III

ALBERT WHITEHEAD

At seven-thirty a.m. in the standardised bathroom of his villa at Croydon, Albert Whitehead was shaving himself with his right hand. He had never taken a conscious satisfaction in this, for him, remarkable performance; and indeed it was due to modesty rather than pride that he was able to use his right hand at all.

When young Albert went to France at the age of seventeen, his powerful voice, his fine physical condition and his football—the Chelsea managers had their eyes on him—had already earned him his corporal’s stripes. He might well expect a commission if he bore himself with moderate efficiency in action and lived to receive it. After his first three days in the line, Corporal Whitehead had no reason to be displeased with himself. His platoon commander allowed him responsibility without fuss. They repulsed a determined little raid which left him acting sergeant. His imagination was not troublesome. Albert looked back with pleasure at those three days. He had undergone a physical test of manhood and satisfied himself. That was comforting to remember after fifteen years of office life.

On the fourth day an ironical god put it into the head of a nervous young private to carry his rifle at the trail with his little finger inside the trigger guard; it gave him a vague sense of security to have even the most useless of his fingers near the trigger—a harmless vice if he could have been trusted to remember his safety catch. He tripped over a duckboard and shot Albert Whitehead through the wrist at a range of eight inches. Albert reported the incident and walked back to the casualty clearing station, leaving his platoon commander breathing fury and damnation upon the thoughtless idiot who had shot him. Albert’s wound had not yet reached the fiery height of pain; he did not think it very serious, but supposed he had got a Blighty. He was not as joyful at the thought of hospital in England as he should have been. He was by no means a funk-ridden hero, desirous of testing and retesting his own courage; but the sweets of responsibility had tasted good in his mouth, and his experience of battle, while tense, had been neither nerve-racking nor unduly messy. He was a fine young animal, in all simplicity accepting the world as he found it.

The clearing station was filling up, for two miles away a German divisional commander was straightening out a salient that had been driven at great cost into his sector. The salient did him no harm and was indeed a handicap to its unfortunate defenders, but he disliked its reproachful appearance on the map. Albert Whitehead had to wait his turn. When it came, the surgeon stripped off the bandages and noticed the severe powder burns around the bruised hole.

“Self-inflicted?”

“What?” asked Albert, not understanding.

“You shot yourself,” the man said positively.

“I? No, sir! I’ll tell you how it happened.”

“No time to listen!”—the surgeon told the truth, for he was tortured by want of sleep and the certain knowledge that his skill was slowly ebbing from weary fingers—“Go and lie down. You’ll be bloody lucky if your turn comes at all to-day.”

“But I didn’t shoot myself,” Albert insisted, still unbelieving in face of the unjust horror of this accusation.

The surgeon signed to his orderly to remove the patient and replace the temporary dressings.

“It’s no good, mate,” said the orderly not unkindly. “You should find out what ’appens to them as goes and blows their ’ands off before you ups and does it.”

“But, God damn you, it was an accident!” shouted Corporal Whitehead. “It ain’t my fault if a perishing bastard trips on a bloody duckboard, is it?”

“Well, if it’s as you say,” answered the orderly, “you should have brought down some word. Can’t blame us!”

“Can’t I send a message?”

“No one to send, and if they’re copping it as ’ard as it looks like, there won’t be no one to send back. And what’s the use anyway?” added the orderly as an afterthought. “They ain’t going to say you didn’t shoot yourself when you did, are they?”

He changed the swab and re-bandaged the shattered wrist.

“Don’t you worry,” he said. “We gets lots like you, and they don’t do nothing to ’em.”

Whitehead in his innocence had never dreamed that his word would be doubted. He had heard of course of hands and feet sacrificed to escape the terror of death, so much harder to endure than the certain arrival of death itself. But that he, Corporal Whitehead, should be accused of this hysteria was a nightmare, a nightmare depending for its torment on the deprivation of the subject of all power of movement or self-help. He felt like a sane man in a lunatic asylum—not that he had ever experienced such a fate, but it was familiar to him from his sensational excursions into paper-covered literature. The more strenuously he denied the accusation, the less likely he was to be believed. To a boy of his generous simplicity the whole situation was incredible. There were so many people who could have told them that he had not done this thing; his mother, his football captain, his platoon commander or any one of his fellows. A muddled procession of friends and enemies marched through his mind, all of them ready to swear to his honesty of purpose.

Confusing the real and the imaginary, he sat up and looked around the ruined farmhouse with a vague hope of finding some one person who would be instantly convinced that Albert Whitehead was not the sort of blighter who shoots his hand off. The man next to him, catching his desperate eye, winked helpfully. It was all he could do. The bandages on the lower part of his face were shapeless and bulging as if they bound a jelly. The wink cheered Albert enormously. It was exactly the comment he most needed—a fearless assurance of the essential ribaldry and injustice of life. Five minutes later the winker took his short turn at the table. A scalpel mercifully slipped—the surgeon himself could not have said whether it was deliberate or accidental—and the soul went forth to search for some spiritual member, as communicative as the human eye, with which its unconquerable irony might be expressed.

Meanwhile Albert’s bullet hole was growing as painful as any of the more jagged wounds about him. The chaos inside those closed and swollen lips of flesh, the bits of wadding, the splinters of bone, the seeds of death, were defeating the constructive optimism of his cells. From shoulder to fingertip the arm protested against the neglect of its owner by drum taps and rolls and long-drawn trumpet calls of pain. For hours he endured it in a haze of anger and with determination not to add his cries to the muttering of the men awaiting their turn. Actually he was moaning with a regular thirty-second rhythm, but unconscious of it. The haggard surgeon looked over the rows of suffering men and again passed by Whitehead. His resentment of injustice turned to a fury against the heartless devil who would not help him.

“You bastard! Oh you bastard!” shrieked Albert. “Oh you bloody bastard!”

A chorus of voices told him to shut up and wait his turn.

“My turn? My turn? Do you chaps know how long I’ve been here? Six hours! Six bleeding hours!”

“Put him outside,” ordered the surgeon.

The orderlies laid Albert with the dead.

He was quiet there. Protests were futile. All that he could do to influence his fellows he had done. He was now a living island among the dead. In a flash of imagination it occurred to him that he was one with them, so completely was he cut off from communication with his fellows. Compelled to adjust himself to this terrifying isolation, he grew very calm within. It was not merely that he comforted himself with the immemorial thought of man—it cannot last forever. With a wisdom far beyond his seventeen years, he realised that for himself he alone existed and that he must do the best he could with that little world. He found in it unknown reserves of strength. He cared no more for honour or dishonour. He ceased to worry about friends and football and wages; nor did he promise himself a future as a refuge from the unendurable present. He was content to discover that there was a plane in which the human soul could exist whatever happened to it, that peace was attainable even if one escaped the notice of men, or perhaps because one escaped it. He had not found the ironical peace of that dead wink, the refuge of the passionate west, but he was near to the complete detachment of the east.

Some ten hours later, when the rush of casualties had eased, the orderlies remembered Corporal Whitehead and carried him to the table. He was by then delirious. There was a fresh surgeon in attendance, still alert enough to be imaginative. The neglected wound troubled him. He asked questions. He accepted the explanations that had, he heard, been offered by the chattering burning lump of humanity set down before him. He gave generously of a peace-time skill, sent to Albert’s unit for confirmation of his story and despatched him marked urgent along the route of healing. Of all this the fevered mind knew nothing until it awoke to consciousness a week later in a London hospital.

The long days of agony while tubes drained the suspended wrist were easy to bear, for he had discovered a technique of endurance. The continual operations were less bearable, for they seemed merely to waste his body. He doubted whether these kindly doctors and nurses, to whom the history of his case was known, were treating him as anything but an experimental rabbit. That their whole pride in their profession was involved in the efforts to undo the damage wrought by one weary surgeon, he could not, at this point, be expected to believe. Nevertheless, a graft of bone from his own shin and a permanent loan of the jumping sinews of a kangaroo were so far successful that in six months he was able to wiggle his fingers. The wrist was immovable and always would be so; but the restricted use of his right hand depended for the future, they said, on himself.

Albert Whitehead now knew himself to be different from the mass of his fellows in inward form, but he had a dread of any difference in outward appearance. A crippled hand would make him conspicuous, an exception among the crowd of honest, unthinking men in which he wanted to be sunk. He exercised the mutilated sinews unceasingly. Within a year he could eat, write, shave himself and perform the ordinary tasks of daily life. Fifteen years later he had forgotten the handicap, though not its cause, and unobservant friends knew him for months before ever noticing the stiff wrist and the fingers that could not curl to meet the palm.

Albert Whitehead finished his shave, took a cold bath and, while dressing, made himself tea and boiled a couple of eggs. In this he differed from the other two hundred fathers of families who were also about to catch the 8.35 to town. Either their servants, if they had any, or their wives got their breakfasts. Albert’s income did not yet run to a servant. With his wife he had made a pact, since the baby arrived, that he would get his own breakfast. Edith Whitehead, a simple woman with two very definite qualities—a sense of humour and a power of honest love—at first protested against this lone and early breakfast-making but was compelled to give way. She discovered that to start her day two hours after her husband—which was only fair, Albert pointed out, since she carried on four hours later at the other end—improved her health and good-fellowship. The family secret that Albert Whitehead broke his fast by his own efforts never passed the front door. They knew well that envious wives would have tattled of Edith’s laziness and husbands reproached Albert for his bad example.

He said good-bye to his wife and his small son, who had instantly occupied the treasured depression in the double bed when his father left it, and caught the 8.35 to town. For fifteen years he had been an inconspicuous and painstaking clerk in the export department of Hanson & Crane Ltd., Toy Manufacturers, whose advertisement he had answered on his discharge from hospital in 1918.

Hanson & Crane Ltd. was a wealthy little business which employed some hundred and fifty men in the Bermondsey factory and ten in the Bond Street shop. All the shares were held by the managing director, his solicitor, his next-door neighbour whose golf had never been quite good enough to beat him, an antique capitalist who was Chairman of the Board, and two of his cronies who seldom left Bournemouth and their bath chairs. There were neither Hansons nor Cranes in the firm, nor had there been since the middle of the eighteenth century. Hanson had been a maker of toys so ingenious that it had pleased His Majesty Louis XV to present his children at birth with a complete set of playthings manufactured by the English craftsman. He had died young and rich. Crane had only been connected with the firm for a couple of years. He was the landlord of the Anchor at Wapping, and had backed Hanson with some of the profits accrued from the thirst of homecoming American colonists.

Since the eighteenth century Hanson & Crane had known many changes of fortune but had preserved its title. Under the guidance of Mr Seafair, the managing director, it had remade a famous name in the early nineteen-hundreds by the excellence of its tin soldiers and its toy trains. The royal arms of three nations were suspended over the entrance to the Bond Street shop, and few indeed were those princes who had not hit their cousins and brothers and scattered with their feet the regiments of Hanson & Crane when neither nurse nor—on one famous occasion—Field Marshal von Kluck himself could decide the victor in their Lilliputian manoeuvres.

It was his success in foreign courts that had turned Seafair’s attention to the export trade, up to then entirely in German hands. After the war princely customers were to seek, but he still had an eastern market of sultans and maharajahs, and a western market of rich and prolific estancieros, nitrate kings and mine owners. The United States trade had never been important owing to a feeling, which Hanson & Crane, with their magnificent tradition, still considered a trifle unpatriotic, that American toys were good enough for American children.

When England went off the gold standard, Seafair, though privately believing that the Last Judgment was at hand, discovered that for good-class toys he was at last able to meet the prices of the Nürnberg factories. He ordered the mass production of his favourite export lines and at once found that his export manager was a nincompoop—a discovery made at the same time by several thousand directors throughout the country who had long since given up export as hopeless and installed as managers pet nephews or clerks from the home sales known to be inefficient but believed to speak French. Seafair fired his export manager, nearly disrupting Hanson & Crane in the process since the man was the son-in-law of his golfing partner, and temporarily left Albert Whitehead in charge.

Albert took no particular pleasure in his new responsibility for his salary was not increased; nor pride, since he was unwilling to be separated from the mass, to be isolated again where they could point a finger at him. He began, however, to work ten hours a day instead of seven, and was puzzled by a conviction, which occasionally broke through his modesty, that he was doing the work with twice the thoroughness of his former boss. He had a peculiar gift for understanding the difficulties of agents five thousand miles away; out of the long letters and almost incomprehensible English he would extract the very commercial soul of the writer. Albert Whitehead spoke no foreign languages and had never been abroad apart from his single and disastrous experiment in the service of his country; but he had astonishing human sympathy. After six months Seafair, who knew most of the agents personally, was disconcerted by Whitehead’s accurate appreciation of credit risks. He seemed to have a flair for distinguishing the men who could pay and didn’t want to, who wanted to pay and couldn’t, and neither could nor wanted to. Seafair, while not yet admitting to himself that he meant to leave Whitehead in charge, stopped looking for a qualified export manager and raised his chief clerk’s salary by £25 a year.

On his arrival at Hanson & Crane Ltd., Albert chatted to his two typists and three clerks until a snarl over the office telephone announced that Mr Seafair had opened the day’s foreign correspondence and was ready to give his instructions for dealing with it. Albert was not perturbed by Seafair’s early morning voice. He understood his managing director, accepted him without liking or disliking, and met his incalculable moods with passive or obstinate calm.

Seafair on his part enjoyed an employee who was neither frightened of him nor resentful. The managing director was close on seventy and considered that at that age a man should be able to say what he pleased. He did. Indeed he always had. But his feudal and kindly spirit had preserved him from the consequences; he never sacked an employee of Hanson & Crane Ltd. if he could possibly avoid it, and he was invariably generous in time of illness, marriage or birth. Seafair was neither gruff nor hearty. He was not a bear. Rather did he resemble an old snake guarding a treasure. He could use a silky charm and insinuating manner. He could hiss evilly and strike viciously; yet the hiss was without malice and the strike without venom. The managing director was a crotchety and energetic old man, cursed, respected, and, on the whole, liked by his board and his employees. He was unaccountable but he was not petty.

Seafair’s white head swayed back and forth behind his desk.

“Good morning, sir!” said Albert.

The managing director grunted, and remained silent for three awkward minutes. He always hated to say the word that would finally commit him to any policy upon which he had decided.

“Well, what are you doing in here?” he asked sharply.

“I thought you sent for me, sir,” replied Albert, promptly making for the door.

“So I did! Come back here!”

Albert returned up the floor of the long office, without any sign of amusement or resentment. Seafair declared to himself that the clerk should remain in charge of the export, whether he had the necessary qualifications or not; it was pleasant to deal with a man who paid no more attention to one’s mood than a mirror.

“Sit down, Mr Whitehead. A cigarette?”

“Thank you.”

Albert sat down. It was the first time he had ever touched a chair in Seafair’s office unless it were to place one for those whom his ruler chose to honour. That he should now be so honoured himself filled him with no elation. It might be the prelude to getting the sack or the first symptom of his director’s senile decay. He picked a cigarette from the cedar-wood box that was offered to him, and waited.

“Export’s going up, Mr Whitehead. Do you know why?”

“Quality tells, sir.”

“I know. I know. It always must in the end,” said Seafair, who prided himself on the transparent honesty of his workmanship and his marketing. “But there’s more to it than that. What do you think about Jews, Mr Whitehead?”

“I’ve met very few, sir. They seem to me much like anyone else. So far as I can tell, they’re a lot more honest than they are supposed to be.”

“Very right. I’ve never had to regret doing business with a Jew,” said Mr Seafair pontifically—it was not strictly true, but it suited him to believe it. “I’ll tell you what’s so remarkable about them, Mr Whitehead. They hang together!”

Albert made no reply, but waited for his employer to go on. Like most Englishmen of his type he had little knowledge of Jewish names. Cohen and Isaacs were familiar to him. But he would have been surprised to learn how many of those agents whose thoughts he so gently extracted from their ill-written letters were Jewish; the poetic name endings of -stein, -blum, -baum and -berg meant nothing to him.

“The Jewish boycott,” Mr Seafair continued, “should open up some markets to us that we’ve never been able to touch. If they won’t buy toys from Germany, they have to buy from us. Now, I can’t do a foreign tour. I’m too old. And you can’t, because you don’t know a damned thing about it. So we must have a traveller to do a quick run round and report. What do you think?”

“It’ll be expensive.”

“It’ll be very expensive. And I don’t suppose we’ll gain anything. And I know he’ll swindle us on the travelling expenses. And he’ll probably be useless. But, Mr Whitehead, it’s got to be done!”

“If you’ve decided, sir—”

“I have decided,” interrupted Mr Seafair sharply. “And I’ve engaged a man. If the Board don’t like it, they can go to hell.”

“What’s he like?”

“Damn it! Do I know what he’s like?” exploded the managing director, regretting that he had ever allowed his impulse to bear fruit. “Bendrihem recommended him to me. He’s the sort of chap Bendrihem would recommend. All the wrong type for a salesman! No stories and a general attitude of don’t-give-a-damn about him!”

“I dare say we can arrange for him to be taught some stories, sir,” said Whitehead inscrutably.

“Oh, you do, do you! Then let me tell you he’s probably forgotten more stories than the whole of Hanson & Crane ever heard. That’s the sort of chap he is. He’s got the languages and he’s got the experience and I like him—he held out for his price! If he does it for himself, he’ll do it for us. But he’s not the right type, Mr Whitehead. What I want you to do is to have a look at him and teach him anything you can about the toy business and tell me what you think. He’ll call on you at eleven. Now get out and let me do some work!”

“The foreign correspondence, Mr Seafair?” asked Whitehead getting up.

Seafair slammed the file across the desk to him.

“Deal with it yourself. I don’t see why I should be bothered to tell you how to answer everything. Are you an export manager or are you not?”

“I don’t know, sir,” replied Albert with such a lack of inflection that Seafair was quite unable to take the remark either as an impertinence or an invitation to make his intentions known.

It was intended to be a simple statement of fact, and after a moment’s consideration Seafair took it so, snarled fiercely and chuckled to himself. Whitehead picked up the file and left the managing director’s office.

Albert’s first impression of Toby Manning was neutral. The man was what he had been brought up to call a gentleman—that is to say: he bore himself well, was dressed in good cloth, spoke a cultured English and had certainly been educated at a public school and possibly at a university. Whitehead had little first-hand knowledge of the type. He reserved judgment. There were none such in Hanson & Crane Ltd., but there were not, for example, any Scotchmen either. The chap was out of the usual run of toy salesmen. That was all one could say.

Manning shook hands with a slight but definitely un-English bow, smiled pleasantly with his eyes and sat down. Whitehead vaguely envied the man’s ease, quite unaware that he also had it himself.

“You’ll find it’s not a bad firm to work for,” he said.

“Yes. That’s my impression. I don’t know how I’m going to get the hang of your business in a fortnight. But Mr Seafair thinks it will be enough.”

“It would take you a year to learn about costs and production,” said Whitehead, thinking that Seafair’s impatience must be a bit bewildering to a newcomer. “But don’t worry. I can give you a few tips on the way we run our export in a fortnight. I expect you chaps learn quickly.”

He had a feeling that these overseas representatives with their bronzed faces and gift of tongues must be masters of any number of trades. Like merchant adventurers, they could sell anything from soap to machine guns.

Whitehead’s father had been a commercial traveller. He remembered the romance of the bag of samples and the sudden, mysterious journeys with horse and trap. Little Albert was occasionally allowed to accompany his father, and had been fascinated by the inns and shops of the market towns they visited. He had wished to be a traveller himself, but it was too isolated a job for the man who had emerged from hospital.

“Would you like to look through the files this morning?” asked Whitehead.

“Not much good yet. I’d like to sit quiet in your office and ask questions whenever something turns up. It’ll be a damned nuisance for you, I’m afraid. But, you see, I know what I don’t know, and you can’t possibly know it.”

Albert considered this profound truth and laughed. Mr Manning would, of course, be a nuisance. On the other hand it would be pleasant to have someone to talk to without feeling that he was wasting Hanson & Crane’s time.

“Do what you like. I’ll help you all I can.”

“Splendid! Will you lunch with me?”

“No. Look here, you lunch with me!”

“I’ll toss you for it.”

Manning lost.

“I’ll slip out for an hour,” he said, “and let you clear up the morning’s work.”

“Thanks. Then we can start square,” answered Whitehead gratefully, for he wanted to begin dictation on the pile of foreign correspondence.

When the door had closed on Mr Manning, Albert decided that he liked him. They did not toss for lunches in Hanson & Crane Ltd. They grabbed an economical meal at midday and went home promptly at five to the outer suburbs and high tea. Albert had naturally tossed for every kind of refreshment in his time, but he had never done so in the office. The simple act seemed to bring in a breath of air from the unknown places where Manning had spent his life, to which in a fortnight he would return.

Toby Manning’s true reason for going out was that he wanted to pawn his watch. His rent and food were paid for a week ahead—or rather his credit at the Earl’s Court boarding house was good for another week—but his cash in hand was twopence and one of the coins Spanish at that. He considered it, however, a true asset, since it would undoubtedly produce a piece of chocolate from a slot machine. In spite of his poverty he had refused to compromise when Seafair offered him £600 a year, had stood firm for £750 and had got it. With only twopence in his pocket a man could afford to back his luck. Complete destitution carried with it independence for just so long as no one could guess the destitution. It was a point of honour with Toby that nobody could. The world was far more likely to suspect him of carelessness in dress than of poverty.

During the last anxious months he had withdrawn himself from the few friends he had in England, not wishing to incur obligations that he would be unable to return. It was the purest good fortune that he had made a new one: Simon Bendrihem. He ran into him at a tiny Spanish restaurant where he occasionally ate when so nauseated by boarding-house food that he was compelled to be extravagant.

Having yielded, after much argument with himself, to the temptation to eat at Pepe’s, Toby was unreasonably annoyed to find the restaurant full. Any other evening he would have waited patiently for a table, but, being a little morbid after weeks of introspection, the trifling disappointment seemed to him a gratuitous and deliberate insult on the part of fate. Standing at the door he surveyed the restaurant angrily and hungrily. His aloofness was translated by all the patrons but one as the arrogance of an Englishman who disliked their faces, despised their clothes and thought their table manners deplorable.

Simon Bendrihem happened to look up from his soup and meet the smouldering eyes of the tall figure at the door. It had an air of outward independence that suggested the landowner or the young sea captain. Yet he was certainly a townsman; there was no more bluffness in him than in a fallen angel. A man under some kind of spiritual compulsion? Annoyance at finding no empty table—obviously his immediate trouble—was not enough to account for this air of having materialised out of the darkness with a flaming sword. On a sudden impulse of curiosity Bendrihem smiled and indicated the empty seat opposite his own.

Toby thanked him in Spanish, placing him as a Latin American businessman. Bendrihem, himself uncertain of the chance acquaintance’s nationality, for Toby’s manner was continental and his complexion dark, answered haltingly in the same language, trying instinctively to modernise the ancient form of it handed down to him by ancestors expelled from Spain four hundred years earlier.

“I thought you might be an Argentine,” said Toby, failing to understand the curious accent.

“No. I was born in Constantinople.”

“Of course! I should have guessed.”

“Yes, I’m a Jew. English on the passport. Simon Bendrihem is my name.”

Bendrihem stated his race with neither pride nor hesitation. Toby instantly liked him. It would have seemed a treachery to his own people had Bendrihem answered shortly that he was English and thus implied that Jewry was only a religion. The man created an atmosphere of calmness about him. He carried his fifty years with easy discipline, like a blunt-headed, hard-working Caesar. His short hawk nose, ageless eyes and energetic mouth were in themselves such absolute and satisfying proof that Jewry was a race, or a variety, or whatever one was supposed to call a group of Europeans of whom the majority were recognisable as belonging to the group.

“My name is Manning,” said Toby. “It’s kind of you to ask me to sit down. I hate dining alone.”

“So do I,” Bendrihem answered cordially.

It was only a partial truth. Simon Bendrihem loved any kind of society, preferably intelligent, but was sufficiently English rarely to seek for it from strangers. He was surprised by the obvious pleasure with which his offer of an empty chair had been accepted. Apparently the fallen angel entered into worldly life with considerable gusto once it had been warmed by some sign of human interest.

Toby Manning ordered himself a casserole and a pitcher of wine, and sat down to enjoy his food and his company with the delight of a man let out of prison. The conversation at the Earl’s Court boarding house resembled its hash: a dull résumé of unimportant events, striving after conventionality and avoiding any definite taste. With conscious vulgarity he cleaned the garlic sauce from his plate with a bit of bread, ate it and swallowed a great draught of wine.

“There’s a lot to be said for the Ottoman Empire,” he remarked. “It was the nearest approach to a world state that modern Europe has known. Nobody cared what language you spoke or what the colour of your eyes was. You were accepted as Moslem, Jew or Christian and given the privileges and disabilities of your beliefs. A man was only persecuted if he started talking nonsense about nationality.”

“You knew the Empire?”

“No. But I know some of the countries that have been carved out of it.”

Toby talked eagerly and, since his companion was a stranger whom he was unlikely to see again, talked about himself. Simon Bendrihem, who was fascinated by the curiosities of human nature, encouraged him with oriental craft and feminine understanding, seeking for the quality of fire by which he had been so impressed. He could not find it. What he did find were a shimmer of charm, and a light-hearted, almost brutal acceptance of life. There was also a shade of bitterness which seemed foreign both to his vision of the man and to the sturdy reality of his speech. Guessing at its cause, Bendrihem accepted as a hypothesis that he had been frustrated by the working of some economic law. Manning did not seem a person to resent too hardly the injustices of sex or society.

“What’s your business?” he asked when they had reached the coffee.

“None at the moment,” Toby replied, retiring into his shell with an abruptness that confirmed Bendrihem’s suspicions.

“So! Well, it’s hard once one has been marked by the wilderness.”

“Surely not so marked? I’m quite a common type.”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt that you can look like any other upper-class Englishman if you want to,” said Bendrihem swiftly. “You have the caste marks all over you. But I get the impression that you’ve jumped off the ladder of easy jobs. That’s all I meant.”

“How the hell do you know that?” Toby exclaimed.

“Don’t think I intend to pry into your private affairs.”

“I don’t resent it. I’ve met chaps like you before. You have such insight into human nature that one can only be grateful for it.”

“Perhaps because we chaps don’t want to change human nature. Speaking for myself, I only want to understand it.”

“A collector rather than a priest.”

“If you like,” said Bendrihem shortly.

He disliked the illustration, knowing himself to be exaggeratedly warm-hearted in all his dealings with men.

“I didn’t mean to suggest that you go about with a killing bottle and a pin,” Toby explained. “You’re content to observe.”

“Not entirely,” replied Bendrihem, seeking to bring the conversation back to personalities. “To observe doesn’t satisfy me. To help does.”

Toby smiled.

“I’m absurdly proud,” he said.

“You should be. Tell me—what languages do you speak?”

“Oh, a bit of everything in common use, and German, Spanish and French well.”

Simon Bendrihem had an agency for German printing machinery, and it was he who had imported the offset presses which decorated Hanson & Crane’s tin plate. He was in love with his delicate and powerful machines, and frequently visited his customers, more to see how his steel children were behaving than to beget further orders. Since he knew a little of every industry, from dairies to toilet paper, important enough to do its own printing, his clients used him as a walking information bureau able to advise them on the purchase of men and materials. He was comfortably off, for he had equipped whole newspaper plants and followed the advice of the proprietors in the investment of his profits.

“I know a firm which is looking for an overseas representative,” he said. “I don’t think it’s likely to become a permanent job—there isn’t enough trade to support one. Frankly, it would be a blind alley. But if you like to run round the continent for a year or so while looking out for something better, it might interest you.”

“It would interest me, by God!” exclaimed Toby. “What’s the trade?”

“Toys. Hanson & Crane Ltd.”

“Is there enough in toys to pay the expenses of a tour and a decent salary?”

“I doubt it. That’s why I tell you that the job can’t last long. But Seafair—he’s the managing director—is probably right to spend some money now. The toy trade is all German, you know, and the Jewish boycott should have some effect. It’s a good time to make new connections.”

“But is the boycott really serious?” asked Toby sceptically.

“It could be. It depends on the non-German manufacturers rather than my people. I needn’t tell you that Jewish solidarity is a myth.”

“You needn’t,” said Toby. “They help one another, of course. But all the Jews I’ve ever met were hopeless individualists. By and large, they are less capable of coöperation than any other community.”

“That’s too strong. I won’t admit that,” answered Bendrihem firmly. “But since each of us is playing his own hand and fighting for wretched little triumphs of money or position, there isn’t as much energy left for coöperation as there should be. The boycott means this: at equal prices the Jews will buy from non-German manufacturers; at dearer prices they will not. I myself import printing machinery from Germany. I can’t get it anywhere else. What am I, for example, to do?”

“I don’t know. What are you going to do?”

“Give up my agency. I can afford to allow myself that protest. But suppose I couldn’t. I should argue that my personal boycott of German goods wouldn’t affect German trade at all; my principals would merely find another agent and sell as much as before. So, boycott or no boycott, I should continue trading with the enemy.”

“It’s a farce then?”

“No, no! You misunderstand me. I say that when and where other manufacturers can give as good an article as the Germans at the same price, Jewish agents and buyers will give them the preference. The power of the boycott depends on the manufacturers not on us. I don’t think you’ll get many orders for Hanson & Crane, but if you can tell them what opportunities are open, you’ll have earned your money.”

“This is awfully good of you,” said Toby gratefully.

“No. You must thank the coincidence—that we happened to meet and I knew of the job. After all, it’s the way most posts are filled. I’ll call on Seafair to-morrow morning. You get a letter of application to him in the afternoon.”

“This is a fairy tale!” laughed Toby. “Let’s have another pitcher of wine. Tell me, why didn’t you pick one of your own people for this job?”

“Why should I?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, I want an answer,” insisted Bendrihem. “Would you go out of your way to find a Gentile if a Jew would do?”

“No. But I might look for an Englishman in preference to a German or Frenchman or Spaniard.”

“It’s not a parallel. But as a matter of fact I don’t think you would. You’re very international.”

“Thank you,” said Toby. “I hope so. It’s the first virtue of aristocracy.”

“What is?”

“Internationalism.”

“But why of an aristocrat? And what is an aristocrat?”

“A man who thinks for himself,” Toby replied, “and is humane. I’ll use the word gentleman if you like, though I hate it. I mean that it’s practically impossible to be a gentleman and a nationalist.”

“I see,” said Bendrihem thoughtfully. “Yes. Aristocrat is the better word. I’ve known a good many men—especially Englishmen—who were rabid nationalists but very gentle in their daily life.”

Having pawned his watch, Toby strolled back to Hanson & Crane’s factory along the dank and grimy arches of the Southern Railway. He had no illusions that this wave of luck would carry him anywhere that he really wanted to go, but looked forward to leaving England. He had felt smothered by his own country. The cause, he knew, was partly disappointment; but there remained a residue of discontent that could not be accounted for by his failure to find employment.

There was a quality lacking in his England: it was close to the quality he had so loved during three years that he had spent in the north of Spain. Muy brutos y muy nobles, those Basques and Riojanos! They had a spirit of noble barbarity. There were so many men among them who refused to act by, and indeed were ignorant of the standards of the mass, who lived according to the dictates of their own good taste. The English were neither barbarous nor noble. They seemed to be going the way of the United States, to be aiming at a civilisation in which thought should be communal rather than individual. The human being with standards of his own was vanishing. True, he had met two of them in a week—Bendrihem and Whitehead. He was surprised that he should place Whitehead in this category on so short an acquaintance, but the richness and simplicity of the man’s character were unmistakeable.

He invited the export clerk to beer and a steak at a pub in the Borough High Street. He would have liked to celebrate his new job with a better meal, but kept the expenses low, suspecting that their common lunch might become a daily habit and that Whitehead would wish to return as good hospitality as he received. Their conversation began with sport, hovered over foreign trade and settled on foreign affairs in general. Whitehead was well informed. He read little but the penny press, yet was able to appreciate their facts while rejecting their opinions.

“You’re a lucky chap,” said Albert. “I wish I had half a chance to get abroad. But I suppose you’ll be sorry to leave England?”

He pictured to himself Manning’s club, his theatre parties, his week-ends in the country—a cheerful round of highly civilised social life which Toby had actually enjoyed some eight years earlier, but not since.

“No. I thought I wanted to live here. But I find I don’t—at any rate, not yet. And I’ve had six months in London. It’s enough.”

“A holiday?”

“Yes. But not the pleasantest kind. I’ve spent it looking for a job.”

“Shouldn’t have thought you’d have much difficulty in finding one,” said Whitehead courteously.

“Not so easy as all that!” Toby answered.

There was no point in giving away his past misery. And what Whitehead had said was true—he wouldn’t have had much difficulty if his life had followed a more conventional course. As it was, he had envied the clerks, with their fluid labour market, their friends scattered through other offices, their tea-shop lunches, their little versatilities—invoicing, shipping, bookkeeping, correspondence—that commanded safe little prices. A loose unorganised body that of the clerks, yet closed as a jealous trades union. It was as difficult to descend into it from responsible ranks as to rise into it from manual labour. Toby sympathised with those thousands of unemployed who flocked to London when the collapse of international trade destroyed their means of livelihood. He met them in the waiting room wherever a job was open, the ship’s officers, the foreign managers and accountants, the foreign salesmen, all those who had been so respectfully thanked at board meetings, our loyal servants abroad, our Paris house, our Buenos Aires branch. Back they had come with their small savings—for they were men who lived well—sure that until trade revived London would give them wages, ready at first to take half their usual salary, ready later to take a quarter of it and join the ranks of the clerks. But an employer when faced by a Manning or a smart first officer or a well-groomed man of fifty who had successfully run an office of two hundred impatient Italians was at once suspicious; they must, he thought, have something badly wrong with them if they were ready to live on what he was able to pay; he did not understand that the reaction of nine out of ten employers was as his own, and that the tenth was handing out his minor posts to known men, charitably and loyally disregarding merit. So, since the homing exiles had no unemployment pay, they starved, or barely ate by joining the ranks of the failures and bankrupts who sold refrigerators and water softeners from door to door.

“Where do you suppose Seafair will send me first?” asked Toby.

“I believe he’s got Central Europe in his head.”

“Do you approve?”

“Yes. But it’s not quite fair to you. You can’t send us enough orders to pay for your trip. What we really expect is for you to find us some reliable agents and tell us how to collect blocked debts.”

“Well, I’ll follow your instructions.”

“Mine?” exclaimed Albert, genuinely startled. “I shan’t give you any.”

“I’m working under you.”

“Are you? Well, I suppose you are in a way. But I don’t know much about export management. I haven’t been at it long, and I’m not sure if they’ll appoint me permanently.”

“They will if that’s what you want.”

“I hope so. I’m afraid I’m too easy-going. But I want the job all right for the sake of the boy. A wonderful boy! You must see him.”

“I’d love to,” said Toby.

“We’ll fix a day. He can talk a bit already. The doctor said he’d never seen such a remarkable boy before. Till we got him I didn’t worry much about money. My missus is a good sport, you know. She never minds what happens so long as there’s a cheque every Friday. Of course she sometimes tells me I ought to ask for more, but I don’t pay any attention. I suppose most women are like that?”

“I think so. They never feel their husbands and lovers are being paid enough. They say it’s the women who suffer from strikes, but it’s always the women who start them.”

“You’ve a queer way of putting things,” said Albert. “That boy of mine has got to have a good education. He’s going to be worth it. I say, what was I talking about?”

“You were saying you were too easy-going.”

“Oh yes! Well, most businessmen would say so. But I don’t see any point in driving my office. If they know what I want, they seem to do it for me. And if they don’t know what I want, I’ve only got myself to blame, haven’t I?”

“Yes,” Toby answered. “It’s a damned sensible way of looking at it. But what about the people who are helplessly and naturally inefficient?”

“I’ve only had one in the office so far. I got him transferred to the home side to see if they could make a salesman of him. I believe he’s doing very well.”

Toby roared with laughter. Though he had been a salesman himself, and not a bad one, he was delighted by any remark, especially if it were unconscious as Whitehead’s, which revealed the characterless nature of their job.

“What’s so funny?” asked Albert.

“That you agree with me about salesmen! They don’t need brains, method, efficiency or any mental discipline. They only need to be simpático.”

“What does that mean?”

“Friendly. The best salesman, old boy, would be a well-mannered dog that could talk. He’s only got to wag his tail at the right moment, eat politely whatever is offered to him, jump up and down when it’s expected of him, and refrain from lifting his leg where he shouldn’t!”

“Did you tell Seafair that?” asked Albert, a little shocked.

“God forbid!”

“He says that salesmen are born not made.”

“He’s quite right. They only need to be born. Other men have to be born and made. Have another beer?”

“No, thanks awfully,” said Albert. “It makes me too sleepy in the afternoon.”

He would have enjoyed another beer, but he felt that Manning’s wit was beginning to run away with his discretion, and that if it ran any faster his first afternoon in the office might not be a success. This kindly thought did Toby an injustice. If conventionality were required of him, he could be as conventional as his well-mannered dog.

They walked back to the factory. There was time to inspect and be inspected before the rhythm of the afternoon’s work began, and Albert introduced the new arrival to his colleagues. On the whole Toby liked them. He was aware of an undercurrent of jealousy, but sympathised with its cause. These men were proud of their firm and certain that it was a privilege for any newcomer to be admitted into it. They were content with their employment; their loyalty to Hanson & Crane was beyond doubt. It might, he thought, have served a nobler purpose than commerce—and then cursed himself for a lack of understanding. His own loyalty to Hanson & Crane would, after all, be precise and quixotic for as long as they chose to employ him. They were all in the same boat. They dignified and decorated commerce with the splendid virtues of honour and loyalty, because for the average man there was no other way of earning a living. Whitehead and some of the others knew as well as he did that the making of money was not the object of life but simply a game they were playing. He spotted those who didn’t know it by an attitude which he had learned to recognise in the United States. Their forced jokes and sullen eyes asserted the statement: I am as good as you. Toby was not disposed to deny it. He wondered, while trying to put them at their ease, why it was that a good state education should make a man feel inferior, whereas a man who couldn’t even read tended to adopt as his own the prouder attitude: You are as good as I.

They passed through the office and the packing sheds into the factory. There Toby no longer questioned the human values of his colleagues. To clip clockwork motors into toy locomotives for eight hours a day could not be a joy to anyone, but he suspected that it did less damage to man’s spirit than promoting companies or compelling a customer to buy something he could well do without. Moreover, the factory included a high proportion of craftsmen, for the finer models of trains and armies were finished and coloured by hand. Pay was good and so was the tradition. There were several family clans of grandfather, father and son.

The factory hands were full of curiosity about the new foreign representative and the journeys he would make. They could afford the luxury of liking him at first sight, since he would never be in direct contact with them. Toby appreciated their interest. He was fascinated by the endless belts carrying their cargoes of miniature machinery from one pair of skilled hands to another, and exhilarated by the powerful metallic rhythm of Bendrihem’s tin-printing machines that fed the ovens with gaily decorated sheets of plate. His natural geniality blossomed. It was pleasant to think that these were the men who would gain overtime pay should he land an order of importance. To feel that it depended on him whether a machine hand could enjoy two glasses of bitter or one before going home to his wife compelled him to think more kindly of the salesman.

The next fortnight was a period of concentrated work. Toby spent his days in office and factory, filling a notebook with considerably more pains than he had ever taken at school. Having extracted an advance of salary from Seafair, he paid off his boarding house and took a room in a Bermondsey pub close to Hanson & Crane. He detested early rising. By getting out of bed at 7.30 he was able to enter the gates of Hanson & Crane a little after eight.

The Duke of Wellington was none too clean and surrounded by gaunt streets of factories; but it gave him a sense of freedom. The Earl’s Court boarding house had imprisoned him in respectability, which he had resented far more bitterly than poverty. If he merely sent the waitress out for beer, his fellow guests had been shocked at his extravagance and alarmed at the suggestion of hilarity. The pub symbolised for him his return to the true world where gentility was despised and gentleness respected. It gave him, too, a ridiculous but pleasant illusion of living in the country. The meals were the same cold joint, cheese and stewed fruit. The bedrooms had texts and chamber pots. There were no other permanent guests; occasionally a foreman or commercial traveller, missing the last train home from London Bridge after late work and subsequent celebrations, would stay the night.

Albert Whitehead was his constant companion. Toby occupied a chair in the export clerk’s office and worried him with questions whenever he was sufficiently unoccupied to answer them. Far from resenting this incubus, Albert educated it with patience and good humour, fed to it files and corrected its notes. Toby was present at most of Whitehead’s contacts with his equals and subordinates. They trusted him and never showed ill temper before him, as if he had been a man whom rank or a vow of poverty had placed beyond temptation to envy. Toby was puzzled to account for this general respect. Some of the staff were more capable than Whitehead; many were more cultured and spoke English with a better accent; most had a more worldly manner. None had his quiet courtesy. Apparently the attitude was catching.

Outside the office Toby remained a lonely student of toys. He and Albert lunched together, still talking shop, and generally dropped into the Duke of Wellington for gin and bitters at the end of the day. Once he went back to Croydon with the export clerk, ate one of Edith Whitehead’s generous high teas and was invited by young Thomas Whitehead to be present at the nightly ceremony of the bath. Once the pair dined with him at Pepe’s and were thrilled by the unaccustomed atmosphere of wine and Latinity. Most of his evenings he spent studying the catalogues of Hanson & Crane and toiling—for he was no arithmetician—to calculate the cost of metals, manufacture and overhead on hypothetical toys designed by himself to the specifications of imaginary markets. He commonly reproached himself that he was not master of any trade. Partly by fate, partly by his own will he had changed too often the scene and nature of his occupation. That as a rolling stone he had gathered no money caused him inconvenience but no shame whatever—he was too well aware of the gathering of spiritual moss—yet he did suffer from a sense of unfulfilment in the presence of professionals, whether stock brokers, plumbers, doctors or engineers. Therefore he worked at toys as fanatically as a budding saint upon the salvation of his soul.

Seafair already regretted the grandiose impulse that had led him to engage a foreign representative, and, lest he should vent his annoyance on his new employee, saw him as seldom as he could manage. When he was compelled to take notice of him, he forced himself to be polite. He did not usually waste courtesy on the firm’s travellers, considering them, whatever their age, as irresponsible young men to be bullied, cursed and paternally protected in time of need. His Mr Manning, however, he refused to treat as a permanent part of the firm, and fitted him into the same mental pigeonhole as Hanson & Crane’s solicitor and auditor—outside experts who received his money but were not subject to his sovereignty.

Three days before his overseas representative was to start, Seafair summoned him to his office and enquired what route he proposed to take. The question surprised Toby, for he knew that Seafair had already stormed over his route in several furious discussions with Whitehead, and that at last Albert had tacitly and tactfully made up his managing director’s mind for him by presenting for signature a dozen letters addressed to existing agents and customers advising them that the firm’s Mr Manning was on the way. Seafair, snarling and thankful, had signed them.

“I suggest starting out through Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, sir,” Toby answered, falling into the part that was apparently expected of him, “and then down through Poland and Austria to the Balkans.”

“Very good, Mr Manning! Very good! You are sure that Norway and Sweden ought to be visited?”

“Most important of all, I should say. They are solvent countries and on the sterling bloc.”

“I quite agree,” said Seafair, nodding his blunt little white head approvingly. “Sit down a minute! A cigarette?”

Toby lit cigarettes for his managing director and himself, and took a chair.

“I quite agree, Mr Manning,” Seafair repeated. “Sweden especially ought to be our best market. It needs visiting by an experienced man. You are quite sure you can handle it?”

“I think so,” Toby answered cheerfully. “They’re nice people, the Swedes.”

“I’m very glad to hear you say so. Very glad!” declared Seafair, as if his representative’s approval had set a seal of excellence upon the Swedes. “It has always been my impression. Always.”

“You know Sweden, sir?”

“No. But I was thinking—or rather Mrs Seafair was thinking—that we might spend our summer holiday in Stockholm.”

Toby nodded gravely. It was obvious that Mr Seafair meant to have his fare to Stockholm and back paid for by Hanson & Crane.

“You would enjoy it,” he said. “I don’t suppose you would care to spend a busman’s holiday visiting customers, but if you did, I am sure you would be more effective than I.”

“I dare say I should,” replied Seafair, much pleased, “though that is not to depreciate you. Experience counts for a lot in the toy trade. And if the Board ask me to do so, I shall try to make it convenient to visit Norway also.”

“In that case I suggest I go straight to Helsingfors and start from there,” said Toby.

“That is what I hoped you would say, Mr Manning. And then you will have the added pleasure of Mr Bendrihem as a travelling companion.”

“Mr Bendrihem? Is he going to Helsingfors?”

“He tells me he has had the offer of a Finnish agency for newsprint. Just the thing for him if the paper is up to the standard of our English dailies! He’s quite right to go and look into it.”

“Is there anything you want me to do for him?” asked Toby, puzzled by the complex workings of Mr Seafair’s mind.

“Nothing! Nothing at all!” said Mr Seafair hastily. “I thought it would be nice for you.”

Toby decided that the real reason for his being sent out in Bendrihem’s company was that Seafair wished an eye to be kept on him and a report made on him; in fact that the reluctant old gentleman wanted to put off as long as possible the day when he would have an expensive traveller completely uncontrolled in Europe. Whether Seafair had thought of his Scandinavian holiday in order to have an excuse for sending him with Bendrihem, or whether he was sending him with Bendrihem to have an excuse for going to Norway and Sweden himself, Toby did not know. Nor did Seafair. When compelled by Whitehead to take some definite decision, he had been conscious of instinctive discontent. The alteration of Toby’s route, which he had equally instinctively devised, satisfied and soothed him.

“I like your spirit, Mr Manning,” announced Seafair, delighted that his employee had made the interview easy. “We shall get on very well. At the same time I want you to understand that this job is only temporary,” he added, feeling that his enthusiasm might be too favourably interpreted. “It depends on you what you make of it. And if you ask me, I don’t think you or any other man could make much.”

“I understand that, sir,” answered Toby. “It’s a gamble on both sides.”

Seafair wove his head back and forth. He liked this odd bird and felt so much at ease with him that he no longer cared whether he were rude to him or not.

“But it has to be taken! I’m an old man, young fellow, or I’d see you in hell before I spent the firm’s money just to give you a good time on the continent.”

“It’s a pity you can’t come along too, sir,” said Toby, smiling broadly. “We could have a good time—off the expense account, of course!”

“I should hope so! Now listen to me! I want you to be comfortable. I don’t want you to stint yourself. But don’t send me any bills from Grand Hotels with champagne and a bedroom for two on them—see? Decent second-class hotels. Reasonable restaurants. Not too much entertaining of customers. You’re selling toys, not armaments. Understand?”

“Perfectly, sir!” replied Toby.

He had no doubt that Hanson & Crane would be delighted with his expense accounts. The hotels and restaurants that he preferred were seldom dear, and would be luxury enough after the cleanly horrors of his boarding house.

“Very well, Mr Manning,” said Seafair, getting up. “Then all I have to do is to wish you luck. Remember that if you make a mistake we’ll back you up. But for God’s sake don’t make any! Good-bye, my boy!”

Contented with his employers and himself, and too exhilarated by the sensation of liberty to question the ultimate truth of his reasons for feeling it, Toby sailed from London to Gothenburg on the 5th of July 1933. Bendrihem, who sailed with him, had the impression of a man dominated by ruthless energy and disciplined only by an inner joy. The fallen angel was very much up and about again.

The 6th of July was a long day for Albert Whitehead. With relief he turned to the routine jobs that the education of Manning had prevented him from completing. He forbade his clerks and typists to approach him, and after ten hours in the office caught up with the factory memos and his personal files and card indexes. At seven he left the office to the charwomen and walked slowly to London Bridge station. The dismal streets of south London, lined with staring warehouse windows and dotted with the mighty dung of dray horses, oppressed him. He was disappointed that he had not the glow of virtue he expected from a day of meticulous work efficiently and exactly performed. He wanted a drink, but it did not seriously occur to him to have one. He allowed himself only a beer at lunch, having formed his habits in loyalty to the ever-increasing needs of wife and son. Drinking with Toby Manning at the Duke of Wellington had not somehow counted; his conscience had no more to say against it than against, for example, a Sunday in the country; it was admittedly an extravagance, but permissible. Though it was not on his direct route to the station, he passed the Duke of Wellington and felt his disappointment turn to depression. Not until he was in the train and his mind sunk in the effortless reading of an evening paper did he feel the normal peace of Albert Whitehead.

Edith had prepared a high tea which did credit to her west-country upbringing. A steamed haddock, well moistened with butter, was ready to take the edge off a husband’s appetite and a basin of strong Ceylon tea to comfort his soul. The grocer had supplied a ham, a cheese, butter and a plum cake. Of Mrs Whitehead’s own making there were a sponge cake, a dish of apple pasties, and two-pound pots of marrow, plum and raspberry jam. It was a rich table. The total value would have horrified a housewife accustomed to plan her meals to be eaten at a sitting. But in fact it was economical, since the foods, except bread and the haddock, were intended to return again and again to the table until consumed.

Albert did justice by his food, while Edith recounted the miracles of Thomas Whitehead’s day, and watched with an artist’s pride her husband’s capacity for apple pasties. Young Thomas was fractious. He had insisted on staying up until his father returned, and Edith had yielded, knowing that the father’s pleasure would be as great as the son’s; but it was long after his usual bed-time, and he could only be bribed into fairly decent social behaviour by a promise that if he were good he might have all his celluloid ducks in his bath as well as the usual battered submarine. Miniature waterfowl were prohibited except on special occasions, since they inspired Thomas to an unendurable frenzy of noise and splashing.

When his son had been scooped, kicking, out of his bath, wiped and put to bed, Albert came downstairs, turned on the wireless and sulked. Edith was disappointed. She liked to be entertained, while washing up, by an account of Seafair’s idiosyncrasies, of the daily office routine, of the new orders from abroad related by Albert through the open door of the kitchen. His daily chronicle of events was humorously vivid. Mrs Whitehead had an accurate picture of the business and personalities of Hanson & Crane.

“Have you had a hard day, Bert?” she asked, fishing the last spoon out of the soapy water.

“No.”

“You told me you would have a lot to clear up after Mr Manning left.”

“I did. But it wasn’t hard, Edie. It just kept me late—that’s all.”

Mrs Whitehead devoted herself in silence to the drying of her cups and silver. She was a plump, easy-going farmer’s daughter, placid as the well-watered Somerset valley from which she came, instinctively wise as one of her father’s sheepdogs. She knew well that when her man had one of his fits he was best left alone until he chose to return to the world of women. Therefore she neither clattered her crockery nor showed disapproval with her comely back nor in any way expressed resentment at the temporary absence of her husband’s soul on its personal business. She stacked the dishes, pulled Albert’s ear with casual affection and took up her library book.

It was by no means the type of book most demanded by Croydon housewives. Mrs Whitehead, having found her romance and being consciously and healthily content to enjoy it, was impatient with the second-hand retailing of love in fiction. What she liked was a blood-and-thunder novel in which the hero was hotly pursued through outlandish spots by convincing enemies thirsting for his blood. Detective stories bored her, since she took no pleasure in the conviction of the murderer. She would have preferred him to escape.

Edith Whitehead curled herself up on the window seat. The roses of the suburban front garden, dimly seen in the deep blue of the northern twilight, were behind her. A pink and frilly lampshade justified itself by adding warmth of colour to her brown hair and creamy complexion. Albert’s heart warmed to his wife. He repented that he had made no attempt to allow her to share his mood.

“I wonder how Mr Manning will get on,” he said.

Mrs Whitehead looked up from her book and closed it. The hero was hiding from giant ants in the jungles of the planet Venus, but she preferred, at any rate with her own husband, the realities of conversation.

“He’ll be all right,” she answered.

“But he doesn’t know anything about the trade yet,” Albert objected. “He’s bound to get into some trouble.”

“Don’t you believe it, my dear. He’s got a head on him.”

“Yes, but Seafair only gave him two weeks to learn the job.”

“You’ll have taught him what’s what anyway. You can always make things easy to understand.”

“That’s what he said,” Albert answered. “But I don’t see why.”

“Tell you what, my dear,” announced Mrs Whitehead with bold intuition. “You miss him. And that’s that.”

“Miss him?” asked Albert, startled. “Well, I think I do, Edie. He made me feel so important somehow.”

“It’s time somebody did! I hope he made old Seafair think you important too!”

“He’d do anything he could, Edie.”

“And so would plenty of others too!” said Edith jealously. “You think too much of him, Bert.”

“Well, he’s a gentleman …” began Albert, searching for expression of what distinguished Toby Manning from the rest of his acquaintances.

“No more a gentleman than you, my dear!” declared Mrs Whitehead, and added inconsistently: “Gentleman indeed! He’s nothing of the sort! And he’d be the first to say so!”

“You’re right. He doesn’t quite belong anywhere,” Albert replied. “By George, Edie, he must be lonely!”

“Whatever makes you think that?”

“I don’t know. But I know what I should feel like if I hadn’t got you and the kid. Nobody understands anything, Edie. Look at them round here! They’re all scrambling from one day to another. They want more money or a better job or a bigger car—just because they must have something to live for. Manning doesn’t seem to give a damn for any of those things. He lives for something else. And so do I!”

“There, dear! There!” said Edith, sitting down on the arm of his chair and drawing his head to her broad firm breast. “You’re tired.”

“I’m not tired,” declared Albert indignantly, moving away from her. “And it’s not that I don’t love you and the boy and our life together. You know I do! It’s all I’ve got. But there’s more than that to life, and Manning knows what it is. ’Struth, I wish I had his education!”

“I’m glad you haven’t,” said Mrs Whitehead.

“Well, I don’t know what I’d do with it, and that’s a fact. I might get to thinking I was somebody, which wouldn’t do at all.”

Albert shivered and pulled nervously at his stiff wrist.

“He’s a lonely man all right, Edie. He doesn’t mind what they do to him. It’s when you mind what they do to you that you’re not lonely.”

“It’s that hand of yours worrying you again,” said Edith. “I always know when you begin to talk about ‘they.’”

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” answered Albert, with a sudden note of discovery in his voice. “I’m not afraid of them any longer. If I want to be different to other people, I will. Manning is.”

“Well, you never were like other people anyway, darling,” Edith protested. “And if you mean that you’re more sure of yourself since running about with your Mr Manning, well, I hope it’s so!”

“That is a bit what I mean,” admitted Albert, smiling. “A chap ought to be able to do what he likes within reason—so long as he doesn’t get uppish. Here, Edie! What do you let me talk about myself so much for?”

“Does you good, Bert! You were like a bear when you came in from the office and now you’re yourself again. Why don’t you hop round to the pub and have a quick one before closing? It would do you good.”

“Let’s both go,” suggested Albert, greatly daring.

“But Tommy might wake up.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll slip out and bring one back for you too. What’ll you have?”

Edith giggled. This was rare excitement.

“I’ll have a gin and tonic,” she said. “Oh, Bert! Won’t it be fun when the boy grows up a bit and we can go out again!”