CHAPTER I

THE three young men sat together at a marble-topped table in the
teashop. Their cups of coffee stood untasted before them. The saucer
under Reddy’s cup was half full of coffee, slopped into it by an
irritated waitress who missed the usual familiar smirk which Morris
wontedly bestowed upon her when he gave his order. Reddy had not noticed
this bad piece of service, although normally it would have curled his
fastidious lip. He flicked nervously at the ash of his cigarette and
looked across the table at the other two, first Morris with his scowling
brow, his woolly hair horrid with grease, his eyelid drooping and his
mouth pulled to one side to keep the cigarette smoke out of his eye, and
then Oldroyd with his heavy face wrinkled with perplexity.

“He knows about it all right, then,” said Morris bitterly.

“Certain of it,” said Reddy. “I couldn’t have made a mistake. What would
he have said that about Hunter for if he didn’t know?”

“It means the sack,” said Oldroyd. “It does that.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” sneered Morris. “God damn it, of
course it does. We know what Mac’s like as well as you do, if not
better. The minute he comes back from Glasgow old Harrison’ll go
trotting in there, and five minutes after that Mac’s buzzer will go, and
Maudie will come and fetch us in to get the key of the street. Mac won’t
ever let that by, silly old fool he is, with all his notions about
‘commercial honour’ and stuff like that.”

Morris ended by making a noise in the back of his throat indicating
profound disgust; he flung himself back in his chair and filled his
lungs deep with cigarette smoke.

“And we’ll be looking for a job,” said Oldroyd. “I’ve been out before
and I know what it’s like.”

There was a north-country flavour about his speech: his I’s were
softened into Ah’s.

“Know what it’s like? D’you think I don’t know too?” said Morris. “‘Dear
Sir, In reply to your advertisement in to-day’s “Daily Express”’—bah,
I’ve done hundreds of ’em. God, you’re lucky compared to me. I got a
wife an’ two nippers, don’t you forget. An’ a fat chance we’ve got of
finding another job. ‘Copies of two recent testimonials.’ What sort of
testimonials do you think old Mac’s going to give us? Sacked for taking
bribes! We’ll be starving in the streets in a fortnight’s time. Jesus,
it’ll be cold. I’ve had some. And all I made out of that damned show was
three quid—three measly quid, up to date. Just because that blinking
fool, Cooper, couldn’t keep his mouth shut.”

He glowered round at the other two, and so evident was the fiendish bad
temper which possessed him that they did not dare remind him of the
other factors in the situation which oppressed them with grievances
beyond the immediate one of prospective dismissal—they dared not remind
him that the whole scheme for extracting bribes from Mr. Cooper was of
his devising, nor that they had only shared three pounds between the two
of them; their rogue’s agreement gave half the spoils to Morris and
divided the other half between Reddy and Oldroyd.

Morris’s rage frightened Reddy even more than did the prospect of
dismissal; never having been unemployed, and always having had a father
and mother at his back, Reddy did not appreciate fully the gnawing fears
which were assaulting the other two—hunger and cold were only words to
him. Reddy knew his father would be pained and hurt by his ignominious
dismissal, but his mother would stand up for him. It might be long
before he could buy himself another new suit; it might even mean giving
up his beloved motor-bicycle, although such a catastrophe was too
stupendous to be really possible; those were realities which lay in the
future, while across the table to him was reality in the present—Morris
mad with fury, his thick lips writhing round his cigarette and his
thick, hairy hands beating on the table.

That may have been Reddy’s first contact with reality in all his
twenty-two years of life, for that matter. He was in touch with emotions
and possibilities which he had only read about, inappreciatively, before
that. It was strangely fascinating as well as terrifying. Morris had
always exercised a certain fascination for him, possibly through the
contrast of his virility and coarseness compared with his own frail
elegance, but now in the hour of defeat the spell was stronger still.
Certainly at the moment Reddy felt no regret at having allowed Morris to
seduce them into the manipulation of correspondence which had left a
clear field for the tenders of the Adelphi Artistic Studio, and had
earned them six pounds in secret commissions and their approaching
dismissal.

The blind ferocity in Morris’s face changed suddenly to something more
deliberate and calculating.

“By God,” he said, leaning forward and tapping the table, “if we could
get Harrison out of this business it’d be all right for us.”

“How do you mean?” asked Oldroyd blankly.

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “But if we could——Get Mac to fire _him_
instead of _us_, or get him out of the way some other way somehow. One
of us would get Harrison’s job then—eight quid a week, and pickings if
you kept your eyes open. And we wouldn’t be on the street, either. God!
If only we could do it! Can’t one of you two dam’ fools think of
anything?”

“No,” replied Oldroyd, after a blank interval of thought, adding, for
the sake of his wilting self-respect, “And not so much of your dam’
fools, either.”

“Dam’ fools? Of course we’re all dam’ fools to be in this blasted mess.
But we won’t be dam’ fools if we get out of it again. Golly, it would be
grand if we could!”

“No,” said Oldroyd heavily, “there isn’t any way out. We’ve just got to
take what’s coming to us, haven’t we, Reddy?”

Reddy nodded, but he was not really in agreement. He was still gazing
fascinatedly at Morris’s distorted face.

“Don’t be a fool and give up the game before you have to,” expostulated
Morris, looking sharply round at Oldroyd. “Mac won’t be back at the
office until Wednesday. We’ve still got to-morrow to do something about
it. Harrison can’t do anything to us on his own. We’ve still got a
chance.”

“Fat lot of chance we’ve got!” said Oldroyd.

The time which had now elapsed since Reddy had first told the story of
his interview with Harrison had given him time to recover some of his
fatalistic composure; so much of it, in fact, had returned to him that
now he was able to turn his attention to the nearly cold coffee before
him. He gulped it down noisily and replaced the cup with a clatter on
the saucer. Morris sipped at his.

“God! I can’t drink that stuff,” he said, and pushed the cup away.

Reddy did not even taste his. Morris looked up at the clock.

“Look at the time! I’ll have to bunk to get the 6.20. Give us our
tickets, please, miss. So long, you fellows. Keep your pecker up,
Oldroyd, old man. We’re not dead yet.”

And with that he was gone, forgetting his own exasperation for the
moment in the flurry of hurrying out, paying his bill, and scrambling
through the traffic in the Strand over to Charing Cross Station. It only
returned to him while standing in a packed compartment in the train,
crawling along through the first fog of the year; by the time he reached
home he was in a bad enough temper to quarrel for the thousandth time
with his wife.