Part 2

Many people who think they know the City well have been compelled to admit that they do not know Angel Pavement. You could go wandering half a dozen times between Bunhill Fields and London Wall, or across from Barbican to Broad Street Station, and yet miss Angel Pavement. Some of the street maps of the district omit it altogether; taxi-drivers often do not even pretend to know it; policemen are frequently not sure; and only postmen who are caught within half a dozen streets of it are triumphantly positive. This all suggests that Angel Pavement is of no great importance. Everybody knows Finsbury Pavement, which is not very far away, because Finsbury Pavement is a street of considerable length and breadth, full of shops, warehouses, and offices, to say nothing of buses and trams, for it is a real thoroughfare. Angel Pavement is not a real thoroughfare, and its length and breadth are inconsiderable. You might bombard the postal districts of E. C. 1 and E. C. 2 with letters for years, and yet never have to address anything to Angel Pavement. The little street is old, and has its fair share of sooty stone and greasy walls, crumbling brick and rotting woodwork, but somehow it has never found itself on the stage of history. Kings, princes, great bishops, have never troubled it; murders it may have seen, but they have all belonged to private life; and no literary masterpiece has ever been written under one of its roofs. The guide-books, the volumes on London’s byways, have not a word to say about it, and those motor-coaches, complete with guide, that roam about the City in the early evening never go near it. The guide himself, who knows all about Henry the Eighth and Wren and Dickens and is so highly educated that he can still talk with an Oxford accent at the very top of his voice, could probably tell you nothing about Angel Pavement.

It is a typical City side-street, except that it is shorter, narrower, and dingier than most. At one time it was probably a real thoroughfare, but now only pedestrians can escape at the western end, and they do this by descending the six steps at the corner. For anything larger and less nimble than a pedestrian, Angel Pavement is a _cul de sac_, for all that end, apart from the steps, is blocked up by _Chase & Cohen: Carnival Novelties_, and not even by the front of Chase & Cohen but by their sooty, mouldering, dusty-windowed back. Chase & Cohen do not believe it is worth while offering Angel Pavement any of their carnival novelties--many of which are given away, with a thirty shilling dinner and dance, in the West End every gala night--and so they turn the other way, not letting Angel Pavement have so much as a glimpse of a pierrot hat or a false nose. Perhaps this is as well, for if the pavementeers could see pierrot hats and false noses every day, there is no telling what might happen.

What you do see there, however, is something quite different. Turning into Angel Pavement from that crazy jumble and jangle of buses, lorries, drays, private cars, and desperate bicycles, the main road, you see on the right, first a nondescript blackened building that is really the side of a shop and a number of offices; then _The Pavement Dining Rooms: R. Ditton, Propr._, with R. Ditton’s usual window display of three cocoanut buns, two oranges, four bottles of cherry cider picturesquely grouped, and if not the boiled ham, the meat-and-potato pie; then a squashed little house or bundle of single offices that is hopelessly to let; and then the bar of the _White Horse_, where you have the choice of any number of mellowed whiskies or fine sparkling ales, to be consumed on or off the premises, and if on, then either publicly or privately. You are now halfway down the street, and could easily throw a stone through one of Chase & Cohen’s windows, which is precisely what somebody, maddened perhaps by the thought of the Carnival Novelties, has already done. On the other side, the southern side, the left-hand side when you turn in from the outer world, you begin, rather splendidly, with _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas Fittings_, and two windows almost bright with sample fittings. Then you arrive at _T. Benenden: Tobacconist_, whose window is filled with dummy packets of cigarettes and tobacco that have long ceased even to pretend they have anything better than air in them; though there are also, as witnesses to T. Benenden’s enterprise, one or two little bowls of dry and dusty stuff that mutter, in faded letters, “Our Own Mixture, Cool Sweet Smoking, Why not Try it?” To reach T. Benenden’s little counter, you go through the street doorway and then turn through another door on the left. The stairs in front of you--and very dark and dirty they are, too--belong to _C. Warstein: Tailors’ Trimmings_. Next to T. Benenden and C. Warstein is a door, a large, stout, old door from which most of the paint has flaked and shredded away. This door has no name on it, and nobody, not even T. Benenden, has seen it open or knows what there is behind it. There it is, a door, and it does nothing but gather dust and cobwebs and occasionally drop another flake of dried paint on the worn step below. Perhaps it leads into another world. Perhaps it will open, one morning, to admit an angel, who, after looking up and down the little street for a moment, will suddenly blow the last trumpet. Perhaps that is the real reason why the street is called Angel Pavement. What is certain, however, is that this door has no concern with the building next to it and above it, the real neighbour of T. Benenden and C. Warstein and known to the postal authorities as No. 8, Angel Pavement.

No. 8, once a four-storey dwelling-house where some merchant-alderman lived snugly on his East India dividends, is now a little hive of commerce. For the last few years, it has contrived to keep an old lady and a companion (unpaid) in reasonable comfort at The Palms Private Hotel, Torquay, and, in addition, to furnish the old lady’s youngest niece with an allowance of two pounds a week in order that she might continue to share a studio just off the Fulham Road and attempt to design scenery for plays that are always about to be produced at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead. It has also indirectly paid the golf-club subscription and caddie fees of the junior partner of Fulton, Gregg & Fulton, the solicitors, who are responsible for the letting and the rents. As for the tenants themselves, their names may be found on each side of the squat doorway. The ground floor is occupied by the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, the first floor by _Twigg & Dersingham_, and the upper floors by the _Universal Hosiery Co._, the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, and, at the very top, keeping its eye on everybody, the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, which seems to be content with the possession of a front attic.

This does not mean that we have now finished with No. 8, Angel Pavement. It is for the sake of No. 8 that we have come to Angel Pavement at all, but not for the whole of No. 8, but only for the first floor. No doubt a number of tales, perhaps huge violent epics, could be started, jumped into life, merely by opening the door of the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, or by trudging up the stairs to the _Universal Hosiery Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, or by looking up at the grimy skylight, and giving a shout to the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, but we must keep to the less mysterious but more respectable first floor--and _Twigg & Dersingham_.

II

On this particular morning in autumn, Mrs. Cross was rather later than usual. That did not matter very much because it was not one of the floor-washing mornings, but just one of the ordinary dust-round-and-sweep-up-a-bit mornings. But somebody, one of the interfering sort, had left a note for her in the general office, that is, the room just behind the frosted glass partitions and the sort of ticket office window with _Enquiries_ on it, and this note said: _Mrs. Cross. What about turning this room out for a change? Thank you!!_

“An’ thank _you_!” said Mrs. Cross, quite aloud and with grim irony, as she tore up this note and popped it in the top of the stove. To show that she was not the kind of woman to be dictated to in this fashion, she immediately went and gave the other room, Mr. Dersingham’s private office, a thoroughly good sweeping and dusting. Having done that, she waddled straight across the general office to the other room, which, with its long counter and cupboards and drawers and samples of wood and litter, was the one she liked least, being always in a terrible mess. On her way, she completely ignored the general office, did not even give it a look, just as if it were full of people in the habit of leaving notes. Her back told it very plainly that she would clean up the office in her own way. Once in the other room, the nasty one, she felt so pleased about this rebuff that she set to work with a will, and for the next ten minutes was enveloped in a cloud of dust. By the time she had finished, there may have been very few articles in the room that were free from dust, but nearly all of them had at least exchanged their old dust for another variety that came perhaps from quite a distant corner. Then she thrust back a wisp of grey hair from her swollen face, on which time and trouble had first sketched a few lines and then deepened them by puffing out the surrounding flesh; she dragged her swollen feet across to the discarded leather office chair in the corner; she flopped into the chair and put her swollen hands--for though she said with some truth that she worked her fingers to the bone, hot water and soap and wet scrubbing brushes had piled sodden, nerveless flesh on those bones--in her lap, and rested. Immediately she plunged into a fierce reverie, in which the figure of Mr. Cross, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, the two rooms between the City Road and the black Regent’s Canal that were her home, Mrs. Tomlinson, the woman she was going to clean for later in the morning, and the image of a pound of stewing steak, all played their parts. Then she returned to the general office.

This time, she noticed its existence, and what she saw suddenly gave her a little fright. She had been a bit too hasty (her old fault) about that note. It really did want a good tidying. She had neglected it a bit lately, because for the last three mornings she had been late, all because she was not getting her proper sleep, and all because Mrs. Williams and her husband on the next floor had got a loud speaker, one of them little horns, and it was not only a loud speaker but also a late speaker, and in fact would speak your head off. And if she didn’t get on with this office a bit, the one that left that note would be complaining to Mr. Dersingham, and then that might mean another job gone, all due to hastiness. She had better be putting her hastiness behind a brush and duster. And, as if to give her a final push, a clock somewhere outside sounded the half-hour. Half-past eight!--well, now she would have to bustle round.

She was still bustling round--though, to be accurate, she was only engaged in passing a languid, duster-holding hand over the tin cover of the typewriter--when Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham’s next employee arrived, and their day really began. The frosted glass door that opened from the little space in which enquirers were kept waiting for a few minutes, now swung back to admit into the general office the body of a boy about fifteen, whose eyes were focussed upon a paper, folded into a very small compass, that he held about four inches away from them. This was the office boy or very junior clerk, Stanley Poole, who had just come all the way from Hackney, which remained with him as a combined flavour of cocoa and bread dipped in bacon fat that still haunted his palate. His body, which was small and thin but sufficiently tough, and was crowned by a snub nose, some freckles, greyish-greenish eyes, and some unbrushed sandy hair, had been in the service of Twigg & Dersingham for the last twenty minutes, when it had boarded a tram and a bus and had walked down several streets. Now it had arrived in the office. But his mind had not yet begun the day’s work. Even now, when the very threshold had been passed, it was still in the wilds of Mexico, enjoying the heroic and exhilarating companionship of Jack Dashwood and Dick Robinson, the Boy Aviators, the terror of all Mexican bandits.

“So you’ve come,” said Mrs. Cross, putting back that wisp of hair again. “It’s about time I was ’opping it if you’ve come.”

Stanley looked up and nodded. With a sigh, he withdrew from the world of the Boy Aviators and the Mexican bandits. He tried to fold his paper into a still smaller compass, before cramming it into his pocket.

“Read, read, read!” cried Mrs. Cross derisively. “Some of yer’s always at it. What they find to put in all the time beats me. What’s that yer reading now? Murders, I’ll bet.”

“’Tisn’t,” replied Stanley, balancing himself on one leg for no particular reason that we can discover. “It’s a boys’ paper.” He made this announcement with a kind of sullen reluctance, not because he was really a sullen lad, but simply because he had discovered that when his elders asked these questions, they were usually not in search of information, but were trying to get at him.

“Penny bloods, them things is.”

“’Tisn’t,” said Stanley, balancing himself on the other leg now. “This is tuppence. I buy it ev’ry week, have done ever since it come out. _Boy’s Companion_, it’s called. It’s got the best tales in,” he added, in a sudden burst of confidence. “All about boys who fly in airplanes an’ go to Mexico an’ Russia an’ all over an’ have advenshers!”

“Advenshers! They’d be better off at ’ome--with their advenshers! You’ll be wantin’ to go an’ ’ave advenshers yerself next--and then what will yer poor mother say?”

But this only goaded Stanley into making new and even more dangerous admissions. “I’m going to try and be a detective,” he mumbled.

“Well now, did y’ever!” cried Mrs. Cross, at once shocked and delighted. “A detective! I never ’eard of such a thing! What d’yer come ’ere for if yer want to be a detective. There’s no detectin’ ’ere. Go on with yer! ’Ere, yer not big enough, and yer never will be either, ’cos yer’d ’ave to be a pleeceman first before they’d let yer be a detective, and they’d never ’ave yer as a pleeceman.”

“You can be detective without being a bobby first,” replied Stanley scornfully. He had gone into this question, and was not to be put off by a mere outsider like Mrs. Cross. “’Sides, you can be a private detective an’ find jewels an’ shadder people. That’s what I’d like to do--shadder people.”

“What’s that? Follerin’ ’em about, is it? Oh, that’s nasty work, that is. Shadderin’! I’d shadder yer if I caught yer at it, my words I would.” And Mrs. Cross took up her brush and dust-pan and gave them a fierce little shake, almost as if she had just caught _them_ at it. “Now you just get on with yer work like a good boy, and don’t you go tellin’ anybody else yer want to be shadderin’ else yer’ll be gettin’ yerself into trouble. Yer can’t expect people to ’ave any patience with shadderers. If Mr. Dersingham knew what was goin’ on in that ’ead of yours, ’e’d tell yer to go straight ’ome and ’ave nothing more to do with yer, and yer’d find yerself shadderin’ for another job, and that’s all the shadderin’ _you’d_ get.”

Stanley turned away, and then pulled a face, not so much at Mrs. Cross as at the whole narrow school of thought represented at this moment by Mrs. Cross. He went to the letter-box and brought back the morning’s post, which he placed on the nearest high desk. There he remembered something, and looked with a grin at Mrs. Cross, who was now having a final bustle round.

“Did you see that note left for you?” he inquired.

Mrs. Cross suspended operations at once. “Yes, I did see it, and if yer want to know where it is, I can tell yer, ’cos it’s in that stove.” She struck an attitude that suggested a counsel for the prosecution of the high-handed type. “And oo, might I ask, left that there note? Oo wrote it? Just you tell me that, that’s all?”

“Miss Matfield wrote it.”

“An’ I thought as much. Soon as I set eyes on it, I knew. Miss Matfield wrote it! Miss Matfield!” Her irony was now so terrible that she shook all over with it, and her head seemed in danger of falling off. “And ’ow long, might I ask, ’as Miss Matfield been in this office, doin’ ’er typewriting? ’Ow long? Two munce. All right--three munce. An’ ’ow long ’ave I been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s, coming ’ere ev’ry morning, week in an’ week out, to clean this office? Yer don’t know. No, yer don’t know, and yer Miss Matfield doesn’t know. Well, I’ll tell yer. I’ve been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s for seven years, I ’ave. It wasn’t this Mr. Dersingham that started me, it was ’is uncle, old Mr. Dersingham, ’im oo’s dead now--an’ a nice old gentleman ’e was, too, nicer than this one an’ a better ’ead on ’im to my way of thinking--and when this Mr. Dersingham took on, ’e sent for me and said, ‘You keep on cleaning, Mrs. Cross, and I’ll pay yer whatever my uncle did,’ that’s what ’e said to me in that very room there, and I said, ‘Much obliged, sir, and the very best attention as always,’ and ’e said, ‘I’m sure it will, Mrs. Cross.’ Typewriters! Coming and going so fast I can’t be bothered learning their names. If there’s been one ’ere since I started, there’s been eight or ten or a dozen. Miss Matfield! Now when she comes in, just give ’er a message from me,” she cried, thoroughly reckless by this time. “Just say to ’er: ‘Mrs. Cross ’as seen the note left and only asks oo is cleaning this office, Miss Matfield or ’er, and if ’er, then them oo’s been doing it for seven years, week in and week out, knows their own business better than them oo’s only been typewriting ’ere for three munce, and so Mrs. Cross’ll thank ’er to keep ’er notes to ’erself in future till they’re asked for.’ Just you tell ’er that, boy. And I’ll say good-morning.”

With that, Mrs. Cross unfastened her apron and gathered up her things with great dignity, gave Stanley a final shake of the head, and waddled out, closing the outer door behind her, a moment later, with a decisive bang.

Left to himself, Stanley, with the contemptuous air of a man who is meant for better things, began his morning’s work. After taking off the two typewriter covers, dumping a few books on the high desks, and filling up all the ink-pots and putting out clean sheets of blotting paper (which duty was a little fad of Mr. Smeeth’s), he remembered that he was a creature with a soul. So, grasping a short round ruler in such a way that it remotely resembled a revolver, he crouched behind Mr. Smeeth’s high stool for a few tense moments, then sprang out, pointing his gun at the place where the great criminal’s bottom waistcoat button would have been, and said hoarsely: “Put ’em up, Diamond Jack. No, you don’t! Not a move!” He gave a warning flourish of the gun, then said casually, over his shoulder, to one of his assistants or a few police sergeants or somebody like that, “Take him away.” And that was the end of Diamond Jack, and yet another triumph for S. Poole, the young detective whose exploits were rivalling even those of the Boy Aviators. And having thus refreshed himself, Stanley replaced the round ruler and condescended to perform one or two more of those monotonous and trifling actions that Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham demanded of him at this hour of the morning. These left him ample time for thought, and he began to wonder if he would be able to get out during the morning. Once outside the office--even though he was only going to the post office or the railway goods department or some firm not four streets away--he could enjoy himself, for the affairs of Twigg & Dersingham faded to a grey thread of routine; he plunged at once into the drama of London’s underworld; and as he hopped and dodged about the crowded streets, like a sandy-haired sparrow, he was able to do some marvellous shadowing. There also loomed already, early as it was, a problem that would become more and more disturbing as the long morning wore on and he became hungrier and hungrier. This was the problem of where to go and what to buy for lunch, for which his mother allowed him a shilling every day. He always ate his breakfast so quickly that his stomach forgot about it almost at once and left him hollow inside by ten o’clock and absolutely aching by twelve. He often wondered what would happen to him if, instead of being the first to go to lunch, at half past twelve, he was the last, and had to wait until about half past one. There are innumerable ways of spending a shilling on lunch, from the downright solid way of blowing the lot on sausage or fried liver and mashed potatoes, say at the _Pavement Dining Rooms_, to the immediately delightful but rather unsatisfying method of spreading it out, buying a jam tart here, a banana there, and some milk chocolate somewhere else; and Stanley knew them all.

He was trifling with the thought of trying the nearest Lyons again, and was actually searching his memory to discover the exact price of a portion of Lancashire Hot-pot in that establishment, when he was interrupted by the arrival of a colleague. This was Turgis, the clerk, who might be described as Stanley’s senior or Mr. Smeeth’s junior. He was in his early twenties, a thinnish, awkward young man, with a rather long neck, poor shoulders, and large, clumsy hands and feet. You would not say he was ugly, but on the other hand you would probably admit, after reflection, that it would have been better for him if he had been actually uglier. As it was, he was just unprepossessing. You would not have noticed him in a crowd--and a great deal of his time was spent in a crowd--but if your attention had been called to him, you would have given him one glance and then decided that that was enough. He was obviously neither sick nor starved, yet something about his appearance, a total lack of colour and bloom, a slight pastiness and spottiness, the faint grey film that seemed to cover and subdue him, suggested that all the food he ate was wrong, all the rooms he sat in, beds he slept in, and clothes he wore, were wrong, and that he lived in a world without sun and clean rain and wandering sweet air. His features were not good nor yet too bad. He had rather full brown eyes that might have been called pretty if they had been set in a girl’s face; a fairly large nose that should have been masterful but somehow was not; a small, still babyish mouth, usually open, and revealing several big and irregular teeth; and a drooping rather than retreating chin. His blue serge suit bulged and bagged and sagged and shone, and had obviously done all these things five days after it had left the multiple cheap tailors’ shop, in the window of which a companion suit, clothing the wax model of a light-weight champion, still maliciously challenged Turgis with its smooth surface and sharp creases every time he sneaked past it. His soft collar was crumpled, his tie a little frayed, and there was a pulpy look about his shoes. Any sensible woman could have compelled him to improve his appearance almost beyond recognition within a week, and it was quite clear that no sensible woman took any interest in him.

“Morning, Stanley,” he said, not very cheerfully.

“Hello,” said Stanley, in the toneless voice of one who expects nothing.

Turgis went over to his own high desk, pulled a blotting-pad out of the drawer, put a book or two on his desk, examined a note he had left on his pad, reminding him to “ring Whishaws first thing,” and then spent a melancholy five minutes at the telephone.

“Will I have to call there this morning?” Stanley asked hopefully, when Turgis had rung off.