Chapter Ten: THE LAST ARABIAN NIGHT

I

The outward changes in Turgis, already noticed by Miss Matfield and Mr. Smeeth, were only tiny scattered hints and clues, and by no means in proportion to the changes within, for during these last seven weeks, ever since that night when Lena Golspie had failed to keep her appointment with him, his life had been like a bad dream. There are some dreams, trembling on the edge of nightmare, in which the dreamer goes rushing frantically through dismal reeling phantasmagoria of familiar scenes and places trying to find a lost somebody or something. This had been Turgis’s real life. He had got up as usual, bolted his breakfast and exchanged a word or two with the Pelumptons, hurried down to the Tube, climbed into the City, sent and received advice notes, telephoned to this firm and that, fed variously in teashops and dining-rooms, looked at newspapers, even gone to the pictures, all as usual; but these customary activities had merely been a dream within a dream, a shadowy routine of existence. His real life had been this pursuit of Lena, and so far it had had all the urgency and dark bewilderment of a bad dream.

He had been able to call again at the flat before her father had returned, but she had only spent half an hour with him and had been vague and shifty in her excuses. He had flung away his resentment, had made the most abject apologies, and at last had made her promise to meet him again. She had kept him waiting twenty minutes on this occasion, and when she did come, she only turned the evening into a misery. She had been cold, had criticized his appearance, his manners, and had made him jealous. When he had tried to kiss her, she had laughed at him and evaded him. Then her father had returned, Christmas came, and the two of them had gone to Paris, leaving Turgis to imagine, with a vividness and force that brought a curious mingling of pain and pleasure, a host of scenes in which Lena went smiling in the arms of rich and handsome Frenchmen and Americans. But at least he could not see her, and so he was free for a few days to make what he could of life by himself. He made nothing of it. He could not forget her for a single minute. London was a jumble of silly meaningless faces. Before he had met her he had spent most of his leisure looking for adventures with girls and hardly ever finding them, but now, of course, they were offered at every turn, thrust on him, and they had no interest at all. He tried once—a girl outside one of the smaller picture houses had smiled at him and he had taken her in—but it was merely dull and savourless, like trying to eat sawdust. After that, he never bothered, living entirely in his thought of Lena and in the memory of those two first rapturous nights. He could not believe—how should he?—that those two nights did not mean as much, or nearly as much, to her as they meant to him, and so he was ready, was eager, to see in everything she had done since merely so many mysterious feminine moods, a queenly wilfulness and waywardness that would gradually be consumed in the mounting fires of passion. He knew that this was what happened with these wonderful creatures: he had seen it happen many a time on the pictures.

At first, he had realized, with wonder and humility, that it was all miraculous, that he was nobody in particular, with nothing very much to offer. But she herself had changed that. She had kissed him into being somebody, and now he had a great deal to offer—his love, his life. Very soon, being a born lover and romantic, it seemed to him that no girl could want more than that. Living over and over again as he did that hour or so of passionate embraces and kisses, he could look back on what appeared to him a long intimacy with her, far removed from any casual encounter (for he knew all about them, and this was quite different), so that he felt he had a claim, a right, and that when she avoided him or in any way challenged that claim, she was trying to escape from the very condition of life itself. Thus, if it was not wilfulness and waywardness, then it was something abominably wicked stirring in her to be regarded as a bigoted and militant priest would regard a heresy. None of this, of course, moved on the surface of his mind, but it coiled and uncoiled below that surface and obscurely determined what did eventually move there or what at last came bursting through, exploding beyond thought, into action.

When the Golspies came back, after Christmas, it took two imploring letters and a final telephone call (he rang up from the nearest call box to the office during a time when Mr. Golspie was safely away from the flat) to induce her to agree to another meeting, and even then, after all the crescendo of excitement, she never turned up. He was left in a hot and salted misery of shame and resentment, but he could no more turn his mind away from her than he could walk about with his eyes closed. And now all London and every familiar way of life were like the flickering background of a film, a film in which he pursued and she evaded him. He could think of nothing, nobody, but Lena.

The sleep that would not come to him at night hovered perilously near him during the morning at the office, when, heavy, drowsy, brooding, he would lean forward, chin in hand, one elbow on the desk, and leave his work untouched until his attention was called to it. He spoke little, and hardly let his dull gaze rest for a moment on one of the others there. They told one another that he seemed stupid, and stupid he was too, in everything that did not concern Lena. In what did concern her, he developed a wonderful acuteness and foresight. Thus, for example, any telephone call from the private office could be overheard at the receiver in the general office, if the little switchboard was rightly manipulated; and it often happened that the Golspies talked over the telephone to one another, usually with reference to what one or other of them proposed doing during the evening; and Turgis became expert at catching these talks while pretending to be at the receiver waiting for some number to be given him. He was able, too, to work on the least hint that might be dropped in Mr. Golspie’s casual talk. Then he would wait hours, even on cold, sleety nights, in the neighbourhood of 4a, Carrington Villas; sometimes in time to see her come out, perhaps with a young man, perhaps with her father and one of his friends, and then to stalk her down the road to the bus or the taxi rank; sometimes late enough to see her returning home, to hear her laughter suddenly break the silence. Twice, he had watched her, with an escort, go into a large expensive restaurant, where he could not possibly follow her. Once he had been able to get to the same theatre, and had sat in the corner of the gallery, looking down at her in the stalls. He had often jeered at young Stanley and his “shaddering,” but now, inspired by his jealous misery, he suddenly turned himself into a master shadower. Icy winds pierced and smote him; his feet ached in the slush; his hands grew numb and his eyes watered; he caught colds that ought to have sent him to bed, but he never heeded them and somehow they disappeared; and all this discomfort hardly troubled him at the time, for he carried a fire inside him, a burning excitement. It was only afterwards, when he trailed back to Nathaniel Street, sat in his little room pulling off his wet boots, turned and tossed and coughed in his bed hour after hour, dragged himself out in the leaden mornings, that he suffered in the body.

His mind, however, lived as it had never lived before, knowing exquisite agonies, finding pleasure and pain inextricably confused in these hours of waiting and shadowing. Sometimes when he was returning to his lodgings, cold, tired out, hopeless, or rose to meet another heavy blank morning, he would tell himself that he had done with it all, and then he might creep through a day or two trying to live a life of his own, but everything would seem then so dull, so savourless, that he hurried back to Carrington Villas, to the waiting and dodging and hurrying round corners. He discovered, too, that when he knew where Lena was, what she was actually doing, his jealous feelings were less strong and sharply barbed than when he did not know where she was and whom she was with: it was bad to realise that for the next two or three hours she would be dancing with that tall fellow who sometimes brought a car, but it was much worse to be miles away from her and to know nothing. When he was pursuing her, though only in this strange, shadowy fashion, Lena and he alone were real, the only real human beings in a city that had been turned, with all its winter magnificence of lighted lamps and shop windows, golden buses, glittering night signs, and shining wet pavements, into an illuminated jungle. When he tried to put her out of his mind, however, there was nothing in the whole city that would let him forget. It had been tantalising, maddening enough before he had met Lena, when he had gone wandering about the streets in an amorous hunger, but now it was a hundred times worse. Everything he saw spoke to him of women and love. The shops he passed were brilliant with hats and clothes that Lena might wear; they showed him her stockings and underclothes; they were piled high with her entrancing little shoes; they invited him to look at her powder-bowls, her lipstick, her scent bottles; there was nothing she wore, nothing she touched, they did not thrust under their blazing electric lights. The theatres and picture houses shouted to him their knowledge of girls and love. The hoardings were covered with illustrations, nine feet high, of happy romances. The very newspapers, under cover of a pretended interest in Palm Beach or feminine athletics, gave him day by day photographs of nearly naked girls with figures like Lena’s. And in and out of the buses, tube trains, theatres, dance-halls, restaurants, teashops, public-houses, taxis, villas, flats, went boys and their sweethearts, girls and their lovers, men and their wives, smiling at one another, laughing together, holding arms, clasping hands, kissing. Slinking through this Venusberg, like a shabby young wolf, he could not forget. It never gave him a chance. He had never given himself a chance. He had nothing to put in the way, no ambition, no interests, no friends; so far he had asked for little, merely food, shelter, and trifling amusement, except love. In his heart of hearts, he did not want to forget.

That first phase of unusual smartness, brushed hair, clean collars, creased trousers, had passed; he could not bother with that any more; if Lena wanted him to be smart again, well and good, she could tell him so, but meanwhile, he was his old shabby self, indeed shabbier than ever. Mr. Dersingham, Mr. Smeeth, Miss Matfield were beginning to give him some queer glances at the office. Well, they could look; so long as he kept the job at all (and that was certainly important), it did not matter to him; he was careless of all that. He was careless of most things these days. His finances, always difficult, had now drifted into a very bad state, and he owed Mrs. Pelumpton a pound or two, and even then he had to cut his ordinary expenses down to the lowest level, which meant that he had to feed cheaply and scantily. That did not matter either, for only now and then did he feel really hungry. Mr. Pelumpton, the old fool, had told him several times he ought to see a doctor, and even Mrs. Pelumpton was beginning to ask him if he hadn’t a pain anywhere, he looked “that bad,” she said. He told her that he hadn’t a pain, though this was not true, for very often now he had a sort of pain, not easy to describe, but roughly amounting to a tender hollowness, in his head. He tried one or two things at the chemist’s, just to make him sleep, for the nights following these vigils were the worst, when he turned and tossed and his eyes burned and the hollow place in his head enlarged itself; but these things did not do him much good, and what sleep he got, he paid for in the morning, when he felt heavy and shivery, so that the scantiest wash and shave was a hard drudgery. His work in the office was that too, though after Mr. Smeeth had taken him into the “White Horse,” he tried to appear a bit more energetic, for he knew very well that if he lost his job, he was in a hopeless situation. All these things, however, were only on the dream-like fringe of life. What was there in the centre, though this was like a dream too, a very different dream, dark, urgent, and with a terrible beauty, was his pursuit of Lena, the outward Lena who was behaving so strangely to him, whom she had welcomed and kissed and held so close. Even yet he believed that she was merely teasing him, holding him off for a little space, and that soon all would be well.

At last, after seeing her several times in one week, at a distance and never once alone, he made a desperate throw and spoke to her. It was a queer night, unlike any other he had seen during the time he had haunted Maida Vale, for during the afternoon, a Wednesday, there had been a sudden heavy fall of snow, so sudden, so heavy, that for once it had remained as snow and had not changed immediately into a black slush. The roofs and gardens and privet hedges in Carrington Villas were still white with it; even the gates and railings here and there were snow lined; and the night was at once curiously light and muffled. He did not pay any close attention to these details, did not consciously observe the brilliance of the stars, the unusually solid velvety black of the houses, the white-blanketed spaces, the sudden crystal glitter now and again, the crunch of the trodden snow as the night crispened; but nevertheless they stole into his consciousness and worked obscurely there. He thought of his boyhood, which he had not left behind him long, though usually it seemed a hundred years away, a faded muddle. Now it returned to him vividly, evoked by the unfamiliar sight of the snow. He had not had a very happy boyhood, but in this hour, when it came back purged of its shame and distresses, it seemed magical and the thought of it warmed and melted him, so that something suspicious, something grudging, something in his mind that matched a certain furtive look he had, shook itself free and then vanished. It left him feeling confident, eager, a young man in a world full of friends.

Then he saw her coming up the street, the tall fellow by her side. He was not sure at first, but then he heard her voice. He hurried forward to meet them before they could turn in the entrance to 4a, and he contrived it so easily that he was able to slow up and then come face to face with them before they had reached the gate. He stopped, raised his hat, and cried: “Good evening.” He did not know whether to add “Miss Golspie” or “Lena,” had no time to decide, but felt that something must be added, so ended with a mumble that might have been anything. His heart knocked painfully. She looked lovelier than ever in the mysterious snowy half-light.

The tall young man stopped at once, raising his hat, too, and smiling.

“Oh!” Lena’s soft little cry was charged with meaning; there was dismay, irritation, disgust in it. She hesitated a moment, threw him a quick frowning glance, then said, coldly: “Oh—good evening,” and at once moved away, leaving the tall young man staring after her for a second or two. Then he gave Turgis a nod and hurried away.

Turgis saw them turn in at the gate. He heard the young man’s short gruff laugh and then an exclamation of some sort followed by a little trill from Lena. The door closed behind them, and it might have been banged to in his face. For several minutes he never moved. Then he slowly walked past the house, and, looking up, saw the light in the window above, in that room where she had given him supper and danced with him and kissed him. For a moment he thought wildly of marching up there, striding in and demanding to know this and that; but he knew there was no sense in that, for not only was the tall young man there, but also Mr. Golspie himself might be there. He crossed the road, turned to look at the lighted window again, stared at it until at last it was nothing but a vague crimson blur, then walked away, his shoulders humped in misery.

“Yersh,” said Mr. Pelumpton, as he shuffled into the conjugal bedroom, three-quarters of an hour later, “e’sh jusht come in, proper blue look on ’im, too. No, I didn’t arshk ’im where ’e’d been. I like ter get a shivil arnsher when I arshksh a man a shivil queshen, I do. ‘Leave you alone, boy,’ I shaysh to myshelf. ‘You go your way an’ I go mine. Yersh.’ What you shay, Mother?”

“I say it’s a pity, too,” replied Mrs. Pelumpton, above the bedclothes. “Worries me, it does, to see a quiet young feller goin’ the wrong way like that. ’E’s got a nasty broodin’ look. And if you want my opinion, ’e’s got ’imself into trouble with some girl—one of these flappers, as they call ’em. My words, I’d give ’em flapper if I’d anything to do with ’em!”

“Oh, I dare shay, I dare shay,” said Mr. Pelumpton, with philosophic melancholy. “If it’sh bother yer want, that’sh where to find it, that’sh my ecshperiensh. Oo, I got a narshty pain in my back to-night. It’sh the cold, yer know.”

II

“Is that Mr. Levy?” Turgis cried down the telephone. “Yes, this is Twigg and Dersingham’s. It’s about the next delivery—you know, you were asking. Well, I’m sorry, but we can’t manage it for Tuesday. No, they say they can’t do it. I’ve been on to them. But they’ll manage it for Thursday—yes, the whole lot. Yes, Thursday certain, Mr. Levy—you can depend on that. Yes, I’ll advise you. All right.”

He put down the receiver and returned to his desk. He was shaking a little. There had been something queer about his voice when he had been speaking to Levy. As he left the telephone, he had noticed both Miss Matfield and little Poppy Sellers glancing curiously at him. Let them look, silly fools, and then mind their own business! He had come to a sudden decision, and the very thought of it made him shake with excitement, though that was not very difficult, because he was not feeling at all well. That great hollow inside his head was filled now with jagging hot wires; his bones ached vaguely; his hands shook a little as he wrote; and his face kept twitching, as if it disliked the feel of his heavy burning eyes. Yet he had not the least desire to go to bed or to see a doctor; he did not feel ill in the ordinary way at all; it was only nerves, he concluded, just imagination. He had only to sleep better and eat more and all would be well.

His decision was to see Lena and have it out with her that very night, if by chance he could find her in the flat. He knew that her father would not be there, because when he had gone to the telephone to ring up Levy, Mr. Golspie had put a call through from the private office, and it had been to book a table for two at a restaurant. On this the cunning shadower in Turgis pounced at once. Mr. Golspie sometimes took his daughter out for the evening, but Turgis was certain that he would not trouble to book a table for her. He had not sounded like a man who was spending the evening with his daughter. If Lena was out, then she was out, and Turgis would have to wait, but he knew she did not go out every night and this was a chance not to be missed. At eight o’clock or just after, when Mr. Golspie was well out of the way, sitting down in his West End restaurant, he would go to the flat and, if Lena was there, he would see her and talk to her in that room of theirs again. He would see her, whatever happened. Whatever happens, whatever happens—a voice inside him said it over and over again as the Friday afternoon, fussy and irritable because of its week-end rush of things-that-must-be-settled-at-once, dragged on, with the last dripping traces of snow fading outside the window.

“Finished that copying, Miss Sellers?” said Mr. Smeeth, as he began to put away his books. “That’s the way. We’ll have that new boy here on Monday, and then you’ll have it easier, eh? You cleared up, Turgis? Did you have a word with Ockley and Sons—y’know, I mentioned it to you this morning?”

“Yes, I did, Mr. Smeeth. It’s all right.”

“You’re through, then, eh?”

“All I can do to-night, Mr. Smeeth. One or two things I’ve had to leave till to-morrow morning—couldn’t help it.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Smeeth, taking out his pipe and pouch. “Well, I don’t think there’ll be much fear of you not turning up here to-morrow morning. What do you say? Pay day, eh, Turgis? That’s one of the days we don’t like to miss.”

Turgis smiled faintly. “No, I’ll be sure not to miss that, Mr. Smeeth. You can count on me for that.”

“It’s as well we can count on somebody for something these days,” Mr. Smeeth remarked jocularly, “Well, you can get away now, Turgis—you, too, Miss Matfield, of course—and I’ll see you in the morning.”

“That’s right,” said Turgis. But as he was taking down his hat and coat, he said to himself, for no particular reason: “How does he know he’ll see me in the morning? He doesn’t want to be so jolly sure about it.” Then as he was putting his overcoat on, he looked across at Smeeth, who was now lighting his pipe, and said to himself: “Old Smeethy there, with his eyeglasses and his pipe and his nice clean collar every day and his nice home with his wife and kids and his walk round to the bank and his seven or eight quid a week, he’s all right and he deserves it, for all his fussing about, ’cos he’s not a bad old stick. But he’s a bit of a dreary devil for all that, and he thinks everything’s settled the way it is with him, and he knows no more really about what’s going on than an old charwoman. Still, if I got on a bit and Lena married me and we’d a nice little home the same as his, I’d like to ask him in sometimes with his wife and we’d have a smoke and a drink.”

And Mr. Smeeth, looking up from his pipe and catching Turgis’s eye, said to himself: “That lad’s looking bad, my words he is, worse than ever to-day. He ought to knock off for a day or two, even if we are short-handed. Doesn’t look after himself, that’s the trouble. And nobody to look after him—in lodgings. Bit miserable that. But then he’s no responsibilities, no worries, only himself to provide for, and he could have a good life—go to concerts and all that—if he only set about it properly. Probably doesn’t know how to look after himself. I ought to ask him up to tea or supper one of these week-ends—be a nice change for him—bit of home life. Yes, I’ll do that when we’re a bit more settled and Edie’s in a good temper.”

Thus, with these thoughts buzzing in their heads, they looked at one another, almost staring as people stare at a familiar word that has suddenly grown strange. Then, with a sober nod across the office, they turned away, Turgis to the door and Smeeth to his desk.

III

It was fine that night, and in the slight stir of wind there was a faint warmth that hurried the black slush into the gutters. Once out of the main road, where the bright lamps and the passing cars and buses were crazily mirrored in the wet stone, Turgis turned into a Maida Vale that was quite unlike the one he had seen two nights before, when the snow lay thick on the ground. Now it was close, dark, and dripping. Carrington Villas was one great gloomy drip-drip and it smelt slightly of wet grass. Turgis, shivering a little, not with cold, but from excitement, never gave these things a thought, but nevertheless he noticed them. He noticed everything that night. The least thing, a shadow moving on a curtain, a boy’s whistle far down the road, stood out clearly, rammed itself home. At No. 2 somebody was playing the piano, and he recognised the very piece; he had heard it many a time at the pictures.

He stood outside the gate. There was a light up there. She was in, that was certain. Some one might be with her, but he would have to risk that. He did not care very much now if there was somebody there, for he could go up and say something. He waited a moment.

Then, as he waited, he was suddenly visited by an impulse to go away, to drop it all then and there and never to think about the girl again. He felt for a second as if he had only to turn on his heel and walk straight forwards until he reached the top of the street, just the top of the street, that was all, and he was free and a different kind of fellow, stronger and happier. It was almost as if a voice whispered sharply in his ear: “Come on. Have done with it. Come away, now.” There was a cold emptiness somewhere in his stomach. He wasn’t well. He could easily have cried. If that light up there had suddenly vanished from the window, he could have turned away without regret. The faint crimson glow remained, however, and he could not leave it now for a safe but empty world.

Once again, he passed the broken statue of the little boy playing with two large fishes, climbed the steps between the two peeling pillars, and carefully rang the bell marked 4a. When nobody seemed to hear it, he remembered what had happened before, and tried the other bell. The door was opened by the enormous woman in the apron.

“Do you know if Miss Golspie’s in, please?”

“Oh, I’m wearing me feet out for them people!” cried the woman. “Up and down, and every time our own bell rings, it’s for them. Miss Golspie, is it? I believe she’s in too, though it’s no business of mine whether she’s in or out or gone to the devil, young man. Would she be expecting you coming at all?”

“No, she isn’t. Do you know if she’s by herself—I mean, is there anybody else there?”

“I’ll see, I’ll see. I’ll give her a shout. Just come inside and close the door gently behind you, so there’s no draught in the place, and then I’ll give her a shout.” And the woman went down the hall, climbed a few stairs, and gave a shout that soon opened the door above. “Miss Golspie, there’s a young man here, known to you—I’ve seen him before meself—he wants to know if you’re alone up there and can he come up to see you.”

“Yes, I’m all on my lonesome to-night,” Turgis heard Lena cry. “Tell him to come up, please, and I won’t be a minute.” She sounded as if she was pleased. It was wonderful to hear her like that.

“You’ve to go up and then when you get there, she says she won’t keep you a minute, meaning you’ll wait while she tidies herself and makes herself pretty.”

“Thanks very much,” said Turgis fervently, and up he went. The door was open and he walked forward, straight into the big sitting-room, which he had revisited so many times in his imagination these last few weeks that it was quite strange to see waiting quietly there for him, the very same room, with the very same piles of bright cushions, the same deep sofa thing, the same gramophone records, books, magazines, bottles, fancy boxes, fruit, and glasses all over the place, the same two big shaded lamps. He shook to see it there, solid, real. He did not sit down, but stood in the middle of the room, holding his hat, glancing quickly, nervously, at this thing and that.

“Hel-lo!” cried Lena gaily in the doorway. Then the sound was cut short. He turned to face her.

“Oh!” she cried, staring at him. “It’s you.” And her face fell, her voice dropped.

He tried to say something.

“Do you want to see my father about something?” she demanded.

“No, I don’t. I want to see you—Lena.”

“What do you want to see me about?”

“Oh!—you know, Lena. Everything.”

She came forward a little now. “I don’t know. My father will be coming back soon—any minute.”

“He won’t,” he told her sullenly.

“How do you know he won’t? You don’t know anything about it!”

“I do. I know where he is, and I know he won’t be back for some time.”

“Yes, you would! That’s why you’re here. You’ve been spying and following me about, haven’t you? Making me look a fool! You look a fool too, let me tell you that, a nasty fool.”

“Well, what if I have? I wanted to see you.”

“Well, I didn’t want to see you,” she cried, furious now. “And you ought to have known I didn’t. You can’t take a hint. I told you as plainly as I could I didn’t want to see you any more.”

“Lena, why don’t you?”

“Because I don’t, and that’s why. If I don’t want to see you, why don’t you go away and stop away? I don’t want you hanging about me and coming slinking in here, looking like nothing on earth. Just because I felt sorry for you once and hadn’t anything much to do and was nice to you, do you think I’ve got to spend all my time trailing round to the pictures with you?”

“But, Lena, listen⁠——”

“I tell you I won’t listen. I don’t want to hear. If you only saw yourself! Go away. I won’t listen. I didn’t want to be rude to you, but you’re so stupid and you just make me look silly too.”

“Lena, please, please, just listen a minute⁠——”

“Oh, go away, can’t you! Fool!”

“You’ll have to listen,” he screamed. He sprang forward, dropping his hat, and seized both her wrists and held them tight. As she struggled to break loose, he poured it all out in a wild unbroken rush of short phrases, the whole story of his first distant adoration, his desire and his passion, all the ecstasies and miseries of his love. As he came to the end, his grasp suddenly slackened and she was able to free her wrists. She had not listened to him. She was in a fury.

“You damned rotten rotten⁠——” she gasped, fighting for breath. Then she flared up into a shriek: “Keep your filthy hands off me,” and she flung her own hands into his face, pushing him away.

Things were snapping inside him now like taut fiddle-strings. “All right, I’ll kiss you for that,” he cried, and caught hold of her before she could get away. He was not a muscular youth, but he was strong enough now. He pressed her body to his and forced a few brief kisses upon her before she had a chance to do anything but push and wriggle. The feel of her body, the soft cheek burning beneath his lips, the scent of her hair, touched a spring inside him; all tenderness for her vanished; his blood leaped and sent a murderous cataract roaring in his ears. He still held her, but hardly noticed her hands on his face.

She gave a violent twist, partly freeing herself. “You dirty, filthy pig!” she cried. “Let me go. I hate you. If you touch me again, I’ll scream and scream until somebody comes.”

He looked at her and there came, like a flash of lightning, the conviction that she was hateful, and something broke, and a great blinding tide of anger swept over him. Her scream was cut short, for his hands were round her soft white throat, pressing and pressing it as he shook her savagely. Her head wobbled like a silly mechanical doll’s. Her mouth was open and her eyes were bulging, and so she wasn’t even nice to look at any more, but just silly and ugly, so silly and ugly that his hands, which had an independent life of their own now and were strong and masterful, pressed harder than ever. A horrible rusty noise came from that open mouth. She suddenly went limp, and, as his hands released their grip, her eyes closed and she slipped backwards, striking her head against the corner of the divan as she fell and then rolling over on to the floor, a huddle of clothes and white flesh. She made no movement at all, not a twitch, not a tremor. He crept forward, his eyes fixed on what could be seen of her face, purply-white and still. The whole figure was completely motionless. He waited a minute, raising his eyes in a slow strained fashion until they took in nothing but the shape and colour of a fancy box of cigarettes on the little table by the divan. There was a gay picture of a Turkish woman on the box. He had had some cigarettes from that box; they were very good; they were foreign cigarettes; Turkish, of course, but not sold in England; foreign words just above the picture of the Turkish woman, foreign words. Very slowly his eyes left the box and returned to the figure on the floor. Lena. Not a movement. No, that wasn’t Lena any more; that was a body. You couldn’t lie there like that unless you were dead. Lena was dead.

He stopped thinking then; no more thoughts came, not one. He picked up his hat and shambled quickly out of the room, out of the flat, leaving the door wide open behind him. When he reached the hall below, somebody came out from somewhere, perhaps spoke to him, but he took no notice. He left the house. It was better outside, in the dark.

IV

Down the straight length of Maida Vale, past the detached villas, past the great blocks of flats that were like illuminated fortresses, he moved at a steady pace, never lingering, just as if he were a young man who knew exactly where he was going and knew exactly how long it would take him to get there. But he wasn’t going anywhere; he was only moving on, simply leaving that room with the bright cushions and the fancy boxes and the quiet huddle of clothes and limbs by the end of the deep sofa. He wasn’t quite real. He was a young man walking in a film. Somebody spoke to him once. It was a big man in a cap and mackintosh, and he planted himself squarely in front of the dazed Turgis and said, almost angrily: “Here, I say, how do I find Nugent Terrace?” And when Turgis muttered that he didn’t know, that he was a stranger in that district, the big man said that he was a stranger too and that everybody he asked was a stranger, that they were all bloody strangers. When Turgis was walking on again, he kept repeating that—“all bloody strangers.” He noticed things as he went along, though they weren’t very real, only like the things you see in the background of a film. Maida Vale turned itself into Edgware Road, and immediately became bright and crowded, a gleaming medley of shop windows, pubs, picture theatre entrances, hawkers’ barrows, and pale faces. There was a shop where you could get sixpenny packets of gaspers for fivepence. A woman was shouting at a pub door; she was drunk. A lot of people were waiting to see the pictures, and a fellow with a banjo was singing to them. Two Chinamen came out of a sweet shop: All These Chocolates Our Own Make. That fried fish smelt bad. Two men starting a row, and a woman trying to pull one of them away. A good raincoat for 25/6. Funny what a lot of these imitation bunches of bananas there were, and didn’t look a bit like the real ones either. That chap standing in the shop doorway was just like Smeeth, might be his double. It streamed on and on, like a coloured film, a film with heavy bumping bodies and real eyes in it. Marble Arch, and some people waiting for buses.

Now, quite suddenly, he felt sick and terribly tired. There was nothing left of his body but some tiny aching old bones, but his head was enormous and there was more screeching and grinding and dull roaring in the great hollow inside it than there was among the cars in the road. He tried to think. Had he really gone there and done that? He had gone to that room so many times in his imagination, had so many scenes there, so many vivid encounters with Lena, that perhaps this last visit wasn’t real either. Had he done that? His fingers, closing round ghostly flesh, sent a sharp message to say he had done it. Yes, he had. Then there was no changing it at all. It was there. As if curtains had suddenly parted and been drawn up, he saw the room again; he was back in it; a Turkish woman on a box of cigarettes, and then—on the floor, not a movement. Something inside him, a little wild thing, trapped, mad, sent up a scream. Something else muttered over and over again that it was an accident, only an accident, a pure accident, just an accident, all accidental, simply an accident; and then it said that he wasn’t well, not at all well, ill in fact, nerves and all that, yes nerves, quite ill, not healthy, not well. The tears came into his eyes as he thought how true this was, for lots of people had said that he wasn’t well and he knew he wasn’t well. Then a bus came up and everybody got on it, so he got on it too, and sat inside. The man next to him had a big swelling at the back of his neck, and for a moment Turgis was sorry for him, but after that he forgot all about him, forgot about all the other people in the bus, forgot all about Oxford Street and Regent Street that rolled past like a gleaming and glittering frieze. He did not notice where the bus was going; he did not care; he sank into a sick stupor.

“’Ere, come along,” said the conductor. “Fares, please.”

Mechanically, vacantly, Turgis handed him twopence and received his ticket.

Nobody else bothered about him at all. They glanced in his direction and then looked indifferently away. Yet in a week or two perhaps they might all of them be talking about him. But then he would not be Turgis any more, Mrs. Pelumpton’s lodger and the railway and shipping clerk at Twigg & Dersingham’s; he would be the Maida Vale Flat Murderer; and as that he could set huge machines in motion, send men running here and there, men with notebooks, men with cameras; news editors would mention him at conferences; sub-editors would rack their brains for good headlines for him; reporters would describe his little room in Nathaniel Street and interview Mrs. Pelumpton; columns on his “ill-fated romance” would be commissioned for the Sunday papers; good money would be paid for the smallest snapshot of him; every detail of his past would be sent roaring through the printing machines; men who had known him would boast of it; special contributors would comment on his story and his fate for twenty guineas a thousand words; scholarly criminologists would make a note of his case for future reference; novelists and dramatists would see if he could be worked up into anything good; millions would talk about him, would denounce him, would cry for his execution, would sign petitions, or perhaps pray for his soul; if he were set free, ten thousand women would be ready to marry him, and any halting sentences he could produce about himself would be handsomely paid for and conjured into The Story of My Life, announced on innumerable placards and hoardings: he would be somebody at last—the Maida Vale Flat Murderer. As yet, however, he was only a shabby, hollow-eyed youth with a vacant look, huddled in a seat that slowly moved round Piccadilly Circus, where, against the night sky, commerce was clowning it royally in a multi-coloured fantasy of lights. Nobody bothered about him yet; they were, as the big man had said, all strangers.

At the corner of the Strand and Wellington Street the bus turned and then stopped, and there he left it and began walking eastward. He had no destination, no plan; his mind issued no commands to his body to move, this way or that; his legs simply went on; while his mind was half in a dream and, for the rest, a vague jangle of conflicting voices. It was quieter now, less crowded, for he was going along Fleet Street, where later, perhaps, the machines would pound him into brisk news just as the other machines had pulped the tall trees into paper for such news. They were waiting, just round the corner, down the dark alleys, these machines, ready to pounce on some unhappy morsel of humanity. But as yet he was still only Turgis, Mrs. Pelumpton’s, Twigg & Dersingham’s, and now he drifted on, up Ludgate Hill, turning his face towards the old grey ghost of St. Paul’s, then curving in its shadow round Church Yard, up Old Change, down Cheapside, along Milk Street and Aldermanbury. It was better here in the City; not so much glare and noise, not so many people; it was huge, dark, and wettish, like a big cellar, a cave. It made his head feel better; and at last he could think a bit, though it was like trying to think in a nightmare. His legs were taking him somewhere now. There was no sense in it, but then there was no sense in anything. Oh, what had he done, what had he done? A street lamp, set queerly at the side of a great blank wall, threw its uncertain light on to a short curving flight of stone steps. While he questioned himself, his feet sought these steps and trod them with an ease that suggested familiarity. His hand touched the stout little iron post at the top, as it had done many and many a time before, for the blank wall belonged to Chase & Cohen: Carnival Novelties, and these were the steps that prevented Angel Pavement from being a cul de sac.

Two little yellow lights flickered at him, like a dubious pair of eyes, from somewhere down the little street. He walked towards them, quite slowly now, as if at last his mind was attempting to control his legs. The lights were those of a car. They were the feeble headlights of a taxi. And above this taxi, there was one lighted window, on the first floor, and on the first floor of No. 8. Somebody was in the office, Twigg & Dersingham’s, at this time, ten o’clock. He had to tell himself so very slowly and clearly, and he did it while he was standing in front of the waiting taxi.

He put his head round the corner, to look in the driver’s seat. “I say,” he began, with difficulty as if his voice was rusty, “I say⁠——”

“Hel-lo, hel-lo!” the driver suddenly shouted, so that Turgis jumped back. “What the hel-lo! You give me a start, mate. I must ha’ dropped off.”

“I say,” said Turgis, returning to look at him earnestly, “did you bring somebody here? In there, I mean.”

“I did,” replied the driver. “And I’m waiting for the party to come out.”

“Who was it? I mean, what was he like?”

The driver pushed forward a wrinkled red face. “Now I should say—that’s my business. Who d’you think you are, young feller? Scotland Yard or what?”

“No, but you see, I happened to be passing, you see,” he hesitated a moment, “and, well, I work up there—where the light is—in that office, and I wondered who it was.”

“Your place—like?”

“Yes.” Turgis gulped. He felt sick; he was trembling; he couldn’t talk like this long. “My place, where I work.”

“I see. Well, matter of fact, there’s two of ’em in there, and I brought ’em here from a restaurant in Greek Street. There’s a young lady and a stiffish gent—big moustache. That’s who’s in there, mate. Now are you satisfied?”

“Yes—thanks.”

“’Ere,” said the driver, after a pause, pushing his face over the edge of his door and staring at Turgis, “’ere, half a minute, boy, what’s the matter? You’re not crying, are you? Got the jim-jams, boy, or what?”

But Turgis had disappeared into the dark doorway.

V

The office door was slightly open, so that a thin pencil of light pointed across the landing. Turgis waited a minute, staring at it from the shadow. He passed a hand roughly over his wet face. Then, summoning all the courage left him in the world, he blundered in, almost flinging himself into the private office beyond.

“Now who the hell are you?” roared Mr. Golspie, jumping up from his chair at the table. Somebody gave a scream. It was Miss Matfield, in the corner.

“Lena,” said Turgis, choking over the name.

“Well, I’ll be damned! If it isn’t What’s-his-name—Turgis.” Mr. Golspie glared at him, and advanced ferociously. “And what the devil do you want charging in here like this, eh? What’s the game, eh?”

“Lena. Lena.”

“Do you mean my daughter, Lena? What are you talking about? What about her? What the blazes has she got to do with you?”

“I think—I’ve killed her.”

“Killed her?”

“Yes.” And Turgis stumbled to a chair and began sobbing.

“My God! he’s mad, he’s clean mad,” cried Mr. Golspie to Miss Matfield, who had risen from her chair and was looking from Turgis to Mr. Golspie in startled bewilderment. “Here, you, stop that blubbering, and try to talk sense. What do you know about my daughter, Lena? You’ve never even set eyes on her.”

“I have,” cried Turgis, almost indignantly. “I was with her to-night, in your flat. I’ve been there before. I took some money there first⁠——” He hesitated.

“That’s right, he did take some money there,” said Miss Matfield quickly. “Oh!—I believe it’s true.”

Mr. Golspie pounced on him at once, clapping a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Come on, then. What happened? Get it out, quick.”

Turgis blurted out a few sentences, broken and confused, but they were quite enough.

“My God, if she is, I’ll kill you. Come on, get up, you—you bloody little rat, you—we’re going straight into that taxi and we’re going to see, and you’re coming with us.”

“But can’t you telephone?” cried Miss Matfield, wildly.

“Yes, of course—no, I can’t. I knew I’d have thought of it. The rotten telephone’s out of order—been out of order for two days. Come on, let’s get away. You turn the lights out, Lilian; I’m going to look after this fellow. Hurry up, for God’s sake.”

It was a long long journey. For the first five minutes or so, nothing was said, but after that Mr. Golspie, out of sheer impatience, began to ask questions, and piece by wretched piece, he dragged the whole miserable story out of Turgis, who sat facing him, on one of the little seats, trembling, afraid every minute that Mr. Golspie was going to hurl himself across the tiny space at him. His misery was so great, now that his brain was clearer, that he felt that he would not mind being killed, but nevertheless Mr. Golspie’s huge violence, repressed but apparently ready to burst out any moment, terrified him. Miss Matfield hardly spoke a word the whole time, and when she did it was in a very soft shaky voice. But she stared at Turgis, and when the lights flashed in he saw that her face was pale. It never occurred to him to wonder what she was doing there so late with Mr. Golspie.

“It just shows you, doesn’t it?” said Mr. Golspie to Miss Matfield. “If I hadn’t suddenly thought during dinner I ought to slip back there for quarter of an hour, to tot those figures up to show that chap in the morning, we’d never have seen this fellow. What were you doing there anyhow? I don’t know if it’s much good asking you, because you seem to me wrong in your damned head—but what were you doing there?”

“I don’t know,” Turgis muttered. “I just went there. I didn’t know where I was going. I suppose when I got to the City, well, I just went to Angel Pavement—sort of force of habit.”

“Another ten minutes and we shouldn’t have been there, and then I shouldn’t have got back home till twelve. What time is it now? Quarter past ten, eh? What time did you leave my place?”

“I don’t know really. I’m all mixed up⁠——”

“My God!—you are,” said Mr. Golspie bitterly. “And you’re going to be a worse mix up soon, let me tell you.”

“I think—it couldn’t have been much after eight—I don’t know, though—might have been half-past eight.”

“Nearly two hours—och!” Mr. Golspie groaned. “Here, this fellow’s got to drive faster than this, or we’ll be all the damned night getting there.”

It was horrible stumbling back up that garden path again, going through the hall and climbing the stairs once more. It was worse inside the flat. “You go in there and wait, you,” said Mr. Golspie, and gave him a mighty shove that landed him in the middle of the sitting-room, which seemed to him now, of all the places he had ever known, the most horrible, the most closely packed with misery, and the very sight of its cushions and fancy boxes made him feel sick. Nevertheless, he had not been there more than a minute before he knew somehow that Lena was not dead. Then, after a few more minutes, voices came through the open door behind him, and he turned and crept nearer to it.

“No, no, no!” cried a voice, and he recognised it at once as that of the foreign, witch-like old woman who lived downstairs, “she would not ’ave a doctair. I loosen her dress and geef her cognac and do dees teeng and odair teengs, and ven I say, ‘You ’ave a vairy great shock, my dee-air, ve call a doctair,’ she say: ‘No, no, no. No doctair.’ Vell den, eet does not mattair. But I say, ‘You go to bed. Aw, yes, you go to bed, at vonce, my dee-air.’ And she deed not vant to go to bed, but I make her go.”

“Little monkey!” Mr. Golspie rumbled. “Good job you thought something was up, though, and came in. I’m much obliged. Very grateful. Just take Miss Matfield here in to her, will you, and I’ll be back in a minute or two.”

“Is she all right?” cried Turgis, as Mr. Golspie came into the room.

“I don’t know about that,” he replied grimly, “but she’s a damned sight better than she was when you left her lying here, you crazy little skunk. Come here.”

“Oh!—thank God!”

“Come here. You can do your thanking afterwards.” And he grabbed Turgis by the lapel of his coat and yanked him nearer. “Just listen to me. There are one or two things I could do to you. To start with, I could give you such a damned good hiding you’d never want to look at a girl, never mind put your hands on her, for the next six months. See?” And he shook Turgis with a sort of menacing playfulness, like a terrier with a rat. “And while I’m about it, here’s a bit of good advice for you. Keep away from ’em. You’re not a lady-killer, y’know—though, by God, you nearly were to-night—and if you take a good look at yourself, you’ll see why. Drop it. You’re no good at it. And another thing I could do to you, mister half-starved caveman, is to hand you over to the police. I could do that all right, couldn’t I?” he demanded, looking sternly at his wretched prisoner, who, hearing that tone and meeting that look, had every excuse for not realising that this was the last thing Mr. Golspie had any idea of doing.

“Yes, you could, Mr. Golspie,” he replied miserably. He saw himself marched off, locked in a cell.

“Well, I’m not going to, not yet, anyhow. But, listen—if I ever set eyes on you again, I will. If you come within a mile of this place⁠——”

“Oh, I won’t, I won’t.” And Turgis certainly meant it.

“And you don’t go back to that office, understand? You don’t go near it again. Keep right away from it. Keep away from me altogether, see?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Turgis gasped, for now Mr. Golspie had stopped shaking him, but was pulling him backwards through the sitting-room doorway, almost lifting him bodily with that huge powerful grasp on his coat shoulder.

“I don’t ever want to see you again, unless it’s in the dock or the madhouse,” said Mr. Golspie, throwing open the door of the flat with one hand while with the other he gave a violent twist and brought Turgis round in front of him. “The very sight of you turns my stomach, see? You understand? You’re not going back to that office, and you’re not coming within a mile of this flat, and you’re going to keep out of my sight and you’re going to keep your nasty mouth shut, too. You’ve been lucky to-night, my God you have! But if ever I see you again, you won’t be lucky. So get out and bloody well stay out. There!” And Mr. Golspie, spinning him round, released his coat collar, put a hand in the small of his back, and with a short run and a tremendous heave sent him sprawling down the stairs. He pitched forward badly, banged his nose so hard that it bled, and was bruised, but managed to pick himself up at the bottom and go blindly along the hall to the front door.

He waited a minute outside, leaning dizzily against one of the pillars. The cool darkness rocked round him. In the garden, just by the broken statue of the boy and the two fishes, he was violently sick.

VI

Nearly all Nathaniel Street was in darkness when he returned there that night. At No. 5 they were still up, and he could hear them singing; a rum lot at No. 5. Across the street there was a light or two and a gramophone going somewhere. But that was all. No. 9 was in complete darkness; obviously they had all gone to bed, Edgar too, for when Edgar was out, Mrs. Pelumpton always left a light in the hall for him, a courtesy she did not extend to her two lodgers, Park and Turgis. If they were so late, they had to grope. Very, quietly, slowly and painfully, for he had walked all the way from Maida Vale, partly because he wanted to arrive late and so avoid any questions, and was tired out, aching all over, Turgis crawled upstairs to his room at the top. There he lit the tiny gas mantle, and then sat down on his bed, resting his head in his hands.

All his face felt stiff. Laboriously, he removed his soaking shoes, and was not surprised to find that his socks were wet. He put a match to the little gas-fire, which exploded with a startling bang in that stillness. He did not take his socks off, but held out in turn the sole of each foot towards the gas-fire and watched it steam. He had no slippers; he was always meaning to buy some, but never did. He stared at his reflection, holding the cracked little mirror in the wooden frame near the gaslight. There was a bruise on the ridge of his rather prominent nose; dried blood caked about the nostrils; a long smear down one cheek and just above one eyebrow. The eyes, red-rimmed, stared back at him in despair. In all his life he had never hated himself as much as he did then. The cracked face in the black wooden frame began to twitch a little, and he banished it. The water he had used before going out was still in the basin, and now he soaped his hands in it and rubbed them over his face, until his eyes smarted. When he had finished wiping his face, he looked at it again in the mirror, and found that the smears and dried blood had gone, but that the bruise was more marked than before. He did not look long. His face, pale and silly, disgusted him. Going through his pockets, he discovered a crumpled cigarette and had the first smoke for several hours. He remembered the last one, when he was on his way to Maida Vale, not five hours ago. Not five hours ago! A hundred years ago.

The haze had completely vanished from his mind, leaving a dreadful clarity. He saw himself quite clearly, and loathed what he saw. He knew now that Lena was simply a little flirt, who had happened to be bored, her friends being away, when he first called at the flat with the money, and had amused herself with him for a few hours because she had nothing better to do and, for the time being, his obvious worship entertained her. Then the minute somebody better came along, she had dropped him at once, and had afterwards been so annoyed that she had disliked the very sight of him. Now it seemed all quite clear, and it was unbelievable that he could not see it like that before, that he could have gone on dreaming away and hanging about to see her and deluding himself. He did not even hate her now. She simply did not interest him.

What did interest him, however, was the figure he cut himself, and that was what he saw with such terrible clearness. As he sat drooping on the bed, pulling away mechanically at the last inch of the cigarette, he put himself through a pitiless cross-examination. How could he ever have thought that he could make a girl like Lena fall in love with him, a girl who was pretty, who could meet all kinds of fellows, who had lived in places like Paris, who had a father with money? The very thought of Mr. Golspie crushed the last grains of self-respect in him. What had he, Harold Turgis, been fancying himself for? What was he? What could he do? What had he got? Nothing, nothing, nothing. Only a silly face, with a big useless nose and a trembling mouth and eyes that began to water almost if anybody looked hard at them. He threw the stump of his cigarette at the dirty saucer in front of the gas-fire, missed it, and had to go down painfully on his knees and retrieve the glowing end.

He returned to the bed and curled up on it, his eyes fixed on some photographs, cut out of a film weekly, pinned up on the opposite wall; but he did not see the photographs, for he was staring through them, through the wall, into the future, a vague darkness, in which he, a small lonely figure, moved obscurely. His job was gone. He had finished with Twigg & Dersingham and Angel Pavement. Perhaps they might have given him a rise soon; he might have had Smeeth’s job and seven or eight pounds a week before long, a proper home and carpets and armchairs and a big wireless set of his own; and now it might be a long time before he got a job as good as the one he had just lost. What could he do? A bit of typing and clerking, that was all, and anybody could do that; even girls could do it; some of them, really educated ones like Miss Matfield (yes, and what had she been doing with Mr. Golspie?), just as well as he could. And when he had queued up and looked at advertisements and written letters and trailed round and waited and got a job at last, what then? What would he get out of it? Nothing. He saw the world before him with no happiness in it, only foolish work and weariness, and unnamed fears, a place of jagged stones, shadows, dim menacing giants.

Having got so far, he could go no further. A little voice, like that of some tiny erect indignant figure in a great gloomy assembly, spoke up now, protesting. It was not right. It was not fair. There had been a time when it had looked as if everything was going to be quite different. Something had gone wrong. Where, how had it gone wrong? He could be happy; he could be as happy as anybody, if only he had a chance to be; and why hadn’t he a chance to be? Here!—if he’d a chance, he could be a lot happier than Park or Smeeth or even Mr. Dersingham—yes, he could! Then why shouldn’t he be? What was wrong? What was it, what was it? The little voice asked these questions, but no answer came. No answer. It was as if the erect figure suddenly collapsed and the gloomy assembly remained untroubled, unstirring.

It was no good. Every bit of him, from the damp soles of his feet to his tangled hair (which seemed to have a separate and equally miserable existence of its own, this night), agreed that it was no good. He stood up. He looked about him, as if searching the little room in despair for something to touch, to hold, to cling to, now that the night was pouring in, through the decayed woodwork of the window frame, through the cracked mortar and the foul old stone, its malevolent influences, its beckoning and gibbering ghosts. The calm, the clarity, were gone; the dream fumes rose and drifted again; but when he moved, he still moved slowly, as if led here and there by uncertain spectral hands. He fastened the window tight, and stuffed paper in its various crevices. The door fitted badly, and he had to stuff more paper, indeed all the paper he had, between the door and the frame, and then in the keyhole. He turned off the gas from the tiny mantle, leaving the room uncertainly illuminated by the gas-fire. For a moment he considered the dying glow of the mantle. Could he use that gas? If he had a tube he could, but he hadn’t a tube; and if he turned it on full, it gave out so little gas that it would be painfully, horribly slow doing anything to him. No, the gas-fire was the thing. He had only to turn it out now, wait a minute or two until the burners had cooled, then put a hand to that tap again, lie on his bed and hear the gas hissing out for a minute or two, fall asleep and all would be over.

He sat on the floor, in front of the fire, leaning his elbow against the side of his bed. Staring at the three twisted glowing pillars of the fire, he contemplated with sombre satisfaction his approaching end. It would be painless, that he knew, for he had once talked to a man in the Pavement Dining Rooms, and this man had a brother who was a policeman, and this policeman had had a lot of experience with people who had done it with gas and he gave it as his opinion that they all passed quietly away in their sleep without a bit of pain and fuss and worry: it was far easier getting out of the world altogether than taking a train to the City at Camden Town Tube Station. They would find him in the morning, peacefully asleep. There would be an inquest and it would get into the papers. Some of them, Mr. Golspie and Lena, perhaps, would have to give evidence. Mrs. Pelumpton, too. Had the deceased been strange in his actions lately, had he something on his mind? A promising young fellow—would anybody say that? Tragic End, Young Clerk’s Fatal Romance. Who would be really sorry? Nobody. No, no, one or two, perhaps a lot of people; you never knew. Poppy Sellers, for instance; Miss Matfield had said that little Poppy, poor kid, was keen on him; so that she ought to be sorry, very sorry; perhaps it would be the great sorrow of her life—“He meant everything to me, that boy. I worshipped him”—he could hear these, and other heart-broken phrases from the pictures, coming from a rather vague Poppy Sellers, very pale and dressed in black. It made him feel sorry himself, and it was the pleasantest feeling he had had for hours, quite warm and luxuriant.

“A very sad case, gentlemen,” said the coroner, mournfully. “Here you have a young man full of promise⁠——” Turgis interrupted him, for somehow Turgis was there too: “It’s all right saying that now,” he cried to them all, triumphant in his bitterness, “but why didn’t you do something about it before? It’s too late now, and you know it is. Too late, too late! Let this,” he continued sternly, “be a warning to you.” But that was silly. He would be dead and gone. Perhaps he ought to leave a letter; they usually left letters; but he hated writing letters, and he knew there was no ink in the room. No, of course, he hadn’t any ink! He’d nothing! He might as well finish it off now, and show them all, the rotten swine!

As he arrived at this savage conclusion, he noticed for the first time that the three little glowing pillars of the gas-fire were dwindling. They shrank rapidly until they were nothing but quivering blue blobs that shot up once and popped, shot up again and popped, then popped out altogether. No more gas. He hadn’t a shilling, he had only eightpence. He couldn’t even commit suicide, couldn’t afford it.

After a short silence, an unusual sound, a most strange sound, a fantastic and incredible sound, came from the side of the bed and travelled round the dark little room. It came from Turgis, and he may have been crying, he may have been laughing, or doing both at once. He was certainly not committing suicide.

He made a great deal of noise now. Putting out a hand, quite instinctively, to the tap of the gas-fire, he touched something hot in the darkness there, gave a sharp cry, and banged his hand on the floor. Then he stumbled to the window to pull out the paper, and somehow the window stuck and he pushed so hard that when it did open, the rotten old woodwork of the frame partly gave way, and as it suddenly flew open and the night air rushed in, there was a loud crack. The door was noisier still. He was determined to get all the paper away, but it was not easy and he was impatient, and he began pulling away at the knob of the door until at last the door suddenly swung in and he sat down with a bump, the knob still in his hand. It was then that he heard sounds from below, and saw through the open door a light travelling jerkily upwards. The next minute he was looking at the extraordinary figure of Mr. Pelumpton, who was standing outside in his nightshirt, holding a candle.

“Now let’sh ’ave reashon, let’sh ’ave reashon,” said Mr. Pelumpton reproachfully. “Bangin’ and knocking the housh about like that! The mishish thought shomebody was breakin’ in. ’Ave a bit o’ shensh, boy, jusht ’ave a bit o’ shensh! Can’t go on like that, thish time o’ night. It’sh all very well going out an’ ’aving a pint or two an’ coming in late—done it myshelf in me time—but that’sh no reashon for carrying on like that, ish it? Blesh me shoul!—like a nearthquake, jusht like a nearthquake. Now jusht get yourshelf to bed quietly, boy, and let other people shleep even if you can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Turgis told him. “It was an accident. I’m all right. I’m not drunk or anything.”

“Well, you might be in the ratsh, properly in the ratsh, green sherpentsh all round you, the way yer going on,” said Mr. Pelumpton severely, as he withdrew.

In ten minutes, Turgis was fast asleep.

VII

“Well, we’ll have to see,” said Mrs. Pelumpton dubiously. “That’s what we’ll have to do, we’ll have to see.”

Turgis had been trying to explain, without any reference to the real facts, why he hadn’t gone to the office that Saturday morning, why he wasn’t going there again, and why he couldn’t immediately pay Mrs. Pelumpton what he owed her. He had not come down to breakfast until late, and both Pelumptons were convinced that he had been uproariously drunk on the previous night, when he had made all that noise.

“I’m sure they’ll let me have this fortnight’s money all right, Mrs. Pelumpton,” he told her. “And then I’ll settle up at once, before I do anything else.”

Mrs. Pelumpton stopped bustling about for a minute, stood and looked at him, making herself as compact as possible, so that she seemed exactly square from the front; and suddenly said in a startlingly deep voice: “Will you promise me one thing?”

Turgis said he would. He was ready to promise anything to her.

“Well, it’s this. Promise me to keep right off the drink this next week or two.”

“I promise,” he replied promptly. Two glasses of bitter a week were usually enough for him at any time. The Pelumptons were positive, however, that he had been drinking heavily for weeks. Mr. Pelumpton, a beer man himself, said that whisky made you look and behave like that, if you could only get enough of it.

“In or out of work, that ’abit’s bad,” Mrs. Pelumpton continued. “But far, far worse it is, out of work. Keep off it for a bit. Don’t touch a drop. I’m not one of these prohibiters and temperancers—though I did sign the pledge when I was a girl, but then I wouldn’t ’ave touched a drop then anyhow, didn’t like the taste of it—but I do say that a young feller like yourself who’s going to ’ave to look for a job is better without a single drop, if only for the sake of not being smelt.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mrs. Pelumpton,” said Turgis, who was hoping that this good advice meant that she was willing to let him stay on while he was looking for another job.

“I know I am. And what’s just ’appened—’cos you can talk about business until you’re blue in the face, but you won’t make me believe you haven’t got into trouble with your little goings-on lately and that’s why they’ve given you the sack—but I say, what’s just ’appened ought to be a lesson. You can’t afford it and you ’aven’t got the ’ead for it, so you’ve just got to let the booze alone. Pa can’t afford it, but I will say ’e’s got the ’ead for it. You ’aven’t. That’s why it’s a lesson. Promise me that, and I’ll let you run on a bit, paying me what you can, while you’re out of a job. We’ve got to live and let live in these times, and I will say that up to lately you’ve been as quiet and reg’lar paying a young chap as I’ve ever let to. And just you keep on Pa’s right side too, for ’e won’t like it, being in business himself you might say and a bit of a stickler, but I’ve got a softer nature and I’m not for turning a young chap out just ’cos he’s got his bit of trouble and can’t pay all he’s agreed to pay⁠——”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Pelumpton,” said Turgis warmly.

“—For a few weeks anyhow,” she added cautiously.

Turgis thanked her again, but with considerable less warmth this time. It might be more than any few weeks before he saw another three pounds a week or anything like it, and the way Mrs. Pelumpton talked before she said that, he had imagined she was ready to let him stay on for months. Still, a few weeks were something. He had dreaded telling her that he had lost his job, had not even got this fortnight’s money, and would have to keep her waiting. He felt a bit better now that he had told her, but nevertheless he was still feeling pretty miserable. He wondered what was happening in the office, whether Mr. Golspie had explained to Mr. Dersingham what had occurred last night, whether they would send his money on to him, whether they would give him a reference. He had exactly eightpence now and he wanted a cigarette badly this morning. It was no use, he would have to have a smoke. So he went down the road for a packet of ten gaspers, and then decided to go and look at some advertisements of jobs and perhaps have a peep at the Labour Exchange. It was one of those uncomfortable streaky days, a minute or two of sunshine, then clouds and a bitter east wind. It was miserable walking about in it with just twopence in your pocket, no job, a terrifying Mr. Golspie (with possible police) somewhere about, and no hope in any direction. When he saw the Labour Exchange, he was sorry he had gone that way, for the very look of it made him feel still more wretched. He hated Labour Exchanges.

It was late when he had dinner, and when it was over and Mrs. Pelumpton was washing and tidying up in that despairing fury at which she always arrived on Saturday, Mr. Pelumpton returned from the pub down the road, immensely oracular, and insisted on talking to Turgis for the next hour. This time Turgis was compelled to stay there and listen, for already he was beginning to feel that he was there on sufferance. Moreover, with only twopence in his pocket, and an east wind blowing outside, he was better off there than he would be anywhere else. Something must have told Mr. Pelumpton this, for he never took his dim boiled eyes off Turgis, and droned on and on, sometimes touching on the dusty mysteries of “dealing,” sometimes offering ridiculous good advice. It was awful. Turgis sat there, steadily hating the old bore. “That’s right, Mr. Pelumpton,” he would say, with dreary politeness, adding to himself: “You silly old devil, you ought to give those whiskers of yours a good wash and brush up.” But there was not much satisfaction in that.

At about half-past three, Mr. Pelumpton’s steady flow was suddenly checked. Somebody was at the front door. Mrs. Pelumpton immediately made a dramatic appearance from nowhere, crying, “You go and see, Pa. It might be Maggie,” and then waited, tense, with lifted brows and open mouth, while Pa shuffled out of the room and along the hall.

“Yersh, that’sh right,” they heard him say. “Come inshide. Jusht a minute.” And then he came shuffling back, so maddeningly deliberate that his wife’s eyes began rolling round with sheer impatience. “Is it Mrs. Foster?” she cried.

“No, it ishn’t Mishish Foshter,” he replied, with dignity. He looked at Turgis. “It’sh a young lady from your offish who’sh been shent to shee you.”

“Take her in the front,” said Mrs. Pelumpton, before Turgis could get out of the room.

It was little Poppy Sellers, and Turgis took her into the front; which only made it all the more queer, for he hardly ever went into that room. It was used only on the most special occasions, and for about three hundred and sixty days of the year it remained a shrouded and mysterious chamber. It housed, behind faded lace curtains, some of Mr. Pelumpton’s best bargains in “pieshesh,” a piano with a pleated silk front, two armchairs that were very shiny and plushy, half a bearskin rug, several books in one glass case, dozens of butterflies in another case, two real oil paintings of waterfalls, and a fine collection of shells, glass paper-weights, wool mats, marble ash-trays, and souvenirs of all the South-Eastern seaside resorts. Above the mantelpiece, and flanked by two tall mirrors that had storks painted on them, Mrs. Pelumpton’s father, so immensely enlarged in sepia that at a first glance he seemed to be a generous view of the Alps, stared down in mild astonishment. The air inside this room was quite different from that of the rest of the house; it did not smell of food at all; it was unlived-in, chilly, with hints of wool and varnish in it. There was a large paper fan in the fireplace, and immediately the two human beings entered the room, a host of indignant specks ran down the folds of this fan, making a queer little flicker of movement and sound in that dim quiet place.

“I’ve brought your money,” said Poppy, bringing an envelope out of her scarlet handbag. She was very smart, this afternoon, in a black and white check coat, a hat nearly the same colour as her handbag, a yellow scarf with red dots in it, and dark silky stockings and shiny black shoes. Not the Japanese style this time—more French. She looked well in that front parlour, sitting in one of the plushy armchairs. “Yes, this is it,” she continued, handing it over. “I think you’ll find that all right. Mr. Smeeth said somebody had better take it, and I said I would, ’cos I have a cousin that lives up here, in Bartholomew Road, and I sometimes come up here, so I said I didn’t mind bringing it, ’cos I know the district, even if I do live a long way off, and I hadn’t anything special to do to-day.” She rattled this off very quickly, as if it were a set piece she had rehearsed a good many times on the way.

“Thanks very much,” said Turgis. Recent events had left him with an imagination that was capable of leaping into life very suddenly. It leaped now. Here was Poppy Sellers bringing his money to him just as he had taken the money to Lena Golspie. She had been ready with a good excuse just as he had. This thought did not immediately pluck him out of his despondency, but it certainly made him feel several inches taller at once. Besides, the kid had made herself look so neat and smart, quite pretty in fact.

“Aren’t you well?” she asked him, looking at him very earnestly.

“I’m not too bright,” he admitted. “Matter of fact, I’ve been a bit off colour for some time. Nothing much, y’know. Nerves, really, that’s what it is. I’m one of those highly strung people I am.”

“You look pale, and you’ve got a mark on your nose, haven’t you?” She examined his face in that special detached way that all women seem to have at times, looking at your face as if it was not part of you, but something you were showing them, like a picture or a piece of china. Then she nodded wisely at it. “I believe something’s been up. Here, listen,” she continued eagerly, “something’s happened, hasn’t it? I mean, you’re not coming back, are you?”

Turgis admitted sadly that he was not.

“I’ve been puzzling and puzzling my head about it,” she told him, a mounting excitement in her face and voice. “When you didn’t come this morning, Mr. Smeeth said you must be ill, and he wasn’t surprised. And I thought so, too. And Miss Matfield didn’t say anything, and I thought she looked a bit queer, as if she knew something. She does, too, I’m sure, though I don’t know what. She doesn’t tell me much—bit stand-offish, you know, though she’s nice, she really is—but she knows a lot, and something’s been going on with her some time, if you ask me. But, anyhow, Mr. Golspie came in, later on, and he was talking to Mr. Dersingham, and then they sent for Mr. Smeeth, and after a bit, Mr. Smeeth came back and said later on, y’know, just trying to be ordinary like, as if nothing special had happened, that you weren’t coming back. I knew all the time there was something funny about it. And I didn’t see how they’d told you, ’cos you didn’t know last night, did you? Course it’s not my business, I know,” she added, with a wistful note, “but I couldn’t help wondering. And I’m sorry, too.”

“You’re sorry I’m not coming back?”

“Yes, I am,” she declared, tightening her lips, nodding, then looking him full in the face. “I don’t care what anybody says—I am.”

“I’m sorry, too. Can’t be helped, I suppose. I’ve been in trouble.” His voice trembled slightly as a wave of self-pity swept over him.

She kept her eyes fixed on his, and they were dark and round. “Did you—do something?”

He nodded. Already, even in this nod, there was a certain gloomy romantic suggestion.

“Course you needn’t tell me if you don’t want,” she said hastily, “but p’r’aps you’d like to, ’cos I’m not trying to poke my nose in—it’s not that—but I’d reelly, reelly, like to know—’cos—well, it doesn’t seem a bit fair, turning you off like that, and I said so this morning. You’ve always done your work all right, and you knew a lot about it, didn’t you? I’m sure you’ve helped me a lot, and I don’t care who knows it. And I said so straight out. I spoke up for you. They can say what they like about me, but I do stick up for my friends and anybody I like.” Then she lowered her voice. “You didn’t take something, did you?”

“D’you mean—pinch some money?”

“Yes,” she replied, looking down at her brilliant handbag.

“I should think I didn’t. Nothing like that. It wasn’t anything to do with Twigg and Dersingham’s at all. It was something—quite different.”

“I see.” She ran a finger up and down the bag. Nothing was said for a minute. As the room, chill and shuttered, waited for somebody to speak, there stole into it all the Saturday afternoon noises of Nathaniel Street, but all faint, muffled. Mrs. Pelumpton’s father stared down at them with mild astonishment. Turgis, sitting up in the other armchair, tapped a foot, and a few more specks stirred in the paper fan. This front room made him feel miserable, hopeless. He looked at the girl, and though she was so quiet now, she seemed delightfully vivid, warm, alive, human. He did not tell himself that, but he felt it.

“Well, I suppose,” she began, grasping her bag properly and making a movement of her body.

“Listen, I’ll tell you what happened,” he said quickly.

“You needn’t if you don’t want, y’know.”

He did want. He told her almost the whole story, as he saw it then, and he did not see it then quite as he had seen it when he had returned in abject misery to his room the previous night. It took on a certain romantic colouring, and, as the history of a poor, virtuous, infatuated young man and a rich, wicked syren, it was not unlike a good many films that both the narrator and his hearer had seen and admired. She listened enthralled, exclaiming now and then, her eyes round with wonder.

Her first question, when he had done, was about Lena. What was she like, and did he still think she was as pretty as all that? This was not an easy question to answer, for he had to convey the impression that Lena was immensely seductive and at the same time to suggest that she had no further attraction for him. But he contrived to answer it, a trifle awkwardly, perhaps, but he satisfied Poppy.

“Course you never ought to have done that,” she cried, thinking of his terrible assault upon the jeering “vamp.” The glance she gave him, however, had more wonder and awe in it than disgust. It made him feel that he was not a man to be trifled with. “That was awful, that was. You didn’t reelly know what you were doing at the time, did you?”

“That’s it. I didn’t. Nerves, y’know. Highly strung. A sort of madness, it was. Can’t imagine now how I did it, ’cos I’ve never been that sort of chap, though, mind you, I’ve always had a temper if I got properly roused. Still, I don’t know how I came to do it, I don’t, really I don’t. Must have been properly mad at the time. Seems strange now, I can tell you, ’cos I don’t feel anything about it now, nothing at all.”

“Well, I don’t say you ought to have done it, ’cos you oughtn’t, and it’s turned out lucky the way it has.” She had a moment of real distress, imagining how it might have turned out. Then she went on to consider other aspects of the matter. “But I must say she very near deserved it, whatever happened, going on the way she did.” She had throughout shown the greatest indignation with Lena. “Horrible, I call it. Some girls haven’t any real feelings at all. Girl I know—she lives near us, and she’s one of these manicurists—she’s just the same. Treats boys and talks about them, too, in the most awful way. If they only heard what she said about them, they’d never look at her again. She’s asking for trouble too, and she’ll get it before long, and it’ll serve her right—I haven’t a bit of sympathy for her. I wouldn’t behave to a boy like that, I don’t care who he was, not if I’d never liked him at all and he was always follering me round and all that. And look at the way she went and encouraged you at first, making herself as cheap as anything—that ought to have told you, but of course boys can never see that.”

“I can see it now,” said Turgis, with the air of a man purged and purified by great suffering, a pale romantic figure.

“Boys haven’t a bit of sense like that,” she cried indignantly. “And you were just as silly as the rest, in that business. Mind you, I can see there’s a good excuse for you, ’cos a girl like that, with her father so well off and able to have all the clothes she wants and make herself look nice all the time—course you think it’s all natural, her looking like that, but it’s having the money and nothing else to do that does it—well, there is some excuse, and I admit it. Fancy you going on with Mr. Golspie’s daughter like that! And I never knew! Doesn’t it just show you?”

Undoubtedly it did. They continued a little longer, dramatically and not unpleasantly, in this strain, and then Miss Sellers asked what time it was, and Turgis, instead of telling her the time, said: “Just a minute. Don’t go. I want to give my landlady some of this money, and I’d rather not keep her waiting for it. I’ll be back in half a minute.”

Mrs. Pelumpton, who was making tea, was very pleased to see the money.

“This young lady works in the same office, you see,” Turgis explained, “and they sent her up with it. We’ve been having a good talk about all the business and all that.”

“Quite so,” said Mrs. Pelumpton, affably but with dignity, as if the very presence of a strange member of her own sex in the house, even though not in the same room, made her put on a special manner, affable, dignified, ladylike. “Perhaps the young lady would like a cup of tea, with yourself—that is, if she cares to take us as she finds us?”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. Pelumpton,” cried Turgis. “I’ll go and ask her.”

Miss Sellers was easily persuaded to abandon a projected visit to her cousin in Bartholomew Road, and stayed to tea, during which she and Mrs. Pelumpton discovered, after a great deal of elaborate cross-questioning, that Miss Sellers and her sister had actually stayed for a week in a boarding-house at Clacton that had been kept, three years before they went there, by Mrs. Pelumpton’s sister, whom therefore, they had only missed meeting by two years and ten months. Delighted to discover once more they were living in a world so small, so cosy, Miss Sellers and Mrs. Pelumpton were very pleased with one another. After tea, when the Pelumptons were out of the way, Turgis, though still the same young man, without prospects, without hope, actually went to the length of indulging in that mysterious badinage which is the signal of sexual attraction and interest among the young inarticulate creatures of this country. “What d’you mean?” they cried to one another. “Oh, I don’t mean what you mean!”

Then, at the end of half an hour or so of this, “Well, I half promised to see a girl friend to-night.”

“Oh, well, don’t bother,” he told her. “She can do without you, can’t she, just for to-night?”

“Just for to-night, eh? Well, can’t you do without me too, Mister Cheeky?”

“No, I can’t. I want somebody to cheer me up.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Thanks for the compliment. Anybody will do, eh?”

“No, I didn’t say that. You know I didn’t.”

“Well, you meant it.”

“No, I didn’t. Reelly, I didn’t. Come on. What d’you say?”

“All right then,” she said, turning her perky little head on one side and smiling. Then she looked serious. “Listen, though. If we do go, I must pay for myself. Yes, I must. I believe in that,” she added earnestly, as if she had thought about it for years and had not just invented this rule for herself, knowing only too well that he would be hard up in the near future and that every extra shilling would make a great difference. “I’ll come if you’ll let me pay for myself. There now!”

As they walked down Nathaniel Street, they decided that it must be one of the big West End picture theatres, but could not settle which it should be, and argued pleasantly about it, and she pretended to care more about it than she actually did and he pretended to care less; she was the eager, excited, imploring female, and he was the large, knowing, tolerant, protective male. Out in the smoky blue and gold of the lighted streets, they were more at ease than they had been in the house. Already they may have felt that they were going further together now than the way to the remotest picture theatre could take them. Perhaps this was the best day’s work in one or other of their lives; perhaps the worst. Saturday night: the children of the pavements and chimney-pots came pouring out, seeking adventure, entertainment, profit or forgetfulness in the vast impersonal thunder and glare of the city; and soon these two were lost in the crowd.