Part 13
“Ar, well,” Mr. Pelumpton continued, philosophically, “we’ve got a lot to put with in our bishnish. And you can take that from me, Mishter Turgish. But if the shtuff’sh there, we don’t mind. All in the day’sh work, shee?”
“After something good, Mr. Pelumpton?” Turgis inquired.
“That’sh right. A lovely piesh he’sh got to shell--a shideboard--oh, a lovely piesh, it ish--only wantsh a bit of polishing and it’sh good enough for anybody, that piesh ish, fit for a palash. I can’t ’andle it myshelf, not ash trade ish now, but I know who can. It’sh a commission job.”
“That’s the idea,” said Turgis, with vague approval. He was a youth who liked to agree with his company, not because he felt kindly disposed towards other people, but simply because it was less trouble to agree and applaud. He really thought Mr. Pelumpton a ridiculous old bore.
“Now that’s one thing I’ve always wanted,” cried Mrs. Pelumpton. “A sideboard, a proper nice sideboard, cupboards and all, and room for everything. Mahogany, I’d like.”
“Ah, that’sh what a lot o’ people would like. They’re fetching good money them thingsh are. Show me a good shideboard, a sholid piesh--not sho much of your shtuff about it, Mishter Turgish----”
“What’s his stuff, for Heaven’s sake?” Mrs. Pelumpton demanded. “He hasn’t got any stuff, have you, Mr. Turgis? What you talking about, Dad?”
Mr. Pelumpton took out his pipe for this, and looked very reproachfully at his wife. “What am I talking about? I’m talking about what I know, that’sh what I’m talking about. ’Ow many pieshesh of furnisher have been through my handsh? Thoushandsh. All right then. Don’t I know the trade? Ho, no! Ho, no! I don’t know the trade.” Then he pointed his pipe at Turgis, who was very busy with his treacle pudding, and then said very slowly, very solemnly: “Veneersh. You know what them are. Well, that’sh hish shtuff. Am I right, Mishter Turgish?”
“That’s right,” said Turgis. “That’s what we sell at our place, Mrs. Pelumpton. Veneers for furniture, and inlays, and all that. ’S’matter of fact, I don’t have anything to do with ’em personally, ’cos it isn’t my particular job, but that’s what we sell all right.”
“Well, I never did!” Mrs. Pelumpton was filled with honest wonder at a world in which so many different things were bought and sold. “And I never knew that. Thought you was in an office, down in the City, y’know--a clurk.”
“Sho he ish,” her husband assured her, “but that’sh what hish firm shellsh. He told me long shinsh, didn’t you, Mishter Turgish. Well, ash I wash shaying, show me a good shideboard, a sholid piesh, and I’ll get you what you like for it--in reashon, in reashon, y’know. Trade may be bad. Trade _ish_ bad. But for shome thingsh you ’ave a shteady demand, that’sh what you ’ave--a shteady demand. Where we’re feeling it in our bishnish ish in the shmall thingsh----”
Mr. Pelumpton was now settling down to a good long monologue, but he reckoned without his audience, both of whom knew these monologues too well. His wife, seeing that Turgis had finished, pounced upon his used plates and bore them off, with a bustle and clatter that brought a frown to her husband’s face. He now tried to buttonhole Turgis, who was lighting a cigarette. “Now you take me, Mishter Turgish,” he began.
But Turgis refused to take him; he had taken him too often before; and now he promptly escaped upstairs, to his own room. It is difficult for a room to be both stuffy and cold, but this room contrived it somehow, and offered you the choice, if you chose to interfere with it, of being still stuffier or still colder. Turgis, who preferred stuffiness to cold, lit the gas-fire, that tiny antique, which so deeply resented being called into service again that it exploded with an indignant bang and then wheezily complained every other second. After the last breath of raw November had been driven out of the room, Turgis took off his collar and his shoes and stretched himself out on the bed. First, he read all the advertisements in his newspaper, which specialised on Saturdays in the mail-order business. There was a whole page of these advertisements, offering everything from Orientally perfumed cigarettes to electric belts for rheumatism, and Turgis carefully read them all. In public he pretended to be very knowing and cynical about advertisements, but in private he was still their willing victim, and nearly every shilling he spent, whether on clothes, drink, tobacco, or amusement, was conjured out of his pocket by the richest and most artful advertising managers. Perhaps that is why his suits bagged so soon, his shoes soaked up the rain, his cigarettes shredded and split, and his amusements failed to amuse.
When he had done with the newspaper, he took from the mantelpiece (and he could do this without getting up from the bed) the latest issue of a twopenny periodical that was devoted to the films, though more especially to the film actors with the longest eyelashes and the actresses with the largest eyes. He spent the next half-hour staring at the photographs in this paper and reading its scrappy paragraphs, not with any particular enthusiasm. Turgis was not really a film enthusiast. He knew nothing about camera angles and “cutting” and all the intricacies of crowd work, and never in his life had he seriously compared one film with another. He could laugh at the comic men with the rest, but he did not fully appreciate the clowning on the screen, simply because he had not a very strong sense of humour. No, what drew him to the films was the fact that he and they had a common enthusiasm, they had both a passionate interest in sex. In those dim sensuous palaces, filled with throbbing music and shifting coloured lights, Turgis the lover entered his dream kingdom. You could say that the money he paid at their doors was silver tribute to Aphrodite, to whose worship the Phœnicians of the Californian coast have built more temples than ever the old Phœnicians of Cyprus did; and for a few moments, as he sat in the steep darkened galleries, Turgis would be shaken and then intoxicated by the golden presence of the goddess as she flashed through with her train, Eros and the Hours and the Graces, though of all that retinue only two remained with him, to see him home, Pothos and Himeros, shapes of longing and yearning.
The paper slipped from his fingers. His eyes closed; his jaw dropped a little; and his head turned on the pillow, so that the light of the gas-fire, now coming to life in the dwindling daylight, for the window was no brighter than a slate, played faintly but rosily on his features, the pleasant width of the brow, the nose that had missed masterfulness, the round chin that fell away, and as his breathing grew more regular and he slipped into unconsciousness, that light brought something at once grotesque and sad, the red gleam and deep shadow of some Gothic tragedy, into the little room. And for an hour or so Turgis slept, while Saturday went rattling and roaring on, gathering momentum, through the dark little abysses of brick and smoke outside, the streets of London.
III
The Turgis who came out of 9, Nathaniel Street, later that Saturday afternoon, was quite different from the youth we have already met. He was washed, brushed, conscientiously shaved, and he moved briskly. This was for him the best time of all the week. Saturday sang in his heart. If the Great Something ever happened, it would happen on Saturday. The trams, buses, shops, bars, theatres, and picture palaces, they all gleamed and glittered through the rich murk to-day for him. Even now, Adventure--in high heels and silk stockings--might be moving his way. He was making for the West End, for on Saturdays, especially the alternate Saturdays when he received his pay, he despised Camden Town and Islington and Finsbury Park, those little centres that broke the desert of North London with oases of flashing lights and places of entertainment. These were good enough in their way, but if you had a few shillings to spend, the West was a great deal better, offering you the real thing in giant teashops and picture theatres. For this was his usual Saturday night programme, if he had the money: first, tea at one of the big teashops, which were always crowded with girls and always offered a chance of a pick-up; then a visit to one of the great West End cinemas, in which, once inside, he could spin out the whole evening, perhaps on the edge of adventure all the time. And this was his programme for this night, too, though, of course, he was always ready to modify it if anything happened in the teashop, if he found the right sort of girl there and she wanted to do something else.
At the very time he was setting out, hundreds and hundreds of girls, girls with little powdered snub noses, wet crimson mouths, shrill voices, and gleaming calves, were also setting out--nearly all of them, unfortunately, in pairs--to carry out the very same programme. Turgis knew this, or perhaps only a hunter’s instinct led him to where the game were thickest; but he did not visualise them, luckily for him, for the tantalising image would have driven him nearly to madness. But there they were, tripping down innumerable dark steps, chirping and laughing together in buses and trams without end, and making for the same small area, the very same buildings, perhaps to jostle him as they passed. It would have been easier for Turgis, as he knew only too well, if he too had had a companion, to match all these pairs of girls, but he had only a few acquaintances, no friends, and, in any event, he preferred to hunt in solitude, to thread his way through the brilliant jungle alone with his hunger and his dream.
A bus took him to the West End, where, among the crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the café of his choice, a teashop that had gone mad and turned Babylonian, a white palace with ten thousand lights. It towered above the older buildings like a citadel, which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps a new civilisation, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand lights and acres of white napery and bewildering glittering rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and cashbox girls and black-coated floor managers and temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the mounds of shimmering bonbons and multi-coloured Viennese pastries, the cauldrons of stewed steak, the vanloads of harlequin ices, were a few men who went to work juggling with fractions of a farthing, who knew how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and seconds a waitress (five feet four in height and in average health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from the kitchen lift to the table in the far corner. In short, there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the upper stories, and cold science working in the basement. Such was the gigantic teashop into which Turgis marched, in search not of mere refreshment but of all the enchantment of unfamiliar luxury. Perhaps he knew in his heart that men have conquered half the known world, looted whole kingdoms, and never arrived at such luxury. The place was built for him.
It was built for a great many other people too, and, as usual, they were all there. It steamed with humanity. The marble entrance hall, piled dizzily with bonbons and cakes, was as crowded and bustling as a railway station. The gloom and grime of the streets, the raw air, all November, were at once left behind, forgotten: the atmosphere inside was golden, tropical, belonging to some high midsummer of confectionery. Disdaining the lifts, Turgis, once more excited by the sight, sound, and smell of it all, climbed the wide staircase until he reached his favourite floor, where an orchestra, led by a young Jewish violinist with wandering lustrous eyes and a passion for tremolo effects, acted as a magnet to a thousand girls. The door was swung open for him by a page; there burst, like a sugary bomb, the clatter of cups, the shrill chatter of white-and-vermilion girls, and, cleaving the golden, scented air, the sensuous clamour of the strings; and, as he stood hesitating a moment, half dazed, there came, bowing, a sleek grave man, older than he was and far more distinguished than he could ever hope to be, who murmured deferentially: “For one, sir? This way, please.” Shyly, yet proudly, Turgis followed him.
That was the snag really, though. This place was so crowded that you had to take the seat they offered you; there was no picking and choosing your company at the table. And, as usual, Turgis was not lucky. The vacant seat he was shown, and which he dare not refuse, was at a table already occupied by three people, and not one of them remotely resembled a nice-looking girl. There were two stout middle-aged women, voluble, perspiring, and happy over cream buns, and a middle-aged man, who no doubt had been of no great size even before this expedition started, but was now very small and huddled, and gave the impression that if the party stayed there much longer, he would shrink to nothing but spectacles, a nose, a collar, and a pair of boots. For the first few minutes, Turgis was so disappointed that he was quite angry with these people, hated them. And of course it was impossible to get hold of a waitress. After five minutes or so of glaring and waiting, he began to wish he had gone somewhere else. There was a pretty girl at the next table, but she was obviously with her young man, and so fond of him that every now and then she clutched his arm and held it tight, just as if the young man might be thinking of running away. At another table, not far away, were three girls together, two of whom looked very interesting, with saucy eyes and wide smiling mouths, but they were too busy whispering and giggling to take any notice of him. So Turgis suddenly stopped being a bright youth, shooting amorous glances, and became a stern youth who wanted some tea, who had gone there for no other purpose than to obtain some tea, who was surprised and indignant because no tea was forthcoming.
“And mindjew,” cried one of the middle-aged women to the other, “I don’t bear malice ’cos it isn’t in my nature, as you’ll be the first to agree, my dear. But when she let fly with that, I thought to meself, ‘All right, my lady, now this time you’ve gone a bit _too_ far. It’s my turn.’ But mindjew, even then I didn’t say what I _could_ have said. Not one word about Gravesend crossed my lips to her, though it was there on the tip of my tongue.”
Turgis looked at her with disgust. Silly old geezer!
At last the waitress came. She was a girl with a nose so long and so thickly powdered that a great deal of it looked as if it did not belong to her, and she was tired, exasperated, and ready at any moment to be snappy. She took the order--and it was for plaice and chips, tea, bread and butter, and cakes: the great tea of the whole fortnight--without any enthusiasm, but she returned in time to prevent Turgis from losing any more temper. For the next twenty minutes, happily engaged in grappling with this feast, he forgot all about girls, and when the food was done and he was lingering over his third cup of tea and a cigarette, though no possible girls came within sight, he felt dreamily content. His mind swayed vaguely to the tune the orchestra was playing. Adventure would come; and for the moment he was at ease, lingering on its threshold.
From this tropical plateau of tea and cakes, he descended into the street, where the harsh night air suddenly smote him. The pavements were all eyes and thick jostling bodies; at every corner, the newspaper sellers cried out their football editions in wailing voices of the doomed; cars went grinding and snarling and roaring past; and the illuminated signs glittered and rocketed beneath the forgotten faded stars. He arrived at his second destination, the Sovereign Picture Theatre, which towered at the corner like a vast spangled wedding-cake in stone. It might have been a twin of that great teashop he had just left; and indeed it was; another frontier outpost of the new age. Two Jews, born in Poland but now American citizens, had talked over cigars and coffee on the loggia of a crazy Spanish-Italian-American villa, within sight of the Pacific, and out of that talk (a very quiet talk, for one of the two men was in considerable pain and knew that he was dying inch by inch) there had sprouted this monster, together with other monsters that had suddenly appeared in New York, Paris, and Berlin. Across ten thousand miles, those two men had seen the one-and-sixpence in Turgis’s pocket, and, with a swift gesture, resolving itself magically into steel and concrete and carpets and velvet-covered seats and pay-boxes, had set it in motion and diverted it to themselves.
He waited now to pay his one-and-sixpence, standing in the queue at the balcony entrance. It was only a little after six and the Saturday night rush had hardly begun, but soon there were at least a hundred of them standing there. Near Turgis, on either side, the sexes were neatly paired off. There were one or two middle-aged women but no unaccompanied girl in sight in the whole queue. The evening was not beginning too well.
When at last they were admitted, they first walked through an enormous entrance hall, richly tricked out in chocolate and gold, illuminated by a huge central candelabra, a vast bunch of russet gold globes. Footmen in chocolate and gold waved them towards the two great marble balustrades, the wide staircases lit with more russet gold globes, the prodigiously thick and opulent chocolate carpets, into which their feet sank as if they were the feet of archdukes and duchesses. Up they went, passing a chocolate and gold platoon or two and a portrait gallery of film stars, whose eyelashes seemed to stand out from the walls like stout black wires, until they reached a door that led them to the dim summit of the balcony, which fell dizzily away in a scree of little heads. It was an interval between pictures. Several searchlights were focussed on an organ keyboard that looked like a tiny gilded box, far below, and the organ itself was shaking out cascades of treacly sound, so that the whole place trembled with sugary ecstasies. But while they waited in the gangway, the lights faded out, the gilded box dimmed and sank, the curtains parted to reveal the screen again, and an enormous voice, as inhuman as that of a genie, announced that it would bring the world’s news not only to their eyes but to their ears.
“One? This way, sir,” and the attendant went down, flashing his light. This was always an exciting moment for Turgis. He might find himself next to some wonderful girl, as lonely as he was, who would talk to him, squeeze his hand, let him take her home, and kiss him in the darkness of some mysterious suburb. The great adventure might begin at the end of that pointing pencil of light. On the other hand, he might find himself miserably wedged in between two fat middle-aged people. It was all a gamble, with the odds heavily against the wonderful girl, as he knew too well. But still, there was always a chance, and he never walked down these dark steps behind the electric torch without feeling a mounting excitement.
The light pointed along a row, and he followed it, pushing past a dozen indignant knees. The last pair was very stubborn, and he negotiated them without enthusiasm. He had no luck. Here, on one side of him was the owner of the knees, an enormous woman, bulging over her seat, and on the other was a man with a beard and a noisy pipe. And it was too late to change his place now. Once again the miracle had not happened. Gloomily he turned his attention to the news film, and not one single inch or roar of it entertained him. It was followed by a comedy, all about a lot of silly kids, and he sat there, steadily hating it. He also hated the enormous woman, who laughed so much that great lumps of her hit him on the shoulder. He decided, miserably, that he ought not to have come to the Sovereign. Next time he would give the Sovereign a miss. Stiff with fat women and men with stinking pipes, that’s what it was--oh, cripes!--awful hole! And another Saturday night going, gone!
Then came the film of the evening, the star feature, and Turgis soon began to take an interest in it and found himself lifted out of his gloom. It was a talkie called “The Glad-Rag Way,” and it was all about a beautiful girl (and she was beautiful, for she was Lulu Castellar, one of his favourites) who went to New York to dance in cabarets and for a time forgot all about her sweetheart, a poor young inventor who lived in the most dismal lodgings, like Turgis, but, unlike Turgis, also contrived to have his hair exquisitely waved at regular intervals. This beautiful girl behaved in the most foolish way. She accepted presents from rich men with ugly leering mouths; she went out to supper with them and got tipsy, as well she might, for the whole atmosphere consisted sometimes of champagne bubbles; she attended parties, very late at night, in their flats, and though the rooms in these flats were three hundred feet long and two hundred feet broad, the parties themselves were undoubtedly intimate affairs, at which a girl was able to express herself by dancing on the table and throwing off some of her clothes. Everything this girl wore, every movement she made, only called the attention of these leering fellows to some part of her ravishing figure; and even when she herself had stopped making eyes and smiling at them and undulating round them, with a champagne glass in her hand, her charming legs still insisted on claiming their notice. It was obvious that at any moment these rich cads would make their old mistake, they would assume that she was not a virtuous girl and would act accordingly, to her astonishment and indignation and shame at being so misunderstood, so treated. Meanwhile, the young inventor had received a letter (and you heard him tear it open) asking him to come to New York to meet three heavy men who had just been barking at one another about him in the previous scene. It was, as he himself admitted, his “beeg chaince.”
His train was still roaring across the screen when Turgis, whose interest had been thoroughly roused, heard a voice say “’Scuse me” and saw a dim feminine shape that was obviously trying to get past.
“’S’quite all right,” he said affably, withdrawing his knees to let her pass.
She dropped into the seat on his left, taking the place of the man with the foul pipe, who must have crept out, towards the other gangway, without Turgis noticing him. This girl who had just arrived was still only a dim shape, but he felt sure she was young and pretty.
“’Scuse me,” she whispered again, “but is this the big picture?”
“Yes, it is,” he replied eagerly.
“Has it been on long?”
“No, not so long. It isn’t half through yet, I’m sure,” he told her, trying to talk as if he were a confidential old friend. “I’ll bet the best’s coming on.”
“Well, I hope you’re right,” she said, settling herself in the rather narrow seat and then giving her attention to the screen.