“Cut some off for George,” said Mrs. Smeeth, “and I’ll keep it warm for
him. He’s going to be late again. You’re a bit late yourself to-night,
Dad.”
“I know. We’ve had a funny day to-day,” replied Mr. Smeeth, but for the
time being he did not pursue the subject. He was busy carving, and
though it was only cold mutton he was carving, he liked to give it all
of his attention.
“Now then, Edna,” cried Mrs. Smeeth to her daughter, “don’t sit there
dreaming. Pass the potatoes and the greens--careful, they’re hot. And
the mint sauce. Oh, I forgot it. Run and get it, that’s a good girl.
All right, don’t bother yourself. I can be there and back before you’ve
got your wits together.”
Mr. Smeeth looked up from his carving and eyed Edna severely. “Why
didn’t you go and get it when your mother told you. Letting her do
everything.”
His daughter pulled down her mouth and wriggled a little. “I’d have
gone,” she said, in a whining tone. “Didn’t give me time, that’s all.”
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.”
“No, I didn’t,” said Mr. Smeeth slowly. “That’s all right, George. Only
don’t take all night about it, that’s all. Oh!--there’s just another
thing.” He hesitated a moment. “Somebody told me he’d seen you once or
twice with that flash bookie chap--what’s his name?--y’know--Shandon.
Well, you keep away from that chap, George. I don’t interfere--and you
know I don’t--but that chap’s a wrong ’un, and I don’t want to see a
boy of mine in his company.”
“Shandon’s no friend of mine,” said George, flushing. “I don’t knock
about with him. He comes into the garage sometimes, that’s all. He’s a
friend of Barrett’s.”
“Well, if half of what I hear’s true,” Mr. Smeeth remarked, “he’s a
friend to nobody, that chap. And you just keep out of his way, George,
see?”
“First I’ve heard of this,” said Mrs. Smeeth, looking severely at her
son.
“All ri’, Dad,” George muttered, nodding. “So long, Ma.” And he was off.
Mrs. Smeeth promptly rushed the remaining dirty plates into the
kitchen, and then returned, five minutes later, to find her husband
looking at a battered copy of a detective story that had somehow
found its way into the room. You could not say he was reading it. So
far, he was merely glancing suspiciously at it. Mrs. Smeeth took up
the evening paper, pecked at it here and there, then pottered about
a minute or two, then turned on the wireless, which only let loose
another patronising gentleman, switched it off, brought two socks and
some darning wool from the top of the little bookcase, examined them
with distaste, looked across at her husband, then said: “I can’t settle
down to anything to-night, somehow. How d’you feel about a little walk
round? We might look in at Fred’s for an hour. What d’you say? Oh no,
I thought not--won’t stir, the old stick-in-the-mud. One of these days
I’ll be finding a nice young man to take me to the pictures. Well, if
you won’t stir, I will. I think I’ll just slip round to Mrs. Dalby’s
for an hour. She asked me if I would.”
“You do,” said Mr. Smeeth. “I’m all right here.”
He lit his pipe again, made up the fire, and tried to settle down with
the detective story, which at once hustled him into the library of the
old Manor House, where the baronet’s body was waiting to be discovered.
But he did not make much headway with it. Goath and Mr. Dersingham and
this Golspie kept appearing in that library. Angel Pavement was just
outside the old Manor House. So he put the book away and tried the
wireless. This time the patronising gentlemen had all gone home, and
in their place was a rich and adventurous flood of sound. It was not
unfamiliar to Mr. Smeeth, and, after a pleasant tussle with his memory,
he recognised it as something by Mendelssohn, an overture it was, a
sea piece, either Whats-It’s Cave or Hebrides or something. Unlike his
wife and children and most of his friends, Mr. Smeeth had a genuine, if
unambitious, passion for music, and this was the kind of music he knew
and liked best. He sank into his chair, and the sharp lines on his face
softened as the music came swirling out of the little cone and there
arrived with it the old mysterious enchantment of the ear. A phantom
sea rolled about his chair: the room was filled with foam and salt air,
the green glitter of the waves, the white flash and the crying of great
sea birds. And Mr. Smeeth, a magically drowned man, worried no longer,
and for a brief space was happy.