You could tell at once, by the way in which Mr. Smeeth entered the
office that his attitude towards Twigg & Dersingham was quite different
from that of his young colleagues. They came because they had to come;
even if they rushed in, there was still a faint air of reluctance about
them; and there was something in their demeanour that suggested they
knew quite well that they were shedding a part of themselves, and that
the most valuable part, leaving it behind, somewhere near the street
door, where it would wait for them to pick it up again when the day’s
work was done. In short, Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham had merely hired
their services. But Mr. Smeeth obviously thought of himself as a real
factor of the entity known as Twigg & Dersingham: he was their Mr.
Smeeth. When he entered the office, he did not dwindle, he grew; he
was more himself than he was in the street outside. Thus, he had a
gratitude, a zest, an eagerness, that could not be found in the others,
resenting as they did at heart the temporary loss of their larger and
brighter selves. They merely came to earn their money, more or less.
Mr. Smeeth came to work.
His appearance was deceptive. He looked what he ought to have been,
in the opinion of a few thousand hasty and foolish observers of this
life, and what he was not--a grey drudge. They could easily see him as
a drab ageing fellow for ever toiling away at figures of no importance,
as a creature of the little foggy City street, of crusted ink-pots and
dusty ledgers and day books, as a typical troglodyte of this dingy and
absurd civilisation. Angel Pavement and its kind, too hot and airless
in summer, too raw in winter, too wet in spring, and too smoky and
foggy in autumn, assisted by long hours of artificial light, by hasty
breakfasts and illusory lunches, by walks in boots made of sodden
cardboard and rides in germ-haunted buses, by fuss all day and worry at
night, had blanched the whole man, had thinned his hair and turned it
grey, wrinkled his forehead and the space at each side of his short
grey moustache, put eyeglasses at one end of his nose and slightly
sharpened and reddened the other end, and given him a prominent Adam’s
apple, drooping shoulders and a narrow chest, pains in his joints, a
perpetual slight cough, and a hay-fevered look at least one week out of
every ten. Nevertheless, he was not a grey drudge. He did not toil on
hopelessly. On the contrary, his days at the office were filled with
important and exciting events, all the more important and exciting
because they were there in the light, for just beyond them, all round
them, was the darkness in which lurked the one great fear, the fear
that he might take part no longer in these events, that he might lose
his job. Once he stopped being Twigg & Dersingham’s cashier, what
was he? He avoided the question by day, but sometimes at night, when
he could not sleep, it came to him with all its force and dreadfully
illuminated the darkness with little pictures of shabby and broken men,
trudging round from office to office, haunting the Labour Exchanges and
the newspaper rooms of Free Libraries, and gradually sinking into the
workhouse and the gutter.
This fear only threw into brighter relief his present position. He had
spent years making neat little columns of figures, entering up ledgers
and then balancing them, but this was not drudgery to him. He was a
man of figures. He could handle them with astonishing dexterity and
certainty. In their small but perfected world, he moved with complete
confidence and enjoyed himself. If you only took time and trouble
enough, the figures would always work out and balance up, unlike life,
which you could not possibly manipulate so that it would work out and
balance up. Moreover, he loved the importance, the dignity, of his
position. Thirty-five years had passed since he was an office boy, like
Stanley, but a trifle smaller and younger; he was a boy from a poor
home; and in those days a clerkship in the City still meant something,
cashiers and chief clerks still wore silk hats, and to occupy a safe
stool and receive your hundred and fifty a year was to have arrived.
Mr. Smeeth was now a cashier himself and he was still enjoying his
arrival. Somewhere at the back of his mind, that little office boy
still lived, to mark the wonder of it. Going round to the bank, where
he was known and respected and told it was a fine day or a wet day,
was part of the routine of his work, but even now it was something
more than that, something to be tasted by the mind and relished. The
“Good-morning, Mr. Smeeth,” of the bank cashiers at the counter still
gave him a secret little thrill. And, unless the day had gone very
badly indeed, he never concluded it, locking the ledger, the cash
book, and the japanned box for petty cash, away in the safe and then
filling and lighting his pipe, with out being warmed by a feeling
that he, Herbert Norman Smeeth, once a mere urchin, then office boy
and junior clerk to Willoughby, Tyce & Bragg, then a clerk with the
Imperial Trading Co., then for two War years a lance-corporal in the
orderly room of the depot of the Middlesex Regiment, and now Twigg &
Dersingham’s cashier for the last ten years, had triumphantly arrived.
It was, when you came to think of it--as he had once boldly ventured
to point out to a friendly fellow boarder at Channel View, Eastbourne
(they had stayed up rather late, after their wives had gone upstairs,
to split a bottle of beer and exchange confidences)--quite a romance,
in its way. And the fear that grew in the dark and came closer to the
edge of it to whisper to him, that fear did not make it any less of a
romance.
Mr. Smeeth now unlocked the safe, took out his books and the petty
cashbox, looked over the correspondence and attended to that part
meant for him, made a note that Brown & Gorstein, and North-Western
and Trades Furnishing Co., and Nickman & Sons had not fulfilled their
promises and sent cheques, dealt with the two small cheques that some
other people had sent, gave Miss Matfield three letters to type, asked
Turgis to telephone to Briggs Brothers and the London and North-Eastern
Railway, delighted Stanley by giving him a message to take out, and,
in short, plunged into the day’s work and set Twigg & Dersingham in
motion, even though Twigg had been quiet and unstirring for years in
Streatham Cemetery, and the present Mr. Dersingham was only in motion
yet on the District Railway, on his way to the office.
Stanley disappeared, as usual, like a shell from a gun, before Mr.
Smeeth could possibly change his mind; Miss Matfield contemptuously
rattled off her letters (the little _ping_ of the typewriter bell
sounding like a repeated ironical exclamation); Turgis talked down
the telephone rather gloomily; and Mr. Smeeth made the neatest little
figures, sometimes in pencil, sometimes in ink, and opened more and
more books on his high desk. And for ten minutes or so, no word was
spoken that had not immediate reference to the affairs of the office.
They were interrupted by the entrance of yet another employee of the
firm. This was Goath, the senior traveller, whose job it was to visit
all the cabinet-makers in London and the home counties and to persuade
them to buy the veneers and inlays of Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham. He
entered in the usual fashion, came trailing in, with one large flat
foot feeling reluctantly for the new bit of ground and the other large
flat foot equally reluctantly taking leave of the old bit of ground.
He was smoking the usual cigarette, which left a faint and fading
spurt of smoke vanishing happily into nothing behind him. He wore the
same shapeless old overcoat, bagging monstrously at the pockets, and
he wore it in the same way, that is, almost hanging off his drooping
shoulders. The familiar dusty bowler hat was tilted, not cheerfully but
depressingly, back from his furrowed and pimply forehead. He did what
he always did. He turned upon the activities of the office a dull and
knowing eye, an eye like a wet morning in February, just as damp and
grey and hopeless, and at once these activities seemed to dwindle, to
shrink from it. Mr. Dersingham had often said to Mr. Smeeth, and Mr.
Smeeth had often said to Mr. Dersingham, that what Goath didn’t know
about selling inlays and veneers and the like was not worth knowing.
But when you looked at him standing there, it seemed as if what he did
know was also not worth knowing: it had had such a bad effect upon him.
Everything about Goath was the same as usual except his appearance at
this hour, on this day, for Goath only called at the office, his base
of operations, on certain days and this was not one of them.
“Busy are’n’cher,” said Goath. It was not an inquiry. It was not a
greeting. It was a kind of gloomy sneer.
Mr. Smeeth laid down his pen. “Hello, what are you doing here?”
“Told to come,” replied Goath. “Mr. Dersingham told me to come in this
morning--wanted to see me.”
“Oh, did he?” It was obvious from Mr. Smeeth’s tone that he did not
like the look of this, quite apart from not liking the look of Mr.
Goath, for which he can hardly be blamed.
“He did. Why he did, I don’t know,” Goath continued drearily, “so don’t
ask me because I can’t tell you. He simply said, ‘Come here first thing
in the morning the day after to-morrow’--that’s this morning now--and
I’ve come. And I’ve got here too early, into the bargain.”
“Mr. Dersingham didn’t tell me anything about it,” said Mr. Smeeth,
with the air of a man who liked to be told something about it.
Goath gave a ferocious pull at the last half inch of his cigarette and
made a horrible hissing noise. “He wanted to make it a surprise--a
pleasant little surprise for you all--that’s it.” And as he said this
he tried to make Miss Matfield, who had just got up from her machine,
accept a friendly leer, but all that it encountered was a stare like a
high wall with broken glass along the top.
Mr. Smeeth ran a finger backwards and forwards along his lower lip, a
trick of his in a reflective moment. Now that he had looked at it a
little longer, he plainly liked it still less. But then, after a short
pause, he brightened up. “Perhaps he’s got some new stuff to show you?
Perhaps he wants to ask you something about it?”
“Haven’t heard of anything new. I’d have heard. It always gets round;
everything gets round: ‘No good showing us that,’ they say. ‘Show us
some of this new stuff. That’s what we want,’ they tell you. That’s
what they say, soon enough. And they don’t know what they want,
not half their time, they don’t. There’s fellers making furniture
now--_and_ making money out of it--who don’t know a good bit of wood
from a bit of oilcloth. How they get away with it,” Goath concluded
mournfully, “beats me.”
“That’s right, Goath,” said Mr. Smeeth. “It beats me, too. It’s cheek
that does it, really, that’s my opinion--cheek, and a bit of luck. But
honestly now, how are things going? You’ve been on the North London
round this time, haven’t you? How’s it going? Better than last time,
eh?”
“No,” the other replied, with all the satisfaction of the confirmed
pessimist. “Worse.” He took off his bowler hat and for once examined it
with the distaste it deserved. “Much worse.”
Mr. Smeeth’s face fell at once, and he made a tut-tut-tutting noise.
“That’s bad.”
“Bloody bad, I call it, if Ethel here’ll excuse me.”
Miss Matfield turned on him at once. “My name is Matfield,” she told
him. “If you want to say ‘bloody’ you can, for all I care, but I’m not
‘Ethel here’ or Ethel anywhere else, and I don’t intend to be.”
“I’m crushed,” said Goath, putting on a faint and entirely repulsive
air of vocal dandyism, “quite crushed.” But, being in his fifties,
indeed, having apparently been in them almost longer than anybody else
has ever been, and a hardened offender, he was not crushed.
“That’s all right, Miss Matfield,” Mr. Smeeth told her, uncomfortably.
And he gave Goath a warning little frown.
“Well, as I was saying,” Goath continued, “things are rotten. I’ve been
in the trade thirty years, and I’ve never known ’em worse. If the price
is right, then the stuff’s wrong. And if the stuff’s right, the price’s
wrong. And it’s mostly the price. They want it cheap now, want it
given away, no mistake about it, though the money they’re getting for
the finished article is more than ever. You look at what furniture’s
fetching now, retail, and then go and hear some of ’em talk--make you
sick. It would--make you sick.”
“I believe you,” Mr. Smeeth assured him earnestly. Then he hesitated.
“But--after all--somebody must be selling veneers, even if the inlays
have gone out a bit. I mean, they’ve got to buy it from somebody,
haven’t they?”
“Well, whether they have or they haven’t, all I can say is, they’re
not buying it from _me_. And I’ve been going to some of ’em for twenty
years. Yes, I have, young feller,” he added, for some unaccountable
reason catching the eye of Turgis and talking to him quite sternly,
“for twenty years. I was calling on some of them houses--Moses & Stott,
f’r’instance--when you was a baby or nothing at all.”
“It’s a long time, isn’t it, Mr. Goath?” replied Turgis, proud to be
noticed by such terrific seniority and rather proud, too, to think that
though he might not be anybody of much importance even now, at least he
was more than a baby or nothing at all.
“You’re right, young feller,” said Mr. Goath with heavy patronage, “it
_is_ a long time. Hello! Is this him?”
But the person who had just opened the outer door and was now standing
at the other side of the frosted glass partition was obviously not Mr.
Dersingham, so Turgis, in the absence of Stanley, went out to discover
the caller’s business.
“Good-morning,” said a brisk but ingratiating voice. “Any typewriter
supplies? Ribbons, carbons, wax stencil sheets, brushes, rubbers?”
“Not this morning, thank you,” said Turgis.
“Rubbers, brushes, stencil sheets, best quality papers, carbons?
Ribbons?”
“No, not this morning.”
“Well,” said the voice, a little less brisk and ingratiating now, “if
you should want any typewriter supplies any time, here’s my card.
Good-morning.”
“It’s surprising the number of those chaps we get round,” said Mr.
Smeeth, rather sadly, “all trying to sell the same bits of things. If
you bought anything, what would it amount to? A shilling or two, that’s
all. It beats me how they make anything out of it. Smart, well-dressed
chaps too, some of them. I don’t know how they do it, I really don’t.”
“You’d think that chap was making thousands a year,” said Turgis,
speaking in an aggrieved tone, as if somehow his own shabbiness came
into the question. “He’s always all dressed up, spats and everything.
He comes round here about once a fortnight and we’ve never bought
anything from him yet.”
“He’s ’oping, that’s what he’s doing, just ’oping, like me,” Mr. Goath
remarked grimly. “Only it doesn’t run to spats with me. I’d better try
’em, then I might get a big order or two. ‘Here’s old Goath with spats
on,’ they’d be saying up Bethnal Green way. ‘We’ll have to give him an
order now.’ P’r’aps they would. And then again, p’r’aps they wouldn’t.
Ah well--” and he yawned hugely and kept his eyes closed even after
the yawn was done--“I dunno, I dunno, I dunno.” He sent this rumbling
away into the mournful distance. “Fact is, some of these mornings my
inside’s all wrong, dead rotten. Doctor says it’s liver--that’s all
because I take a drop of whisky--but I say it’s ’eart. And whether it’s
’eart or liver, I’m going to sit down.”
The room sank into a kind of mild sadness, rather like that of the
atmosphere outside, where rich autumn had been bleached and deadened
into a mere smokiness and gathering grey twilight, in which the
occasional smell of a sodden dead leaf came like a remembrance of
another world, as startling as a spent arrow from some battle still
raging in the sun.
The faces of the three men--Mr. Smeeth’s grey oval, Goath’s purpled
pulp, Turgis’s tarnished youth--sank with the room, were half frozen
into immobility, and seemed for a moment or two to be vacant, staring
into nothing. Miss Matfield, who had risen from her table, saw it all
for one queer second tangled with a whole jumble of deathly images:
they were all under a spell, powerless to stir while the sky rained
soot, dust poured from every crevice, and cobwebs wound about them. She
wanted to scream. Instead, quite without thinking, she swept off her
table a little brass box crammed with paper fasteners, and the clatter
it made restored her to her normal senses.
“Sorry!” she cried harshly, stooping.
“And I should think so,” said Goath.
“That should be Mr. Dersingham,” said Mr. Smeeth, cocking an ear
towards the approaching footsteps.
Mr. Dersingham put his head inside the general office. “Good morning,
everybody,” he cried. “You’re here then, Goath. Are the letters in my
room, Turgis? All right then, I’ll just have a peep at them, and then I
want to see you, Goath, and you too, Smeeth. I’ll give you a shout when
I’m ready. Stanley about?... All right--doesn’t matter if he isn’t.
Send him in when he comes. I’ve forgotten to buy some cigarettes. I
may want you in about five minutes, Miss Matfield. And if a man called
Bronse rings up for me, don’t put him through. Tell him I’m out.
Oh--and I say--Smeeth, just make out a what-you-call-it, will you--a
statement of outstanding accounts--you know, just rough and ready? I
shall want that. Anything come this morning? It doesn’t matter, though;
you can tell me later.”
“And if I know anything,” Mr. Goath mumbled, when the head of
Mr. Dersingham had been withdrawn, “that won’t take you long,
Smeeth--telling how much you’ve got in this morning.”
“It won’t,” said Mr. Smeeth cheerlessly.