Chapter Twenty-Two
Having gotten lost in an unfamiliar corridor on his way to the lobby the next morning, Pluck happened upon Modeste, the former cleaning lady who, it will be remembered, I trust, had revenged herself upon her social superiors by shitting in the interview room, and who was now slumped, sobbing, against the door of a linen closet.
“Girl!” Pluck shouted to the fifty-year-old. “What in Heaven’s name is the matter?! You’re making a disgusting display of yourself! No gentleman of any self-regard would ever demean himself to wed and procreate with such a slob! If you’ve no concern for your own future, I implore you to at least consider the bleak prospects for your as-yet-unconceived offspring.”
Modeste wrung her hands, just like they used to do, in old books. “I can’t do it, monsieur! I just don’t have it in me!”
“You can’t do what, my dear?”
“Take on the whole world! Defeat all prejudice! Vanquish all evil! It’s just too much, sir, for li’l ol’ me—can’t you see?”
The ugliness of her face was not, Pluck observed, improved by the addition of a film of mucous tears spread thereupon. The gentleman in him, however—the gentleman, I say—would not let himself be told to lie down like a dead racehorse that had been shot and would soon be turned, if not to glue, then to ground-up meat for cows or something (because it would be both silly and counterproductive to feed glue to cows—can you imagine?). Meaning, that Pluck proceeded to inquire, with an inexpressibly tasteful simplicity:
“What’s wrong?”
Pluck having reconfigured his diction in order to allow himself to be understood by an underling, that underling, having duly understood, now returned:
“I was humiliated, sir! Humiliated!”
“How so?”
“I was the one who shat in your room, sir!”
Pluck thought. Was she referring to that night, last week, when, in the middle of a bad dream, he sleepjumped out of bed and sleepwalked over to the corner of his room and sleepshat on a rug before sleepwiping himself with the drape then sleepreturning to bed and finally sleepsleeping till midday? But he had—when awake, now—paid off that other cleaning lady, that kind, sweet, gentle one, the one you, Reader, deigned, a little arbitrarily, it must be said, to designate “Maisie”—he had paid her off to clean it up and tell not a soul. (In reality, she toyed with the notion of publishing a pamphlet, to sell for a modest sum to guests and staff from a kiosk in the lunchroom, relating every detail of that misadventure, but lacked the printing facilities and soon let her mind roam off to other matters.)
“I. . .don’t think that was you, girl,” Pluck said to Modeste. “You may put your vacuous thoughts to rest on that score.”
“Yes, sir, it was, it definitely was. Remember? The meeting room, just off the lobby, which you use for your torture room?”
“I think you mean ‘interview room’, and, yes, now that you’ve specified it, I do remember. That eldest Drig boy, wasn’t it? Little bastard. I ought to have smacked him across the face with the poker immediately afterward, so that the lesson might have been branded on his psyche more effectively.”
“Yes, sir, but after I cleaned that up, I went and shat there myself—in the next corner over. Don’t you remember?” She was panicking, now, clutching with her witch’s claws at figments in the air, in the dawning belief that the one towering, ethical act by which she’d hoped to be defined had left such a transitory imprint on the wet sand of mankind’s memory.
“Dimly,” Pluck lied, to calm her down. “But what of it?”
“I was discharged, sir. Discharged! Discharged, from a job I’d come to love, and prosper at, and be respected for! Discharged!”
Pluck made a show of checking his watch. “Yes, yes, I heard you the first time. So what’s any of this got to do with me?”
She looked down at the dirty carpet and wrung her hands some more, to Pluck’s audible (he sighed) irritation. “I’d felt a kind of. . .rebirth. . .sir. When I done it. Took the shit, I mean. As if. . .all the tuppence’s worth o’ life I’d sloshed through up till then had been swept away, and I could finally. . .say something.”
“With your shit?”
“Aye, with my shit. Sir.”
Despite the woman’s physical repugnance, offensive breath and annoying croaky voice, Pluck was moved. He raised his chin and, in the half-lit corridor, pondered in silence what she’d said. Once or twice, she’d started to say something more, but he hushed her, angrily and with a plethora of profanity, and thought some more. He finally took her hand—bony, slimy from where she’d wiped her nose, and soiled from things you don’t want to know—patted it, and promised: “I will be your champion.”
He dragged her through the corridors until he was even more lost. He was forced to ask her for navigational assistance, and she led him to the lobby; from there, he resumed command, and led her the few steps to the interview room. He strode inside, yanking her after him. Enid and Bartoff were in their seats, the former engaged in idiotic smalltalk with Mifkin, the latter engaged in idiotic pleasantries with his dog. Pluck rushed to the snacks table, grabbed a cheese knife and stood in magnificent profile against the hearth: the firelight gilded his brow, nose and chin with an outline of liquid flame, whilst he waved the knife about and vowed to disembowel any man or woman, or, if it came to that, child or animal or plant, who dared to stop this old hag from expressing her innermost angel. “Go on, dear,” he continued in direct speech, “to whichever corner you fancy. And, by all that’s most holy, show the world what it is you’re made of!” She did; Bartoff swooned and crashed to the floor; the mutt sniffed its fallen master and licked his ears, increasingly disturbed. This done, Pluck flung the knife to the carpet and walked out, straightening his bow-tie and smirking with a sense of duty done.
The other, younger, cleverer and more attractive cleaning lady—“Maisie”, if that’s what we’re still calling her—was meanwhile sat at a low bench in the scullery, consuming today’s gourmet slop to the accompaniment of pan-banging, plate-dropping and cook-cursing. The room was hot and dress-dewy with humidity. She stared into the swill in the bowl before her. She pondered her lot as a woman and a servant, and concluded that it was not for this purpose that the Lord above had endowed her with a soul. It was at this moment that the inspiration for a life in the battle for woman’s suffrage and the depenisification of the handlers of the levers of power struck her. She was tired of being nice, and compliant, but she knew she couldn’t just grab hold of the nearest cleaver and start chopping off cocks left and right without having first perfected a plan. She would be wily, and cagey, and strong-willed, and she would hide her pride in a corner of her soul until the day would come when that cleaver would meet its first cock, and she would hear a bell peel between her ears, and the first move towards a rebalancing of the universe would be made.
A bell summoned her. She was told to go clean up another pile of faeces in the meeting room. Modeste had been expressing herself again, it would seem.