Part 3

“No, they’re sending somebody. Good job, too! We don’t want you off half the morning. You’ll stop in and do a bit of work, my son, for a change. Do you good.”

“What work?” demanded Stanley, with scorn.

“By jingo, I like that!” cried Turgis. “There’s plenty to do, if you’ll only look for it instead of dodging it. You ask Smeethy, he’ll find you some. Haven’t you got enough? You can do some of mine, if you like. I’ve got more than I want.”

Stanley changed the subject. “I say,” he began, grinning, “you ought to have heard old Ma Cross on about that note. She let herself go all right, didn’t she just! Oo, you ought to have heard her.”

“What did she say?” Turgis inquired. But he did it very languidly, just to show that what amused small fry like Stanley might not amuse him.

At that moment, however, they heard the outer door opening, and the next moment the cause of all the trouble, Miss Matfield herself, walked in. She flung down a library book, her large handbag, and a pair of gloves on her table, then marched over to her hook and removed her coat and hat, while the other two waited in silence. They were both rather frightened of Miss Matfield. Even Mr. Smeeth and Mr. Dersingham himself were rather frightened of Miss Matfield.

“_Good_ morning,” she cried, looking from one to the other of them, and, as usual, putting a disturbingly ironical inflection into her tones. “Are we all very well this morning? Well, I’m not,” and here, her voice changed. “O Lord! I thought I’d never get here. That bus journey gets fouler every morning, slower and slower and fouler and fouler.” She sat down opposite her machine, but took no notice of it.

“You ought to try the Tube,” Turgis suggested, not very boldly or hopefully. He had made this suggestion before. Everything had been said before, and they all knew it.

“Oh, I can’t bear the Tube.” Once more she seemed to annihilate the whole vast organisation.

It was now Stanley’s turn. “Oo, I like it. I think it’s exciting. I wish they had ’em where we live.”

Miss Matfield was now busy rummaging in her handbag, and all she said was “Curse!” rather like a villain in an old-fashioned melodrama. It is only these strictly modern young ladies, who live their own life by pounding a typewriter all day and then retiring to tiny bed-sitting rooms in clubs, these beings who are supposed to be the inheritors of the earth, who can afford to talk like villains in old-fashioned melodramas. Miss Matfield, after a final and unsuccessful rummage, said “Curse!” again, then closed the bag with a sharp snap, seized her gloves, and marched them over to her coat. The other two said nothing, but looked at her. What they saw was a girl of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, or even twenty-nine, with dark bobbed hair, decided eyebrows, a smouldering eye, a jutting nose, a mouth that was a discontented crimson curve, and a firm round chin that was ready to double itself at any moment. She was not pretty, but she might have been handsome if somebody had kept telling her she was pretty. She was a trifle taller and bigger-boned than the average girl of her class and type, with a good neck and good shoulders, but her figure as a whole--and it was plain to the view in her belted orange-coloured jumper, her short dark skirt, and artfully silky stockings--was perhaps too top-heavy, too masterful in the bust for the flattened calves below, to please everybody. (Including that distant and wistful connoisseur, Turgis, who by making an effort at times was able to see her as a female figure and not as a personality.) For the rest, her face, her voice, her manner, all pointed to the conclusion that Lilian Matfield nursed some huge, some overwhelming grievance against life, but though she gave tongue to a thousand little grievances every day, she never mentioned the monster. But there it was, raging away, when she was complaining or being bitter about everything; and there it was, raging away more furiously than ever, when she was being bright and jolly, which was not often, and hardly at all during business hours.

“The char must have got my note,” she announced on her return to her table, “but I must say she doesn’t seem to have done much about it. Look at that. This is the foulest office I’ve ever worked in. She never makes any attempt to clean it properly. All she’s done now is to walk round with a duster. And we’ve got to spend all day in the beastly place, all filthy, just because she won’t take the least trouble. Well, I’m going to make a row about it.”

“She got it all right,” cried Stanley, delighted to be important and to make a little trouble for somebody. “You ought to have heard her. Didn’t she go on!” And, in order to show exactly how she did go on, he opened his mouth and his eyes still wider. But then he stopped. The outer door had been opened, and feet were being wiped. That meant that Mr. Smeeth had arrived, and Mr. Smeeth liked to find Stanley busy during these first few minutes. So Stanley broke off, and dashed at a bit of work he had saved for this moment.

“_Good_ morning, everybody,” said Mr. Smeeth, putting down his hat and his folded newspaper, and then rubbing his hands. “It’s getting a bit nippy in the mornings now, isn’t it? Real autumn weather.”

III

You could tell at once, by the way in which Mr. Smeeth entered the office that his attitude towards Twigg & Dersingham was quite different from that of his young colleagues. They came because they had to come; even if they rushed in, there was still a faint air of reluctance about them; and there was something in their demeanour that suggested they knew quite well that they were shedding a part of themselves, and that the most valuable part, leaving it behind, somewhere near the street door, where it would wait for them to pick it up again when the day’s work was done. In short, Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham had merely hired their services. But Mr. Smeeth obviously thought of himself as a real factor of the entity known as Twigg & Dersingham: he was their Mr. Smeeth. When he entered the office, he did not dwindle, he grew; he was more himself than he was in the street outside. Thus, he had a gratitude, a zest, an eagerness, that could not be found in the others, resenting as they did at heart the temporary loss of their larger and brighter selves. They merely came to earn their money, more or less. Mr. Smeeth came to work.

His appearance was deceptive. He looked what he ought to have been, in the opinion of a few thousand hasty and foolish observers of this life, and what he was not--a grey drudge. They could easily see him as a drab ageing fellow for ever toiling away at figures of no importance, as a creature of the little foggy City street, of crusted ink-pots and dusty ledgers and day books, as a typical troglodyte of this dingy and absurd civilisation. Angel Pavement and its kind, too hot and airless in summer, too raw in winter, too wet in spring, and too smoky and foggy in autumn, assisted by long hours of artificial light, by hasty breakfasts and illusory lunches, by walks in boots made of sodden cardboard and rides in germ-haunted buses, by fuss all day and worry at night, had blanched the whole man, had thinned his hair and turned it grey, wrinkled his forehead and the space at each side of his short grey moustache, put eyeglasses at one end of his nose and slightly sharpened and reddened the other end, and given him a prominent Adam’s apple, drooping shoulders and a narrow chest, pains in his joints, a perpetual slight cough, and a hay-fevered look at least one week out of every ten. Nevertheless, he was not a grey drudge. He did not toil on hopelessly. On the contrary, his days at the office were filled with important and exciting events, all the more important and exciting because they were there in the light, for just beyond them, all round them, was the darkness in which lurked the one great fear, the fear that he might take part no longer in these events, that he might lose his job. Once he stopped being Twigg & Dersingham’s cashier, what was he? He avoided the question by day, but sometimes at night, when he could not sleep, it came to him with all its force and dreadfully illuminated the darkness with little pictures of shabby and broken men, trudging round from office to office, haunting the Labour Exchanges and the newspaper rooms of Free Libraries, and gradually sinking into the workhouse and the gutter.

This fear only threw into brighter relief his present position. He had spent years making neat little columns of figures, entering up ledgers and then balancing them, but this was not drudgery to him. He was a man of figures. He could handle them with astonishing dexterity and certainty. In their small but perfected world, he moved with complete confidence and enjoyed himself. If you only took time and trouble enough, the figures would always work out and balance up, unlike life, which you could not possibly manipulate so that it would work out and balance up. Moreover, he loved the importance, the dignity, of his position. Thirty-five years had passed since he was an office boy, like Stanley, but a trifle smaller and younger; he was a boy from a poor home; and in those days a clerkship in the City still meant something, cashiers and chief clerks still wore silk hats, and to occupy a safe stool and receive your hundred and fifty a year was to have arrived. Mr. Smeeth was now a cashier himself and he was still enjoying his arrival. Somewhere at the back of his mind, that little office boy still lived, to mark the wonder of it. Going round to the bank, where he was known and respected and told it was a fine day or a wet day, was part of the routine of his work, but even now it was something more than that, something to be tasted by the mind and relished. The “Good-morning, Mr. Smeeth,” of the bank cashiers at the counter still gave him a secret little thrill. And, unless the day had gone very badly indeed, he never concluded it, locking the ledger, the cash book, and the japanned box for petty cash, away in the safe and then filling and lighting his pipe, with out being warmed by a feeling that he, Herbert Norman Smeeth, once a mere urchin, then office boy and junior clerk to Willoughby, Tyce & Bragg, then a clerk with the Imperial Trading Co., then for two War years a lance-corporal in the orderly room of the depot of the Middlesex Regiment, and now Twigg & Dersingham’s cashier for the last ten years, had triumphantly arrived. It was, when you came to think of it--as he had once boldly ventured to point out to a friendly fellow boarder at Channel View, Eastbourne (they had stayed up rather late, after their wives had gone upstairs, to split a bottle of beer and exchange confidences)--quite a romance, in its way. And the fear that grew in the dark and came closer to the edge of it to whisper to him, that fear did not make it any less of a romance.

Mr. Smeeth now unlocked the safe, took out his books and the petty cashbox, looked over the correspondence and attended to that part meant for him, made a note that Brown & Gorstein, and North-Western and Trades Furnishing Co., and Nickman & Sons had not fulfilled their promises and sent cheques, dealt with the two small cheques that some other people had sent, gave Miss Matfield three letters to type, asked Turgis to telephone to Briggs Brothers and the London and North-Eastern Railway, delighted Stanley by giving him a message to take out, and, in short, plunged into the day’s work and set Twigg & Dersingham in motion, even though Twigg had been quiet and unstirring for years in Streatham Cemetery, and the present Mr. Dersingham was only in motion yet on the District Railway, on his way to the office.

Stanley disappeared, as usual, like a shell from a gun, before Mr. Smeeth could possibly change his mind; Miss Matfield contemptuously rattled off her letters (the little _ping_ of the typewriter bell sounding like a repeated ironical exclamation); Turgis talked down the telephone rather gloomily; and Mr. Smeeth made the neatest little figures, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink, and opened more and more books on his high desk. And for ten minutes or so, no word was spoken that had not immediate reference to the affairs of the office.

They were interrupted by the entrance of yet another employee of the firm. This was Goath, the senior traveller, whose job it was to visit all the cabinet-makers in London and the home counties and to persuade them to buy the veneers and inlays of Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham. He entered in the usual fashion, came trailing in, with one large flat foot feeling reluctantly for the new bit of ground and the other large flat foot equally reluctantly taking leave of the old bit of ground. He was smoking the usual cigarette, which left a faint and fading spurt of smoke vanishing happily into nothing behind him. He wore the same shapeless old overcoat, bagging monstrously at the pockets, and he wore it in the same way, that is, almost hanging off his drooping shoulders. The familiar dusty bowler hat was tilted, not cheerfully but depressingly, back from his furrowed and pimply forehead. He did what he always did. He turned upon the activities of the office a dull and knowing eye, an eye like a wet morning in February, just as damp and grey and hopeless, and at once these activities seemed to dwindle, to shrink from it. Mr. Dersingham had often said to Mr. Smeeth, and Mr. Smeeth had often said to Mr. Dersingham, that what Goath didn’t know about selling inlays and veneers and the like was not worth knowing. But when you looked at him standing there, it seemed as if what he did know was also not worth knowing: it had had such a bad effect upon him. Everything about Goath was the same as usual except his appearance at this hour, on this day, for Goath only called at the office, his base of operations, on certain days and this was not one of them.

“Busy are’n’cher,” said Goath. It was not an inquiry. It was not a greeting. It was a kind of gloomy sneer.

Mr. Smeeth laid down his pen. “Hello, what are you doing here?”

“Told to come,” replied Goath. “Mr. Dersingham told me to come in this morning--wanted to see me.”

“Oh, did he?” It was obvious from Mr. Smeeth’s tone that he did not like the look of this, quite apart from not liking the look of Mr. Goath, for which he can hardly be blamed.

“He did. Why he did, I don’t know,” Goath continued drearily, “so don’t ask me because I can’t tell you. He simply said, ‘Come here first thing in the morning the day after to-morrow’--that’s this morning now--and I’ve come. And I’ve got here too early, into the bargain.”

“Mr. Dersingham didn’t tell me anything about it,” said Mr. Smeeth, with the air of a man who liked to be told something about it.

Goath gave a ferocious pull at the last half inch of his cigarette and made a horrible hissing noise. “He wanted to make it a surprise--a pleasant little surprise for you all--that’s it.” And as he said this he tried to make Miss Matfield, who had just got up from her machine, accept a friendly leer, but all that it encountered was a stare like a high wall with broken glass along the top.

Mr. Smeeth ran a finger backwards and forwards along his lower lip, a trick of his in a reflective moment. Now that he had looked at it a little longer, he plainly liked it still less. But then, after a short pause, he brightened up. “Perhaps he’s got some new stuff to show you? Perhaps he wants to ask you something about it?”

“Haven’t heard of anything new. I’d have heard. It always gets round; everything gets round: ‘No good showing us that,’ they say. ‘Show us some of this new stuff. That’s what we want,’ they tell you. That’s what they say, soon enough. And they don’t know what they want, not half their time, they don’t. There’s fellers making furniture now--_and_ making money out of it--who don’t know a good bit of wood from a bit of oilcloth. How they get away with it,” Goath concluded mournfully, “beats me.”

“That’s right, Goath,” said Mr. Smeeth. “It beats me, too. It’s cheek that does it, really, that’s my opinion--cheek, and a bit of luck. But honestly now, how are things going? You’ve been on the North London round this time, haven’t you? How’s it going? Better than last time, eh?”

“No,” the other replied, with all the satisfaction of the confirmed pessimist. “Worse.” He took off his bowler hat and for once examined it with the distaste it deserved. “Much worse.”

Mr. Smeeth’s face fell at once, and he made a tut-tut-tutting noise. “That’s bad.”

“Bloody bad, I call it, if Ethel here’ll excuse me.”

Miss Matfield turned on him at once. “My name is Matfield,” she told him. “If you want to say ‘bloody’ you can, for all I care, but I’m not ‘Ethel here’ or Ethel anywhere else, and I don’t intend to be.”

“I’m crushed,” said Goath, putting on a faint and entirely repulsive air of vocal dandyism, “quite crushed.” But, being in his fifties, indeed, having apparently been in them almost longer than anybody else has ever been, and a hardened offender, he was not crushed.

“That’s all right, Miss Matfield,” Mr. Smeeth told her, uncomfortably. And he gave Goath a warning little frown.

“Well, as I was saying,” Goath continued, “things are rotten. I’ve been in the trade thirty years, and I’ve never known ’em worse. If the price is right, then the stuff’s wrong. And if the stuff’s right, the price’s wrong. And it’s mostly the price. They want it cheap now, want it given away, no mistake about it, though the money they’re getting for the finished article is more than ever. You look at what furniture’s fetching now, retail, and then go and hear some of ’em talk--make you sick. It would--make you sick.”

“I believe you,” Mr. Smeeth assured him earnestly. Then he hesitated. “But--after all--somebody must be selling veneers, even if the inlays have gone out a bit. I mean, they’ve got to buy it from somebody, haven’t they?”

“Well, whether they have or they haven’t, all I can say is, they’re not buying it from _me_. And I’ve been going to some of ’em for twenty years. Yes, I have, young feller,” he added, for some unaccountable reason catching the eye of Turgis and talking to him quite sternly, “for twenty years. I was calling on some of them houses--Moses & Stott, f’r’instance--when you was a baby or nothing at all.”

“It’s a long time, isn’t it, Mr. Goath?” replied Turgis, proud to be noticed by such terrific seniority and rather proud, too, to think that though he might not be anybody of much importance even now, at least he was more than a baby or nothing at all.

“You’re right, young feller,” said Mr. Goath with heavy patronage, “it _is_ a long time. Hello! Is this him?”

But the person who had just opened the outer door and was now standing at the other side of the frosted glass partition was obviously not Mr. Dersingham, so Turgis, in the absence of Stanley, went out to discover the caller’s business.

“Good-morning,” said a brisk but ingratiating voice. “Any typewriter supplies? Ribbons, carbons, wax stencil sheets, brushes, rubbers?”

“Not this morning, thank you,” said Turgis.

“Rubbers, brushes, stencil sheets, best quality papers, carbons? Ribbons?”

“No, not this morning.”

“Well,” said the voice, a little less brisk and ingratiating now, “if you should want any typewriter supplies any time, here’s my card. Good-morning.”

“It’s surprising the number of those chaps we get round,” said Mr. Smeeth, rather sadly, “all trying to sell the same bits of things. If you bought anything, what would it amount to? A shilling or two, that’s all. It beats me how they make anything out of it. Smart, well-dressed chaps too, some of them. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t.”

“You’d think that chap was making thousands a year,” said Turgis, speaking in an aggrieved tone, as if somehow his own shabbiness came into the question. “He’s always all dressed up, spats and everything. He comes round here about once a fortnight and we’ve never bought anything from him yet.”

“He’s ’oping, that’s what he’s doing, just ’oping, like me,” Mr. Goath remarked grimly. “Only it doesn’t run to spats with me. I’d better try ’em, then I might get a big order or two. ‘Here’s old Goath with spats on,’ they’d be saying up Bethnal Green way. ‘We’ll have to give him an order now.’ P’r’aps they would. And then again, p’r’aps they wouldn’t. Ah well--” and he yawned hugely and kept his eyes closed even after the yawn was done--“I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.” He sent this rumbling away into the mournful distance. “Fact is, some of these mornings my inside’s all wrong, dead rotten. Doctor says it’s liver--that’s all because I take a drop of whisky--but I say it’s ’eart. And whether it’s ’eart or liver, I’m going to sit down.”

The room sank into a kind of mild sadness, rather like that of the atmosphere outside, where rich autumn had been bleached and deadened into a mere smokiness and gathering grey twilight, in which the occasional smell of a sodden dead leaf came like a remembrance of another world, as startling as a spent arrow from some battle still raging in the sun.

The faces of the three men--Mr. Smeeth’s grey oval, Goath’s purpled pulp, Turgis’s tarnished youth--sank with the room, were half frozen into immobility, and seemed for a moment or two to be vacant, staring into nothing. Miss Matfield, who had risen from her table, saw it all for one queer second tangled with a whole jumble of deathly images: they were all under a spell, powerless to stir while the sky rained soot, dust poured from every crevice, and cobwebs wound about them. She wanted to scream. Instead, quite without thinking, she swept off her table a little brass box crammed with paper fasteners, and the clatter it made restored her to her normal senses.

“Sorry!” she cried harshly, stooping.

“And I should think so,” said Goath.

“That should be Mr. Dersingham,” said Mr. Smeeth, cocking an ear towards the approaching footsteps.

Mr. Dersingham put his head inside the general office. “Good morning, everybody,” he cried. “You’re here then, Goath. Are the letters in my room, Turgis? All right then, I’ll just have a peep at them, and then I want to see you, Goath, and you too, Smeeth. I’ll give you a shout when I’m ready. Stanley about?... All right--doesn’t matter if he isn’t. Send him in when he comes. I’ve forgotten to buy some cigarettes. I may want you in about five minutes, Miss Matfield. And if a man called Bronse rings up for me, don’t put him through. Tell him I’m out. Oh--and I say--Smeeth, just make out a what-you-call-it, will you--a statement of outstanding accounts--you know, just rough and ready? I shall want that. Anything come this morning? It doesn’t matter, though; you can tell me later.”

“And if I know anything,” Mr. Goath mumbled, when the head of Mr. Dersingham had been withdrawn, “that won’t take you long, Smeeth--telling how much you’ve got in this morning.”

“It won’t,” said Mr. Smeeth cheerlessly.

IV