Part 21

His seat was not very comfortable, high up too, but he liked the look of the place, with its bluey-green walls and gilded organ-pipes and lights shining through holes in the roof like fierce sunlight, its rows of little chairs and music stands, all ready for business. It was fine. He did not buy a programme--they were asking a shilling each for them, and a man must draw a line somewhere--but spent his time looking at the other people and listening to snatches of their talk. They were a queer mixture, quite different from anybody you were likely to see either in Stoke Newington or Angel Pavement; a good many foreigners (the kind with brown baggy stains under their eyes), Jewy people, a few wild-looking young fellows with dark khaki shirts and longish hair, a sprinkling of quiet middle-aged men like himself, and any number of pleasant young girls and refined ladies; and he studied them all with interest. On one side of him were several dark foreigners in a little party, a brown wrinkled oldish woman who never stopped talking Spanish or Italian or Greek or some such language, a thin young man who was carefully reading the programme, which seemed to be full of music itself, and, on the far side, two yellow girls. On the other side, his neighbour was a large man whose wiry grey hair stood straight up above a broad red face, obviously an Englishman but a chap rather out of the common, a bit cranky perhaps and fierce in his opinions.

This man, moving restlessly in the cramped space, bumped against Mr. Smeeth and muttered an apology.

“Not much room, is there?” said Mr. Smeeth amiably.

“Never is here, sir,” the man replied fiercely.

“Is that so,” said Mr. Smeeth. “I don’t often come here.” He felt it would not do to admit that this was the very first time.

“Always crowded at these concerts, full up, packed out, not an inch of spare room anywhere. And always the same. What the devil do they mean when they say they can’t make these concerts pay? Whose fault is it?” he demanded fiercely, just as if Mr. Smeeth were partly responsible. “We pay what they ask us to pay. We fill the place, don’t we? What do they want? Do they want people to hang down from the roof or sit on the organ pipes? They should build a bigger hall or stop talking nonsense.”

Mr. Smeeth agreed, feeling glad there was no necessity for him to do anything else.

“Say that to some people,” continued the fierce man, who needed no encouragement, “and they say, ‘Well, what about the Albert Hall? That’s big enough, isn’t it?’ The Albert Hall! The place is ridiculous. I was silly enough to go and hear Kreisler there, a few weeks ago. Monstrous! They might as well have used a race course and sent him up to play in a captive balloon. If it had been a gramophone in the next house but one, it couldn’t have been worse. Here you do get the music, I will say that. But it’s damnably cramped up here.”

The orchestral players were now swarming in like black beetles, and Mr. Smeeth amused himself trying to decide what all the various instruments were. Violins, ’cellos, double-basses, flutes, clarinets, bassoons, trumpets or cornets, trombones, he knew them, but he was not sure about some of the others--were those curly brass things the horns?--and it was hard to see them at all from where he was. When they had all settled down, he solemnly counted them, and there were nearly a hundred. Something like a band, that! This was going to be good, he told himself. At that moment, everybody began clapping. The conductor, a tall foreign-looking chap with a shock of grey hair that stood out all round his head, had arrived at his little railed-in platform, and was giving the audience a series of short jerky bows. He gave two little taps. All the players brought their instruments up and looked at him. He slowly raised his arms, then brought them down sharply and the concert began.

First, all the violins made a shivery sort of noise that you could feel travelling up and down your spine. Some of the clarinets and bassoons squeaked and gibbered a little, and the brass instruments made a few unpleasant remarks. Then all the violins went rushing up and up, and when they got to the top, the stout man at the back hit a gong, the two men near him attacked their drums, and the next moment every man jack of them, all the hundred, went at it for all they were worth, and the conductor was so energetic that it looked as if his cuffs were about to fly up to the organ. The noise was terrible, shattering: hundreds of tin buckets were being kicked down flights of stone steps; walls of houses were falling in; ships were going down; ten thousand people were screaming with toothache; steam hammers were breaking loose; whole warehouses of oilcloth were being stormed and the oilcloth all torn into shreds; and there were railway accidents innumerable. Then suddenly the noise stopped; one of the clarinets, all by itself, went slithering and gurgling; the violins began their shivery sound again and at last shivered away into silence. The conductor dropped his arms to his side. Nearly everybody clapped.

Neither Mr. Smeeth nor his neighbour joined in the applause. Indeed, the fierce man snorted a good deal, obviously to show his disapproval.

“I didn’t care for that much, did you?” said Mr. Smeeth, who felt he could risk it after those snorts.

“That? Muck. Absolute muck,” the fierce man bellowed into Mr. Smeeth’s left ear. “If they’ll swallow that they’ll swallow anything, any mortal thing. Downright sheer muck. Listen to ’em.” And as the applause continued, the fierce man, in despair, buried his huge head in his hands and groaned.

The next item seemed to Mr. Smeeth to be a member of the same unpleasant family as the first, only instead of being the rowdy one, it was the thin sneering one. He had never heard a piece of music before that gave such an impression of thinness, boniness, scragginess, and scratchiness. It was like having thin wires pushed into your ears. You felt as if you were trying to chew ice-cream. The violins hated the sight of you and of one another; the reedy instruments were reedier than they had ever been before but expressed nothing but a general loathing; the brass only came in to blow strange hollow sounds; and the stout man and his friends at the top hit things that had all gone flat, dead, as if their drums were burst. Very tall thin people sat about drinking quinine and sneering at one another, and in the middle of them, on the cold floor, was an idiot child than ran its finger-nail up and down a slate. One last scratch from the slate, and the horror was over. Once more, the conductor, after wiping his brow, was acknowledging the applause.

This time, Mr. Smeeth did not hesitate. “And I don’t like that either,” he said to his neighbour.

“You don’t?” The fierce man was almost staggered. “You don’t like it? You surprise me, sir, you do indeed. If you don’t like that, what in the name of thunder _are_ you going to like--in modern music. Come, come, you’ve got to give the moderns a chance. You can’t refuse them a hearing altogether, can you?”

Mr. Smeeth admitted that you couldn’t, but said it in such a way as to suggest that he was doing his best to keep them quiet.

“Very well, then,” the fierce man continued, “you’ve got to confess that you’ve just listened to one of the two or three things written during these last ten years or so that is going to _live_. Come now, you must admit that.”

“Well, I dare say,” said Mr. Smeeth, knitting his brows.

Here the fierce man began tapping him on the arm. “Form? Well, of course, the thing hasn’t got it, and it’s no good pretending it has, and that’s where you and I”--Mr. Smeeth was given a heavier tap, almost a bang, to emphasise this--“find ourselves being cheated. But we’re asking for something that isn’t there. But the tone values, the pure orchestral colouring--superb! Damn it, it’s got poetry in it. Romantic, of course. Romantic as you like--ultra-romantic. All these fellows now are beginning to tell us they’re classical, but they’re all romantic really, the whole boiling of ’em, and Berlioz is their man only they don’t know it, or won’t admit it. What do _you_ say?”

Mr. Smeeth observed very cautiously that he had no doubt there was a lot to be said for that point of view. When the interval came and he went out to smoke a pipe, he took care to keep moving so that the fierce man, who appeared to be on the prowl, did not find him.

The concert was much better after the interval. It began with a longish thing in which a piano played about one half, and most of the orchestra, for some of them never touched their instruments, played the other half. A little dark chap played the piano and there could be no doubt about it, he _could_ play the piano. Terrum, ter-_rum_, terrum, terrum, trum, trum, trrrrr, the orchestra would go, and the little chap would lean back, looking idly at the conductor. But the second the orchestra stopped he would hurl himself at the piano and crash out his own Terrum, ter-_rum_, terrum, terrum, trum trum trrr. Sometimes the violins would play very softly and sadly, and the piano would join in, scattering silver showers of notes or perhaps wandering up and down a ladder of quiet chords, and then Mr. Smeeth would feel himself very quiet and happy and sad all at the same time. In the end, they had a pell-mell race, and the piano shouted to the orchestra and then went scampering away, and the orchestra thundered at the piano and went charging after it, and they went up hill and down dale, shouting and thundering, scampering and charging, until one big bang, during which the little chap seemed to be almost sitting on the piano and the conductor appeared to be holding the whole orchestra up in his two arms, brought it to an end. This time Mr. Smeeth clapped furiously, and so did the fierce man, and so did everybody else, even the violin players in the orchestra; and the little chap, now purple in the face, ran in and out a dozen times, bowing all the way. But he would not play again, no matter how long and loud they clapped, and Mr. Smeeth, for his part, could not blame him. The little chap had done his share. My word, there was talent for you!

“Our old friend now,” said the fierce man, turning abruptly.

“Where?” cried Mr. Smeeth, startled.

“On the programme,” the other replied. “It’s the Brahms Number One next.”

“Is it really,” said Mr. Smith. “That ought to be good.” He had heard of Brahms, knew him as the chap who had written some Hungarian dances. But, unless he was mistaken, these dances were only a bit of fun for Brahms, who was one of your very heavy classical men. The Number One part of it he did not understand, and did not like to ask about it, but as the elderly foreign woman on his right happened to be examining the programme, he had a peep at it and had just time to discover that it was a symphony, Brahms’ First Symphony in fact, they were about to hear. It would probably be clean above his head, but it could not possibly be so horrible to listen to as that modern stuff in the first half of the programme.

It was some time before he made much out of it. The Brahms of this symphony seemed a very gloomy, ponderous, rumbling sort of chap, who might now and then show a flash of temper or go in a corner and feel sorry for himself, but for the most part simply went on gloomily rumbling and grumbling. There were moments, however, when there came a sudden gush of melody, something infinitely tender swelling out of the strings or a ripple of laughter from the flutes and clarinets or a fine flare up by the whole orchestra, and for these moments Mr. Smeeth waited, puzzled but excited, like a man catching glimpses of some delectable strange valley through the swirling mists of a mountain side. As the symphony went on, he began to get the hang of it more and more, and these moments returned more frequently, until at last, in the final section, the great moment arrived and justified everything, the whole symphony concert.

It began, this last part, with some muffled and doleful sounds from the brass instruments. He had heard some of those grim snatches of tune earlier on in the symphony, and now when they were repeated in this fashion they had a very queer effect on him, almost frightened him. It was as if all the workhouses and hospitals and cemeteries of North London had been flashed past his eyes. Those brass instruments didn’t think Smeeth had much of a chance. All the violins were sorry about it; they protested, they shook, they wept; but the horns and trumpets and trombones came back and blew them away. Then the whole orchestra became tumultuous, and one voice after another raised itself above the menacing din, cried in anger, cried in sorrow, and was lost again. There were queer little intervals, during one of which only the strings played, and they twanged and plucked instead of using their bows, and the twanging and plucking, quite soft and slow at first, got louder and faster until it seemed as if there was danger everywhere. Then, just when it seemed as if something was going to burst, the twanging and plucking was over, and great mournful sounds came reeling out again, like doomed giants. After that the whole thing seemed to be slithering into hopelessness, as if Brahms had got stuck in a bog and the light was going. But then the great moment arrived. Brahms jumped clean out of his bog, set his foot on the hard road, and swept the orchestra and the fierce man and the three foreigners and Mr. Smeeth and the whole Queen’s Hall along with him, in a noble stride. This was a great tune. Ta _tum_ ta ta _tum_ tum, ta _tum_ ta-ta _tum_ ta _tum_. He could have shouted at the splendour of it. The strings in a rich deep unison sweeping on, and you were ten feet high and had a thousand glorious years to live. But in a minute or two it had gone, this glory of sound, and there was muddle and gloom, a sudden sweetness of violins, then harsh voices from the brass. Mr. Smeeth had given it up, when back it came again, swelling his heart until it nearly choked him, and then it was lost once more and everything began to be put in its place and settled, abruptly, fiercely, as if old Brahms had made up his mind to stand no nonsense from anybody or anything under the sun. There, there, there there, _There_. It was done. They were all clapping and clapping and the conductor was mopping his forehead and bowing and then signalling to the band to stand up, and old Brahms had slipped away, into the blue.

There was a cold drizzle of rain outside in Langham Place, where the big cars of the rich were nosing one another like shiny monsters, and it was a long and dreary way to Chaucer Road, Stoke Newington, but odd bits of the magic kept floating back into his mind, and he felt more excited and happy than he had done when he had heard about the rise that morning. Undoubtedly a lot of this symphony concert stuff was either right above his head or just simply didn’t mean anything to anybody. But what was good _was_ good. Ta _tum_ ta ta--now how did that go? All the way from the High Street to Chaucer Road, as he hurried down the darkening streets and tried to make his overcoat collar reach the back of his hat, he was also trying to capture that tune. He could feel it still beating and glowing somewhere inside him.

His wife and Edna were in. He heard their voices as he shut the front door. George was probably still out. “Hello, there. Only me,” he shouted. “George in yet?” They told him that George was in bed (George was always out very late or in bed quite early. A puzzling lad), so he carefully locked and bolted the front door.

“Well, here’s the wanderer,” cried Mrs. Smeeth gaily. She had still got her hat and coat on, and was refreshing herself with a piece of cake and half a tumbler of stout. “And where did you get to, Dad?”

“Went to a concert,” he replied, a trifle self-consciously. He drew nearer the fire and began taking off his boots.

“Get your dad his slippers, Edna, that’s a good girl,” said her mother. “And where was this concert then?”

“Queen’s Hall.”

“Oo! classy, aren’t we?” cried Mrs. Smeeth. “Did you like it?”

“I’ll bet he didn’t,” said Edna, an aggressive low-brow.

“How do you know he didn’t, miss. Some people like a bit of good music, even if you don’t. We’re not all jazz-mad. There’s nobody round here who enjoys good music, classical pieces, better than your father. Isn’t that so, Dad? Nobody knows that better than I do, the times I’ve had to listen to it as well, and a little bit goes a long way with me. Now you get off to bed, Edna, now, else you won’t be getting up in the morning and then you’ll be in a bit more trouble at the shop.”

“What’s this?” asked Mr. Smeeth, looking at his wife and then at his daughter. “Has she been getting into any trouble?”

“It wasn’t my fault at all, and you needn’t have mentioned it, Mother,” Edna began, but she was cut short by her mother.

“I didn’t say it was, but it will be if you don’t pop off upstairs.” She waited then until Edna had disappeared. “Tells me she’s had some bother with the buyer or floor manager, all something and nothing, but she thinks one or two of them there are getting their knife into her, and I’ve just been telling her to keep quiet a bit and not give any back answers until it’s blown over. Well,” she continued, settling back in her chair, after disposing of the stout, “I think George told you I was going to see Fred Mitty and his wife.”

“He did,” said Mr. Smeeth. “And how’s Cousin Fred? What’s brought him here?”

“I can’t quite make out what it is. Something to do with advertising and something to do with picture theatres and all that. He didn’t explain it properly. But he’s looking well, and so is his wife, and the daughter. Quite grown up, she is, about Edna’s age but bigger than Edna. But laugh!” Her face lit up. “Laugh! I thought I’d have died. I wish you’d been there, Dad. Oh, dear, dear, dear! Fred was always a lively card, never knew him when he wasn’t, but he gets funnier as he gets older, and he set us off to-night and I thought we’d never have stopped. He started taking off a man he knew in Birmingham--I believe he worked for him--and it seems this man talks on one side of his mouth, can’t help it, you see, and Fred started----”

“I think, if you don’t mind, we’ll have all this to-morrow, Edie,” said Mr. Smeeth, standing up. “I feel like going to bed. I’m tired.”

“Oh, all right, Mister Methodical,” cried Mrs. Smeeth good-humouredly. “Fat lot of good it is saving a joke for you, isn’t it? Never mind, you’ll see for yourself on Saturday. I’ll ask Fred to do it again. They’re all coming up on Saturday night.”

“Oh, they are, are they,” said Mr. Smeeth with an entire lack of enthusiasm.

“Oh, I know what you’d like to say,” she told him, as they moved to the door. “But I had to ask them back, hadn’t I? Besides, we’ve got to have a bit of life sometime.”

That was true enough. He didn’t want to spoil her fun. He hadn’t told her about the rise yet, and he wasn’t sure if he was going to tell her. Somebody had to do the worrying and saving at 17, Chaucer Road. Tum _tum_ tum tum--no, he couldn’t get it. He turned out the light and followed his wife upstairs.

IV

All the following day, he told himself that he would not say a word to Mrs. Smeeth about the extra money until he had made arrangements to save most of it. Once he had committed himself, it would be safe--though not pleasant--to tell her. In the meantime, if she asked him why he wasn’t getting the rise he had been promised, he would have to put her off with some tale or other. That wouldn’t be very pleasant either and not at all simple. To look at Mrs. Smeeth, with her free and easy style, you would think she was easy to lie to, but she wasn’t--or so it seemed to Mr. Smeeth. Whenever he tried he found himself, at his age too, still blushing and stammering. But there it was; that was the plan. And he spent some of his lunch time, all that could be spared from the usual poached egg and cup of coffee, “looking into” one or two things, insurance and National Savings chiefly, and when he returned to the office and made a few notes and calculations in his neat little script, he felt vaguely rich and rather important for once in his life.

The only person in the office who noticed any change in him was Stanley. Stanley’s interest in the affairs of Twigg and Dersingham, never strong at any time, had almost entirely lapsed now that Mr. Golspie was away, and that afternoon he found Mr. Smeeth unbearably tyrannical. He had to comfort himself by imagining a certain dramatic scene in the future, in which Mr. Smeeth, now the victim of a desperate gang, called in despair on the great detective, S. Poole, only to discover, after bowing humbly, that he was face to face with Stanley, the boy he had once bullied and despised. “Yes, Smeeth,” said S. Poole, lighting another cigar, “you little imagined then who it was copying your letters and filling your inkwells. But we will let bygones be bygones. Come, I will rid you of these pests.” And the great S. Poole, after slipping a revolver into the pocket of his fur coat, strode out, followed by an amazed and trembling Smeeth. “Courage, man, courage,” said S. Poole, as he climbed into the driving seat of his powerful roadster. “I can never thank you enough, Mr. Poole----”

“And just get on with your work, Stanley,” said the same voice. But oh!--the difference in intonation. “I told you those letters have to catch the country post. Be ready to slip out with them. Got the envelopes there?”

On his tram, going home, Mr. Smeeth turned the pages of his evening paper, looking for those appeals to “The Saving Man” and “The Small Investor.” One of the advertisements asked him, not for the first time, what he was going to do in the Evening of Life, and though he still had no answer ready, for once he could look at it without feeling himself shrinking somewhere. Already he carried a good insurance for a man in his position; he had a bit, for emergencies, in the Post Office Savings Bank; and now he would have over a pound a week to put away. Now if he did that for ten years, fifteen years, perhaps increased it if the firm went on doing so well and gave him another rise, why, then, surely--and he lost himself in pleasant speculations.

He arrived home to find Edna sitting over the fire, hugging herself in misery, and red and swollen about the eyes.

“Hello, hello,” he cried. “What’s the matter here?”

“Lost my job,” Edna mumbled into the fire.

“Yes, she’s a fine one, isn’t she?” And Mrs. Smeeth bounced into the room with a saucepan in her hand. “I told her to be careful, last night, the way they were getting their knife into her, and in she comes, half an hour ago, and tells me they’ve had a regular dust-up and the long and short of it all is, my lady’s sacked.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” said Edna, who had obviously said this a great many times before.

“Just you go upstairs and tidy yourself up,” cried her mother. “Dinner will be ready in a minute and the face you’ve got now isn’t fit to be seen at a table. It would put us off our food. And don’t start telling me you don’t want any dinner, just because you’ve got sacked. Get along upstairs and don’t keep us waiting all night when you do get up.”

“What’s all this about?” Mr. Smeeth asked, with the quiet despair of a man who has known something like it happen before, and not a few times before. He put on that look familiar to all wives, who are left wondering why men should imagine that domestic life, unlike any other kind of life, ought really to be entirely lacking in disturbing events.

“Look at me with this saucepan in my hand,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, laughing at herself. “Just you sit down and keep calm, and I’ll have dinner on the table in a minute, though what it’ll be like, Lord only knows, the way I’ve been badgered and rushed.”