Chapter I

Mr. Bultishaw stood leaning heavily against the bar in “The Duchess of Teck,” talking to his friend, Mr. Ticknett. Their friendship had endured for nearly twenty-seven years, and they still called each other “_Mr._” Bultishaw and “_Mr._” Ticknett. They were on the surface a curiously ill-matched couple, and the other salesmen and buyers from Cotterway’s could never see what they had in common. Bultishaw was a big puffy man, shabbily florid. He had a fat babyish face, with large bright eyes which always seemed to be on the verge of tears, but whether this condition of liquefaction was due to his excessive emotionalism, or to the generally liquid state of his whole body, it would be difficult to decide. He was of an excitable nature, and though his voice seemed to come wheezing through various local derangements of his system, and was always pitched in a low key, it suggested a degree of excitement--usually of a querulous kind--quite remarkable in a person of his appearance. He was a man of moods, too.... He was not always querulous, in fact his querulousness might generally be traced to an occasional revolt of his organic system against the treatment to which it was normally subjected. There were times when he was genial, playful, kind, sentimental, and maudlin. His clothes had a certain pretentiousness of style and wealth, not sustained by the dilapidated condition of their linings and edges, and the many stains of alcohol and the burns from matches and tobacco carelessly dropped. He was the manager of the linoleum department at Cotterway’s.

Ticknett had a similar position with regard to “soft goods” in the same firm. But in appearance and character he was entirely dissimilar to Bultishaw. One of the junior salesmen one day called him “The Chinese God,” and there was indeed something a little Eastern in his reserved manner, his suavity, and his great capacity for apparently minding his own business and yet at the same time--well, nobody liked Ticknett, but they all admired his ability, and most of them feared him. He was admired because he had risen from the position of being a “packer” in the yard to that of great influence, and he even shared the confidence of Mr. Joseph Cotterway himself. His skin was rather yellow, and he had very heavy black eyebrows and mustache and deep-set eyes with a slight cast. His clothes were so well cut that in the bar of “The Duchess of Teck” they seemed almost assertively unobtrusive.

Bultishaw was a prolific talker, and Ticknett was a patient listener. This was perhaps one of their principal bonds of mutual understanding. They had, of course, one common interest of an absorbing nature. It bubbled and sparkled in the innumerable glasses which, at all hours of the day, Mrs. Clarke and Daphne and Gladys handed to them across the bar of “The Duchess of Teck,” which in those days was always crowded with the salesmen and the staff of Cotterway’s.

On this particular morning, Bultishaw was holding a glass in his fat fingers, and breathing heavily between each sentence. He was saying:

“’Sperience is the thing that counts in the furnishing trade, like anywhere else--ugh! Take any line you like--ugh!--buying cork carpets, eating oysters, or extending the Empire--ugh!--it’s the man with ’sperience who counts. These young fellers!... ugh!...”

Bultishaw shrugged his shoulders expressively, and glanced round the bar. Immediately a change came over his expression. His eyes sparkled angrily, and he shook the dregs of whisky in his glass, and drank them off with a spluttering gulp. Ticknett followed the glance of his friend and was quickly observant of the reason of Bultishaw’s sudden trepidation. “Percy” had entered the bar. Percy was Bultishaw’s assistant and also his _bête-noir_.

He was a slim young man dressed in a most extravagant manner. He had a pale face, and a slightly receding chin. He wore a small bowler hat with a very narrow brim, pointed patent leather boots, a very shapely overcoat which almost suggested that he wore corsets, a pale lemon tie held together by a gold pin, and a spotted green waistcoat.

Percy was a very high-spirited young person--an irrepressible--with a genius for taking stage center. He was invariably accompanied by several friends of his own age, and he had a habit of greeting a whole barful of men, whether he knew them or not, with a cheering cry of:

“Hullo! hullo! HULLO! So here we all are!”

He would deliver this greeting with such a gay abandon that every one would look up and laugh. Men would nod, and call out:

“Hullo! here’s Percy! How do, Percy?”

And even those who did not know him would be conscious of some contagious fever of geniality. The conversation would grow louder and livelier, and Percy would invariably become the center of a laughing group.

In spite of his extravagance of manner, his irresponsibility, his passion for misquoting poetry, he had been marked down by several discriminating heads of the firm as “a smart boy.”

He was indeed a very smart boy, from his gay clothes to his sparkling repartée with Daphne and Gladys. To Daphne it was known that he was an especial favorite. He would hold her hand across the bar, and smile at her engagingly, and say:

“And how is the moon of my delight?” And other enigmatic and brilliant things.

And Daphne would look at him with her sleepy, passionate eyes, and say:

“Oh, go on! You are a one!”

She was a silent little thing, incredibly ignorant. She was not pretty, but she had masses of gold-brown hair, and a figure rather over-developed. There was about her something extremely attractive to the men who frequented “The Duchess of Teck,” a kind of brooding motherliness. She had an appealing way of sighing, and her eyes were always watchful, as though in the face of every stranger she might discover the solution of her troubles.

Bultishaw hated Percy for several reasons. One was essentially a question of personality. He hated his aggressive exuberance, his youthfulness, his ridiculous clothes, his way of brushing back his hair, and incidentally of scoring off Bultishaw. He hated him because he had the habit of upsetting the placid calm of “The Duchess of Teck.” He created a restlessness. People did not listen so well when Percy was in the room.

Moreover, he hated the way he took possession of Daphne. It is difficult to know what Bultishaw’s ideas were with regard to Daphne. He was himself a widower, aged fifty-six, and he lived in a small flat in Bloomsbury with his two daughters, who were both about Daphne’s age. He never made love to her, but he treated her with a sort of proprietary sense of confidence. He told her all about himself. In the morning when the bar was empty he would expatiate on the various ailments which had assailed him overnight, his sleeplessness, his indigestion, his loss of appetite. And he found her very sympathetic. She would say:

“Oh, reely, Mr. Bultishaw! I _am_ sorry! It’s too bad! Have you ever tried Ponk’s Pills?”

They would discuss Ponk’s Pills exhaustively, and their effect on the system, but eventually Mr. Bultishaw would say that he thought he would try “just a wee drop of Scotch.” And so he would start his day.

It must, alas! be acknowledged that the accumulated years of his convivial mode of life were beginning to tell on Bultishaw. He was not the man he was. At his best he was a good salesman. He knew the cork lino industry inside out. He had had endless experience. But there were days of fuddlement, days when he would make grievous mistakes, forget appointments, go wrong in his calculations. And the directors were not unobservant of the deterioration of his work and of his personal appearance. There was a very big rumor that Bultishaw was to be superseded by a younger man. This rumor had reached Bultishaw himself, and he accepted it with ironic incredulity.

“How can any one manage lino without ’sperience?” he said.

Nevertheless the rumor had worried him of late, and had increased his sleeplessness. He was conscious of himself--the vast moral bulk of himself rolling down the hill. He knew he would never be able to give up drinking. He had no intention of trying. He had been at it too long. He had managed in his time to save nearly a thousand pounds. If he were sacked it would bring in a little bit, but not enough to live on. About fifty pounds a year, but he spent quite this amount in the bar of “The Duchess of Teck” alone. He would have to hunt round for another job. It would be ignominious, and it might be difficult to secure at his age.

This was, then, another reason for disliking Percy, for “the smart boy’s” name had been mentioned in this very connection. And what did this soapy-headed young fool know about cork carpets? What ’sperience had he had? A paltry two years. He was, too, so insufferably familiar and insolent. He had even once had the audacity to address Bultishaw as “Mr. Bulky-chops,” a pseudonym that was not only greeted with roars of laughter but had been adopted by others.

On this morning then when Percy made his accustomed entrance with its bravura accompaniment: “Hullo! hullo! HULLO! So here we all are!” Mr. Bultishaw’s hand trembled, and he turned his back and muttered:

“That young--!”

The yellow face of Ticknett turned in the direction of Percy, but it was quite expressionless and he made no comment. He lighted another cigarette and looked across the bar at Daphne. The girl’s cheeks were dimpled with smiles. Percy was talking to her. Suddenly Ticknett said to her in his chilling voice:

“I want two more Scotch whiskies and a split soda.”

The girl looked up, and the dimples left her cheeks. She seemed almost imperceptibly to shrink within herself. She poured out the drinks and handed them to Ticknett. Bultishaw continued his querulous complaints about the insolence of young and ignorant men, trying to oust older and more experienced men from their hardly fought for positions.

And Ticknett listened, and his dark mustache moved in a peculiar way as he said:

“Yes, yes, I quite agree with you, Mr. Bultishaw. It’s too bad.”