Chapter Three: THE DERSINGHAMS AT HOME

I

By the middle of the following week, there were several changes at Twigg & Dersingham’s. The greatest change was in the atmosphere of the place. Even if you had merely opened the outer door, remaining on that side of the frosted glass partition, you would have felt the difference at once. No doubt the typewriters rattled and pinged, the telephone bell rang, voices came through, all in a new and bustling, optimistic fashion. The very chair you were invited to sit on, when you waited behind that partition, had been dusted. Mrs. Cross had not found herself immune from this new influence: she had given the general office a thorough cleaning. There was no question now of anybody not having enough work to do. Stanley still went out, indeed he went out more than ever, but he was compelled to speed up his “shaddering” methods and was only able to follow men who were in a tremendous hurry. Mr. Smeeth among his little figures was as busy and happy as a monk at his manuscript. Turgis, whose duty it was to see that goods were duly forwarded to and from Twigg & Dersingham’s, became both hoarse and haughty down the telephone to all manner of forwarding agents, and spoke to railway goods clerks as if they were strange and unwelcome dogs. Miss Matfield rattled off her letters with slightly less contempt and disgust, rather as if they were no longer the effusions of complete lunatics but were now merely the work of village idiots. And she had acquired an assistant. The staff of Twigg & Dersingham had been enlarged at the beginning of this week by the appointment of a second typist. Miss Poppy Sellers had arrived.

The girls who earn their keep by going to offices and working typewriters may be divided into three classes. There are those who, like Miss Matfield, are the daughters of professional gentlemen and so condescend to the office and the typewriter, who work beneath them just as girls once married beneath them. There are those who take it all simply and calmly, because they are in the office tradition, as Mr. Smeeth’s daughter would have been. Then there are those who rise to the office and the typewriter, who may not make any more money than their sisters and cousins who work in factories and cheap shops—they may easily make considerably less money—but nevertheless are able to cut superior and ladylike figures in their respective family circles because they have succeeded in becoming typists. Poppy belonged to this third class. Her father worked on the Underground, and he and his family of four occupied half a house not far from Eel Brook Common, Fulham, that south-western wilderness of vanishing mortar and bricks that are coming down in the world. This was not Poppy’s first job, for she was twenty and had been steadily improving herself in the commercial world since she was fifteen, but it was easily her most important one. She had been chosen out of a large number of applicants, had been started at two pounds and ten shillings a week, and had been told confidentially by Mr. Smeeth, who seemed to her a terrifying figure, that she had good prospects if she would only learn and work hard. This Poppy fully intended to do, for—as her testimonials were compelled to admit—she was a very industrious and conscientious girl. She was not sufficiently plain to escape entirely the attentions of the youths who hung about the entrance to the Red Hall Cinema in Walham Green (and Poppy frequently visited the Red Hall with her friend, Dora Black, for she liked entertainment), but nobody yet had said that she was pretty. She was small and slight, had dark hair and brown eyes, and she aimed, rather timidly, at a Japanese or Javanese or general Oriental effect, wearing a fringe and all that, but only succeeded in looking vaguely dingy and untidy. Whenever she despairingly made a special effort, plying hard the lipstick, being lavish with the Oriental-effect face-powder, and raising and keeping her eyebrows so high that it hurt, people asked her if she wasn’t feeling very well. This failure to achieve the exotic beauty that was—as both she and Dora Black believed—“her type,” tended to keep poor Poppy slightly depressed and out of love with herself. During her first few days at Twigg & Dersingham’s she was like a mouse. She was overawed by the newness and importance of everything, and she saw that it would be impossible for her to make a friend of the large, superior, infinitely knowledgeable, tremendously condescending Miss Matfield. But, like a mouse, she kept her eyes open, missing nothing, with her busy little Cockney mind fastening on every crumb of information and gossip. After three days, Miss Dora Black of Basuto Road, Fulham, knew more, though at second-hand, about the office staff at Twigg & Dersingham than Mr. Dersingham himself had learned in three years.

One of Miss Poppy Sellers’ first tasks had been to copy out replies to the letters answering Twigg & Dersingham’s advertisement in the Times and the Daily Telegraph. This was for another man, to take Goath’s place, though he would have to spend much of his time further afield. He had to be as unlike Goath as possible in character, but not unlike him in experience. In short, he had to be “young, keen, energetic,” and “with some connection in furnishing trade and knowledge of veneers and inlays.” And the change brought about by Mr. Golspie was such that Twigg & Dersingham were able to declare that for the right man there was “a good opening.”

It has been said that the modern English do not like work. It cannot be said that they do not look for it and ask for it. The day after this advertisement appeared, the postal heavens opened and a hurricane of letters fell upon Twigg & Dersingham. Into Angel Pavement all that day there poured a bewildering stream of replies. It seemed as if street after street, whole suburbs, had been waiting for this particular opening. There were, it appeared, dozens of men with vast connections in the furnishing trade and the most thorough, the most intimate knowledge of veneers and inlays, and most of these men, though they had apparently refused scores of offers recently, were only too willing to assist Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham. Then there were men who had not perhaps exactly a connection, but had been for years, so to speak, on the fringe of the furnishing trade, men who had sold pianos, who had given removing estimates, who had done a little valuing, who knew something about upholstering. Then there were older men, ex-officers many of them, who knew about all kinds of things and were ready to enclose the most astonishing testimonials, who admitted that the furnishing trade and veneers and inlays were all new to them but who felt that they could soon learn all there was to know, and in the meantime were anxious to show how they could command men and to display their unusual ability to organize. And, last of all, there were the public school men, fellows who knew nothing about veneers and inlays and did not even pretend to care about them, but pointed out that they could drive cars, manage an estate, organise anything or anybody, and were willing to go out East, being evidently under the impression that Twigg & Dersingham had probably a couple of tea plantations as well as a business in veneers and inlays. These correspondents expressed themselves in every imaginable sort of handwriting and on every conceivable kind of notepaper, from superior parchment to dirty little pink bits that had been saved up in a box on the mantelpiece, but in one particular they were all alike: they were all keen, all energetic.

“This tells you something about the old country, doesn’t it?” said Mr. Golspie, who always talked as if he came from some newer one. He and Mr. Dersingham and Mr. Smeeth had been going through the pile.

“It’s only the slump,” said Mr. Dersingham, who was feeling optimistic these days. “It’s not so bad as it was, is it, Smeeth?”

“I suppose it isn’t, really, Mr. Dersingham.” But Mr. Smeeth sounded rather doubtful. These letters had given him another glimpse of the dark gulf. It was a sight that left him feeling shaky.

Mr. Golspie grunted. “Far as I can see from this lot, you can have the pick of England’s talent for four or five quid a week. There isn’t a dam’ thing these fellows can’t do—except find work. Well, I’ve got about four likely ones here. What have you chaps got?”

After a good deal more trouble and talk, they finally narrowed the possible applications down to ten, and these ten were asked to appear at the office in the early afternoon, two days later. They all came at once, and so had to wait their turn on the landing outside, while Stanley, enjoying himself hugely, dashed in and out to summon them. Mr. Smeeth, going round to the bank, had to make his way through this little crowd, and at the first moment, when he stepped outside the office and the two or three of them nearest the door made way for him with almost ostentatious smartness, he felt triumphant, proud, a solid and successful man among a lot of failures. But the very next moment, this feeling disappeared. They were all very well brushed, in their best clothes, and were already looking keen and energetic, especially those nearest the door, who looked the keenest and most energetic, their faces having already taken on the expression most likely to impress the mysterious powers within the office. A few of them were young and had an easy confident look, that of men merely seeking a change of job. Others were older, less confident, tense or wistful. Mr. Smeeth bumped into one, the last in the group, who was standing at the corner near the top of the stairs.

“I beg your pardon,” the man cried, eagerly, anxiously. He was indeed an anxious man, about Mr. Smeeth’s age and not unlike him, greyish, lined, brittle; a man with a wife and family and vanishing possessions; a man who time after time had found himself the last in the group, waiting at the corner, with the hope inspired by the letter, the letter that came thunderingly, triumphantly, that morning, like an act of deliverance, now dying in him.

“My fault,” Mr. Smeeth assured him, stopping, and offering the smile of a polite culprit. But when their eyes met fairly, this smile trembled, then fled, leaving Mr. Smeeth himself grave, anxious. He suddenly felt for this man a swelling sympathy, a deep stir of pity, that he had not known for many a month. They might have been brothers; and, indeed, brothers they were for a second or so, peering at one another in some darkened house of tragedy.

“Good luck!” Mr. Smeeth heard himself saying.

“Thanks,” and there came the ghost of a smile.

Mr. Smeeth never saw him again. He had no luck. The successful applicant was very different, much younger, a tall fellow with a remarkably small head, an inquisitive pink nose, and a very wide mouth that opened to show about twice the ordinary number of teeth. His name was Sandycroft, and he knew the trade, for though he had never sold veneers and inlays, he had bought them, having been at one time with Briggs Brothers. This set him apart from all the other applicants. Moreover, he appeared to be all keenness and energy, and threw the most passionate emphasis into the slightest remark he made.

“Mr. Twigg,” he cried, addressing Mr. Golspie, “and Mr. Dersingham, you can rely on me. I know the trade. I know the people. I know the ropes, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

“All right,” said Mr. Golspie with his usual genial brutality. “But don’t go knowing too many ropes. Eh, Dersingham?”

“Oh, quite!” replied Mr. Dersingham, who did not quite follow this, but looked knowing all the same.

“I understand, sir. I know what you mean. I couldn’t do it, sir. It’s not in my character. Honesty isn’t everything, but I believe it’s the first thing. And I’m straight. I believe in being straight, sir.”

“Good!” said Mr. Golspie heartily, for he, too, believed in Sandycroft and his like being straight.

“And if it’s possible, gentlemen,” Sandycroft continued, looking from one to the other of them, “I’d like to stay on now and just pick up the threads, so that I can start right away on the road to-morrow morning. I’m keen to get going, desperately keen. You know what it is, sir. After only a week or two doing nothing much, a man like me feels rusty. I want to get on with it. My wife laughs at me. ‘Have a rest,’ she says. But no, I’m not like that. I must be getting on with something.”

“Good man,” said Mr. Dersingham approvingly.

“Well, I think we’ll have to be getting on with something, too,” said Mr. Golspie. “He’d better come round here in the morning and learn what there is to know about it then, before we send him out.”

“I think he had,” replied Mr. Dersingham. “Look here, you’d better go home now—break the news to your wife and that sort of thing, eh?—and then be down about nine or so in the morning. If we’re not here then, you have a talk to Smeeth—that’s the cashier, out there—and he’ll be able to tell you something.”

“Very good, sir,” and you would have thought the speaker was about to salute smartly before retiring. He did not, however, but threw a keen and energetic glance at Mr. Golspie (whom he had recognised at once as the dominant partner), then a keen and energetic glance at Mr. Dersingham, picked up his hat (and in such a manner as to suggest that he could do some wonderful things even with that, if he wished to), brought his hat in front of the second button of his overcoat, gave three brisk nods, then wheeled about and made an exit like a torpedo from its tube.

Actually, what Mr. Dersingham and Mr. Golspie did get on with was an invitation to dinner, delivered by Mr. Dersingham and accepted by Mr. Golspie. It had come to that. There were things about Golspie that did not please Mr. Dersingham, for he was dogmatic, rough, domineering, and was apt to jeer and sneer in a way that left Mr. Dersingham’s mind bruised and resentful. A few terms at Worrell would obviously have made a great difference to Golspie, who now, in his middle age, showed only too plainly both by word and deed that he was not a gentleman. From that there was no escape: Golspie was not a gentleman. But Dersingham did not think of him as an Englishman who is not a gentleman, a bit of a bounder, an outsider (and there can be no doubt that Golspie at times did talk and act like a bounder, a complete outsider); he contrived to think of him as a kind of foreigner who had acquired an extraordinary command of the English language. This was not difficult, because Golspie did seem to have spent most of his time outside England and to have no roots in this country. And the fact remained that he had presented the firm of Twigg & Dersingham with a new and glorious lease of life, as if he were a god, a commercial god with a baldish head and a large moustache. So the Dersinghams had talked it over and decided that he must be asked to dinner, properly asked to dinner and not merely invited to take pot-luck some Sunday. And this meant something, for though your Old Worrelian who has to hack out his living in the City will smoke a cigar and drink a whisky or share a couple of club chops, if necessary, with any fairly decent sort of fellow he meets in the way of business, he draws the line—his own words—at inviting most of these fellows into his home, to meet his wife and possibly another Old Worrelian or two. Thus it says something for Mr. Golspie’s standing that, in spite of certain pronounced defects, he received such an invitation, which, by the way, he accepted calmly enough, with no show of surprise or gratitude.

“There’ll be some other people I think you’d like to know,” said Mr. Dersingham, “but we won’t make it too formal. Just a black tie, y’know, black tie.” He said this as people always say it, that is, as if a white tie weighed a ton and they are letting you down lightly.

“What do you mean? Wear a dinner jacket?”

“That’s the idea,” said Mr. Dersingham, telling himself that really Golspie was extraordinarily out of touch. “And—er—eightish then, next Tuesday, eh?”

“Right you are,” replied Mr. Golspie. “Very pleased.”

II

The Dersinghams occupied a lower maisonette in that region, eminently respectable but a trifle dreary, between Gloucester Road and Earl’s Court Road: 34A, Barkfield Gardens, S.W. 5. Nearly all the people who live in that part of London have the privilege, as the estate agents point out in all their advertisements, of “overlooking gardens,” which means that their windows stare down at iron railings, sooty privet and laurel hedges, and lawns and flower-beds that look as if they are only too willing to give up the unequal struggle. Some of these gardens are better than others, but Barkfield Gardens is not one of them. It is one of the smallest and dreariest of the squares, and is rapidly losing caste, its houses slipping through the maisonette and large flat era too quickly and already coming within sight of the small flats, the nursing homes, the boarding houses, the girls’ clubs. The Dersinghams did not like Barkfield Gardens. They did not like their maisonette, all the rooms of which seemed higher than they were long or broad and were singularly cheerless. Mr. Dersingham never did anything about it, because he was waiting—as he always said—until he knew where he stood financially. (From which you might gather that he knew where he stood philosophically or socially or politically or artistically.) Now and again, however, Mrs. Dersingham would read all the advertisement columns devoted to desirable residences, rush round to some agents, and even inspect a few houses, but as she had never really decided what it was she wanted, and her husband never succeeded in knowing where he stood financially, they remained at 34A, in the rooms that made them seem like insects at the bottom of a test-tube, grumbling, while a stream of cooks and housemaids, endlessly diverted from four local registries, flowed through the dark basement, leaving as sediment innumerable memories of glum looks, impertinent answers, lying references, missing silk stockings, broken crockery and ruined meals. For some women this state of affairs, making comfort and tranquillity impossible, would have had its compensations, for it would have provided unlimited material for talk, but Mrs. Dersingham prided herself on not being the sort of woman who spends her time discussing the shortcomings of her servants. Most of her friends prided themselves on this fact too, and they told one another what they could have said had they been that sort of women, and then gave examples. “I know, but listen to this, my dear,” they all cried at once.

At seven-forty-five on the evening of the dinner party to which Mr. Golspie had been invited, Mr. Dersingham was busy being his own butler, attending to the wines. He poured some claret into one decanter, some Sauterne into another, and some port into a third, then poured a little gin and a great deal of French and Italian vermouth into a cocktail shaker, and carried the shaker and some glasses into the drawing-room. Having done this, he remembered the cigarettes and filled the silver cigarette box, a wedding present bearing the Worrell colours in enamel, with Sahibs and some Turkish that his wife always said she preferred to any other, no matter what they happened to be. Then he presented himself with a cocktail, looked at the fire, which was blazing cheerfully, looked at the chairs, which were long, low, fat, and brown, glanced round the room, which seemed to him a very handsome and friendly place now that the two shaded lights took away the attention from the great bleak expanse of wall above, sipped the cocktail, tried to hum a tune, and began to feel a certain warm glow, a feeling proper to a host.

Mrs. Dersingham, who was in the bedroom, trying to powder the space between her shoulder blades, was less fortunate. She felt anxious. Cook had been rather cross all day and might spoil everything, and even when she tried, she was apt to make the soup greasy and forget the salt in the vegetables. And Agnes, the new maid, had pretended to understand all about serving, but she was so stupid that she might easily go sticking vegetable dishes under people’s noses anyhow, and there was bound to be some awful confusion when it came to clearing the table for dessert. You could laugh it off, of course, but you got so tired of laughing it off. It was a pity this sort of thing couldn’t be done properly or laughed off altogether. How terribly tiresome it was! And then, too, all the time you were so worried and anxious about the food and the serving, you were expected to be keeping the conversation going, terribly bright and hostessy.

“I wish,” said a silly girl at the back of Mrs. Dersingham’s mind, a girl who had always been there but who did not say much except when she was rather tired or cross—“I wish I was a terribly successful actress who lived in a marvellous little flat and had a terribly devoted maid and a dresser and a huge car and nothing much to eat before the performance and then went on and was absolutely marvellous and everybody applauded and then I put on a wonderful Russia sable coat and diamonds and went out to supper and everybody stared. No, I don’t. I wish I was a terribly successful woman writer with a villa somewhere on the Riviera with orange trees and mimosa and things and lunch in the sunshine and marvellous distinguished people coming to call. No, I don’t. I wish I was terribly rich with a housekeeper and about fifteen servants and a marvellous maid of my own and umpteen Paris model gowns every season and a house in Town and a place in the country and a very attractive dark young man, very aristocratic and a racing motorist or yachtsman or something like that, terribly in love with me but just devoted and respectful all the time and coming and looking so miserable and me saying ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but you can see how it is. I can never love anybody but Howard, but we can still be friends, can’t we?’”

This silly girl still went rambling idiotically on while there returned into the rest of Mrs. Dersingham’s mind various queries and worries about the sauce for the fish and the crême caramel not setting properly and Agnes spilling things. And all the time she was powdering her back or neck, trying on the crystal beads and then the amber, rubbing her cheeks with a tiny reddened pad, and staring at her reflection in the Jacobean mirror that she had bought at Brighton and that turned out to be a poor mirror and not Jacobean at all. The one consolation was that you always knew that you actually looked better than you did in that stupid mirror. Remembering this for the thousandth time, Mrs. Dersingham switched off the light, stood outside the night nursery a moment to discover if the children were quiet, then joined her husband in the drawing-room.

“Oh, thank goodness, nobody’s here yet,” she said, pulling a cushion or two about, then warming her hands. “It’s such a ghastly rush. It’s wonderful to have a few minutes’ peace and quietness.” She was already talking as if company were present.

“Rather,” said Mr. Dersingham, loyally.

She stood in front of him now. “I suppose I look a thorough mess,” she continued with a relapse into her natural manner.

“Not a bit. Jolly fine,” Mr. Dersingham mumbled, feeling awkward as usual. He always had a suspicion that he ought to have said something first: “My word, you’re looking jolly fine to-night,” something of that sort. But somehow he never did.

“Don’t be too complimentary, will you, darling? Well, I must say I feel a thorough mess to-night. What I’d really like is early bed and a book. This rush and seeing people all the time is so terrible.” Once more, she was beginning to put on her company manner.

Mrs. Dersingham did not look a thorough mess, but neither did she look as attractive as she hoped she did. She looked like hundreds of other English wives in their earlier thirties, that is, fair, tired, bright, and sagging. She had pleasant blue eyes, a turned-up nose, and a slightly discontented mouth. Her life, apart from the secret saga of the kitchen and nursery, where creatures with the most astoundingly good references were for ever turning out to be lazy, impudent, and thieving, was really rather dull, for she had no strong interests and very few friends in London. But this she would not admit, not even to her husband, except on rare occasions when she lost her temper, broke down, and the truth came blazing through. She pretended that her life was one exciting and multi-coloured whirl of people and social events. She did not actually tell lies, but she created an atmosphere in which every little occurrence was instantly distorted and magnified, like objects dropped into a glass tank full of water. A tea on Monday and a dinner party on Friday were transformed into a week’s feasting, a rushing here, there, and everywhere, not enjoyed but endured. If she met a person two or three times, then she had met whole crowds of him or her, day and night. Two matinées (with an old school friend or her mother up from Worcester) coming within one week reduced her to the condition of a dramatic critic at the end of a heavy autumn season. Even when she admitted that she had not attended a certain function, met a person, seen a play, read a book, she contrived to give these confessions a positive instead of a negative flavour, and so strong a positive flavour that somehow she seemed to be in close contact with the function, person, play, or book. She did this partly by throwing the emphasis on the auxiliary verb: “No, I haven’t seen her,” or: “No, I haven’t seen it,” which suggested to the listener that Mrs. Dersingham had attended a series of important committee meetings, had thrashed it out, and had decided with the rest that there should be nothing done about these people, these plays, these books, just yet. Thus, by this and other methods, she created an atmosphere in which a few outings and encounters were transformed into a rich and strenuous social life, which, so strong are our dreams, frequently left her genuinely fatigued. All this puzzled that simple man, her husband, but he never said anything now. The last time he had asked, after the company had gone, why she had complained so much about having to rush about, when he, for his part, could not see she had done much rushing about, she had turned on him quite fiercely and said that if it depended on him she would be sitting moping in the flat, never seeing anybody or anything, from one week’s end to another, and that the less he said the better; an answer that left him completely bewildered.

The Dersinghams, standing together now on their bearskin rug, heard the first guest arrive. It must be either Golspie or the Trapes. It could not be the Pearsons, who, living in the maisonette above, always waited until they heard some one else arrive below, before they made their appearance. And Golspie it was, looking strangely unfamiliar to Mr. Dersingham in a rather voluminous dinner jacket and a very narrow black tie. He had hardly been introduced to Mrs. Dersingham before the Pearsons, who were just as anxious not to be late as they were not to be first, came in, breathless and smiling.

“A-ha, good evening!” cried Mr. Pearson, as if he had found them out.

“And how are you, my dear?” cried Mrs. Pearson to her hostess, in such a tone of voice that nobody would have imagined that they had met less than four hours ago.

The Pearsons were a middle-aged, childless couple, who had recently retired from Singapore. Mr. Pearson was a tallish man, with a long thin neck on which was perched a pear-shaped head. His cheeks were absurdly plump, a sharp contrast to all the rest of him, so that he always appeared to have just blown them out. He was both nervous and amiable, and consequently he laughed a great deal at nothing in particular, and the sound he made when he laughed can only be set down as Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee. Mrs. Pearson, who was altogether plump, had her face framed in a number of mysterious dark curls, and looked vaguely like one of the musical comedy actresses of the picture postcard era, one who had perhaps retired, after queening it in The Catch of the Season, to keep a jolly boarding-house. They were a lonely, friendly pair, who obviously did not know what on earth to do to pass the time, so that this was for them an occasion of some importance, to be looked forward to, to be referred to, to be enjoyed to the last syllable of small talk.

They were now all shouting at one another, after the fashion of hosts and guests in Barkfield Gardens and elsewhere.

“Found your way here all right then?” Mr. Dersingham bellowed to Mr. Golspie.

“Came in a taxi,” Mr. Golspie boomed over his cocktail.

“That’s the best way if you’re going to a strange house in London, isn’t it?” Mr. Pearson shouted. “We always do it when we can afford it. Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

“And how’s the little darling to-night?” Mrs. Pearson inquired at the top of her voice, affectionately maternal as usual.

“Oh, we took the infant’s temperature, and it was normal. He’s all right,” Mrs. Dersingham screamed in reply, elaborately unmaternal as usual.

“I’m so glad, so glad.” And as she said it, Mrs. Pearson looked all beaming and moist. “I was so afraid there might be something really wrong with the dear kiddy. I was telling Walter that you thought it might be a chill. I’m so glad it wasn’t, my dear. You can’t be too careful with them, can you?”

“This Russian business looks pretty queer, doesn’t it?” Mr. Dersingham shouted.

“Very queer. What do you make of it?” Mr. Pearson shouted in reply. He made nothing of it himself yet, because the evening paper had not told him what to make of it and he had heard nobody’s opinion yet. On any question that had its origin west of Suez, Mr. Pearson liked to agree with his company. When it was east of Suez, he sometimes took a line of his own, and when Singapore itself was actually involved, he had been known to contradict people.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Dersingham,” said Mr. Golspie who as usual knew his own mind. “It’s all a lot of tripe, bosh, bunkum. I know those yarns. Fellows up in Riga trying to earn their money, they send out that stuff.”

“That’s terribly interesting, Mr. Golspie,” Mrs. Dersingham shrieked at him, suddenly looking like a woman of the world who had wanted to get to the bottom of this business for some time. “Of course, you’ve been up there, haven’t you?”

“Round about.” And Mr. Golspie gave her a grin, at once sardonic and friendly. It seemed to tell her that she was all right, not a bad-looking girl, but she mustn’t try to draw him, for that wasn’t her line at all, not at all.

“It makes a difference when you’ve been there, doesn’t it?” cried Mr. Pearson. “You know the facts. Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

“And where do you live now, Mr. Golspie?” Mrs. Pearson inquired, rather archly and with her head on one side.

“Just got a furnished flat in Maida Vale,” replied Mr. Golspie.

“Now I don’t think I know that part,” Mrs. Pearson said, girlishly reflective.

“There’s a lot of London we still don’t know. Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

“You’re not missing much if you don’t know Maida Vale, from what I’ve seen of it,” Mr. Golspie boomed away. “Where I live seems to be full of Jews and music-hall turns. Old music-hall turns, not the good-lookin’ young uns.”

“Tee-tee-tee,” Mr. Pearson put it, rather doubtfully.

“Oh, you men!” cried Mrs. Pearson, who had not lived at Singapore for nothing: she knew her cues.

“Tee-tee.” Triumphant this time.

Miss Verever was announced, and very resentfully, for already Agnes had had enough of the evening and she had not liked the way this particular guest had walked in and looked at her.

There is something to be said for Agnes. Miss Verever was one of those people who, at a first meeting, demand to be disliked. She was Mrs. Dersingham’s mother’s cousin, a tall, cadaverous virgin of forty-five or so, who displayed, especially in evening clothes, an uncomfortable amount of sharp gleaming bone, just as if the upper part of her was a relief map done in ivory. In order that she might not be overlooked in company and also to protect herself, she had developed and brought very near to perfection a curiously disturbing manner, which conveyed a boundless suggestion of the malicious, the mocking, the sarcastic, the sardonic, the ironical. What she actually said was harmless enough, but her tone of voice, her expression, her smile, her glance, all these suggested that her words had some devilish inner meaning. In scores of smaller hotels and pensions overlooking the Mediterranean, merely by asking what time the post went or inquiring if it had rained during the night, she had made men wonder if they had not shaved properly and women ask themselves if something had gone wrong with their complexions, and compelled members of both sexes to consider if they had just said something very silly. After that, she had only to perform the smallest decent action for people to say that she had a surprisingly kind heart as well as a terrifyingly clever satirical head. This was all very well if people had booked rooms under the same roof for the next three months, but on chance acquaintances, wondering indignantly what on earth she had against them, this peculiar manner of hers had an unfortunate effect.

She now advanced, kissed her hostess, shook hands with her host, and then, pursing her lips and screwing up the rest of her features, said: “I hope you’ve not been waiting for me. I’m sure you have, haven’t you?” And strange as it may seem, this remark and this simple question immediately made the whole dinner party appear preposterous.

“No, we haven’t really,” Mr. Dersingham told her, at the same time asking himself why in the name of thunder they had ever thought of inviting her. “Somebody still to come. The Trapes.”

“Oh, I’m glad I’m not the last, then,” said Miss Verever, with a bitter little smile, which she kept on her face while she was being introduced to the other guests.

A minute later, the Trapes arrived to complete the party. Late guests may be divided into two classes, the repentant, who arrive, perspiring and profusely apologetic, to babble about fogs and ancient taxis and stupid drivers, and the unrepentant, who stalk in haughtily and look somewhat aggrieved when they see all the other guests, their eyebrows registering their disapproval of people who do not know what time their own parties begin. The Trapes were admirable specimens of the unrepentant class. They were both tall, cold, thin, and rather featureless. Trape himself was an Old Worrelian and a contemporary of Dersingham’s. He was a partner in a firm of estate agents, but called himself Major Trape because he had held that rank at the end of the war and had become so soldierly training the vast mob of boys who were conscripted then that he could not bring himself to say good-bye to his outworn courtesy title. He was indeed so curt, so military, so imperial, that it was impossible to imagine him letting and selling houses in the ordinary way, and the mind’s eye saw him mopping up, with a small raiding party, all flats and bijou residences, and sallying out with an expeditionary force to plant the Union Jack on finely timbered, residential and sporting estates. His wife was a somewhat colourless woman, very English in type, who always looked as if she was always faintly surprised and disgusted by life. Perhaps she was, and perhaps that was why she always talked with a certain ventriloquial effect, producing a voice with hardly any movement of her small iced features.

Leaving them all to shout at one another, Mrs. Dersingham now slipped out of the room, for it was imperative that dinner should be announced as soon as possible. She returned three minutes later, trying not unsuccessfully to look as if she had not a care in the world, a sort of Arabian Nights hostess, and then, after the smallest interval, Agnes popped her head into the room, thereby forgetting one of her most urgent instructions, and said, without any enthusiasm at all: “Please, m’, dinner’s served.”

Mrs. Dersingham smiled heroically at her guests, who, with the exception of Mr. Golspie, looked at one another and at the door as if they were hearing about this dinner business for the first time and were mildly interested and amused. Mr. Golspie, for his part, looked like a man who wanted his dinner, and actually took a step or two towards the door. Then began that general stepping forward and stepping backward and smiling and hand-waving which take place at this moment in all those unhappy sections of society that have lost formality and yet have not reached informality. There they were, smiling and dithering round the door.

“Now then, Mrs. Pearson,” cried Mr. Golspie in his loudest and most brutal tones. “In you go.” And, without more ado, this impatient guest put a hand behind Mrs. Pearson’s elbow, and Mrs. Pearson found herself through the door, the leader of the exodus. They crowded into the small dining-room, where the soup was already steaming under the four shaded electric lights.

“Now let me see,” Mrs. Dersingham began, as usual, feeling that these guests were not people now but six enormous bodies of which she, the wretched criminal, had to dispose. “Now let me see. Will you sit there, Mrs. Trape. And Mrs. Pearson, there.” And then, having disposed of the bodies, she had time to notice that the soup looked horribly greasy.

III

The soup was bad, and Miss Verever left most of hers and contrived to be looking down at it very curiously every time Mrs. Dersingham glanced across the table at her. As there were eight of them, Mrs. Dersingham was not sitting at the end of the table, opposite her husband. Mr. Golspie was there, and very much at his ease, putting away a very ungentlemanly quantity of bread under that great moustache of his. On Mr. Golspie’s right were Mrs. Dersingham, Major Trape, and Mrs. Pearson, and on the other side were Miss Verever, Mr. Pearson, and Mrs. Trape.

“And how,” said Miss Verever to Mrs. Dersingham, “did you enjoy your Norfolk holiday this summer? You never told me that, and I’ve been dying to know.” The smile that accompanied this statement announced that Miss Verever could not imagine a more idiotic or boring topic, that you would be insufferably dull if you answered her question and terribly rude if you didn’t.

“Not bad,” Mrs. Dersingham shouted desperately. “In fact, quite good, on the whole. Rather cold, you know.”

“Really, you found it cold?” And you would have sworn that the speaker meant to suggest that the cold had obviously been manufactured for you and that it served you right.

At the other end of the table, Major Trape and his host were talking about football, across Mrs. Pearson, who nodded and smiled and shook her mysterious curls all the time, to show that she was not really being left out.

“Do you ever watch rugger, Golspie?” Mr. Dersingham demanded down the table.

“What, Rugby? Haven’t seen a match for years,” replied Mr. Golspie. “Prefer the other kind when I do watch one.”

Major Trape raised his eyebrows. “What, you a soccah man? Not this professional stuff? Don’t tell me you like that.”

“What’s the matter with it?”

“Oh, come now! I mean, you can’t possibly—I mean, it’s a dirty business, selling fellahs for money and so on, very unsporting.”

“I must say I agree, Trape,” said Mr. Dersingham. “Dashed unsporting business, I call it.”

“Oh, certainly,” Major Trape continued, “must be amatahs—love of the game. Play the game for its own sake, I say, and not as all these fellahs do—for monay. Can’t possibly be a sportsman and play for monay. Oh, dirty business, eh, Dersingham?”

“I’m with you there.”

A sound came from Mrs. Trape’s face and it seemed to declare that she was with him too.

“Well, I’m not with you,” said Mr. Golspie bluntly. He did not care tuppence about it, one way or the other, but there was something in Trape’s manner that demanded contradiction, and Mr. Golspie was not the man to ignore such a challenge. “If a poor man can play a game well, why shouldn’t he allow that game to keep him? What’s the answer to that? A man’s as much right to play cricket and football for a living as he has to clean windows or sell tripe⁠——”

“Tripe indeed! How can you, Mr. Golspie?” cried Mrs. Pearson, girlishly shaking her curls at him.

“My wife hates tripe,” said Mr. Pearson. “Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

“I disagree,” said Major Trape, stiffer than ever now. “Those things are business, quite diff’rent. Games ought to be played for their own sake. That’s the proper English way. Love of the game. Clean sport. Don’t mind if the other fellahs win. Sport and business, two diff’rent things.”

“Not if sport is your business,” Mr. Golspie returned, looking darkly mischievous. “We can’t all be rich amachures. Let the chaps have their six or seven pounds a week. They earn it. If one lot of chaps can earn their living by telling us to be good every Sunday—that is, if you go to listen to ’em: I don’t—why shouldn’t another lot be paid to knock a ball about every Saturday, without all this talk of dirty business? It beats me. Unless it’s snobbery. Lot o’ snobbery still about in this country. It pops up all the time.”

“What is this argument all about?” Miss Verever inquired. And, perhaps feeling that Mr. Golspie needed a rebuke, she put on her most peculiar look and brought out her most disturbing tone of voice, finally throwing in a smile that was a tried veteran, an Old Guard.

But Mr. Golspie returned her gaze quite calmly, and even conveyed a piece of fish, and far too large a piece, to his mouth before replying. “We’re arguing about football and cricket. I don’t suppose you’re interested. I’m not much, myself. I like billiards. That’s one thing about coming back to this country, you can always get a good game of billiards. Proper tables, y’know.”

“I used to be very fond of a game of billiards, snooker too,” said Mr. Pearson, nodding his head so that his fat cheeks shook like beef jellies, “when I was out in Singapore. There were some splendid players at the club there, splendid players, make breaks of forty and fifty. But I wasn’t one of them. Tee-tee-tee⁠——”

“We went to see Susie Dean and Jerry Jerningham the other night,” said Major Trape, turning to Mrs. Dersingham. “Good show. Very clevah, very clevah. You been to any shows lately, Mrs. Dersingham?”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Pearson informed her host and anybody else who cared to listen. “When we were out in Singapore, my husband was always going over to the club for billiards. And now he hardly ever plays. I don’t think he’s had a game this year. Have you, Walter? I’m just saying I don’t think you’ve had a game this year.”

“And so what with one thing and another,” Mrs. Dersingham told Major Trape, “I’ve simply not been able to see half the plays I’ve wanted to see. Something has to go, hasn’t it? We were out at the Trevors’—I think you know them, don’t you?—the shipbuilding people, you know, only of course these Trevors are out of that—they’re terribly in with all that young smart set, Mrs. Dellingham, young Mostyn-Price, Lady Muriel Pagworth, and the famous Ditchways. Well, what with that, and then going to Mrs. Westbury’s musical tea-fight—Dossevitch and Rougeot ought to have been there and were only prevented from coming at the last minute, but Imogen Farley was there and played divinely. Oh, and then on top of all that, I went to see that new thing at His Majesty’s—what’s it called?—oh, yes—The Other Man. And so I haven’t had a single moment for any other show.”

“No, by Jove, you haven’t, have you?” said Major Trape, with whom this miracle of the social loaves and fishes worked every time. “You’re worse than Dorothy, and I tell her she overdoes it. Mustn’t overdo it, you know.”

Mrs. Dersingham, wondering how long Agnes was going to be bringing up the cutlets, shrugged her shoulders, and did it exactly as she had seen Irene Prince do it in Smart Women at the Ambassadors. “It is stupid, I know,” she confessed charmingly, “and I’m always saying I’ll cut most of it out—but—well, you know what happens.”

Miss Verever, wearing her most peculiar smile, leaned forward, caught the eye of her hostess, and said, “But what does happen, my dear?”

Mrs. Dersingham was able to escape, however, by plunging at once into the talk at the other end of the table, as if she had not heard Miss Verever’s inquiry. “Oh, have you been reading that?” she cried across the table to Mrs. Trape, who did not look as if she had spoken for weeks, but nevertheless had actually just conjured out several remarks. “No, I haven’t read it, and I don’t mean to.” But did Agnes mean to bring the cutlets?

The talk at Mr. Dersingham’s end, as we have guessed, had suddenly turned literary. Mrs. Trape had just read a certain book. It was, she added, apparently throwing her voice into the claret decanter, a very clever book. Mr. Dersingham had not read this book, and did not hesitate to say that it did not sound his kind of book, for after a jolly good hard day in the office he found such books too heavy going and preferred a detective story. Mrs. Pearson was actually reading a book, had been reading it that very afternoon, had nearly finished it and was enjoying it immensely.

“And I’m sure it’s a story you’d like, Mr. Dersingham,” she cried, “even though there aren’t any detectives in it. I could hardly put it down. It’s all about a girl going to one of those Pacific Islands, one of those lovely coral and lagoon places, you know, and she goes there to stay with an uncle because she’s lost all her money and when she gets there she finds that he’s drinking terribly, and so she goes to another man—but I mustn’t spoil it for you. Do read it, Mrs. Trape.”

The claret decanter murmured that it would love to read it, and asked what the name of the book was, so that it might put it down on its library list.

“I’ll tell you the title in a moment,” and Mrs. Pearson, bringing her curls to rest, bit her lip reflectively. “Now how stupid of me! Do you know, I can’t remember. It’s a very striking title, too, and that’s what made me take it when the girl at the library showed it to me. Now isn’t that silly of me?”

“I can never remember the titles either,” Mr. Dersingham assured her heartily. “What was the name of the chap who wrote it? Was it a man or a woman?”

“I think it was a man’s name, in fact I’m nearly sure it was. It was quite a common name, too. Something like Wilson. No, it wasn’t, it was Wilkinson. Walter, do you remember the name of the author of that book I’m reading? Wasn’t it Wilkinson?”

“You’re thinking of the man that came to mend the wireless set,” Mr. Pearson replied, shooting his long neck at her. “That was Wilkinson. You know the people, Dersingham—the electricians in Earl’s Court Road?”

“Oh, so it was. How silly of me!”

“Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

Mrs. Pearson smiled vaguely but amiably, then said: “So you see I can’t tell you now, but I’ll tell Mrs. Dersingham in the morning and then she can tell you.”

A sudden silence fell on the table at that moment, perhaps because there was a sort of scratching sound at the door, which opened, but only about an inch or two. That silence was shattered by the most appalling crash of breaking crockery, followed by a short sharp wail. Then silence again for one sinking moment. The cutlets and the vegetables had arrived at last, and a brown stain, creeping beneath the door, told where they were.

“My God!” cried Mr. Golspie to Miss Verever, as Mrs. Dersingham dashed to the door, “there goes our dinner.”

“Indeed!”

“You bet your life!” Mr. Golspie, earnest and unabashed, assured her.

Miss Verever and Major Trape exchanged glances, which removed Mr. Golspie once and for all from decent society and handed him over to the social worker and the anthropologist.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Dersingham had disappeared through the doorway, and Mr. Dersingham was trying to follow her example but could not do so because, what with cutlets, vegetables, gravy, broken dishes and plates, a weeping Agnes, and a panic-stricken Mrs. Dersingham, there was no space for him. So he stood there, holding the door open, with his body inside the dining-room and his head outside.

“Oh, do shut the door, Howard,” the guests heard Mrs. Dersingham cry.

“All right,” the invisible head replied hesitatingly. “But I say—can’t I—er—do anything? I mean, do you want me to come out or—er—well, what do you want me to do?”

“Oh, go-in-and-shut-the-door.” And there was no doubt that in another moment Mrs. Dersingham would have screamed, for this was the voice of a woman in an extremity.

Mr. Dersingham closed the door and returned to his chair. He looked at Major Trape, and Major Trape looked at him, and no doubt they were both remembering the good old school, Worrelians together.

“Sorry, but—er—” and here Mr. Dersingham looked round apologetically at his guests—“I’m afraid there’s been some sort of accident outside.”

Immediately, Mrs. Trape, Mrs. Pearson, Major Trape, and Mr. Pearson began talking all at once, not talking about this accident but about accidents in general, with special reference to very queer accidents that had happened to them. Miss Verever merely looked peculiarly at everybody, while Mr. Golspie finished his claret with a certain remote gloom, as if he were a man taking quinine on the summit of a mountain.

Then the door, which had not been properly fastened, swung open again, to admit a mixed knocking and gobbling and guggling noise that suggested that Agnes was now lying on the floor, in hysterics, and drumming her feet. Then came a new voice, very hoarse and resentful, and this voice declared that it was all a crying shame, even if the girl was clumsy with her hands, and that one pair of hands was one pair of hands and could not be expected to be any more, and that while notices were being given right and left, her notice could be taken, there and then. In short, the cook had arrived on the scene.

Mr. Dersingham arose miserably, but whether to shut the door again or to make an entrance into the drama outside we shall never know, for Mrs. Pearson, fired with neighbourly solicitude, sprang up, crying, “Poor Mrs. Dersingham! I’m sure I ought to do something,” and was outside, with the door closed behind her, before Mr. Dersingham knew what was happening.

And Mrs. Pearson, once outside, did not simply intrude, did not gape and hang about and get in the way, but took charge of the situation, for though Mrs. Pearson may have been a foolish table-talker, may have worn mysterious curls and been old-fashioned and monstrously girlish and affectionate, she was a housewife of experience, who had weathered the most fantastic tropical domestic storms in Singapore.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind my coming out,” she cried, “and I felt I must help, because after all we are neighbours, aren’t we? and that makes a difference.”

“It’s too absurd,” Mrs. Dersingham wailed. “This wretched girl’s smashed everything and ruined the dinner, and now she’s going off into a fit or something out of sheer temper. And it’s all her own fault. I engaged her sister to come and help her to-night, and then when her sister couldn’t come, at the last minute of course, she wouldn’t let me get anybody else, she said she could do it herself.”

Mrs. Pearson was looking at Agnes, who was still guggling and drumming on the floor. “Only stupid hysterics. Get up at once, you silly, silly girl. Do you hear? You’re in the way. We’ll pour cold water over her. That will soon bring her round, you’ll see.”

The cook, who was standing in the hall, a few yards away, and had been looking on with the air of a complacent prophetess, now began to lose some of her rigidity. The mournful triumph died out of her face. She had no respect for Mrs. Dersingham, but for some strange reason she had almost a veneration for Mrs. Pearson, who was possibly a far more ladylike and commanding figure in her eyes.

“That’s so,” the cook hoarsely declared now. “A jug of water’s what she wants. Accidents will happen and one pair of hands can’t be two or three pairs of hands, eight for dinner being out of all reason with them steps and no service lift, but there’s no call to be lying there all night, Agnes, having your hysterics and carrying on silly when there’s all this mess to be cleared, let alone anything else.”

This treacherous withdrawal of a stout ally, combined with the talk of cold water, soon brought the hysterics to mere choking and sniffing, and in a minute or two Agnes was bending over the ruins. “I’ll clear these away,” she announced between sniffs and chokes, “but I won’t bring anything else and serve it, I won’t. I couldn’t if I tried, I couldn’t. I haven’t a nerve in me body, not after what’s happened, I haven’t.”

“But I shall have to give them something,” Mrs. Dersingham was saying. Clearly she no longer included Mrs. Pearson among the guests. Mrs. Pearson had ceased to be one of “them.”

“Of course you will, my dear,” cried Mrs. Pearson, her eyes gleaming with a happy excitement. “Not that we’d mind, of course. It’s the men, isn’t it? You know what the men are? Now then, what about eggs?”

“Eggs,” the cook repeated hoarsely and gloomily. “There’s two eggs, an’ two eggs only, in that kitchen. Just the two eggs, and them’s for the morning.”

“Listen, my dear.” And Mrs. Pearson clutched at her neighbour affectionately and imploringly. “Do leave it to me and I promise you I won’t be ten minutes. I won’t, really. Now not a word! Don’t bother about anything. Just you leave it to me.” She hurried towards the outer door, pulled herself up before she reached it, and cried over her shoulder, “But warm some plates, that’s all.”

During the subsequent interval, Mrs. Dersingham had not the heart to return to the dining-room, though she did just look in, put her face round the door and smile apologetically at everybody and say that it was too absurd and annoying and that the two of them, she and Mrs. Pearson, would be back in a few minutes. She spent the rest of the time superintending the salvage work outside the dining-room door and helping cook to find enough fresh plates to warm. She felt hot, dishevelled and miserable. She could have cried. Indeed, that was why she did not slip upstairs to her bedroom to look at herself and powder her nose, for once there, really alone with herself, she was sure she would have cried. Oh, it was all too hateful for words!

“There!” And Mrs. Pearson stood before her, breathless, flushed, and happy, and whipped off the lid of a silver dish.

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Dersingham in the very reek of the omelette, a fine large specimen. “You angel! It’s absolutely perfect.”

“I remembered we had some eggs, and then I remembered we had a bottle of mushrooms tucked away somewhere, and so I rushed upstairs and made this mushroom omelette. It ought to be nice. I used to be good with omelettes.”

“It’s marvellous. And I don’t know how to begin to thank you, my dear.” And Mrs. Dersingham meant it. From that moment, Mrs. Pearson ceased to be a merely foolish if kindly neighbour and became a friend, worthy of the most secret confidences. In the steam of the omelette, rich as the smoke of burnt offerings, this friendship began, and Mrs. Dersingham never tasted a mushroom afterwards without being reminded of it.

“Don’t think of it, my dear,” said Mrs. Pearson happily, for her own life, after months of the dull routine of time-killing, had suddenly become crimson, rich and glorious. “Now have you got the plates ready? You must have this served at once, mustn’t you? Where’s that silly girl? Gone to bed? All right, then, make the cook serve the rest of the dinner. She must have everything ready by this time. Call her, my dear. Tell her to bring up the plates.” And they returned at last to the dining-room, two sisters out of burning Troy.

Alas, all was not well in there. Something had happened during the interval of waiting. It was not the women, who were all sympathetic smiles and solicitude: Mrs. Trape even dropped the ventriloquial effect, actually disturbed the lower part of her face, in order to explain that she knew, no one better, what it was these days, when anything might be expected of that class; and Miss Verever, though retaining automatically some peculiarities of tone and grimace, contrived to say something reassuring. No, it was not the women; it was the men. Mr. Golspie looked like a man who had already said some brutal things and was fully prepared to say some more; Major Trape looked very stiff and uncompromising, as if he had just sentenced a couple of surveyors to be shot; Mr. Pearson gave the impression that he had been faintly tee-teeing on both sides of a quarrel and was rather tired of it; and Mr. Dersingham looked uneasy, anxious, exasperated. There was no mistaking the atmosphere, in which distant thunder still rolled. The stupid men had had to wait for the more substantial part of dinner; they had felt empty, then they had felt cross; and so they had argued, shouted, quarrelled, not all of them perhaps, but certainly Mr. Golspie and Major Trape. Probably at any moment, they would begin arguing, shouting, quarrelling again. Mrs. Dersingham, very tired now and with a hundred little nerves screaming to be taken out of all this and put to bed, would have liked to bang their silly heads together.

Cook came in, breathing heavily and disapprovingly, and gave them their omelette. There was not a single movement she made during the whole time she was in the room that did not announce, quite plainly, that she was the cook, that the kitchen was her place, that she did not pretend to be able to wait at table and that if they did not like it they could lump it. Her heavy breathing went further, pointing out that when she did condescend to wait at table, she expected to find a better company than this seated round it. Even Mrs. Pearson had apparently lost favour, for she had her plate shoved contemptuously in front of her, like the rest. Real ladies, that plate said, don’t rush away and cook omelettes for other people’s dinner tables. “P’raps you’ll ring when you want the next,” the cook wheezed, and then slowly, scornfully, took her departure.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Dersingham,” said Major Trape, “this omelette’s awf’ly good, awf’ly good. And there’s nothing I like better than a jolly good omelette.”

A voice from Mrs. Trape’s direction said that it agreed with him.

“They’re right there,” said Mr. Golspie to Mrs. Dersingham, as if the Trapes were not often right. “It’s as good an omelette as I’ve had for months and months, and that’s saying something, because I’ve been in places where they can make omelettes. They can’t make ’em here in England.” And he said this in such a way as to suggest that it was really a challenge to Trape, who was nothing if not patriotic. Obviously, he and Trape had been quarrelling.

Major Trape stiffened, then smiled laboriously at his hostess. “Mr. Golspie seems to think we can’t make anything in England. That’s where he and I diffah. Isn’t it, Dersingham?”

“Well, yes, in a way, I suppose,” Mr. Dersingham mumbled unhappily. He felt divided between Worrell and Angel Pavement, between his old and respected school friend, Trape, with whom he instinctively agreed, and the forceful man who was now saving Twigg & Dersingham and making it prosperous, his guest for the first time, too; and it was a wretched situation. He muttered now that there was a lot to be said on both sides.

“There may be,” said Major Trape. “But I don’t like to hear a man continually runnin’ down his own country. Tastes diffah, I suppose. But I feel—well, it isn’t done, that’s all.”

“Time it was done then,” said Mr. Golspie aggressively. “Most of the people I meet here these days seem to be living in a fool’s paradise⁠——”

“Now, Mr. Golspie,” cried his hostess with desperate vivacity, “you’re not to call us all fools. Is he, Mrs. Trape? We won’t have it.” Then, saving the situation at all cost, she turned to Miss Verever. “My dear, I forgot to tell you, I’ve had the absurdest letter from Alice. When I read it, I simply howled.”

“No, did you?” said Miss Verever.

“A-ha!” cried Mr. Dersingham, doing his best. “What’s the latest from Alice? We must all hear about this.”

They were all listening now, all at peace for the moment.

“Oh, it was too ridiculous,” cried Mrs. Dersingham, despairingly racking her brains to remember something amusing in that letter, or, failing that, something amusing in any letter she had ever had from anybody. “You know what Alice is—at least, you do, my dear, and so do you. I suppose it isn’t really funny unless you know her. You see, the minute I read a letter of hers, of course I can see her in my mind and hear her voice and all that sort of thing, and unless you can do that, well I dare say it isn’t so funny, after all. But, you see, Alice—she’s my youngest sister, I must explain, and they live down in Devon—oh, miles from anywhere. Will you ring, please, darling? Well, Alice has a dog, the absu-u-urdest creature⁠——”

She struggled through with it somehow, and fortunately cook made such a noise clearing and then serving the sweet that most of the anecdote, presumably the funniest part, was lost in the clatter. The cook had been so noisy, so incredibly heavy in her breathing, and so obviously disapproving, when she was serving the sweet, that Mrs. Dersingham dare not have her up again to clear the table for dessert, so as the fruit-plates and the finger-bowls, the port decanter and glasses, were all on the sideboard, she made a joke of it—showing the last gleam of vivacity she felt she would be able to show for months—and she and Dersingham, assisted by Mr. Pearson, who said—tee-tee-tee-tee-tee—that he was used to clearing a table, having been well brought up, did what they could to make the dinner look as if it were coming to a civilised end. Mrs. Dersingham felt that Mr. Golspie, plainly a porty sort of man, and Major Trape might not want to argue so unpleasantly once they had some port inside them. This was the longest and most ghastly dinner she ever remembered. It was not really very late, but it seemed like two in the morning. As she tried to peel a very soft pear, she felt she wanted to throw it at the opposite wall and then scream at the top of her voice.

It was then they heard a ring at the outer door. Perhaps the postman, rather late and with something special to deliver. A minute or so later, there came another and longer ring.

“The only time we were there it rained for a whole week,” said Major Trape, concluding his account of the watering places, “and so I said, ‘Nevah again.’ Can’t imagine how these towns get their reputation. These weathah reports they give out⁠——”

Another ring, very determined this time.

“I’m sorry, but do go and see who that is at the door, my dear,” Mrs. Dersingham cried, apologetically. “I’ve just remembered. Agnes has gone to bed, and cook probably can’t hear or won’t hear. I don’t suppose it’s anybody but the late post.”

Mr. Dersingham was absent several minutes, and somehow during that time nobody appeared to want to talk. Mrs. Dersingham did not press the fruit upon her guests. The moment the last piece was eaten, she intended to rise from the table, and then—oh, thank Heaven!—the worst was over. The men could stay on drinking port and quarrel like cats and dogs if they liked. She would be out of it, among nice, silly, comfortable women in the drawing-room, and so it would all be over. And then, just as she was nearly succeeding in consoling herself, her husband reappeared, and he was not alone. The idiot had brought a complete stranger into the dining-room with him, a girl.

She was a very pretty girl, quite young, and on his face was that fatuous smile which husbands always seem to wear in the company of young and very pretty girls. All wives recognize and detest that fatuous smile. It is bad at any time, but when it accompanies a girl who is a complete stranger into the dining-room at the conclusion of a disastrous dinner, and brings her into the presence of a wife who has not felt even decently presentable for hours and hours and who has been ready to scream for the last forty-five minutes, then it is a catastrophe and a mortal injury. And so Mrs. Dersingham gave Mr. Dersingham one look that sent that fatuous smile trembling into oblivion. And then, half rising from her chair, Mrs. Dersingham looked at the stranger, and decided at once that she had never before seen a girl she disliked so much at sight as this one.

“I’m afraid—er—I don’t⁠——” she began.

But the girl was not even looking at her. She was busy having her left cheek brushed by the large moustache of Mr. Golspie, who had flung an arm round her shoulders.

“Well, hang me, Lena girl,” Mr. Golspie was roaring, “if I hadn’t forgotten all about you.”

“You would,” said the girl coolly. “You’re a rotten father. I’ve told you that before. Now introduce me.”

IV

“Now this is my fault,” Mr. Golspie boomed at the Dersinghams, turning from one to the other, “my fault entirely. I ought to have told you. I meant to, but I forgot. This girl of mine wrote to say she was coming from Paris to-day, but of course she didn’t say how and when and what and where, just left it all vague, y’know, as usual, all up in the air. When it got to be half past seven and she hadn’t turned up, I began to wonder. What was I to do?” And as he asked this he stared fiercely at Mr. Pearson, who happened to catch his eye.

“Quite so, Mr. Golspie,” Mr. Pearson, startled, jerked out.

“Well, I’ll tell you what I did do. I left a message with the caretaker of the flats, so that if she did come she’d know where I was⁠——”

“All right, my dear,” his daughter interrupted, “you needn’t go on and on. Nobody wants to hear all about it. I got the message. I wasn’t going to spend hours all alone in that poisonous flat. So I took a taxi and came here. And that’s that.” And having thus dismissed the subject, Miss Golspie, who seemed an astonishingly cool and composed young lady, smiled at Mrs. Dersingham, who did not return the smile. Miss Golspie then produced a small mirror from her handbag and carefully examined her features in it.

And even Mrs. Dersingham would have been compelled to admit that they were very charming features. Lena Golspie still remained, after closer inspection, a very pretty girl. She had reddish-gold hair, large brown eyes, an impudent little nose, and a luscious mouth. She looked rather smaller than she actually was. Her neck, shoulders, and arms were slenderly, even too delicately, fashioned, but she had strong, well-shaped legs; and was indeed the complete attractive young female animal. Only in a certain slant of the eye and some movements of the mouth did she resemble her father, though a very acute listener might have found some likeness in their voices. Their accent, however, was quite different, for Mr. Golspie spoke with a breadth of vowel sound and roughness of consonants that suggested the toned-down Lowlander or North-country Englishman, whereas his daughter’s English did not properly belong to any part of England but seemed to be that international English, of a kind that a clever foreigner might pick up in the Anglo-Saxon colony in Paris and that is sometimes spoken by both English and Americans on the stage, a language without roots and background, a language for “the talkies.” Indeed, in Lena’s company you might have felt you were taking part in a “talkie.”

“And I intended to tell you when I first came in,” Mr. Golspie continued, determined to have his say. “Just to warn you that this daughter o’ mine—who doesn’t behave herself as nicely as she looks, I can tell you—might be landing herself on you.”

“Quite all right, of course,” said Mr. Dersingham. “I mean—delighted!”

“Good! No harm done, then.” And Mr. Golspie sat down, grinned at his daughter, noticed the decanter in front of him, and promptly helped himself to another glass of port.

“But I must say,” cried Lena, who had now concluded the examination of her own features and was busy examining everybody else’s, “I thought you’d have finished dinner hours ago. Did you begin late or have you been wolfing an awful lot?”

“I think we’d better all go straight into the drawing-room,” said Mrs. Dersingham hurriedly, “unless you men feel you must stay and drink some more port.”

“Not a bit,” said Mr. Golspie heartily. “I’m ready, for one.” And to show that he was, he drained his glass in one sharp gulp.

“Only too delighted, Mrs. Dersingham,” said Major Trape, bowing and looking very severe, as if indirectly to rebuke the uncouth Golspie.

“Good work!” said Mr. Dersingham, who obviously felt that something was still wrong somewhere and was trying in vain to appear hearty and enthusiastic. He opened the door. “Much better if we all barge in together now.”

“Come along, Miss Golspie,” and the patient little smile that Mrs. Dersingham contrived to produce was itself a studied insult. “We don’t mind a bit your not being dressed. It doesn’t matter at all, I assure you.”

Miss Golspie turned wondering large brown eyes upon her. “Oh, did you want me to change? I would have done if I’d known—specially as I’ve brought over one or two marvellous new dresses—but it didn’t seem worth it. Sorry and all that!”

“Not in the least,” replied Mrs. Dersingham, pale with weariness and vexation. Cheerfully—oh, so cheerfully!—she could have murdered this girl.

They trooped rather silently into the drawing-room, which did not seem particularly pleased to see them. It had been neglected itself for some time—so that the fire was low and ashy—and now it did not seem to welcome visitors. Cook arrived with coffee, and put down the tray with the air of a camel exhibiting the last straw. She did not attempt to serve it. She put it down on the rickety little table and immediately made that table seem ten times more rickety. There was no cup for Miss Golspie, who of course said at once that she would have some coffee, and so Mr. Dersingham, with what seemed to his wife a great deal of unnecessary fuss and silliness, insisted that he should go without. And then, having taken the tiniest sip of coffee, this Golspie girl ostentatiously put the cup on one side, and, on being asked by Mr. Pearson, who had also turned silly and officious, if she would have some more, replied that she did not really want any coffee.

“I’ll tell you what, though,” she declared, in a loud clear voice, “I’d adore a cocktail, if there are any going.”

“Oh, would you, Miss Golspie?” Mr. Dersingham began. “Well, I dare say I could rake up⁠——” But he was not allowed to continue.

“I’m afraid there aren’t any cocktails going,” said Mrs. Dersingham, in a voice that was if anything louder and clearer, and as frosted as the best Martini.

And the insensitive Mr. Golspie did not improve the situation by chiming in with “I should think not. Don’t you take any notice of her, Mrs. Dersingham. I’ll give her cocktails!”

“When you get her home, eh?” Mr. Pearson cried, with rash facetiousness. “Tee-tee-tee-tee-tee.”

It was easily his least successful “Tee-tee” of the evening. Mrs. Pearson looked surprised at him. Mr. Golspie gave him a glance that told him quite plainly to mind his own business and not try to be funny. Lena herself shot a furious glance at both her father and Mr. Pearson, but did not cast a single look in Mrs. Dersingham’s direction—a very ominous sign. As for Mrs. Dersingham, she could not decide which was the more awful, Mr. Golspie or his terrible daughter. She tried to start a conversation with Mrs. Pearson, who was now all embarrassed smiles, and Mrs. Trape, whose face had been completely frost-bound for the last ten minutes.

Miss Verever, every feature in battle order, now bore down on Lena, opening the engagement with a long-range smile of the most sinister peculiarity. “Do I understand, Miss Golspie,” she said, with the most mysterious grimace and the most baffling inflections, “that you’ve just come from Paris? Have you been living there?”

“Hello, hello!” cried Lena’s startled expression. “What have I done to you?” But all she actually said in reply was, “Yes, I’ve just come from there, and I’ve been living there.”

“Oh, you have been living there?”

“Yes, for the last eighteen months. With an uncle. You see, he lives there, and I’ve been living with him.”

“Oh, your uncle lives there?”

“Yes, he’s lived there nearly all his life. He is half French, anyhow. And my aunt’s completely French.”

“Then is your father—Mr. Golspie—half French?” asked Miss Verever, in one of her strangest whispers.

“No, not at all,” said Lena, with a little impatient shake of her head. “You see, this uncle’s my mother’s brother, not my father’s.”

“Oh, your mother’s.” And now Miss Verever produced her most famous glance of inquiry, awfully enigmatical in its final meaning and yet immediately challenging. She followed it up with a new smile, crooked, terrible. “Well, then, of course, your mother must be half French, I suppose, just like your uncle?”

“Yes, she was.” And then Lena’s little nose wrinkled, partly in bewilderment, partly in distaste. Then she looked straight at Miss Verever, who was bending over her and searching her with an unwinking gaze. “But what about it? I mean, there’s nothing particularly funny about that, is there? Lots of people are half French, aren’t they?”

“Yes, I suppose so.” Miss Verever was taken aback.

“Well, then, what are you looking at me like that for?” cried Lena, at once registering a direct hit. “I mean, you look as if there was something terribly weird about it all. There really isn’t, you know. It’s all quite simple.” The shell crashed through and exploded somewhere near the magazine.

Miss Verever was jerked upright by her surprise. Then she turned glacial. “I beg your pardon.”

“Oh, I don’t mind, but⁠——”

Miss Verever did not wait to hear, but turned away at once and joined the other three women. Lena, after staring after her for a moment, gave a tiny wriggle and then broke into a duet of Old Worrelian talk between Mr. Dersingham and Major Trape, who were merely chivalrous at first but very soon began to wear that fatuous smile. And towards the three of them an icy current began to flow from the group of women. Too tired, too cross, even to pretend to be a good brisk hostess, Mrs. Dersingham let the whole thing slide, and merely prayed for the end. It was not long in coming.

“Shall I?” Miss Golspie was heard to cry to the two men.

They nodded and smiled, a little doubtfully perhaps, but still they nodded and smiled, men under a spell.

“All right, then, I will. Just to cheer us all up. We’re getting terribly dismal.” And Miss Golspie, with a final and coquettish nod and smile of her own at the other two nodders and smilers, marched across the room, puffing away at one of her host’s Sahibs. Then she sat down at the baby grand.

“That’s the way, Lena,” her father shouted approvingly. He had been talking in a corner to Mr. Pearson. “Let’s have a tune. Do us good.”

Before anybody else could say a word, Lena had begun playing. She played some dance tunes, very sketchily, but with great speed and noise. The first two or three minutes were bad, but the next two or three minutes were much worse, for then her left hand, guessing wildly, began hitting any note roughly in the neighbourhood of the right one, and the very fire irons joined in the din. After ten minutes, she reached a grand fortissimo. Mrs. Dersingham could bear it no longer.

“Oh, do stop that noise!” she shrieked, rushing forward, white and trembling with fury.

Lena stopped at once. They were all fixed, rooted, in a vast sudden silence.

Mrs. Dersingham bit her lip, recovered herself. “I’m sorry,” she said, coldly and curtly, “but I really must ask you to stop playing. I’ve—got a bad headache.”

“I see,” replied Lena, getting up from the piano. “Sorry.” She walked forward a step or two, then looked at Mrs. Dersingham. “Have you had it all the evening or has it just come on now?” And this was not a polite inquiry, but a challenge. The tone of voice made that obvious.

“Does that matter?” And Mrs. Dersingham turned away.

Into the silence that fell now there came the voice, quavering a little, of Mrs. Pearson. “Now I really think it’s time we were going,” it began. But nobody took any notice of it.

For Lena burst into a torrent of speech. “No, it doesn’t matter, of course. But I just asked because I thought you might have started that headache since I came, because you’ve just been as rotten as you could be, and I didn’t ask to come—I’ve been travelling half the day and I’m as tired as you are—and I wouldn’t have come at all if my father hadn’t told me to, and I thought you were friends of his, but from the minute I came in, you’ve not said a decent word to me or given me a decent look⁠——”

“Hoy!” roared her father, seizing her by the arm and shaking her a little. “What the blazes is all this? What’s the matter with you, girl? That’s not the way to behave⁠——”

“No, and that’s not the way to behave either,” cried Lena, shaking herself free. “What have I done? I didn’t want to push myself into her beastly house.” And then she grabbed her father’s arm and burst into tears. “I’m going,” she sobbed. “Take me home.”

Mr. Golspie put an arm round her and she continued her sobbing on his shoulder. “Sorry about this,” he said, over her head. “My fault, I expect. I oughtn’t to have told her to come. The kid’s a bit nervy—tired, y’know.”

“Yes, of course—travelling and all that,” said Mr. Dersingham, feeling that some reply was expected.

This was Mrs. Dersingham’s chance, but she did not take it. She might have accepted the apology if her husband had not been so ready to accept it and make an excuse for the girl. But now she turned her back on Mr. Golspie and his terrible daughter, and said to Mrs. Pearson: “Must you really go? It’s quite early, you know. Oh, Mrs. Trape, you’re not going, are you? Why?” And it was well done, bravely done, but it was a mistake, perhaps the biggest mistake she ever made.

Mr. Golspie’s face changed its expression, all the good-humour dying out of it at once. “All right,” he said shortly. “Come on, Lena, shake yourself up a bit. We’re going now. Good-night, all. See you in the morning, Dersingham. Good-night.” And immediately he marched himself and his daughter out of the room, and, a minute later, before Dersingham had followed him up, out of the house.

Half an hour later, the Dersinghams were alone, and Mrs. Dersingham was curled up in the largest chair, crying. “I don’t care, I don’t care,” she sobbed. “They were awful, both of them. The man was nearly as bad as his terrible daughter. They were ghastly, and I hope to Heaven I never see either of them again. Or any of those people, except Mrs. Pearson. Oh, what a horrible, ghastly evening!”

“I know, I know, my dear,” said her husband, hovering about vaguely and trying to be consoling. “Everything went wrong. I know.”

“No, you don’t, you can’t possibly know how awful it was for me. No, don’t touch me, leave me alone. I just want to go miles and miles away, and never see anybody for months. Don’t ever let me see those vile Golspies again. And I don’t care what I said or did. It couldn’t be too bad for them. Next time, if you want to invite anybody from Angel Pavement, invite the clerks and the typists, anybody before those awful Golspies.”

“There, there,” said Mr. Dersingham, “there, there, there.” And when dialogue is reduced to this, it is time we quitted the scene.

Lena, in the taxi that carried them away from Barkfield Gardens, had stopped crying and was now fiercely resentful, like the spoilt child she was. “Well, they were rotten snobs. And it wasn’t my fault that half her beastly dinner had been dropped outside the door; I didn’t even know until you told me; and it was probably a good job for you, it was dropped, for I’ll bet it was the most awful muck. But there wasn’t one of those old cats who gave me a decent look or spoke a decent word to me. You ought to have seen that long thin bony one when I asked her what she was looking so funny about! And you needn’t think it was only me they didn’t like, either. They didn’t like you, I could see that. They weren’t real friends, any of them.”

“Who said they were, young woman?” her father demanded. “Don’t make such a palaver about it. I know all about ’em. The best of the lot was that chap with the long neck and the wobbly cheeks—Pearson, the chap from Singapore—and he was only half-baked. If Dersingham’s wife doesn’t think we’re good enough for them, let her go on thinking so. I’ll bet she thinks I’m good enough to keep on putting some ginger in that half dead concern of theirs. After what I’ve seen of the Dersingham end of Twigg and Dersingham, all I can say is that Twigg, whoever he was, must have been a dam’ smart chap to have got the firm going at all.”

“You don’t mean to say you’re making money for those blighters?” cried Lena, winding an arm round his.

“The people I’m going to make money for,” replied Mr. Golspie grimly, at the same time squeezing the arm, “are these people, these two here. Just you keep quiet and leave it to me, Miss Golspie.”