“Here!” said Mr. Smayle, “manners, manners! The trouble with you, old man,” he went on, “is that you can’t take a joke. No offence meant, I’m sure-and none taken, I hope.”
He clapped Mr. Tallboy on the shoulder.
“Do you mind keeping your hands off me, Smayle,” said Mr. Tallboy.
“Oh, all right, all right, your Highness. Got out of bed the wrong side, hasn’t he?” He appealed to Miss Meteyard, being troubled by an obscure feeling that men should not quarrel before ladies, and that it was somehow up to him to preserve the decencies by turning the whole thing into a joke.
“Money’s a sore point with us all, I’m afraid, Mr. Smayle,” replied Miss Meteyard. “Let’s talk about something jollier. That’s a nice rose you’ve got there.”
“Out of my own garden,” replied Mr. Smayle, with pride. “Mrs. Smayle’s a wonder with the roses. I leave it all to her, bar the digging and mulching, of course.”
They emerged from the lift and signed their names at the desk. Miss Meteyard and Mr. Smayle passed on through the anteroom and turned by common consent to the left up the stair by the Dispatching. Mr. Tallboy shouldered past them and took a lone and frosty course down the main corridor to ascend by the iron staircase.
“I’m reelly very sorry,” said Mr. Smayle, “that Tallboy and I should have indulged in anything approaching to words in your presence, Miss Meteyard.”
“Oh, that’s nothing. He seems a little irritable. I don’t think he likes that little upset of his with Mr. Copley to be talked about.”
“No, but reelly,” said Mr. Smayle, lingering at the door of Miss Meteyard’s room, “if a man can’t take a harmless joke, it’s a great pity, isn’t it?”
“It is,” said Miss Meteyard. “Hullo! What are all you people doing here?”
Mr. Ingleby and Mr. Bredon, seated on Miss Meteyard’s radiator with a volume of the New Century Dictionary between them, looked up unabashed.
“We’re finishing a Torquemada cross-word,” said Ingleby, “and naturally the volume we wanted was in your room. Everything always is.”
“I forgive you,” said Miss Meteyard.
“But I do wish you wouldn’t bring Smayle in here with you,” said Mr. Bredon. “The mere sight of him makes me think of Green Pastures Margarine. You haven’t come to dun me for that copy, have you? Because don’t, there’s a good fellow. I haven’t done it and I can’t do it. My brain has dried up. How you can live all day with Margarine and always look so fresh and cheerful passes my understanding.”
“I assure you it’s an effort,” said Mr. Smayle, displaying his teeth. “But it reelly is a great refreshment to see you copy-writers all so cheerful and pleasant together. Not like some people I could name.”
“Mr. Tallboy has been unkind to Mr. Smayle,” said Miss Meteyard.
“I like to be agreeable with everybody,” said Mr. Smayle, “but reelly, when it comes to shoving your way past a person into the lift as if one wasn’t there and then telling you to keep your hands off as if a person was dirt, a man may be excused for taking offence. I suppose Tallboy thinks I’m not worth speaking to, just because he’s been to a public school and I haven’t.”
“Public school,” said Mr. Bredon, “first I’ve heard of it. What public school?”
“He was at Dumbleton,” said Mr. Smayle, “but what I say is, I went to a Council School and I’m not ashamed of it.”
“Where’s Dumbleton?” demanded Ingleby. “I shouldn’t worry, Smayle. Dumbleton isn’t a public school, within the meaning of the act.”
“Isn’t it?” said Mr. Smayle, hopefully. “Well, you and Mr. Bredon have had college educations, so you know all about it. What schools do you call public schools?”
“Eton,” said Mr. Bredon, promptly, “-and Harrow,” he added, magnanimously, for he was an Eton man.
“ Rugby,” suggested Mr. Ingleby.
“No, no,” protested Bredon, “that’s a railway junction.”
Ingleby delivered a brisk left-hander to Bredon’s jaw, which the latter parried neatly.
“And I’ve heard, “Bredon went on, “that there’s a decentish sort of place at Winchester, if you’re not too particular.”
“I once met a man who’d been to Marlborough,” suggested Ingleby.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Bredon. “They get a terrible set of hearty roughs down there. You can’t be too careful of your associates, Ingleby.”
“Well,” said Mr. Smayle, “Tallboy always says that Dumbleton is a public school.”
“I daresay it is-in the sense that it has a Board of Governors,” said Ingleby, “but it’s nothing to be snobbish about.”
“What is, if you come to that?” said Bredon. “Look here, Smayle, if only you people could get it out of your heads that these things matter a damn, you’d be a darn sight happier. You probably got a fifty times better education than I ever did.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head. “Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not deceiving myself about that, and I’d give anything to have had the same opportunities as you. There’s a difference, and I know there’s a difference, and I don’t mind admitting it. But what I mean is, some people make you feel it and others don’t. I don’t feel it when I’m talking to either of you, or to Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Hankin, though you’ve been to Oxford and Cambridge and all that. Perhaps it’s just because you’ve been to Oxford and Cambridge.”
He struggled with the problem, embarrassing the other two men by his wistful eyes.
“Look here,” said Miss Meteyard, “I know what you mean. But it’s just that these two here never think twice about it. They don’t have to. And you don’t have to, either. But the minute anybody begins to worry about whether he’s as good as the next man, then he starts a sort of uneasy snobbish feeling and makes himself offensive.”
“I see,” said Mr. Smayle. “Well, of course, Mr. Hankin doesn’t have to try and prove that he’s better than me, because he is and we both know it.”
“Better isn’t the right word, Smayle.”
“Well, better educated. You know what I mean.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Ingleby. “If I were half as good at my job as you are at yours, I should feel superior to everybody in this tom-fool office.”
Mr. Smayle shook his head, but appeared comforted.
“I do wish they wouldn’t start that kind of thing,” said Ingleby when he had gone. “I don’t know what to say to them.”
“I thought you were a Socialist, Ingleby,” said Bredon. “It oughtn’t to embarrass you.”
“So I am a Socialist,” said Ingleby, “but I can’t stand this stuff about Old Dumbletonians. If everybody had the same State education, these things wouldn’t happen.”
“If everybody had the same face,” said Bredon, “there’d be no pretty women.”
Miss Meteyard made a grimace.
“If you go on like that, I shall be getting an inferiority complex too.”
Bredon looked at her gravely.
“I don’t think you’d care to be called pretty,” he said, “but if I were a painter I should like to make a portrait of you. You have very interesting bones.”
“Good God!” said Miss Meteyard. “I’m going. Let me know when you’ve finished with my room.”
There was a mirror in the typists’ room, and in this Miss Meteyard curiously studied her face.
“What’s the matter, Miss Meteyard?” asked Miss Rossiter. “Got a spot coming?”
“Something of the sort,” said Miss Meteyard, absently. “Interesting bones indeed!”
“Pardon?” said Miss Rossiter.
“Smayle is getting unbearable,” grumbled Mr. Tallboy to Mr. Wedderburn. “Vulgar little tick. I hate a fellow who digs you in the ribs.”
“He means no harm,” rejoined Mr. Wedderburn. “He’s quite a decent sort, really.”
“Can’t stand those teeth,” grumbled Mr. Tallboy. “And why must he put that stinking stuff on his hair?”