NO WOMAN SHOULD ...

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 302, 17 September 1936, Page 7

NO WOMAN SHOULD ...

Short Story

By

Prudence O’Shea

JT all comes back to that one

fact; a woman shouldn’t speak to a man she doesn’t know.

When my father died I inherited £3OOO, which I invested in a neat little shop selling chocolates and cigarettes. It was near a bottle factory, and all day long trade was ’ brisk, save, perhaps, from two to four in .the afternoon.

Then the factory hooter went for tea, and out the girls rushed in their overalls, without hats, buying a packet of ten or some chocolates. The men, too. It was a lock-up shop, my home being with a married sister in the suburbs, and one or two of her friends used to ask me what I’d do if anyone ever walked in with a revolver and held me up, because I used to take a lot of money every day. When I hopped on the Underground in the evenings no one guessed just how much money I was carrying in my little attache case to bank the following mornijig. But I’m not green, and I had no reason to be afraid of smash and grab raids because by the till, beneath my feet. I had an alarm, and even if I had to put up my hands while the takings were removed I’d have been pressing the bell and the raiders wouldn’t have got far.' But that’s by the way. I met a lot of funny people. Laugh! I sometimes kept my sister and her two girls with tears streaming down their faces. And though I’m not young, you’d be surprised how many men tried to get fresh. Perhaps they had a bit of <p»iet necking in mind. Or more likely, they guessed the business belonged to me. But that’s by the way, too, except that a man would have to be pretty slick to take me in. The first time the mild little man came in was about the middle of March, and he smiled courteously and bought a packet of twenty and said I’d a nice little business. I said p’raps I bad and p’raps I hadn’t. * * * WEEK later he came in again and said it was nice to be in a sheltered place after being in the park most of the day, where a very blustery wind was blowing. “Why?” I asked. “What’s your job?” “You’d never guess,” be replied, and after lighting his cigarette and moving out of the other customers’ ways, he went out. Tlie third time he came in he said a funny thing and I would have thought it pretty fresh if his eyes hadn't been such an innocent blue. Even shy, they were. He said: “I’ve got to stop coming here because you’re the sort of woman that makes a man want tto loiter and talk.”

Oh well ... I guess I smiled, though I let him see I thought it was all blarney. He didn’t come again until the last week in April. Well I remember it! He started by saying his feet were tired. It was three o’clock and business had been brisk all day. As soon as the weather gets fine, you know, the girls and men in the factory go

and sit in some recreation grounds near and buy more cigarettes. My little shop was lit up with sunshine and the little mild man came in smiling with a sort of tender smirk to his lips. He had a soft golden moustache; fair, thin hair; a rather apologetic bearing and his clothes were very shiny ... especially on the seat of his pan'ts. He might have been a retired postman, though I can’t say as I’ve ever met a retired postman. Or a glass-blower or a piano-tuner. Anyway, his work I should think had been refined with a lot of open-air or something artistic about it. His eyes were like a little boy’s, and he quoted something about being in England with April there. “Why?” I asked. “Because then I can do more good,” he replied. • * * * “0H yeah!” I chivvied him, because generally speaking I don’t think men like doing good. But he answered quite seriously: “Though perhaps you would not consider it doing good. My work, I mean. Or rather, my hobby. Though lots of women between forty and fifty have benefited by it.” "Here,” I said, folding my arms, “cut out all this mystery.” So then he started telling me about his work—-or rather his hobby. And I’ll say it 1 was queer. The queerest hobby I’ve ever come across. “I’ve never been married, though I’ve always been romantic,” he started. “Sang -in the choir and all that as a boy and liked trying different musical instruments. And gardening, and star-gazing. It was only after I retired that I took up my hobby. I suppose because I was lonely. And when you’ve been lonely yourself you know what it’s like for others.” Then he stood first on one foot and then on the other and I remembered he’d said his feet ached, so I said: “Sit down, why don’t you?” and as he sat gratefully on the chair on the other side of the counter I couldn’t help thinking that he was the sort of gentle little man who made a warm kitchen look well-furnished.

Well, he went on speaking quite well, not so much like an educated man as a man who reads a lot and remembers what he reads.

“I stumbled on my hobby,” he went on. “when I used to sit in the parkreading my paper and wishing someone . . . well, beautiful and young, perhaps ... would talk to me. They never did. of course, and once or twice I tried to start a conversation with someone like I had in mind, but when I started on poetry they burst out laughing and I knew that to them I was just a funny old man . . . perhaps /vith a screw loose. It quite hurt me at first because I had always been under the impression that although I’d got on in years . . . turned fifty . . . I still somehow looked in my prime. But that’s by the way. When I got over my surprise I had my idea.” “Which was?”

“WELL, you see . . . there's a lot of people in the world like mo. They don’t get together ... they're not

mixers. And they’re proud like me, for if anyone had spoken to me out of pity and I’d known, I’d have hated them. So I thought how awful it must be for women of between thirtyfive and fifty who’ve never had a romance and who’ve worked hard all their lives. They must feel a hundred times worse than me, because I’ve got my little home and perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps they’ve just a furnished room'or live with relatives.”

I looked at my cuticles. “So,” he said dramatically, as you might say, “I started making love to women over middle-age.” “Oh, you didn't!” I exclaimed, because I was shocked, I suppose, and a bit disappointed in him, but his next words made me see how, what you might call, chivalrous it was. “I’m busiest in spring,” he said. “Then I’m out early at about the time the office cleaners are leaving. Any time up till nine. Office cleaners work early and late, you know. In winter they must have to get up before daybreak, and if they live any distance qilt it must be very cold. They don’t get paid much, either.

“Well, I don’t have anything to do with the fat ones who look hearty and come out full of jokes with the lift man. They don’t need romance. I look for the pale ones with the watery eyes who look as if a good meal and fire would do them good. I begin by getting in the same bus as a woman like that. They’re always the same; their skirts are always stretched over the knees through scrubbing, and their hands are always grey and dull and quite misshapen with' work. "P’raps they’re going home to a good breakfast and a lie-down; and p’raps they’re not. I should say not. Ten to one they’ve got charing to do in a private house. Or they’re caretakers during the day. Or p'raps they sell flowers or are cloak-room attendants. “Well, as I say, I’ve picked on a shy. thin one. She comes out of the office building silently, while the others are chy-iking the liftman. I watch betas she pays the bus conductor, and her purse is always very thin and old. Then I start staring at her, and nt first she thinks I’m just absent-minded, but after a bit she notices me. Sometimes a woman is so sure that no one would ever look at her twice that it takes three or four mornings before she notices that I’m always on the same bus.

in spring they look at the trees just swelling with buds, and they think that this spring, after all. is going to bring something special for them. They’ve thought it every spring of their lives, and from what I know of them they’ve always been disappointed. But they still go on hoping. Well, say a woman notices- mestarlng at her the fourth morning. On the fifth I know, as she catches my eye. sitting opposite her, that she has recognised me, and perhaps at the sixth trip I notice that she’s got a new flower on her hat or perhaps she's brushed up the fur on her jacket. “Anyway, there's a kind of difference about her, even if it’s only because her eyes are shining. On the seventh trip 1 know by the way she looks to the left

and right as she comes out from work that she’s looking for me, and although we haven’t spoken it’s giving me as much pleasure to be looked for as it is her to be followed.

“Soon I can tell by the way her friends look with her that she has told them all about me, and that they’re all talking about it. I can hear them saying ‘There’s your friend, Gert,’ and p’raps they say I’m a funny-looking chap, and I daresay she defends me and says I’ve nice ways. “Anyway, I follow her until she jumps on the bus with a kind of lightness and pleasure about it, and says: ‘ ’Lo, Alf!’ to the conductor, and he says, ‘ ’Lo, Gert!’ “Then one day I get out before her, and as I pass her I pull a carnation or some sort of flower out of my lapel and just drop it oh her lap. And then I never see her again.” “Oh, but . . .”

“2^" O. What would be'the good ? I’ve done my work. When I never turn up again perhaps she thinks I’m run over or gone abroad. But whatever she thinks, there’s always her friends to remind her of me when they say: ‘Remember that cove, Gert, who chased you for months?’ And she’ll always think, even if she doesn’t say nothing, that that spring did bring something out of the ordinary.” “Very much out of the ordinary,” I said. Then I added quickly: “Look here . . . you’re not putting the works on me, are you? I mean .. . I’m not one of your cases?” But instead of laughing he replied, quite sadly: “No . . . you’re too young and much too handsome to take me seriously.” I stood with my hands on my hips, looking at him as he rested his elbow's on the counter, humming a song. There was something gay and pleasant about him, and although I’d have had something to say about it if my nieces had started talking to men they didn’t know, it didn’t seem so bad the w’ay he told me about it. And he done it out of kindness. There wasn’t any harm. “Phew . . . I’m tired,” he said, when he’d finished his song. And I suddenly had an idea. I have my tea at about a quarter to four as a rule, and I said: “Look here , . . how about a cup of tea?” * * * TIE blinked up af me and I saw that his eyes were really nice, like a boy’s. “Oh kay!” he said, and I darted into the little storeroom at the back and had the kettle on in no time. I shook a quarter of a pound of biscuits out of a bag and put the tin with the sugar in it on the tray. Then I nipped out into the shop, feeling as gay as a bird. You could have knocked me backwards I He wasn’t there! He’d gone, and the money out of my till had gone! That and the flower he left on the counter were the only signs that he had ever existed. That man, believe me. was an artist! Which comes back to what I said at first: no woman should speak to a man she doesn’t know!