Part 11

“Oh, it was too ridiculous,” cried Mrs. Dersingham, despairingly racking her brains to remember something amusing in that letter, or, failing that, something amusing in any letter she had ever had from anybody. “You know what Alice is--at least, you do, my dear, and so do you. I suppose it isn’t really funny unless you know her. You see, the minute I read a letter of hers, of course I can see her in my mind and hear her voice and all that sort of thing, and unless you can do that, well I dare say it isn’t so funny, after all. But, you see, Alice--she’s my youngest sister, I must explain, and they live down in Devon--oh, miles from anywhere. Will you ring, please, darling? Well, Alice has a dog, the absu-u-urdest creature----”

She struggled through with it somehow, and fortunately cook made such a noise clearing and then serving the sweet that most of the anecdote, presumably the funniest part, was lost in the clatter. The cook had been so noisy, so incredibly heavy in her breathing, and so obviously disapproving, when she was serving the sweet, that Mrs. Dersingham dare not have her up again to clear the table for dessert, so as the fruit-plates and the finger-bowls, the port decanter and glasses, were all on the sideboard, she made a joke of it--showing the last gleam of vivacity she felt she would be able to show for months--and she and Dersingham, assisted by Mr. Pearson, who said--tee-tee-tee-tee-tee--that he was used to clearing a table, having been well brought up, did what they could to make the dinner look as if it were coming to a civilised end. Mrs. Dersingham felt that Mr. Golspie, plainly a porty sort of man, and Major Trape might not want to argue so unpleasantly once they had some port inside them. This was the longest and most ghastly dinner she ever remembered. It was not really very late, but it seemed like two in the morning. As she tried to peel a very soft pear, she felt she wanted to throw it at the opposite wall and then scream at the top of her voice.

It was then they heard a ring at the outer door. Perhaps the postman, rather late and with something special to deliver. A minute or so later, there came another and longer ring.

“The only time we were there it rained for a whole week,” said Major Trape, concluding his account of the watering places, “and so I said, ‘Nevah again.’ Can’t imagine how these towns get their reputation. These weathah reports they give out----”

Another ring, very determined this time.

“I’m sorry, but do go and see who that is at the door, my dear,” Mrs. Dersingham cried, apologetically. “I’ve just remembered. Agnes has gone to bed, and cook probably can’t hear or won’t hear. I don’t suppose it’s anybody but the late post.”

Mr. Dersingham was absent several minutes, and somehow during that time nobody appeared to want to talk. Mrs. Dersingham did not press the fruit upon her guests. The moment the last piece was eaten, she intended to rise from the table, and then--oh, thank Heaven!--the worst was over. The men could stay on drinking port and quarrel like cats and dogs if they liked. She would be out of it, among nice, silly, comfortable women in the drawing-room, and so it would all be over. And then, just as she was nearly succeeding in consoling herself, her husband reappeared, and he was not alone. The idiot had brought a complete stranger into the dining-room with him, a girl.

She was a very pretty girl, quite young, and on his face was that fatuous smile which husbands always seem to wear in the company of young and very pretty girls. All wives recognize and detest that fatuous smile. It is bad at any time, but when it accompanies a girl who is a complete stranger into the dining-room at the conclusion of a disastrous dinner, and brings her into the presence of a wife who has not felt even decently presentable for hours and hours and who has been ready to scream for the last forty-five minutes, then it is a catastrophe and a mortal injury. And so Mrs. Dersingham gave Mr. Dersingham one look that sent that fatuous smile trembling into oblivion. And then, half rising from her chair, Mrs. Dersingham looked at the stranger, and decided at once that she had never before seen a girl she disliked so much at sight as this one.

“I’m afraid--er--I don’t----” she began.

But the girl was not even looking at her. She was busy having her left cheek brushed by the large moustache of Mr. Golspie, who had flung an arm round her shoulders.

“Well, hang me, Lena girl,” Mr. Golspie was roaring, “if I hadn’t forgotten all about you.”

“You would,” said the girl coolly. “You’re a rotten father. I’ve told you that before. Now introduce me.”

IV

“Now this is my fault,” Mr. Golspie boomed at the Dersinghams, turning from one to the other, “my fault entirely. I ought to have told you. I meant to, but I forgot. This girl of mine wrote to say she was coming from Paris to-day, but of course she didn’t say how and when and what and where, just left it all vague, y’know, as usual, all up in the air. When it got to be half past seven and she hadn’t turned up, I began to wonder. What was I to do?” And as he asked this he stared fiercely at Mr. Pearson, who happened to catch his eye.

“Quite so, Mr. Golspie,” Mr. Pearson, startled, jerked out.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I did do. I left a message with the caretaker of the flats, so that if she did come she’d know where I was----”

“All right, my dear,” his daughter interrupted, “you needn’t go on and on. Nobody wants to hear all about it. I got the message. I wasn’t going to spend hours all alone in that poisonous flat. So I took a taxi and came here. And that’s that.” And having thus dismissed the subject, Miss Golspie, who seemed an astonishingly cool and composed young lady, smiled at Mrs. Dersingham, who did not return the smile. Miss Golspie then produced a small mirror from her handbag and carefully examined her features in it.

And even Mrs. Dersingham would have been compelled to admit that they were very charming features. Lena Golspie still remained, after closer inspection, a very pretty girl. She had reddish-gold hair, large brown eyes, an impudent little nose, and a luscious mouth. She looked rather smaller than she actually was. Her neck, shoulders, and arms were slenderly, even too delicately, fashioned, but she had strong, well-shaped legs; and was indeed the complete attractive young female animal. Only in a certain slant of the eye and some movements of the mouth did she resemble her father, though a very acute listener might have found some likeness in their voices. Their accent, however, was quite different, for Mr. Golspie spoke with a breadth of vowel sound and roughness of consonants that suggested the toned-down Lowlander or North-country Englishman, whereas his daughter’s English did not properly belong to any part of England but seemed to be that international English, of a kind that a clever foreigner might pick up in the Anglo-Saxon colony in Paris and that is sometimes spoken by both English and Americans on the stage, a language without roots and background, a language for “the talkies.” Indeed, in Lena’s company you might have felt you were taking part in a “talkie.”

“And I intended to tell you when I first came in,” Mr. Golspie continued, determined to have his say. “Just to warn you that this daughter o’ mine--who doesn’t behave herself as nicely as she looks, I can tell you--might be landing herself on you.”

“Quite all right, of course,” said Mr. Dersingham. “I mean--delighted!”

“Good! No harm done, then.” And Mr. Golspie sat down, grinned at his daughter, noticed the decanter in front of him, and promptly helped himself to another glass of port.

“But I must say,” cried Lena, who had now concluded the examination of her own features and was busy examining everybody else’s, “I thought you’d have finished dinner hours ago. Did you begin late or have you been wolfing an awful lot?”

“I think we’d better all go straight into the drawing-room,” said Mrs. Dersingham hurriedly, “unless you men feel you _must_ stay and drink some more port.”

“Not a bit,” said Mr. Golspie heartily. “I’m ready, for one.” And to show that he was, he drained his glass in one sharp gulp.

“Only too delighted, Mrs. Dersingham,” said Major Trape, bowing and looking very severe, as if indirectly to rebuke the uncouth Golspie.

“Good work!” said Mr. Dersingham, who obviously felt that something was still wrong somewhere and was trying in vain to appear hearty and enthusiastic. He opened the door. “Much better if we all barge in together now.”

“Come along, Miss Golspie,” and the patient little smile that Mrs. Dersingham contrived to produce was itself a studied insult. “We don’t mind a _bit_ your not being dressed. It doesn’t matter at all, I assure you.”

Miss Golspie turned wondering large brown eyes upon her. “Oh, did you want me to change? I would have done if I’d known--specially as I’ve brought over one or two marvellous new dresses--but it didn’t seem worth it. Sorry and all that!”

“Not in the least,” replied Mrs. Dersingham, pale with weariness and vexation. Cheerfully--oh, so cheerfully!--she could have murdered this girl.

They trooped rather silently into the drawing-room, which did not seem particularly pleased to see them. It had been neglected itself for some time--so that the fire was low and ashy--and now it did not seem to welcome visitors. Cook arrived with coffee, and put down the tray with the air of a camel exhibiting the last straw. She did not attempt to serve it. She put it down on the rickety little table and immediately made that table seem ten times more rickety. There was no cup for Miss Golspie, who of course said at once that she would have some coffee, and so Mr. Dersingham, with what seemed to his wife a great deal of unnecessary fuss and silliness, insisted that he should go without. And then, having taken the tiniest sip of coffee, this Golspie girl ostentatiously put the cup on one side, and, on being asked by Mr. Pearson, who had also turned silly and officious, if she would have some more, replied that she did not really want any coffee.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” she declared, in a loud clear voice, “I’d adore a cocktail, if there are any going.”

“Oh, would you, Miss Golspie?” Mr. Dersingham began. “Well, I dare say I could rake up----” But he was not allowed to continue.

“I’m afraid there aren’t any cocktails going,” said Mrs. Dersingham, in a voice that was if anything louder and clearer, and as frosted as the best Martini.

And the insensitive Mr. Golspie did not improve the situation by chiming in with “I should think not. Don’t you take any notice of her, Mrs. Dersingham. I’ll give her cocktails!”

“When you get her home, eh?” Mr. Pearson cried, with rash facetiousness. “Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

It was easily his least successful “Tee-tee” of the evening. Mrs. Pearson looked surprised at him. Mr. Golspie gave him a glance that told him quite plainly to mind his own business and not try to be funny. Lena herself shot a furious glance at both her father and Mr. Pearson, but did not cast a single look in Mrs. Dersingham’s direction--a very ominous sign. As for Mrs. Dersingham, she could not decide which was the more awful, Mr. Golspie or his terrible daughter. She tried to start a conversation with Mrs. Pearson, who was now all embarrassed smiles, and Mrs. Trape, whose face had been completely frost-bound for the last ten minutes.

Miss Verever, every feature in battle order, now bore down on Lena, opening the engagement with a long-range smile of the most sinister peculiarity. “Do I understand, Miss Golspie,” she said, with the most mysterious grimace and the most baffling inflections, “that you’ve just come from Paris? Have you been living there?”

“Hello, hello!” cried Lena’s startled expression. “What have I done to you?” But all she actually said in reply was, “Yes, I’ve just come from there, and I’ve been living there.”

“Oh, you _have_ been living there?”

“Yes, for the last eighteen months. With an uncle. You see, he lives there, and I’ve been living with him.”

“Oh, your _uncle_ lives there?”

“Yes, he’s lived there nearly all his life. He is half French, anyhow. And my aunt’s completely French.”

“Then is your father--Mr. Golspie--half French?” asked Miss Verever, in one of her strangest whispers.

“No, not at all,” said Lena, with a little impatient shake of her head. “You see, this uncle’s my mother’s brother, not my father’s.”

“Oh, your _mother’s_.” And now Miss Verever produced her most famous glance of inquiry, awfully enigmatical in its final meaning and yet immediately challenging. She followed it up with a new smile, crooked, terrible. “Well, then, of course, your mother must be half French, I suppose, just like your uncle?”

“Yes, she was.” And then Lena’s little nose wrinkled, partly in bewilderment, partly in distaste. Then she looked straight at Miss Verever, who was bending over her and searching her with an unwinking gaze. “But what about it? I mean, there’s nothing particularly funny about that, is there? Lots of people are half French, aren’t they?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Miss Verever was taken aback.

“Well, then, what are you looking at me like that for?” cried Lena, at once registering a direct hit. “I mean, you look as if there was something terribly weird about it all. There really isn’t, you know. It’s all quite simple.” The shell crashed through and exploded somewhere near the magazine.

Miss Verever was jerked upright by her surprise. Then she turned glacial. “I beg your pardon.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, but----”

Miss Verever did not wait to hear, but turned away at once and joined the other three women. Lena, after staring after her for a moment, gave a tiny wriggle and then broke into a duet of Old Worrelian talk between Mr. Dersingham and Major Trape, who were merely chivalrous at first but very soon began to wear that fatuous smile. And towards the three of them an icy current began to flow from the group of women. Too tired, too cross, even to pretend to be a good brisk hostess, Mrs. Dersingham let the whole thing slide, and merely prayed for the end. It was not long in coming.

“Shall I?” Miss Golspie was heard to cry to the two men.

They nodded and smiled, a little doubtfully perhaps, but still they nodded and smiled, men under a spell.

“All right, then, I will. Just to cheer us all up. We’re getting terribly dismal.” And Miss Golspie, with a final and coquettish nod and smile of her own at the other two nodders and smilers, marched across the room, puffing away at one of her host’s _Sahibs_. Then she sat down at the baby grand.

“That’s the way, Lena,” her father shouted approvingly. He had been talking in a corner to Mr. Pearson. “Let’s have a tune. Do us good.”

Before anybody else could say a word, Lena had begun playing. She played some dance tunes, very sketchily, but with great speed and noise. The first two or three minutes were bad, but the next two or three minutes were much worse, for then her left hand, guessing wildly, began hitting any note roughly in the neighbourhood of the right one, and the very fire irons joined in the din. After ten minutes, she reached a grand _fortissimo_. Mrs. Dersingham could bear it no longer.

“Oh, do _stop_ that noise!” she shrieked, rushing forward, white and trembling with fury.

Lena stopped at once. They were all fixed, rooted, in a vast sudden silence.

Mrs. Dersingham bit her lip, recovered herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, coldly and curtly, “but I really must ask you to stop playing. I’ve--got a bad headache.”

“I see,” replied Lena, getting up from the piano. “Sorry.” She walked forward a step or two, then looked at Mrs. Dersingham. “Have you had it all the evening or has it just come on now?” And this was not a polite inquiry, but a challenge. The tone of voice made that obvious.

“Does that matter?” And Mrs. Dersingham turned away.

Into the silence that fell now there came the voice, quavering a little, of Mrs. Pearson. “Now I really think it’s time we were going,” it began. But nobody took any notice of it.

For Lena burst into a torrent of speech. “No, it doesn’t matter, of course. But I just asked because I thought you might have started that headache since I came, because you’ve just been as rotten as you could be, and I didn’t ask to come--I’ve been travelling half the day and I’m as tired as you are--and I wouldn’t have come at all if my father hadn’t told me to, and I thought you were friends of his, but from the minute I came in, you’ve not said a decent word to me or given me a decent look----”

“Hoy!” roared her father, seizing her by the arm and shaking her a little. “What the blazes is all this? What’s the matter with you, girl? That’s not the way to behave----”

“No, and that’s not the way to behave either,” cried Lena, shaking herself free. “What have I done? I didn’t want to push myself into her beastly house.” And then she grabbed her father’s arm and burst into tears. “I’m going,” she sobbed. “Take me home.”

Mr. Golspie put an arm round her and she continued her sobbing on his shoulder. “Sorry about this,” he said, over her head. “My fault, I expect. I oughtn’t to have told her to come. The kid’s a bit nervy--tired, y’know.”

“Yes, of course--travelling and all that,” said Mr. Dersingham, feeling that some reply was expected.

This was Mrs. Dersingham’s chance, but she did not take it. She might have accepted the apology if her husband had not been so ready to accept it and make an excuse for the girl. But now she turned her back on Mr. Golspie and his terrible daughter, and said to Mrs. Pearson: “Must you _really_ go? It’s quite early, you know. Oh, Mrs. Trape, _you’re_ not going, are you? Why?” And it was well done, bravely done, but it was a mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake she ever made.

Mr. Golspie’s face changed its expression, all the good-humour dying out of it at once. “All right,” he said shortly. “Come on, Lena, shake yourself up a bit. We’re going now. Good-night, all. See you in the morning, Dersingham. Good-night.” And immediately he marched himself and his daughter out of the room, and, a minute later, before Dersingham had followed him up, out of the house.

Half an hour later, the Dersinghams were alone, and Mrs. Dersingham was curled up in the largest chair, crying. “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sobbed. “They were _awful_, both of them. The man was nearly as bad as his terrible daughter. They were ghastly, and I hope to Heaven I never see either of them again. Or any of those people, except Mrs. Pearson. Oh, what a horrible, ghastly evening!”

“I know, I know, my dear,” said her husband, hovering about vaguely and trying to be consoling. “Everything went wrong. I know.”

“No, you don’t, you can’t possibly know how awful it was for me. No, don’t touch me, leave me _alone_. I just want to go miles and miles away, and never see anybody for months. Don’t ever let me see those vile Golspies again. And I don’t care what I said or did. It couldn’t be too bad for them. Next time, if you want to invite anybody from Angel Pavement, invite the clerks and the typists, anybody before those awful Golspies.”

“There, there,” said Mr. Dersingham, “there, there, there.” And when dialogue is reduced to this, it is time we quitted the scene.

Lena, in the taxi that carried them away from Barkfield Gardens, had stopped crying and was now fiercely resentful, like the spoilt child she was. “Well, they _were_ rotten snobs. And it wasn’t _my_ fault that half her beastly dinner had been dropped outside the door; I didn’t even know until you told me; and it was probably a good job for you, it _was_ dropped, for I’ll bet it was the most awful muck. But there wasn’t one of those old cats who gave me a decent look or spoke a decent word to me. You ought to have seen that long thin bony one when I asked her what she was looking so funny about! And you needn’t think it was only _me_ they didn’t like, either. They didn’t like you, I could see that. They weren’t real friends, any of them.”

“Who said they were, young woman?” her father demanded. “Don’t make such a palaver about it. I know all about ’em. The best of the lot was that chap with the long neck and the wobbly cheeks--Pearson, the chap from Singapore--and he was only half-baked. If Dersingham’s wife doesn’t think we’re good enough for them, let her go on thinking so. I’ll bet she thinks I’m good enough to keep on putting some ginger in that half dead concern of theirs. After what I’ve seen of the Dersingham end of Twigg and Dersingham, all I can say is that Twigg, whoever he was, must have been a dam’ smart chap to have got the firm going at all.”

“You don’t mean to say you’re making money for those blighters?” cried Lena, winding an arm round his.

“The people I’m going to make money for,” replied Mr. Golspie grimly, at the same time squeezing the arm, “are these people, these two here. Just you keep quiet and leave it to me, Miss Golspie.”

_Chapter Four_: TURGIS SEES HER

I

Turgis was not lazy and while he was in the office he preferred doing something to doing nothing, but he did not share Mr. Smeeth’s enthusiasm for office work and never regarded himself as one of the firm. It was all very well for Twigg & Dersingham to be suddenly busy again, indeed much busier than they had ever been before, but Turgis did not see the fun of going hard at it all day and every day and frequently having to stay an hour later. No doubt somebody was doing well out of it, but he, Turgis, was getting nothing out of it but a great deal more work. He grumbled about this to Mr. Smeeth. It was Saturday morning; he had just received his fortnight’s pay, six pound notes, one ten-shilling note, and two florins; and it was a time for such confidences.

“All right, all right,” said Mr. Smeeth, with the manner of a person who knew a great deal. “That’s your point of view, isn’t it?”

Turgis, a little diffidently now, for he had a considerable respect for Mr. Smeeth if no particular liking for him, replied that it was.

“Now let me tell you something, my boy,” Mr. Smeeth continued gravely. “Just a week or two ago--I’ll tell you exactly what day it was; it was the day Mr. Golspie first called here--Mr. Dersingham was talking things over with me, in that room there. I’m telling you this in confidence, mind. And Mr. Dersingham said the office expenses were too big and somebody would have to go. And it looked as if that somebody would be you.”

“Me!” Turgis’s mouth, always open a little, was now wide open, for his jaw suddenly dropped.

“You, Turgis,” said Mr. Smeeth, with the satisfied air of a man who has produced the desired effect. “It was touch and go whether I told you that very day. I’m glad I didn’t because you might have got a fright for nothing. Now it’s all right, of course. We’re busy, and we need everybody. But when you want to start grumbling about a bit of extra work, my boy, just you remember that. You might have been looking for work now, and I’ll bet you wouldn’t have liked that, would you?”

“No, I wouldn’t, Mr. Smeeth,” replied Turgis, humbly enough.

“And I don’t blame you.” Feeling fairly confident, for once, about his own job, Mr. Smeeth had a great desire to enlarge upon this topic, which had for him a terrible fascination. “Jobs aren’t easy to get, are they?”

“Not if you haven’t influence and you’re not in the know, Mr. Smeeth,” said Turgis, who was a great believer in the mysterious power of influence and being in the know, and realised only too well that there were few people in London who had less influence or were further from the know than himself. “That’s the trouble. I seen it myself. You can’t get a look in. I’d a packet--my words, I’d a packet--before I got taken on here. Trailin’ round, queueing up, round again--oh, dear! You know what it’s like.”

“No, I don’t,” Mr. Smeeth returned, sharply.