_Epilogue_
_Prologue_
She came gliding along London’s broadest street, and then halted,
swaying gently. She was a steamship of some 3,500 tons, flying the flag
of one of the new Baltic states. The Tower Bridge cleared itself of
midgets and toy vehicles and raised its two arms, and then she passed
underneath, accompanied by cheerfully impudent tugs, and after some
manœuvring and hooting and shouting, finally came to rest alongside
Hay’s Wharf. The fine autumn afternoon was losing its bright gold and
turning into smoke and distant fading flame, so that it seemed for
a moment as if all London bridges were burning down. Then the flare
of the day died out, leaving behind a quiet light, untroubled as yet
by the dusk. On the wharf, men in caps lent a hand with ropes and a
gangway, contrived to spit ironically, as if they knew what all this
fuss was worth, and then retired to group themselves in the background,
like a shabby and faintly derisive chorus; and men in bowler hats
arrived from nowhere, carrying dispatch cases, notebooks, bundles of
papers, to exchange mysterious jokes with the ship’s officers above;
and two men in blue helmets, large and solid men, took their stand in
the very middle of the scene and appeared to tell the ship, with a
glance or two, that she could stay where she was for the time being
because nothing against her was known so far to the police. The ship,
for her part, began to think about discharging her mixed cargo.
This cargo was so mixed that it included the man who now emerged from
the saloon, came yawning on to the deck, and looked down upon Hay’s
Wharf. This solitary passenger was a man of medium height but of a
massive build, square and bulky about the shoulders, and thick-chested.
He might have been forty-five; he might have been nearly fifty; it was
difficult to tell his exact age. His face was somewhat unusual, if
only because it began by being almost bald at the top, then threw out
two very bushy eyebrows, and finally achieved a tremendous moustache,
drooping a little by reason of its very length and thickness; a
moustache in a thousand, with something rhetorical, even theatrical,
about it. He wore, carelessly, a suit of excellent grey cloth but of
a foreign cut and none too well-fitting. This passenger had come with
the ship from the Baltic state that owned her, but there was something
about his appearance, in spite of his clothes, his moustache, that
suggested he was really a native of this island. But that is perhaps
all it did suggest. He was one of those men who are difficult to place.
The sight of him did not call up any particular background, and you
could not easily imagine him either at work or at home. He had come
from the Baltic to the Thames, but it might just as well have been from
any place to any other place. As he stood there, straddling at ease, a
thick figure of a man but not slow and heavy, with his gleaming bald
front and giant moustache, looking down at the wharf quite incuriously,
he seemed a man who was neither coming home nor leaving it, and yet not
a simple traveller, and this gave him a faint piratical air.
“Lon-don, eh?” cried a voice at his elbow. It came from the second
mate, a small natty youngster not unlike a pale and well-brushed
monkey. “Vairy nice, eh?”
“All right.”
“You com’ ’ere, Misdair Colsbee? You stay ’ere?” The second mate liked
to air his English and had not had much opportunity of doing so during
the voyage.
“Yes, I stay here,” replied Mr. Golspie, for that was the name the
second officer was trying to pronounce. “That is,” he boomed, as an
afterthought, “if there’s anything doing.”
“You leef ’ere, in Lon-don?” pursued the other, who had missed the
force of the last remark.
“No, I don’t. I don’t live anywhere. That’s me.” And Mr. Golspie said
this with a kind of grim relish, as if to suggest that he might pop
up anywhere, and that when he did, something or somebody had better
look out. He might have been one of the quieter buccaneers sailing into
harbour.
Then, nodding amiably, he stepped forward, looked up and down the
wharf again, and returned to the saloon, where he took a cigar from
the box the captain had bought at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, and
helped himself to a drink from one of the many bottles that overflowed
from the sideboard to the table. It had been a convivial voyage. Mr.
Golspie and the captain were old acquaintances who had been able to
do one another various good turns. The captain had promised to make
Mr. Golspie very comfortable, and one way of making Mr. Golspie very
comfortable was to lay in and then promptly bring out a sound stock
of whisky, cognac, vodka, and other liquors. There had been nothing
one-sided about this arrangement, for the captain had been able to
keep pace with his guest, even though his progress had not had the
same steady dignity. The captain, who had once served in the Russian
Imperial Navy and had only resigned from it by escaping in his shirt
and trousers over the side one night, was apt to turn fantastic in
his drink. On two nights out of the three, during the voyage, he had
insisted upon declaiming a long speech from Goethe’s _Faust_ in four
different languages, to show that he was a man of culture. And on the
night before they had entered the Thames Estuary, the previous night,
in fact, he had gone further than that, for he had laughed a great
deal, sung four songs that Mr. Golspie could not understand at all,
told a long story apparently in Russian, cried a little, and shaken
Mr. Golspie’s hand so hard and so often that as he thought about it
all now, over his cigar in the saloon that seemed so strangely still,
Mr. Golspie could almost feel the ache again in his hand. Mr. Golspie
himself did not perform any of these antics; he merely mellowed as the
evening waned and the bottles were emptied; and he was mellowing now,
early though it was, for he and the captain had sat a long time over
lunch. Apparently, however, Mr. Golspie did not consider that he was
sufficiently mellow, for he now helped himself to another drink.
The men in bowler hats were by this time on board. Some of them were
interviewing the captain. Others were interested in Mr. Golspie, for
they had to decide whether he was fit to land in the island of his
birth. His relations with these officials were quite amiable, but they
did not prevent him from expressing his views.
“Regulations! Of course they’re regulations!” he boomed through the
great moustache, mellow but pugnacious. “But that doesn’t mean they’re
not a lot o’ damned nonsense. There’s more palaver getting into England
now than there was getting into Russia and Turkey before the blasted
war. And we used to laugh at ’em. Backward countries we used to call
’em. Passports!” Here he laughed, then tapped the young man on the
lapel of his blue serge coat. “Never kept a rogue out yet, never. Only
wants a bit of cleverness. All they do is to make trouble for honest
men--fellows like me, wanting to do a bit of good to trade. Isn’t that
right? You bet it is.”
He then saw the customs officers, who dipped a hand here and there in
his two steamer trunks and three battered suitcases.
“I expect you’d like to get away,” said one of them, beginning to chalk
up his approval of the luggage.
Mr. Golspie watched him with idle benevolence, looking quite unlike a
man who has two hundred and fifty cigars cunningly stowed away in a
steamer trunk. “Not this time. No hurry, for once. I’m staying aboard
to pick a bit of dinner with the skipper here.” He waved a hand,
presumably to indicate the city that lay all round them. “It can wait.”
“What can?” And the young man gave a final flourish of chalk.
“London can,” replied Mr. Golspie. “All of it.”
The young man laughed, not because he thought this last remark very
witty, but because this passenger suddenly reminded him of a comedian
he had once seen at the Finsbury Park Empire. “Well, I dare say it can.
It’s been waiting a long time.”
Left to himself, with his cigars all safe, Mr. Golspie ruminated for a
minute or two, then climbed to the upper deck, perhaps to decide what
it was that had been waiting so long.
He found himself staring at the immense panorama of the Pool. Dusk was
falling; the river rippled darkly; and the fleet of barges across the
way was almost shapeless. There was, however, enough daylight lingering
on the north bank, where the black piles and the whitewashed wharf
edge above them still stood out sharply, to give shape and character
to the waterfront. Over on the right, the grey stones of the Tower
were faintly luminous, as if they had contrived to store away a little
of their centuries of sunlight. The white pillars of the Custom House
were as plain as peeled wands. Nearer still, two church spires thrust
themselves above the blur of stone and smoke and vague flickering
lights: one was as blanched and graceful as if it had been made of
twisted paper, a salute to Heaven from the City; the other was abrupt
and dark, a despairing appeal, the finger of a hand flung out to the
sky. Mr. Golspie, after a brief glance, ignored the pair of them. They
in their turn, however, were dominated by the severely rectangular
building to the left, boldly fronting the river and looking over
London Bridge with a hundred eyes, a grim Assyrian bulk of stone. It
challenged Mr. Golspie’s memory, so that he regarded it intently. It
was there when he was last in London, but was new then. Adelaide House,
that was it. But he still continued to look at it, and with respect,
for the challenge remained, though not to the memory. Both the blind
eyes and the lighted eyes of its innumerable windows seemed to answer
his stare and to tell him that he did not amount to very much, not here
in London. Then his gaze swept over the bridge to what could be seen
beyond. The Cold Storage place, and then, cavernous, immense, the great
black arch of Cannon Street Station, and high above, far beyond, not in
the city but in the sky and still softly shining in the darkening air,
a ball and a cross. It was the very top of St. Paul’s, seen above the
roof of Cannon Street Station. Mr. Golspie recognised it with pleasure,
and even half sung, half hummed, the line of a song that came back to
him, something about “St. Paul’s with its grand old Dome.” Good luck to
St. Paul’s! It did not challenge him: it was simply there, keeping an
eye on everything but interfering with nobody. And somehow this glimpse
of St. Paul’s suddenly made him realise that this was the genuine old
monster, London. He felt the whole mass of it, spouting and fuming and
roaring away. He realised something else too, namely, the fact that
he was still wearing his old brown slippers, the ones that Hortensia
had given him. He had arrived, had crept right into the very heart of
London, wearing his old brown slippers. He had slipped two hundred
and fifty cigars past their noses, and had not even changed into his
shoes. James Golspie was surveying London in his slippers, and London
was not knowing, not caring--just yet. These thoughts gave him enormous
pleasure, bringing with them a fine feeling of cunning and strength: he
could have shaken hands with himself; if there had been a mirror handy
he would probably have exchanged a wink with his reflection.
He walked round the deck. Lights were flickering on along the wharf,
immediately giving the unlit entrances a sombre air of mystery. A few
men down there were heaving and shouting, but there was little to see.
Mr. Golspie continued his walk, then stopped to look across and over
London Bridge at the near waterfront, the south bank. Such lighting
as there was on this side was very gay. High up on the first building
past the bridge, coloured lights revolved about an illuminated bottle,
to the glory of Booth’s Gin, and further along, a stabbing gleam of
crimson finally spelt itself into Sandeman’s Port. Mr. Golspie regarded
both these writings on the wall with admiration and sympathy. The sight
of London Bridge itself too, pleased him now, for all the buses had
turned on their lights and were streaming across like a flood of molten
gold. They brought another stream of pleasant images into Mr. Golspie’s
mind, a bright if broken pageant of convivial London: double whiskies
in crimson-shaded bars; smoking hot steaks and chops and a white cloth
on a little corner table; the glitter and velvet of the music-halls;
knowing gossip, the fine reek of Havanas, round a club fender and fat
leather chairs; pretty girls, a bit stiff perhaps (though not as stiff
as they used to be) but very pretty and not so deep as the foreign
ones, coming out of shops and offices, with evenings to spend and not
much else: he saw it all and he liked the look of it. There was a size,
a richness, about London. You could find anything or anybody you wanted
in it, and you could also hide in it. He had been a fool to stay away
so long. But, anyhow, here he was. He took a long and wide and exultant
look at the place.
Dinner that night was very good indeed, the best the boat had given
him. Mr. Golspie and the captain shared it with the chief engineer, who
came beaming and shining from the depths, and the first mate, usually
a very wooden fellow, for ever brooding over some mysterious domestic
tragedy in Riga, but now for once gigantically social and cheerful. The
steward, the one with the cropped head and gold tooth, lavished his all
upon them. Bottles that had not been emptied before were emptied now,
together with some that were produced for the first time. The talk, so
far as Mr. Golspie had any part in it, was conducted in a fantastic
mixture of English, German, and the ship’s own Baltic language, a
mixture it would be impossible to reproduce here, but it went very
well, smashing its way through the entanglements of irregular verbs
and doubtful substantives, for nothing removes the curse of Babel like
food, drink, and good-fellowship. All four grew expansive, bellowed
confidences, roared through the fog of cigar smoke, threw back their
heads to laugh, and were gods for an hour.
“Very soon we shall meet again,” said the captain to Mr. Golspie,
clinking glasses for the third time. “Is that not so, my friend?”
“Leave it to me, my boy,” replied Mr. Golspie, very flushed, with tiny
beads of perspiration on that massive bald front of his.
“You come back when you have finished your business here in London?”
“As to that, I can’t say. If I can, I will.”
“That is good,” said the captain. Then he looked very deep, and put a
finger as big as a pork sausage to his forehead. “And now you will tell
us what this business is, eh? In secret. We will not tell.”
The chief engineer tugged at the ends of his moustache, which was
nearly as large as Mr. Golspie’s, and tried to look even deeper than
the captain, like the repository of innumerable commercial secrets.
“I say this,” cried the huge first mate, who was in no condition now
to wait until his opinion had been asked. “I say this. It is good
business. It is for the good of our country. I drink to you,” he
shouted, and promptly did so, with the result that he immediately
remembered that disastrous affair at Riga, and sat silent, with the
tears in his eyes, for the next twenty minutes.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Golspie, taking out his cigar and
looking at it very knowingly, as if it was a fellow conspirator.
“There’s no need to make a mystery of it. D’you remember Mikorsky? Wait
a minute. Not the little fellow with the office in Danzig, but the big
fellow with the beard, in the timber trade. That’s the one. Remember
him?”
The captain did, and was evidently so pleased by this effort of memory
that he appeared to conduct several bars of one of the stormier
symphonies. The mate remembered, too, but only nodded, his tearful
blue eyes being still fixed on that tragic interior in Riga. The chief
engineer did not remember Mikorsky, and, in what seemed nothing less
than mental anguish, repeated the name in twenty different tones,
beginning very high and ending in a despairing bass.
“I’ve done one or two little jobs for him,” Mr. Golspie continued,
“during the time I had a bit of a pull. We’d a night or two together,
too. I met him one day, not a month ago, and he said he was just
going down into the country, to see his cousin, and I ought to go
with him. So I did. I’d nothing better to do. Hot as hell it was down
there, too, and I was bitten to death. This cousin of Mikorsky’s was
in the furniture end of the timber trade, and he’d invented a new
process, machine, treatment, everything, for turning out veneers
and inlays. And labour costs next to nothing down there. I asked
where all this stuff was going. Well, they’d got orders from Germany
and Czecho-Slovakia and Austria and a chance of something in Paris.
‘What’s it going to cost in London?’ I said, showing ’em one of their
lines, and they told me. It sounded all right to me, but I didn’t say
anything. Not then. I went away and made a few enquiries. I found out
what they were paying for this sort of stuff in Bethnal Green and
Hoxton and those parts, in London, you know, where the furniture’s
made----”
“Bednal Green, yes,” said the chief engineer proudly. “My uncle Stefan
was there, yes, old Stefan in Bednal Green. Socialist,” he added, as a
melancholy afterthought.
“He was, was he?” Mr. Golspie boomed, with a certain brutal heartiness
characteristic of him. “Well, good luck to him! I’ll get on with the
tale. They were paying half as much again for the same sort o’ stuff,
veneers and inlays, not a bit better, here in London. Couldn’t get it
where it was produced so cheap, y’see? Didn’t look about ’em. They’re
getting slow here. There’s something in this for me, I said to myself,
and off I went down there again, to see this other Mikorsky, the
cousin. I wanted to know how much of this stuff I could have every
month, various lines, and the prices. They told me, and guaranteed
it. We had a few drinks on it, and I walk out, with a contract in my
pocket, so much of this, that, and the other, at so much, whenever I
liked to take it up, and me the sole agent for Great Britain.”
“Very good business,” said the captain, with a grave judicial air, in
spite of his rather goggly eyes. “And now, you sell it all, eh? You
make big profit?”
“What I do is to find somebody who’s in the way of selling it, somebody
who’s in this line o’ business, and then go in with ’em.” Mr. Golspie
refreshed himself noisily. “And if I haven’t laid my hand on somebody
by this time the day after to-morrow, my name’s not Jimmy Golspie.”
“Make plenty of money, be rich, eh?”
“No, it’s too honest. But I’ll pick a bit up, to be going on with.”
“Ah no, no!” cried the captain, reaching over and patting Mr. Golspie
on the shoulder. “You make plenty, here in London. Ho-ho, yes! Plenty!
Money here in London--oh!--” And he held out his hands as if he
expected the Bank of England to be emptied into them.
“Not so much as you think,” said Mr. Golspie, shaking his head very
slowly. “Oh no, not at all. They may have it, but it’s all tied up.
It’s not--er--shir--circulating. I tell you, they’re slow here, they’re
slow.”
“You think they sleep?”
“That’s right. Half asleep, most of ’em.”
“Ho-ho,” roared the captain. “And you will put them awake?”
“One or two, p’rhaps, I might be able to shake up a bit. If not, I’m on
the move again. And I’ll have to be on the move now, boys. I told that
steward’s mate--the fellow that plays the concertina--to go and get me
a taxi and take my traps ashore. It ought to be there, at the corner,
any minute now. All right then. Just a last one for luck.”
They were having this last one, with some formality, when the man
returned to say that the taxi was waiting. Mr. Golspie led the way to
the deck, and then stopped near the gangway to say good-bye.
“Now for it,” he cried, more for his own benefit than for his
listeners’. “Straight back into the old rabbit warren. God, what a
place! Millions and millions, and most of ’em don’t know they’re born
yet! Eyes and tails, that’s all they are, diving in and out of their
little holes. The good old rabbit warren. Look at it! Ah, well, it’s no
good looking at it here because you can’t see it. But I’ve been looking
at it. What a place! Well, Chief--well, Captain--this is where I go.”
“And the beautiful daughter, the little Lena?” the captain inquired.
“Is she here, waiting for you?”
“Not yet. She’s still in Paris, with her aunt, but she’ll be coming
over as soon as I’ve settled down. Golspie and Daughter, that’ll be
the style of the firm then, and we’ll see what London makes of it.
And--my God--if I don’t waken some of ’em up, she will, the artful
little devil! But she’ll have to behave here. Yes, she’ll have to
behave. Well, Captain, keep her afloat, and remember me to all the
girls and boys at the other end, and let’s meet again next time you’re
over. Drop me a line to the office here. I’ll tell ’em where to find
me. Where the devil’s the lad? Oh, he’s there, is he? Has he taken
everything ashore? Right you are! So long!”
After a final wave of the hand, Mr. Golspie, a very massive figure now
in his huge ulster, made a slow, steady, and very dignified progress
down the gangway. When he found himself treading at last the stones of
London, he turned his head and nodded, then strode off more briskly
to the corner of Battle Bridge Lane, where the taxi was waiting. Two
minutes later, he had gone hooting into the lights and shadows of the
city, which sent whirling past the windows a crazy frieze, glimmering,
glittering, darkening, of shops, taverns, theatre doors, hoardings,
church porches, crimson and gold segments of buses, little lighted
interiors of saloon cars, railings and doorsteps and lace curtains,
mounds and chocolate, thousands of cigarette packets, beer and buns
and aspirin and wreaths and coffins, and faces, faces, more and more
faces, strange, meaningless and without end. But the lights that came
flashing in found a tiny answering gleam in Mr. Golspie’s eyes; and
when they had gone, in the double darkness of the cab and the shadow
of that great moustache, he grinned. London neither knew nor cared;
nevertheless, there it was: Mr. James Golspie had arrived.
_Chapter One_: THEY ARRIVE
I
Many people who think they know the City well have been compelled to
admit that they do not know Angel Pavement. You could go wandering half
a dozen times between Bunhill Fields and London Wall, or across from
Barbican to Broad Street Station, and yet miss Angel Pavement. Some of
the street maps of the district omit it altogether; taxi-drivers often
do not even pretend to know it; policemen are frequently not sure;
and only postmen who are caught within half a dozen streets of it are
triumphantly positive. This all suggests that Angel Pavement is of no
great importance. Everybody knows Finsbury Pavement, which is not very
far away, because Finsbury Pavement is a street of considerable length
and breadth, full of shops, warehouses, and offices, to say nothing of
buses and trams, for it is a real thoroughfare. Angel Pavement is not a
real thoroughfare, and its length and breadth are inconsiderable. You
might bombard the postal districts of E. C. 1 and E. C. 2 with letters
for years, and yet never have to address anything to Angel Pavement.
The little street is old, and has its fair share of sooty stone and
greasy walls, crumbling brick and rotting woodwork, but somehow it
has never found itself on the stage of history. Kings, princes,
great bishops, have never troubled it; murders it may have seen, but
they have all belonged to private life; and no literary masterpiece
has ever been written under one of its roofs. The guide-books, the
volumes on London’s byways, have not a word to say about it, and those
motor-coaches, complete with guide, that roam about the City in the
early evening never go near it. The guide himself, who knows all about
Henry the Eighth and Wren and Dickens and is so highly educated that
he can still talk with an Oxford accent at the very top of his voice,
could probably tell you nothing about Angel Pavement.
It is a typical City side-street, except that it is shorter, narrower,
and dingier than most. At one time it was probably a real thoroughfare,
but now only pedestrians can escape at the western end, and they do
this by descending the six steps at the corner. For anything larger and
less nimble than a pedestrian, Angel Pavement is a _cul de sac_, for
all that end, apart from the steps, is blocked up by _Chase & Cohen:
Carnival Novelties_, and not even by the front of Chase & Cohen but
by their sooty, mouldering, dusty-windowed back. Chase & Cohen do not
believe it is worth while offering Angel Pavement any of their carnival
novelties--many of which are given away, with a thirty shilling dinner
and dance, in the West End every gala night--and so they turn the other
way, not letting Angel Pavement have so much as a glimpse of a pierrot
hat or a false nose. Perhaps this is as well, for if the pavementeers
could see pierrot hats and false noses every day, there is no telling
what might happen.
What you do see there, however, is something quite different. Turning
into Angel Pavement from that crazy jumble and jangle of buses,
lorries, drays, private cars, and desperate bicycles, the main road,
you see on the right, first a nondescript blackened building that is
really the side of a shop and a number of offices; then _The Pavement
Dining Rooms: R. Ditton, Propr._, with R. Ditton’s usual window display
of three cocoanut buns, two oranges, four bottles of cherry cider
picturesquely grouped, and if not the boiled ham, the meat-and-potato
pie; then a squashed little house or bundle of single offices that is
hopelessly to let; and then the bar of the _White Horse_, where you
have the choice of any number of mellowed whiskies or fine sparkling
ales, to be consumed on or off the premises, and if on, then either
publicly or privately. You are now halfway down the street, and could
easily throw a stone through one of Chase & Cohen’s windows, which
is precisely what somebody, maddened perhaps by the thought of the
Carnival Novelties, has already done. On the other side, the southern
side, the left-hand side when you turn in from the outer world, you
begin, rather splendidly, with _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas
Fittings_, and two windows almost bright with sample fittings. Then you
arrive at _T. Benenden: Tobacconist_, whose window is filled with dummy
packets of cigarettes and tobacco that have long ceased even to pretend
they have anything better than air in them; though there are also, as
witnesses to T. Benenden’s enterprise, one or two little bowls of dry
and dusty stuff that mutter, in faded letters, “Our Own Mixture, Cool
Sweet Smoking, Why not Try it?” To reach T. Benenden’s little counter,
you go through the street doorway and then turn through another door on
the left. The stairs in front of you--and very dark and dirty they are,
too--belong to _C. Warstein: Tailors’ Trimmings_. Next to T. Benenden
and C. Warstein is a door, a large, stout, old door from which most
of the paint has flaked and shredded away. This door has no name on
it, and nobody, not even T. Benenden, has seen it open or knows what
there is behind it. There it is, a door, and it does nothing but gather
dust and cobwebs and occasionally drop another flake of dried paint
on the worn step below. Perhaps it leads into another world. Perhaps
it will open, one morning, to admit an angel, who, after looking up
and down the little street for a moment, will suddenly blow the last
trumpet. Perhaps that is the real reason why the street is called Angel
Pavement. What is certain, however, is that this door has no concern
with the building next to it and above it, the real neighbour of T.
Benenden and C. Warstein and known to the postal authorities as No. 8,
Angel Pavement.
No. 8, once a four-storey dwelling-house where some merchant-alderman
lived snugly on his East India dividends, is now a little hive of
commerce. For the last few years, it has contrived to keep an old lady
and a companion (unpaid) in reasonable comfort at The Palms Private
Hotel, Torquay, and, in addition, to furnish the old lady’s youngest
niece with an allowance of two pounds a week in order that she might
continue to share a studio just off the Fulham Road and attempt to
design scenery for plays that are always about to be produced at the
Everyman Theatre, Hampstead. It has also indirectly paid the golf-club
subscription and caddie fees of the junior partner of Fulton, Gregg
& Fulton, the solicitors, who are responsible for the letting and
the rents. As for the tenants themselves, their names may be found
on each side of the squat doorway. The ground floor is occupied by
the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, the first floor by _Twigg &
Dersingham_, and the upper floors by the _Universal Hosiery Co._, the
_London and Counties Supply Stores_, and, at the very top, keeping its
eye on everybody, the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, which seems
to be content with the possession of a front attic.
This does not mean that we have now finished with No. 8, Angel
Pavement. It is for the sake of No. 8 that we have come to Angel
Pavement at all, but not for the whole of No. 8, but only for the first
floor. No doubt a number of tales, perhaps huge violent epics, could be
started, jumped into life, merely by opening the door of the _Kwik-Work
Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, or by trudging up the stairs to the _Universal
Hosiery Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, or by
looking up at the grimy skylight, and giving a shout to the _National
Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, but we must keep to the less mysterious but
more respectable first floor--and _Twigg & Dersingham_.