Chapter I: Part 1

_Angel
Pavement_

BY
J. B. PRIESTLEY

HARPER & BROTHERS
New York _and_ London
1930

_Angel Pavement
Copyright, 1930, by J. B. Priestley
Printed in the U. S. A.
Fourth Printing_

_To
C. S. EVANS_

_because he is not only a good friend and a fine publisher,
but also because he is a London man and will know
what I am getting at in this London novel._

[Contents]

_Prologue_

I. THEY ARRIVE--12

II. MR. SMEETH IS REASSURED--51

III. THE DERSINGHAMS AT HOME--87

IV. TURGIS SEES HER--128

V. MISS MATFIELD WONDERS--169

VI. MR. SMEETH GETS HIS RISE--219

VII. ARABIAN NIGHTS FOR TURGIS--264

VIII. MISS MATFIELD’S NEW YEAR--313

IX. MR. SMEETH IS WORRIED--356

X. THE LAST ARABIAN NIGHT--402

XI. THEY GO HOME--444

_Epilogue_

_Prologue_

She came gliding along London’s broadest street, and then halted, swaying gently. She was a steamship of some 3,500 tons, flying the flag of one of the new Baltic states. The Tower Bridge cleared itself of midgets and toy vehicles and raised its two arms, and then she passed underneath, accompanied by cheerfully impudent tugs, and after some manœuvring and hooting and shouting, finally came to rest alongside Hay’s Wharf. The fine autumn afternoon was losing its bright gold and turning into smoke and distant fading flame, so that it seemed for a moment as if all London bridges were burning down. Then the flare of the day died out, leaving behind a quiet light, untroubled as yet by the dusk. On the wharf, men in caps lent a hand with ropes and a gangway, contrived to spit ironically, as if they knew what all this fuss was worth, and then retired to group themselves in the background, like a shabby and faintly derisive chorus; and men in bowler hats arrived from nowhere, carrying dispatch cases, notebooks, bundles of papers, to exchange mysterious jokes with the ship’s officers above; and two men in blue helmets, large and solid men, took their stand in the very middle of the scene and appeared to tell the ship, with a glance or two, that she could stay where she was for the time being because nothing against her was known so far to the police. The ship, for her part, began to think about discharging her mixed cargo.

This cargo was so mixed that it included the man who now emerged from the saloon, came yawning on to the deck, and looked down upon Hay’s Wharf. This solitary passenger was a man of medium height but of a massive build, square and bulky about the shoulders, and thick-chested. He might have been forty-five; he might have been nearly fifty; it was difficult to tell his exact age. His face was somewhat unusual, if only because it began by being almost bald at the top, then threw out two very bushy eyebrows, and finally achieved a tremendous moustache, drooping a little by reason of its very length and thickness; a moustache in a thousand, with something rhetorical, even theatrical, about it. He wore, carelessly, a suit of excellent grey cloth but of a foreign cut and none too well-fitting. This passenger had come with the ship from the Baltic state that owned her, but there was something about his appearance, in spite of his clothes, his moustache, that suggested he was really a native of this island. But that is perhaps all it did suggest. He was one of those men who are difficult to place. The sight of him did not call up any particular background, and you could not easily imagine him either at work or at home. He had come from the Baltic to the Thames, but it might just as well have been from any place to any other place. As he stood there, straddling at ease, a thick figure of a man but not slow and heavy, with his gleaming bald front and giant moustache, looking down at the wharf quite incuriously, he seemed a man who was neither coming home nor leaving it, and yet not a simple traveller, and this gave him a faint piratical air.

“Lon-don, eh?” cried a voice at his elbow. It came from the second mate, a small natty youngster not unlike a pale and well-brushed monkey. “Vairy nice, eh?”

“All right.”

“You com’ ’ere, Misdair Colsbee? You stay ’ere?” The second mate liked to air his English and had not had much opportunity of doing so during the voyage.

“Yes, I stay here,” replied Mr. Golspie, for that was the name the second officer was trying to pronounce. “That is,” he boomed, as an afterthought, “if there’s anything doing.”

“You leef ’ere, in Lon-don?” pursued the other, who had missed the force of the last remark.

“No, I don’t. I don’t live anywhere. That’s me.” And Mr. Golspie said this with a kind of grim relish, as if to suggest that he might pop up anywhere, and that when he did, something or somebody had better look out. He might have been one of the quieter buccaneers sailing into harbour.

Then, nodding amiably, he stepped forward, looked up and down the wharf again, and returned to the saloon, where he took a cigar from the box the captain had bought at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, and helped himself to a drink from one of the many bottles that overflowed from the sideboard to the table. It had been a convivial voyage. Mr. Golspie and the captain were old acquaintances who had been able to do one another various good turns. The captain had promised to make Mr. Golspie very comfortable, and one way of making Mr. Golspie very comfortable was to lay in and then promptly bring out a sound stock of whisky, cognac, vodka, and other liquors. There had been nothing one-sided about this arrangement, for the captain had been able to keep pace with his guest, even though his progress had not had the same steady dignity. The captain, who had once served in the Russian Imperial Navy and had only resigned from it by escaping in his shirt and trousers over the side one night, was apt to turn fantastic in his drink. On two nights out of the three, during the voyage, he had insisted upon declaiming a long speech from Goethe’s _Faust_ in four different languages, to show that he was a man of culture. And on the night before they had entered the Thames Estuary, the previous night, in fact, he had gone further than that, for he had laughed a great deal, sung four songs that Mr. Golspie could not understand at all, told a long story apparently in Russian, cried a little, and shaken Mr. Golspie’s hand so hard and so often that as he thought about it all now, over his cigar in the saloon that seemed so strangely still, Mr. Golspie could almost feel the ache again in his hand. Mr. Golspie himself did not perform any of these antics; he merely mellowed as the evening waned and the bottles were emptied; and he was mellowing now, early though it was, for he and the captain had sat a long time over lunch. Apparently, however, Mr. Golspie did not consider that he was sufficiently mellow, for he now helped himself to another drink.

The men in bowler hats were by this time on board. Some of them were interviewing the captain. Others were interested in Mr. Golspie, for they had to decide whether he was fit to land in the island of his birth. His relations with these officials were quite amiable, but they did not prevent him from expressing his views.

“Regulations! Of course they’re regulations!” he boomed through the great moustache, mellow but pugnacious. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not a lot o’ damned nonsense. There’s more palaver getting into England now than there was getting into Russia and Turkey before the blasted war. And we used to laugh at ’em. Backward countries we used to call ’em. Passports!” Here he laughed, then tapped the young man on the lapel of his blue serge coat. “Never kept a rogue out yet, never. Only wants a bit of cleverness. All they do is to make trouble for honest men--fellows like me, wanting to do a bit of good to trade. Isn’t that right? You bet it is.”

He then saw the customs officers, who dipped a hand here and there in his two steamer trunks and three battered suitcases.

“I expect you’d like to get away,” said one of them, beginning to chalk up his approval of the luggage.

Mr. Golspie watched him with idle benevolence, looking quite unlike a man who has two hundred and fifty cigars cunningly stowed away in a steamer trunk. “Not this time. No hurry, for once. I’m staying aboard to pick a bit of dinner with the skipper here.” He waved a hand, presumably to indicate the city that lay all round them. “It can wait.”

“What can?” And the young man gave a final flourish of chalk.

“London can,” replied Mr. Golspie. “All of it.”

The young man laughed, not because he thought this last remark very witty, but because this passenger suddenly reminded him of a comedian he had once seen at the Finsbury Park Empire. “Well, I dare say it can. It’s been waiting a long time.”

Left to himself, with his cigars all safe, Mr. Golspie ruminated for a minute or two, then climbed to the upper deck, perhaps to decide what it was that had been waiting so long.

He found himself staring at the immense panorama of the Pool. Dusk was falling; the river rippled darkly; and the fleet of barges across the way was almost shapeless. There was, however, enough daylight lingering on the north bank, where the black piles and the whitewashed wharf edge above them still stood out sharply, to give shape and character to the waterfront. Over on the right, the grey stones of the Tower were faintly luminous, as if they had contrived to store away a little of their centuries of sunlight. The white pillars of the Custom House were as plain as peeled wands. Nearer still, two church spires thrust themselves above the blur of stone and smoke and vague flickering lights: one was as blanched and graceful as if it had been made of twisted paper, a salute to Heaven from the City; the other was abrupt and dark, a despairing appeal, the finger of a hand flung out to the sky. Mr. Golspie, after a brief glance, ignored the pair of them. They in their turn, however, were dominated by the severely rectangular building to the left, boldly fronting the river and looking over London Bridge with a hundred eyes, a grim Assyrian bulk of stone. It challenged Mr. Golspie’s memory, so that he regarded it intently. It was there when he was last in London, but was new then. Adelaide House, that was it. But he still continued to look at it, and with respect, for the challenge remained, though not to the memory. Both the blind eyes and the lighted eyes of its innumerable windows seemed to answer his stare and to tell him that he did not amount to very much, not here in London. Then his gaze swept over the bridge to what could be seen beyond. The Cold Storage place, and then, cavernous, immense, the great black arch of Cannon Street Station, and high above, far beyond, not in the city but in the sky and still softly shining in the darkening air, a ball and a cross. It was the very top of St. Paul’s, seen above the roof of Cannon Street Station. Mr. Golspie recognised it with pleasure, and even half sung, half hummed, the line of a song that came back to him, something about “St. Paul’s with its grand old Dome.” Good luck to St. Paul’s! It did not challenge him: it was simply there, keeping an eye on everything but interfering with nobody. And somehow this glimpse of St. Paul’s suddenly made him realise that this was the genuine old monster, London. He felt the whole mass of it, spouting and fuming and roaring away. He realised something else too, namely, the fact that he was still wearing his old brown slippers, the ones that Hortensia had given him. He had arrived, had crept right into the very heart of London, wearing his old brown slippers. He had slipped two hundred and fifty cigars past their noses, and had not even changed into his shoes. James Golspie was surveying London in his slippers, and London was not knowing, not caring--just yet. These thoughts gave him enormous pleasure, bringing with them a fine feeling of cunning and strength: he could have shaken hands with himself; if there had been a mirror handy he would probably have exchanged a wink with his reflection.

He walked round the deck. Lights were flickering on along the wharf, immediately giving the unlit entrances a sombre air of mystery. A few men down there were heaving and shouting, but there was little to see. Mr. Golspie continued his walk, then stopped to look across and over London Bridge at the near waterfront, the south bank. Such lighting as there was on this side was very gay. High up on the first building past the bridge, coloured lights revolved about an illuminated bottle, to the glory of Booth’s Gin, and further along, a stabbing gleam of crimson finally spelt itself into Sandeman’s Port. Mr. Golspie regarded both these writings on the wall with admiration and sympathy. The sight of London Bridge itself too, pleased him now, for all the buses had turned on their lights and were streaming across like a flood of molten gold. They brought another stream of pleasant images into Mr. Golspie’s mind, a bright if broken pageant of convivial London: double whiskies in crimson-shaded bars; smoking hot steaks and chops and a white cloth on a little corner table; the glitter and velvet of the music-halls; knowing gossip, the fine reek of Havanas, round a club fender and fat leather chairs; pretty girls, a bit stiff perhaps (though not as stiff as they used to be) but very pretty and not so deep as the foreign ones, coming out of shops and offices, with evenings to spend and not much else: he saw it all and he liked the look of it. There was a size, a richness, about London. You could find anything or anybody you wanted in it, and you could also hide in it. He had been a fool to stay away so long. But, anyhow, here he was. He took a long and wide and exultant look at the place.

Dinner that night was very good indeed, the best the boat had given him. Mr. Golspie and the captain shared it with the chief engineer, who came beaming and shining from the depths, and the first mate, usually a very wooden fellow, for ever brooding over some mysterious domestic tragedy in Riga, but now for once gigantically social and cheerful. The steward, the one with the cropped head and gold tooth, lavished his all upon them. Bottles that had not been emptied before were emptied now, together with some that were produced for the first time. The talk, so far as Mr. Golspie had any part in it, was conducted in a fantastic mixture of English, German, and the ship’s own Baltic language, a mixture it would be impossible to reproduce here, but it went very well, smashing its way through the entanglements of irregular verbs and doubtful substantives, for nothing removes the curse of Babel like food, drink, and good-fellowship. All four grew expansive, bellowed confidences, roared through the fog of cigar smoke, threw back their heads to laugh, and were gods for an hour.

“Very soon we shall meet again,” said the captain to Mr. Golspie, clinking glasses for the third time. “Is that not so, my friend?”

“Leave it to me, my boy,” replied Mr. Golspie, very flushed, with tiny beads of perspiration on that massive bald front of his.

“You come back when you have finished your business here in London?”

“As to that, I can’t say. If I can, I will.”

“That is good,” said the captain. Then he looked very deep, and put a finger as big as a pork sausage to his forehead. “And now you will tell us what this business is, eh? In secret. We will not tell.”

The chief engineer tugged at the ends of his moustache, which was nearly as large as Mr. Golspie’s, and tried to look even deeper than the captain, like the repository of innumerable commercial secrets.

“I say this,” cried the huge first mate, who was in no condition now to wait until his opinion had been asked. “I say this. It is good business. It is for the good of our country. I drink to you,” he shouted, and promptly did so, with the result that he immediately remembered that disastrous affair at Riga, and sat silent, with the tears in his eyes, for the next twenty minutes.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Mr. Golspie, taking out his cigar and looking at it very knowingly, as if it was a fellow conspirator. “There’s no need to make a mystery of it. D’you remember Mikorsky? Wait a minute. Not the little fellow with the office in Danzig, but the big fellow with the beard, in the timber trade. That’s the one. Remember him?”

The captain did, and was evidently so pleased by this effort of memory that he appeared to conduct several bars of one of the stormier symphonies. The mate remembered, too, but only nodded, his tearful blue eyes being still fixed on that tragic interior in Riga. The chief engineer did not remember Mikorsky, and, in what seemed nothing less than mental anguish, repeated the name in twenty different tones, beginning very high and ending in a despairing bass.

“I’ve done one or two little jobs for him,” Mr. Golspie continued, “during the time I had a bit of a pull. We’d a night or two together, too. I met him one day, not a month ago, and he said he was just going down into the country, to see his cousin, and I ought to go with him. So I did. I’d nothing better to do. Hot as hell it was down there, too, and I was bitten to death. This cousin of Mikorsky’s was in the furniture end of the timber trade, and he’d invented a new process, machine, treatment, everything, for turning out veneers and inlays. And labour costs next to nothing down there. I asked where all this stuff was going. Well, they’d got orders from Germany and Czecho-Slovakia and Austria and a chance of something in Paris. ‘What’s it going to cost in London?’ I said, showing ’em one of their lines, and they told me. It sounded all right to me, but I didn’t say anything. Not then. I went away and made a few enquiries. I found out what they were paying for this sort of stuff in Bethnal Green and Hoxton and those parts, in London, you know, where the furniture’s made----”

“Bednal Green, yes,” said the chief engineer proudly. “My uncle Stefan was there, yes, old Stefan in Bednal Green. Socialist,” he added, as a melancholy afterthought.

“He was, was he?” Mr. Golspie boomed, with a certain brutal heartiness characteristic of him. “Well, good luck to him! I’ll get on with the tale. They were paying half as much again for the same sort o’ stuff, veneers and inlays, not a bit better, here in London. Couldn’t get it where it was produced so cheap, y’see? Didn’t look about ’em. They’re getting slow here. There’s something in this for me, I said to myself, and off I went down there again, to see this other Mikorsky, the cousin. I wanted to know how much of this stuff I could have every month, various lines, and the prices. They told me, and guaranteed it. We had a few drinks on it, and I walk out, with a contract in my pocket, so much of this, that, and the other, at so much, whenever I liked to take it up, and me the sole agent for Great Britain.”

“Very good business,” said the captain, with a grave judicial air, in spite of his rather goggly eyes. “And now, you sell it all, eh? You make big profit?”

“What I do is to find somebody who’s in the way of selling it, somebody who’s in this line o’ business, and then go in with ’em.” Mr. Golspie refreshed himself noisily. “And if I haven’t laid my hand on somebody by this time the day after to-morrow, my name’s not Jimmy Golspie.”

“Make plenty of money, be rich, eh?”

“No, it’s too honest. But I’ll pick a bit up, to be going on with.”

“Ah no, no!” cried the captain, reaching over and patting Mr. Golspie on the shoulder. “You make plenty, here in London. Ho-ho, yes! Plenty! Money here in London--oh!--” And he held out his hands as if he expected the Bank of England to be emptied into them.

“Not so much as you think,” said Mr. Golspie, shaking his head very slowly. “Oh no, not at all. They may have it, but it’s all tied up. It’s not--er--shir--circulating. I tell you, they’re slow here, they’re slow.”

“You think they sleep?”

“That’s right. Half asleep, most of ’em.”

“Ho-ho,” roared the captain. “And you will put them awake?”

“One or two, p’rhaps, I might be able to shake up a bit. If not, I’m on the move again. And I’ll have to be on the move now, boys. I told that steward’s mate--the fellow that plays the concertina--to go and get me a taxi and take my traps ashore. It ought to be there, at the corner, any minute now. All right then. Just a last one for luck.”

They were having this last one, with some formality, when the man returned to say that the taxi was waiting. Mr. Golspie led the way to the deck, and then stopped near the gangway to say good-bye.

“Now for it,” he cried, more for his own benefit than for his listeners’. “Straight back into the old rabbit warren. God, what a place! Millions and millions, and most of ’em don’t know they’re born yet! Eyes and tails, that’s all they are, diving in and out of their little holes. The good old rabbit warren. Look at it! Ah, well, it’s no good looking at it here because you can’t see it. But I’ve been looking at it. What a place! Well, Chief--well, Captain--this is where I go.”

“And the beautiful daughter, the little Lena?” the captain inquired. “Is she here, waiting for you?”

“Not yet. She’s still in Paris, with her aunt, but she’ll be coming over as soon as I’ve settled down. Golspie and Daughter, that’ll be the style of the firm then, and we’ll see what London makes of it. And--my God--if I don’t waken some of ’em up, she will, the artful little devil! But she’ll have to behave here. Yes, she’ll have to behave. Well, Captain, keep her afloat, and remember me to all the girls and boys at the other end, and let’s meet again next time you’re over. Drop me a line to the office here. I’ll tell ’em where to find me. Where the devil’s the lad? Oh, he’s there, is he? Has he taken everything ashore? Right you are! So long!”

After a final wave of the hand, Mr. Golspie, a very massive figure now in his huge ulster, made a slow, steady, and very dignified progress down the gangway. When he found himself treading at last the stones of London, he turned his head and nodded, then strode off more briskly to the corner of Battle Bridge Lane, where the taxi was waiting. Two minutes later, he had gone hooting into the lights and shadows of the city, which sent whirling past the windows a crazy frieze, glimmering, glittering, darkening, of shops, taverns, theatre doors, hoardings, church porches, crimson and gold segments of buses, little lighted interiors of saloon cars, railings and doorsteps and lace curtains, mounds and chocolate, thousands of cigarette packets, beer and buns and aspirin and wreaths and coffins, and faces, faces, more and more faces, strange, meaningless and without end. But the lights that came flashing in found a tiny answering gleam in Mr. Golspie’s eyes; and when they had gone, in the double darkness of the cab and the shadow of that great moustache, he grinned. London neither knew nor cared; nevertheless, there it was: Mr. James Golspie had arrived.

_Chapter One_: THEY ARRIVE

I

Many people who think they know the City well have been compelled to admit that they do not know Angel Pavement. You could go wandering half a dozen times between Bunhill Fields and London Wall, or across from Barbican to Broad Street Station, and yet miss Angel Pavement. Some of the street maps of the district omit it altogether; taxi-drivers often do not even pretend to know it; policemen are frequently not sure; and only postmen who are caught within half a dozen streets of it are triumphantly positive. This all suggests that Angel Pavement is of no great importance. Everybody knows Finsbury Pavement, which is not very far away, because Finsbury Pavement is a street of considerable length and breadth, full of shops, warehouses, and offices, to say nothing of buses and trams, for it is a real thoroughfare. Angel Pavement is not a real thoroughfare, and its length and breadth are inconsiderable. You might bombard the postal districts of E. C. 1 and E. C. 2 with letters for years, and yet never have to address anything to Angel Pavement. The little street is old, and has its fair share of sooty stone and greasy walls, crumbling brick and rotting woodwork, but somehow it has never found itself on the stage of history. Kings, princes, great bishops, have never troubled it; murders it may have seen, but they have all belonged to private life; and no literary masterpiece has ever been written under one of its roofs. The guide-books, the volumes on London’s byways, have not a word to say about it, and those motor-coaches, complete with guide, that roam about the City in the early evening never go near it. The guide himself, who knows all about Henry the Eighth and Wren and Dickens and is so highly educated that he can still talk with an Oxford accent at the very top of his voice, could probably tell you nothing about Angel Pavement.

It is a typical City side-street, except that it is shorter, narrower, and dingier than most. At one time it was probably a real thoroughfare, but now only pedestrians can escape at the western end, and they do this by descending the six steps at the corner. For anything larger and less nimble than a pedestrian, Angel Pavement is a _cul de sac_, for all that end, apart from the steps, is blocked up by _Chase & Cohen: Carnival Novelties_, and not even by the front of Chase & Cohen but by their sooty, mouldering, dusty-windowed back. Chase & Cohen do not believe it is worth while offering Angel Pavement any of their carnival novelties--many of which are given away, with a thirty shilling dinner and dance, in the West End every gala night--and so they turn the other way, not letting Angel Pavement have so much as a glimpse of a pierrot hat or a false nose. Perhaps this is as well, for if the pavementeers could see pierrot hats and false noses every day, there is no telling what might happen.

What you do see there, however, is something quite different. Turning into Angel Pavement from that crazy jumble and jangle of buses, lorries, drays, private cars, and desperate bicycles, the main road, you see on the right, first a nondescript blackened building that is really the side of a shop and a number of offices; then _The Pavement Dining Rooms: R. Ditton, Propr._, with R. Ditton’s usual window display of three cocoanut buns, two oranges, four bottles of cherry cider picturesquely grouped, and if not the boiled ham, the meat-and-potato pie; then a squashed little house or bundle of single offices that is hopelessly to let; and then the bar of the _White Horse_, where you have the choice of any number of mellowed whiskies or fine sparkling ales, to be consumed on or off the premises, and if on, then either publicly or privately. You are now halfway down the street, and could easily throw a stone through one of Chase & Cohen’s windows, which is precisely what somebody, maddened perhaps by the thought of the Carnival Novelties, has already done. On the other side, the southern side, the left-hand side when you turn in from the outer world, you begin, rather splendidly, with _Dunbury & Co.: Incandescent Gas Fittings_, and two windows almost bright with sample fittings. Then you arrive at _T. Benenden: Tobacconist_, whose window is filled with dummy packets of cigarettes and tobacco that have long ceased even to pretend they have anything better than air in them; though there are also, as witnesses to T. Benenden’s enterprise, one or two little bowls of dry and dusty stuff that mutter, in faded letters, “Our Own Mixture, Cool Sweet Smoking, Why not Try it?” To reach T. Benenden’s little counter, you go through the street doorway and then turn through another door on the left. The stairs in front of you--and very dark and dirty they are, too--belong to _C. Warstein: Tailors’ Trimmings_. Next to T. Benenden and C. Warstein is a door, a large, stout, old door from which most of the paint has flaked and shredded away. This door has no name on it, and nobody, not even T. Benenden, has seen it open or knows what there is behind it. There it is, a door, and it does nothing but gather dust and cobwebs and occasionally drop another flake of dried paint on the worn step below. Perhaps it leads into another world. Perhaps it will open, one morning, to admit an angel, who, after looking up and down the little street for a moment, will suddenly blow the last trumpet. Perhaps that is the real reason why the street is called Angel Pavement. What is certain, however, is that this door has no concern with the building next to it and above it, the real neighbour of T. Benenden and C. Warstein and known to the postal authorities as No. 8, Angel Pavement.

No. 8, once a four-storey dwelling-house where some merchant-alderman lived snugly on his East India dividends, is now a little hive of commerce. For the last few years, it has contrived to keep an old lady and a companion (unpaid) in reasonable comfort at The Palms Private Hotel, Torquay, and, in addition, to furnish the old lady’s youngest niece with an allowance of two pounds a week in order that she might continue to share a studio just off the Fulham Road and attempt to design scenery for plays that are always about to be produced at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead. It has also indirectly paid the golf-club subscription and caddie fees of the junior partner of Fulton, Gregg & Fulton, the solicitors, who are responsible for the letting and the rents. As for the tenants themselves, their names may be found on each side of the squat doorway. The ground floor is occupied by the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, the first floor by _Twigg & Dersingham_, and the upper floors by the _Universal Hosiery Co._, the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, and, at the very top, keeping its eye on everybody, the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, which seems to be content with the possession of a front attic.

This does not mean that we have now finished with No. 8, Angel Pavement. It is for the sake of No. 8 that we have come to Angel Pavement at all, but not for the whole of No. 8, but only for the first floor. No doubt a number of tales, perhaps huge violent epics, could be started, jumped into life, merely by opening the door of the _Kwik-Work Razor Blade Co., Ltd._, or by trudging up the stairs to the _Universal Hosiery Co._ and the _London and Counties Supply Stores_, or by looking up at the grimy skylight, and giving a shout to the _National Mercantile Enquiry Agency_, but we must keep to the less mysterious but more respectable first floor--and _Twigg & Dersingham_.

II

On this particular morning in autumn, Mrs. Cross was rather later than usual. That did not matter very much because it was not one of the floor-washing mornings, but just one of the ordinary dust-round-and-sweep-up-a-bit mornings. But somebody, one of the interfering sort, had left a note for her in the general office, that is, the room just behind the frosted glass partitions and the sort of ticket office window with _Enquiries_ on it, and this note said: _Mrs. Cross. What about turning this room out for a change? Thank you!!_

“An’ thank _you_!” said Mrs. Cross, quite aloud and with grim irony, as she tore up this note and popped it in the top of the stove. To show that she was not the kind of woman to be dictated to in this fashion, she immediately went and gave the other room, Mr. Dersingham’s private office, a thoroughly good sweeping and dusting. Having done that, she waddled straight across the general office to the other room, which, with its long counter and cupboards and drawers and samples of wood and litter, was the one she liked least, being always in a terrible mess. On her way, she completely ignored the general office, did not even give it a look, just as if it were full of people in the habit of leaving notes. Her back told it very plainly that she would clean up the office in her own way. Once in the other room, the nasty one, she felt so pleased about this rebuff that she set to work with a will, and for the next ten minutes was enveloped in a cloud of dust. By the time she had finished, there may have been very few articles in the room that were free from dust, but nearly all of them had at least exchanged their old dust for another variety that came perhaps from quite a distant corner. Then she thrust back a wisp of grey hair from her swollen face, on which time and trouble had first sketched a few lines and then deepened them by puffing out the surrounding flesh; she dragged her swollen feet across to the discarded leather office chair in the corner; she flopped into the chair and put her swollen hands--for though she said with some truth that she worked her fingers to the bone, hot water and soap and wet scrubbing brushes had piled sodden, nerveless flesh on those bones--in her lap, and rested. Immediately she plunged into a fierce reverie, in which the figure of Mr. Cross, who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, the two rooms between the City Road and the black Regent’s Canal that were her home, Mrs. Tomlinson, the woman she was going to clean for later in the morning, and the image of a pound of stewing steak, all played their parts. Then she returned to the general office.

This time, she noticed its existence, and what she saw suddenly gave her a little fright. She had been a bit too hasty (her old fault) about that note. It really did want a good tidying. She had neglected it a bit lately, because for the last three mornings she had been late, all because she was not getting her proper sleep, and all because Mrs. Williams and her husband on the next floor had got a loud speaker, one of them little horns, and it was not only a loud speaker but also a late speaker, and in fact would speak your head off. And if she didn’t get on with this office a bit, the one that left that note would be complaining to Mr. Dersingham, and then that might mean another job gone, all due to hastiness. She had better be putting her hastiness behind a brush and duster. And, as if to give her a final push, a clock somewhere outside sounded the half-hour. Half-past eight!--well, now she would have to bustle round.

She was still bustling round--though, to be accurate, she was only engaged in passing a languid, duster-holding hand over the tin cover of the typewriter--when Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham’s next employee arrived, and their day really began. The frosted glass door that opened from the little space in which enquirers were kept waiting for a few minutes, now swung back to admit into the general office the body of a boy about fifteen, whose eyes were focussed upon a paper, folded into a very small compass, that he held about four inches away from them. This was the office boy or very junior clerk, Stanley Poole, who had just come all the way from Hackney, which remained with him as a combined flavour of cocoa and bread dipped in bacon fat that still haunted his palate. His body, which was small and thin but sufficiently tough, and was crowned by a snub nose, some freckles, greyish-greenish eyes, and some unbrushed sandy hair, had been in the service of Twigg & Dersingham for the last twenty minutes, when it had boarded a tram and a bus and had walked down several streets. Now it had arrived in the office. But his mind had not yet begun the day’s work. Even now, when the very threshold had been passed, it was still in the wilds of Mexico, enjoying the heroic and exhilarating companionship of Jack Dashwood and Dick Robinson, the Boy Aviators, the terror of all Mexican bandits.

“So you’ve come,” said Mrs. Cross, putting back that wisp of hair again. “It’s about time I was ’opping it if you’ve come.”

Stanley looked up and nodded. With a sigh, he withdrew from the world of the Boy Aviators and the Mexican bandits. He tried to fold his paper into a still smaller compass, before cramming it into his pocket.

“Read, read, read!” cried Mrs. Cross derisively. “Some of yer’s always at it. What they find to put in all the time beats me. What’s that yer reading now? Murders, I’ll bet.”

“’Tisn’t,” replied Stanley, balancing himself on one leg for no particular reason that we can discover. “It’s a boys’ paper.” He made this announcement with a kind of sullen reluctance, not because he was really a sullen lad, but simply because he had discovered that when his elders asked these questions, they were usually not in search of information, but were trying to get at him.

“Penny bloods, them things is.”

“’Tisn’t,” said Stanley, balancing himself on the other leg now. “This is tuppence. I buy it ev’ry week, have done ever since it come out. _Boy’s Companion_, it’s called. It’s got the best tales in,” he added, in a sudden burst of confidence. “All about boys who fly in airplanes an’ go to Mexico an’ Russia an’ all over an’ have advenshers!”

“Advenshers! They’d be better off at ’ome--with their advenshers! You’ll be wantin’ to go an’ ’ave advenshers yerself next--and then what will yer poor mother say?”

But this only goaded Stanley into making new and even more dangerous admissions. “I’m going to try and be a detective,” he mumbled.

“Well now, did y’ever!” cried Mrs. Cross, at once shocked and delighted. “A detective! I never ’eard of such a thing! What d’yer come ’ere for if yer want to be a detective. There’s no detectin’ ’ere. Go on with yer! ’Ere, yer not big enough, and yer never will be either, ’cos yer’d ’ave to be a pleeceman first before they’d let yer be a detective, and they’d never ’ave yer as a pleeceman.”

“You can be detective without being a bobby first,” replied Stanley scornfully. He had gone into this question, and was not to be put off by a mere outsider like Mrs. Cross. “’Sides, you can be a private detective an’ find jewels an’ shadder people. That’s what I’d like to do--shadder people.”

“What’s that? Follerin’ ’em about, is it? Oh, that’s nasty work, that is. Shadderin’! I’d shadder yer if I caught yer at it, my words I would.” And Mrs. Cross took up her brush and dust-pan and gave them a fierce little shake, almost as if she had just caught _them_ at it. “Now you just get on with yer work like a good boy, and don’t you go tellin’ anybody else yer want to be shadderin’ else yer’ll be gettin’ yerself into trouble. Yer can’t expect people to ’ave any patience with shadderers. If Mr. Dersingham knew what was goin’ on in that ’ead of yours, ’e’d tell yer to go straight ’ome and ’ave nothing more to do with yer, and yer’d find yerself shadderin’ for another job, and that’s all the shadderin’ _you’d_ get.”

Stanley turned away, and then pulled a face, not so much at Mrs. Cross as at the whole narrow school of thought represented at this moment by Mrs. Cross. He went to the letter-box and brought back the morning’s post, which he placed on the nearest high desk. There he remembered something, and looked with a grin at Mrs. Cross, who was now having a final bustle round.

“Did you see that note left for you?” he inquired.

Mrs. Cross suspended operations at once. “Yes, I did see it, and if yer want to know where it is, I can tell yer, ’cos it’s in that stove.” She struck an attitude that suggested a counsel for the prosecution of the high-handed type. “And oo, might I ask, left that there note? Oo wrote it? Just you tell me that, that’s all?”

“Miss Matfield wrote it.”

“An’ I thought as much. Soon as I set eyes on it, I knew. Miss Matfield wrote it! Miss Matfield!” Her irony was now so terrible that she shook all over with it, and her head seemed in danger of falling off. “And ’ow long, might I ask, ’as Miss Matfield been in this office, doin’ ’er typewriting? ’Ow long? Two munce. All right--three munce. An’ ’ow long ’ave I been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s, coming ’ere ev’ry morning, week in an’ week out, to clean this office? Yer don’t know. No, yer don’t know, and yer Miss Matfield doesn’t know. Well, I’ll tell yer. I’ve been cleaning for Twiggs and Dersingham’s for seven years, I ’ave. It wasn’t this Mr. Dersingham that started me, it was ’is uncle, old Mr. Dersingham, ’im oo’s dead now--an’ a nice old gentleman ’e was, too, nicer than this one an’ a better ’ead on ’im to my way of thinking--and when this Mr. Dersingham took on, ’e sent for me and said, ‘You keep on cleaning, Mrs. Cross, and I’ll pay yer whatever my uncle did,’ that’s what ’e said to me in that very room there, and I said, ‘Much obliged, sir, and the very best attention as always,’ and ’e said, ‘I’m sure it will, Mrs. Cross.’ Typewriters! Coming and going so fast I can’t be bothered learning their names. If there’s been one ’ere since I started, there’s been eight or ten or a dozen. Miss Matfield! Now when she comes in, just give ’er a message from me,” she cried, thoroughly reckless by this time. “Just say to ’er: ‘Mrs. Cross ’as seen the note left and only asks oo is cleaning this office, Miss Matfield or ’er, and if ’er, then them oo’s been doing it for seven years, week in and week out, knows their own business better than them oo’s only been typewriting ’ere for three munce, and so Mrs. Cross’ll thank ’er to keep ’er notes to ’erself in future till they’re asked for.’ Just you tell ’er that, boy. And I’ll say good-morning.”

With that, Mrs. Cross unfastened her apron and gathered up her things with great dignity, gave Stanley a final shake of the head, and waddled out, closing the outer door behind her, a moment later, with a decisive bang.

Left to himself, Stanley, with the contemptuous air of a man who is meant for better things, began his morning’s work. After taking off the two typewriter covers, dumping a few books on the high desks, and filling up all the ink-pots and putting out clean sheets of blotting paper (which duty was a little fad of Mr. Smeeth’s), he remembered that he was a creature with a soul. So, grasping a short round ruler in such a way that it remotely resembled a revolver, he crouched behind Mr. Smeeth’s high stool for a few tense moments, then sprang out, pointing his gun at the place where the great criminal’s bottom waistcoat button would have been, and said hoarsely: “Put ’em up, Diamond Jack. No, you don’t! Not a move!” He gave a warning flourish of the gun, then said casually, over his shoulder, to one of his assistants or a few police sergeants or somebody like that, “Take him away.” And that was the end of Diamond Jack, and yet another triumph for S. Poole, the young detective whose exploits were rivalling even those of the Boy Aviators. And having thus refreshed himself, Stanley replaced the round ruler and condescended to perform one or two more of those monotonous and trifling actions that Messrs. Twigg & Dersingham demanded of him at this hour of the morning. These left him ample time for thought, and he began to wonder if he would be able to get out during the morning. Once outside the office--even though he was only going to the post office or the railway goods department or some firm not four streets away--he could enjoy himself, for the affairs of Twigg & Dersingham faded to a grey thread of routine; he plunged at once into the drama of London’s underworld; and as he hopped and dodged about the crowded streets, like a sandy-haired sparrow, he was able to do some marvellous shadowing. There also loomed already, early as it was, a problem that would become more and more disturbing as the long morning wore on and he became hungrier and hungrier. This was the problem of where to go and what to buy for lunch, for which his mother allowed him a shilling every day. He always ate his breakfast so quickly that his stomach forgot about it almost at once and left him hollow inside by ten o’clock and absolutely aching by twelve. He often wondered what would happen to him if, instead of being the first to go to lunch, at half past twelve, he was the last, and had to wait until about half past one. There are innumerable ways of spending a shilling on lunch, from the downright solid way of blowing the lot on sausage or fried liver and mashed potatoes, say at the _Pavement Dining Rooms_, to the immediately delightful but rather unsatisfying method of spreading it out, buying a jam tart here, a banana there, and some milk chocolate somewhere else; and Stanley knew them all.

He was trifling with the thought of trying the nearest Lyons again, and was actually searching his memory to discover the exact price of a portion of Lancashire Hot-pot in that establishment, when he was interrupted by the arrival of a colleague. This was Turgis, the clerk, who might be described as Stanley’s senior or Mr. Smeeth’s junior. He was in his early twenties, a thinnish, awkward young man, with a rather long neck, poor shoulders, and large, clumsy hands and feet. You would not say he was ugly, but on the other hand you would probably admit, after reflection, that it would have been better for him if he had been actually uglier. As it was, he was just unprepossessing. You would not have noticed him in a crowd--and a great deal of his time was spent in a crowd--but if your attention had been called to him, you would have given him one glance and then decided that that was enough. He was obviously neither sick nor starved, yet something about his appearance, a total lack of colour and bloom, a slight pastiness and spottiness, the faint grey film that seemed to cover and subdue him, suggested that all the food he ate was wrong, all the rooms he sat in, beds he slept in, and clothes he wore, were wrong, and that he lived in a world without sun and clean rain and wandering sweet air. His features were not good nor yet too bad. He had rather full brown eyes that might have been called pretty if they had been set in a girl’s face; a fairly large nose that should have been masterful but somehow was not; a small, still babyish mouth, usually open, and revealing several big and irregular teeth; and a drooping rather than retreating chin. His blue serge suit bulged and bagged and sagged and shone, and had obviously done all these things five days after it had left the multiple cheap tailors’ shop, in the window of which a companion suit, clothing the wax model of a light-weight champion, still maliciously challenged Turgis with its smooth surface and sharp creases every time he sneaked past it. His soft collar was crumpled, his tie a little frayed, and there was a pulpy look about his shoes. Any sensible woman could have compelled him to improve his appearance almost beyond recognition within a week, and it was quite clear that no sensible woman took any interest in him.

“Morning, Stanley,” he said, not very cheerfully.

“Hello,” said Stanley, in the toneless voice of one who expects nothing.

Turgis went over to his own high desk, pulled a blotting-pad out of the drawer, put a book or two on his desk, examined a note he had left on his pad, reminding him to “ring Whishaws first thing,” and then spent a melancholy five minutes at the telephone.

“Will I have to call there this morning?” Stanley asked hopefully, when Turgis had rung off.

“No, they’re sending somebody. Good job, too! We don’t want you off half the morning. You’ll stop in and do a bit of work, my son, for a change. Do you good.”

“What work?” demanded Stanley, with scorn.

“By jingo, I like that!” cried Turgis. “There’s plenty to do, if you’ll only look for it instead of dodging it. You ask Smeethy, he’ll find you some. Haven’t you got enough? You can do some of mine, if you like. I’ve got more than I want.”

Stanley changed the subject. “I say,” he began, grinning, “you ought to have heard old Ma Cross on about that note. She let herself go all right, didn’t she just! Oo, you ought to have heard her.”

“What did she say?” Turgis inquired. But he did it very languidly, just to show that what amused small fry like Stanley might not amuse him.

At that moment, however, they heard the outer door opening, and the next moment the cause of all the trouble, Miss Matfield herself, walked in. She flung down a library book, her large handbag, and a pair of gloves on her table, then marched over to her hook and removed her coat and hat, while the other two waited in silence. They were both rather frightened of Miss Matfield. Even Mr. Smeeth and Mr. Dersingham himself were rather frightened of Miss Matfield.

“_Good_ morning,” she cried, looking from one to the other of them, and, as usual, putting a disturbingly ironical inflection into her tones. “Are we all very well this morning? Well, I’m not,” and here, her voice changed. “O Lord! I thought I’d never get here. That bus journey gets fouler every morning, slower and slower and fouler and fouler.” She sat down opposite her machine, but took no notice of it.

“You ought to try the Tube,” Turgis suggested, not very boldly or hopefully. He had made this suggestion before. Everything had been said before, and they all knew it.

“Oh, I can’t bear the Tube.” Once more she seemed to annihilate the whole vast organisation.

It was now Stanley’s turn. “Oo, I like it. I think it’s exciting. I wish they had ’em where we live.”