Chapter II: Part 2

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----”