Angel Pavement

HARPER & BROTHERS New York _and_ London 1930

_Angel Pavement Copyright, 1930, by J. B. Priestley Printed in the U. S. A. Fourth Printing_

_To C. S. EVANS_

_because he is not only a good friend and a fine publisher, but also because he is a London man and will know what I am getting at in this London novel._

[Contents]

_Prologue_

I. They Arrive--12

II. Mr. Smeeth Is Reassured--51

III. The Dersinghams At Home--87

IV. Turgis Sees Her--128

V. Miss Matfield Wonders--169

VI. Mr. Smeeth Gets His Rise--219

VII. Arabian Nights For Turgis--264

VIII. Miss Matfield’S New Year--313

IX. Mr. Smeeth Is Worried--356

X. The Last Arabian Night--402

XI. They Go Home--444

_Epilogue_

_Prologue_

She came gliding along London’s broadest street, and then halted, swaying gently. She was a steamship of some 3,500 tons, flying the flag of one of the new Baltic states. The Tower Bridge cleared itself of midgets and toy vehicles and raised its two arms, and then she passed underneath, accompanied by cheerfully impudent tugs, and after some manœuvring and hooting and shouting, finally came to rest alongside Hay’s Wharf. The fine autumn afternoon was losing its bright gold and turning into smoke and distant fading flame, so that it seemed for a moment as if all London bridges were burning down. Then the flare of the day died out, leaving behind a quiet light, untroubled as yet by the dusk. On the wharf, men in caps lent a hand with ropes and a gangway, contrived to spit ironically, as if they knew what all this fuss was worth, and then retired to group themselves in the background, like a shabby and faintly derisive chorus; and men in bowler hats arrived from nowhere, carrying dispatch cases, notebooks, bundles of papers, to exchange mysterious jokes with the ship’s officers above; and two men in blue helmets, large and solid men, took their stand in the very middle of the scene and appeared to tell the ship, with a glance or two, that she could stay where she was for the time being because nothing against her was known so far to the police. The ship, for her part, began to think about discharging her mixed cargo.

This cargo was so mixed that it included the man who now emerged from the saloon, came yawning on to the deck, and looked down upon Hay’s Wharf. This solitary passenger was a man of medium height but of a massive build, square and bulky about the shoulders, and thick-chested. He might have been forty-five; he might have been nearly fifty; it was difficult to tell his exact age. His face was somewhat unusual, if only because it began by being almost bald at the top, then threw out two very bushy eyebrows, and finally achieved a tremendous moustache, drooping a little by reason of its very length and thickness; a moustache in a thousand, with something rhetorical, even theatrical, about it. He wore, carelessly, a suit of excellent grey cloth but of a foreign cut and none too well-fitting. This passenger had come with the ship from the Baltic state that owned her, but there was something about his appearance, in spite of his clothes, his moustache, that suggested he was really a native of this island. But that is perhaps all it did suggest. He was one of those men who are difficult to place. The sight of him did not call up any particular background, and you could not easily imagine him either at work or at home. He had come from the Baltic to the Thames, but it might just as well have been from any place to any other place. As he stood there, straddling at ease, a thick figure of a man but not slow and heavy, with his gleaming bald front and giant moustache, looking down at the wharf quite incuriously, he seemed a man who was neither coming home nor leaving it, and yet not a simple traveller, and this gave him a faint piratical air.

“Lon-don, eh?” cried a voice at his elbow. It came from the second mate, a small natty youngster not unlike a pale and well-brushed monkey. “Vairy nice, eh?”

“All right.”

“You com’ ’ere, Misdair Colsbee? You stay ’ere?” The second mate liked to air his English and had not had much opportunity of doing so during the voyage.

“Yes, I stay here,” replied Mr. Golspie, for that was the name the second officer was trying to pronounce. “That is,” he boomed, as an afterthought, “if there’s anything doing.”

“You leef ’ere, in Lon-don?” pursued the other, who had missed the force of the last remark.

“No, I don’t. I don’t live anywhere. That’s me.” And Mr. Golspie said this with a kind of grim relish, as if to suggest that he might pop up anywhere, and that when he did, something or somebody had better look out. He might have been one of the quieter buccaneers sailing into harbour.

Then, nodding amiably, he stepped forward, looked up and down the wharf again, and returned to the saloon, where he took a cigar from the box the captain had bought at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, and helped himself to a drink from one of the many bottles that overflowed from the sideboard to the table. It had been a convivial voyage. Mr. Golspie and the captain were old acquaintances who had been able to do one another various good turns. The captain had promised to make Mr. Golspie very comfortable, and one way of making Mr. Golspie very comfortable was to lay in and then promptly bring out a sound stock of whisky, cognac, vodka, and other liquors. There had been nothing one-sided about this arrangement, for the captain had been able to keep pace with his guest, even though his progress had not had the same steady dignity. The captain, who had once served in the Russian Imperial Navy and had only resigned from it by escaping in his shirt and trousers over the side one night, was apt to turn fantastic in his drink. On two nights out of the three, during the voyage, he had insisted upon declaiming a long speech from Goethe’s _Faust_ in four different languages, to show that he was a man of culture. And on the night before they had entered the Thames Estuary, the previous night, in fact, he had gone further than that, for he had laughed a great deal, sung four songs that Mr. Golspie could not understand at all, told a long story apparently in Russian, cried a little, and shaken Mr. Golspie’s hand so hard and so often that as he thought about it all now, over his cigar in the saloon that seemed so strangely still, Mr. Golspie could almost feel the ache again in his hand. Mr. Golspie himself did not perform any of these antics; he merely mellowed as the evening waned and the bottles were emptied; and he was mellowing now, early though it was, for he and the captain had sat a long time over lunch. Apparently, however, Mr. Golspie did not consider that he was sufficiently mellow, for he now helped himself to another drink.

The men in bowler hats were by this time on board. Some of them were interviewing the captain. Others were interested in Mr. Golspie, for they had to decide whether he was fit to land in the island of his birth. His relations with these officials were quite amiable, but they did not prevent him from expressing his views.

“Regulations! Of course they’re regulations!” he boomed through the great moustache, mellow but pugnacious. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not a lot o’ damned nonsense. There’s more palaver getting into England now than there was getting into Russia and Turkey before the blasted war. And we used to laugh at ’em. Backward countries we used to call ’em. Passports!” Here he laughed, then tapped the young man on the lapel of his blue serge coat. “Never kept a rogue out yet, never. Only wants a bit of cleverness. All they do is to make trouble for honest men--fellows like me, wanting to do a bit of good to trade. Isn’t that right? You bet it is.”

He then saw the customs officers, who dipped a hand here and there in his two steamer trunks and three battered suitcases.

“I expect you’d like to get away,” said one of them, beginning to chalk up his approval of the luggage.

Mr. Golspie watched him with idle benevolence, looking quite unlike a man who has two hundred and fifty cigars cunningly stowed away in a steamer trunk. “Not this time. No hurry, for once. I’m staying aboard to pick a bit of dinner with the skipper here.” He waved a hand, presumably to indicate the city that lay all round them. “It can wait.”

“What can?” And the young man gave a final flourish of chalk.

“London can,” replied Mr. Golspie. “All of it.”

The young man laughed, not because he thought this last remark very witty, but because this passenger suddenly reminded him of a comedian he had once seen at the Finsbury Park Empire. “Well, I dare say it can. It’s been waiting a long time.”

Left to himself, with his cigars all safe, Mr. Golspie ruminated for a minute or two, then climbed to the upper deck, perhaps to decide what it was that had been waiting so long.

He found himself staring at the immense panorama of the Pool. Dusk was falling; the river rippled darkly; and the fleet of barges across the way was almost shapeless. There was, however, enough daylight lingering on the north bank, where the black piles and the whitewashed wharf edge above them still stood out sharply, to give shape and character to the waterfront. Over on the right, the grey stones of the Tower were faintly luminous, as if they had contrived to store away a little of their centuries of sunlight. The white pillars of the Custom House were as plain as peeled wands. Nearer still, two church spires thrust themselves above the blur of stone and smoke and vague flickering lights: one was as blanched and graceful as if it had been made of twisted paper, a salute to Heaven from the City; the other was abrupt and dark, a despairing appeal, the finger of a hand flung out to the sky. Mr. Golspie, after a brief glance, ignored the pair of them. They in their turn, however, were dominated by the severely rectangular building to the left, boldly fronting the river and looking over London Bridge with a hundred eyes, a grim Assyrian bulk of stone. It challenged Mr. Golspie’s memory, so that he regarded it intently. It was there when he was last in London, but was new then. Adelaide House, that was it. But he still continued to look at it, and with respect, for the challenge remained, though not to the memory. Both the blind eyes and the lighted eyes of its innumerable windows seemed to answer his stare and to tell him that he did not amount to very much, not here in London. Then his gaze swept over the bridge to what could be seen beyond. The Cold Storage place, and then, cavernous, immense, the great black arch of Cannon Street Station, and high above, far beyond, not in the city but in the sky and still softly shining in the darkening air, a ball and a cross. It was the very top of St. Paul’s, seen above the roof of Cannon Street Station. Mr. Golspie recognised it with pleasure, and even half sung, half hummed, the line of a song that came back to him, something about “St. Paul’s with its grand old Dome.” Good luck to St. Paul’s! It did not challenge him: it was simply there, keeping an eye on everything but interfering with nobody. And somehow this glimpse of St. Paul’s suddenly made him realise that this was the genuine old monster, London. He felt the whole mass of it, spouting and fuming and roaring away. He realised something else too, namely, the fact that he was still wearing his old brown slippers, the ones that Hortensia had given him. He had arrived, had crept right into the very heart of London, wearing his old brown slippers. He had slipped two hundred and fifty cigars past their noses, and had not even changed into his shoes. James Golspie was surveying London in his slippers, and London was not knowing, not caring--just yet. These thoughts gave him enormous pleasure, bringing with them a fine feeling of cunning and strength: he could have shaken hands with himself; if there had been a mirror handy he would probably have exchanged a wink with his reflection.

He walked round the deck. Lights were flickering on along the wharf, immediately giving the unlit entrances a sombre air of mystery. A few men down there were heaving and shouting, but there was little to see. Mr. Golspie continued his walk, then stopped to look across and over London Bridge at the near waterfront, the south bank. Such lighting as there was on this side was very gay. High up on the first building past the bridge, coloured lights revolved about an illuminated bottle, to the glory of Booth’s Gin, and further along, a stabbing gleam of crimson finally spelt itself into Sandeman’s Port. Mr. Golspie regarded both these writings on the wall with admiration and sympathy. The sight of London Bridge itself too, pleased him now, for all the buses had turned on their lights and were streaming across like a flood of molten gold. They brought another stream of pleasant images into Mr. Golspie’s mind, a bright if broken pageant of convivial London: double whiskies in crimson-shaded bars; smoking hot steaks and chops and a white cloth on a little corner table; the glitter and velvet of the music-halls; knowing gossip, the fine reek of Havanas, round a club fender and fat leather chairs; pretty girls, a bit stiff perhaps (though not as stiff as they used to be) but very pretty and not so deep as the foreign ones, coming out of shops and offices, with evenings to spend and not much else: he saw it all and he liked the look of it. There was a size, a richness, about London. You could find anything or anybody you wanted in it, and you could also hide in it. He had been a fool to stay away so long. But, anyhow, here he was. He took a long and wide and exultant look at the place.

Dinner that night was very good indeed, the best the boat had given him. Mr. Golspie and the captain shared it with the chief engineer, who came beaming and shining from the depths, and the first mate, usually a very wooden fellow, for ever brooding over some mysterious domestic tragedy in Riga, but now for once gigantically social and cheerful. The steward, the one with the cropped head and gold tooth, lavished his all upon them. Bottles that had not been emptied before were emptied now, together with some that were produced for the first time. The talk, so far as Mr. Golspie had any part in it, was conducted in a fantastic mixture of English, German, and the ship’s own Baltic language, a mixture it would be impossible to reproduce here, but it went very well, smashing its way through the entanglements of irregular verbs and doubtful substantives, for nothing removes the curse of Babel like food, drink, and good-fellowship. All four grew expansive, bellowed confidences, roared through the fog of cigar smoke, threw back their heads to laugh, and were gods for an hour.

“Very soon we shall meet again,” said the captain to Mr. Golspie, clinking glasses for the third time. “Is that not so, my friend?”

“Leave it to me, my boy,” replied Mr. Golspie, very flushed, with tiny beads of perspiration on that massive bald front of his.

“You come back when you have finished your business here in London?”

“As to that, I can’t say. If I can, I will.”

“That is good,” said the captain. Then he looked very deep, and put a finger as big as a pork sausage to his forehead. “And now you will tell us what this business is, eh? In secret. We will not tell.”

The chief engineer tugged at the ends of his moustache, which was nearly as large as Mr. Golspie’s, and tried to look even deeper than the captain, like the repository of innumerable commercial secrets.

“I say this,” cried the huge first mate, who was in no condition now to wait until his opinion had been asked. “I say this. It is good business. It is for the good of our country. I drink to you,” he shouted, and promptly did so, with the result that he immediately remembered that disastrous affair at Riga, and sat silent, with the tears in his eyes, for the next twenty minutes.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Golspie, taking out his cigar and looking at it very knowingly, as if it was a fellow conspirator. “There’s no need to make a mystery of it. D’you remember Mikorsky? Wait a minute. Not the little fellow with the office in Danzig, but the big fellow with the beard, in the timber trade. That’s the one. Remember him?”

The captain did, and was evidently so pleased by this effort of memory that he appeared to conduct several bars of one of the stormier symphonies. The mate remembered, too, but only nodded, his tearful blue eyes being still fixed on that tragic interior in Riga. The chief engineer did not remember Mikorsky, and, in what seemed nothing less than mental anguish, repeated the name in twenty different tones, beginning very high and ending in a despairing bass.

“I’ve done one or two little jobs for him,” Mr. Golspie continued, “during the time I had a bit of a pull. We’d a night or two together, too. I met him one day, not a month ago, and he said he was just going down into the country, to see his cousin, and I ought to go with him. So I did. I’d nothing better to do. Hot as hell it was down there, too, and I was bitten to death. This cousin of Mikorsky’s was in the furniture end of the timber trade, and he’d invented a new process, machine, treatment, everything, for turning out veneers and inlays. And labour costs next to nothing down there. I asked where all this stuff was going. Well, they’d got orders from Germany and Czecho-Slovakia and Austria and a chance of something in Paris. ‘What’s it going to cost in London?’ I said, showing ’em one of their lines, and they told me. It sounded all right to me, but I didn’t say anything. Not then. I went away and made a few enquiries. I found out what they were paying for this sort of stuff in Bethnal Green and Hoxton and those parts, in London, you know, where the furniture’s made----”

“Bednal Green, yes,” said the chief engineer proudly. “My uncle Stefan was there, yes, old Stefan in Bednal Green. Socialist,” he added, as a melancholy afterthought.

“He was, was he?” Mr. Golspie boomed, with a certain brutal heartiness characteristic of him. “Well, good luck to him! I’ll get on with the tale. They were paying half as much again for the same sort o’ stuff, veneers and inlays, not a bit better, here in London. Couldn’t get it where it was produced so cheap, y’see? Didn’t look about ’em. They’re getting slow here. There’s something in this for me, I said to myself, and off I went down there again, to see this other Mikorsky, the cousin. I wanted to know how much of this stuff I could have every month, various lines, and the prices. They told me, and guaranteed it. We had a few drinks on it, and I walk out, with a contract in my pocket, so much of this, that, and the other, at so much, whenever I liked to take it up, and me the sole agent for Great Britain.”

“Very good business,” said the captain, with a grave judicial air, in spite of his rather goggly eyes. “And now, you sell it all, eh? You make big profit?”

“What I do is to find somebody who’s in the way of selling it, somebody who’s in this line o’ business, and then go in with ’em.” Mr. Golspie refreshed himself noisily. “And if I haven’t laid my hand on somebody by this time the day after to-morrow, my name’s not Jimmy Golspie.”

“Make plenty of money, be rich, eh?”

“No, it’s too honest. But I’ll pick a bit up, to be going on with.”

“Ah no, no!” cried the captain, reaching over and patting Mr. Golspie on the shoulder. “You make plenty, here in London. Ho-ho, yes! Plenty! Money here in London--oh!--” And he held out his hands as if he expected the Bank of England to be emptied into them.

“Not so much as you think,” said Mr. Golspie, shaking his head very slowly. “Oh no, not at all. They may have it, but it’s all tied up. It’s not--er--shir--circulating. I tell you, they’re slow here, they’re slow.”

“You think they sleep?”

“That’s right. Half asleep, most of ’em.”

“Ho-ho,” roared the captain. “And you will put them awake?”

“One or two, p’rhaps, I might be able to shake up a bit. If not, I’m on the move again. And I’ll have to be on the move now, boys. I told that steward’s mate--the fellow that plays the concertina--to go and get me a taxi and take my traps ashore. It ought to be there, at the corner, any minute now. All right then. Just a last one for luck.”

They were having this last one, with some formality, when the man returned to say that the taxi was waiting. Mr. Golspie led the way to the deck, and then stopped near the gangway to say good-bye.

“Now for it,” he cried, more for his own benefit than for his listeners’. “Straight back into the old rabbit warren. God, what a place! Millions and millions, and most of ’em don’t know they’re born yet! Eyes and tails, that’s all they are, diving in and out of their little holes. The good old rabbit warren. Look at it! Ah, well, it’s no good looking at it here because you can’t see it. But I’ve been looking at it. What a place! Well, Chief--well, Captain--this is where I go.”

“And the beautiful daughter, the little Lena?” the captain inquired. “Is she here, waiting for you?”

“Not yet. She’s still in Paris, with her aunt, but she’ll be coming over as soon as I’ve settled down. Golspie and Daughter, that’ll be the style of the firm then, and we’ll see what London makes of it. And--my God--if I don’t waken some of ’em up, she will, the artful little devil! But she’ll have to behave here. Yes, she’ll have to behave. Well, Captain, keep her afloat, and remember me to all the girls and boys at the other end, and let’s meet again next time you’re over. Drop me a line to the office here. I’ll tell ’em where to find me. Where the devil’s the lad? Oh, he’s there, is he? Has he taken everything ashore? Right you are! So long!”

After a final wave of the hand, Mr. Golspie, a very massive figure now in his huge ulster, made a slow, steady, and very dignified progress down the gangway. When he found himself treading at last the stones of London, he turned his head and nodded, then strode off more briskly to the corner of Battle Bridge Lane, where the taxi was waiting. Two minutes later, he had gone hooting into the lights and shadows of the city, which sent whirling past the windows a crazy frieze, glimmering, glittering, darkening, of shops, taverns, theatre doors, hoardings, church porches, crimson and gold segments of buses, little lighted interiors of saloon cars, railings and doorsteps and lace curtains, mounds and chocolate, thousands of cigarette packets, beer and buns and aspirin and wreaths and coffins, and faces, faces, more and more faces, strange, meaningless and without end. But the lights that came flashing in found a tiny answering gleam in Mr. Golspie’s eyes; and when they had gone, in the double darkness of the cab and the shadow of that great moustache, he grinned. London neither knew nor cared; nevertheless, there it was: Mr. James Golspie had arrived.

_Chapter One_: THEY ARRIVE

I

Many people who think they know the City well have been compelled to admit that they do not know Angel Pavement. You could go wandering half a dozen times between Bunhill Fields and London Wall, or across from Barbican to Broad Street Station, and yet miss Angel Pavement. Some of the street maps of the district omit it altogether; taxi-drivers often do not even pretend to know it; policemen are frequently not sure; and only postmen who are caught within half a dozen streets of it are triumphantly positive. This all suggests that Angel Pavement is of no great importance. Everybody knows Finsbury Pavement, which is not very far away, because Finsbury Pavement is a street of considerable length and breadth, full of shops, warehouses, and offices, to say nothing of buses and trams, for it is a real thoroughfare. Angel Pavement is not a real thoroughfare, and its length and breadth are inconsiderable. You might bombard the postal districts of E. C. 1 and E. C. 2 with letters for years, and yet never have to address anything to Angel Pavement. The little street is old, and has its fair share of sooty stone and greasy walls, crumbling brick and rotting woodwork, but somehow it has never found itself on the stage of history. Kings, princes, great bishops, have never troubled it; murders it may have seen, but they have all belonged to private life; and no literary masterpiece has ever been written under one of its roofs. The guide-books, the volumes on London’s byways, have not a word to say about it, and those motor-coaches, complete with guide, that roam about the City in the early evening never go near it. The guide himself, who knows all about Henry the Eighth and Wren and Dickens and is so highly educated that he can still talk with an Oxford accent at the very top of his voice, could probably tell you nothing about Angel Pavement.

It is a typical City side-street, except that it is shorter, narrower, and dingier than most. At one time it was probably a real thoroughfare, but now only pedestrians can escape at the western end, and they do this by descending the six steps at the corner. For anything larger and less nimble than a pedestrian, Angel Pavement is a _cul de sac_, for all that end, apart from the steps, is blocked up by _Chase & Cohen: Carnival Novelties_, and not even by the front of Chase & Cohen but by their sooty, mouldering, dusty-windowed back. Chase & Cohen do not believe it is worth while offering Angel Pavement any of their carnival novelties--many of which are given away, with a thirty shilling dinner and dance, in the West End every gala night--and so they turn the other way, not letting Angel Pavement have so much as a glimpse of a pierrot hat or a false nose. Perhaps this is as well, for if the pavementeers could see pierrot hats and false noses every day, there is no telling what might happen.

What you do see there, however, is something quite different. Turning into Angel Pavement from that crazy jumble and jangle of buses, lorries, drays, private cars, and desperate bicycles, the main road, you see on the right, first a nondescript blackened building that is really the side of a shop and a number of offices; then _The Pavement Dining Rooms: R. Ditton, Propr._, with R. Ditton’s usual window display of three cocoanut buns, two oranges, four bottles of cherry cider picturesquely grouped, and if not the boiled ham, the meat-and-potato pie; then a squashed little house or bundle of single offices that is hopelessly to let; and then the bar of the _White Horse_, where you have the choice of any number of mellowed whiskies or fine sparkling ales, to be consumed on or off the premises, and if on, then either publicly or privately. You are now halfway down the street, and could easily throw a stone through one of Chase & Cohen’s windows, which is precisely what somebody, maddened perhaps by the thought of the Carnival Novelties, has already done. On the other side, the southern side, the left-hand side when you turn in from the outer world, you begin, rather splendidly, with _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas Fittings_, and two windows almost bright with sample fittings. Then you arrive at _T. Benenden: Tobacconist_, whose window is filled with dummy packets of cigarettes and tobacco that have long ceased even to pretend they have anything better than air in them; though there are also, as witnesses to T. Benenden’s enterprise, one or two little bowls of dry and dusty stuff that mutter, in faded letters, “Our Own Mixture, Cool Sweet Smoking, Why not Try it?” To reach T. Benenden’s little counter, you go through the street doorway and then turn through another door on the left. The stairs in front of you--and very dark and dirty they are, too--belong to _C. Warstein: Tailors’ Trimmings_. Next to T. Benenden and C. Warstein is a door, a large, stout, old door from which most of the paint has flaked and shredded away. This door has no name on it, and nobody, not even T. Benenden, has seen it open or knows what there is behind it. There it is, a door, and it does nothing but gather dust and cobwebs and occasionally drop another flake of dried paint on the worn step below. Perhaps it leads into another world. Perhaps it will open, one morning, to admit an angel, who, after looking up and down the little street for a moment, will suddenly blow the last trumpet. Perhaps that is the real reason why the street is called Angel Pavement. What is certain, however, is that this door has no concern with the building next to it and above it, the real neighbour of T. Benenden and C. Warstein and known to the postal authorities as No. 8, Angel Pavement.

No. 8, once a four-storey dwelling-house where some merchant-alderman lived snugly on his East India dividends, is now a little hive of commerce. For the last few years, it has contrived to keep an old lady and a companion (unpaid) in reasonable comfort at The Palms Private Hotel, Torquay, and, in addition, to furnish the old lady’s youngest niece with an allowance of two pounds a week in order that she might continue to share a studio just off the Fulham Road and attempt to design scenery for plays that are always about to be produced at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead. It has also indirectly paid the golf-club subscription and caddie fees of the junior partner of Fulton, Gregg & Fulton, the solicitors, who are responsible for the letting and the rents. As for the tenants themselves, their names may be found on each side of the squat doorway. The ground floor is occupied by the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, the first floor by _Twigg & Dersingham_, and the upper floors by the _Universal Hosiery Co._, the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, and, at the very top, keeping its eye on everybody, the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, which seems to be content with the possession of a front attic.

This does not mean that we have now finished with No. 8, Angel Pavement. It is for the sake of No. 8 that we have come to Angel Pavement at all, but not for the whole of No. 8, but only for the first floor. No doubt a number of tales, perhaps huge violent epics, could be started, jumped into life, merely by opening the door of the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, or by trudging up the stairs to the _Universal Hosiery Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, or by looking up at the grimy skylight, and giving a shout to the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, but we must keep to the less mysterious but more respectable first floor--and _Twigg & Dersingham_.

II

On this particular morning in autumn, Mrs. Cross was rather later than usual. That did not matter very much because it was not one of the floor-washing mornings, but just one of the ordinary dust-round-and-sweep-up-a-bit mornings. But somebody, one of the interfering sort, had left a note for her in the general office, that is, the room just behind the frosted glass partitions and the sort of ticket office window with _Enquiries_ on it, and this note said: _Mrs. Cross. What about turning this room out for a change? Thank you!!_

“An’ thank _you_!” said Mrs. Cross, quite aloud and with grim irony, as she tore up this note and popped it in the top of the stove. To show that she was not the kind of woman to be dictated to in this fashion, she immediately went and gave the other room, Mr. Dersingham’s private office, a thoroughly good sweeping and dusting. Having done that, she waddled straight across the general office to the other room, which, with its long counter and cupboards and drawers and samples of wood and litter, was the one she liked least, being always in a terrible mess. On her way, she completely ignored the general office, did not even give it a look, just as if it were full of people in the habit of leaving notes. Her back told it very plainly that she would clean up the office in her own way. Once in the other room, the nasty one, she felt so pleased about this rebuff that she set to work with a will, and for the next ten minutes was enveloped in a cloud of dust. By the time she had finished, there may have been very few articles in the room that were free from dust, but nearly all of them had at least exchanged their old dust for another variety that came perhaps from quite a distant corner. Then she thrust back a wisp of grey hair from her swollen face, on which time and trouble had first sketched a few lines and then deepened them by puffing out the surrounding flesh; she dragged her swollen feet across to the discarded leather office chair in the corner; she flopped into the chair and put her swollen hands--for though she said with some truth that she worked her fingers to the bone, hot water and soap and wet scrubbing brushes had piled sodden, nerveless flesh on those bones--in her lap, and rested. Immediately she plunged into a fierce reverie, in which the figure of Mr. Cross, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, the two rooms between the City Road and the black Regent’s Canal that were her home, Mrs. Tomlinson, the woman she was going to clean for later in the morning, and the image of a pound of stewing steak, all played their parts. Then she returned to the general office.

This time, she noticed its existence, and what she saw suddenly gave her a little fright. She had been a bit too hasty (her old fault) about that note. It really did want a good tidying. She had neglected it a bit lately, because for the last three mornings she had been late, all because she was not getting her proper sleep, and all because Mrs. Williams and her husband on the next floor had got a loud speaker, one of them little horns, and it was not only a loud speaker but also a late speaker, and in fact would speak your head off. And if she didn’t get on with this office a bit, the one that left that note would be complaining to Mr. Dersingham, and then that might mean another job gone, all due to hastiness. She had better be putting her hastiness behind a brush and duster. And, as if to give her a final push, a clock somewhere outside sounded the half-hour. Half-past eight!--well, now she would have to bustle round.

She was still bustling round--though, to be accurate, she was only engaged in passing a languid, duster-holding hand over the tin cover of the typewriter--when Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham’s next employee arrived, and their day really began. The frosted glass door that opened from the little space in which enquirers were kept waiting for a few minutes, now swung back to admit into the general office the body of a boy about fifteen, whose eyes were focussed upon a paper, folded into a very small compass, that he held about four inches away from them. This was the office boy or very junior clerk, Stanley Poole, who had just come all the way from Hackney, which remained with him as a combined flavour of cocoa and bread dipped in bacon fat that still haunted his palate. His body, which was small and thin but sufficiently tough, and was crowned by a snub nose, some freckles, greyish-greenish eyes, and some unbrushed sandy hair, had been in the service of Twigg & Dersingham for the last twenty minutes, when it had boarded a tram and a bus and had walked down several streets. Now it had arrived in the office. But his mind had not yet begun the day’s work. Even now, when the very threshold had been passed, it was still in the wilds of Mexico, enjoying the heroic and exhilarating companionship of Jack Dashwood and Dick Robinson, the Boy Aviators, the terror of all Mexican bandits.

“So you’ve come,” said Mrs. Cross, putting back that wisp of hair again. “It’s about time I was ’opping it if you’ve come.”

Stanley looked up and nodded. With a sigh, he withdrew from the world of the Boy Aviators and the Mexican bandits. He tried to fold his paper into a still smaller compass, before cramming it into his pocket.

“Read, read, read!” cried Mrs. Cross derisively. “Some of yer’s always at it. What they find to put in all the time beats me. What’s that yer reading now? Murders, I’ll bet.”

“’Tisn’t,” replied Stanley, balancing himself on one leg for no particular reason that we can discover. “It’s a boys’ paper.” He made this announcement with a kind of sullen reluctance, not because he was really a sullen lad, but simply because he had discovered that when his elders asked these questions, they were usually not in search of information, but were trying to get at him.

“Penny bloods, them things is.”

“’Tisn’t,” said Stanley, balancing himself on the other leg now. “This is tuppence. I buy it ev’ry week, have done ever since it come out. _Boy’s Companion_, it’s called. It’s got the best tales in,” he added, in a sudden burst of confidence. “All about boys who fly in airplanes an’ go to Mexico an’ Russia an’ all over an’ have advenshers!”

“Advenshers! They’d be better off at ’ome--with their advenshers! You’ll be wantin’ to go an’ ’ave advenshers yerself next--and then what will yer poor mother say?”

But this only goaded Stanley into making new and even more dangerous admissions. “I’m going to try and be a detective,” he mumbled.

“Well now, did y’ever!” cried Mrs. Cross, at once shocked and delighted. “A detective! I never ’eard of such a thing! What d’yer come ’ere for if yer want to be a detective. There’s no detectin’ ’ere. Go on with yer! ’Ere, yer not big enough, and yer never will be either, ’cos yer’d ’ave to be a pleeceman first before they’d let yer be a detective, and they’d never ’ave yer as a pleeceman.”

“You can be detective without being a bobby first,” replied Stanley scornfully. He had gone into this question, and was not to be put off by a mere outsider like Mrs. Cross. “’Sides, you can be a private detective an’ find jewels an’ shadder people. That’s what I’d like to do--shadder people.”

“What’s that? Follerin’ ’em about, is it? Oh, that’s nasty work, that is. Shadderin’! I’d shadder yer if I caught yer at it, my words I would.” And Mrs. Cross took up her brush and dust-pan and gave them a fierce little shake, almost as if she had just caught _them_ at it. “Now you just get on with yer work like a good boy, and don’t you go tellin’ anybody else yer want to be shadderin’ else yer’ll be gettin’ yerself into trouble. Yer can’t expect people to ’ave any patience with shadderers. If Mr. Dersingham knew what was goin’ on in that ’ead of yours, ’e’d tell yer to go straight ’ome and ’ave nothing more to do with yer, and yer’d find yerself shadderin’ for another job, and that’s all the shadderin’ _you’d_ get.”

Stanley turned away, and then pulled a face, not so much at Mrs. Cross as at the whole narrow school of thought represented at this moment by Mrs. Cross. He went to the letter-box and brought back the morning’s post, which he placed on the nearest high desk. There he remembered something, and looked with a grin at Mrs. Cross, who was now having a final bustle round.

“Did you see that note left for you?” he inquired.

Mrs. Cross suspended operations at once. “Yes, I did see it, and if yer want to know where it is, I can tell yer, ’cos it’s in that stove.” She struck an attitude that suggested a counsel for the prosecution of the high-handed type. “And oo, might I ask, left that there note? Oo wrote it? Just you tell me that, that’s all?”

“Miss Matfield wrote it.”

“An’ I thought as much. Soon as I set eyes on it, I knew. Miss Matfield wrote it! Miss Matfield!” Her irony was now so terrible that she shook all over with it, and her head seemed in danger of falling off. “And ’ow long, might I ask, ’as Miss Matfield been in this office, doin’ ’er typewriting? ’Ow long? Two munce. All right--three munce. An’ ’ow long ’ave I been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s, coming ’ere ev’ry morning, week in an’ week out, to clean this office? Yer don’t know. No, yer don’t know, and yer Miss Matfield doesn’t know. Well, I’ll tell yer. I’ve been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s for seven years, I ’ave. It wasn’t this Mr. Dersingham that started me, it was ’is uncle, old Mr. Dersingham, ’im oo’s dead now--an’ a nice old gentleman ’e was, too, nicer than this one an’ a better ’ead on ’im to my way of thinking--and when this Mr. Dersingham took on, ’e sent for me and said, ‘You keep on cleaning, Mrs. Cross, and I’ll pay yer whatever my uncle did,’ that’s what ’e said to me in that very room there, and I said, ‘Much obliged, sir, and the very best attention as always,’ and ’e said, ‘I’m sure it will, Mrs. Cross.’ Typewriters! Coming and going so fast I can’t be bothered learning their names. If there’s been one ’ere since I started, there’s been eight or ten or a dozen. Miss Matfield! Now when she comes in, just give ’er a message from me,” she cried, thoroughly reckless by this time. “Just say to ’er: ‘Mrs. Cross ’as seen the note left and only asks oo is cleaning this office, Miss Matfield or ’er, and if ’er, then them oo’s been doing it for seven years, week in and week out, knows their own business better than them oo’s only been typewriting ’ere for three munce, and so Mrs. Cross’ll thank ’er to keep ’er notes to ’erself in future till they’re asked for.’ Just you tell ’er that, boy. And I’ll say good-morning.”

With that, Mrs. Cross unfastened her apron and gathered up her things with great dignity, gave Stanley a final shake of the head, and waddled out, closing the outer door behind her, a moment later, with a decisive bang.

Left to himself, Stanley, with the contemptuous air of a man who is meant for better things, began his morning’s work. After taking off the two typewriter covers, dumping a few books on the high desks, and filling up all the ink-pots and putting out clean sheets of blotting paper (which duty was a little fad of Mr. Smeeth’s), he remembered that he was a creature with a soul. So, grasping a short round ruler in such a way that it remotely resembled a revolver, he crouched behind Mr. Smeeth’s high stool for a few tense moments, then sprang out, pointing his gun at the place where the great criminal’s bottom waistcoat button would have been, and said hoarsely: “Put ’em up, Diamond Jack. No, you don’t! Not a move!” He gave a warning flourish of the gun, then said casually, over his shoulder, to one of his assistants or a few police sergeants or somebody like that, “Take him away.” And that was the end of Diamond Jack, and yet another triumph for S. Poole, the young detective whose exploits were rivalling even those of the Boy Aviators. And having thus refreshed himself, Stanley replaced the round ruler and condescended to perform one or two more of those monotonous and trifling actions that Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham demanded of him at this hour of the morning. These left him ample time for thought, and he began to wonder if he would be able to get out during the morning. Once outside the office--even though he was only going to the post office or the railway goods department or some firm not four streets away--he could enjoy himself, for the affairs of Twigg & Dersingham faded to a grey thread of routine; he plunged at once into the drama of London’s underworld; and as he hopped and dodged about the crowded streets, like a sandy-haired sparrow, he was able to do some marvellous shadowing. There also loomed already, early as it was, a problem that would become more and more disturbing as the long morning wore on and he became hungrier and hungrier. This was the problem of where to go and what to buy for lunch, for which his mother allowed him a shilling every day. He always ate his breakfast so quickly that his stomach forgot about it almost at once and left him hollow inside by ten o’clock and absolutely aching by twelve. He often wondered what would happen to him if, instead of being the first to go to lunch, at half past twelve, he was the last, and had to wait until about half past one. There are innumerable ways of spending a shilling on lunch, from the downright solid way of blowing the lot on sausage or fried liver and mashed potatoes, say at the _Pavement Dining Rooms_, to the immediately delightful but rather unsatisfying method of spreading it out, buying a jam tart here, a banana there, and some milk chocolate somewhere else; and Stanley knew them all.

He was trifling with the thought of trying the nearest Lyons again, and was actually searching his memory to discover the exact price of a portion of Lancashire Hot-pot in that establishment, when he was interrupted by the arrival of a colleague. This was Turgis, the clerk, who might be described as Stanley’s senior or Mr. Smeeth’s junior. He was in his early twenties, a thinnish, awkward young man, with a rather long neck, poor shoulders, and large, clumsy hands and feet. You would not say he was ugly, but on the other hand you would probably admit, after reflection, that it would have been better for him if he had been actually uglier. As it was, he was just unprepossessing. You would not have noticed him in a crowd--and a great deal of his time was spent in a crowd--but if your attention had been called to him, you would have given him one glance and then decided that that was enough. He was obviously neither sick nor starved, yet something about his appearance, a total lack of colour and bloom, a slight pastiness and spottiness, the faint grey film that seemed to cover and subdue him, suggested that all the food he ate was wrong, all the rooms he sat in, beds he slept in, and clothes he wore, were wrong, and that he lived in a world without sun and clean rain and wandering sweet air. His features were not good nor yet too bad. He had rather full brown eyes that might have been called pretty if they had been set in a girl’s face; a fairly large nose that should have been masterful but somehow was not; a small, still babyish mouth, usually open, and revealing several big and irregular teeth; and a drooping rather than retreating chin. His blue serge suit bulged and bagged and sagged and shone, and had obviously done all these things five days after it had left the multiple cheap tailors’ shop, in the window of which a companion suit, clothing the wax model of a light-weight champion, still maliciously challenged Turgis with its smooth surface and sharp creases every time he sneaked past it. His soft collar was crumpled, his tie a little frayed, and there was a pulpy look about his shoes. Any sensible woman could have compelled him to improve his appearance almost beyond recognition within a week, and it was quite clear that no sensible woman took any interest in him.

“Morning, Stanley,” he said, not very cheerfully.

“Hello,” said Stanley, in the toneless voice of one who expects nothing.

Turgis went over to his own high desk, pulled a blotting-pad out of the drawer, put a book or two on his desk, examined a note he had left on his pad, reminding him to “ring Whishaws first thing,” and then spent a melancholy five minutes at the telephone.

“Will I have to call there this morning?” Stanley asked hopefully, when Turgis had rung off.

“No, they’re sending somebody. Good job, too! We don’t want you off half the morning. You’ll stop in and do a bit of work, my son, for a change. Do you good.”

“What work?” demanded Stanley, with scorn.

“By jingo, I like that!” cried Turgis. “There’s plenty to do, if you’ll only look for it instead of dodging it. You ask Smeethy, he’ll find you some. Haven’t you got enough? You can do some of mine, if you like. I’ve got more than I want.”

Stanley changed the subject. “I say,” he began, grinning, “you ought to have heard old Ma Cross on about that note. She let herself go all right, didn’t she just! Oo, you ought to have heard her.”

“What did she say?” Turgis inquired. But he did it very languidly, just to show that what amused small fry like Stanley might not amuse him.

At that moment, however, they heard the outer door opening, and the next moment the cause of all the trouble, Miss Matfield herself, walked in. She flung down a library book, her large handbag, and a pair of gloves on her table, then marched over to her hook and removed her coat and hat, while the other two waited in silence. They were both rather frightened of Miss Matfield. Even Mr. Smeeth and Mr. Dersingham himself were rather frightened of Miss Matfield.

“_Good_ morning,” she cried, looking from one to the other of them, and, as usual, putting a disturbingly ironical inflection into her tones. “Are we all very well this morning? Well, I’m not,” and here, her voice changed. “O Lord! I thought I’d never get here. That bus journey gets fouler every morning, slower and slower and fouler and fouler.” She sat down opposite her machine, but took no notice of it.

“You ought to try the Tube,” Turgis suggested, not very boldly or hopefully. He had made this suggestion before. Everything had been said before, and they all knew it.

“Oh, I can’t bear the Tube.” Once more she seemed to annihilate the whole vast organisation.

It was now Stanley’s turn. “Oo, I like it. I think it’s exciting. I wish they had ’em where we live.”

Miss Matfield was now busy rummaging in her handbag, and all she said was “Curse!” rather like a villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. It is only these strictly modern young ladies, who live their own life by pounding a typewriter all day and then retiring to tiny bed-sitting rooms in clubs, these beings who are supposed to be the inheritors of the earth, who can afford to talk like villains in old-fashioned melodramas. Miss Matfield, after a final and unsuccessful rummage, said “Curse!” again, then closed the bag with a sharp snap, seized her gloves, and marched them over to her coat. The other two said nothing, but looked at her. What they saw was a girl of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, or even twenty-nine, with dark bobbed hair, decided eyebrows, a smouldering eye, a jutting nose, a mouth that was a discontented crimson curve, and a firm round chin that was ready to double itself at any moment. She was not pretty, but she might have been handsome if somebody had kept telling her she was pretty. She was a trifle taller and bigger-boned than the average girl of her class and type, with a good neck and good shoulders, but her figure as a whole--and it was plain to the view in her belted orange-coloured jumper, her short dark skirt, and artfully silky stockings--was perhaps too top-heavy, too masterful in the bust for the flattened calves below, to please everybody. (Including that distant and wistful connoisseur, Turgis, who by making an effort at times was able to see her as a female figure and not as a personality.) For the rest, her face, her voice, her manner, all pointed to the conclusion that Lilian Matfield nursed some huge, some overwhelming grievance against life, but though she gave tongue to a thousand little grievances every day, she never mentioned the monster. But there it was, raging away, when she was complaining or being bitter about everything; and there it was, raging away more furiously than ever, when she was being bright and jolly, which was not often, and hardly at all during business hours.

“The char must have got my note,” she announced on her return to her table, “but I must say she doesn’t seem to have done much about it. Look at that. This is the foulest office I’ve ever worked in. She never makes any attempt to clean it properly. All she’s done now is to walk round with a duster. And we’ve got to spend all day in the beastly place, all filthy, just because she won’t take the least trouble. Well, I’m going to make a row about it.”

“She got it all right,” cried Stanley, delighted to be important and to make a little trouble for somebody. “You ought to have heard her. Didn’t she go on!” And, in order to show exactly how she did go on, he opened his mouth and his eyes still wider. But then he stopped. The outer door had been opened, and feet were being wiped. That meant that Mr. Smeeth had arrived, and Mr. Smeeth liked to find Stanley busy during these first few minutes. So Stanley broke off, and dashed at a bit of work he had saved for this moment.

“_Good_ morning, everybody,” said Mr. Smeeth, putting down his hat and his folded newspaper, and then rubbing his hands. “It’s getting a bit nippy in the mornings now, isn’t it? Real autumn weather.”

III

You could tell at once, by the way in which Mr. Smeeth entered the office that his attitude towards Twigg & Dersingham was quite different from that of his young colleagues. They came because they had to come; even if they rushed in, there was still a faint air of reluctance about them; and there was something in their demeanour that suggested they knew quite well that they were shedding a part of themselves, and that the most valuable part, leaving it behind, somewhere near the street door, where it would wait for them to pick it up again when the day’s work was done. In short, Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham had merely hired their services. But Mr. Smeeth obviously thought of himself as a real factor of the entity known as Twigg & Dersingham: he was their Mr. Smeeth. When he entered the office, he did not dwindle, he grew; he was more himself than he was in the street outside. Thus, he had a gratitude, a zest, an eagerness, that could not be found in the others, resenting as they did at heart the temporary loss of their larger and brighter selves. They merely came to earn their money, more or less. Mr. Smeeth came to work.

His appearance was deceptive. He looked what he ought to have been, in the opinion of a few thousand hasty and foolish observers of this life, and what he was not--a grey drudge. They could easily see him as a drab ageing fellow for ever toiling away at figures of no importance, as a creature of the little foggy City street, of crusted ink-pots and dusty ledgers and day books, as a typical troglodyte of this dingy and absurd civilisation. Angel Pavement and its kind, too hot and airless in summer, too raw in winter, too wet in spring, and too smoky and foggy in autumn, assisted by long hours of artificial light, by hasty breakfasts and illusory lunches, by walks in boots made of sodden cardboard and rides in germ-haunted buses, by fuss all day and worry at night, had blanched the whole man, had thinned his hair and turned it grey, wrinkled his forehead and the space at each side of his short grey moustache, put eyeglasses at one end of his nose and slightly sharpened and reddened the other end, and given him a prominent Adam’s apple, drooping shoulders and a narrow chest, pains in his joints, a perpetual slight cough, and a hay-fevered look at least one week out of every ten. Nevertheless, he was not a grey drudge. He did not toil on hopelessly. On the contrary, his days at the office were filled with important and exciting events, all the more important and exciting because they were there in the light, for just beyond them, all round them, was the darkness in which lurked the one great fear, the fear that he might take part no longer in these events, that he might lose his job. Once he stopped being Twigg & Dersingham’s cashier, what was he? He avoided the question by day, but sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, it came to him with all its force and dreadfully illuminated the darkness with little pictures of shabby and broken men, trudging round from office to office, haunting the Labour Exchanges and the newspaper rooms of Free Libraries, and gradually sinking into the workhouse and the gutter.

This fear only threw into brighter relief his present position. He had spent years making neat little columns of figures, entering up ledgers and then balancing them, but this was not drudgery to him. He was a man of figures. He could handle them with astonishing dexterity and certainty. In their small but perfected world, he moved with complete confidence and enjoyed himself. If you only took time and trouble enough, the figures would always work out and balance up, unlike life, which you could not possibly manipulate so that it would work out and balance up. Moreover, he loved the importance, the dignity, of his position. Thirty-five years had passed since he was an office boy, like Stanley, but a trifle smaller and younger; he was a boy from a poor home; and in those days a clerkship in the City still meant something, cashiers and chief clerks still wore silk hats, and to occupy a safe stool and receive your hundred and fifty a year was to have arrived. Mr. Smeeth was now a cashier himself and he was still enjoying his arrival. Somewhere at the back of his mind, that little office boy still lived, to mark the wonder of it. Going round to the bank, where he was known and respected and told it was a fine day or a wet day, was part of the routine of his work, but even now it was something more than that, something to be tasted by the mind and relished. The “Good-morning, Mr. Smeeth,” of the bank cashiers at the counter still gave him a secret little thrill. And, unless the day had gone very badly indeed, he never concluded it, locking the ledger, the cash book, and the japanned box for petty cash, away in the safe and then filling and lighting his pipe, with out being warmed by a feeling that he, Herbert Norman Smeeth, once a mere urchin, then office boy and junior clerk to Willoughby, Tyce & Bragg, then a clerk with the Imperial Trading Co., then for two War years a lance-corporal in the orderly room of the depot of the Middlesex Regiment, and now Twigg & Dersingham’s cashier for the last ten years, had triumphantly arrived. It was, when you came to think of it--as he had once boldly ventured to point out to a friendly fellow boarder at Channel View, Eastbourne (they had stayed up rather late, after their wives had gone upstairs, to split a bottle of beer and exchange confidences)--quite a romance, in its way. And the fear that grew in the dark and came closer to the edge of it to whisper to him, that fear did not make it any less of a romance.

Mr. Smeeth now unlocked the safe, took out his books and the petty cashbox, looked over the correspondence and attended to that part meant for him, made a note that Brown & Gorstein, and North-Western and Trades Furnishing Co., and Nickman & Sons had not fulfilled their promises and sent cheques, dealt with the two small cheques that some other people had sent, gave Miss Matfield three letters to type, asked Turgis to telephone to Briggs Brothers and the London and North-Eastern Railway, delighted Stanley by giving him a message to take out, and, in short, plunged into the day’s work and set Twigg & Dersingham in motion, even though Twigg had been quiet and unstirring for years in Streatham Cemetery, and the present Mr. Dersingham was only in motion yet on the District Railway, on his way to the office.

Stanley disappeared, as usual, like a shell from a gun, before Mr. Smeeth could possibly change his mind; Miss Matfield contemptuously rattled off her letters (the little _ping_ of the typewriter bell sounding like a repeated ironical exclamation); Turgis talked down the telephone rather gloomily; and Mr. Smeeth made the neatest little figures, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink, and opened more and more books on his high desk. And for ten minutes or so, no word was spoken that had not immediate reference to the affairs of the office.

They were interrupted by the entrance of yet another employee of the firm. This was Goath, the senior traveller, whose job it was to visit all the cabinet-makers in London and the home counties and to persuade them to buy the veneers and inlays of Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham. He entered in the usual fashion, came trailing in, with one large flat foot feeling reluctantly for the new bit of ground and the other large flat foot equally reluctantly taking leave of the old bit of ground. He was smoking the usual cigarette, which left a faint and fading spurt of smoke vanishing happily into nothing behind him. He wore the same shapeless old overcoat, bagging monstrously at the pockets, and he wore it in the same way, that is, almost hanging off his drooping shoulders. The familiar dusty bowler hat was tilted, not cheerfully but depressingly, back from his furrowed and pimply forehead. He did what he always did. He turned upon the activities of the office a dull and knowing eye, an eye like a wet morning in February, just as damp and grey and hopeless, and at once these activities seemed to dwindle, to shrink from it. Mr. Dersingham had often said to Mr. Smeeth, and Mr. Smeeth had often said to Mr. Dersingham, that what Goath didn’t know about selling inlays and veneers and the like was not worth knowing. But when you looked at him standing there, it seemed as if what he did know was also not worth knowing: it had had such a bad effect upon him. Everything about Goath was the same as usual except his appearance at this hour, on this day, for Goath only called at the office, his base of operations, on certain days and this was not one of them.

“Busy are’n’cher,” said Goath. It was not an inquiry. It was not a greeting. It was a kind of gloomy sneer.

Mr. Smeeth laid down his pen. “Hello, what are you doing here?”

“Told to come,” replied Goath. “Mr. Dersingham told me to come in this morning--wanted to see me.”

“Oh, did he?” It was obvious from Mr. Smeeth’s tone that he did not like the look of this, quite apart from not liking the look of Mr. Goath, for which he can hardly be blamed.

“He did. Why he did, I don’t know,” Goath continued drearily, “so don’t ask me because I can’t tell you. He simply said, ‘Come here first thing in the morning the day after to-morrow’--that’s this morning now--and I’ve come. And I’ve got here too early, into the bargain.”

“Mr. Dersingham didn’t tell me anything about it,” said Mr. Smeeth, with the air of a man who liked to be told something about it.

Goath gave a ferocious pull at the last half inch of his cigarette and made a horrible hissing noise. “He wanted to make it a surprise--a pleasant little surprise for you all--that’s it.” And as he said this he tried to make Miss Matfield, who had just got up from her machine, accept a friendly leer, but all that it encountered was a stare like a high wall with broken glass along the top.

Mr. Smeeth ran a finger backwards and forwards along his lower lip, a trick of his in a reflective moment. Now that he had looked at it a little longer, he plainly liked it still less. But then, after a short pause, he brightened up. “Perhaps he’s got some new stuff to show you? Perhaps he wants to ask you something about it?”

“Haven’t heard of anything new. I’d have heard. It always gets round; everything gets round: ‘No good showing us that,’ they say. ‘Show us some of this new stuff. That’s what we want,’ they tell you. That’s what they say, soon enough. And they don’t know what they want, not half their time, they don’t. There’s fellers making furniture now--_and_ making money out of it--who don’t know a good bit of wood from a bit of oilcloth. How they get away with it,” Goath concluded mournfully, “beats me.”

“That’s right, Goath,” said Mr. Smeeth. “It beats me, too. It’s cheek that does it, really, that’s my opinion--cheek, and a bit of luck. But honestly now, how are things going? You’ve been on the North London round this time, haven’t you? How’s it going? Better than last time, eh?”

“No,” the other replied, with all the satisfaction of the confirmed pessimist. “Worse.” He took off his bowler hat and for once examined it with the distaste it deserved. “Much worse.”

Mr. Smeeth’s face fell at once, and he made a tut-tut-tutting noise. “That’s bad.”

“Bloody bad, I call it, if Ethel here’ll excuse me.”

Miss Matfield turned on him at once. “My name is Matfield,” she told him. “If you want to say ‘bloody’ you can, for all I care, but I’m not ‘Ethel here’ or Ethel anywhere else, and I don’t intend to be.”

“I’m crushed,” said Goath, putting on a faint and entirely repulsive air of vocal dandyism, “quite crushed.” But, being in his fifties, indeed, having apparently been in them almost longer than anybody else has ever been, and a hardened offender, he was not crushed.

“That’s all right, Miss Matfield,” Mr. Smeeth told her, uncomfortably. And he gave Goath a warning little frown.

“Well, as I was saying,” Goath continued, “things are rotten. I’ve been in the trade thirty years, and I’ve never known ’em worse. If the price is right, then the stuff’s wrong. And if the stuff’s right, the price’s wrong. And it’s mostly the price. They want it cheap now, want it given away, no mistake about it, though the money they’re getting for the finished article is more than ever. You look at what furniture’s fetching now, retail, and then go and hear some of ’em talk--make you sick. It would--make you sick.”

“I believe you,” Mr. Smeeth assured him earnestly. Then he hesitated. “But--after all--somebody must be selling veneers, even if the inlays have gone out a bit. I mean, they’ve got to buy it from somebody, haven’t they?”

“Well, whether they have or they haven’t, all I can say is, they’re not buying it from _me_. And I’ve been going to some of ’em for twenty years. Yes, I have, young feller,” he added, for some unaccountable reason catching the eye of Turgis and talking to him quite sternly, “for twenty years. I was calling on some of them houses--Moses & Stott, f’r’instance--when you was a baby or nothing at all.”

“It’s a long time, isn’t it, Mr. Goath?” replied Turgis, proud to be noticed by such terrific seniority and rather proud, too, to think that though he might not be anybody of much importance even now, at least he was more than a baby or nothing at all.

“You’re right, young feller,” said Mr. Goath with heavy patronage, “it _is_ a long time. Hello! Is this him?”

But the person who had just opened the outer door and was now standing at the other side of the frosted glass partition was obviously not Mr. Dersingham, so Turgis, in the absence of Stanley, went out to discover the caller’s business.

“Good-morning,” said a brisk but ingratiating voice. “Any typewriter supplies? Ribbons, carbons, wax stencil sheets, brushes, rubbers?”

“Not this morning, thank you,” said Turgis.

“Rubbers, brushes, stencil sheets, best quality papers, carbons? Ribbons?”

“No, not this morning.”

“Well,” said the voice, a little less brisk and ingratiating now, “if you should want any typewriter supplies any time, here’s my card. Good-morning.”

“It’s surprising the number of those chaps we get round,” said Mr. Smeeth, rather sadly, “all trying to sell the same bits of things. If you bought anything, what would it amount to? A shilling or two, that’s all. It beats me how they make anything out of it. Smart, well-dressed chaps too, some of them. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t.”

“You’d think that chap was making thousands a year,” said Turgis, speaking in an aggrieved tone, as if somehow his own shabbiness came into the question. “He’s always all dressed up, spats and everything. He comes round here about once a fortnight and we’ve never bought anything from him yet.”

“He’s ’oping, that’s what he’s doing, just ’oping, like me,” Mr. Goath remarked grimly. “Only it doesn’t run to spats with me. I’d better try ’em, then I might get a big order or two. ‘Here’s old Goath with spats on,’ they’d be saying up Bethnal Green way. ‘We’ll have to give him an order now.’ P’r’aps they would. And then again, p’r’aps they wouldn’t. Ah well--” and he yawned hugely and kept his eyes closed even after the yawn was done--“I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.” He sent this rumbling away into the mournful distance. “Fact is, some of these mornings my inside’s all wrong, dead rotten. Doctor says it’s liver--that’s all because I take a drop of whisky--but I say it’s ’eart. And whether it’s ’eart or liver, I’m going to sit down.”

The room sank into a kind of mild sadness, rather like that of the atmosphere outside, where rich autumn had been bleached and deadened into a mere smokiness and gathering grey twilight, in which the occasional smell of a sodden dead leaf came like a remembrance of another world, as startling as a spent arrow from some battle still raging in the sun.

The faces of the three men--Mr. Smeeth’s grey oval, Goath’s purpled pulp, Turgis’s tarnished youth--sank with the room, were half frozen into immobility, and seemed for a moment or two to be vacant, staring into nothing. Miss Matfield, who had risen from her table, saw it all for one queer second tangled with a whole jumble of deathly images: they were all under a spell, powerless to stir while the sky rained soot, dust poured from every crevice, and cobwebs wound about them. She wanted to scream. Instead, quite without thinking, she swept off her table a little brass box crammed with paper fasteners, and the clatter it made restored her to her normal senses.

“Sorry!” she cried harshly, stooping.

“And I should think so,” said Goath.

“That should be Mr. Dersingham,” said Mr. Smeeth, cocking an ear towards the approaching footsteps.

Mr. Dersingham put his head inside the general office. “Good morning, everybody,” he cried. “You’re here then, Goath. Are the letters in my room, Turgis? All right then, I’ll just have a peep at them, and then I want to see you, Goath, and you too, Smeeth. I’ll give you a shout when I’m ready. Stanley about?... All right--doesn’t matter if he isn’t. Send him in when he comes. I’ve forgotten to buy some cigarettes. I may want you in about five minutes, Miss Matfield. And if a man called Bronse rings up for me, don’t put him through. Tell him I’m out. Oh--and I say--Smeeth, just make out a what-you-call-it, will you--a statement of outstanding accounts--you know, just rough and ready? I shall want that. Anything come this morning? It doesn’t matter, though; you can tell me later.”

“And if I know anything,” Mr. Goath mumbled, when the head of Mr. Dersingham had been withdrawn, “that won’t take you long, Smeeth--telling how much you’ve got in this morning.”

“It won’t,” said Mr. Smeeth cheerlessly.

IV

Seated at his table, looking through the morning’s letters, as he was now, Howard Bromport Dersingham might have been accepted as a typical specimen of the smart younger City man. At a first glance, he seemed the brother of all those smart younger City men who figure in advertisements, wearing unique collars, ties, suits, examining the infallible watch, or looking at a vision of less successful men who have never taken the particular correspondence course. He looked much too good for Angel Pavement, where business is merely business and a rather haphazard and dusty affair at that. He would not have seemed out of place in one of those skyscrapers filled with terrifically efficient and successful operatives and administratives, in those regions where business is not at all a haphazard and dusty affair and takes on a solemn air, even a mystical tinge, as if it really explained the universe. It appeared absurd that such a fellow and all his concerns should be sandwiched between the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_.

Another glance or two, however, would reveal the fact that he was only a rough, weakly unfinished sketch of the type. The hard-boiled eye, the chiselled nose, the severely controlled mouth, the masterful chin, all these were missing, and in their place were ordinary masculine English features, neither very good nor very bad, very strong nor very weak. Mr. Dersingham was a year or two under forty, tallish, fairly well-built but beginning to sag a little; his hair, which was now rapidly taking leave of him, was light brown, and his eyes light blue, and they neither sparkled nor pierced but just regarded the world blandly and amiably; he had retained one of those short pruned moustaches that crept under the noses of so many subalterns during the War; and he looked clean, healthy and kind, but a trifle flabby and none too intelligent. It was only after the War, during which he had assisted, with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm, one of the new battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, that he had joined his uncle at Twigg & Dersingham’s. Before the War he had tried various things with no particular success, though he liked to suggest that the War had almost ruined his prospects. (In strict fact, it had improved them, for his uncle would never have taken him into the business, and left it to him when he died, if he had not taken pity on him as a returned hero.) It had been the intention of his parents to send Howard Bromport to Oxford or Cambridge, but they had lost money suddenly and Howard Bromport, no scholar, had failed to obtain a scholarship, so he had been compelled to stroll into business. In spirit, however, he went on to the university, and thus he became one of those men who are haunted by a lost Oxford or Cambridge career. These are not the scholars or the brilliant athletes who have been denied their chance of distinction, but simply the fellows who have been robbed of an opportunity of acquiring more striped ties, college blazers, and tobacco jars decorated with college coats-of-arms, in short, the fervent freshmen who never had the freshman nonsense knocked out of them. They it is who turn into the essential public school “old boys.” Dersingham was a tremendous “old boy.” He never missed a reunion, never failed to renew his stock of school ties. The public school spirit worked for ever in him. He was always ready to do the decent thing--and this was not hard, for he was really a decent, kindly soul, stupid though he might be--not for your sake, not for his own, but “for the sake of the old school.” Strictly speaking, that school, Worrell (one of the second-class public schools, fatally second-class but terrifically public school) is not very old, but it has turned out so many fellows like Dersingham that it has acquired, by verbal association, the antiquity of Eton. Perhaps the shortest definition of Dersingham--and he himself would have asked for no other--was that he was an old Worrelian.

He did not play games very well and was not even a good judge of them, but he liked nothing better than solemn long discussions about them, in which minor pedantries could be thrashed out to the bitter end. Still, he played golf nearly every week-end, a little lawn tennis, and when the Charlatans had to turn out a third side at cricket, he sometimes turned out with them, as a possible slow bowler. (For four weeks every year he dropped the old Worrelian and wore the Charlatan tie.) He smoked considerable quantities of _Sahib Straight Cut Virginia_ cigarettes, drank steadily but not too much for reasonable health and decency, delighted in detective and adventure stories, humorous anecdotes, jigging easy tunes, musical comedies, and good loud talk in which everybody agreed with everybody else except about things that could not matter very much to anybody, disliked literature, art and music, cranks and fanatics of every kind, most foreigners, anything or anybody really mean or cruel (when he could see the meanness and cruelty), and all the opinions that newspaper editors asked him to dislike. He had one or two real friends, a host of acquaintances, and a wife and two children whom he did not understand but of whom he was genuinely fond.

And now, after glancing through the letters, most of which were merely offers to sell him something he did not want, he sat on, stroking his ruddy cheek, looking puzzled and feeling puzzled. After a few minutes of this, he took a sheet of paper and carefully made some notes upon it. He did this all the more carefully because he felt that somehow by writing down what was already in his head, he was really grappling hard with the problem. Having frowned at these notes for another minute or so, he shook himself, set his face in hard business-like lines, reached out for a cigarette and then remembered that there were none, and rang the bell.

Miss Matfield appeared, or rather a notebook and pencil appeared, with a shadow of Miss Matfield in charge of them.

“I’m sorry, Miss Matfield,” said Mr. Dersingham, with true old Worrelian courtesy. “I’d forgotten I’d told you to come in. I think I’d better see Mr. Smeeth and Mr. Goath first, and you can take down some letters afterwards. Will you ask them to come in--and then--er--just carry on with something, eh?”

“Very well,” said Miss Matfield.

“Good!” said Mr. Dersingham. He never felt sure how he ought to handle Miss Matfield, quite apart from the fact that she seemed to him a rather formidable sort of girl. Her father, he knew, was a doctor, only a doctor in the country now, miles from anywhere, but he had once played scrum half with the Alsations. Ordering about the daughter of a scrum half of the Alsations, just as if she was some ordinary little tuppenny-ha’penny typist, was a ticklish business. And that was why Mr. Dersingham added “Good!”: it meant that he knew all about the surgery and the Alsations.

“You fellows had better sit down,” he said to Smeeth and Goath. “We may be some time over this. That’s right. Now wait a minute. Let me see, Goath, you’re making--what? Two hundred, plus commission, that’s it, isn’t it? And you, Smeeth, what are you getting now? Three-fifteen, isn’t it?”

Mr. Smeeth, troubled, admitted that it was. He had seen what was coming all along, had seen it for days and days and horrible nights.

“And what am I making?” Mr. Dersingham gave a short and embarrassed laugh. “Well, you can imagine for yourself, Goath, and you know well enough, Smeeth. Just lately I’ve been making nothing, not a bean. Just paying expenses, that’s all.”

“Er,” Mr. Goath began with a pessimistic rumble.

“Just a minute. Don’t think I’m beginning like this because I think you fellows are not earning all you make. I know you are. There’s no question about that. But we’ve got to go into it all, haven’t we?--got to see where we stand. I’ll tell you in strict confidence that if it hadn’t been for my wife having a little money of her own, I couldn’t have carried on as long as I have done. You’ve only to look at the figures to see that for yourselves.”

Here he stopped long enough to give Mr. Goath a chance of describing the state of the cabinet-making and wholesale furnishing trades. As we have heard him already, we do not want to hear him again. It is sufficient to say that his theme was that if the price was right, the stuff wasn’t, and if the stuff was right, the price wasn’t, and that this theme was elaborated by many variations in the minor key. And something in the nature of a second subject, repeated continually in the bass, was added by the statement that the speaker had been thirty years in the trade. To all of which Mr. Dersingham and Mr. Smeeth listened with gloomy attention.

“Well,” said Mr. Dersingham, looking at his miserable little notes, “we’ll have to go into all that later on. We’re getting the wood from all the same people we dealt with in my uncle’s time--and in some cases we’re getting it on better terms than he did, isn’t that so, Smeeth?”

“Ah, but there’s more competition now, a lot more,” said Goath dejectedly. “More and more competition, that’s the way it is. Some of these people in the trade must be cutting it as fine as that”--and he waggled a very dirty thumb-nail--“to get orders. Nearly giving it away. Pay when you like, too. Foreigners,” he added darkly, “that’s what we’re up against now, foreigners, coming over here to unload the stuff like mad. I met one coming out of Nickman’s only yesterday morning, coming out as I was going in, and looking as pleased with himself as if he’d just backed a dozen winners. German he was. Speaking English as good as you and me, and dressed all up to the nines, but German all over him. And he had backed the winners all right, you bet he had. Got a pocket full of orders, he had. What’s the good of having a war, I say, if it only means Germans coming over here and pinching trade right under our noses. Cor!--makes me sick--thirty years in the trade and tramping round week in and week out, and nothing doin’ two-thirds o’ the time, not a thing, and foreigners coming here with fur coats on--fur coats! Taking the bread right out of your mouth, that’s all they’re doing.”

“Quite so, Goath,” cried Mr. Dersingham. “I don’t say I’m not with you there. But we can buy from Germany, just the same, and have been doing for some time, but it’s beginning to look as if we can’t compete. That’s what I was going to talk about, to begin with. We shall have to try and do some cutting, too. It’s our only chance. And the only way to do that--I think you fellows will agree, especially you, Smeeth--is to reduce expenses. The--er--what’s-its-name--er--overhead charges are too big.” Having found this word “overhead,” so suggestive of big business, of keen men piling up fortunes in forty-two storey buildings, Mr. Dersingham clutched at it thankfully: it was a floating plank on the wide ocean of puzzle and muddle into which he had suddenly been plunged. “That’s it. The first thing, the very first thing, we’ve got to do is to reduce the overheads in this business.”

Mr. Smeeth tried to look very brisk and business-like, but he seemed greyer than ever and there was a mournful droop in his voice. “Well, we can try, sir. But it won’t be easy. We’re spending as little as we can, here in the office.”

“Dash it all, Smeeth, I know that.” Mr. Dersingham rubbed his cheek irritably. “But we shall have to spend less. I don’t want to do it--I want to do the decent thing by everybody here--but you see how it is, don’t you? Must cut something down. Now look here, to begin with, there’s Turgis. What’s he getting? A hundred and seventy-five, isn’t he? And Miss Matfield? We started her at three pounds a week, didn’t we?”

“That’s right, Mr. Dersingham. It was less than she’d been getting before, but she said she’d start at that with us, and then we’d see about giving her a rise when she’d settled down with us. She’s a very capable girl, very capable, and very intelligent, too, much better than the last we had; no comparison at all.”

“And Turgis? What about him?”

“I can’t really grumble, sir,” replied Mr. Smeeth. “He does his best. He’s a bit careless sometimes, I’ll admit, and he’s not to be trusted far with figures yet--you remember the terrible mess he made of the books when I was on my holidays this year?--but as these boys go nowadays, he’s as good as the next. He doesn’t take the interest in his work and in the firm that I did when I was his age, but then they don’t these days, and that’s all you can say about it. Miss Matfield’s just the same, for that matter. She does her work all right, but she’s not _interested_, doesn’t think of herself, you might say, as one of the firm, but just comes in the morning, does what she’s told to do, and then goes in the evening.”

“Thinking about young men, that’s what they are, all these typewriters,” said Goath. “Young men and dancing and going to the pickshers, that’s what’s running in their ’eads, and you can’t expect anything else of ’em, not in _my_ opinion. Cheeky with it, they are, too.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Smeeth, I really am, but I don’t see anything else for it. One of them will have to go, either Turgis or Miss Matfield. We can’t spare you, Smeeth----”

“Thank you, sir.” And as he said it--quite simply and not with any touch of irony--Mr. Smeeth looked still greyer. Indeed, he shook a little.

“No question of it at all,” Mr. Dersingham continued heartily, “absolutely none. But we’ll have to get rid of one of these two and divide the work between us. I’ll do something. I’ll begin to type my own letters. I’ll have a good shot at it anyhow. It’s a question now whether you’d rather keep Turgis and let him do some of the letters or keep Miss Matfield and divide his work between the two of you. Stanley might do a bit more, too, if he’s got any sense. In any case, we must have a boy, so there’s no question of getting rid of him. Now what d’you think, Smeeth? Turgis or Miss Matfield? Nothing much in it, I know, but you ought to decide. You’ll have most of the extra work yourself, I expect, when it gets down to brass tacks, though, mind you, I’m going to do a lot more myself, if I’ve time, in the office.”

Mr. Smeeth did not feel quite so bad as he had felt a minute ago, but he felt bad enough. He tried to give all his attention to the immediate problem, which was serious enough for him, for he knew very well that it was he who would have to do most of the extra work, but, try as he would, his mind wandered darkly. He could not pretend to himself now that such pitiful economies as these could stop the rot. He had seen it coming for months. The firm, his position, his very living, they were all crumbling away together. The next thing would be that he would have to accept a cut in his salary. And the next thing after that would be finding himself outside, in Angel Pavement, with a hat on his head and no salary, no office, nothing. He hesitated, stammering something, rather painfully.

“I didn’t want to spring it on you,” said Mr. Dersingham, “and I suppose you’d really like a day or two to think it over.”

“Wouldn’t think a minute if I was you,” said Mr. Goath. “Get rid of the girl, right away, without ’esitation. They never should have started girls in the City. The place has never been right since. Powderin’ noses! Cups o’ tea! You don’t know where y’are.”

“I would like to think it over, Mr. Dersingham,” Mr. Smeeth told him slowly. “I don’t want to get rid of the wrong one.”

“I’d like to get it settled to-day while we’re at it, but you think it over between now and five o’clock, and then we’ll have another talk about it. All right then.” And Mr. Dersingham examined his notes again, and then looked very severe. “The next thing is this question of what-d’you-call-it--these rotters who won’t pay up. You’ve made out a statement, have you?”

But there was a knock at the door, and Stanley sidled in, a card in his hand. “Somebody wants to see you, sir.”

“I’m busy. Who is it? Shut the door.” He examined the card. “Never heard of this chap. Look at this, Goath. Anybody you know? What does he want?”

“Wanted to speak to you, sir,” replied Stanley, looking very mysterious and important, with a hint of the “shadderer” in his manner. “Very important. That’s what he said.”

“I’ll bet he did,” said Mr. Dersingham, with a grin at the other two. “Probably wants to sell me some ridiculous office gadget. If he did, though, he’d probably have something about it on his card. This is a private card. Golspie, Golspie? No, I don’t know him. Look here, Stanley, just tell him I’m having a discussion--no, a thingumty--a conference, just now, but if it’s something really important, not trying to sell me typewriters and files and muck, I’ll see him soon. He can either call again or he can wait there. Tell him that.”

Mr. Golspie decided to wait.

V

He was still waiting there, sitting in the little chair beside the door and behind the partition, ten minutes later. Sometimes, Stanley and Turgis and Miss Matfield heard him stir and clear his throat. They also caught the fragrance of the excellent cigar he was smoking. Its fumes seemed to turn the office into a dull little box and their duties into the most mechanical and trivial tasks. There was something rich and adventurous about that drifting luxuriant smoke. It unsettled them.

“Who is he?” Turgis whispered. “What’s he like?”

Stanley crept nearer and curved a hand round his mouth. “He’s biggish and broad and got a big moustache,” he whispered in reply. “D’you know what I bet he is?”

“No, I give it up.”

“Inspector from Scotland Yard.”

“You’ve got ’em on the brain, you little chump,” said Turgis. “Course he isn’t.”

“Well, I’ll betcher. He looks just like one. You go and have a look at him.”

But Turgis was saved from the necessity, for the visitor suddenly marched into the office itself.

“Where’s that boy?” he demanded. “Oh, look here, just go in again and tell Mr. What’s-it----”

“Mr. Dersingham, sir,” said Stanley brightly, proud to serve Scotland Yard or anybody who suggested it.

“Mr. Dersingham. Tell him I can’t wait much longer--I’m not used to hanging about like this--and that if I go, _I go_, for good and all, and then he’ll be sorry. D’you get that? All right then, trot off and speak out. Wait a minute, though. He doesn’t know what I want, doesn’t know who I am, so I’d better show him I’m not going to waste his time.” He took something out of the small despatch case he was carrying, and the others recognised it at once as a sample book of veneers and inlays, a few square inches of each specimen wood, thin as cardboard, being fastened to each stout page. “Now give him this, tell him to look it over, and say that’s what I’ve come to talk about. D’you understand?”

Having thus despatched the boy, Mr. Golspie stood there at ease, his feet wide apart, his big chest thrown out, coolly enjoying his cigar. It was one of the strictest rules of the place that casual callers were not allowed beyond the partition, and Turgis ought to have ordered him out of the office at once. But somehow Turgis felt that this was not a man to be ordered out of the office by him.

“Not much of a place this, I must say,” Mr. Golspie observed, looking about him, then addressing Turgis. “But they keep you pretty busy, eh?”

“Well, they do and they don’t,” Turgis mumbled. “I mean to say, sometimes we’re busy and sometimes we’re not. It all depends, you see.”

“I don’t see, but I’ll take your word for it. Must be a dark hole, this, a bit later on, when you get the fogs. Too dark for my taste. Not enough air either. I like plenty of air, though God knows it’s not worth having when you get it, in this neighbourhood. What do they call this street? Angel Pavement, isn’t it? That’s a dam’ queer name for a street, though I’ve known queerer names in my time. How did it get it, d’you know?”

Turgis admitted that he didn’t.

“Didn’t suppose you would,” the stranger told him. “Perhaps this young lady knows. They know everything nowadays.”

Miss Matfield looked up. “No, I don’t know,” she replied, with a hint of distaste in her tone. Then she bent her eyes to her work again. “And I don’t care.”

“No, you don’t care,” said Mr. Golspie, bluff, hearty, and completely unabashed. “I don’t suppose you care tuppence about the whole concern. Why should you, anyhow? I wouldn’t, if I were a good-lookin’ girl, not tuppence.”

Miss Matfield looked up again, this time wearily, wrinkling various parts of her face. Then she brought to bear upon this intruder the full force of her contemptuous gaze, which would instantly have routed Turgis, Mr. Smeeth, or Mr. Dersingham, and a great many other people of her acquaintance. On this objectionable man it had no effect at all. He stared hard at her, and then smiled, or rather grinned broadly. Defeated by such complete insensitiveness, Miss Matfield made a gesture of annoyance, and then went on with her work, without looking up again.

“Now what the devil’s that boy doing in there!” Mr. Golspie boomed to Turgis. “You’d better go and see if they’ve killed him. You needn’t, though. He’s coming.”

He came, followed by Mr. Smeeth, who said: “I’m sorry you’ve been kept waiting. Mr. Dersingham can see you now.”

They waited until they heard the door close behind him before any of them spoke again.

“What does he want, Mr. Smeeth?” asked Turgis.

“I don’t know what he wants exactly, Turgis,” Mr. Smeeth replied. “I take it he wants to sell us some stuff. He sent some good samples in; really first-class Mr. Dersingham and Goath said it was. I don’t pretend to know much about it. But I expect the price will put it out of the question.”

“He’s a funny sort of chap, isn’t he?”

“A loathsome brute!” cried Miss Matfield from her machine. “Imagine working for a man like that! Ghastly!”

Mr. Smeeth regarded her thoughtfully, and then, after telling Stanley to get on with his work and if he hadn’t any work to go and find some, he turned to regard Turgis equally thoughtfully. One of them had to go. Should he put it to them now? Miss Matfield would probably not care very much--it was hard to imagine her caring, though she had been anxious enough to get the job--whereas Turgis, who had an oldish poverty-stricken father somewhere up in the Midlands, lived in lodgings here in London, and was lucky if he had five pounds in all the world, would be very hard hit and would not easily find another job. It would have to be Miss Matfield. Yet Miss Matfield, who had a good education behind her, was the more promising worker of the two, and would take over some of Turgis’s work and be glad to do it. Well, well, this wanted a bit more thinking about, and, in the meantime, there were a hundred and one little things to be done.

The three in Mr. Dersingham’s room remained there for the next half hour, giving no sign of their existence beyond an occasional rumble of voices. At the end of that time, the door opened, louder voices and a fresh reek of cigars invaded the general office, and Mr. Dersingham called out: “I say, Smeeth, we’re all going out. Shan’t be back before lunch. I’ll give you a ring if I’m going to be any later.” And then they were gone, leaving Mr. Smeeth and Turgis staring at one another. The various lunch hours, beginning with Stanley’s (he went to the _Pavement Dining Rooms_ and had sausage and mash, after all), came and went, the afternoon wore on, and still there was no message from Mr. Dersingham or Goath. The crescendo of the last hour of the day, when Stanley turned berserk with the copying press and Turgis snarled at the telephone and then yelled into it, had begun when the message actually did arrive.

“Hello! Is that you, ol’ man--I mean, Smeeth? Dersingham speakin’.” Even through the telephone, a strangeness, a certain richness, could be remarked in Mr. Dersingham’s voice. He seemed quite excited.

“Smeeth speaking, Mr. Dersingham.”

“Good, very good. Well, look here, Smeeth, I shan’t be back this afternoon. Nothing important, is there? You just carry on then--and then--er--you know, finish off, sign anything that wants signing, then finish off, lock up, go home.”

“That’ll be all right, Mr. Dersingham. There’s nothing very important. But what about that business we talked about this morning? Yes, Turgis and Miss Matfield?”

“All done with,” and the telephone seemed to chuckle. “No need to bother about that, not the slightest. Turgis stays. Miss Matfield stays. D’you know, Smeeth, that that girl’s father played scrum half with the Alsations? He did--same fella, Matfield. No, she stays. Both stay.”

“I’m very glad, sir,” said Mr. Smeeth, who really was glad, though perhaps he was mostly puzzled. There seemed to be no sense in all this.

“Explain ev’rything in the morning, Smeeth,” continued the voice of Mr. Dersingham. “Only person who goes is Goath.”

“What! I didn’t catch that, sir.”

“Goath, Goath. We’ve done with him. Goath’s finished with. Don’t want to see him again. If he comes for his money, pay him at once, d’you understand, Smeeth, at once, up to end of month. Then tell him--to clear--right out, right out.”

“But--but what’s happened, Mr. Dersingham? I don’t understand.”

“Explain ev’rything in the morning. But you understand about Goath, eh? Pay the blighter off if he comes, finish with him. You understand that, eh? Righto. Carry on then, ol’ man.”

Bewildered, Mr. Smeeth laid down the receiver and walked over to his desk. He had hardly time to collect his thoughts and to begin to wonder whether he ought to say something to the others, when the door flew open, almost like a vertical trap-door, to shoot into the middle of the office, where it suddenly stopped dead, the figure of a man. It was Goath. His ancient overcoat was still hanging from his shoulders as if it hardly belonged to him, but, on the other hand, his bowler hat, instead of being at the back of his head, was now tilted forward, giving him an unusual and almost sinister look. His face was purpler than ever; his eyes were glaring; and his mouth was opening and shutting, as if he were an indignant fish. To say of Goath that he had been drinking was to say nothing, for he was obviously always drinking, but this time he had plainly had more than usual or had been mixing his liquors. And his appearance, his manner, everything about him, was so extraordinary that everybody in the office stopped work at once to look at him.

“Smeeth,” the apparition cried in a thick, hoarse voice, “you pay me my money, d’y’ear. Sala’y to end of mun’ an’ commission to yesserday. I’ve finished wi’ Twigg an’ Dersi’am, finished, finished--com-pletely.” Here he produced a magnificent cutting gesture that nearly upset his balance. “I’ve finished wi’ them. They finished wi’ me. All over.”

“Mr. Dersingham’s just told me, Goath,” said Mr. Smeeth, looking at him in astonishment. “And I’ll give you your money if you really want it now----”

“Mus’ ’ave it. Finished--com-pletely, com-pletely.”

“But what’s happened?”

“I’ll tell you what’s ’appened,” replied Goath with tremendous solemnity, lowering his head so far that it looked as if his hat would fall off. “Go--Golspie, tha’s wha’s ’appened--Gol-sss-pie.”

“Who’s that? Do you mean----”

“Feller came s’mornin’.”

“But what about him?”

Goath now threw back his head and looked defiant. “Mister Wha’sit bloody Gol-spie,” he announced with great deliberation, “tha’s the feller. An’ he’s a--devil. I tol’ him, I tol’ him ‘Thirry years--thirry _years_--in the trade, tha’s me.’ An’ wha’ did he say to tha’? Wha’ did he bloody well say?”

“Here, old man, steady, steady,” Mr. Smeeth cautioned him.

“Don’t mind me,” said Miss Matfield coolly. “Go on, Mr. Goath. What did he say? Tell us all about it.”

“Never mind wha’ he said,” cried Goath aggressively, glaring round at them all. “Does’n’ ma’er wha’ _’e_ said. Who is ’e? Where’s ’e come from? With ’is drinks an’ cigars! All ri’--very nice--drinks an’ cigars--but anybody can buy drinks an’ cigars, an’ _do_ buy drinks an’ cigars _and_ big lunches. It’s wha’ _I_ say--thirry years, don’ forge’ tha’, thirry years--wha’ _I_ say tha’ ma’ers. An’ I say--wha’s the game?--where’s’e get this stuff from?--who tol’ ’im to come here?”

“Yes, but what’s this chap doing?” Mr. Smeeth asked. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Bullyin’ an’ twistin’, tha’s wha’ ’e’s doin’,” replied Goath promptly, taking off his hat. “An’ he’s got Mr. Dersi’am like tha’, jus’ like tha’.” And, to the intense delight of Stanley, one hand fell heavily on the hat. “It’s jus’ like wha’s it--y’know--wha’s it, wha’s it?” And to show what he did mean, Goath glared harder than ever and then wiggled his fingers in front of his eyes, directing them at Miss Matfield, who let out a sudden peal of laughter.

“Hypnotism,” suggested Turgis.

“Tha’s ri’, boy, tha’s ri’. Hyp-no-tism. Jus’ like tha’. But not me,” he continued, speaking very slowly and more distinctly now, “not me. I tell ’em what I think. Begins tellin’ me I oughter to do this an’ oughter do that, an’ I won’t ’ave it. I know the trade an’ I speak my mind. An’ another thing. If I don’t like a feller, I don’t like ’im, and that finishes it. That feller comes ’ere, very well, I don’t, I finish.”

“Is he coming here?” demanded Mr. Smeeth.

“You’ll see, you’ll see, Smeeth. I say no more. Finish. You just let me ’ave my money.”

“All right, Goath,” said Mr. Smeeth, who had been jotting down some figures for the last minute or two. “I won’t keep you a minute. Then you’d better get straight home, old man----”

“Have no ’ome,” Goath announced. “Lodgings.” He lurched up to the desk, which was high enough for him to rest his elbows on the edge of it. “That’s the way, Smeeth, a nice lil cheque. I tell you, Smeeth, ol’ man, you’ve always been decent to me, an’ now I’m sorry for you.”

“Well, I’m sorry too, Goath, and I must say I don’t understand what’s happening at all. Mr. Dersingham rang up and told me you were leaving. Are you sure it’s not all a mistake? I mean, you chaps seem to have--er--had rather a lot to-day, you know, and in the morning you might all feel different about it.”

With an effort Goath stood erect, and then held out his hand to Mr. Smeeth. “No, no, I’ve finished. Shake hands, ol’ man. See you again sometime. Meet some day--still in the trade, y’know, can’t change after thirty years--have to stick to the trade. Goo’-bye, all.” And Goath, after removing the dent from his hat with one fierce jab, crammed it on the back of his head and, with a final wave of the hand, departed.

“Well, this beats me,” Mr. Smeeth confessed. “I can’t make head or tail of it, I really can’t.”

“It looks as if that other chap is taking his place, don’t you think?” said Turgis. “Though I must say he didn’t look as if he wanted that sort of job. I mean, he looked too smart and bossy.”

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” Mr. Smeeth told him.

“Thank the Lord, we’ve seen the last of Mr. Goath, anyhow!” cried Miss Matfield fervently. “I loathed the sight of him, he always looked so dirty and dilapidated. I’m sure he was a rotten man to have going round calling on people.”

“But what if the other chap comes?” said Turgis, grinning. “You didn’t like the look of him, did you?”

“I should think not! I never thought of that.” She groaned as she stuck another sheet of paper into the typewriter. “What a life!”

“That’s right, let’s get finished. Turgis, Stanley, come on, get a move on,” said Mr. Smeeth sharply. And down below, in Angel Pavement, now a deep narrow pool of darkness sharply spangled with electric lights, you could hear a little host of other people finishing for the night, a final clatter of typewriters, a banging of doors, the hooting of homing cars, the sound of footsteps hurrying up the street towards liberty.

_Chapter Two_: MR. SMEETH IS REASSURED

I

Mr. Smeeth, still puzzling and pondering over the sullen departure of Goath and the arrival of this mysterious Mr. Golspie, put his books away for the night, and, as his habit was, pulled out his pipe and tobacco pouch. The others had gone, and the office was in darkness except for the solitary light above his desk. His pouch, one of those oilskin affairs, was nearly empty, and he had to take out the last crumbs in order to get a decent pipeful. He had just lit up, blown out the first few delicious clouds, and switched off his light, when the telephone rang sharply, urgently, in the gloom. As he groped back to the receiver, he felt almost frightened. What was coming now? He found himself wishing he had gone earlier, just a little earlier, but nevertheless he had not the strength of mind to ignore the telephone’s peremptory challenge.

“Hello?” he began.

A huge voice cut him short, came roaring out of the dark. “Look ’ere, Charlie, what abart makin’ it fifty? Carm on, yer gotter do it, ol’ son, yer can’t get away from it----”

“Wait a moment,” Mr. Smeeth told him. “This is Twigg and Dersingham. Who do you----”

“I know, _I know_,” the voice continued, smashing its way across London and entirely ignoring Mr. Smeeth’s protest. “I know wotcher goin’ to say, but it’ll ’ave to be fifty this time. I been talkin’ ter Tommy Rawson s’afternoon, an’ ’e says yer’ll be lucky if yer get it at that. ‘Tell Charlie from me,’ ’e says, ‘’e won’t touch it under fifty an’ ’e’ll be lucky if ’e gets it at that.’ Tommy’s own words them. An’ I agree, _I agree_. Nar then, what d’yer say, Charlie?”

“You’ve got the wrong number,” cried Mr. Smeeth.

“What’s that? I want Mr. ’Iggins.”

“There’s no Mr. Higgins here. This is Twigg and Dersingham.”

“Wrong number again,” said the voice, disgusted. “Ring off--for gord’s sake.”

Mr. Smeeth, relieved, rang off with pleasure, and departed, chuckling a little. Who was Charlie, and what was it he had to pay fifty for, and why did Tommy Rawson think he’d be lucky if he got it? “Might easily be crooks,” he concluded, with a little romantic thrill, worthy of Stanley himself, and then smiled at himself. More likely to be fellows buying second-hand cars, loads of scrap iron, or something like that. At the bottom of the stairs, he ran into the tall fellow with the broad-brimmed hat, who was just coming out of his _Kwik-Work Razor Blade_ place.

The tall man nodded. “Turning colder.”

“Just a bit,” replied Mr. Smeeth heartily. These little encounters and recognitions pleased him, making him feel that he was somebody. “Not so bad, though, for the time of year.”

“That’s right. Business good?”

“So-so. Not so good as it might be.” And then Mr. Smeeth let the tall man stride away down Angel Pavement, for he remembered that he was out of tobacco and so turned into the neighbouring shop, the one occupied by T. Benenden.

Mr. Smeeth was one of T. Benenden’s regular customers, a patron (perhaps the only one) of T. Benenden’s Own Mixture (_Cool Sweet Smoking_). “No,” he liked to tell some fellow pipe-smoker, “I don’t fancy your ounce-packet stuff. I like my tobacco freshly mixed, y’know, and so I always get it from a little shop near the office. It’s the chap’s own mixture and so it’s always fresh. Oh, fine stuff!--you try a pipeful--and very reasonable. Been getting it for years now. And the chap I get it from is a bit of a character in his way.” Saying this made Mr. Smeeth feel that he was a connoisseur of both tobacco and human nature, and it gave an added flavour to his pipe, which could do with it after being charged with nothing but T. Benenden’s own mixture. It was hardly possible that he was right about the tobacco being “freshly mixed,” for though mixed--and well mixed--it may have been, it could not come from T. Benenden’s little shop, with its hundreds of dusty dummy packets, its row of battered tin canisters, its dilapidated weight scales, its dirty counter, its solitary wheezing gas mantle, its cobwebs and dark corners, and still be fresh. On the other hand, he was certainly right when he described T. Benenden himself as a bit of a character in his way.

T. Benenden’s way was that of the philosophical financier turned shopkeeper. He was an oldish man who wore thick glasses (which only magnified eyes that protruded far enough without their help), a straggling pepper-and-salt beard, one of those old-fashioned single high collars and a starched front, and no tie. When Mr. Smeeth first visited the shop, years ago, he was at once startled and amused by this absence of tie, jumping to the conclusion that the man had forgotten his tie. Now, he would have been far more startled to see Benenden _with_ a tie. He had often been tempted to ask the chap why he wore these formal collars and fronts and yet no tie, but somehow he had never dared. Benenden himself, though he was ready to talk on many subjects, never mentioned ties. Either he deliberately ignored them or he had never noticed the part these things were now playing in the world, simply did not understand about ties. What he did like to talk about, perhaps because his shop was in the City, was finance, a sort of Arabian Nights finance. He sat there behind his counter, steadily smoking his stock away, and peered at old copies of financial periodicals or the City news of ordinary papers, and out of this reading, and the bits of gossip he heard, and the grandiose muddle of his own mind, he concocted the most astonishing talk. It was difficult to buy an ounce of tobacco from him without his making you feel that the pair of you had just missed a fortune.

As soon as he recognised Mr. Smeeth, T. Benenden very deliberately pulled down his scales and then placed on the counter the particular dirty old canister set apart for his own mixture. “The usual, I suppose, Mr. Smeeth?” he said, picking up the pouch and then smoothing it out on the counter. “I saw your chief this morning, the young fellow--Mr. Dersingham. Came in for some _Sahibs_. Got somebody with him too, new to me, well set up gentleman, with a good cigar in his mouth, a very good cigar. You’ll know who I mean?”

“He called this morning at the office,” said Mr. Smeeth.

“Well, I didn’t say anything,” Benenden continued, very seriously as he weighed out the tobacco. “It’s not my business to say anything. I _don’t_ say anything. But I keep my eyes open. And I said to myself, the minute they went out, ‘This looks to me as if Twigg and Dersingham’s are moving on a bit. This has the look of a merging job, or a syndicate job, or a trust job. And,’ I said, ‘if Mr. Smeeth does happen to come in for the usual, I’ll put it straight to him. It’s no concern of mine, but he’ll tell _me_. I’ll test my judgment,’ I said.”

“Sorry, Mr. Benenden,” said Mr. Smeeth, smiling at him, “but I’ve nothing to tell you. I don’t rightly know what’s happening, but you can depend on it, it’s nothing in that line.”

“Then,” cried Benenden, quite passionately, rolling up the pouch and then slapping it down on the counter, “you’re wrong. I don’t mean you, Mr. Smeeth, I mean the firm. That’s the way things are going all the time now, Mr. Smeeth, big combinations--merging away till you don’t know where you are--and sweeping the deck, until--dear me--there isn’t a picking, not a crumb, left. You see what I mean? Now there’s a bit here in one of the papers--I was just reading it when you came in--and I don’t suppose you’ve seen it. Just a minute and I’ll find it. Now here it is. Suppose, Mr. Smeeth, just suppose,” and here T. Benenden leaned across the counter and his eyes seemed colossal, “I’d come to you a fortnight since, a week since, and said to you, ‘What about picking up a bit on South Coast Laundries?’--what would you have said?”

“I’d have said it takes me all my time to pay my own laundry bill,” Mr. Smeeth replied, much amused by this retort of his.

T. Benenden made a slight gesture of contempt to show that this was mere trifling. Then he looked very solemn, very impressive. “You’d have said, ‘I can’t be bothered with South Coast Laundries. I’m not touching ’em--don’t want ’em--take your South Coast Laundries away. And you’d have been right--as far as you could see, _then_. But what happens, what happens? Read your paper. It’s there, under my very ’and. Along comes a big merger--a bit of syndicate and trust work--and up they go, right up to the top--bang! Now--you see--you can’t touch ’em. And there’s a feller here--you can see it in the paper--who’s been clearing anything out of it--a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand--a clean sweep, made for life. And he’s not the only one, not a bit of it! And we sit here, pretending to laugh at South Coast Laundries or whatever it might be, and what are we doing? We’re missing it, that’s what we’re doing, we’re missing it.” Here, a dramatic pause.

“And if your Mr. Dersingham isn’t careful,” Benenden concluded, still impressive even if a trifle vague now, “_he’s_ going to miss it. He wants to keep his eyes open. There’s one or two bits in this paper I’d like to show him. Let’s see, what was it you gave me? Half a crown, wasn’t it? That’s right then--one and six change. And good-night to _you_, Mr. Smeeth.” And T. Benenden, after stooping down to the tiny gas-jet to relight his pipe, retired to his corner to ruminate.

Mr. Smeeth made his way to Moorgate, where, as usual, he bought an evening paper and then climbed to the upper deck of a tram. There, when he was not being bumped by the conductor, jostled by outgoing and incoming passengers, thrown back or hurled forward by the tram itself, an irritable and only half tamed brute, he stared at the jogging print and tried to acquaint himself with the latest and most important news of the day. An excitable column and a half told him that a young musical comedy actress, whom he had never seen and had no particular desire to see, had got engaged, that it had been quite a romance, that she was very very happy and not sure yet whether she would leave the stage or not. Mr. Smeeth, not caring whether she left the stage or dropped dead on it, turned to another column. This discussed the problem of careers for married women, a problem that had been left absolutely untouched since the morning papers came out, ten hours before. It did not interest Mr. Smeeth, so he tried another column. This reported an action for divorce, in which it appeared that the petitioning wife had only been allowed a hundred and fifty pounds a year on which to dress herself. The judge had said that this seemed to him--a mere bachelor (laughter)--an adequate allowance, but the paper had collected the opinions of well-known society hostesses, who all said it was not adequate. Mr. Smeeth, who found he could not share the editor’s passionate interest in this topic, now tried another page, which promptly informed him that evening gowns would certainly be longer this winter, and then went on to tell him, to the tune of three solid columns, that the modern business girl (with her latch-key) had quite a different attitude towards marriage and therefore must not be confused with her grandmother (Victorian, with no latch-key). Mr. Smeeth, feeling sure that he had read all this before, passed on, and arrived at the sports page, where the prospects of certain women golfers were discussed at considerable length. Never having set eyes on any of these Amazons and not being interested in golf, Mr. Smeeth next tried the gossip columns. The tram was swaying now and the print fairly dancing, so that it was at the cost of some eye-strain and a slight headache that he learned from these paragraphs that Lord Winthrop’s brother, who was over six feet, intended to spend the winter in the West Indies, that the youngest son of Lady Nether Stowey could not only be seen very frequently at the Blue Pigeon Restaurant but was also renowned for the way in which he painted fans, that the member for the Tewborough Division, who must not be mistaken for Sir Adrian Putter, now in Egypt, had perhaps the best collection of teapots of any man in the House, and that he must not imagine, as so many people did, that Chingley Manor, where the fire had just occurred, was the Chingley Manor mentioned by Disraeli, for it was not, and the paragraphist, who seemed to go about a great deal, knew them both well. Indeed, he and his editor seemed to know all about everybody and everything, except Mr. Smeeth and all the other staring men on the tram, and the people they knew, and all their concerns and all the things in which they were interested. Nevertheless, Mr. Smeeth reflected, as he carefully folded the paper, there were a lot of things in it that his wife would like to read. They seemed to have stopped writing penny papers for men.

Mr. Smeeth occupied a six-roomed house (with bath) in a street full of six-roomed houses (with baths), in that part of Stoke Newington that lies between the High Street and Clissold Park--to be precise, at the postal address: 17, Chaucer Road, N. 16. Why the late Victorian speculative builder had fastened on Chaucer is a mystery, unless he had come to the conclusion that the Canterbury Pilgrims, who have never vanished from this island, might come to rest in the twentieth century behind his brick walls. But there it was, Chaucer Road, and Mr. Smeeth had once tried his hand at Chaucer, but what with one thing and another, the queer spelling and all that, had not made much of him. All that he remembered now was that Chaucer had called birds “Smally foulies,” and to this day, when he was in a waggish mood, Mr. Smeeth liked to bring in “smally foulies,” only to be countered with “You and your ‘smelly foulies!’” from a delighted Mrs. Smeeth. Towards 17, Chaucer Road, Mr. Smeeth now stepped out, swinging his folded newspaper, through the alternating lamplight and gloom, the crisping air, of the autumn evening. Dinner, with a cup of tea to follow, awaited him, for during the week, Mr. Smeeth, like a wise man, preferred to dine when work was done for the day.

II

“Cut some off for George,” said Mrs. Smeeth, “and I’ll keep it warm for him. He’s going to be late again. You’re a bit late yourself to-night, Dad.”

“I know. We’ve had a funny day to-day,” replied Mr. Smeeth, but for the time being he did not pursue the subject. He was busy carving, and though it was only cold mutton he was carving, he liked to give it all of his attention.

“Now then, Edna,” cried Mrs. Smeeth to her daughter, “don’t sit there dreaming. Pass the potatoes and the greens--careful, they’re hot. And the mint sauce. Oh, I forgot it. Run and get it, that’s a good girl. All right, don’t bother yourself. I can be there and back before you’ve got your wits together.”

Mr. Smeeth looked up from his carving and eyed Edna severely. “Why didn’t you go and get it when your mother told you. Letting her do everything.”

His daughter pulled down her mouth and wriggled a little. “I’d have gone,” she said, in a whining tone. “Didn’t give me time, that’s all.”

Mr. Smeeth grunted impatiently. Edna annoyed him these days. He had been very fond of her when she was a child--and, for that matter, he was still fond of her--but now she had arrived at what seemed to him a very silly awkward age. She had a way of acting, of looking, of talking, all acquired fairly recently, that irritated him. An outsider might have come to the conclusion that Edna looked like a slightly soiled and cheapened elf. She was between seventeen and eighteen, a smallish girl, thin about the neck and shoulders but with sturdy legs. She had a broad snub nose, a little round mouth that was nearly always open, and greyish-greenish-blueish eyes set rather wide apart; and scores of faces exactly like hers, pert, pretty-ish and under-nourished, may be seen within a stone’s-throw of any picture theatre any evening in any large town. She had left school as soon as she could, and had wandered in and out of various jobs, the latest and steadiest of them being one as assistant in a big draper’s Finsbury Park way. At home now, being neither child nor an adult, neither dependent nor independent, she was at her worst; languid and complaining, shrill and resentful, or sullen and tearful; she would not eat properly; she did not want to help her mother, to do a bit of washing-up, to tidy her room; and it was only when one of her silly little friends called, when she was going out, that she suddenly sprang into a vivid personal life of her own, became eager and vivacious. This contrast, as sharp as a sword, sometimes angered, sometimes saddened her father, who could not imagine how his home, for which he saw himself for ever planning and working, appeared in the eyes of fretful, secretive and ambitious adolescence. These changes in Edna annoyed and worried him far more than they did Mrs. Smeeth, who only took offence when she had a solid grievance, and turned a tolerant, sagely feminine eye on what she called Edna’s “airs and graces.”

There was a bustle and clatter, and Mrs. Smeeth returned to dump upon the table a little jug without a handle. “I’m getting properly mixed up in my old age,” she announced, breathlessly. “First I thought it was there, in front of the bottom shelf. Then when I went, I thought I couldn’t have made any, because it wasn’t there. And then--lo and behold--it was there all the time, right at the back of the second shelf. Oh, you’ve given me too much, Dad. Take some back. I’m not a bit hungry somehow to-night, haven’t been all day. You know how you get sometimes, can’t fancy anything. Here, Edna, you want more than that. Well, I dare say you don’t, but you’re going to have it, miss. None of this silly starving yourself, a girl your age! Because your mother doesn’t feel hungry for once in her life, it doesn’t mean you’re just going to sit there, pecking worse than a little sparrow.” And here she stopped, to take breath, to snatch Edna’s plate and put some more meat on it, to sit down, to do half a dozen other things, all in a flash.

According to all the literary formulas, the wife of Mr. Smeeth should have been a grey and withered suburban drudge, a creature who had long forgotten to care for anything but a few household tasks, the welfare of her children, and the opinion of one or two chapel-going neighbours, a mere husk of womanhood, in whom Mr. Smeeth could not recognise the girl he had once courted. But Nature, caring nothing for literary formulas, had gone to work in another fashion with Mrs. Smeeth. There was nothing grey and withered about her. She was only in her early forties, and did not look a day older than her age, by any standards. She was a good deal plumper than the girl Mr. Smeeth had married, twenty-two years before, but she was no worse for that. She still had a great quantity of untidy brown hair, a bright blue eye, rosy cheeks, and a ripe moist lip. She came of robust country stock, and perhaps that is why she had been able to conjure any amount of bad food into healthy and jolly womanhood. By temperament, however, she was a real child of London, a daughter of Cockaigne. She adored oysters, fish and chips, an occasional bottle of stout or glass of port, cheerful gossip, hospitality, noise, jokes, sales, outings, comic songs, entertainments of any kind, in fact, the whole rattling and roaring, laughing and crying world of food and drink and bargaining and adventure and concupiscence. She liked to spend as much money as she could, but apart from that, would have been quite happy if the Smeeths had dropped to a lower social level. She never shared any of her husband’s worries, and was indeed rather impatient of them, sometimes openly contemptuous, but she had no contempt, beyond that experienced by all deeply feminine natures for the male, for the man himself. He had been her sweetheart, he was her husband; he had given her innumerable pleasures, had looked after her, had been patient with her, had always been fond of her; and she loved him and was proud of what seemed to her his cleverness. She knew enough about life to realise that Smeeth was a really good husband and that this was something to be thankful for. (North London does not form any part of that small hot-house world in which a good husband or wife is regarded as a bore, perhaps as an obstacle in the path of the partner’s self-development.) Chastity for its own sake made no appeal to her, and she recognised with inward pleasure (though not with any outward sign) the glances that flirtatious and challenging males, in buses and shops and tea-rooms, threw in her direction. If Mr. Smeeth had started any little games--as she frankly confessed--she would not have moaned and repined, but would have promptly “shown him” what she could do in that line. As it was, he did not require showing. He grumbled sometimes at her extravagance, her thoughtlessness, her rather slap-dash housekeeping, but in spite of all that, in spite too, of the fact that for two-and-twenty years they had been cooped up together in tiny houses, she still seemed to him an adorable person, at once incredible and delightful in the large, wilful, intriguing, mysterious mass of her femininity, the Woman among the almost indistinguishable crowd of mere women.

“And if this pudding tastes like nothing on earth,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, rushing it on to the table, “don’t blame me, blame Mrs. Newark at number twenty-three. She came charging in, like a fire brigade, just as I was in the middle of mixing it, and shrieked at me--you know what a voice she has?--she said, ‘What d’you think, Mrs. Smeeth!’ And I said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs. Newark. What is it this time?’ I slipped that in just to remind her it wasn’t the first time she’d nearly frightened the life out of me, breaking the news about nothing. ‘Well,’ she said--just a minute, mind your hand, Dad, that’s hot. Pass the custard, Edna. Dad wants it. That’s right.” And Mrs. Smeeth sat down, flushed and panting.

“Bit on the heavy side, p’raps,” said Mr. Smeeth, who had now tasted his pudding, “but I’ve had worse from you, Mother, much worse.” Another spoonful. “Not so bad at all.”

“No, it isn’t, is it?” his wife replied. “But if it isn’t, it ought to be. I thought Mrs. Screaming Twenty-three had done it in properly. ‘Well,’ she said, and nearly bursting she was, ‘do you know, Mrs. Smeeth, I’ve had a letter from Albert, and he’s been in hospital in Rangoon, and now he’s all right, and the letter came not ten minutes since.’ ‘You don’t say!’ I said. ‘Where’s he been in hospital?’ And she said, ‘Rangoo-oon’--just like that. Reminded me of that Harry Tate sketch, you remember, Dad? Rangoo-oon! I nearly laughed in her face. And talk about sketches! If you want a sketch you couldn’t beat this Albert she’s making so much fuss about. ’Member him, Edna?--teeth sticking out a yard, and all cross-eyed. They saw something in Rangoo-oon when they saw Albert.”

“Oo, he was sorful!” cried Edna, shuddering in a refined way.

“Still, we can’t all be oil-paintings,” Mrs. Smeeth remarked philosophically. Then she looked mischievous. “And we can’t all look like Mr. Ronald Mawlborough either.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” Mr. Smeeth inquired.

“There you are, you see, Dad, you’re not up in these things. You’re behind the times. Matter of fact, you have seen him, ’cos I remember the two of us seeing him together, in that picture at the Empire.”

“Oh, one of those movie chaps, is he?” Mr. Smeeth was obviously more interested in pudding than in movie chaps.

“I should think he is. Isn’t he, Edna?”

“Oh, do shut up, Mother,” cried Edna, crimson now and wriggling.

“What’s this about?”

“He’s the latest, isn’t he, Edna?” said Mrs. Smeeth wickedly. “And I must say he’s a good-looking young fellow--curly hair, dark eyes, and all that. Free with his photographs too. Yours sincerely, Ronald Mawlborough, that’s him. Nothing stand-offish about him when he addresses his sweet young admirers----”

“Mother!” Edna screamed, nothing now but two imploring eyes in a scarlet face.

“That’s what comes of not doing your bedroom out, miss,” her mother retorted. “I go up to her bedroom, Dad, and what do I find? Mr. Ronald Mawlborough, hers sincerely, on a big photo. You can nearly count his eyelashes. That’s the latest now. Not content with cutting ’em out of these movie papers, they send to Hollywood for them. Darling Mr. Ronald, they write, I shall die if you don’t send me your photo, signed in your own sweet handwriting. Yours truly, Edna Smeeth, seventeen Chaucer Road, Stoke Newington, England.”

Mr. Smeeth looked severe. “Well, I must say, Edna, I call that a silly game.”

“I only did it for fun,” she muttered, “just to see what would happen, that’s all. Some of our girls have got dozens----”

“Pity they’ve got nothing better to do,” was her father’s comment.

“Oh, well, they might be doing worse,” said Mrs. Smeeth, rising from the table. “It won’t do them any good, but it won’t do them any harm either. We’ve all been a bit silly in our time. I’m sure I was when I was a girl. Girls _are_ a bit silly, if you ask me, and it’s a good job for the men they are. But that doesn’t mean they can’t help to clear a table. Come on, Edna, get these things away while I make the tea.”

“Oh, all ri-ight,” Edna sighed wearily, and rose in slow-motion time. Ten minutes later, after gulping down her tea, she rushed out of the room, leaving her parents sitting at ease, Mrs. Smeeth over her second cup of tea, Mr. Smeeth over his pipe.

The room was small and contained far too much furniture and too many knick-knacks. Nearly everything in it was shoddy and ugly, manufactured hastily, in the mass, to catch a badly-informed eye, to be bought and exhibited for a brief season by the purchaser, and then to be in the way and finally rot out of the way. Nevertheless, the total effect of the room was not displeasing, because it had a cosy, homelike atmosphere, which Mr. Smeeth, whose imagination, heightened by fear, perhaps told him that outside beyond the firelight and the snug walls were stalking poverty, disgrace, shame, disease, and death, enjoyed even more than Mrs. Smeeth. It was probably this feeling, and not so much the strain of the day’s work, that made him a man difficult to rouse and get out of the house in the evening, as his wife, who was all for going out somewhere, or, failing that, inviting somebody in, knew to her cost.

“You’re an old home-bird, you are,” she said, with a sort of affectionate contempt, as she saw him settling deeper now into his chair. “Well, what’s been bothering you to-day? You started to tell me and then didn’t.”

“I got a real fright this morning, I don’t mind telling you, Edie,” he began. “Not that I hadn’t seen it coming the way things were going on,” he added, with a gloomy pride.

“Now then, don’t start on,” she warned him, shaking a teaspoon. “You see too much coming. Always looking into the middle of next week and noticing how black it’s getting. Talk about depressions in Iceland! They ought to give you the job, and then there’d be plenty. However, go on, my dear. Mustn’t interrupt.”

“Well, somebody’s got to look, haven’t they?” he replied. “And if Mr. Dersingham had looked a bit harder, we’d all be better off.”

“Do you mean to say you won’t get that rise at Christmas he was talking about?”

“Rise at Christmas! I thought this morning I was in for a rise outside. I tell you, Edie, when he started, my heart went into my boots.” And he plunged into an account of the scene in Mr. Dersingham’s room that morning and then discussed the mysterious events that followed it, all of which Mrs. Smeeth punctuated with nods and ejaculations, such as “Did he really?”, “Well, I never!”, and “Silly old geezer!” She gave him more of her attention than she usually did, because she could see that he was seriously concerned, but at the same time she did not really bother her own head about it, as he knew very well. To her it was all rather unreal, and he was convinced that the idea that he might lose his job, be thrown into the street with only the gloomiest prospect of getting anything half as good, never really entered her head. And this indifference, this childlike confidence in his ability to produce the usual six or seven pounds every week, did nothing to restore his own self-confidence, at least not at such moments as these, but only made him feel that he had to think for two, and in the end left him lonely with his fear.

“All I’m hoping now,” he went on, earnestly, “is that this chap who called has got something up his sleeve. It’s so funny Goath going like that. Looks to me as if this chap, Golspie, thought Goath wasn’t any good--and I’ve thought so once or twice myself lately--and worked it so that Mr. Dersingham got rid of him. Perhaps he’s going to take his place. I must say, it’s a funny business. In all my experience----”

“Don’t you worry, it’ll be all right,” cried Mrs. Smeeth. “We’re going to be lucky, we are. I don’t care if Mr. Dersingham goes mental, we’re going to be lucky. Soon too! I don’t think I told you, but Mrs. Dalby’s sister--the one with the fringe and the jet ear-rings, who reads the cards--told me my fortune the other afternoon, and she said luck was coming, money and good luck, and all through a stranger, a middling-coloured man in a strange bed. Is this man you’re talking about middling-coloured?”

“Don’t ask me, I never noticed what colour he was. He hadn’t any colour. He’d got a big moustache, if that’s any use to you. But what puzzles me is this, why did Mr. Dersingham----”

“Don’t you worry yourself, Dad, why Mr. Dersingham did anything,” his wife interrupted. “Think he’s spending his time worrying about you? Not him! And don’t you bother your old head about him, either. Let’s have a bit o’ music. It’ll cheer us up.” She bounced over to the corner in which George, who had a head for these things, had fixed up that tangle of wires which still passes by the name of “wireless,” a loud speaker apparatus. “What starts it? I can never remember,” she said, with one hand hovering over the various knobs. “Is it this thing you pull out?”

It must have been, for she pulled it, and immediately a loud, patronising voice filled the room. “Let us turn to anothuh aspect of this problam,” it shouted. “As we have already seen--ah--a company cannot barrow unless it is aixpressly authorised--that is, authorised by its memorandum of association--ah--to do so. Let us see what this invalves. Suppose a companay has been formed for the purpose--we will say--ah--of discounting cammercial bills----”

“Oh, help!” cried Mrs. Smeeth, and promptly turned the voice out of the room. “A lot of cheering up you’ll do!” she told the loud speaker severely. “Look in the paper and see when the singing and playing comes on.”

There was a glimpse of Edna, all dressed up, very white about the nose, very red about the lips.

“Where you’re going, Edna?” her mother shrieked.

“Out.”

“Who with?”

“Minnie Watson.”

“Well, don’t be late then, you and your Minnie Watson.” A bang of the front door was Edna’s only reply. “It’s Minnie Watson ev’ry night now,” said Mrs. Smeeth. “Next month it’ll be all somebody else. I said to her last night, ‘Where’s Annie Frost now you used to be so friendly with?’”

“Is that Frost’s girl?” inquired Mr. Smeeth. “The chap who keeps the _Hand and Glove_?”

“That’s right, Jimmy Frost. So when I said that to her, the little madam turns up her nose at once and says, ‘Catch me going with Annie Frost!’ Just like that. And it doesn’t seem a minute since they were as thick as thieves. I could have died laughing. Just the same, I was, at her age.”

“You won’t make me believe that,” said Mr. Smeeth sturdily. “You’d more sense. Seems to me these young girls now haven’t a scrap of sense. The bit they leave school with is knocked out of them by pictures nowadays. They think about pictures--movies and talkies--from morning till night. They’re getting jazzed off their little heads.”

“That sounds like Georgie,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, starting up. “I’ll go and get his dinner out of the oven. Come on, boy, hurry up if you want any dinner to-night. It’s nearly cinders now.”

Left to himself, Mr. Smeeth slowly knocked out his pipe in the coal-scuttle and then stared into the fire, brooding. He was always catching himself grumbling about the children now, and he did not want to be a grumbling father. He had enjoyed them when they were young, but now, although there were times when he felt a touch of pride, he no longer understood them. George especially, the elder of the two, and once a very bright promising boy, was both a disappointment and a mystery. George had had opportunities that he himself had never had. But George had shown an inclination from the first, to go his own way, which seemed to Mr. Smeeth a very poor way. He had no desire to stick to anything, to serve somebody faithfully, to work himself steadily up to a good safe position. He simply tried one thing after another, selling wireless sets, helping some pal in a garage (he was in a garage now, and it was his fourth or fifth), and though he always contrived to earn something and appeared to work hard enough, he was not, in his father’s opinion, getting anywhere. He was only twenty, of course, and there was time, but Mr. Smeeth, who knew very well that George would continue to go his own way without any reference to him, did not see any possibility of improvement. The point was, that to George, there was nothing wrong, and his father was well aware of the fact that he could not make him see there was anything wrong. That was the trouble with both his children. There was obviously nothing bad about either of them; they compared very favourably with other people’s boys and girls; and he would have been quick to defend them; but nevertheless, they were growing up to be men and women he could not understand, just as if they were foreigners. And it was all very perplexing and vaguely saddening.

The truth was, of course, that Mr. Smeeth’s children _were_ foreigners, not simply because they belonged to a younger generation but because they belonged to a younger generation that existed in a different world. Mr. Smeeth was perplexed because he applied to them standards they did not recognise. They were the product of a changing civilisation, creatures of the post-war world. They had grown up to the sound of the Ford car rattling down the street, and that Ford car had gone rattling away, to the communal rubbish heap, with a whole load of ideas that seemed still of supreme importance to Mr. Smeeth. They were the children of the Woolworth stores and the moving pictures. Their world was at once larger and shallower than that of their parents. They were less English, more cosmopolitan. Mr. Smeeth could not understand George and Edna, but a host of youths and girls in New York, Paris and Berlin would have understood them at a glance. Edna’s appearance, her grimaces and gestures, were temporarily based on those of an Americanised Polish Jewess, who, from her mint in Hollywood, had stamped them on these young girls all over the world. George’s knowing eye for a machine, his cigarette and drooping eyelid, his sleek hair, his ties and shoes and suits, the smallest details of his motor-cycling and dancing, his staccato impersonal talk, his huge indifferences, could be matched almost exactly round every corner in any American city or European capital.

Mrs. Smeeth returned with the food, and a minute or two later, George descended from his bedroom, shining, sleek, brushed. He was better looking, better built, tougher in body, than his father had ever been, and he owed far more to his mother, though there was about her a certain generosity of the blood, a suggestion of ruddy mounting sap, that was absent in him: he was drier, more compressed and blanched; and though he was a good-looking youth, who moved easily, quickly, he had hardly any more of the bloom of twenty than had the moving pictures of Mr. Ronald Mawlborough and his kind. In short, he looked too old for an English boy of that age. It was as if the Americanised world he had grown up to discover about him, had contrived to introduce into North London the drying and ageing American climate.

“You’re late to-night, George,” said his father.

“Been busy,” he replied, dispatching his dinner quickly, quietly, efficiently, but with no signs of taking any pleasure in his food. After a few minutes’ silence, he continued: “Feller came in with an old _Lumbden_, twelve horse. Could have had it for fifteen quid. Nothing much wrong with it. Wanted new plugs and mag. and brakes re-lining and something doing to the differential, and just cleanin’ up a bit. All right then. Take you anywhere. Thought once of sellin’ the ol’ bike and having a shot at this _Lumbden_.”

“I wish you would, Georgie,” cried Mrs. Smeeth. “You could take us all out then. See us going out in style, eh, Dad? Besides, I hate that stinking rattling ol’ bike of yours. Nasty dangerous things they are too. Get rid of it, Georgie, before it gets rid of you.”

“That’s all right,” said George, “but the ol’ bike goes--travels like a bird. This _Lumbden_ couldn’t look at her. No, me for the little ol’ bike, till I can put my hand on something in the super-sports style. And don’t worry, I shan’t do that in a hurry--costs too much. Doesn’t matter, though--Barrett’s buying this _Lumbden_. We’ll do her up a bit, paint her up, and sell her. There won’t be any hurry either, so when we’ve put a few works in her, if you want a ride, pass the word on, and we’ll have a run in her.”

“We’ll go down to Brighton and see your aunt Flo,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, her eyes brightening at the thought of an outing. “Now don’t forget, Georgie boy. That’s a promise to your old mother. Don’t go spending all your time taking the girls out in it. Give your mother a chance. She can enjoy a ride as well as the next.”

“Righto,” said George briskly. He rose from the table.

“Here, you want some pudding.”

“Not to-night. Off pudding to-night. Couldn’t look it in the face. ’Sides, I haven’t time.”

“Time!” cried his mother. “You’re never in. Where you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Just knocking about with some of the fellers.”

Mr. Smeeth looked at him, rather gravely. He felt it was his turn to speak now. “Just a minute,” he said sharply. “What does ‘knocking about’ mean exactly, may I ask?”

At this, George looked a shade less confident, a trifle younger, as he stood there tapping his cigarette. “I dunno. Might do one thing, might do another. Might have a game of billiards at the Institute, or look in at the pictures, or go down to the second house at Finsbury Park. Depends what everybody wants to do. No harm in that, Dad.” He lit his cigarette.

“Course there isn’t,” said Mrs. Smeeth. “Your father never said there was.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Mr. Smeeth slowly. “That’s all right, George. Only don’t take all night about it, that’s all. Oh!--there’s just another thing.” He hesitated a moment. “Somebody told me he’d seen you once or twice with that flash bookie chap--what’s his name?--y’know--Shandon. Well, you keep away from that chap, George. I don’t interfere--and you know I don’t--but that chap’s a wrong ’un, and I don’t want to see a boy of mine in his company.”

“Shandon’s no friend of mine,” said George, flushing. “I don’t knock about with him. He comes into the garage sometimes, that’s all. He’s a friend of Barrett’s.”

“Well, if half of what I hear’s true,” Mr. Smeeth remarked, “he’s a friend to nobody, that chap. And you just keep out of his way, George, see?”

“First I’ve heard of this,” said Mrs. Smeeth, looking severely at her son.

“All ri’, Dad,” George muttered, nodding. “So long, Ma.” And he was off.

Mrs. Smeeth promptly rushed the remaining dirty plates into the kitchen, and then returned, five minutes later, to find her husband looking at a battered copy of a detective story that had somehow found its way into the room. You could not say he was reading it. So far, he was merely glancing suspiciously at it. Mrs. Smeeth took up the evening paper, pecked at it here and there, then pottered about a minute or two, then turned on the wireless, which only let loose another patronising gentleman, switched it off, brought two socks and some darning wool from the top of the little bookcase, examined them with distaste, looked across at her husband, then said: “I can’t settle down to anything to-night, somehow. How d’you feel about a little walk round? We might look in at Fred’s for an hour. What d’you say? Oh no, I thought not--won’t stir, the old stick-in-the-mud. One of these days I’ll be finding a nice young man to take me to the pictures. Well, if you won’t stir, I will. I think I’ll just slip round to Mrs. Dalby’s for an hour. She asked me if I would.”

“You do,” said Mr. Smeeth. “I’m all right here.”

He lit his pipe again, made up the fire, and tried to settle down with the detective story, which at once hustled him into the library of the old Manor House, where the baronet’s body was waiting to be discovered. But he did not make much headway with it. Goath and Mr. Dersingham and this Golspie kept appearing in that library. Angel Pavement was just outside the old Manor House. So he put the book away and tried the wireless. This time the patronising gentlemen had all gone home, and in their place was a rich and adventurous flood of sound. It was not unfamiliar to Mr. Smeeth, and, after a pleasant tussle with his memory, he recognised it as something by Mendelssohn, an overture it was, a sea piece, either Whats-It’s Cave or Hebrides or something. Unlike his wife and children and most of his friends, Mr. Smeeth had a genuine, if unambitious, passion for music, and this was the kind of music he knew and liked best. He sank into his chair, and the sharp lines on his face softened as the music came swirling out of the little cone and there arrived with it the old mysterious enchantment of the ear. A phantom sea rolled about his chair: the room was filled with foam and salt air, the green glitter of the waves, the white flash and the crying of great sea birds. And Mr. Smeeth, a magically drowned man, worried no longer, and for a brief space was happy.

III

The next day Mr. Smeeth struggled out of sleep to find himself faced with one of those dark spouting mornings which burst over unhappy London like gigantic bombs filled with dirty water. At the first sign of the approach of one of these outrages, all clocks ought to be put back three hours, so that everybody might stay in bed until their fury is spent. There is no end to their malice. They sweep, lash, and machine-gun the streets with rain; they send up fountains of mud from every passing wheel; they contrive that fires shall not burn and water boil, that tea shall be lukewarm, bacon fat congealed, and warranted fresh eggs change in their very cups to mere eggs and dubious; they make the husband turn on the wife, the father on the child, and thus help to ruin all family life; and they lavishly sow all the ills that townsmen know, colds, indigestion, rheumatism, influenza, bronchitis, pneumonia, and are indeed the industrious hirelings of Death.

“Got your umbrella?” said Mrs. Smeeth. She had been out of bed over an hour, but somehow looked as if her real self was still there, as if this was a mysteriously wrapped wraith of herself she had projected downstairs. “Goo’-bye, then. You’ll have to run for it, Dad.”

Dad did not run for it, but he managed to trot down Chaucer Road and then along the neighbouring street, but after that he had a pain over his heart and was reduced to a sort of quick shamble. Before he reached the High Street and his tram, the bottom of his trousers were unpleasantly heavy, his boots (one of Mrs. Smeeth’s bargains and made of cardboard) gave out a squelching sound, and the newspaper he carried was being rapidly reconverted into its original pulp. The tram, its windows steaming and streaming, was more crowded than usual, of course, and carried its maximum cargo of wet clothes, the wearers of which were simply so many irritable ghosts. After enormous difficulty, Mr. Smeeth succeeded in filling and lighting his morning pipe of T. Benenden’s Own, and then--so stubborn is the spirit of man--succeeded in unfolding and examining his pulpy newspaper. Before he had reached the end of City Road, he had learned that the cost of a public school education was too high, that the night clubs on Broadway were not doing the business they had done, that a man in Birmingham had cut his wife’s throat, that students in Cairo were again on strike, that an old woman in Hammersmith had died of starvation, that a policeman in Suffolk had found six pound notes in the prisoner’s left sock, and that bubonic plague is conveyed to human beings by fleas from infected rats. And Angel Pavement, when he arrived there, looked as if it had been plucked, grey and dripping, from the bottom of an old cistern.

It was an unpleasant morning at the office. To begin with, the situation was more puzzling than ever. Once more, Mr. Dersingham did not appear, but telephoned about half past ten to say that he would not be there until late afternoon and would Mr. Smeeth “just carry on.” Goath did not reappear, and Mr. Smeeth felt sure now that he had vanished for ever. Then Miss Matfield was haughtier than usual, and very cross. Young Turgis, who had contrived to get wetter than anybody else on his way up to the office, went slouching about with a long pale face, and every now and then startled and intimidated everybody by sneezing explosively. Stanley, at odds with the weather, the world, and his present destiny, hung about and got in people’s way, and when told to get on with his work, pointed out, not very respectfully, that he hadn’t any work, and Mr. Smeeth did not find it easy to supply him with any. Several inquiries by telephone could not be properly answered, always an unsatisfactory state of affairs. Mr. Smeeth had sufficient routine work to carry him through the morning, but he felt queerly insecure, not at all happy with his books, his neat little figures, his pencil, rubber, blue ink and red ink, now that he no longer knew what was happening to the firm. It was like trying to post a ledger swinging above a dark gulf.

Lunch time found him at his usual teashop, sitting at a wet marble-topped table and waiting for his poached egg on toast and cup of coffee. The wet morning had perished outside, where there was even a faint gleam of sunshine, but it had found a haven in this teashop, which seemed to be four hours behind the weather in the street, for it was all damp and steaming. Mr. Smeeth was jammed into a corner with another regular patron, a man with a glass eye, bright blue and with such a fixed glare about it that the thing frightened you. Mr. Smeeth was sitting on the same side as the glass eye, and as the owner of it, who was busy eating two portions of baked beans on toast and drinking a glass of cold milk, never turned his head as he talked, the effect was disconcerting and rather horrible.

“Firm we’ve been doing business with,” said the man, disposing of a few beans that had quitted their toast, “has come a nasty cropper--a ve-ery nasty cropper. Claridge and Molton--d’you know