was just there that the tactless waitress interrupted us so rudely. It was in vain that I tried to lead him back to the subject.

Almost his last words to me that afternoon were: