Part 4

Seated at his table, looking through the morning’s letters, as he was now, Howard Bromport Dersingham might have been accepted as a typical specimen of the smart younger City man. At a first glance, he seemed the brother of all those smart younger City men who figure in advertisements, wearing unique collars, ties, suits, examining the infallible watch, or looking at a vision of less successful men who have never taken the particular correspondence course. He looked much too good for Angel Pavement, where business is merely business and a rather haphazard and dusty affair at that. He would not have seemed out of place in one of those skyscrapers filled with terrifically efficient and successful operatives and administratives, in those regions where business is not at all a haphazard and dusty affair and takes on a solemn air, even a mystical tinge, as if it really explained the universe. It appeared absurd that such a fellow and all his concerns should be sandwiched between the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_.

Another glance or two, however, would reveal the fact that he was only a rough, weakly unfinished sketch of the type. The hard-boiled eye, the chiselled nose, the severely controlled mouth, the masterful chin, all these were missing, and in their place were ordinary masculine English features, neither very good nor very bad, very strong nor very weak. Mr. Dersingham was a year or two under forty, tallish, fairly well-built but beginning to sag a little; his hair, which was now rapidly taking leave of him, was light brown, and his eyes light blue, and they neither sparkled nor pierced but just regarded the world blandly and amiably; he had retained one of those short pruned moustaches that crept under the noses of so many subalterns during the War; and he looked clean, healthy and kind, but a trifle flabby and none too intelligent. It was only after the War, during which he had assisted, with rapidly diminishing enthusiasm, one of the new battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, that he had joined his uncle at Twigg & Dersingham’s. Before the War he had tried various things with no particular success, though he liked to suggest that the War had almost ruined his prospects. (In strict fact, it had improved them, for his uncle would never have taken him into the business, and left it to him when he died, if he had not taken pity on him as a returned hero.) It had been the intention of his parents to send Howard Bromport to Oxford or Cambridge, but they had lost money suddenly and Howard Bromport, no scholar, had failed to obtain a scholarship, so he had been compelled to stroll into business. In spirit, however, he went on to the university, and thus he became one of those men who are haunted by a lost Oxford or Cambridge career. These are not the scholars or the brilliant athletes who have been denied their chance of distinction, but simply the fellows who have been robbed of an opportunity of acquiring more striped ties, college blazers, and tobacco jars decorated with college coats-of-arms, in short, the fervent freshmen who never had the freshman nonsense knocked out of them. They it is who turn into the essential public school “old boys.” Dersingham was a tremendous “old boy.” He never missed a reunion, never failed to renew his stock of school ties. The public school spirit worked for ever in him. He was always ready to do the decent thing--and this was not hard, for he was really a decent, kindly soul, stupid though he might be--not for your sake, not for his own, but “for the sake of the old school.” Strictly speaking, that school, Worrell (one of the second-class public schools, fatally second-class but terrifically public school) is not very old, but it has turned out so many fellows like Dersingham that it has acquired, by verbal association, the antiquity of Eton. Perhaps the shortest definition of Dersingham--and he himself would have asked for no other--was that he was an old Worrelian.

He did not play games very well and was not even a good judge of them, but he liked nothing better than solemn long discussions about them, in which minor pedantries could be thrashed out to the bitter end. Still, he played golf nearly every week-end, a little lawn tennis, and when the Charlatans had to turn out a third side at cricket, he sometimes turned out with them, as a possible slow bowler. (For four weeks every year he dropped the old Worrelian and wore the Charlatan tie.) He smoked considerable quantities of _Sahib Straight Cut Virginia_ cigarettes, drank steadily but not too much for reasonable health and decency, delighted in detective and adventure stories, humorous anecdotes, jigging easy tunes, musical comedies, and good loud talk in which everybody agreed with everybody else except about things that could not matter very much to anybody, disliked literature, art and music, cranks and fanatics of every kind, most foreigners, anything or anybody really mean or cruel (when he could see the meanness and cruelty), and all the opinions that newspaper editors asked him to dislike. He had one or two real friends, a host of acquaintances, and a wife and two children whom he did not understand but of whom he was genuinely fond.

And now, after glancing through the letters, most of which were merely offers to sell him something he did not want, he sat on, stroking his ruddy cheek, looking puzzled and feeling puzzled. After a few minutes of this, he took a sheet of paper and carefully made some notes upon it. He did this all the more carefully because he felt that somehow by writing down what was already in his head, he was really grappling hard with the problem. Having frowned at these notes for another minute or so, he shook himself, set his face in hard business-like lines, reached out for a cigarette and then remembered that there were none, and rang the bell.

Miss Matfield appeared, or rather a notebook and pencil appeared, with a shadow of Miss Matfield in charge of them.

“I’m sorry, Miss Matfield,” said Mr. Dersingham, with true old Worrelian courtesy. “I’d forgotten I’d told you to come in. I think I’d better see Mr. Smeeth and Mr. Goath first, and you can take down some letters afterwards. Will you ask them to come in--and then--er--just carry on with something, eh?”

“Very well,” said Miss Matfield.

“Good!” said Mr. Dersingham. He never felt sure how he ought to handle Miss Matfield, quite apart from the fact that she seemed to him a rather formidable sort of girl. Her father, he knew, was a doctor, only a doctor in the country now, miles from anywhere, but he had once played scrum half with the Alsations. Ordering about the daughter of a scrum half of the Alsations, just as if she was some ordinary little tuppenny-ha’penny typist, was a ticklish business. And that was why Mr. Dersingham added “Good!”: it meant that he knew all about the surgery and the Alsations.

“You fellows had better sit down,” he said to Smeeth and Goath. “We may be some time over this. That’s right. Now wait a minute. Let me see, Goath, you’re making--what? Two hundred, plus commission, that’s it, isn’t it? And you, Smeeth, what are you getting now? Three-fifteen, isn’t it?”

Mr. Smeeth, troubled, admitted that it was. He had seen what was coming all along, had seen it for days and days and horrible nights.

“And what am I making?” Mr. Dersingham gave a short and embarrassed laugh. “Well, you can imagine for yourself, Goath, and you know well enough, Smeeth. Just lately I’ve been making nothing, not a bean. Just paying expenses, that’s all.”

“Er,” Mr. Goath began with a pessimistic rumble.

“Just a minute. Don’t think I’m beginning like this because I think you fellows are not earning all you make. I know you are. There’s no question about that. But we’ve got to go into it all, haven’t we?--got to see where we stand. I’ll tell you in strict confidence that if it hadn’t been for my wife having a little money of her own, I couldn’t have carried on as long as I have done. You’ve only to look at the figures to see that for yourselves.”

Here he stopped long enough to give Mr. Goath a chance of describing the state of the cabinet-making and wholesale furnishing trades. As we have heard him already, we do not want to hear him again. It is sufficient to say that his theme was that if the price was right, the stuff wasn’t, and if the stuff was right, the price wasn’t, and that this theme was elaborated by many variations in the minor key. And something in the nature of a second subject, repeated continually in the bass, was added by the statement that the speaker had been thirty years in the trade. To all of which Mr. Dersingham and Mr. Smeeth listened with gloomy attention.

“Well,” said Mr. Dersingham, looking at his miserable little notes, “we’ll have to go into all that later on. We’re getting the wood from all the same people we dealt with in my uncle’s time--and in some cases we’re getting it on better terms than he did, isn’t that so, Smeeth?”

“Ah, but there’s more competition now, a lot more,” said Goath dejectedly. “More and more competition, that’s the way it is. Some of these people in the trade must be cutting it as fine as that”--and he waggled a very dirty thumb-nail--“to get orders. Nearly giving it away. Pay when you like, too. Foreigners,” he added darkly, “that’s what we’re up against now, foreigners, coming over here to unload the stuff like mad. I met one coming out of Nickman’s only yesterday morning, coming out as I was going in, and looking as pleased with himself as if he’d just backed a dozen winners. German he was. Speaking English as good as you and me, and dressed all up to the nines, but German all over him. And he had backed the winners all right, you bet he had. Got a pocket full of orders, he had. What’s the good of having a war, I say, if it only means Germans coming over here and pinching trade right under our noses. Cor!--makes me sick--thirty years in the trade and tramping round week in and week out, and nothing doin’ two-thirds o’ the time, not a thing, and foreigners coming here with fur coats on--fur coats! Taking the bread right out of your mouth, that’s all they’re doing.”

“Quite so, Goath,” cried Mr. Dersingham. “I don’t say I’m not with you there. But we can buy from Germany, just the same, and have been doing for some time, but it’s beginning to look as if we can’t compete. That’s what I was going to talk about, to begin with. We shall have to try and do some cutting, too. It’s our only chance. And the only way to do that--I think you fellows will agree, especially you, Smeeth--is to reduce expenses. The--er--what’s-its-name--er--overhead charges are too big.” Having found this word “overhead,” so suggestive of big business, of keen men piling up fortunes in forty-two storey buildings, Mr. Dersingham clutched at it thankfully: it was a floating plank on the wide ocean of puzzle and muddle into which he had suddenly been plunged. “That’s it. The first thing, the very first thing, we’ve got to do is to reduce the overheads in this business.”

Mr. Smeeth tried to look very brisk and business-like, but he seemed greyer than ever and there was a mournful droop in his voice. “Well, we can try, sir. But it won’t be easy. We’re spending as little as we can, here in the office.”

“Dash it all, Smeeth, I know that.” Mr. Dersingham rubbed his cheek irritably. “But we shall have to spend less. I don’t want to do it--I want to do the decent thing by everybody here--but you see how it is, don’t you? Must cut something down. Now look here, to begin with, there’s Turgis. What’s he getting? A hundred and seventy-five, isn’t he? And Miss Matfield? We started her at three pounds a week, didn’t we?”

“That’s right, Mr. Dersingham. It was less than she’d been getting before, but she said she’d start at that with us, and then we’d see about giving her a rise when she’d settled down with us. She’s a very capable girl, very capable, and very intelligent, too, much better than the last we had; no comparison at all.”

“And Turgis? What about him?”

“I can’t really grumble, sir,” replied Mr. Smeeth. “He does his best. He’s a bit careless sometimes, I’ll admit, and he’s not to be trusted far with figures yet--you remember the terrible mess he made of the books when I was on my holidays this year?--but as these boys go nowadays, he’s as good as the next. He doesn’t take the interest in his work and in the firm that I did when I was his age, but then they don’t these days, and that’s all you can say about it. Miss Matfield’s just the same, for that matter. She does her work all right, but she’s not _interested_, doesn’t think of herself, you might say, as one of the firm, but just comes in the morning, does what she’s told to do, and then goes in the evening.”

“Thinking about young men, that’s what they are, all these typewriters,” said Goath. “Young men and dancing and going to the pickshers, that’s what’s running in their ’eads, and you can’t expect anything else of ’em, not in _my_ opinion. Cheeky with it, they are, too.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Smeeth, I really am, but I don’t see anything else for it. One of them will have to go, either Turgis or Miss Matfield. We can’t spare you, Smeeth----”

“Thank you, sir.” And as he said it--quite simply and not with any touch of irony--Mr. Smeeth looked still greyer. Indeed, he shook a little.

“No question of it at all,” Mr. Dersingham continued heartily, “absolutely none. But we’ll have to get rid of one of these two and divide the work between us. I’ll do something. I’ll begin to type my own letters. I’ll have a good shot at it anyhow. It’s a question now whether you’d rather keep Turgis and let him do some of the letters or keep Miss Matfield and divide his work between the two of you. Stanley might do a bit more, too, if he’s got any sense. In any case, we must have a boy, so there’s no question of getting rid of him. Now what d’you think, Smeeth? Turgis or Miss Matfield? Nothing much in it, I know, but you ought to decide. You’ll have most of the extra work yourself, I expect, when it gets down to brass tacks, though, mind you, I’m going to do a lot more myself, if I’ve time, in the office.”

Mr. Smeeth did not feel quite so bad as he had felt a minute ago, but he felt bad enough. He tried to give all his attention to the immediate problem, which was serious enough for him, for he knew very well that it was he who would have to do most of the extra work, but, try as he would, his mind wandered darkly. He could not pretend to himself now that such pitiful economies as these could stop the rot. He had seen it coming for months. The firm, his position, his very living, they were all crumbling away together. The next thing would be that he would have to accept a cut in his salary. And the next thing after that would be finding himself outside, in Angel Pavement, with a hat on his head and no salary, no office, nothing. He hesitated, stammering something, rather painfully.

“I didn’t want to spring it on you,” said Mr. Dersingham, “and I suppose you’d really like a day or two to think it over.”

“Wouldn’t think a minute if I was you,” said Mr. Goath. “Get rid of the girl, right away, without ’esitation. They never should have started girls in the City. The place has never been right since. Powderin’ noses! Cups o’ tea! You don’t know where y’are.”

“I would like to think it over, Mr. Dersingham,” Mr. Smeeth told him slowly. “I don’t want to get rid of the wrong one.”

“I’d like to get it settled to-day while we’re at it, but you think it over between now and five o’clock, and then we’ll have another talk about it. All right then.” And Mr. Dersingham examined his notes again, and then looked very severe. “The next thing is this question of what-d’you-call-it--these rotters who won’t pay up. You’ve made out a statement, have you?”

But there was a knock at the door, and Stanley sidled in, a card in his hand. “Somebody wants to see you, sir.”

“I’m busy. Who is it? Shut the door.” He examined the card. “Never heard of this chap. Look at this, Goath. Anybody you know? What does he want?”

“Wanted to speak to you, sir,” replied Stanley, looking very mysterious and important, with a hint of the “shadderer” in his manner. “Very important. That’s what he said.”

“I’ll bet he did,” said Mr. Dersingham, with a grin at the other two. “Probably wants to sell me some ridiculous office gadget. If he did, though, he’d probably have something about it on his card. This is a private card. Golspie, Golspie? No, I don’t know him. Look here, Stanley, just tell him I’m having a discussion--no, a thingumty--a conference, just now, but if it’s something really important, not trying to sell me typewriters and files and muck, I’ll see him soon. He can either call again or he can wait there. Tell him that.”

Mr. Golspie decided to wait.

V

He was still waiting there, sitting in the little chair beside the door and behind the partition, ten minutes later. Sometimes, Stanley and Turgis and Miss Matfield heard him stir and clear his throat. They also caught the fragrance of the excellent cigar he was smoking. Its fumes seemed to turn the office into a dull little box and their duties into the most mechanical and trivial tasks. There was something rich and adventurous about that drifting luxuriant smoke. It unsettled them.

“Who is he?” Turgis whispered. “What’s he like?”

Stanley crept nearer and curved a hand round his mouth. “He’s biggish and broad and got a big moustache,” he whispered in reply. “D’you know what I bet he is?”

“No, I give it up.”

“Inspector from Scotland Yard.”

“You’ve got ’em on the brain, you little chump,” said Turgis. “Course he isn’t.”

“Well, I’ll betcher. He looks just like one. You go and have a look at him.”

But Turgis was saved from the necessity, for the visitor suddenly marched into the office itself.

“Where’s that boy?” he demanded. “Oh, look here, just go in again and tell Mr. What’s-it----”

“Mr. Dersingham, sir,” said Stanley brightly, proud to serve Scotland Yard or anybody who suggested it.

“Mr. Dersingham. Tell him I can’t wait much longer--I’m not used to hanging about like this--and that if I go, _I go_, for good and all, and then he’ll be sorry. D’you get that? All right then, trot off and speak out. Wait a minute, though. He doesn’t know what I want, doesn’t know who I am, so I’d better show him I’m not going to waste his time.” He took something out of the small despatch case he was carrying, and the others recognised it at once as a sample book of veneers and inlays, a few square inches of each specimen wood, thin as cardboard, being fastened to each stout page. “Now give him this, tell him to look it over, and say that’s what I’ve come to talk about. D’you understand?”

Having thus despatched the boy, Mr. Golspie stood there at ease, his feet wide apart, his big chest thrown out, coolly enjoying his cigar. It was one of the strictest rules of the place that casual callers were not allowed beyond the partition, and Turgis ought to have ordered him out of the office at once. But somehow Turgis felt that this was not a man to be ordered out of the office by him.

“Not much of a place this, I must say,” Mr. Golspie observed, looking about him, then addressing Turgis. “But they keep you pretty busy, eh?”

“Well, they do and they don’t,” Turgis mumbled. “I mean to say, sometimes we’re busy and sometimes we’re not. It all depends, you see.”

“I don’t see, but I’ll take your word for it. Must be a dark hole, this, a bit later on, when you get the fogs. Too dark for my taste. Not enough air either. I like plenty of air, though God knows it’s not worth having when you get it, in this neighbourhood. What do they call this street? Angel Pavement, isn’t it? That’s a dam’ queer name for a street, though I’ve known queerer names in my time. How did it get it, d’you know?”

Turgis admitted that he didn’t.

“Didn’t suppose you would,” the stranger told him. “Perhaps this young lady knows. They know everything nowadays.”

Miss Matfield looked up. “No, I don’t know,” she replied, with a hint of distaste in her tone. Then she bent her eyes to her work again. “And I don’t care.”

“No, you don’t care,” said Mr. Golspie, bluff, hearty, and completely unabashed. “I don’t suppose you care tuppence about the whole concern. Why should you, anyhow? I wouldn’t, if I were a good-lookin’ girl, not tuppence.”

Miss Matfield looked up again, this time wearily, wrinkling various parts of her face. Then she brought to bear upon this intruder the full force of her contemptuous gaze, which would instantly have routed Turgis, Mr. Smeeth, or Mr. Dersingham, and a great many other people of her acquaintance. On this objectionable man it had no effect at all. He stared hard at her, and then smiled, or rather grinned broadly. Defeated by such complete insensitiveness, Miss Matfield made a gesture of annoyance, and then went on with her work, without looking up again.

“Now what the devil’s that boy doing in there!” Mr. Golspie boomed to Turgis. “You’d better go and see if they’ve killed him. You needn’t, though. He’s coming.”

He came, followed by Mr. Smeeth, who said: “I’m sorry you’ve been kept waiting. Mr. Dersingham can see you now.”

They waited until they heard the door close behind him before any of them spoke again.

“What does he want, Mr. Smeeth?” asked Turgis.

“I don’t know what he wants exactly, Turgis,” Mr. Smeeth replied. “I take it he wants to sell us some stuff. He sent some good samples in; really first-class Mr. Dersingham and Goath said it was. I don’t pretend to know much about it. But I expect the price will put it out of the question.”

“He’s a funny sort of chap, isn’t he?”

“A loathsome brute!” cried Miss Matfield from her machine. “Imagine working for a man like that! Ghastly!”

Mr. Smeeth regarded her thoughtfully, and then, after telling Stanley to get on with his work and if he hadn’t any work to go and find some, he turned to regard Turgis equally thoughtfully. One of them had to go. Should he put it to them now? Miss Matfield would probably not care very much--it was hard to imagine her caring, though she had been anxious enough to get the job--whereas Turgis, who had an oldish poverty-stricken father somewhere up in the Midlands, lived in lodgings here in London, and was lucky if he had five pounds in all the world, would be very hard hit and would not easily find another job. It would have to be Miss Matfield. Yet Miss Matfield, who had a good education behind her, was the more promising worker of the two, and would take over some of Turgis’s work and be glad to do it. Well, well, this wanted a bit more thinking about, and, in the meantime, there were a hundred and one little things to be done.

The three in Mr. Dersingham’s room remained there for the next half hour, giving no sign of their existence beyond an occasional rumble of voices. At the end of that time, the door opened, louder voices and a fresh reek of cigars invaded the general office, and Mr. Dersingham called out: “I say, Smeeth, we’re all going out. Shan’t be back before lunch. I’ll give you a ring if I’m going to be any later.” And then they were gone, leaving Mr. Smeeth and Turgis staring at one another. The various lunch hours, beginning with Stanley’s (he went to the _Pavement Dining Rooms_ and had sausage and mash, after all), came and went, the afternoon wore on, and still there was no message from Mr. Dersingham or Goath. The crescendo of the last hour of the day, when Stanley turned berserk with the copying press and Turgis snarled at the telephone and then yelled into it, had begun when the message actually did arrive.

“Hello! Is that you, ol’ man--I mean, Smeeth? Dersingham speakin’.” Even through the telephone, a strangeness, a certain richness, could be remarked in Mr. Dersingham’s voice. He seemed quite excited.

“Smeeth speaking, Mr. Dersingham.”