Part 6

Mr. Smeeth grunted impatiently. Edna annoyed him these days. He had been very fond of her when she was a child--and, for that matter, he was still fond of her--but now she had arrived at what seemed to him a very silly awkward age. She had a way of acting, of looking, of talking, all acquired fairly recently, that irritated him. An outsider might have come to the conclusion that Edna looked like a slightly soiled and cheapened elf. She was between seventeen and eighteen, a smallish girl, thin about the neck and shoulders but with sturdy legs. She had a broad snub nose, a little round mouth that was nearly always open, and greyish-greenish-blueish eyes set rather wide apart; and scores of faces exactly like hers, pert, pretty-ish and under-nourished, may be seen within a stone’s-throw of any picture theatre any evening in any large town. She had left school as soon as she could, and had wandered in and out of various jobs, the latest and steadiest of them being one as assistant in a big draper’s Finsbury Park way. At home now, being neither child nor an adult, neither dependent nor independent, she was at her worst; languid and complaining, shrill and resentful, or sullen and tearful; she would not eat properly; she did not want to help her mother, to do a bit of washing-up, to tidy her room; and it was only when one of her silly little friends called, when she was going out, that she suddenly sprang into a vivid personal life of her own, became eager and vivacious. This contrast, as sharp as a sword, sometimes angered, sometimes saddened her father, who could not imagine how his home, for which he saw himself for ever planning and working, appeared in the eyes of fretful, secretive and ambitious adolescence. These changes in Edna annoyed and worried him far more than they did Mrs. Smeeth, who only took offence when she had a solid grievance, and turned a tolerant, sagely feminine eye on what she called Edna’s “airs and graces.”

There was a bustle and clatter, and Mrs. Smeeth returned to dump upon the table a little jug without a handle. “I’m getting properly mixed up in my old age,” she announced, breathlessly. “First I thought it was there, in front of the bottom shelf. Then when I went, I thought I couldn’t have made any, because it wasn’t there. And then--lo and behold--it was there all the time, right at the back of the second shelf. Oh, you’ve given me too much, Dad. Take some back. I’m not a bit hungry somehow to-night, haven’t been all day. You know how you get sometimes, can’t fancy anything. Here, Edna, you want more than that. Well, I dare say you don’t, but you’re going to have it, miss. None of this silly starving yourself, a girl your age! Because your mother doesn’t feel hungry for once in her life, it doesn’t mean you’re just going to sit there, pecking worse than a little sparrow.” And here she stopped, to take breath, to snatch Edna’s plate and put some more meat on it, to sit down, to do half a dozen other things, all in a flash.

According to all the literary formulas, the wife of Mr. Smeeth should have been a grey and withered suburban drudge, a creature who had long forgotten to care for anything but a few household tasks, the welfare of her children, and the opinion of one or two chapel-going neighbours, a mere husk of womanhood, in whom Mr. Smeeth could not recognise the girl he had once courted. But Nature, caring nothing for literary formulas, had gone to work in another fashion with Mrs. Smeeth. There was nothing grey and withered about her. She was only in her early forties, and did not look a day older than her age, by any standards. She was a good deal plumper than the girl Mr. Smeeth had married, twenty-two years before, but she was no worse for that. She still had a great quantity of untidy brown hair, a bright blue eye, rosy cheeks, and a ripe moist lip. She came of robust country stock, and perhaps that is why she had been able to conjure any amount of bad food into healthy and jolly womanhood. By temperament, however, she was a real child of London, a daughter of Cockaigne. She adored oysters, fish and chips, an occasional bottle of stout or glass of port, cheerful gossip, hospitality, noise, jokes, sales, outings, comic songs, entertainments of any kind, in fact, the whole rattling and roaring, laughing and crying world of food and drink and bargaining and adventure and concupiscence. She liked to spend as much money as she could, but apart from that, would have been quite happy if the Smeeths had dropped to a lower social level. She never shared any of her husband’s worries, and was indeed rather impatient of them, sometimes openly contemptuous, but she had no contempt, beyond that experienced by all deeply feminine natures for the male, for the man himself. He had been her sweetheart, he was her husband; he had given her innumerable pleasures, had looked after her, had been patient with her, had always been fond of her; and she loved him and was proud of what seemed to her his cleverness. She knew enough about life to realise that Smeeth was a really good husband and that this was something to be thankful for. (North London does not form any part of that small hot-house world in which a good husband or wife is regarded as a bore, perhaps as an obstacle in the path of the partner’s self-development.) Chastity for its own sake made no appeal to her, and she recognised with inward pleasure (though not with any outward sign) the glances that flirtatious and challenging males, in buses and shops and tea-rooms, threw in her direction. If Mr. Smeeth had started any little games--as she frankly confessed--she would not have moaned and repined, but would have promptly “shown him” what she could do in that line. As it was, he did not require showing. He grumbled sometimes at her extravagance, her thoughtlessness, her rather slap-dash housekeeping, but in spite of all that, in spite too, of the fact that for two-and-twenty years they had been cooped up together in tiny houses, she still seemed to him an adorable person, at once incredible and delightful in the large, wilful, intriguing, mysterious mass of her femininity, the Woman among the almost indistinguishable crowd of mere women.

“And if this pudding tastes like nothing on earth,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, rushing it on to the table, “don’t blame me, blame Mrs. Newark at number twenty-three. She came charging in, like a fire brigade, just as I was in the middle of mixing it, and shrieked at me--you know what a voice she has?--she said, ‘What d’you think, Mrs. Smeeth!’ And I said, ‘I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs. Newark. What is it this time?’ I slipped that in just to remind her it wasn’t the first time she’d nearly frightened the life out of me, breaking the news about nothing. ‘Well,’ she said--just a minute, mind your hand, Dad, that’s hot. Pass the custard, Edna. Dad wants it. That’s right.” And Mrs. Smeeth sat down, flushed and panting.

“Bit on the heavy side, p’raps,” said Mr. Smeeth, who had now tasted his pudding, “but I’ve had worse from you, Mother, much worse.” Another spoonful. “Not so bad at all.”

“No, it isn’t, is it?” his wife replied. “But if it isn’t, it ought to be. I thought Mrs. Screaming Twenty-three had done it in properly. ‘Well,’ she said, and nearly bursting she was, ‘do you know, Mrs. Smeeth, I’ve had a letter from Albert, and he’s been in hospital in Rangoon, and now he’s all right, and the letter came not ten minutes since.’ ‘You don’t say!’ I said. ‘Where’s he been in hospital?’ And she said, ‘Rangoo-oon’--just like that. Reminded me of that Harry Tate sketch, you remember, Dad? Rangoo-oon! I nearly laughed in her face. And talk about sketches! If you want a sketch you couldn’t beat this Albert she’s making so much fuss about. ’Member him, Edna?--teeth sticking out a yard, and all cross-eyed. They saw something in Rangoo-oon when they saw Albert.”

“Oo, he was sorful!” cried Edna, shuddering in a refined way.

“Still, we can’t all be oil-paintings,” Mrs. Smeeth remarked philosophically. Then she looked mischievous. “And we can’t all look like Mr. Ronald Mawlborough either.”

“Who’s he when he’s at home?” Mr. Smeeth inquired.

“There you are, you see, Dad, you’re not up in these things. You’re behind the times. Matter of fact, you have seen him, ’cos I remember the two of us seeing him together, in that picture at the Empire.”

“Oh, one of those movie chaps, is he?” Mr. Smeeth was obviously more interested in pudding than in movie chaps.

“I should think he is. Isn’t he, Edna?”

“Oh, do shut up, Mother,” cried Edna, crimson now and wriggling.

“What’s this about?”

“He’s the latest, isn’t he, Edna?” said Mrs. Smeeth wickedly. “And I must say he’s a good-looking young fellow--curly hair, dark eyes, and all that. Free with his photographs too. Yours sincerely, Ronald Mawlborough, that’s him. Nothing stand-offish about him when he addresses his sweet young admirers----”

“Mother!” Edna screamed, nothing now but two imploring eyes in a scarlet face.

“That’s what comes of not doing your bedroom out, miss,” her mother retorted. “I go up to her bedroom, Dad, and what do I find? Mr. Ronald Mawlborough, hers sincerely, on a big photo. You can nearly count his eyelashes. That’s the latest now. Not content with cutting ’em out of these movie papers, they send to Hollywood for them. Darling Mr. Ronald, they write, I shall die if you don’t send me your photo, signed in your own sweet handwriting. Yours truly, Edna Smeeth, seventeen Chaucer Road, Stoke Newington, England.”

Mr. Smeeth looked severe. “Well, I must say, Edna, I call that a silly game.”

“I only did it for fun,” she muttered, “just to see what would happen, that’s all. Some of our girls have got dozens----”

“Pity they’ve got nothing better to do,” was her father’s comment.

“Oh, well, they might be doing worse,” said Mrs. Smeeth, rising from the table. “It won’t do them any good, but it won’t do them any harm either. We’ve all been a bit silly in our time. I’m sure I was when I was a girl. Girls _are_ a bit silly, if you ask me, and it’s a good job for the men they are. But that doesn’t mean they can’t help to clear a table. Come on, Edna, get these things away while I make the tea.”

“Oh, all ri-ight,” Edna sighed wearily, and rose in slow-motion time. Ten minutes later, after gulping down her tea, she rushed out of the room, leaving her parents sitting at ease, Mrs. Smeeth over her second cup of tea, Mr. Smeeth over his pipe.

The room was small and contained far too much furniture and too many knick-knacks. Nearly everything in it was shoddy and ugly, manufactured hastily, in the mass, to catch a badly-informed eye, to be bought and exhibited for a brief season by the purchaser, and then to be in the way and finally rot out of the way. Nevertheless, the total effect of the room was not displeasing, because it had a cosy, homelike atmosphere, which Mr. Smeeth, whose imagination, heightened by fear, perhaps told him that outside beyond the firelight and the snug walls were stalking poverty, disgrace, shame, disease, and death, enjoyed even more than Mrs. Smeeth. It was probably this feeling, and not so much the strain of the day’s work, that made him a man difficult to rouse and get out of the house in the evening, as his wife, who was all for going out somewhere, or, failing that, inviting somebody in, knew to her cost.

“You’re an old home-bird, you are,” she said, with a sort of affectionate contempt, as she saw him settling deeper now into his chair. “Well, what’s been bothering you to-day? You started to tell me and then didn’t.”

“I got a real fright this morning, I don’t mind telling you, Edie,” he began. “Not that I hadn’t seen it coming the way things were going on,” he added, with a gloomy pride.

“Now then, don’t start on,” she warned him, shaking a teaspoon. “You see too much coming. Always looking into the middle of next week and noticing how black it’s getting. Talk about depressions in Iceland! They ought to give you the job, and then there’d be plenty. However, go on, my dear. Mustn’t interrupt.”

“Well, somebody’s got to look, haven’t they?” he replied. “And if Mr. Dersingham had looked a bit harder, we’d all be better off.”

“Do you mean to say you won’t get that rise at Christmas he was talking about?”

“Rise at Christmas! I thought this morning I was in for a rise outside. I tell you, Edie, when he started, my heart went into my boots.” And he plunged into an account of the scene in Mr. Dersingham’s room that morning and then discussed the mysterious events that followed it, all of which Mrs. Smeeth punctuated with nods and ejaculations, such as “Did he really?”, “Well, I never!”, and “Silly old geezer!” She gave him more of her attention than she usually did, because she could see that he was seriously concerned, but at the same time she did not really bother her own head about it, as he knew very well. To her it was all rather unreal, and he was convinced that the idea that he might lose his job, be thrown into the street with only the gloomiest prospect of getting anything half as good, never really entered her head. And this indifference, this childlike confidence in his ability to produce the usual six or seven pounds every week, did nothing to restore his own self-confidence, at least not at such moments as these, but only made him feel that he had to think for two, and in the end left him lonely with his fear.

“All I’m hoping now,” he went on, earnestly, “is that this chap who called has got something up his sleeve. It’s so funny Goath going like that. Looks to me as if this chap, Golspie, thought Goath wasn’t any good--and I’ve thought so once or twice myself lately--and worked it so that Mr. Dersingham got rid of him. Perhaps he’s going to take his place. I must say, it’s a funny business. In all my experience----”

“Don’t you worry, it’ll be all right,” cried Mrs. Smeeth. “We’re going to be lucky, we are. I don’t care if Mr. Dersingham goes mental, we’re going to be lucky. Soon too! I don’t think I told you, but Mrs. Dalby’s sister--the one with the fringe and the jet ear-rings, who reads the cards--told me my fortune the other afternoon, and she said luck was coming, money and good luck, and all through a stranger, a middling-coloured man in a strange bed. Is this man you’re talking about middling-coloured?”

“Don’t ask me, I never noticed what colour he was. He hadn’t any colour. He’d got a big moustache, if that’s any use to you. But what puzzles me is this, why did Mr. Dersingham----”

“Don’t you worry yourself, Dad, why Mr. Dersingham did anything,” his wife interrupted. “Think he’s spending his time worrying about you? Not him! And don’t you bother your old head about him, either. Let’s have a bit o’ music. It’ll cheer us up.” She bounced over to the corner in which George, who had a head for these things, had fixed up that tangle of wires which still passes by the name of “wireless,” a loud speaker apparatus. “What starts it? I can never remember,” she said, with one hand hovering over the various knobs. “Is it this thing you pull out?”

It must have been, for she pulled it, and immediately a loud, patronising voice filled the room. “Let us turn to anothuh aspect of this problam,” it shouted. “As we have already seen--ah--a company cannot barrow unless it is aixpressly authorised--that is, authorised by its memorandum of association--ah--to do so. Let us see what this invalves. Suppose a companay has been formed for the purpose--we will say--ah--of discounting cammercial bills----”

“Oh, help!” cried Mrs. Smeeth, and promptly turned the voice out of the room. “A lot of cheering up you’ll do!” she told the loud speaker severely. “Look in the paper and see when the singing and playing comes on.”

There was a glimpse of Edna, all dressed up, very white about the nose, very red about the lips.

“Where you’re going, Edna?” her mother shrieked.

“Out.”

“Who with?”

“Minnie Watson.”

“Well, don’t be late then, you and your Minnie Watson.” A bang of the front door was Edna’s only reply. “It’s Minnie Watson ev’ry night now,” said Mrs. Smeeth. “Next month it’ll be all somebody else. I said to her last night, ‘Where’s Annie Frost now you used to be so friendly with?’”

“Is that Frost’s girl?” inquired Mr. Smeeth. “The chap who keeps the _Hand and Glove_?”

“That’s right, Jimmy Frost. So when I said that to her, the little madam turns up her nose at once and says, ‘Catch me going with Annie Frost!’ Just like that. And it doesn’t seem a minute since they were as thick as thieves. I could have died laughing. Just the same, I was, at her age.”

“You won’t make me believe that,” said Mr. Smeeth sturdily. “You’d more sense. Seems to me these young girls now haven’t a scrap of sense. The bit they leave school with is knocked out of them by pictures nowadays. They think about pictures--movies and talkies--from morning till night. They’re getting jazzed off their little heads.”

“That sounds like Georgie,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, starting up. “I’ll go and get his dinner out of the oven. Come on, boy, hurry up if you want any dinner to-night. It’s nearly cinders now.”

Left to himself, Mr. Smeeth slowly knocked out his pipe in the coal-scuttle and then stared into the fire, brooding. He was always catching himself grumbling about the children now, and he did not want to be a grumbling father. He had enjoyed them when they were young, but now, although there were times when he felt a touch of pride, he no longer understood them. George especially, the elder of the two, and once a very bright promising boy, was both a disappointment and a mystery. George had had opportunities that he himself had never had. But George had shown an inclination from the first, to go his own way, which seemed to Mr. Smeeth a very poor way. He had no desire to stick to anything, to serve somebody faithfully, to work himself steadily up to a good safe position. He simply tried one thing after another, selling wireless sets, helping some pal in a garage (he was in a garage now, and it was his fourth or fifth), and though he always contrived to earn something and appeared to work hard enough, he was not, in his father’s opinion, getting anywhere. He was only twenty, of course, and there was time, but Mr. Smeeth, who knew very well that George would continue to go his own way without any reference to him, did not see any possibility of improvement. The point was, that to George, there was nothing wrong, and his father was well aware of the fact that he could not make him see there was anything wrong. That was the trouble with both his children. There was obviously nothing bad about either of them; they compared very favourably with other people’s boys and girls; and he would have been quick to defend them; but nevertheless, they were growing up to be men and women he could not understand, just as if they were foreigners. And it was all very perplexing and vaguely saddening.

The truth was, of course, that Mr. Smeeth’s children _were_ foreigners, not simply because they belonged to a younger generation but because they belonged to a younger generation that existed in a different world. Mr. Smeeth was perplexed because he applied to them standards they did not recognise. They were the product of a changing civilisation, creatures of the post-war world. They had grown up to the sound of the Ford car rattling down the street, and that Ford car had gone rattling away, to the communal rubbish heap, with a whole load of ideas that seemed still of supreme importance to Mr. Smeeth. They were the children of the Woolworth stores and the moving pictures. Their world was at once larger and shallower than that of their parents. They were less English, more cosmopolitan. Mr. Smeeth could not understand George and Edna, but a host of youths and girls in New York, Paris and Berlin would have understood them at a glance. Edna’s appearance, her grimaces and gestures, were temporarily based on those of an Americanised Polish Jewess, who, from her mint in Hollywood, had stamped them on these young girls all over the world. George’s knowing eye for a machine, his cigarette and drooping eyelid, his sleek hair, his ties and shoes and suits, the smallest details of his motor-cycling and dancing, his staccato impersonal talk, his huge indifferences, could be matched almost exactly round every corner in any American city or European capital.

Mrs. Smeeth returned with the food, and a minute or two later, George descended from his bedroom, shining, sleek, brushed. He was better looking, better built, tougher in body, than his father had ever been, and he owed far more to his mother, though there was about her a certain generosity of the blood, a suggestion of ruddy mounting sap, that was absent in him: he was drier, more compressed and blanched; and though he was a good-looking youth, who moved easily, quickly, he had hardly any more of the bloom of twenty than had the moving pictures of Mr. Ronald Mawlborough and his kind. In short, he looked too old for an English boy of that age. It was as if the Americanised world he had grown up to discover about him, had contrived to introduce into North London the drying and ageing American climate.

“You’re late to-night, George,” said his father.

“Been busy,” he replied, dispatching his dinner quickly, quietly, efficiently, but with no signs of taking any pleasure in his food. After a few minutes’ silence, he continued: “Feller came in with an old _Lumbden_, twelve horse. Could have had it for fifteen quid. Nothing much wrong with it. Wanted new plugs and mag. and brakes re-lining and something doing to the differential, and just cleanin’ up a bit. All right then. Take you anywhere. Thought once of sellin’ the ol’ bike and having a shot at this _Lumbden_.”

“I wish you would, Georgie,” cried Mrs. Smeeth. “You could take us all out then. See us going out in style, eh, Dad? Besides, I hate that stinking rattling ol’ bike of yours. Nasty dangerous things they are too. Get rid of it, Georgie, before it gets rid of you.”

“That’s all right,” said George, “but the ol’ bike goes--travels like a bird. This _Lumbden_ couldn’t look at her. No, me for the little ol’ bike, till I can put my hand on something in the super-sports style. And don’t worry, I shan’t do that in a hurry--costs too much. Doesn’t matter, though--Barrett’s buying this _Lumbden_. We’ll do her up a bit, paint her up, and sell her. There won’t be any hurry either, so when we’ve put a few works in her, if you want a ride, pass the word on, and we’ll have a run in her.”

“We’ll go down to Brighton and see your aunt Flo,” cried Mrs. Smeeth, her eyes brightening at the thought of an outing. “Now don’t forget, Georgie boy. That’s a promise to your old mother. Don’t go spending all your time taking the girls out in it. Give your mother a chance. She can enjoy a ride as well as the next.”

“Righto,” said George briskly. He rose from the table.

“Here, you want some pudding.”

“Not to-night. Off pudding to-night. Couldn’t look it in the face. ’Sides, I haven’t time.”

“Time!” cried his mother. “You’re never in. Where you going?”

“Out.”

“Out where?”

“Just knocking about with some of the fellers.”

Mr. Smeeth looked at him, rather gravely. He felt it was his turn to speak now. “Just a minute,” he said sharply. “What does ‘knocking about’ mean exactly, may I ask?”

At this, George looked a shade less confident, a trifle younger, as he stood there tapping his cigarette. “I dunno. Might do one thing, might do another. Might have a game of billiards at the Institute, or look in at the pictures, or go down to the second house at Finsbury Park. Depends what everybody wants to do. No harm in that, Dad.” He lit his cigarette.

“Course there isn’t,” said Mrs. Smeeth. “Your father never said there was.”