The Butcher Shop

by Jean Devanny

  “What nonsense!” he exclaimed impatiently. “Are you a child or merely a fool? You know perfectly well that I shall not tell Mrs. Messenger. She is not the sort of woman to be told things of that kind, even if I were the sort of man to tell them. Only don’t do it again, that’s all.” He snapped his words out now. “I can’t imagine what your notion is in lying about your hostess, but don’t do it again. If I ever have reason to think that you are lying about her again I’ll tell Messenger, and that’s flat.”

  It was in Miette’s mind to say: “Oh, no, you won’t. If you did, I should tell Barry what I know.” (What did she know of the sort of man Messenger was?) But expediency exhorted her to reply humbly instead: “I shan’t lie about her again. I lied because I was jealous.”

  He looked down on her in pitiable contempt. “Jealous! Why, in Heaven’s name?” Did that poor stupid creature dare to see herself a rival of that glorious other? Glengarry was sorry. “Why, in Heaven’s name?” he repeated more gently.

  “Because of you—and Jimmy—and Ian.” Miette played her cards well now. “You are all in love with Margaret. I love Ian, but he doesn’t bother his head about me now. Do you know, he is not living with me now, and it is all because he is in love with Margaret.”

  “Nonsense! It is because of his injury.” Glengarry did not want her embarrassing confidences.

  “It is not. I know. I know Ian. He’s only a baby. He can’t hide anything from me. And I like you, and you won’t speak a decent word to me because of Margaret—”

  “Look here, my girl,” he interrupted again. “That’s rot! I am quite willing to speak a decent word to you at any time. What I am not willing to do is to speak an indecent word to you. Do you get me?”

  “But I don’t want you to speak indecently to me. Why, I should hate you if you did. I can’t imagine—”

  “Don’t try. I’m sure your imagination is defective.” This dryly. “But why should you worry over me at all? You have your husband. I can assure you that if Mrs. Messenger did not exist you would still have no attraction for me.” He said this kindly, however, for he could appreciate well enough the trials of the tawdry soul denied the only thing life meant to her.

  Miette just looked up at him, and the man coloured under her meaning gaze. She nodded her head as much as to say: “Yes, you should blush, for you know that is a lie.” Then she said: “I know that, of course, but that doesn’t stop me liking you.” She became engagingly frank. “It makes me like you all the more. But you don’t dislike me, do you? Wait a bit. You can see how I am situated here, Glen. Margaret doesn’t like me. No one likes me unless it is you. Jimmy won’t come near the house because I’m here. (She did not dare speak her mind on that subject.) Ian has turned against me. Oh, yes, I mean it. All the ‘lambing’ season he has done nothing but talk to Margaret all day, and now he has taken to reading all the time. I like the children, but they don’t like me. Now, I know that no man would give a thought to poor me when Margaret is around; I don’t want—truly, Glen, I don’t expect anything from you (not unless you offer, of course), but would you mind just being nice to me sometimes? I don’t want to stay here. I want to go to Wellington and get work, but what about Ian? He can only leave here to go to a hospital. I love Ian, Glen, think what you will, and I couldn’t bear that. But if I stay here not being liked by a single soul I’ll go crazy. I have always had friends—plenty of them, people like ourselves, like Ian and me. If Ian had only stuck to me (Ian was her trump card, and she played it well), I wouldn’t have minded the rest, but—”

  Glengarry had seated himself on the table. He swung one leg and watched her. What she said was true enough, he thought. Certainly no one liked her. That was her own fault, but— He supposed she had her virtues as well as her faults.

  “Well, Mrs. Longstair, I can’t see why you should come to me, but of course I haven’t the slightest objection to you talking to me any time you like. I won’t have you compromising me, though. You understand that. I know your type of woman,” he said bluntly. “I know the difficulties of your temperament. Don’t try to put anything over on me, that’s all.”

  He stood up, and Miette gleefully allowed him to depart. She almost quivered with pleasurable excitement. She had not dreamed of getting so far as this in a single night. She had established a sort of intimacy between them. The man would not dislike her now, at any rate. That lie had been a stroke of genius, after all. She knew a man would forgive a woman any lie if it were told for love of him. It had made him take her into account. Still, he was a slippery customer, and she must be on her guard all the time. She still had his handkerchief. She sniffed at it, and it smelled good to her. An idea took her that the handkerchief might be useful to her on some future occasion. She put it away unwashed, in case—

  Miette had heard of Glengarry’s marriage through his mother. She had overheard Mrs. Glengarry discussing it with Mrs. Curdy.

  Margaret, though a trifle surprised, was glad to see Miette friendly with her lover. It told her that Miette had put Tutaki out of her mind, or at least was trying to. She tried to put her dislike and contempt for the woman aside, fully believing that all unpleasantness was over.

  And Miette used her to further her designs on Glengarry. “Do you think Glen would mind if I rode out with him in the morning, Margaret?” was the way she came at it the first time.

  “Why, no, of course not, Miette,” answered Margaret cordially.

  “Well, I hardly like asking him, Margaret. Would you mind?”

  And of course Margaret did not mind. She gladly requested Glengarry to take Miette out with him, and he, though preferring to do nothing of the kind, willingly obliged Margaret.

  In a few weeks Glengarry had got sort of used to her hanging around him. She had not tried to “put anything over on him,” and it had pleased Margaret to have him suffer her. He had even developed a sort of tolerant liking for her.

  Needless to say, Miette wanted him, but not crazily, as she still hungered after the Maori. Jimmy went about the house again now as much as the busy shearing season allowed him time to, but he never by any chance allowed her “to get at him,” as he expressed it to himself. He came to the house to see his friends the Messengers, and did not even recognise Miette unless compelled to do so by circumstances. Therefore were the flames of Miette’s revengeful passions kept alive. Not that they needed fuel. Was it not her boast that she never forgave an injury?

  The time came, then, just before Christmas of that year when Miette deemed it safe to move a step further. It was the time of Margaret’s house party. The Governor-General, his wife and sister and half a dozen of his train visited Maunganui for ten days. Consequently Margaret and Barry were continually occupied. All sorts of excursions were undertaken from day to day, and each evening saw carloads of visitors streaming up the drive.

  Margaret enjoyed it right enough. She liked the gaiety, the din and bustle. And oh! Did she not wear some beautiful frocks! Each evening before going downstairs she would show herself off before the children in the nursery, then to the servants and Mrs. Glengarry, who would shake her old head and smile deliciously at the beauty of her “bonny lass.”

  Barry’s adoration of her at this time was complete, and as for Glengarry—he was not far behind.

  Miette kept as much as possible out of the way. She was out of place here, and she felt it. Ian despised the “representatives of British Imperialism,” and refused even to meet them. Glengarry hated the “show,” too, and was glad to find asylum in Miette’s rooms.

  When the party had gone, then, and the house was itself again, Margaret soon became conscious of a difference in Miette. She tried to ignore it, to regard it as fancy, but that would not do. Before long she had to recognise that Miette was “vamping” Glengarry. She could scarcely believe it. “Well, of all the stupid, impudent hussies!” she told herself blankly when the conclusion was forced upon her. “To try it on again after the trouble with Jimmy.” Then wrath bubbled up in her, and lastly am
usement. She need not worry over this. Was not Glen hers?

  Of course, Miette never “pawed” Glengarry. Her operations were imperceptible to the man himself, who had ceased to regard her as dangerous. Margaret alone saw the tiny acts, invested by Miette, as only a woman could invest them, with a significance that only a woman would understand: the furtive glances, the little intimacies, all one-sided, but still serving their purpose. Only to Margaret were the chance words dropped, accidentally, of course, and the dozen and one other little things betrayed by which one woman lets another know of her intimacies.

  And Margaret laughed quietly in amused contempt and ignored it.

  Until she overheard the maids making a joke of it. She gathered, with tingling ears and strange emotions, that the maids believed in an intrigue going on between her lover and Miette. She rushed away to her room telling herself that she had been a fool. She should have known that, having once given good reason to be considered disreputable, Miette always lay open to the charge. Why, she had been continually with Glen. How silly she, Margaret, had been! She suffered terribly to think that her lover’s name was coupled lightly with Miette’s.

  Again she was faced with the problem—what to do? Patently, she could not interfere again. And on such a ground as servants’ tattle. Yet it was intolerable. Oh, how she loathed that woman who was pure animal! The creature who was befouling her home—her children’s home. It was intolerable, and yet she could do nothing. Good taste, delicacy, and before all, pride, forbade it.

  But the woman in her was awake now. Instead of ignoring Miette’s shuffles she found herself looking for them, and when she found them she was not amused. Miette saw it, and redoubled her cunning. She told Margaret subtle little half-truths, those deadliest of woman’s weapons, with an air of childish innocence. For instance: “I have a cold to-day. I told Glen last night that I would catch cold, but he would persist in keeping me out in the night air.”

  Truth was, she had, uninvited, gone with Glengarry to a neighbouring paddock to bring the bay foal into the yard in readiness for an early morning start. But on finding the grass heavy with dew and fearing a cold, which gave her a red nose and puffed up her eyes abnormally, Miette had, before going very far, suggested that she had better go back as her shoes were wet. And the man had absently remarked: “Oh, well, we haven’t far to go, but please yourself.”

  And again: “Margaret, would you show me how to knit?”

  Margaret: “Knit! Why, you have said a hundred times that you hated knitting.”

  “Yes, so I do, but Glen said that he wished I would learn to knit, as he liked to see a woman knitting.”

  On this occasion something really cold had clutched at Margaret’s heart. Not jealousy; it had not come to that just yet, more of a faraway fear. Still, she showed Miette how to knit.

  Truth was, Miette had complained of having nothing to do, and Glengarry had said: “Well, why don’t you do something? Why don’t you knit or sew like other women?”

  “Oh, knitting—sewing.” Miette had spoken contemptuously. “I hate women that knit. They have never got any intelligence.”

  And he had replied off-handedly, rather coldly in fact: “Please yourself. Personally, I prefer the women that knit.”

  Margaret began to pay more attention to Glengarry. And her attentions were clothed in her most charming manner. She took to joining him and Miette when she saw them together, and there was that in her demeanour that caused Glengarry to look at her askance.

  Miette saw her house of cards tumbling to the ground at this. She had been baffled and disappointed at finding herself unable to make Margaret display jealousy, and had been deliberating on something more drastic. If she could only awaken desire in the man! She had had to see that no illicit relation existed between the two; no opportunity of any kind ever presented itself with Barry at home, but that fact only incensed her the more. It bespoke the existence of a higher love which Miette, being incapable of understanding, had always denied the existence of. And, her experience of men having told her that Glengarry was the most unspiritual of men, she was forced to see that Margaret was responsible for the exalted quality of the love. Miette felt the grossness in the man. He would have been her easy prey had some sublime safeguard not preserved him.

  She had not anticipated that Margaret would come right out in the open as she now did. She had no clue to the other’s behaviour. She had thought to make her miserable, jealous, but instead, without giving Miette the slightest satisfaction in regard to her part, she had come out, clothed in all her radiance and charm, to pull down Miette’s rotten little house of cards about her ears.

  Miette saw it tumbling. If Margaret went on like that, never allowing her so much as a minute’s tête-à-tête with the man, “gobbling him up,” as Miette expressed it, she, Miette, might just as well give up the game.

  Imagine her surprise and delight to find the man himself become her own ally.

  Margaret had followed the woman in her. She did not doubt Glengarry—not yet, but reason pointed out that the man might be forgetting her. She knew too well the vein of grossness in him, and she knew how Miette would pander to it. If Glen were forgetting her, ceasing to love her, he might in time succumb to Miette as Jimmy had done.

  The bare idea of such a contingency had roused fearsome emotions in Margaret’s breast. So fearsome were they that she was appalled. She scurried hither and thither in search of immunity from them. They made her tremble in wonder and awe at herself. They made her realise how little the ordinary mortal, passing smoothly along life’s path, knows of the possibilities within himself. She must find immunity. And the woman in her had told her to tighten up the shackles.

  There was no intent to reopen that old struggle; only a frank desire, if his love for her was dying, to revive it.

  Margaret did not realise her own value. And, simple as ever, she did not tally up the whole sum in estimating the effect her attentions would have on her lover. She counted on reviving his love; what she really did was to re-awaken his mighty passions. She gave him no hint of her motivation; she would sooner have died, at that stage of the tragedy, than to have allowed Glen to think that Miette’s tawdry play could affect her. She re-awakened his mighty passions and he, blind as to her motives, believed that was her object. Why else could she suddenly swoop upon him in that way? He got a bit sulky. What did she want to come at that again for, when things were going along so splendidly! Confound the women! They were never content. Surely it should be enough for her to know that she had him fast for ever. He had felt absolutely secure, had thought her happy and contented as himself, and here she came swooping upon him with the full force of her glorious beauty, plunging him back into the old days of hopeless longing, making his nights a sleepless hell of desire.

  Glengarry’s torment made him cruel. He repulsed her. Anything to regain his peace of mind. He tried to discourage her attentions, and Miette was always there waiting her chance, guessing at what was toward, often almost arriving at the truth. She, learned in the bestial side of men, saw the stirring of Glengarry’s passions, and her heart would leap in hope that she might turn them to her own gain; in hope that Margaret’s foolishness and simplicity would do for her what herself could never accomplish.

  The man never gave a thought to Miette. When he fled to her rooms as he took to doing in order to avoid his love, she was to him but a refuge from that which was a torture to him. He did not dare see Margaret alone. He stuck to Messenger as much as he could, but there was a limit to that.

  Did he know of the chaos that Margaret’s mind was becoming? Or of the transformation that the spirit of her was undergoing? Of course not. Tossing on his bed at night he almost cursed her, believing that in wantonness she thus punished him.

  What chances now had Miette to “get her own back”! She did not neglect them. She had no means of confirming her guesses at the real situation. Conceited and stupid as she was, she could not persuade herself that she was responsible for the situ
ation, for the man never, by word or look, encouraged her to believe that she had made any impression on him. She was convinced that he was still, as he had declared to her: “in love with Mrs. Messenger and proud of it!” Why was he behaving so, then? Miette guessed and guessed at the puzzle, and then had it solved by Ian.

  Longstair was not allowed to remain in the dark regarding Margaret’s move and Glengarry’s reaction to it, one may be sure. Miette’s garrulity would have disallowed this in any case.

  Margaret had refused to allow Ian to withdraw himself from her, as he had wished to do. Thinking that he was giving way to melancholy because of his injury, she had gone to his rooms after him and insisted on him giving her his time as usual. She knew how essential discussion was to his happiness. But now it was she who neglected him, and Ian suffered in his mild way. She did not come to his rooms because of Miette. When he sought her without she was only spasmodically interested. Urged on by his wife, he watched Margaret and Glengarry. Even to outsiders it was evident that Margaret was paying a great deal of attention to the man, and Ian, for one, noticed now and again a thoughtful look on Barry’s face.

  And Miette said to Ian: “I wish Glen would not come after me so much, Hubby. He will give Margaret the impression that I am the cause of him not wanting her, and she will cause trouble again like she did over Jimmy. Glen is a nice man. I like him, Hub, but I don’t want any trouble over him. I think I shall tell him to keep away from me. Ay? What do you think?”

  And poor Ian, jealous and conscientious, at once replied: “Of course not. The man has got the right to choose his own associates. She beats me. She ought to know that it is impossible for Glengarry to carry on with her when Messenger and he are so friendly.”

  So he solved Miette’s puzzle. “Oh!” she said; and after a while added: “So that’s it.” After another pause she burst out in a flash of honesty: “Then he’s a silly damn fool!”