Chapter Five: MISS MATFIELD WONDERS

I

Mr. Golspie took the typewritten sheets from Miss Matfield and then spread them out on her table. “All six letters alike, eh? That’s the style, Miss Matfield. Hello, is this exactly what I said?”

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t.” And Miss Matfield raised her eyes and gave him a steady level glance.

“As a matter of fact, it isn’t, eh? Then what is it, as a matter of fact? Just a little improvement, eh?”

Miss Matfield coloured slightly. “Well, if you want to know, Mr. Golspie, all I’ve done is to change was into were twice, simply for the sake of making it more grammatical. That’s all.”

“Half a minute, half a minute,” Mr. Golspie boomed at her. “Not more grammatical. Just grammatical. You made it grammatical when before it wasn’t grammatical. Either it’s grammatical or it isn’t, d’you see? And now I’m being more grammatical, eh?” He guffawed, suddenly, dreadfully.

“I don’t pretend to be particularly marvellous about grammar,” she replied, trying to be severe, “but I do happen to know when to use was and when to use were. It’s one of the few things they taught me. And so I thought you wouldn’t object if I changed them.”

“Much obliged.” He regarded her amiably. “By the way, what is it you do pretend to be particularly marvellous at?”

“Does that matter?” This in her best haughty manner. Everybody in the office knew it and respected it.

But Mr. Golspie only gave her a friendly leer. “Of course it matters,” he declared heartily. “Now I like to know these things. Take me. I used to play a good game at billiards, and I can still play poker with the best, bridge, too. Oh, and I can crack walnuts between my finger and thumb—fact!” He held up a very large thick hairy finger and thumb that matched it. “And that’s not all either. Still—we are a bit busy, aren’t we?”

“I am.” Miss Matfield looked at her typewriter.

“And so,” he continued cheerfully, “for the time being, we’ll say it doesn’t matter. I’ll take these nice grammatical letters away with me. You’ve addressed the envelopes, have you? Right.” He turned his broad back on her, gave Mr. Smeeth a wink, whistled softly, and departed for the private office.

Miss Matfield drew her full lower lip between her teeth and frowned at her typewriter. As usual, she was left with a vague sense of defeat. It was, of course, the man’s insensitiveness—and she saw again that large thick hairy finger—that made him so difficult to snub. Nobody else in the office had dared to talk to her as he did, not after she had spent her first hour in the building. It was a nuisance, not being able to put him in his place, as Mr. Dersingham, Mr. Smeeth, and the others had been put in their places. It was annoying to think that the very next time he spoke to her he would probably talk in the same strain, not altogether an unfriendly strain, but disrespectful, jeering, humiliating in a fashion. She could not really stand up to it, but found herself wanting to lower her eyes, turn her head away, and almost retreat in maidenly blushes—oh, gosh! Lilian Matfield feeling like that! How her friends would howl if they knew! Yet she didn’t really dislike him, not now.

A little later, when they were clearing up for the night, she was presented with this problem of Mr. Golspie again by some artless questions from the little Sellers girl, who still treated Miss Matfield with great deference and thus was still in favour.

“He’s funny, isn’t he?” said Miss Sellers, referring to Mr. Golspie.

“A bit weird.”

“I wish you’d tell me, Miss Matfield,” Miss Sellers continued, earnestly and deferentially, “d’you reelly like him?”

Miss Matfield raised her thick black brows and produced a long mmm sound that went up and then down again. Having gone through this little performance, she said, “Do you?”

“Well,” said Miss Sellers, wrinkling her little nose in an agony of mental effort, “I do an’ I don’t—if you see what I mean.”

Miss Matfield knew exactly what she meant, but did not say so. She merely gave the other girl an encouraging glance.

“Sometimes I think he’s nice,” Miss Sellers went on, staring at nothing, “an’ sometimes I don’t like him a bit. Not that he ever says anything or does anything, y’know—course I don’t see as much of him as you do, Miss Matfield—but sometimes I catch a crool look⁠——”

“A what?”

Miss Sellers’ voice had dropped to a whisper. “A crool look,” she repeated, her eyes enormous. “An’ a reel nasty tone of voice he’s got too, sometimes. And then I think ‘Well, I don’t like you, and I wouldn’t like to cross your path, that I wouldn’t.’ And then the next time, he’s as nice as anything. But I don’t like him as much as I like Mr. Dersingham. Do you, Miss Matfield? Mr. Dersingham’s a reel gentleman, isn’t he? I like him best.”

“I don’t.” This came in a hoarse whisper. It was from Stanley, who, free from his letter-copying for a minute, had quietly joined them.

“Now who asked you your opinion?” Miss Sellers demanded. “You go away.”

“I like Mr. Golspie best,” said Stanley, contriving to introduce an enthusiastic note into his hoarse whisper. “An’ I’ll tell you why. He’s what they call a man’s man. I’ll bet he’s had advenshers.”

“You an’ your advenshers!” Miss Sellers was very contemptuous. “What d’you know about it?”

“I’ve heard things, I have,” said Stanley, very slowly and impressively.

“What have you heard?”

“Shan’t tell you.”

“No, because you’ve got nothing to tell. You run away and get your work done, little boy.”

“I’m as big as you are.”

“Cheeky! Here, you want to go an’ shadder a few manners the next time you go shaddering,” Miss Sellers jeered, singling out, with feminine swiftness and accuracy, the weak joint in the other’s armour.

“Huh! Shan’t learn ’em from you.”

“Oh, be quiet, the pair of you,” cried Miss Matfield, and began tidying her table. Nothing more was said about Mr. Golspie, but on her way home Miss Matfield could not help thinking about him. She always had a book with her for the journey on the 13 bus to and from the office, but the jogging and the crowding and the changing lights did not make reading easy, especially on the return journey to West Hampstead, and frequently she spent more time with her own thoughts than she did with those of her author. On this particular evening Mr. Golspie claimed her attention, almost to the exclusion of anybody or anything else. She could not make up her mind about him, had no label or pigeonhole ready for him, and this annoyed her, for she liked to know exactly what she felt and thought about people; to be able to dismiss them in a phrase. The fact that Mr. Golspie spoke to her every day, if only for a few minutes, gave her work to do, was sufficient to make her anxious to determine her attitude towards him. Men, with their thick skins and yawning indifference, might be able to work with people for years and not know or care anything about them as persons, but this drab stuff about “governors” and “colleagues” could find no place to stay in Miss Matfield’s mind. In the talk among the girls at the Club, all the men who dictated letters to them became immense characters, comic, grotesquely villainous, or heroic and adorable. Their femininity, frozen for a few hours every day at the keyboard of their machines, thawed and gushed out in these perfervid personalities. Behind their lowered eyes, their demure expressions, as they sat with their notebooks on hard little office chairs, these comic and romantic legends buzzed and sang, to be released later in the dining-room, the lounge, the tiny bedrooms, of the Club. Thus, something had to be done about Mr. Golspie, who would have appeared to most of the girls, as Miss Matfield knew only too well, a gigantic find, a mine of glittering material. So far he had merely passed as “weird,” but that would not do. It had not sufficed in Miss Matfield’s private thoughts since the first two days.

She knew exactly what she thought about the others at the office. Mr. Dersingham she neither liked nor disliked; she merely tolerated him, with a sort of easy contempt; he was “sloppy and a bit feeble,” and a familiar type, with nothing at all weird about him. Smeeth seemed to her a vaguely pathetic creature who lived a grey life in some grey suburb; the pleasure he got from what seemed to her his drudgery sometimes irritated her, but at other times it roused something like pity; and when she was not despising him, she liked him. Turgis she despised and occasionally resented. She resented his shabbiness and dinginess, his unhealthy skin and open mouth, his whole forlorn air, simply because these things, which were always there in the office, beside her, hurt her own pride by indicating the indignity of her situation. Occasionally, perhaps after a week-end in the country, when the thought of going back to Angel Pavement almost—as she said—made her feel sick, there flashed through her mind an image of Turgis. There had been moments when she had felt sorry for him, but they were very rare. Stanley and the funny little Cockney girl she tolerated and even liked, so long as they behaved themselves, and they might have been a couple of amusing little animals, a pair of spaniels perhaps, inferior and somewhat neglected. All these people were securely in their places. But not Mr. Golspie, the mysterious, large, jocular, brutal man, who always contrived—and for the life of her she could not discover how he did it—to get the best of her in any talk between them, who irritated one half of her, the sensible half, by making the other half feel fluttered and foolish, all girlish—ugh! How she had loathed him at first! Well, she still loathed him, or at least she disliked him, despised him, because he was nothing but a middle-aged bullying lout. He had a ridiculous moustache. He reeked of cigars and whisky, bar parlours. He was at once comic and awful.

As the bus rattled and roared up the long straight slope of Finchley Road on its way to Swiss Cottage, she told herself several times that Golspie was comic and awful and found something comforting in this conclusion. It was not, however, much of a conclusion; it only remained one for a few minutes, for Mr. Golspie, even in memory, even as an image, a faintly illuminated leer in the dark of her mind (like the Cheshire Cat in Alice), refused to stay in his place and wear his label. He escaped, and mocked her. It was all too stupid, and when she got up to leave the bus she determined to leave Mr. Golspie behind her, too. She found another girl from the Club waiting for the bus to stop, and when it did stop, they smiled at one another and walked up from the Finchley Road together. Mr. Golspie faded away.

“Do you come all the way from the City in that bus, Matfield?” the other girl inquired languidly. She was a very languid girl, rather affected, and her name was Morrison.

“The whole way.”

“How revolting!”

“It is. Absolutely foul! Where do you get it, Morrison? You don’t work in the City, do you?”

“No, Bayswater,” Miss Morrison sighed. “I get it just in Orchard Street. I have to take another bus first along Bayswater Road. Unless I walk, and I loathe walking, specially on these beastly dark nights. Even then, it seems an awfully long way.”

“Nothing to the way I have to come,” said Miss Matfield, sternly. When there was any grumbling about, and there usually was some about, she liked to have her share. “Sometimes it takes hours and hours.”

“I know. I took a job in the City once and I only stuck it a week.” Miss Morrison groaned in the darkness at the thought of it. “I nearly died. Honestly, Matfield, if I’d to go to the City every day and come back here, I’d die, I’d absolutely pass out, I would really. I don’t know how you stick it. But then you’re so energetic, aren’t you?”

Miss Matfield at once denied this terrible charge, and told herself that the Morrison girl was pretty awful. “I’m worn out now,” she continued. “Only I’d rather have the City because I can’t bear those private secretary jobs. Yours is one of them, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” with another sigh. “And pretty ghastly. The woman I’m working for now means well, but she’s an idiot, she really is, Matfield, a full-sized idiot. No man in any office could ever be such an idiot. She’s just dotty.”

“Well, here we are at our beautiful home,” said Miss Matfield, looking up at the Club entrance.

“I know. Isn’t it revolting?”

“Absolutely vile,” she replied mechanically, as they walked in. “I don’t suppose there are any letters for me. No, of course not. There wouldn’t be.”

“Mine’s a bill,” Miss Morrison groaned. “Are you always getting bills? I never seem to get anything else. Just millions of foul bills.”

“Foul! Cheerio.”

“Oh—er—cheerio.”

II

The Burpenfield Club, called after Lady Burpenfield, who had given five thousand pounds to the original fund; was one of the residential clubs or hostels provided for girls who came from good middle-class homes in the country but were compelled, by economic conditions still artfully adjusted to suit the male, to live in London as cheaply as possible. Two fairly large houses had been thrown together and their upper floors converted into a host of tiny bedrooms, and there was accommodation for about sixty girls. For twenty-five to thirty shillings a week the Club gave them a bedroom, breakfast and dinner throughout the week, and all meals on Saturday and Sunday. It was light and well ventilated and very clean, offered an astonishing amount of really hot water, and had a large lounge, a drawing-room (No Smoking), a small reading-room and library (Quiet Please), and a garden stocked with the hardiest annuals. The food was not brilliant—and no doubt it returned to the table too often in the shape of fish-cakes, rissoles, and shepherd’s pie—but it was reasonably wholesome and could be eaten with safety if not with positive pleasure. The staff was very efficient and was controlled, as everybody and everything else in the Club was controlled, by the secretary, Miss Tattersby, daughter of the late Dean of Welborough, and perhaps the most respectable woman in all Europe. The rules were not too strict. There were no compulsory religious services. Male visitors could not be entertained in bedrooms, but could be brought to dinner and were allowed in the lounge, where they occasionally might be seen, sitting in abject misery. Intoxicants were not supplied by the Club but could be introduced, in reasonable quantities, into the dining-room when guests were present. Smoking was permitted, except in the dining and drawing-rooms. There were a good many regulations about beds and baths and washing and so forth, but they were not oppressive. In the evenings, throughout the winter months, fires, quite large cheerful fires, brightened all the public rooms. The lighting was good. The beds and chairs were fairly comfortable. Dramatic entertainments and dances were given two or three times a year. All this for less than it would cost to live in some dingy and dismal boarding-house or the pokiest of poky flats.

What more could a girl want? Parents and friends of the family who visited the Burpenfield found themselves compelled to ask this question. The answer was that there was only one thing that most girls at the Burpenfield did want, and that was to get away. It was very odd. You were congratulated on getting into the Burpenfield when you first went there, and you were congratulated even more heartily when you finally left it. During the time you were there, you grumbled, having completely lost sight of the solid advantages of the place. The girls who stayed there year after year until at last they were girls no longer but women growing grey, did stop grumbling and even pointed out to another these solid advantages, but their faces always wore a resigned look.

There was, to begin with, that institution atmosphere, which was rather depressing. The sight of those long tiled corridors did not cheer you when you returned, tired, rather cross, head-achy, from work in the evening. The food was monotonous and the dining-room too noisy. Then, if you were not going out, you had to choose between your little box of a bedroom, the lounge (usually dominated by a clique of young insufferable rowdies), or the silent and inhuman drawing-room. Moreover, Miss Tattersby, known as “Tatters,” was terrifying. Very early, Miss Tattersby had arrived at the sound conclusion that a brisk rough sarcasm was her best weapon, and she made full use of it. You felt the weight and force of it even in the notices she was so fond of pinning up: “Need residents who have First Dinner take up so much time ...”; “Some residents seem to have forgotten that the Staff has other duties besides ...”; “Is it necessary again to remind residents that washing stockings in the bathrooms ...”; that is how they went. But this, after all, was only a pale reflection of her method in direct talk, and some girls, finding themselves involved in an intricate affair concerning a pair of stockings or something of that kind, preferred to conduct their side of the case by correspondence, in the shape of little notes to Miss Tattersby hastily left in her office when she was known to be out. Many a girl, after a little brush with “Tatters,” who was immensely tall and bony and staring, and looked like a soured Victorian celebrity, had faced the most infuriated director at her office with a mere shrug. The confident Burpenfield manner in commercial life, of which we have seen something in Miss Matfield in Angel Pavement, was probably the result of various encounters with Miss Tattersby.

But what Miss Matfield, who was cursing the place all over again as she left Miss Morrison and went upstairs to her room, disliked most about the Burpenfield was the presence of all the other members, whose life she had to share. There were too many of them, and their mode of life was like an awful parody of her own. The thought that her own existence would seem to an outsider just like theirs infuriated or saddened her, for she felt that really she was quite different from these others, much superior, a more vital, splendid being. Those whose situation was not at all like her own only annoyed her still more. There were the young girls, all rosy and confident, many of whom were either engaged (to the most hopelessly idiotic young man) or merely filling in a few months of larking about, trying one absurd thing after another, while their doting fathers forwarded generous monthly cheques. Then there were the women older than herself, downright spinsters in their thirties and early forties, who had grown grey and withered at the typewriter and the telephone, who knitted, droned on interminably about dull holidays they had had, took to fancy religions, quietly went mad, whose lives narrowed down to a point at which washing stockings became the supreme interest. Some of them were frankly depressing. You met them drooping about the corridors, kettle in hand, and they seemed to think about nothing but hot water. Others were mechanically and terribly brisk and bright, all nervy jauntiness, laborious slang, and secret orgies of aspirin, and these creatures—poor old things—were if anything more depressing, the very limit. Sometimes, when she was tired and nothing much was happening, Miss Matfield saw in one of these women an awful glimpse of her own future, and then she rushed into her bedroom and made the most fantastic and desperate plans, not one of which she ever attempted to carry out. Meanwhile, time was slipping away and nothing was happening. Soon she would be thirty. Thirty! People could say what they liked—but life was foul.

There was still half an hour before dinner, and, after tidying herself, she sat on her bed trying to repair a ladder in a second-best pair of stockings. She was interrupted by a knock at the door and the entrance of an extraordinary figure. It had a greeny-brown face and was dressed in what appeared to be Oriental costume, and the general effect was that of a seasick Arab chieftain.

“Help!” cried Miss Matfield, but only to her visitor. “What is it? Who are you? It can’t be you, Caddie.”

The green face never moved a muscle, but a careful voice came from it, and the voice, though muffled and lacking its usual variety of tones, was undoubtedly that of her neighbour, Miss Isabel Cadnam, otherwise “Caddie.” She had put a mud pack on her face and had wrapped her head in a towel.

“And you haven’t to smile or anything,” she announced cautiously, “or it’ll crack. But I’ve come to ask you a favour. Are you in to-night? I mean you’re not dressing or anything grand? Well, can I borrow your shawl, the reddy-black one? You promised to lend it to me, if I wanted it terribly some night.”

Miss Matfield nodded.

“Well, this is the night. A great do. My dear, Ivor’s got tickets for a new cabaret, dance and supper place, opening night to-night, and we’re going. Marvellous!” The face did not move, but the eyes rolled and flashed their appreciation.

“All right, you can have the shawl, Caddie,” said Miss Matfield, lazily rising to stretch out a hand for it. That is all you have to do to find anything in a Burpenfield bedroom. “It sounds marvellous. But I thought you’d had a row with Ivor, parted for ever for the umpteenth time and all that. Why, it’s only last Friday you spent hours and hours telling me about it.”

“We made it up this morning,” the green mask replied, rolling its eyes. “Started over the telephone, too, my dear. Ivor tried to explain and then I tried to explain and then about forty people in the office went off the deep end, so I said I’d meet him for lunch. We met. And there you are. And now we’re going on the razzle.”

“Lucky you!”

“I will say that for Ivor. He can be terribly, terribly stupid, almost stupider than anybody I know, except those foul brutes at the office—honestly, my dear, they are the limit—but the minute we’ve made it up, he always has tickets for something amusing. Free list, you know.”

“I believe he waits until he has the tickets, then rings you up that morning and makes it up,” said Miss Matfield. “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

“What a perfectly loathsome idea, Mattie! What a foul mind you have! Still, he might do that. Rather sweet of him, really, when you think about it. Well, I shall have to fly. I’ve got to get this stuff off. I’ve been wearing it for hours and I feel I shall never be able to smile again. Thanks for the shawl, and, my dear, I’ll take the greatest, the very greatest care of it, and you shall have it back in the morning.”

“Have a good time,” said Miss Matfield, with no particular enthusiasm. “Give my love to Ivor.”

When her visitor had gone, she gave a little impatient shake, sat down again, but threw the stocking on one side. Caddie was really rather a silly creature, but nevertheless she contrived to have quite an amusing, even exciting time. Ivor, a goggly-eyed young man who was with a firm of publicity people, was even sillier than she was, and Miss Matfield admitted to herself at once that she could not possibly endure a single hour of his company, but he pleased Caddie, took her out, quarrelled with her, made it up, took her out more luxuriously, created a continual excitement. It was possible to envy Caddie’s state of mind while despising her taste. Miss Matfield’s ripe mouth, which hardly needed lipstick, took on a discontented curve. It was a pity that silly young men did not amuse her, for there were plenty of Ivors about, whereas there were very few real grown-up men about, men who could make her feel she was still a mere girl. She was beginning to like, definitely to prefer, middle-aged men—and admitted as much to her intimates—but the trouble was that the really nice attractive ones were nearly always terribly domesticated, up to the neck in wives and families, and had hardly more than an occasional faint gleam of interest to spare for a Miss Matfield. The middle-aged men who were interested were always the awful ones, with swollen faces and little boiled eyes, dreary rotters. Mr. Golspie? No, he wasn’t as bad as that, wasn’t quite that type. But quite impossible, of course. Quite absurd.

The gong went clanging below, and as it sounded, a head popped into the room. “You’re in, aren’t you, Mattie?” it said. “Come on, then. I’ve got some News. Very exciting.”

This head, which was decorated with a thick shock of fair hair, horn spectacles, a freckled and turned-up nose, and a wide and amusing mouth, belonged to Evelyn Ansdell, who had had a room close to Miss Matfield’s for the last two years, and who was one of the very few friends she had made at the Burpenfield. She was a slap-dash, untidy, scatter-brained sort of girl, younger than Miss Matfield, and though she had all manner of minor faults, she had the two outstanding virtues of being good-hearted and extremely entertaining.

The two girls went down to the dining-room together and were fortunate enough to get a little table to themselves. There, amid the chatter and clatter that went with the mutton stew and the prunes and custard, Miss Ansdell broke the news, in a series of shrieks and gasps.

“I’m nearly dead,” she began, impressively. “No, really nearly dead. I’ve been ringing up parents like mad for the last hour and a half. Don’t I sound hoarse? Honestly, I’ve been screaming and screaming down the telephone.”

There was nothing novel about this. Miss Matfield knew all about Evelyn’s parents. They were a queer pair, and had been separated for the last four or five years. Mrs. Ansdell roamed about the country, sometimes trying her hand at odd things, while Major Ansdell, no longer in the army but now the representative of some mysterious imperial organisation, roamed about the whole world, completely disappearing for months on end. Now and then, each of them descended upon London and the Burpenfield, and by some odd chance it frequently happened that their London visits coincided, and then Evelyn had to work desperately hard to make sure that they did not arrive at the Club together. Evelyn herself, who had once been sent flying between them like an amused shuttlecock, did not take sides, except perhaps in certain minor differences, but preserved an amiable detachment, not unlike that of a good old referee. Everything was complicated by the fact that all three of them were rather eccentric. All this was strange to Miss Matfield, whose parents adored one another in their dull elderly fashion and were, anyhow, far too sensible and too busy for such alarms and excursions; but the actual novelty of it had passed. So she merely prepared herself to listen to yet another instalment of the Ansdell family row saga.

“It all began with a letter from mother,” Miss Ansdell continued, excitedly. “It came this afternoon. My dear, the maddest letter. But the point is, mother’s going to run a shop, selling antiques. I forget the name of the place, but anyhow she’s actually got the shop and it’s a marvellous place, all oak beams and bow windows and all that, and rich motorists stopping every minute. That’s not so crazy as it sounds, because mother does really know about antiques and old embroideries and things like that, and could make anybody buy anything if she wanted to. And she wants me to go and live with her, and help her in the shop.”

“Oh, Lord!” Miss Matfield groaned. “But you’re not going, are you? She’s wanted you to go before, hasn’t she?”

“Yes, but this is rather different. Quite different, in fact. It really would be rather fun helping her in a shop. I’d much rather do that, swindling the rich motorists, than go on with this secretary rot. You know how I loathe typing and shorthand. And this time she wants me very badly—her own little darling girl by her side sort of thing—you should have seen her letter. So I rang her up—trunk call, my dear, and I’m absolutely broke—to know all about it, and honestly it does sound rather marvellous. Lovely shop, nice old town, lots of nice people, and a car—you have to have a car in this antique business. I must say—even though I know what mother is—I must say it sounds rather marvellous.”

“It does,” Miss Matfield admitted, grudgingly.

“But wait a minute, wait a minute, Mattie, my dear. That isn’t all the excitement. Oh, no! Before I rang off, mother gave me a message to father about some money. He’s in town, you know. So I rang him up and then, after I’d given him the message, I told him what mother had suggested. Well, you should have heard him. I thought every minute I should hear him going up in sheets of flame. Then he was very quiet, and I knew he was going to be pathetic. He can do it even better than mother. If he really gets going, I’d agree to anything—while he’s there. And he said he had a plan he’d had in his mind for months, been thinking about nothing else, and that he’d have mentioned it before only he thought I was so happy here at the Burpenfield. He’s going away again very soon on this Empire rot, and he wants me to go with him as his secretary. He’s going to America—Montreal and Toronto and those places—and then on to Australia, and I’d go everywhere with him. What do you think about that? He said he’d been thinking about it for ages, but I believe he’d invented the job five minutes before, just to do mother in the eye. And now they both want an answer at once. Isn’t it crazy?”

“Completely mad.” But why did nothing like that ever happen to her? “What are you going to do?”

“My dear, I’m going to take one of them. Wouldn’t you? But which, I don’t know. What do you think?”

“Let’s get our coffee,” said Miss Matfield. “Then we can talk about it afterwards.”

This was a blow. Whether Ansdell went off to Canada and Australia or joined her mother at the antique shop, she was lost to the Burpenfield. Another decent and amusing one gone! Something exciting happening to somebody else, as usual! And Miss Matfield was so busy feeling sorry for herself that if her advice had really been demanded over the coffee, she would not have found it easy to give it. Miss Ansdell, however, like many people who ask to be advised, apparently only wanted a listener, for she never stopped talking herself and when she put a question, promptly answered it without giving her friend time to frame a reply.

When they came up from the dining-room, they saw a tall figure standing just inside the entrance hall. “I believe it is,” Miss Ansdell gasped. “Yes, it is. It’s father. Oh, help!”

And Major Ansdell it was. Miss Matfield had met him, just for a few minutes, two or three times before. He was still a handsome, soldierly looking man, though quite elderly, and was immensely courteous in the Roger de Coverley style to all Evelyn’s friends. But there was in him an extraordinary theatrical strain. Quite frequently he behaved as if he were the hero of some old-fashioned melodrama; and was very emotional, very rhetorical, and absurd. He was quite capable of talking just as men talk in bad stories in popular magazines, and Miss Matfield had sometimes wondered whether it was because he had read a great many bad stories or because the stories were nearer the truth than one thought and were worked up, on the fringes of Empire, out of men like Major Ansdell.

Miss Matfield hung back and saw the Ansdells greet one another and then go upstairs, obviously to Evelyn’s room. There was no talking to Major Ansdell in a public room; he was far too fond of a scene and was not at all shy. Miss Matfield went into the lounge, to smoke a cigarette, and spent an envious ten minutes glancing through one of those illustrated weeklies that seem to be produced simply to glorify that small section of society which works only to keep itself amused. It showed her photographs of these demigods and goddesses racing and hunting in the cold places, bathing and lounging in the warm places, and eating and drinking and swaggering in places of every temperature. By the time she had finished her cigarette, Miss Matfield quite understood the temptation to start a revolution, and told herself that these papers simply asked for one. Then she too went upstairs to her room.

She had not been there more than a few minutes when Evelyn Ansdell burst in, crying: “My dear, mother’s on the phone. Do go in and talk to father until I come back. If you don’t, he’ll come down and do something absurd. I’ll be as quick as I can.” And off she went.

Evelyn’s bedroom seemed almost entirely filled by her father, who welcomed his daughter’s friend—and Miss Matfield felt herself thrust into the part of daughter’s friend at once—with his usual grave and elaborate courtesy. He was, she felt, enjoying himself, and was probably the only man who ever had enjoyed himself visiting the Burpenfield. He addressed her as “Miss Mattie,” having heard Evelyn refer to her as “Mattie,” and Miss Matfield did not feel like correcting him. This only made everything more absurd. It was like taking part in a charade.

“I think you know why I’m here, Miss Mattie,” he began, in deep vibrating tones. “I want to persuade this little girl of mine to go overseas with me, to help me with the great work I am doing and to be by my side.”

She nodded and made a vague affirmatory noise. It was all she could do, but then he did not want anything more.

“A father has his feelings, Miss Mattie. We don’t hear much about them. He keeps them to himself. He hides them, buries them,” he continued, with fine emotional effect, clearly enjoying himself. “An Englishman doesn’t like to make a display of these things. It’s part of the tradition—the great tradition—of our race. If we suffer, Miss Mattie, we like to suffer in silence. Isn’t that so? The Britisher—now, just a moment. I know what you’re going to say.”

“Do you?”

“I do. You’re going to say that you don’t like that word ‘Britisher.’”

“I don’t like it much, I must say,” Miss Matfield confessed.

“I knew you didn’t. I didn’t at one time. I detested the term. I wouldn’t have it at all. But my work, my travels up and down the Empire have taught me better. We must have something that describes not an Englishman, not a Scotsman, or a Canadian or an Australian, but simply a subject of the great Empire itself, and the only word for that is ‘Britisher.’ Don’t resent it, Miss Mattie. It stands for a great ideal. And I say that the Britisher doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. But he feels deeply. He may have his work to do, taking him away from his home into the loneliest places, and be glad and proud to do it.” Here the Major made a fine gesture and came within an ace of wrecking his daughter’s toilet stand. So he sat down on the edge of the bed, where he looked enormous and rather like the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass.

“You’re my little girl’s friend, aren’t you, Miss Mattie?” he asked. Miss Matfield said she was, and added that she would be very sorry to lose her.

“I understand that, I understand that,” and he reached over and patted her lightly on the shoulder. “She’s a very lovable child, isn’t she? And you can understand a father’s feelings. I have my work to do, Miss Mattie, and I have many acquaintances, friends if you like, in all parts of the world, but fundamentally, at heart, I’m a lonely man—yes, a lonely man. Evelyn’s my only child, and I want her companionship, I want her by my side, unless of course I should be called upon to visit places where one’s womenfolk couldn’t be taken. If it were a question of our tropical possessions, that would be different, quite different. I don’t like to see a white woman, especially a young girl, in such places. They’re for men, for us rough fellows who like to clean up some backward part of the globe. If you’ve any influence with her—and I’m sure you have, and a very good influence too, a steadying influence naturally, being older⁠——”

“Thank you, Major Ansdell,” said Miss Matfield drily. “You make me sound about fifty. It’s not very complimentary of you.”

“A thousand apologies, my dear Miss Mattie,” cried the Major gallantly. “I know very well you’re under thirty, a mere girl, and a very charming one, I assure you. But Evelyn’s a mere child, you see, isn’t she?”

Miss Matfield said nothing, but thought that some of the child’s antics and talk might possibly astonish him.

“But what I was about to say is this. I want you to use your influence with my little girl to persuade her to come with her old father and join her life with mine. There’s some ridiculous talk,” he continued hurriedly and more naturally, “of her joining her mother in some wild-cat scheme for selling old furniture and broken crockery and silly knick-knacks down in the country somewhere. You know the sort of place. Ye oldy antique shoppy! Faked warming pans! Rubbish! Even if she won’t come with me, I’d fifty times rather see the child staying here and doing her typewriting than embarking on such a gim-crack, nonsensical scheme. Trying to sell faked warming pans to a lot of cads and old women!”

At this moment the door flew open and Evelyn joined them, breathless. The little room was completely full now, and Miss Matfield wanted to escape, to let them talk it out together, but she could not manage it unless she pushed Evelyn out of the way.

“I’ve been talking to mother,” Evelyn began.

The Major jumped up. “Don’t tell me she’s still trying to persuade you to bury yourself among her fenders and warming pans and go smirking behind a counter. It’s the most preposterous idea I ever heard of. It won’t even pay. All good money thrown away.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, father,” Evelyn protested. “Mother really does know a lot about antiques. I know that. I wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t make quite a lot out of it.”

Neither of them took any notice of Miss Matfield, but nevertheless she could not very well leave the room until she had a good opportunity to push past Evelyn.

“Your mother may or may not know a good deal about antiques,” said the Major very impressively, “though I seem to remember her being taken in every day or so by some piece of faked-up rubbish. But she knows nothing whatever about human nature and has no head for business. And if you’re going to keep a shop, my child, you have to know something about human nature and business. Now I could keep a shop and make a success out of it, if I wanted to, because I understand people and know how to organise. Your mother knows no more about organisation than a—a prize rabbit.”

“Well, listen to me, father, and never mind about that. I’ve been talking it over with mother, and I’ll tell you what I’ve decided to do. I’m coming with you on this trip—and, by the way, you’ll have to give me some money for clothes, I haven’t a thing—and then afterwards, if I don’t like it, I shall try mother’s scheme, if the shop’s still in existence.”

“It won’t be. But that doesn’t matter. This is good news, Evelyn. Just the two of us, side by side⁠——”

It looked as if a magnificent parental embrace were arriving. Miss Matfield, murmuring something about letters, slipped out. The Ansdells were absurd, all three of them, but she could not help envying Evelyn. Major Ansdell might be ridiculous, but if he had asked her to go roaming round the Empire with him, she would have accepted like a shot. As it was, she stayed on in Angel Pavement and at the Burpenfield, and would soon have lost an amusing Club neighbour too, almost the only one left with whom she could be friendly and confidential. Foul.

The late post had arrived and there were two letters for her. One was from her mother and was merely the regular hasty bulletin. Dad was working too hard as usual, looking after everybody for miles around except himself, and not looking at all well. The Wesleys’ little girl was down with pneumonia. Those new people, the Milfords, the elderly people who had taken Rogerson’s old house, had a son and his wife home from India, quite nice. There was no chance of her getting up to town this next month but Dad said he might have to come up and would let her know in good time. And when did Lilian think she could manage another week-end at home? Oh—and Mary Fernhill, the quite plain one who went out to South Africa last year and came back so suddenly, well, she was engaged. There was nothing very exciting in all that. Just the usual stuff. Poor mother, poor dad! He did work too hard, and he was beginning to have a terribly pinched look. That was the trouble about being a doctor, you never bothered, went on until you dropped. That was pretty foul too. There didn’t seem to be much good luck going in life, and what there was completely escaped the Matfield family.

The other letter was more interesting, and she kept it until she reached her own room again. It was dated from the Chestervern Agricultural College:

Dear Lilian,

I have to be in London to-morrow (the 16th) and am wondering if you would care to spend the evening with me, have dinner and then go somewhere. It would be a great treat for me. I’m sorry the notice is so short, but couldn’t help that. Will you let me know at once—c/o Holborn Palace Hotel—and tell me what time to call for you if you are free.

Yours sincerely, Norman Birtley.

So Norman Birtley hadn’t forgotten her existence. She sent a dashing note to him at his rather ghastly Holborn Palace Hotel, telling him she was free and could be called for at the Burpenfield at seven o’clock. And after slipping out to post it, she felt slightly better.

Ansdell looked in, having disposed of her father, not without first making him promise her a new outfit. “And we sail in a fortnight, my dear,” she crowed. “And to-morrow I give those beastly people the sack, after which I hand out the same to Tatters in person too. Yes, I am. That will probably close the dear old Burp to me for ever, and not a bad thing too. Except I shall be very sorry to leave you, Mattie. I will really. After all, we’ve had some great conferences in these queer little dens, haven’t we? I’ll have to tell father he must have two secretaries, and then we’ll both go out, slip away and marry big brown men from the West and the great open spaces. What do you say?”

“I’d love it,” said Miss Matfield, forcing a smile. “I’m terribly sorry you’re going. They’ll put some awful creature into your room, either one of the old hot water brigade or some devastatingly bright young person from the lounge set. I suppose it’s nearly time I joined the hot water school, the kettle fillers⁠——”

“Don’t be absurd. You’re one of the very few people here who are really alive—and look it. Let’s change the subject. I believe it’s depressing you. Had any letters?”

“One from mother, very dull, and one from a man I’ve known off and on for years. He’s coming up to town to-morrow and wants me to spend the evening with him, seeing the sights.”

“A-ha! Is he a big brown man? Do you like him?”

“He’s not bad,” Miss Matfield replied, indifferently. “A bit feeble. He’s from my part of the world and used to hang about a lot at one time, but we haven’t seen much of one another for ages.”

“I scent a roam-a-ance,” cried Miss Ansdell. “His sweetheart when a boy. And you have cared all these yee-ars and I never knew⁠——”

“Don’t be an ape. You’re making me feel sick.”

“But seriously, Mattie. Is he going to ask you to marry him, after the coffee has been served in a shaded corner?”

Miss Matfield smiled, but thought this over. “He might, you know,” she admitted, staring into nothing, her eyes growing sombre. “And if I thought I was doomed to stay in this place much longer, spending my evenings washing stockings and pattering round with kettles, I’d marry him next week. But I haven’t the least desire to marry him. He’s quite decent, but—oh—he’s just rather feeble. Most young men seem rather feeble, these days. I suppose most of the other sort were killed in the war. I hate feeble men, don’t you? I mean, I like a man to have plenty of character, a solid lump of it, and I don’t even care if it isn’t a terribly good character so long as there’s plenty of it. There’s a man in my office⁠——”

“You don’t mean Mr. Dirty—Dersy—what’s it?” Miss Ansdell asked.

“No. He’s rather sloppy too. Not a bit amusing. But there’s a man who’s just come lately, Golspie⁠——”

“I know. But you said he was awful.”

“So he is,” Miss Matfield admitted hastily. “I told you about him, didn’t I? I don’t say I like him. He’s rather a brute, and looks it, or at any rate looks weird. But he has got some character, and could do something without asking everybody’s permission. That’s all I meant. Of course, from every other point of view, even poor Norman Birtley, who really isn’t so bad, is worth fifty of him. Imagine going out to dinner with Golspie!” And she laughed aloud at the thought.

They talked of other things, yawned, stared, talked again, more idly, yawned again, and then went to bed.

III

Miss Matfield awoke next morning with a vague feeling that something pleasant and rather exciting was about to happen. Norman Birtley. So that was it. She could think of nothing else, and was rather disappointed, slightly cross with herself, when it all dwindled to Norman. That showed the sort of existence she led, these days. There had been a time when Norman Birtley was only a joke. When he became serious she had brushed him aside. After that, when he turned into the attentive admirer, popping up at odd intervals and popping down again wistfully, it is true she had liked him better. But now, the very thought of an evening with him could bring her out of sleep in a vague sense of excitement. It was absurd. It was pathetic. No, it was simply revolting.

Before she reached the office, she had completely reversed this judgment. There was nothing revolting about it. Perfectly right and natural. Norman Birtley was quite decent; he liked her, admired her, perhaps was in love with her; and she had every right to look forward to an evening with him, to an evening out with anybody (except girls from the Club, sharing Pit seats and sandwiches), for that matter. The 13 bus, grinding away through the slight fog, agreed with this conclusion, hinted that she was too proud, and seemed to say that for its part it took all it could get, like the stout-hearted Cockney it was. There was some fog too in the City, and it was a raw yellow morning for Angel Pavement. Everybody in the office yawned a good deal and was rather irritable for the first two hours. It was that sort of morning. The rest of the day was more comfortable, but dull and slow, lumbering towards five-thirty like a stupefied elephant. Miss Matfield had not much to do. Mr. Golspie was out all day, and it was he who usually kept her busy. Mr. Dersingham, who found himself getting pink and flustered when Miss Matfield coolly stared at him and waited, with a kind of ironic resignation, for his next halting sentence, preferred to dictate his letters, whenever possible, to little Poppy Sellers, in whose eyes, as he rightly suspected, he was a large fine gentleman. The only amusing thing that happened in the afternoon was that poor Mr. Smeeth, returning importantly and fussily from the bank, tried to tell them a funny story he had heard there and completely failed to bring out the point. He was rather pathetic, Mr. Smeeth. After that there were huge blank spaces, during which yellow wisps of fog seemed to creep into one’s mind. But she was able to get away early and have a really good Burpenfield bath, tons of hot water, before changing.

She was quite ready when the message came that Mr. Birtley was waiting below. In the corridor she ran into Kersey, one of the depressing old inhabitants who, as usual, was trailing along with a kettle. She meant well—poor old thing—but she had a horrid trick of saying things that depressed you at once.

“Hello, Matfield,” she droned damply. “Going out, are you? That’s the way. You have to enjoy yourself sometimes, haven’t you? That’s right, dee-ar.”

This was Kersey’s usual speech if she saw that you were dressed to go out. She had another speech ready for you if she saw you were not dressed. “Not going out to-night, eh, Matfield? No, I thought not. Well, you can’t expect to go out every night, can you, dee-ar?” And you left her drooping there, with her kettle, but not before she had set your spirits drooping too, whether you were staying in or going out. It was as if the horrible future addressed a few remarks to you.

Norman Birtley was waiting in the lounge, looking very tall, very awkward, very uncomfortable. Round the fire was the usual set, two or three of the bright young ones with Ingleton-Dodd lounging in the middle of them. Ingleton-Dodd was a large woman, about forty, with a curious white face, her hair plastered back, severe mannish clothes, and a bass voice. She seemed to have more money than anybody else in the Club, and owned quite a good little car, about which she talked a great deal. She was talking about it, or about some car, when Miss Matfield walked in.

“Oh, the man was a complete fool,” she was saying, in that deep bass voice of hers. “I told him to have a look at the mag. ‘Put the mag right,’ I told him, ‘and the whole thing will be right. Clean those points a bit, to start with.’ By this time, he’d taken the mag out and was staring at it like a stuck pig.”

“Marvellous!” cried one of the bright children. They all thought Ingleton-Dodd “the very last word.”

“‘Oh, give it to me,’ I said, and snatched it out of his hand. Then I sent for the manager. ‘Look here,’ I said to him, ‘does anybody in this place know how to time a mag?’ You should have seen his face.”

Awful creature! She ought to have seen Norman Birtley’s face. He was looking at Ingleton-Dodd with fascinated repulsion written clearly on his simple and expressive features. He greeted Miss Matfield confusedly, dropping his hat when he shook hands. His hands were hot and damp, and there was a glint of perspiration on his pink forehead. He had not changed at all, except that he now wore rimless eyeglasses and his sandy moustache was a trifle more in evidence. He was only a year or so older than Miss Matfield and, as he was far less sophisticated than she was, not at all at home in London, which he only visited at long intervals, she felt the older of the two.

“How are you, Lilian?” he inquired, smiling nervously. “You’re looking very well.”

“Am I? I don’t feel it. I’m feeling pretty foul.”

“You’re not, are you?” He looked at her anxiously. “What’s wrong? You haven’t got anything the matter with you, have you? Are you seeing a doctor?”

This obvious concern ought to have pleased her, for it was very flattering. But these questions, demanding as they did a definite answer, a disease or two, only irritated her. It was understood at the Burpenfield that you were nearly always pretty foul, with nothing exactly wrong with you perhaps, but nevertheless in a fairly permanent state of being worn out, nerve-racked, tottering on the brink of something ghastly. Miss Matfield had forgotten that this simple visitor from the country knew nothing of this convention.

“Oh, I’m all right really, I suppose,” she replied, dismissing the subject. “Shall we go now? Where do you propose to take me, Norman? Have you any plans?” She moved to the door.

“Well, I didn’t know exactly what to do. I suppose I ought to have asked you first, but there wasn’t time. There seems to be a rather good show on at the Colladium this week, so I got two seats for that, second house. Do you like music halls?”

“Not bad. It all depends.”

“A fellow I was talking to at the hotel said it was a very good show, so I thought that would be all right. But if you don’t want to go, I suppose I can get rid of the tickets, can’t I?”

“No, that will be all right. I’d like to go,” she told him. They were walking down the hill now, towards Finchley Road.

“Good. And about dinner,” he continued, struggling laboriously with his duties as host. “I thought we might go to a place in Soho. Old Warwick—he’s our principal at the Chestervern Agricultural, and he’s been here a good deal—told me there was a good little place, one of those French or Italian places, you know, a bit bohemian but very good cooking—I’ve got the name and address in my book and I’ll find it in a minute. Anyhow, I thought, if you didn’t mind, we might go there.”

“All right,” she replied, not very enthusiastically. Some of those little Soho places were rather foul, and old Warwick of the Chestervern Agricultural might not be a very good judge. “Let’s go there, and you can dig out the name and address on the way. We’ll hurry and catch a bus.”

“Oh, will a bus be all right?” he cried, obviously relieved. “I thought perhaps we might have to take a taxi.”

“No, a bus will do,” she told him. A taxi, though, would have done a great deal better. She loved riding in taxis. Perhaps—who knows?—if Mr. Birtley had insisted upon their having a taxi, the whole evening might have been different.

Once again she went jogging down the long hill, past the sudden sparkle of Swiss Cottage, the genteel gloom of St. John’s Wood, and a Baker Street that was now like a series of captivating peepshows. They did not talk much inside the bus, which was full and uncommonly noisy, but he shouted a few questions about the Club and Ingleton-Dodd (whom he regarded with horror) and the office and her father and mother, and she screamed fairly adequate if brief replies. Her spirits rose when they actually arrived in Soho, for though she had some mournful memories of its table d’hôte and had been in London long enough to be sceptical about its romantic bohemianism, she could not resist the place itself, the glimpses of foreign interiors, the windows filled with outlandish foodstuffs, chianti flasks, and bundles of long cheroots, the happy foolish little decorations, the strange speech, the dark faces, the girls leaning out of the first-floor windows. It was quite a long time since she had last walked along Old Compton Street. It made her sigh for an adventure. Meanwhile, that very evening took on a faint colouring of adventure while they were still searching for old Warwick’s restaurant, though, with all the good will in the world, she could not transform Norman Birtley, fresh from the Chestervern Agricultural College, into a romantic and adventurous companion.

At last, they found old Warwick’s restaurant. It might have been French or Italian or even Spanish or Hungarian; there was no telling; but it was determinedly foreign in a de-nationalised fashion, rather as if the League of Nations had invented it. No sooner was Norman’s hand on the door than a very fierce-looking, moustachioed, square-jawed Latin flung it open very quickly and with a great flourish, so that they were almost sucked in. The place was very small, rather warm, and smelt of oil. The lights were shaded with coloured crinkly paper. There were only four other people there, two oldish tired girls masticating rather hopelessly in the far corner, and a queer middle-aged couple sitting almost in the window. The fierce Latin swept them across to a tiny table, thrust menus into their hands, rubbed his hands, changed all the cutlery round and then put it all back again, rubbed his hands once more and then suddenly lost all interest in them, as if his business was simply to drag people in and then, having got them seated, to create a momentary illusion of brisk service before they had time to change their minds.

“You can have the whole dinner for three and sixpence,” said Norman, looking up from his menu. “Wonderful how they do it in these places, isn’t it? I mean to say, what would you get in an English restaurant for that? Nothing worth eating, I’ll bet. But these foreigners can do it. Of course, it’s their job. They know how to cook. Shall we have the dinner?”

Miss Matfield thought that they might, and looked about her, not very hopefully, while Norman gave the order to a waitress, a very tall fat girl with a chalky face and no features, who had just appeared. The queer middle-aged couple looked queerer still now, for the man appeared to be dyed and the woman enamelled and it was incredible that they should ever eat food at all. You felt they ought to feed on wood and paint.

Having given the order, Mr. Birtley was now looking about him too, and when he had finished doing this and had obviously noted the more picturesque details for the benefit of the other members of the staff of the Chestervern Agricultural College, he beamed at her through his rimless eyeglasses. “Nothing I enjoy better than studying these queer types,” he whispered. “A place like this is a treat to me, if only for that reason. Old Warwick told me I’d enjoy that part of it. He’s had some very funny experiences in his time. I must try to remember some of the yarns he’s told me, once or twice when I’ve been sitting up with him over a pipe at the Chestervern.”

While Miss Matfield was asking idly what sort of man Mr. Warwick was and Norman was telling her, the waitress had brought them the two halves of a grapefruit, the juice of which had apparently been used some time before. They had not finished with old Warwick, who seemed to Miss Matfield a silly old man, when the waitress returned to give them some mysterious thick soup, which looked like gum but had a rather less pronounced flavour.

Miss Matfield tried three spoonfuls and then looked with horror at her plate. Something was there, something small, dark, squashed. There were legs. She pushed the plate away.

“What’s the matter, Lilian? Don’t you like the soup?”

She pointed with her spoon at the alien body.

Mr. Birtley leaned across and peered at it through his glasses. “No, by George, it isn’t, is it? Is it really? Oh, I say, that’s not good enough, is it? That’s the worst of these foreigners. Do you think I ought to tell them about it?”

“If you don’t, I will,” said Miss Matfield indignantly. “Absolutely revolting!”

But there was nobody to tell. Even the fierce Latin had disappeared. It seemed as if when soup was served, the whole staff hid in the kitchen. Miss Matfield was sure now that her first instinctive disapproval had been right, as usual. This was a foul little place. Unfortunately, she was really hungry, having had a very small lunch.

The next member of the staff they did see obviously could not be blamed for the soup, for he was the wine waiter, an ancient gloomy foreigner. He padded across to Mr. Birtley, who was trying not very successfully to explain a very funny thing that had happened last term at the College, held out a wine list decorated with dirty thumb marks, and waited apathetically.

“A-ha!” cried Mr. Birtley jovially. “Let’s have something to drink, shall we? Do you think we could manage a whole bottle? I think we could. Yes, let’s have a whole bottle. Now then, what is there? Will you have red or white wine, Lilian? It’s all the same to me.”

“I’d like red, I think,” she replied. “Burgundy perhaps.” It was more sustaining. After all, with bread and butter and some burgundy, it might be possible to stun one’s appetite. She had no hopes of the dinner.

“Burgundy it is,” cried Mr. Birtley, with the air of a reckless musketeer. “All right, then. A bottle of Number Eleven. Beaune.”

“You geef me moanay,” murmured the ancient foreigner.

“Righto. Money. There you are.” And then he gave Miss Matfield a wink and smiled at her. She smiled back, softening towards him a little, for he was so obviously enjoying himself and thinking it all so wonderful. Poor Norman!

“You ought to come and see us at the College next time you’re home, Lilian,” he said. “You’d like it. We’ve got one or two amusing fellows on the staff, and the students aren’t a bad crowd. We have little dances sometimes, and tennis in the summer. It’s growing too. In a year or two, if I can scrape up some money, I may get a partnership. Not bad, eh? The fact is,” and he lowered his voice, as if to keep these confidences away from the waitress, who had just deposited some microscopic pieces of fish in front of them and was still standing near, as if to see if they would have the audacity to eat them, “the fact is, I can get on better with old Warwick than any of the other fellows. He’s taken rather a fancy to me, thinks I’ve got more drive than the others. And as a matter of fact,” he added, looking earnestly at her, “I have. And I wish you’d come and look me up down there.”

She said she would, if she could manage it, and then explained, while the ancient foreigner poured out the wine, how difficult it was to do all one wanted to do, what with one thing and another, and then, fortified by the burgundy and determined to drive old Warwick out of the conversation for a time, she went on to tell him more about the office and the Club. He listened attentively, though with just the faintest suggestion of patronage. Obviously he thought a good deal more of himself these days, now that he had made such a hit with his old Warwick of the Chestervern Agricultural. But then all men were alike in that: they all thought they were marvellous. However, she could tell from the way he looked at her that he still thought she was marvellous too, which was very pleasant. She could feel herself getting steadily better looking and more attractive.

This could not be said about the dinner. The chicken was not marvellous, was not even pleasant. Like many other places in Soho, this restaurant evidently had a contract that compelled it to accept only those parts of a chicken that could not be called breast, wing, or leg. It specialised in chicken skin. The salad could be eaten, but its green stuff seemed to have been grown in some London back garden behind a sooty privet hedge. The sweet was composed of a very small ice, the paper in which it had been delivered from the van at the back door, and some coloured water that might have been part of the ice two hours before. That was the dinner, a miserable affair. Even Norman seemed to have a suspicion that it had not been very good, but he did not apologise for it, perhaps out of loyalty to old Warwick. Miss Matfield, in despair, had had two full glasses of the burgundy, a raw and potent concoction, which had produced at once a rather muzzy effect in her mind so that everything seemed a little larger and noisier than usual. Once, just before the coffee, she had found herself wanting to giggle at the thought of Norman taking his sandy moustache back to Chestervern and old Warwick. The coffee, black and bitter, stopped all that nonsense. They smoked a cigarette together over it, and Norman, with tiny beads of perspiration on his ruddy forehead and his glasses slightly misty, talked about old times and smiled sentimentally across the cruet at her.

It was time to be gone. The Latin suddenly decided to notice their existence again, brought the bill, accepted money, proffered change, swept away the tip, and then apparently threw them both into the street, where the air seemed at once remarkably pure and unusually cold. They arrived at the Colladium just at the right moment, a few minutes after the doors had been opened for the second house. The place was, as usual, besieged by a mob of pleasure seekers who all looked like demons in the red glare of the lights at the entrance. Norman led the way, a little uncertainly, and they went swarming down thick-carpeted corridors.

“Didn’t that man say ‘Round to the left and up the stairs’?” Miss Matfield asked. She had a slight headache now. Those peculiar red lights outside the Colladium look exactly like a headache, and perhaps they had inspired the burgundy. “I’m sure he did, you know.”

“I didn’t hear him,” replied Norman, not too amiably. He was somewhat fussed. “Talking to somebody else, p’raps.”

Feeling a little dubious, she followed him down the gangway on the ground floor of the auditorium, which looked as if it were recovering from a fire, there was so much smoke about. There were programme girls showing people to their seats, but you had to wait your turn and Norman, anxious to secure his two beautiful seats, would not wait his turn. He marched on, glancing at his tickets and the lettered rows of stalls, then finally found the row he wanted, and they pushed past a few people, sought and found the right numbers, and sank into their seats.

“This is all right, isn’t it?” said Norman, after breathing a sigh of relief. “Jolly good seats, eh?” He looked round triumphantly. More lights were being turned on; the orchestra was beginning to tune up again; and the place was filling rapidly. Miss Matfield’s headache retreated, dwindled to an occasional twinge.

“What about a programme?” said Norman, and began to make vague, fussy, ineffectual signs.

Then two large determined men, coarse-looking fellows with heavy jowls and cigars stuck in the corners of their insensitive mouths, came pushing down the row. They stopped when they came to Mr. Birtley and Miss Matfield. “Here, I say,” the first one called back to the programme girl, after looking at his ticket, “is this the right row?” Apparently it was, for now he turned his attention to Norman.

“I think you’re sitting in the wrong seats, my friend,” he said, not unpleasantly.

“I don’t think so,” replied Norman, rather sharply. He brought out his own tickets and gave them a reassuring glance.

“Well, I do,” said the other. He had a loud voice, the kind of voice that attracts attention. “Row F, fourteen and fifteen. Isn’t that right? Well, those are my seats, bought and paid for. Ask the girl. She sent us here.”

“I don’t see that,” said Norman stiffly. “Mine are Row F, fourteen and fifteen. And we were here first. They must have made a mistake at the box office.”

Miss Matfield had risen from her seat. People were looking round at them. If there was anything she hated, it was this stupid sort of scene.

The second large determined man, who had nothing like the amount of room to stand in his bulk demanded and deserved, now made a number of impatient noises. These noises goaded his friend into more direct action.

“Here, come on,” he said roughly, “let’s have a look at your tickets. Here are mine. Now let’s have a look at yours.” He almost snatched them out of Norman’s hand. The instant he saw them, he cried triumphantly: “There y’are. Balcony Stalls, Bal-cony Stalls. These aren’t Balcony Stalls. Cor!—you’re in the wrong part of the theatre, boy, in the wrong part of the theatre.”

“Wouldjer believe it!” cried the second man contemptuously.

“Cor! Up there you want to be, right up there, boy.”

“Sorry. I didn’t know.” Poor Norman was very flustered now. Miss Matfield might have been sorry for him, but she wasn’t. She was furious. Even after they had left the seats and were pushing their way back to the gangway, the two brutes were still talking about it and laughing and making contemptuous noises. Then as she arrived, scarlet, in the gangway, she ran into a little party of three that was waiting to be shown to its place. The first was a tall man with a bristling moustache, obviously a foreigner; the second was a youngish girl, very smart and pretty; and the third, who was still interviewing the girl with the chocolates was—yes, no other—Mr. Golspie, rather flushed, very jovial. There was some congestion in this part of the gangway; they had to stop; and he looked up and saw her.

“Evening, Miss Matfield,” he said, grinning at her in his usual fashion. “So this is where we come, is it?”

She stammered something.

“Had a good day at the office? You’ll see me there to-morrow. Half a minute, Lena. Well, Miss Matfield, see you enjoy yourself. Here, take one of these.”

She found one of the boxes of chocolates in her hand. Before she could do anything or even say anything, he had given her another of his vast grins and had turned away. As she followed Norman up the gangway, most of the lights were lowered and the overture blared out. Their seats were in the first tier and by the time they found them, the curtain had risen and the stage was occupied by three very grave young men who were busy throwing one another about.

“That was a bit of a mix-up, wasn’t it?” said Norman, when they had settled themselves. “But it wasn’t really my fault. They should give their seats proper names. I’ve never heard of stalls being up here.”

“Well, you might have asked. I told you what that man said.”

“By George, so you did. Sorry! But, I say, who was that rum looking chap you were talking to down there?”

“He’s a man who’s just joined the firm I’m working with. I do his letters.”

“Didn’t he give you that box of chocolates?”

“Yes, he did. As a matter of fact, he just shoved it into my hand.”

“Funny thing to do,” Norman continued, half resentfully. “What did he want to do that for?”

“I don’t know. You’d better ask him.” She stared at the three young men, who were now climbing on to piles of chairs and tables in order to throw one another a greater distance.

“I must say I didn’t like the look of him very much.”

“That’s sad, isn’t it, Norman?” replied Miss Matfield. “Hadn’t you better call at the office to-morrow morning and tell him so? What had I better do? Get another job?”

“You don’t mean to tell me you like that chap?”

“I don’t know whether I do or not,” she told him, with perfect truth. But her voice betrayed irritation. “It doesn’t matter, anyhow. I’ll admit, though,” she added, more amiably, “that he does look a bit weird. But he’s rather amusing. Have one of his chocolates, seeing that they’re here, and don’t talk so much.”

The subject was dropped and when they talked again, as they did at odd moments throughout the performance, Mr. Golspie was not mentioned. The show itself was neither better nor worse than the others she had seen there. She liked the white-faced clown with the squeaky voice who nearly fell into the orchestra pit, and the two men who got involved in the most passionate argument all about nothing, and the Spanish dancers, and the wildly ridiculous schoolmaster. On the other hand, she did not like the American cross-talking and dancing pair, or the two girls who sang at the piano or the various acrobats and trick cyclists. Norman, who soon recovered from the ticket scene and settled down to enjoy himself, to like as much as he could of the show and to patronise the rest, was rather more human than he had been during the misery of dinner. Old Warwick was banished at last, and the dull shade of Chestervern never fell on the talk.

When they came out of the Colladium into the astonishing sanity of the night, and Norman not only suggested a taxi but actually found one, she felt she was beginning to feel friendly towards him again. And if he had said, “You know, Lilian, I am rather feeble and a bit of an ass, and I know you’re marvellous and far above my style, but I’ve been in love with you a jolly long time and still am, honestly I am, worse than ever in fact, so will you marry me? I’m not doing anything very wonderful, I know, and you might easily find it dull at first down at Chestervern, but we’d have some fun and things would get better all the time”; if he had said something like that, in the proper tone of voice—rather wistful—and with a dumbly devoted look in his eyes, she felt there was no telling what she might reply. She could just see herself marrying him.

But he made no such speech, and was clearly not in that dumbly devoted mood at all. All the way home, he was vaguely sentimental—what fun they’d had in the old tennis club days and what good pals they’d been!—and was timidly amorous, like some faint-hearted Don Juan taking one home after a dance. Unluckily, Miss Matfield was not sentimental, at least not on conventional or Christmas card lines, and she heartily despised and disliked the timidly amorous male, who could not let one alone but had not passion enough, or courage, to make him risk a sound snubbing. He would slip an arm round her waist and she would tell him to take it away because it was uncomfortable, as indeed it was. And then he would say, “Ah, Lilian, you’re not very kind to me,” in a ridiculous mooing voice, like a farm hand trying to ape the artful philanderer. It was all terribly irritating. When at last, as the taxi began grinding up the last hilly half mile, she was so tired of this that she actually asked him questions about his prospects at Chestervern, dropping into the part of the cool interested woman friend with a sound business head, he turned rather sulky and answered her in a poor half-hearted fashion.

“I suppose I can get a bus back?” he said as they stood at the entrance to the Burpenfield and the taxi departed.

“Oh, yes, of course. Just at the bottom there, on the Finchley Road. They run until after twelve, and they’re much quicker at this time of night, too. You’re going back to-morrow, aren’t you?”

“Yes, on the 10.20. I suppose I’d better be getting along now. Rather cold standing here, isn’t it?”

“Well, Norman,” she said, trying to look bright and friendly and not ungrateful, “it’s been nice seeing you again. And thanks awfully for the dinner and everything. I adored that clown with the chairs, didn’t you? Good-bye.”

He shook hands. “Good-bye. I’m glad you liked it,” he muttered. “Good-bye.”

She stood in the entrance a minute or two after he had gone, fumbling for her key, and suddenly from that great ocean of deep depression which she always felt was not far away, rose in the dark a great breaker and swept her away. She could have cried. It was not Norman Birtley—he was a feeble fool who was rapidly getting worse—but the endless cheating of life itself that frightened her and stifled her. She was Lilian Matfield, Lilian Matfield, the same that had gone playing and laughing and singing and looking forward to everything only a few years ago, no different now except a little older and more sensible, and yet she felt, obscurely, darkly, that somehow she was being conjured into somebody miserably different, somebody stiff and faded and dull.

Another girl came up. Miss Matfield steadied herself, found her key, and walked in. Isabel Cadnam was just coming out of the lounge, and they met.

“Hello, Matfield. Been on the razzle? Look here, I hope you didn’t want that shawl I borrowed. I didn’t get in last night until the crack of dawn, and then I was in such a hurry this morning, I forgot about it.”

“No, it didn’t matter, thanks, Caddie. I’m going up. I’m tired.”

“So am I. Had a good night. That show that Ivor took me to last night was rather a wash-out, I must say. The most ghastly people, and millions of them. And Ivor wanted to join in with some of the ghastliest, and I didn’t, of course, and that started it all over again. Another row, my dear. Isn’t it foul?”

Miss Matfield said dispiritedly that it was.

“What did you do to-night, Matfield? Anything thrilling?”

“Not very. Rather dull, in fact. I’ve got a headache. I think I’ve eaten too many chocolates. I’ll try some aspirin.”

“Nothing like it,” said Miss Cadnam. “Look here, I’ll fetch your shawl and bring it round, and then, if you have any to spare, I’ll borrow a couple of aspirins. If I don’t take something, I’ll never get a wink of sleep all night. It’s always the same after I’ve had a row with Ivor. I begin arguing with him the minute I get to bed, and then I go on and on all night until I think my head’s going to burst. Isn’t it foul?”

“Completely,” said Miss Matfield, opening her door. “All right, then. Hurry up with the shawl and I’ll get you the aspirin.” She closed the door behind her.

IV

It was rather queer seeing Mr. Golspie again, in the grey light of Angel Pavement, after that strange meeting at the Colladium. It was rather like seeing someone you had just met in a vivid dream. She did some letters for him the next morning, and when he had finished them, he dropped his impersonal stare and tone of voice, grinned at her, and said: “Enjoy the show last night?”

“Not very much,” she told him. “Did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” he boomed. “Dead as mutton. Not a patch on the old halls. They call it Variety now, but that’s about all the variety you get. All the same, isn’t it? I keep trying it, but it’s poor stuff. That girl of mine likes to go. She enjoys it all right. Did you see her last night? She was there with me.”

“I wondered if it was your daughter. She’s awfully pretty, isn’t she?”

“Think so?” He was pleased at this. “Well, she’s pretty enough, and knows it, the little monkey. Was that the young man, the one I saw you with?”

He really had some ghastly expressions. The young man! “Good Lord, no!” she cried. “He was just an old friend who comes from my part of the world. Shall I bring these letters in to sign as soon as I’ve done them?”

“I’d like them as soon as possible, Miss Matfield. I want to be off before lunch. I’ve got several members of the Chosen Race to see this afternoon.”

That was all. The awful “young man” question was, of course, in his favourite vein, but apart from that, he was much quieter and pleasanter than usual in this little talk. For once he had dropped the jeering and leering style that made her feel so uncomfortable. He was friendlier. And she had never thanked him for the chocolates. She would have to do that when she went back with the letters.

“Oh, Mr. Golspie,” she cried, when he had finished signing the letters, “I forgot to thank you for the lovely box of chocolates. I don’t know why you gave them to me—so suddenly, like that⁠——”

“Just to celebrate the little meeting, that’s all,” he replied, waving a hand. “‘Here’s our Miss Matfield,’ I thought, ‘looking a bit uncomfortable because her young man’s landed in the wrong seats.’”

“Oh, did you notice that? It was a stupid business.”

“Bit of a box-up, certainly,” he said, grinning at her. “Yes, I saw you all right. You looked very annoyed, too. Anyhow, I thought something ought to be done about it.”

“Well, it was very nice of you,” she said, though she was not altogether pleased at the turn the conversation had taken.

“Ah, but I’m a very nice man,” he assured her, looking very solemn for a moment. Then he produced a short disconcerting guffaw, and waved his hand again. She turned away. “And another thing,” he called out. She stopped. “You never catch me getting into the wrong seats, you try me sometime, Miss Matfield, you just try me. You’d be surprised.” He chuckled a little as she went out. This time she felt hot and uncomfortable again, and felt ready to dislike him just as much as she had done when he first came. It was odd how uncomfortable he could make her feel. After all, she had worked for unpleasant men before to-day. But this was rather different.

Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham were now busy making what Mr. Dersingham, who was beginning to wear a look of great self-importance, called a “big drive.” He and Mr. Golspie and the two travellers were visiting as many firms as they could, showing the new stuff that Mr. Golspie had introduced and piling up the orders. Apparently, it was important that as many orders as possible should be obtained during this little period, for some reason that was not made plain to the office staff, and perhaps was not plain to anybody but Mr. Golspie. It meant a great deal of work for everybody. Miss Matfield was kept at her machine nearly all day making out lists, invoices, and advices. It was not difficult work but it was rather close work and very dreary, and it left her fagged and feeling quite unfit to plan some amusement for herself. There were plenty of mildly amusing things that could be done with a little planning, but she was too tired to bother, like so many of the girls at the Club. Going anywhere, even if it was only attending a concert or doing a theatre, always meant so much fuss and arranging that she let it all slide, not excepting the week-end. If somebody had come along with a cut and dried plan for doing something entertaining, that would have been quite different, indeed heavenly; but nobody did. She spent a good deal of her time at the Club listening to Evelyn Ansdell, who was in the thick of her preparations for the Empire tour with the Major and talked at great length about every single thing she had to buy. Evelyn was quite amusing about it, of course, but it was distinctly depressing to think that very soon she would be gone, probably for ever. On the Sunday they both went round to have tea with Major Ansdell who was quite absurd and provided them with an enormous sticky tea—bless him!—but it was really all rather sad. And on Monday and Tuesday there was quite a frantic bustle at the office. Mr. Smeeth turned himself into a faintly apologetic slave-driver, and Mr. Dersingham ran in and out like a large pink fox terrier.

The next morning they learned the reason for all this fuss. Mr. Smeeth, after visiting the private office, came back looking rather important, and said, “Mr. Golspie’s leaving us to-day.”

Every one of them looked surprised, and three of them, Miss Matfield, Turgis, and Stanley, looked either startled or disappointed.

“He’s not going for good, is he, Mr. Smeeth?” asked Turgis, before anyone else could speak.

He had spoken for Miss Matfield, who felt, she did not know why, the most acute anxiety. For some strange reason, which had certainly nothing to do with business, for at heart she did not care a rap whether Twigg & Dersingham sold all the veneers and inlays in England or drifted into bankruptcy, she hated the thought of Mr. Golspie leaving them. At one stroke it flattened the whole life of Angel Pavement.

“He’s not going for good, I’m glad to say,” Mr. Smeeth replied, enjoying their suspense. “He’s only going back for a short visit, on our business, to the place he came from, up there in the Baltic. I don’t know how long he’ll be away. He doesn’t know exactly himself yet. But he’s sailing this afternoon, going the whole way by boat on the Anglo-Baltic. And,” here Mr. Smeeth glanced out of the window at the raw damp morning, “I don’t envy him. It’ll be a cold job crossing the North Sea, this weather. I remember I once had a sail on a boat at Yarmouth one Easter, not very far out, y’know, but—my word!—it was perishing. I was glad to get back. Well, what’s it going to be like right in the middle, this time of year. I wouldn’t be paid, wouldn’t be paid, to do it.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t care,” said Stanley boastfully. Mr. Golspie was still one of Stanley’s heroes—though nobody could discover why, except that he looked rather like a detective—and Stanley had no half measures in the heroic. “I’ll bet he likes it. I would. I wish he’d take me with him. I wouldn’t go. Oh no, oh no! Wouldn’t I just!”

“You get on with your work, Stanley,” said Mr. Smeeth mechanically. “We all know what you’d do and what you wouldn’t do. Well, he’s sailing this afternoon, all the way to the Baltic Sea, and, as I say, I don’t envy him.” And Mr. Smeeth returned, well content, to his cosy desk and his neat little rows of figures.

Half an hour afterwards, Mr. Golspie, wearing an enormous ulster, looked in on them. “You won’t see me for a week or two,” he announced cheerfully. “Keep it going. Shoulders to the wheel! Full steam ahead, as people say—though why they say it, God only knows, because nobody in a ship ever said it—doesn’t mean anything. Make ’em all pay up, Smeeth. Keep your eye on that cut rate with the Anglo-Baltic, Turgis. Just remember me in your prayers, you girls, if you do pray. Do you pray, Miss Matfield? Never mind, tell me another time. And, Stanley⁠——”

“Yes, sir,” said Stanley, springing to attention.

“Run down and get me a taxi, sharp as you can. Good-bye, everybody.”

When they had all said good-bye, too, and he had gone and they had heard the outer door slam behind him, in the sudden quiet that followed, the whole office had appeared to shrink and darken a little. Miss Matfield, aware of this, resented it, and, compressing her lips, threw herself into what work she had on hand with a sort of grey determination, never looking up and only speaking when compelled to answer a question. By lunch time she felt so discontented that, instead of spending the usual ninepence or so at the little teashop not far away, she went further afield, to a superior place just off Cannon Street, and had cutlet and peas, apple tart and cream, and a cup of coffee, paying her half-crown manfully. After that she was more cheerful and more honest. She had been depressed because though all kinds of things seemed to be happening to other people, nothing was happening to her. It was hard luck losing Evelyn Ansdell. It was hard luck losing Mr. Golspie, if only for a week or two. She could not say yet whether she really liked the man, but at least he made Angel Pavement more amusing. It would be terribly flat now without him. Everything, it seemed, was sinking into dullness. Well, she must make an effort and think of something amusing to do. When she returned to the office, quarter of an hour late, as usual, she was cheerful and comparatively friendly with everybody.

Perhaps the little gods who look after these minor affairs decided that she must be encouraged, for at once they found something amusing for her to do. Shortly after three, Mr. Smeeth took a telephone message and then called Miss Matfield to him.

“That was Mr. Golspie, Miss Matfield,” he began, in his pleasantly fussy and important way. “He says they’re sailing later than he thought, about five or so, and he wants you to go down to the ship and take down a few important letters he’s just remembered about. And you’ve also got to take that sample book—it’s in the private office—he forgot it. I haven’t got Mr. Dersingham’s permission for you to go, and I can’t get it, because he’s out, but of course it’s all right. I accept all responsibility. You don’t mind going, do you?”

“I’d love it,” cried Miss Matfield. “But where exactly do I go?” Mr. Smeeth adjusted his eyeglasses and then examined the slip of paper he had been carrying. “You go to Hay’s Wharf, that’s on the south side of the river between London Bridge and the Tower Bridge, you go over London Bridge and turn straight to the left to get there. And the ship’s the L-e-m-m-a-l-a, Lemmala. Can you remember that, Miss Matfield? And he says, ‘Take a taxi,’ so I’d better give you half a crown out of the petty cash for that—I’ll have to put it down as travelling expenses. Now you get your notebook and pencil and your things on, and I’ll get that sample book out of the private office for you. It’ll be a little jaunt for you, something out of the common, won’t it? Stanley’d give his ears to go, wouldn’t you, Stanley? Oh, he’s not there. Where is that lad?”

Yes, it was a little jaunt for her. It was great fun. First, Moorgate Street, the Bank, then King William Street, went rattling past the taxi window; then came London Bridge, with leaden gleams of the river far below on either side; then a slow progress along a narrow street on the other side, a turn to the left up a street still narrower, a mere passage, at the end of which the taxi had to stop altogether. She dodged up another dark lane, asked a pleasant large policeman if she was going the right way, and finally found herself at the water’s edge, where men were busy loading and running about with papers and shouting to one another. There, about fifty yards further down, was the Lemmala, a steamship with one tall thin funnel, not very large and rather dingy but nevertheless a fine romantic sight. A flag she had never seen before drooped from its little mast. As she drew nearer, she heard some of the men shouting down from the deck, and they were speaking in a language she had never heard before, a tremendously foreign language. Up to that moment, business had been for her an affair of clerks and desks and telephones and stupid letters that always began and ended in the same dull way, but now, in a flash, she suddenly realised that it was all very romantic. It was as if Mr. Dersingham had stalked into the office in Elizabethan costume. The wood they sold in Angel Pavement came in boats like this, indeed in this very ship, and at the other end, where the veneers began, there was quite a different sort of life going on, huge forests, thick snow and frosts all winter, wolves on the prowl, bearded men wearing high boots, women in strange bright shawls, scenes out of the Russian Ballet. Miss Matfield, like most members of the English middle classes, was incurably romantic at heart, and now she was genuinely thrilled, and could hardly have been more astonished and delighted if a few nightingales had suddenly burst into song in one of the dark archways. London was really marvellous, and the wonder of it rushed up in her mind and burst there like a rocket, scattering a multi-coloured host of vague but rich associations, a glittering jumble of history and nonsense and poetry, Dick Whittington and galleons, Muscovy and Cathay, East Indiamen, the doldrums far away, and the Pool of London, lapping here only a stone’s throw from the shops and offices and buses.

She had arrived now at the foot of a gangway that came down steeply from the rusty side of the Lemmala. She looked up, hesitating. Somebody was calling. It was Mr. Golspie above, and he was waving her up. When she reached the head of the gangway he was there, waiting for her.

“We’ve a couple of hours at least before she moves,” he explained, piloting her along the deck, then up a short flight of stairs to the deck above, “but I shan’t keep you so long, y’know. Awkward if she moved off and you were still aboard, eh? Have to take a trip then, eh?”