Part 12

“Beg your pardon, Mr. Smeeth. Of course, you don’t. I do, though. Oo, it’s sorful,” cried Turgis earnestly. “’S’not getting any better either. Well I’m glad you told me, Mr. Smeeth. I’d better keep my mouth shut a bit, hadn’t I? It is all right now, isn’t it?”

“Quite all right. You do your best for us,” Mr. Smeeth added sententiously, “and we’ll do our best for you.”

Turgis came nearer, and lowered his voice when he spoke. “D’you think, Mr. Smeeth, there’ll be any chance of a rise, now I’m getting all this extra work? Ought to be, oughtn’t there? I mean, I’m not getting a lot really, am I?”

“You leave it alone a bit, Turgis, and just do your best, and then I’ll see what I can do for you.”

“I wish you would, Mr. Smeeth. You see, it’s not as if I’d got anybody helping me with my work, ’cos this new typist doesn’t really help me out much, does she? And if you could--just--you know--say something to Mr. Golspie or Mr. Dersingham, because, you know, Mr. Smeeth, I am doing my best, and you mustn’t think I want to grumble, ’cos I don’t.”

The new typist had been a great disappointment to Turgis, not because she was of no assistance to him in his work but because she was not the attractive young creature his heated fancy had conjured up to fill the post. Miss Poppy Sellers, with her unfortunate Oriental effect which merely resulted in dinginess and untidiness, did not seem to him at all pretty. At the end of the first morning, though he was flattered by her awe of him, he had dismissed her as a very poor bit of girl stuff. When he had heard that the firm was advertising for another typist, a younger girl to help Miss Matfield, he had had instant visions of working side by side with one of those really pretty ones he often noticed making their way about the City. There were one or two good ones in Angel Pavement itself: quite a pretty piece downstairs with the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co._; another not so dusty who went up the stairs next door to _C. Warstein: Tailors’ Trimmings_; and a real beauty--one to make your mouth water, a peach--at _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas Fittings_, at the end of the street. And there were two or three worth looking at, the flashy young Jewessy type, at _Chase & Cohen’s Carnival Novelties_ place at the end. Any one of these girls, walking into Twigg & Dersingham’s, would have lit up the place for him, and the day’s routine would have become an adventure. But they must go and choose this dreary-looking kid with the fringe. It was just his luck. Two girls working in the same office, and neither of them any good. Miss Matfield was all right in her way, of course, but then she was too big, too old, and far too “posh” and bossy for him, even if she had ever showed any sign--and, so far, she hadn’t--of being really interested in his existence. This other one, Polly Sellers, was interested enough, quite ready to be friends, but then, well--look at her.

The maddening thing about it--and it really was maddening to Turgis--was that all these other ripe and adorable girls (he thought of them as “fine bits”) were all over the place, walking in and out of offices, sitting in corners of teashops, elbowing him sometimes (and he was always there to be elbowed) in buses and tube trains, so that you might have thought they worked for everybody in the City but Twigg & Dersingham. And it was no better, perhaps it was worse, when he was roaming about for pleasure and not simply going to and from the office. Everywhere he saw them, never missed seeing them. His mind was for ever busy with their images, for ever troubled by them. No matter where he went, he was tantalised, the path underneath his feet a narrow dusty track of wilderness but all hung about with rich forbidden clusters of feminine fruit, shrinking, withering, vanishing, at a touch.

Turgis was by temperament a lover. His thoughts never left the other sex long; happiness had for him a feminine shape; the real world was illuminated by the bright glances of girls; and at any moment, one of them might reveal to him an enchanted life they could share together. It would be easy to see him as a lonely lad seeking sympathy in that crowd in which he was lost. It would be just as easy to see him as a figure of furtive lusts, whose mind descended and there lived eagerly in an underworld of tiny mean contacts, seemingly accidental pressures of the arm and the foot. Yet behind both these figures was the lover. And this, in spite of his shabbiness and unprepossessing looks, the shiny baggy suit, and the frayed tie, the open mouth, that slight pastiness and spottiness, that faint grey film which seemed to cover and subdue his physical self. He was no dapper lady-killer. But then if Turgis, even with his scanty means, did not try very hard to make himself superficially attractive to the sex that despises crumpled clothes, matted hair, pasty cheeks, youth that has lost all vividness and glow, it was because he believed that the cry from within, urgent, never ceasing, must receive an answer. He knew that he had little to offer on the surface, was nothing to look at, nobody in particular, but he felt that inside he was different, he was wonderful, and that sooner or later a girl, a beautiful and passionate girl, caring nothing for the outside show, would recognise this difference, this wonder, within, would cry, “Oh, it’s you,” and love would immediately follow. Then life would really begin. So far it had not begun; in the tangle, blather, jumble of mere existence, of eating, sleeping, working, journeying and staring, it had only made a number of false starts. In other words, Turgis had had his little adventures but was not yet in love, or rather--for he was perpetually in love--had not yet found the single outlet for all this flood, the one girl.

After returning to his own desk, Turgis thought about these other girls who might so easily have come to work by his side instead of continuing with the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade_ or _Dunbury & Co._, and then, dismissing them reluctantly, he began to tidy up his desk and finish off the week’s work. It was after twelve and the week-end was in sight. He leaned forward on his high stool, and breathed hard over communications from the London and North Eastern Railway and the City Transport Company. There was a girl at the City Transport--he had never seen her but she often answered the telephone--who sounded nice, lovely voice she had, and once or twice he had made her laugh. If he had been in the office by himself, he would have talked to her properly, perhaps suggested an appointment--on the pictures they called it a “date” but Turgis thought of it as a “point”--but he was never alone, and even if there was only that silly kid, Stanley, there, it would spoil it. But it was fine to hear her laugh down the telephone. Silvery, that was it--silvery laughter--her silvery laughter--just like in a book.

He was interrupted by a touch on his arm, and he looked round to find the new typist at his elbow, looking up at him with her biggish brown eyes. She had a lot of powder on one side of her nose, and none at all, just shiny skin, on the other side. No good.

“Please,” said Miss Sellers in her chirpy little Cockney voice, “please, have you written to the Anglo-What’s-It Shipping?”

“No, I haven’t,” he replied.

She merely stared.

“I haven’t written to the Anglo-What’s-It Shipping,” he continued severely, “because I’ve never heard of the Anglo-What’s-It Shipping. Don’t know them--see?”

“Oo, I’m sorry,” though she did not sound very sorry. “Have I said something wrong? I can’t remember all these names yet. Give me a chance. You know who I mean, don’t you? It is Anglo-something, isn’t it?”

“If it’s the Anglo-Baltic Shipping Co. you’re talking about,” said Turgis with dignity, “then I have written to them. Wrote yesterday, ’s’matter of fact. But to the Anglo-Baltic, mind you. There’s no what’s-it about it.”

The girl looked at him for a moment. “Oo!” she cried softly, “squashed!” And then she promptly walked away.

Turgis glanced after her with distaste. “Getting cheeky now,” he told himself. “That’s the latest--getting cheeky. And just because she can’t make up to me. All right, Miss Dirty Fringe, you’ll have to be told off soon, you will. Try it again, that’s all, just try it again.” And he was filled with a righteous indignation, pointing out to himself that these girls didn’t know their place in an office, wouldn’t get on with their work properly, and were always trying their little tricks on men who wanted to do their job with no nonsense about it.

There was a familiar scurrying, as of some small animal of the undergrowth that had got itself shod with leather and iron tips; the door burst open; Stanley had returned.

“Come on, boy, come on,” said Mr. Smeeth, looking over his eyeglasses. “Get those letters copied, sharp as you can. Don’t want us to be here all day, waiting for you, do you?”

“I want to get the one-five from London Bridge, if I can, Mr. Smeeth,” said Miss Matfield. “I’m spending the week-end in the country, thank God.”

“You’ll get it all right, Miss Matfield,” Mr. Smeeth told her. “Plenty of time. Now then, Stanley--bustle about. Sharp’s the world, my boy.”

“Oo, Miss Matfield,” Miss Sellers began, staring at her, “d’you reely like the country this weather? I don’t know how you can bear it. I couldn’t, not now, when it’s winter. It’s not as if it was summer, is it?”

“Like it best in winter, if it’s not raining too hard. Jolly good! Nothing like so filthy as London is in winter.”

“Well, I’m sure it would give me the ’ump,” Miss Sellers declared. “But I do like it in summer. It’s lovely in summer, I think.” You could almost see her looking at the buttercups and daisies. “I like the seaside best, though. Don’t you, Miss Matfield? It’s lovely at the seaside in summer, I think. I’ve never been in winter. It’s nice in summer even when it rains at the seaside, isn’t it?”

Miss Matfield replied, shortly but amiably, that it was, and then began clearing up her papers.

“Here,” cried Stanley, in the middle of his copying, “I seen a smash right in Moorgate.” He looked round triumphantly.

“I’ll bet you didn’t,” said Turgis.

“I did, and I bet you I did. Anyhow, if I didn’t see it, I was there just after, when the bobby was taking names. Oh, what a crowd! I got right to the front. Car and a lorry it was. The lorry was all right, but you oughter seen the car. Oh, no, it wasn’t a mess--oh, no!”

“And how many hours did you stand there, eh?” Mr. Smeeth inquired. “That’s what takes your time, my boy--doing your bit of nosy-parkering.”

“I had to go that way and I couldn’t get past, Mr. Smeeth,” Stanley cried indignantly. “So I had to see what was up, couldn’t help it. I thought the bobby might take my name as a witness, but he didn’t. I wish he had done,” he added wistfully. “I’d like to be a witness.”

“If you don’t finish those letters in ten minutes,” said Mr. Smeeth, wagging a finger at him, “you’ll be in the dock, and never mind being a witness. How are you getting on, Turgis?”

“Nearly finished, Mr. Smeeth,” Turgis replied. “I’ll just give the City Transport a ring to see if they’ve heard anything about that lot we sent to Norwich.” And he promptly went to the telephone.

There was no silvery laughter this time from the City Transport Company. The voice that answered him was not only a masculine voice but also an irritated, badgered, weary, despairing voice, that of a man who was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he would be spending all Saturday afternoon answering idiotic inquiries. “Yes, I know, I know,” it barked. “You rang me up before about it. Well, we’re doing our best. We’ve got the matter in hand. Yes, yes, yes, I’ve told our Norwich people. I’ll let you know on Monday. The first thing, the very first thing, on Monday, I’ll let you know.” It was pleading now. “Can’t do more than that, can I?” And now it was tired of pleading. “All right, all ri-ight, we’re doing what we ca-a-an. Ring you on Mo-o-onday.”

“They’ve got through to Norwich about it, Mr. Smeeth,” said Turgis, “but they say it’ll have to stand over till Monday.”

“That’s all right then, Turgis. Give them a ring on Monday.”

There was now a feeling throughout the office that all manner of things would have to stand over until Monday. This feeling was not confined to Twigg & Dersingham, but could have been discovered operating upstairs at the _Universal Hosiery Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, and downstairs at the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co._, and at _Chase & Cohen: Carnival Novelties_ on the one side and at _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas Fittings_ on the other side, in fact, all up and down Angel Pavement, and far beyond Angel Pavement, in all the banks and offices and showrooms and warehouses of the City. Very soon the City itself would be standing over until Monday: the crowds of brokers and cashiers and clerks and typists and hawkers would have vanished from its pavements, the bars would be forlorn, the teashops nearly empty or closed; its trams and buses, no longer clamouring for a few more yards of space, would come gliding easily through misty blue vacancies like ships going down London River; and the whole place, populated only by caretakers and policemen among the living, would sink slowly into quietness; the very bank-rate would be forgotten; and it would be left to drown itself in reverie, with a drift of smoke and light fog across its old stones like the return of an army of ghosts. Until--with a clatter, a clang, a sudden raw awakening--Monday.

Papers were swept into drawers, letters were stamped in rows, blotters were shut, turned over, put away, ledgers and petty cash boxes were locked up, typewriters were covered, noses were powdered, cigarettes and pipes were lit, doors were banged, and stairs were noisy with hasty feet. The week was done. Out they came in their thousands into Angel Pavement, London Wall, Moorgate Street, Cornhill and Cheapside. They were so thick along Finsbury Pavement that the Moorgate Tube Station seemed like a monster sucking them down into its hot rank inside. Among these vanishing mites was one with a large but not masterful nose, full brown eyes, a slightly open mouth, and a drooping chin. This was Turgis going home.

He had to stand all the way, and though there were at least five nice-looking girls in the same compartment--and one was very close to him, and two of the others he had noticed several times before--not one of them showed the slightest interest in him.

II

When Turgis returned again to the earth’s surface, he plunged at once into the noise and litter of High Street, Camden Town, and then turned up the Kentish Town Road, for he lodged in Nathaniel Street, which lies in that conglomeration of short streets between the Kentish Town Road and York Road. He was rather later than usual, for this new Golspie business was having its effect even on Saturday morning, and so he walked quickly for once. He was ready for dinner and he knew that dinner would be ready for him. On Saturdays and Sundays, his landlady provided dinner as well as breakfast, and, indeed, was not averse to laying out a bit of tea, too, if that should be called for, Turgis having been with her now for eighteen months and having proved himself to be--by Nathaniel Street standards, which are based on a bitter knowledge of this world--a good quiet lodger, sober, and punctual in his payments. During the week, he had, officially, nothing but breakfast in the house, and had to shift for himself for his other meals, which followed a descending scale of luxury every fortnight, beginning with the alternate week-ends when he was paid. Thus, every other Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Turgis was well fed, and every other Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, he was comparatively half starved. At a pinch, however, his landlady would always give him a little supper. They were all friendly together. They had to be, for they all used the same back room for meals. The bed-sitting-room that Turgis had at the top of the house, so small that the iron bedstead, the yellow washstand, the three deal drawers, the lopsided and groaning basket chair, and the little old gas-fire, a genuine antique among gas-fires, made it seem uncomfortably crowded with furniture and fittings, was no place in which to feed. It did not like being sat in, resented the sight of a cup of tea and a biscuit, and the presence of one good plateful of roast beef, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and gravy, would have completely finished it.

Number 9, like all the other houses in Nathaniel Street, was small and dark, and its gloomy little hall was haunted by a mixed smell of cabbage, camphor, and old newspapers. Turgis never noticed this smell, but on the very rare occasions when he visited some other and less odorous house, then he noticed the absence of it, his nose declaring at once that it had found itself in an unfamiliar atmosphere. Now he hung up his hat and coat and marched straight into the back room. There he discovered his landlady, who, having finished dinner, was enjoying a cup of tea by the fire. She was not enjoying this cup of tea, however, in an easy leisurely fashion; she was sitting, almost tense, on the very edge of the chair; and she had something of the air of a cavalry general between two phases of a battle.

Mrs. Pelumpton had every right to such an air. She was a short and very broad woman, with a mop of untidy grey hair and a withered apple face, and it was easy to see that all her adult life had been one long struggle, and that unless she suffered a paralytic stroke or was driven out of her wits, she would die fighting. In her presence, progress seemed the most absurd myth. If Mrs. Pelumpton could have been turned into the wife of a marauding viking or one of the women following Attila’s horde, she would have felt she had been given a well-earned rest and would have been astonished at, perhaps horrified by, the sudden colour and gaiety of life.

As soon as she saw Turgis she put down her cup and, as it were, jumped into the saddle again. She placed on the table two covered plates, her lodger’s dinner, meat and vegetables under one cover, pudding under the other.

“I’m a bit late to-day, Mrs. Pelumpton,” said Turgis, settling down.

“Well, I said to myself you might have been or you might not, according to whether that clock’s gone and got fast again, and it might well have done that, the way he’s been playing about with it.”

“About quarter of an hour fast, I make it--might be twenty minutes.”

“And that,” said Mrs. Pelumpton very decisively, “is what comes of messing about with it. ‘Leave it alone,’ I told him. ‘Clocks isn’t in your line.’ Not that quarter of an hour’s going to hurt anybody in this house--except Edgar, and he’s got his own watch with proper railway time on it.” Edgar, her son, who also lived in the house, worked on the railway down at King’s Cross. Turgis rarely saw him.

“That’s a nice bit o’ meat you’re having there, Mr. Turgis, isn’t it?” Mrs. Pelumpton continued, after taking a noisy sip of tea and then staring over the cup at him. “Chilled, that is. You’d have thought that was English if I hadn’t told you, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, I would, Mrs. Pelumpton.”

“Well, I won’t deceive you. It isn’t. It’s chilled. And it all depends on the picking. Take what they offer, and you don’t know where you are. You’ve got to look about a bit and pick it yourself. They know me now.” And here Mrs. Pelumpton produced a short triumphant laugh. “They know me all right. ‘Pick where you like, Ma,’ he always says to me. ‘Oh, I’ll watch it,’ I tells him. ‘I’ll watch it.’ And I do.”

“That’s the style. It’s a very nice dinner, Mrs. Pelumpton.”

A certain shuffling noise indicated that the master of the house, the messer-about with clocks, Mr. Pelumpton, was now approaching. Mr. Pelumpton moved very slowly, partly because he suffered from rheumatism, and partly because he was a man of great dignity. To look at him, at his slack and dingy figure, at his watery eyes, bottle nose, ragged and drooping grey moustache, to mark his leisurely air, was to imagine at once that Mr. Pelumpton was one of those men who do not work themselves but merely see that their wives and children work for them. But this was not the truth. Mr. Pelumpton did work, as his talk would quickly inform you. He was a dealer. He had no shop of his own, but he had some vague connection with a shop, where an astonishing variety of second, third, or fourth hand goods were sold, owned by a friend of his. He passed his time in a dusty underworld in which battered chests of drawers and broken gramophones changed hands and the deals were in shillings and the commission in pence. He interviewed parties who had for sale a cracked toilet set or an old bicycle or five mildewed volumes of _The Stately Homes of England_. He could sometimes be found in the humblest auction rooms, ready to bid up to half a crown for the odds and ends. Every Friday he became a _bona-fide_ merchant by making an appearance in Caledonian Market, where, on that grey and windy height, he stood beside a small but very varied stock, consisting perhaps of a Banjo Tutor, two chipped pink vases, a silk underskirt, a large photograph of General Buller, five dirty tennis balls, a zither with most of the strings missing, and the _Letters of Charles Kingsley_. Dealing thus in things that were only one remove from the dustbin, Mr. Pelumpton did not contrive to make much money, and indeed he had been dependent for some time on Mrs. Pelumpton and Edgar; but, on the other hand, you could not say he did not work. He was in the second-hand trade, in the buying and selling line, a legitimate dealer, and took himself and his mysterious business with enormous seriousness. If he was not doing very well, that was because trade was so bad. Mr. Pelumpton had all the deliberation and dignity of an antique merchant prince. He smoked a foul little pipe, liked a glass of beer, was a great reader of newspapers, and always talked in a very solemn and confidential manner. Like many dealers and Caledonian Market men, who have drooping moustaches, very few teeth, and a confidential manner, he softened all the sibilants, putting an “h” behind every “s.” There is no doubt that a dealer who can only say “Yes” is not in such a strong position as the dealer who can draw it out into a mysterious “Yersh.” Mr. Pelumpton was essentially a “Yersh” man.

He now advanced very slowly into the room, carefully seated himself by the fire, took out his evil little pipe, looked at Turgis in a watery fashion, nodded solemnly, put back his pipe, and waited for somebody to ask him something.

“Well, did you catch him in?” his wife inquired. Mr. Pelumpton was always having to slip round the corner to catch somebody in, even if he had only just finished his own dinner.

“Out till five,” replied Mr. Pelumpton. “And a shaushy ansher for me trouble.”

“Who’s bin giving you a saucy answer?”

“Hish mishish,” said Mr. Pelumpton, “if it ish hish mishish. ‘Can’t expect to find ’im in on Shaturday arfternoon,’ she shaysh to me. ‘You’ll excuse me, mishish,’ I told her, ‘but in my bishnish, you’ve got to work Shaturday arfternoon shame ash any other arfternoon. Yersh,’ I told her, ‘an’ Shunday arfternoon too, if you’re not careful.’ Jusht telling her politely, shee? All right, what doesh she shay to that? She shaysh, ‘Well, we’re diff’rent ’ere, shee?’ and then shlamsh the door in me faysh.”

“The cheeky monkey!” cried Mrs. Pelumpton indignantly. “I’d slam it in _her_ face if I’d anything to do with her. It’s downright ignorance, that’s what it is. There’s people round here has no more idea ’ow to behave than a--a--a parrot.”