Part 38

He made a great deal of noise now. Putting out a hand, quite instinctively, to the tap of the gas-fire, he touched something hot in the darkness there, gave a sharp cry, and banged his hand on the floor. Then he stumbled to the window to pull out the paper, and somehow the window stuck and he pushed so hard that when it did open, the rotten old woodwork of the frame partly gave way, and as it suddenly flew open and the night air rushed in, there was a loud crack. The door was noisier still. He was determined to get all the paper away, but it was not easy and he was impatient, and he began pulling away at the knob of the door until at last the door suddenly swung in and he sat down with a bump, the knob still in his hand. It was then that he heard sounds from below, and saw through the open door a light travelling jerkily upwards. The next minute he was looking at the extraordinary figure of Mr. Pelumpton, who was standing outside in his nightshirt, holding a candle.

“Now let’sh ’ave reashon, let’sh ’ave reashon,” said Mr. Pelumpton reproachfully. “Bangin’ and knocking the housh about like that! The mishish thought shomebody was breakin’ in. ’Ave a bit o’ shensh, boy, jusht ’ave a bit o’ shensh! Can’t go on like that, thish time o’ night. It’sh all very well going out an’ ’aving a pint or two an’ coming in late--done it myshelf in me time--but that’sh no reashon for carrying on like that, ish it? Blesh me shoul!--like a nearthquake, jusht like a nearthquake. Now jusht get yourshelf to bed quietly, boy, and let other people shleep even if you can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Turgis told him. “It was an accident. I’m all right. I’m not drunk or anything.”

“Well, you might be in the ratsh, properly in the ratsh, green sherpentsh all round you, the way yer going on,” said Mr. Pelumpton severely, as he withdrew.

In ten minutes, Turgis was fast asleep.

VII

“Well, we’ll have to see,” said Mrs. Pelumpton dubiously. “That’s what we’ll have to do, we’ll have to see.”

Turgis had been trying to explain, without any reference to the real facts, why he hadn’t gone to the office that Saturday morning, why he wasn’t going there again, and why he couldn’t immediately pay Mrs. Pelumpton what he owed her. He had not come down to breakfast until late, and both Pelumptons were convinced that he had been uproariously drunk on the previous night, when he had made all that noise.

“I’m sure they’ll let me have this fortnight’s money all right, Mrs. Pelumpton,” he told her. “And then I’ll settle up at once, before I do anything else.”

Mrs. Pelumpton stopped bustling about for a minute, stood and looked at him, making herself as compact as possible, so that she seemed exactly square from the front; and suddenly said in a startlingly deep voice: “Will you promise me one thing?”

Turgis said he would. He was ready to promise anything to her.

“Well, it’s this. Promise me to keep right off the drink this next week or two.”

“I promise,” he replied promptly. Two glasses of bitter a week were usually enough for him at any time. The Pelumptons were positive, however, that he had been drinking heavily for weeks. Mr. Pelumpton, a beer man himself, said that whisky made you look and behave like that, if you could only get enough of it.

“In or out of work, that ’abit’s bad,” Mrs. Pelumpton continued. “But far, far worse it is, out of work. Keep off it for a bit. Don’t touch a drop. I’m not one of these prohibiters and temperancers--though I did sign the pledge when I was a girl, but then I wouldn’t ’ave touched a drop then anyhow, didn’t like the taste of it--but I do say that a young feller like yourself who’s going to ’ave to look for a job is better without a single drop, if only for the sake of not being smelt.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Pelumpton,” said Turgis, who was hoping that this good advice meant that she was willing to let him stay on while he was looking for another job.

“I know I am. And what’s just ’appened--’cos you can talk about business until you’re blue in the face, but you won’t make me believe you haven’t got into trouble with your little goings-on lately and that’s why they’ve given you the sack--but I say, what’s just ’appened ought to be a lesson. You can’t afford it and you ’aven’t got the ’ead for it, so you’ve just got to let the booze alone. Pa can’t afford it, but I will say ’e’s got the ’ead for it. You ’aven’t. That’s why it’s a lesson. Promise me that, and I’ll let you run on a bit, paying me what you can, while you’re out of a job. We’ve got to live and let live in these times, and I will say that up to lately you’ve been as quiet and reg’lar paying a young chap as I’ve ever let to. And just you keep on Pa’s right side too, for ’e won’t like it, being in business himself you might say and a bit of a stickler, but I’ve got a softer nature and I’m not for turning a young chap out just ’cos he’s got his bit of trouble and can’t pay all he’s agreed to pay----”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Pelumpton,” said Turgis warmly.

“--For a few weeks anyhow,” she added cautiously.

Turgis thanked her again, but with considerable less warmth this time. It might be more than any few weeks before he saw another three pounds a week or anything like it, and the way Mrs. Pelumpton talked before she said that, he had imagined she was ready to let him stay on for months. Still, a few weeks were something. He had dreaded telling her that he had lost his job, had not even got this fortnight’s money, and would have to keep her waiting. He felt a bit better now that he had told her, but nevertheless he was still feeling pretty miserable. He wondered what was happening in the office, whether Mr. Golspie had explained to Mr. Dersingham what had occurred last night, whether they would send his money on to him, whether they would give him a reference. He had exactly eightpence now and he wanted a cigarette badly this morning. It was no use, he would have to have a smoke. So he went down the road for a packet of ten gaspers, and then decided to go and look at some advertisements of jobs and perhaps have a peep at the Labour Exchange. It was one of those uncomfortable streaky days, a minute or two of sunshine, then clouds and a bitter east wind. It was miserable walking about in it with just twopence in your pocket, no job, a terrifying Mr. Golspie (with possible police) somewhere about, and no hope in any direction. When he saw the Labour Exchange, he was sorry he had gone that way, for the very look of it made him feel still more wretched. He hated Labour Exchanges.

It was late when he had dinner, and when it was over and Mrs. Pelumpton was washing and tidying up in that despairing fury at which she always arrived on Saturday, Mr. Pelumpton returned from the pub down the road, immensely oracular, and insisted on talking to Turgis for the next hour. This time Turgis was compelled to stay there and listen, for already he was beginning to feel that he was there on sufferance. Moreover, with only twopence in his pocket, and an east wind blowing outside, he was better off there than he would be anywhere else. Something must have told Mr. Pelumpton this, for he never took his dim boiled eyes off Turgis, and droned on and on, sometimes touching on the dusty mysteries of “dealing,” sometimes offering ridiculous good advice. It was awful. Turgis sat there, steadily hating the old bore. “That’s right, Mr. Pelumpton,” he would say, with dreary politeness, adding to himself: “You silly old devil, you ought to give those whiskers of yours a good wash and brush up.” But there was not much satisfaction in that.

At about half-past three, Mr. Pelumpton’s steady flow was suddenly checked. Somebody was at the front door. Mrs. Pelumpton immediately made a dramatic appearance from nowhere, crying, “You go and see, Pa. It might be Maggie,” and then waited, tense, with lifted brows and open mouth, while Pa shuffled out of the room and along the hall.

“Yersh, that’sh right,” they heard him say. “Come inshide. Jusht a minute.” And then he came shuffling back, so maddeningly deliberate that his wife’s eyes began rolling round with sheer impatience. “Is it Mrs. Foster?” she cried.

“No, it ishn’t Mishish Foshter,” he replied, with dignity. He looked at Turgis. “It’sh a young lady from your offish who’sh been shent to shee you.”

“Take her in the front,” said Mrs. Pelumpton, before Turgis could get out of the room.

It was little Poppy Sellers, and Turgis took her into the front; which only made it all the more queer, for he hardly ever went into that room. It was used only on the most special occasions, and for about three hundred and sixty days of the year it remained a shrouded and mysterious chamber. It housed, behind faded lace curtains, some of Mr. Pelumpton’s best bargains in “pieshesh,” a piano with a pleated silk front, two armchairs that were very shiny and plushy, half a bearskin rug, several books in one glass case, dozens of butterflies in another case, two real oil paintings of waterfalls, and a fine collection of shells, glass paper-weights, wool mats, marble ash-trays, and souvenirs of all the South-Eastern seaside resorts. Above the mantelpiece, and flanked by two tall mirrors that had storks painted on them, Mrs. Pelumpton’s father, so immensely enlarged in sepia that at a first glance he seemed to be a generous view of the Alps, stared down in mild astonishment. The air inside this room was quite different from that of the rest of the house; it did not smell of food at all; it was unlived-in, chilly, with hints of wool and varnish in it. There was a large paper fan in the fireplace, and immediately the two human beings entered the room, a host of indignant specks ran down the folds of this fan, making a queer little flicker of movement and sound in that dim quiet place.

“I’ve brought your money,” said Poppy, bringing an envelope out of her scarlet handbag. She was very smart, this afternoon, in a black and white check coat, a hat nearly the same colour as her handbag, a yellow scarf with red dots in it, and dark silky stockings and shiny black shoes. Not the Japanese style this time--more French. She looked well in that front parlour, sitting in one of the plushy armchairs. “Yes, this is it,” she continued, handing it over. “I think you’ll find that all right. Mr. Smeeth said somebody had better take it, and I said I would, ’cos I have a cousin that lives up here, in Bartholomew Road, and I sometimes come up here, so I said I didn’t mind bringing it, ’cos I know the district, even if I do live a long way off, and I hadn’t anything special to do to-day.” She rattled this off very quickly, as if it were a set piece she had rehearsed a good many times on the way.

“Thanks very much,” said Turgis. Recent events had left him with an imagination that was capable of leaping into life very suddenly. It leaped now. Here was Poppy Sellers bringing his money to him just as he had taken the money to Lena Golspie. She had been ready with a good excuse just as he had. This thought did not immediately pluck him out of his despondency, but it certainly made him feel several inches taller at once. Besides, the kid had made herself look so neat and smart, quite pretty in fact.

“Aren’t you well?” she asked him, looking at him very earnestly.

“I’m not too bright,” he admitted. “Matter of fact, I’ve been a bit off colour for some time. Nothing much, y’know. Nerves, really, that’s what it is. I’m one of those highly strung people I am.”

“You look pale, and you’ve got a mark on your nose, haven’t you?” She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it. “I believe something’s been up. Here, listen,” she continued eagerly, “something’s happened, hasn’t it? I mean, you’re not coming back, are you?”

Turgis admitted sadly that he was not.

“I’ve been puzzling and puzzling my head about it,” she told him, a mounting excitement in her face and voice. “When you didn’t come this morning, Mr. Smeeth said you must be ill, and he wasn’t surprised. And I thought so, too. And Miss Matfield didn’t say anything, and I thought she looked a bit queer, as if she knew something. She does, too, I’m sure, though I don’t know what. She doesn’t tell me much--bit stand-offish, you know, though she’s nice, she really is--but she knows a lot, and something’s been going on with her some time, if you ask me. But, anyhow, Mr. Golspie came in, later on, and he was talking to Mr. Dersingham, and then they sent for Mr. Smeeth, and after a bit, Mr. Smeeth came back and said later on, y’know, just trying to be ordinary like, as if nothing special had happened, that you weren’t coming back. I knew all the time there was something funny about it. And I didn’t see how they’d told you, ’cos you didn’t know last night, did you? Course it’s not my business, I know,” she added, with a wistful note, “but I couldn’t help wondering. And I’m sorry, too.”

“You’re sorry I’m not coming back?”

“Yes, I am,” she declared, tightening her lips, nodding, then looking him full in the face. “I don’t care what anybody says--I am.”

“I’m sorry, too. Can’t be helped, I suppose. I’ve been in trouble.” His voice trembled slightly as a wave of self-pity swept over him.

She kept her eyes fixed on his, and they were dark and round. “Did you--do something?”

He nodded. Already, even in this nod, there was a certain gloomy romantic suggestion.

“Course you needn’t tell me if you don’t want,” she said hastily, “but p’r’aps you’d like to, ’cos I’m not trying to poke my nose in--it’s not that--but I’d reelly, reelly, like to know--’cos--well, it doesn’t seem a bit fair, turning you off like that, and I said so this morning. You’ve always done your work all right, and you knew a lot about it, didn’t you? I’m sure you’ve helped me a lot, and I don’t care who knows it. And I said so straight out. I spoke up for you. They can say what they like about me, but I do stick up for my friends and anybody I like.” Then she lowered her voice. “You didn’t take something, did you?”

“D’you mean--pinch some money?”

“Yes,” she replied, looking down at her brilliant handbag.

“I should think I didn’t. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything to do with Twigg and Dersingham’s at all. It was something--quite different.”

“I see.” She ran a finger up and down the bag. Nothing was said for a minute. As the room, chill and shuttered, waited for somebody to speak, there stole into it all the Saturday afternoon noises of Nathaniel Street, but all faint, muffled. Mrs. Pelumpton’s father stared down at them with mild astonishment. Turgis, sitting up in the other armchair, tapped a foot, and a few more specks stirred in the paper fan. This front room made him feel miserable, hopeless. He looked at the girl, and though she was so quiet now, she seemed delightfully vivid, warm, alive, human. He did not tell himself that, but he felt it.

“Well, I suppose,” she began, grasping her bag properly and making a movement of her body.

“Listen, I’ll tell you what happened,” he said quickly.

“You needn’t if you don’t want, y’know.”

He did want. He told her almost the whole story, as he saw it then, and he did not see it then quite as he had seen it when he had returned in abject misery to his room the previous night. It took on a certain romantic colouring, and, as the history of a poor, virtuous, infatuated young man and a rich, wicked syren, it was not unlike a good many films that both the narrator and his hearer had seen and admired. She listened enthralled, exclaiming now and then, her eyes round with wonder.

Her first question, when he had done, was about Lena. What was she like, and did he still think she was as pretty as all that? This was not an easy question to answer, for he had to convey the impression that Lena was immensely seductive and at the same time to suggest that she had no further attraction for him. But he contrived to answer it, a trifle awkwardly, perhaps, but he satisfied Poppy.

“Course you never ought to have done that,” she cried, thinking of his terrible assault upon the jeering “vamp.” The glance she gave him, however, had more wonder and awe in it than disgust. It made him feel that he was not a man to be trifled with. “That was awful, that was. You didn’t reelly know what you were doing at the time, did you?”

“That’s it. I didn’t. Nerves, y’know. Highly strung. A sort of madness, it was. Can’t imagine now how I did it, ’cos I’ve never been that sort of chap, though, mind you, I’ve always had a temper if I got properly roused. Still, I don’t know how I came to do it, I don’t, really I don’t. Must have been properly mad at the time. Seems strange now, I can tell you, ’cos I don’t feel anything about it now, nothing at all.”

“Well, I don’t say you ought to have done it, ’cos you oughtn’t, and it’s turned out lucky the way it has.” She had a moment of real distress, imagining how it might have turned out. Then she went on to consider other aspects of the matter. “But I must say she very near deserved it, whatever happened, going on the way she did.” She had throughout shown the greatest indignation with Lena. “Horrible, I call it. Some girls haven’t any real feelings at all. Girl I know--she lives near us, and she’s one of these manicurists--she’s just the same. Treats boys and talks about them, too, in the most awful way. If they only heard what she said about them, they’d never look at her again. She’s asking for trouble too, and she’ll get it before long, and it’ll serve her right--I haven’t a bit of sympathy for her. I wouldn’t behave to a boy like that, I don’t care who he was, not if I’d never liked him at all and he was always follering me round and all that. And look at the way she went and encouraged you at first, making herself as cheap as anything--that ought to have told you, but of course boys can never see that.”

“I can see it now,” said Turgis, with the air of a man purged and purified by great suffering, a pale romantic figure.

“Boys haven’t a bit of sense like that,” she cried indignantly. “And you were just as silly as the rest, in that business. Mind you, I can see there’s a good excuse for you, ’cos a girl like that, with her father so well off and able to have all the clothes she wants and make herself look nice all the time--course you think it’s all natural, her looking like that, but it’s having the money and nothing else to do that does it--well, there is some excuse, and I admit it. Fancy you going on with Mr. Golspie’s daughter like that! And I never knew! Doesn’t it just show you?”

Undoubtedly it did. They continued a little longer, dramatically and not unpleasantly, in this strain, and then Miss Sellers asked what time it was, and Turgis, instead of telling her the time, said: “Just a minute. Don’t go. I want to give my landlady some of this money, and I’d rather not keep her waiting for it. I’ll be back in half a minute.”

Mrs. Pelumpton, who was making tea, was very pleased to see the money.

“This young lady works in the same office, you see,” Turgis explained, “and they sent her up with it. We’ve been having a good talk about all the business and all that.”

“Quite so,” said Mrs. Pelumpton, affably but with dignity, as if the very presence of a strange member of her own sex in the house, even though not in the same room, made her put on a special manner, affable, dignified, ladylike. “Perhaps the young lady would like a cup of tea, with yourself--that is, if she cares to take us as she finds us?”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Pelumpton,” cried Turgis. “I’ll go and ask her.”

Miss Sellers was easily persuaded to abandon a projected visit to her cousin in Bartholomew Road, and stayed to tea, during which she and Mrs. Pelumpton discovered, after a great deal of elaborate cross-questioning, that Miss Sellers and her sister had actually stayed for a week in a boarding-house at Clacton that had been kept, three years before they went there, by Mrs. Pelumpton’s sister, whom therefore, they had only missed meeting by two years and ten months. Delighted to discover once more they were living in a world so small, so cosy, Miss Sellers and Mrs. Pelumpton were very pleased with one another. After tea, when the Pelumptons were out of the way, Turgis, though still the same young man, without prospects, without hope, actually went to the length of indulging in that mysterious badinage which is the signal of sexual attraction and interest among the young inarticulate creatures of this country. “What d’you mean?” they cried to one another. “Oh, I don’t mean what _you_ mean!”

Then, at the end of half an hour or so of this, “Well, I _half_ promised to see a girl friend to-night.”

“Oh, well, don’t bother,” he told her. “She can do without you, can’t she, just for to-night?”

“Just for to-night, eh? Well, can’t you do without me too, Mister Cheeky?”

“No, I can’t. I want somebody to cheer me up.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Thanks for the compliment. Anybody will do, eh?”

“No, I didn’t say that. You know I didn’t.”

“Well, you meant it.”

“No, I didn’t. Reelly, I didn’t. Come on. What d’you say?”

“All right then,” she said, turning her perky little head on one side and smiling. Then she looked serious. “Listen, though. If we do go, I must pay for myself. Yes, I must. I believe in that,” she added earnestly, as if she had thought about it for years and had not just invented this rule for herself, knowing only too well that he would be hard up in the near future and that every extra shilling would make a great difference. “I’ll come if you’ll let me pay for myself. There now!”

As they walked down Nathaniel Street, they decided that it must be one of the big West End picture theatres, but could not settle which it should be, and argued pleasantly about it, and she pretended to care more about it than she actually did and he pretended to care less; she was the eager, excited, imploring female, and he was the large, knowing, tolerant, protective male. Out in the smoky blue and gold of the lighted streets, they were more at ease than they had been in the house. Already they may have felt that they were going further together now than the way to the remotest picture theatre could take them. Perhaps this was the best day’s work in one or other of their lives; perhaps the worst. Saturday night: the children of the pavements and chimney-pots came pouring out, seeking adventure, entertainment, profit or forgetfulness in the vast impersonal thunder and glare of the city; and soon these two were lost in the crowd.

_Chapter Eleven_: THEY GO HOME

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