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At Truro he stopped at the first garage he saw, a small one in the outlying part of the town, where there were few passers-by. The few there were, however, immediately collected round the car that swooped down the hill on them hooting, and still went on hooting in spite of having stopped.
How simple, if it had been his mother who was with him, to have asked her to walk on to an hotel or a confectioner’s, and wait for him while he had the horn seen to. She would have proceeded through the town unobserved and unmolested, and the hotel or confectioner would have received her without curiosity, and attended respectfully to her wants. Or she might have waited in the car, and there too she would have aroused neither interest nor comment. A lady, you see. A lady, turning, like a decent Italian house, her plain and expressionless side to the public of the street, and keeping her other side, her strictly private and delightful other side, for her family and friends.
He hurried Sally into the garage, into the furthermost depths of the garage. Not for her, he felt, were quiet walks alone through streets and unquestioning acceptance at hotels; not for him the convenience, the comfort, of a companion who in a crisis needn’t be bothered about, who automatically became effaced. Nothing effaced Sally. Her deplorable conspicuousness made it impossible for her to go anywhere without him. She had to be accompanied and protected as watchfully as if she were the Crown Jewels. Yes, or a perambulator with a baby in it that could never be left alone for an instant, and was always having to be pushed about by somebody. That somebody was himself, Jocelyn Luke; Jocelyn Luke, who as recently as a month ago was working away, hopeful and absorbed, immersed in profoundly interesting and important studies, independent, with nothing at all to trammel him or hinder him—with, on the contrary, everything and everybody conspiring to leave him as untrammelled and unhindered as possible. What was he now? Why, the perambulator’s nursemaid. Just that: the perambulator’s attendant nursemaid.
This seemed to Jocelyn fantastic.
‘Wait here, will you?’ he said, hurrying her into the garage and depositing her like a parcel in the remotest corner. ‘Don’t move, will you, till I fetch you——’
And he left her there, safe as far as he could see, and went back to the shrieking car.
She sat down thankfully on a pile of empty petrol cans. If only she could be left there for a good long while, if only she could spend the rest of the day there.... ‘Don’t move,’ Usband had said; as though she wanted to! Except that she was very hungry, really hungry now that her fears were over, for she had had no dinner yet, and it was two o’clock, how happy would she have been to stay there without moving for the rest of the afternoon. The quiet corner, away from danger, away from having to guess what she ought to say to Usband, and away from the look he gave her when she had said it, seemed almost perfect. It would have been quite perfect if there had been anything to eat.
And as if in answer to her wish, the little door into a shed at the back opened, and in walked a youth, smudged and pasty-looking as those look who work much in garages, bearing in his hand a basin tied up in a crimson handkerchief.
This was young Mr. Soper, the most promising of the mechanics employed at the garage, who daily ate his dinner in that corner. There he could sit on the pile of empty petrol cans, out of sight and yet within earshot should his services suddenly be called for; and on this particular day, his firm having been by chance extra busy all the morning, he had gone later than usual into the private shed at the back to fetch the basin of food left there for him by his landlady’s little son, so that when Jocelyn took Sally into the corner it was empty, because Mr. Soper, instead of being in the middle of his dinner as he would have been on other days, was in the act of collecting it in the shed.
‘Beg pardon, Miss,’ he said, staring at Sally, his mouth dropping open. ‘Beg pardon, I’m sure, Miss——’
And he put his arm quickly back round the door he had just come through and whipped out a chair. ‘Won’t you—won’t you sit more comfortable, Miss?’
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Sally, getting up and smiling politely.
Mr. Soper’s pasty face became bright red at that smile. He proceeded to dust the seat of the chair by rubbing the bottom of his handkerchiefed basin up and down it, and then stood staring at the young lady, the basin dangling sideways in his hand, held carelessly by the knotted corners of its handkerchief, and some of its gravy accordingly dribbling out.
‘It do smell nice, don’t it,’ remarked Sally as she sat down, unable to refrain from sniffing.
‘What do, Miss?’ asked Mr. Soper, recognising with almost incredulous pleasure a manner of speech with which he was at his ease.
‘Wot you got in that there basin,’ said Sally, also recognising, and also with pleasure, accents since her marriage become very dear to her because reminiscent of home.
She smiled with the utmost friendliness at him. Mr. Soper found it difficult to believe his eyes.
‘It’s my dinner,’ said Mr. Soper, gazing at the vision.
‘Well, I didn’t suppose it was your Sunday ’at,’ said Sally, pleased to find that she too, given a chance, could say clever things. ‘Tell by the smell it ain’t a nat.’
Mr. Soper also seemed to think this clever, for he laughed, as Sally put it to herself, like anything.
‘Stew?’ she asked, her delicate nose describing little half circles of appreciative inquiry.
‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Soper. ‘Irish.’
‘Thought so,’ said Sally; and added with a sigh, ‘the best of the lot.’
Mr. Soper being intelligent, though handicapped at the moment by not quite believing his eyes, thought he here perceived encouragement to untie the handkerchief. He put the basin on the floor at the young lady’s feet, and untied it. She gazed at the lovely contents, at potatoes showing their sleek sides through the brimming gravy, at little ends of slender cutlets, at glimpses of bright carrots, at pearly-shouldered onions gleaming from luscious depths, with such evident longing that he was emboldened to ask her if she wouldn’t oblige him by tasting it, and telling him her opinion of it as a stew.
‘There’s stews and stews, you know, Miss,’ he said, hastily arranging it on an empty packing-case convenient for her, ‘but my old woman’s who looks after me is ’ard to beat——’
And he ran into the little shed he had come out of, and after a minute’s rummaging brought her a spoon and plate. His own spoon was in his pocket. He didn’t use a plate.
Sally tasted; and, having tasted, went on tasting. Soon there was danger that Mr. Soper’s dinner would be so much tasted that there wouldn’t be any left, but he cared nothing for that. If he had had a hundred stews, and he starving, they should all have been the young lady’s.
Sally tried not to taste too much, but she was so hungry, and the stew was so lovely. Besides, the young man kept urging her to go on. He was more like a friend than any one she had yet met. That he should never take his eyes off her didn’t disturb her in the least, for she had been used to that all her life; and his language was her language, and he didn’t make her feel nervous, and she knew instinctively that she could do nothing wrong in his sight, and she talked more to him during the half hour they ate the stew together—for she presently insisted on his getting another plate and joining in—than she had talked to Jocelyn the whole time they had known each other; talked more to him, indeed, than she had ever talked to anybody, except, when she was little, to those girl friends who had later fallen away.
How surprising, how delightful, the ease with which she said things to Mr. Soper, and the things that came into her head to say! Quite clever, she was; quite sharp, and quick at the take-up. And laugh—why, the young fellow made her laugh so that she could hardly keep from choking. Not in all her life had she laughed as Mr. Soper made her laugh. Bright, he was, and no mistake. While as for Mr. Soper himself, who could be much, much brighter, he was fortunately kept damped down to his simpler jokes by the effect the strange young lady’s loveliness had on him; so that he who in Truro was known as the life of his set, as the boldest of its wits as well as the most daring of its ladies’ men, was as mild and timid in his preliminary frisks with Sally as a lately born lamb exploring, for the first time, the beautiful strange world it had suddenly discovered.