Part 15

“My friends,” he began, without any hesitation, “the title of my lecture this evening is Understanding and Yew. Let me commence by talking about Yew, jast Yew. Perhaps yew don’t think much of yourselves. Life doesn’t seem to yew to offer very much. There are people--and there may be some of them here with us to-night--who jast haven’t got livingness. They think that life is always jast the same old thing. They can even talk of killing time. Killing time!--when every noo moment of time is diamonded with the greatest passibilities of lahv and trewth and bewdy. Once we have got livingness--once we have got understainding--once we are in toon with the in-fy-nyte--then there is a power within us, yes, within every one of us, that can cree-ate the world anoo. Our external selves can easily be fladdered. It is easy to make too much of what we’ve done. But it is com-pletely im-passible for any words--no matter if the greatest poets utter those words--to fladder what we have within us, our po-tentialities in baddy, mind, and spirrut. We’ve got to get rid of what some people like to call our in-feriority camplexes. We’ve got to realise that power within us. That doesn’t mean--as some people seem to think--that we should develap sooperiority camplexes. And why? Bee-cause, as Noo Thought shows us, there is a Oneness in the Universe and we are all united in that Oneness. It isn’t jast the potes who sing lahv songs. The whole Universe sings a lahv song. The whole Universe _is_ a lahv song. If it isn’t, the very atoms of which we are composed would disintegrate. I tell you, my friends, there is radiant health, there is power, there is wanderful bewdy, there is lahv, all without stint, without measure, eternal, awaiting all of us, and if we only open our eyes, find the way, develap understainding, get in toon, get livingness, there is not only a heaven above but a heaven here upon earth ...”

For some twenty-five minutes more, the voice went sounding on, offering them radiant health, power, truth, beauty, and love, without ever once faltering. Turgis could not understand it all, but he listened in a happy dream, forgetting that his chair was uncomfortable and his feet were cold. He realised that he had only to do something or other, get this livingness and oneness and understanding, just turn a corner, and everything would be different, everything would be marvellous. Vaguely he saw himself trim and sleek, with evening clothes, a huge overcoat, white trousers for summer, money in his pocket, money in the bank, an office of his own perhaps, a flat with shaded lights and big chairs and a gramophone and a wireless set, even a car, and by his side, worshipping him, the loveliest and kindest of girls. It was wonderful.

“Come again, young man,” said the fussy little man, at the door. “Always glad to see you here.”

“Thank you very much,” said Turgis earnestly, still glowing.

And then, somehow, outside in the wet streets, among the black figures hurrying home, it all went. Angrily he tried to recapture the glow and the dream, but they would not return. Inside the steaming bus, swaying with the strap he held, he found there was nothing left. He did not know how to get understanding or livingness or oneness or any of those things, could not even imagine what they were. Neither radiant health nor power, truth nor beauty, was coming his way. As for love, well, he had better chuck thinking about it. There was a girl standing next to him, not a bad sort of girl, but every time the bus went swaying round a corner, he bumped into her, not hurting her but just gently bumping into her. He wasn’t doing it on purpose, but the third time it happened, she drew back and looked daggers at him--silly little idiot! Oh, yes, the universe was a love song all right!

Park was having a cup of tea and a bite of bread-and-butter with Mrs. Pelumpton in the back room when he got back, and he joined them, telling them where he had been and what he had heard.

“Dope, my friend, that’s all you’ve had,” said Park contemptuously, “nothing but dope! Comes from America, doesn’t it? Yes, and why? Because the masses there have got to be doped, that’s why. You come with me next time and you’ll hear something that’ll open your eyes a bit; no dope, but the real thing. What’s the matter with you, Turgis, is that you don’t see how your leg’s being pulled, you’re not properly class-conscious yet.”

Turgis disliked this contemptuous tone. “Are you what-is-it--class-conscious, Park?” he asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, you can have it,” Turgis retorted, in a voice that told Park pretty plainly that he was a dreary devil.

“All right then, my friend, all right. I will have it. And you keep on with the dope.”

“I don’t want any dope. Don’t believe in it.”

“Well, what do you want, then?” demanded Park, who thought he saw in this a chance of a fine long argument.

“I dunno,” said Turgis, finishing his tea. “Yes, I do, though. I want to go to bed.”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Pelumpton approvingly. “Bed. You couldn’t go to a better place. I’m sure I’m ready for mine. We’re all in now, except Edgar, and I’m not waiting for him.”

And then all that was left of Sunday was a walk upstairs.

V

Then, the very next day, on Monday of all days, it happened. It happened in the afternoon. Somebody came in, and, as Stanley was out, Turgis dashed to the other side of the frosted glass partition to see who it was. There, like a being from another world, stood a girl all in bright green, a girl with large brown eyes, the most impudent little nose, and a smiling scarlet mouth, the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

“Good afternoon. Is my father here, please?” She had a queer, fascinating voice.

“Your father?”

“Yes. Mr. Golspie. This is the place, isn’t it? He told me to call for him here.”

“Oh, yes, he is, Miss--Miss Golspie,” cried Turgis eagerly, his eyes devouring her all the time. “He’s in that room there. But I think there’s somebody with him. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

“You needn’t yet if he’s busy with somebody,” said the glorious creature, smiling at him. “I can wait.”

“I can tell him now, if you like.” He was trembling with eagerness to help, to serve.

“No, it doesn’t matter. I know he hates being interrupted. I’ll wait for him. I don’t suppose he’ll be long, will he?”

“I’m sure he won’t,” he told her fervently. “Will you wait here or in the office? It’s warmer in the office.”

“This will do,” and she made a movement towards the chair.

“Excuse me, Miss Golspie.” He brought it stumbling out somehow, and at the same time he dusted the seat of the chair with his handkerchief. “It--it--might be dirty, y’know.”

She looked him full in the eyes, deliciously, drowning him in sweetness, and then smiled. “Thank you. I’d hate to spoil my new coat. Everything looks a bit grimy here, doesn’t it? It’s such a frightfully dark place, too, isn’t it?”

He supposed it was, and tried to imagine her walking up Angel Pavement outside. He still lingered. “Is there anything else,” he began vaguely, hovering, adoring her.

“Quite happy, thanks.”

There was no excuse possible to stay a moment longer. Reluctantly he returned to his desk, with his heart swelling with excitement. The others looked at him inquiringly, but he pretended to be busy with something. He did not even want to explain about a girl like that. He wanted to keep the very thought of her being there to himself. Meanwhile, he was determined to listen hard. The moment that he heard Mr. Golspie’s visitor going, he would rush out, tell Mr. Golspie she was there, and thus see her again.

But he was not able to manage it. Mr. Golspie must have shown his visitor out, for immediately after the door was opened, Turgis heard Mr. Golspie’s voice booming behind the partition. “Hello, Lena girl!” he heard him say. “Forgotten about you coming. Won’t keep you a minute.”

Mr. Golspie then came into the office. “I’ve got to go out,” he told Mr. Smeeth, “and I shan’t be coming back to-day. Be in about eleven in the morning though, if anybody wants me. Mr. Dersingham’ll be back to-morrow afternoon, if anybody wants him. And I say, what’s your name--Turgis----”

“Yes, sir,” replied Turgis smartly.

“Get hold of the Anglo-Baltic--Mr. Borstein, nobody else, mind, Mr. Borstein--and tell him from me that if we’ve any more delays like that with the stuff, there’s going to be heap big trouble. They said they wouldn’t let us down, and they’re letting us down like hell. And you can tell him that from me.”

“Yes, sir, I will. Did you say Mr. Borstein?” And Turgis stared at Miss Lena Golspie’s father, at his massive bald front, at his great moustache, at his big square shoulders. Mr. Golspie had never seemed an ordinary man, but now he had for Turgis the power and fascination of a demi-god. Already his very name spelt sweetness and wonder.

“That’s the chap,” Mr. Golspie grunted. “Afternoon, everybody.” And he departed.

“That was Mr. Golspie’s daughter then who came to the door, was it?” said Mr. Smeeth.

“His daughter, eh?” Miss Matfield raised her eyebrows, then looked at Turgis, and said casually: “What was she like? Pretty?”

“Yes,” Turgis mumbled, “she was.” And he would say no more. He was not going to talk about her. He preferred to think about her. Lena Golspie.

Then, with something like amorous urgency, he went to the telephone, rang up the Anglo-Baltic, and sternly demanded Mr. Borstein. He would tell Mr. Borstein something! He would show him whether he could let them down like hell! Lena Golspie. Lena Golspie. Lena, Lena, Lena. “Hello, is that Mr. Borstein? This is Twigg and Dersingham. Yes, Twigg and Dersingham. Mr. Golspie asked me to ring you up--Mr. Gols-pie, Mr. Gol-spie ...” Lena’s father. Lena, Lena, Lena.

_Chapter Five_: MISS MATFIELD WONDERS

I

Mr. Golspie took the typewritten sheets from Miss Matfield and then spread them out on her table. “All six letters alike, eh? That’s the style, Miss Matfield. Hello, is this exactly what I said?”

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t.” And Miss Matfield raised her eyes and gave him a steady level glance.

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t, eh? Then what is it, as a matter of fact? Just a little improvement, eh?”

Miss Matfield coloured slightly. “Well, if you want to know, Mr. Golspie, all I’ve done is to change _was_ into _were_ twice, simply for the sake of making it more grammatical. That’s all.”

“Half a minute, half a minute,” Mr. Golspie boomed at her. “Not more grammatical. Just grammatical. You made it grammatical when before it wasn’t grammatical. Either it’s grammatical or it isn’t, d’you see? And now I’m being more grammatical, eh?” He guffawed, suddenly, dreadfully.

“I don’t pretend to be particularly marvellous about grammar,” she replied, trying to be severe, “but I do happen to know when to use _was_ and when to use _were_. It’s one of the few things they taught me. And so I thought you wouldn’t object if I changed them.”

“Much obliged.” He regarded her amiably. “By the way, what is it you do pretend to be particularly marvellous at?”

“Does that matter?” This in her best haughty manner. Everybody in the office knew it and respected it.

But Mr. Golspie only gave her a friendly leer. “Of course it matters,” he declared heartily. “Now I like to know these things. Take me. I used to play a good game at billiards, and I can still play poker with the best, bridge, too. Oh, and I can crack walnuts between my finger and thumb--fact!” He held up a very large thick hairy finger and thumb that matched it. “And that’s not all either. Still--we are a bit busy, aren’t we?”

“I am.” Miss Matfield looked at her typewriter.

“And so,” he continued cheerfully, “for the time being, we’ll say it doesn’t matter. I’ll take these nice grammatical letters away with me. You’ve addressed the envelopes, have you? Right.” He turned his broad back on her, gave Mr. Smeeth a wink, whistled softly, and departed for the private office.

Miss Matfield drew her full lower lip between her teeth and frowned at her typewriter. As usual, she was left with a vague sense of defeat. It was, of course, the man’s insensitiveness--and she saw again that large thick hairy finger--that made him so difficult to snub. Nobody else in the office had dared to talk to her as he did, not after she had spent her first hour in the building. It was a nuisance, not being able to put him in his place, as Mr. Dersingham, Mr. Smeeth, and the others had been put in _their_ places. It was annoying to think that the very next time he spoke to her he would probably talk in the same strain, not altogether an unfriendly strain, but disrespectful, jeering, humiliating in a fashion. She could not really stand up to it, but found herself wanting to lower her eyes, turn her head away, and almost retreat in maidenly blushes--oh, gosh! Lilian Matfield feeling like that! How her friends would howl if they knew! Yet she didn’t really dislike him, not now.

A little later, when they were clearing up for the night, she was presented with this problem of Mr. Golspie again by some artless questions from the little Sellers girl, who still treated Miss Matfield with great deference and thus was still in favour.

“He’s funny, isn’t he?” said Miss Sellers, referring to Mr. Golspie.

“A bit weird.”

“I wish you’d tell me, Miss Matfield,” Miss Sellers continued, earnestly and deferentially, “d’you reelly _like_ him?”

Miss Matfield raised her thick black brows and produced a long _mmm_ sound that went up and then down again. Having gone through this little performance, she said, “Do you?”

“Well,” said Miss Sellers, wrinkling her little nose in an agony of mental effort, “I do an’ I don’t--if you see what I mean.”

Miss Matfield knew exactly what she meant, but did not say so. She merely gave the other girl an encouraging glance.

“Sometimes I think he’s nice,” Miss Sellers went on, staring at nothing, “an’ sometimes I don’t like him a bit. Not that he ever says anything or does anything, y’know--course I don’t see as much of him as you do, Miss Matfield--but sometimes I catch a crool look----”

“A what?”

Miss Sellers’ voice had dropped to a whisper. “A crool look,” she repeated, her eyes enormous. “An’ a reel nasty tone of voice he’s got too, sometimes. And then I think ‘Well, I don’t like you, and I wouldn’t like to cross your path, that I wouldn’t.’ And then the next time, he’s as nice as anything. But I don’t like him as much as I like Mr. Dersingham. Do you, Miss Matfield? Mr. Dersingham’s a reel gentleman, isn’t he? I like him best.”

“I don’t.” This came in a hoarse whisper. It was from Stanley, who, free from his letter-copying for a minute, had quietly joined them.

“Now who asked you your opinion?” Miss Sellers demanded. “You go away.”

“I like Mr. Golspie best,” said Stanley, contriving to introduce an enthusiastic note into his hoarse whisper. “An’ I’ll tell you why. He’s what they call a man’s man. I’ll bet he’s had advenshers.”

“You an’ your advenshers!” Miss Sellers was very contemptuous. “What d’you know about it?”

“I’ve heard things, I have,” said Stanley, very slowly and impressively.

“What have you heard?”

“Shan’t tell you.”

“No, because you’ve got nothing to tell. You run away and get your work done, little boy.”

“I’m as big as you are.”

“Cheeky! Here, you want to go an’ shadder a few manners the next time you go shaddering,” Miss Sellers jeered, singling out, with feminine swiftness and accuracy, the weak joint in the other’s armour.

“Huh! Shan’t learn ’em from you.”

“Oh, be quiet, the pair of you,” cried Miss Matfield, and began tidying her table. Nothing more was said about Mr. Golspie, but on her way home Miss Matfield could not help thinking about him. She always had a book with her for the journey on the 13 bus to and from the office, but the jogging and the crowding and the changing lights did not make reading easy, especially on the return journey to West Hampstead, and frequently she spent more time with her own thoughts than she did with those of her author. On this particular evening Mr. Golspie claimed her attention, almost to the exclusion of anybody or anything else. She could not make up her mind about him, had no label or pigeonhole ready for him, and this annoyed her, for she liked to know exactly what she felt and thought about people; to be able to dismiss them in a phrase. The fact that Mr. Golspie spoke to her every day, if only for a few minutes, gave her work to do, was sufficient to make her anxious to determine her attitude towards him. Men, with their thick skins and yawning indifference, might be able to work with people for years and not know or care anything about them as persons, but this drab stuff about “governors” and “colleagues” could find no place to stay in Miss Matfield’s mind. In the talk among the girls at the Club, all the men who dictated letters to them became immense characters, comic, grotesquely villainous, or heroic and adorable. Their femininity, frozen for a few hours every day at the keyboard of their machines, thawed and gushed out in these perfervid personalities. Behind their lowered eyes, their demure expressions, as they sat with their notebooks on hard little office chairs, these comic and romantic legends buzzed and sang, to be released later in the dining-room, the lounge, the tiny bedrooms, of the Club. Thus, something had to be done about Mr. Golspie, who would have appeared to most of the girls, as Miss Matfield knew only too well, a gigantic find, a mine of glittering material. So far he had merely passed as “weird,” but that would not do. It had not sufficed in Miss Matfield’s private thoughts since the first two days.

She knew exactly what she thought about the others at the office. Mr. Dersingham she neither liked nor disliked; she merely tolerated him, with a sort of easy contempt; he was “sloppy and a bit feeble,” and a familiar type, with nothing at all weird about _him_. Smeeth seemed to her a vaguely pathetic creature who lived a grey life in some grey suburb; the pleasure he got from what seemed to her his drudgery sometimes irritated her, but at other times it roused something like pity; and when she was not despising him, she liked him. Turgis she despised and occasionally resented. She resented his shabbiness and dinginess, his unhealthy skin and open mouth, his whole forlorn air, simply because these things, which were always there in the office, beside her, hurt her own pride by indicating the indignity of her situation. Occasionally, perhaps after a week-end in the country, when the thought of going back to Angel Pavement almost--as she said--made her feel sick, there flashed through her mind an image of Turgis. There had been moments when she had felt sorry for him, but they were very rare. Stanley and the funny little Cockney girl she tolerated and even liked, so long as they behaved themselves, and they might have been a couple of amusing little animals, a pair of spaniels perhaps, inferior and somewhat neglected. All these people were securely in their places. But not Mr. Golspie, the mysterious, large, jocular, brutal man, who always contrived--and for the life of her she could not discover how he did it--to get the best of her in any talk between them, who irritated one half of her, the sensible half, by making the other half feel fluttered and foolish, all girlish--ugh! How she had loathed him at first! Well, she still loathed him, or at least she disliked him, despised him, because he was nothing but a middle-aged bullying lout. He had a ridiculous moustache. He reeked of cigars and whisky, bar parlours. He was at once comic and awful.

As the bus rattled and roared up the long straight slope of Finchley Road on its way to Swiss Cottage, she told herself several times that Golspie was comic and awful and found something comforting in this conclusion. It was not, however, much of a conclusion; it only remained one for a few minutes, for Mr. Golspie, even in memory, even as an image, a faintly illuminated leer in the dark of her mind (like the Cheshire Cat in _Alice_), refused to stay in his place and wear his label. He escaped, and mocked her. It was all too stupid, and when she got up to leave the bus she determined to leave Mr. Golspie behind her, too. She found another girl from the Club waiting for the bus to stop, and when it did stop, they smiled at one another and walked up from the Finchley Road together. Mr. Golspie faded away.

“Do you come all the way from the City in that bus, Matfield?” the other girl inquired languidly. She was a very languid girl, rather affected, and her name was Morrison.

“The whole way.”

“How revolting!”

“It is. Absolutely foul! Where do you get it, Morrison? You don’t work in the City, do you?”

“No, Bayswater,” Miss Morrison sighed. “I get it just in Orchard Street. I have to take another bus first along Bayswater Road. Unless I walk, and I loathe walking, specially on these beastly dark nights. Even then, it seems an awfully long way.”

“Nothing to the way I have to come,” said Miss Matfield, sternly. When there was any grumbling about, and there usually was some about, she liked to have her share. “Sometimes it takes hours and hours.”

“I know. I took a job in the City once and I only stuck it a week.” Miss Morrison groaned in the darkness at the thought of it. “I nearly died. Honestly, Matfield, if I’d to go to the City every day and come back here, I’d die, I’d absolutely pass out, I would really. I don’t know how you stick it. But then you’re so energetic, aren’t you?”

Miss Matfield at once denied this terrible charge, and told herself that the Morrison girl was pretty awful. “I’m worn out now,” she continued. “Only I’d rather have the City because I can’t bear those private secretary jobs. Yours is one of them, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” with another sigh. “And pretty ghastly. The woman I’m working for now means well, but she’s an idiot, she really is, Matfield, a full-sized idiot. No man in any office could ever be such an idiot. She’s just dotty.”

“Well, here we are at our beautiful home,” said Miss Matfield, looking up at the Club entrance.

“I know. Isn’t it revolting?”

“Absolutely vile,” she replied mechanically, as they walked in. “I don’t suppose there are any letters for me. No, of course not. There wouldn’t be.”

“Mine’s a bill,” Miss Morrison groaned. “Are you always getting bills? I never seem to get anything else. Just millions of foul bills.”

“Foul! Cheerio.”

“Oh--er--cheerio.”

II