Part 31

“Home to bed!” the other sneered. “T-t-t-t-t-talk like a dam’ fool. Bed!” Then he recollected himself. “All I wanner do is to wish thish young lady a Hap-py New Year.” And he made a clutch at her.

This time Mr. Golspie instantly pinned both the man’s arms to his side with so powerful a grasp that the man cried out. “Talk like a dam’ fool, do I?” said Mr. Golspie, pushing his face forward. “If you don’t make yourself scarce, you’ll start the worst new year you ever remembered. See?” And he shook the man. “See?” And with that, he sent the man flying back, took three or four steps forward to see if any more persuasion was needed, and when he saw it was not--for the man had obviously had quite enough of Mr. Golspie--he returned to Miss Matfield’s side. “I’ve rung up for a taxi,” he said calmly. “There’s a telephone in there where I had my hat and coat. It’ll be here in a minute. We’ll wait just outside and get a breath of fresh air.”

Miss Matfield, who had been half frightened, half elated by the little scene, and now, what with the wine and the dancing and the music and the embracing and the general excitement of the long evening, was in a fantastic condition, tired and excited and timid and audacious and thrilled all at once, followed her brutal or heroic friend out of the studio and into the shadow of the neighbouring house. Just before the shadow ended, he stopped. “We can wait here as well as anywhere,” he said.

She did not tell him that it would be still more sensible to wait at the front gate. She stopped, and said nothing.

“Well, that wasn’t bad,” he said, “though I’d had enough of it when you said you had to go. They’ll keep it up till the milk comes. I shouldn’t have gone, though, if you hadn’t said you’d come with me. If you want to know my opinion, we’ve had a good Old Year’s Night. We’ve got to see more of each other.”

“Oh, have we?” She was in no condition to be femininely cool and mocking, but she did her best.

“Yes, of course we have,” he replied coolly. “You’re the sort of girl I like, and I don’t often find one.”

“Thank you for the compliment,” she said, and was instantly annoyed with herself for sounding so feeble.

“Well, Miss Matfield--oh, damn it, I can’t keep calling you Miss Matfield, not out of the office, anyhow. What’s your other name?”

“Lilian,” she replied, in a tiny voice.

“That’s good--Lilian. Well, Lilian, now that we’re out of that monkey house in there, with everybody snatching and pecking at each other, I can wish you a proper Happy New Year.” And, saying no more, he swept her to him, kissed her several times, and held her close, so close that she could hardly breathe.

She could not have described it as being either pleasant or unpleasant. It was not an experience that could fall into such easy categories. It could not be tasted, examined, reported on, like most of Miss Matfield’s experiences. If it belonged anywhere, it belonged to the fire, flood and earthquake department. Her quickening blood faced and replied to this huge masculine onslaught, but the rest of her was simply dazed and shaken.

“There’s our taxi,” he said, breathing hard, but otherwise cool enough. “What’s the address?”

Inside the taxi, she suddenly felt very tired and quite disinclined to talk. She drooped, leaned against him, and could only repeat to herself that it was all quite absurd, though all the time she knew very well that whatever else it might be, it was not absurd. Mr. Golspie was quiet too, though in that little enclosed space he seemed now a gigantically vital creature, a being essentially different from herself, a huge throbbing engine of a man.

“Getting near your place?” he inquired, as the taxi began to mount the hill.

“Yes, it’s only about half-way up this hill.”

“We’ll have some more nights out together, shall we? Not all like this, y’know. Just the two of us, roaming round a bit, going to a show or two, and so on. What d’you say?”

“Yes, I’d like to. In fact--I’d love it.” She glanced out of the window, then rapped on it. “We’re just outside now. Please, don’t come out. No, no more. All right then--there! Good-bye--and--and thank you for my nice big dinner.”

The dance was over at the Club and most of the lights were out, but a few girls were still drifting about the hall and chattering softly on their way upstairs.

“Hello, Matfield!” somebody cried. “Happy New Year!”

Would it be? It had begun strangely enough. Now that she was back in the familiar and despised Burpenfield atmosphere, the night’s antics ought to have appeared in retrospect gayer and more delightfully adventurous than ever, with Mr. Golspie directing them like a droll and massive fairy prince; but oddly enough, they cut no such figure and she found herself wanting to avoid the thought of them. As she slowly climbed the darkening stairs she shivered a little. She was tired, rather cold, and her head ached. There floated into her mind, as if borne there by white virginal sails, the comforting thought of aspirin and her hot water bottle.

VI

When he asked her, two days later, to spend another evening with him, she gladly accepted, although she had told herself several times before that she would refuse; and after that they spent a good deal of time together. They would have dinner somewhere, and then amuse themselves by visiting some show of his choice. They saw the new Jerry Jerningham musical comedy and a crook play; they went twice to the Colladium; they tried a Talkie or two; and one exciting night he took her to a big boxing match. She never really learned a great deal about him; he would talk about odd experiences he had had by the hour, but he remained mysterious; she never discovered what his plans were, and at times she suspected that he did not intend to stay in England much longer, but this suspicion was only based on casual vague remarks; she never went near his flat, never met his daughter, and never heard a single word from him about his dead wife, if indeed she was dead; and yet she felt she knew him as she had never known a man before. Sometimes he was simply friendly or uncle-ish, dismissing her with a pat on the shoulder or a squeeze of the arm; sometimes he turned cynically and grossly amorous, and when he tried to paw her and she repulsed him, he jeered at her and said things that were all the more brutal because there was in them a hard core of truth, and then she saw him as a gross middle-aged toper, loathed him, and despised herself for having anything to do with him; but then, at other times, after a happy exciting evening, he would reach out to her in sudden passion and her own mood would flare up to match with his, and in some little patch of darkness or in the taxi going home, they would kiss and clutch and strain to one another, without a single word of love passing between them, and she would be left shaken and gasping, unable to decide whether she was a woman who was falling in love with this strange unlikely man or a crazy little fool who had just had too much excitement and wine, who ought to go and have a good hot bath and learn sense and decency. And that was all, so far, though even she guessed it could not go on like that. Meanwhile, between these curious expeditions, she chatted and grumbled as usual at the Club, wrote home in the old strain once a week, and quietly worked away at the office, where nobody knew what was happening to her.

Then, one night, as he took her back to the Club, he said, quite casually: “I see they’re having a nice fine spell on the South Coast. What about a trip down there next week-end, Lilian? Might get hold of a car.”

“Oh yes,” she cried at once, without thinking, for week-ends out of London were her dream, even in January. “Let’s do that.”

“Is it a bargain?” he said quickly, triumphantly.

And then she realised what it meant. “No, no. I’m sorry. I spoke without thinking.”

“Ah, she spoke without thinking, did she? You do far too much thinking. Girls shouldn’t think too much, not good-looking ones, anyhow. When I first met you, you’d done nothing but think for a long time, and you weren’t looking too cheerful on it.”

She made no reply. She was annoyed, partly because she was compelled to recognise the truth behind this little jeer. When he talked about her in his casual, rather brutal fashion, he had a strange knack of fastening upon some unpleasant truth. He seemed to take aim quite wildly, but somewhere in her mind, a bell rang nearly every time.

He changed his tone now. “Oh, come on. Nobody’s going to hurt you. Let’s enjoy ourselves while we’re here.”

“No, thank you,” she said quietly, though she found it far more difficult to resist this kind of appeal.

He pressed her.

“No, I won’t. Sometime, perhaps. But not now. No, I mean it.”

“Well, I’m disappointed in you. Still, I’ll try again. Otherwise, y’know, you might regret saying that, some day. Oh, you can laugh----”

“I might well laugh. I think men are the limit. You just want your own way, no matter what it costs--to me, and you’re quite hurt and disappointed because you can’t have it, and anybody would think to hear you that you’d been spending weeks thinking it all out purely for my benefit.”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Golspie cheerfully, and she knew, though she could not see him properly, that he was grinning. “Just what I have been doing. That’s why I’m disappointed.”

“And that’s why I’m laughing,” she retorted, though she did not feel like laughing now. “At your impudent selfishness. Marvellous!”

“And I tell you, young woman, you might regret it one day. I’m going to ask you again. You think it over.”

“I won’t.”

But she did think it over, and unfortunately she began that very night, so that it was hours and hours before she got to sleep. Her angry taut body refused to relax; her head was a huge hot ring round which her thoughts went galloping dustily; and as she turned in the uneasy darkness she heard the late taxis and cars go hooting far away, melancholy hateful sounds in the deep night, like flying rumours of disaster.

_Chapter Nine_: MR. SMEETH IS WORRIED

I

“Where you going to?” asked Mr. Smeeth, turning round in his chair to look at his wife, who had suddenly made her appearance in the doorway, wearing her hat and coat. She was still flushed with temper. It was surprising how young and smart she looked. Still, she could not go on like that, no matter how young and smart she looked.

“Out,” she replied, with that special look and special voice she had for him when they had quarrelled. Oh dear!

“Yes, I know that,” he pointed out, “but where you going to?”

Up she blazed then, with her colour flaming and her fine blue eyes flashing at him: “Just _out_, and that’s enough for you. Begrudge every penny you give me, keep me as short as you possibly can, tell me I mustn’t buy this and mustn’t buy that, go peeping and spying about and then lose your silly temper because you’ve seen something you don’t like to see--though--goodness me!--there can’t be a woman in this street who hasn’t a few bills like that in the house, and most of them a lot more and instalments, too, to pay and their husbands not bringing in anything like what you are----” Here Mrs. Smeeth stopped, not because this fine rhetorical sentence had got out of control (it had, but she was capable of finishing it somehow), but simply because she wanted to draw a deep breath. “And then you want to know where I’m going! I suppose you’d like me to give an account of that as well, wouldn’t you? Yes, of course. Oh, of course!” Her head wagged as she brought out these vast sneers. “That would be very nice for you, wouldn’t it? I’ll come and ask if I can spend a penny or tuppence. Then I’ll ask if I can walk down the road----”

“Oh, don’t be so silly, Edie,” cried Mr. Smeeth, who hated this sort of wild ridiculous talk and could not see what good it did. Even after all these years, he was still innocent enough to imagine that his wife was trying to argue and failing absurdly, and he did not realise that she was merely exploding into speech.

“Don’t be so silly!” she repeated indignantly, at the same time coming forward into the room. “I’d like to ask anybody who’s the silly one here. They’d soon tell you. And I’d rather be silly than mean. Yes--_mean_. If you’re not careful, Herbert Smeeth, you’ll soon be too mean to live. Pinching and scraping as if you didn’t know where the next penny was coming from! And the more money you’re getting, the worse you are. It’s growing on you, this meanness. My words, I’d like you to be married to some women, that’s all. They’d teach you something about spending.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” he said crossly, “’cos I wouldn’t have it, wouldn’t have it for a single minute. I’d soon put a stop to _their_ little games. As for being mean, you know as well as I do, Edie, I’m not mean, and never have been. There’s nothing you’ve ever really wanted, or the children either, you haven’t had. But somebody’s got to be careful, that’s all. We’re not made of money. When I got this rise, I hoped we’d begin to save properly. Anybody’d think to hear you talk they’d given me the Bank of England instead of another pound a week. Have a bit of sense, Edie. If we’re going to spend every penny we have now and get into debt, where are we going to be if anything happens to us? Just tell me that.”

“And what is going to happen to us? Bless me, the way you talk! A proper old Jonah you’re turning into! You give me the pip, Dad, honestly you do. Anybody’d think to hear _you_ talk that we’ll have to sell up any day. You can’t enjoy yourself a minute for thinking about what might happen to you the year after next or sometime. We’ve only got to live once and we’ve only got to die once, and for heaven’s sake let’s enjoy ourselves while we can, I say.”

“Yes, and when we can’t--what then? I’ve heard this kind of talk before, and I know where it lands people. And anyhow, I can enjoy myself as well as the next, only I can do it sensibly and I don’t need to spend every penny we get and go and ask any Fred Mittys to help me to do it.”

“That’s right. Bring him in. I’ve been waiting for that, I’ve just been waiting for that. I wondered how long you’d be able to keep Fred Mitty out of this. That’s you all over. You got your knife into him the first time he came here, and after that of course he had to be blamed for everything. Go on. Don’t mind me. Why don’t you say I give him all my housekeeping money, and have done with it. Go on.”

“Well, I’ll say this,” said Mr. Smeeth, his temper rising. “That bill from Sorley’s there’s been all this bother about wouldn’t have been that size and would have been paid before now, if you hadn’t taken it into your head to ask Mitty and his wife and their guzzling pals up here those two nights round Christmas. It’s bad enough them coming here at all--most men wouldn’t have it for a minute, not if they couldn’t stand the sight of ’em and never stayed in the house when they were there, like me--but it’s fifty times worse when you go and run yourself into debt to do it, just so they can all swill it down at my expense. It’s not good enough, and you know it isn’t.”

“Oh, isn’t it? Well, next time Christmas comes round, I’ll tell Fred and everybody else to keep away, and we’ll all go into the workhouse, and then you’ll be satisfied. If you wasn’t getting too mean to live, you’d have thought nothing about it. You talk as if I owed Sorley’s about fifty pounds. Three pounds fifteen, that’s all it is, and you make all this bother.”

“Well, it’s three pound fifteen more than you can pay, it seems,” he retorted.

“Who says it is? I haven’t even asked you to pay it yet. Keep your money. I can pay it all right in time. Sorley’s can wait, for all I care.”

“Well, they can’t for all I care. I believe in paying cash down and no debts running on, always have done, and you know it. And I’ll have that to pay, just because you’ve decided to open a free pub for Mitty and his fine little lot. That’s what it amounts to.”

“That’s right, start again now. You can argue with yourself for an hour or two, and see how you like it. I’m going out. And if you want to know, I’ll tell you where I’m going. I’m going,” she added deliberately, “down to Fred Mitty’s.”

He was furious, but he knew that he could not prevent her from going. He looked at her, and he had to twist round in his chair, for she had retreated towards the door: “Well, see you come back sober,” he said.

“What’s that?”

But he did not repeat it. He wished it unsaid. The instant after it had slipped out, he wanted to call it back. And, for all her “What’s that?” she had heard him all right; she was staring at him now, with some of her high colour gone and her mouth curiously drawn down; her whole attitude was different from what it had been during their noisy argument; she was really hurt, this time; he had gone too far, miles and miles too far.

“Yes, I heard you, though,” she said quietly, “and it’s the nastiest thing, by a long, long way, that you’ve said to me in twenty years. Did you ever know me come back in any other way but sober?”

“No, no,” he muttered. “I’m sorry ... bit of a joke.” He couldn’t look her in the face.

“Bit of a joke! I wish it was. But it wasn’t. You meant it, Herbert Smeeth. You meant to be as nasty as you could be. There’s only another thing worse you could say to your wife, and you’d better hurry up and get that said.”

“I tell you, I’m sorry.” He got up from his chair now, and looked at her, mumbling something about “going too far.”

“Yes, and I’m sorry too,” she said bitterly. “I didn’t think you’d got a nasty thing like that in your head to say. Oh, I know it slipped out, and now you wish it hadn’t. But it oughtn’t to have been there to slip out. That’s what hurts me.”

“Well, after all, you’ve as good as called me a miser--or at any rate, a mean devil--half a dozen times to-night,” he told her, but not with much confidence.

“Oh!--that’s different--and you know it is.”

“I don’t see that. Still, if you think so, all I can say, Edie, is--I’m sorry.”

But before he had finished, she had gone, slamming the door contemptuously behind her. A few seconds later, she was outside the house. Mr. Smeeth returned wretchedly to his chair by the fire. There was nothing he disliked more than a quarrel with his wife, and this looked like being a particularly bad one. That remark of his would, he knew, take some living down. If she had been a woman who never took a drink at all, there would have been nothing in that remark; but she liked a drink or two, especially in company, and was liable at times to get flushed and excited, as she well knew herself; and if he had thought for months, he could not have said a thing that would have hurt her more. He was still sorry that he had said it, though there was one part of him that could not help enjoying the fact that the shot had told so well. “That got home on her all right, didn’t it?” it chuckled, even while the rest of him, the part that loved Mrs. Smeeth and was her willing slave, grieved and repented. Mr. Smeeth did not often swear, but now he called Fred Mitty, under his breath, every foul name at his command. That earlier argument would not have taken such a bad turn if it had not been for Mitty. They had had these little squabbles about money before, like most couples, he imagined, one of whom is nearly always a spender and the other a saver. This had been a bit more serious than most of their squabbles, if only because the extra money had made her all the more eager to spend and had made him all the more anxious to begin saving. But Mitty and his wife even came into this part of the quarrel, for the whole thing began when he came across that bill from Sorley’s for three pounds fifteen, which she had not paid and couldn’t pay, and Sorley’s off licence and Mr. and Mrs. Swilling Mitty and their bright pals had been responsible for that bill. He had not seen what they had had because on both occasions, being duly warned, he had taken himself off, once to hear “The Messiah,” and the other time to play whist with Saunders, and had taken care each time, being a peaceable man, to arrive back home as late as possible, when Mitty and Co. were no longer there. He didn’t believe for a moment that his wife was so tremendously fond of the Mitty lot as all that, but just because he had grumbled at first and been a bit heavy-handed about them, she had kept it up, out of devilment and to show her independence. She was like that, if you took the wrong line with her, and he had admitted to himself for a week or two now that, if it was peace and quietness he wanted and not a tussle to decide who was master, he had certainly taken the wrong line.

After brooding over it all for about quarter of an hour, he felt so uncomfortable that if his wife had gone anywhere else but the Mitty’s, he would have gone after her, to call for her and then to try and make it up on the way home. But he had his pride, and it refused to allow him to call for her at the Mitty’s. He tried to dismiss the whole wretched business. He lit his pipe and picked up the evening paper. There was nothing in it he wanted to read and had not read before. He tried the wireless, and the first station plunged him into the middle of a talk on modern sculpture by a young gentleman who was apparently very tired. Finding no satisfaction in him, Mr. Smeeth went over to the other station, which was running a sort of pierrot show. The pierrots themselves seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely and so did their audience, who laughed and clapped unceasingly, but Mr. Smeeth merely felt rather out of it and thought the jokes not good enough, for all that laughing, and the songs not worth all that applause. “Overdoing it,” he muttered darkly at the loud speaker, which replied by bombarding him with more tinny laughter and applause. But he was the master; he had only to make a little movement and the pierrots and their cackling friends were banished at once, simply hurled into silence; and now he made this little movement, and the loud speaker was at once emptied of sound, nothing more than a bit of a horn. He had a book from the Public Library somewhere about, and now, in despair, he found it and began reading. It was _My Singing Years_ by the great soprano, Madame Regina Sarisbury, whom he had once heard in an oratorio years ago, and the young woman at the Library had told him it was a most interesting book, on the word of her sister, who was taking singing lessons and had two or three professional engagements. But so far it had not appealed to him very much. As a matter of fact, he was a reluctant and unenterprising reader, one of those people who hold their books almost at arm’s-length and examine them in a very guarded manner, as if at any moment a sentence might explode with a loud report; and he had probably returned more books half-read than any other member of the local Public Library. Nevertheless, he liked to have a Library book about, and to be discovered reading it.

He was discovered now. Edna came in, pulling off her close-fitting little hat, and fussy and breathless, as usual. In a few minutes, she would swing completely round, becoming slack, indifferent, languid, as if the house bored her. Mr. Smeeth knew this, and it irritated him, though he was very fond of the girl.

“Where’s mother?”

“Your mother’s out.”

“Where’s she gone to? She said she wasn’t going out to-night!”

“The question is, not where she’s gone to, but where you’ve been too,” he said, rather severely, looking at her over the top of his eyeglasses.

Edna did not stop to examine the logic of this, or if she did, she did not comment upon it, being still young enough to recognize the right of parents to talk in this fashion. “Been to the pictures--first house,” she replied.