“Something in that,” murmured Gates, the Area Chairman, but Jim spun round on them.
“Is there? What do you think the Tories will do with the time they've ‘gained' as you say? What have they ever done with time since the last show-down?”
“I think it's nonsense to assume there'll be a war,” argued Figgins. “Germany doesn't want war, not the German Socialists at all events!”
Jim was amazed at their blindness. “The German Socialists, you bloody fool,” he shouted, “where do you imagine they are? Do you think they're holding a protest meeting in the compound of Dachau? Do you think anyone has any say in what goes on over there, since that maniac and his gang took over? This was our last chance to call his bluff, and this time we had the Russians behind us! What do you thinkll happen now, in God's name? How do you think Russia will react to this blasted bit of paper that silly old baboon keeps drooling about?”
“The Russian is no friend of British Socialism,” argued Chairman Gates; “never was, and never will be!”
“God help me,” said Jim, in a strangled voice, “she's our only sizeable ally, isn't she?”
“I say, I say, what about the Popular Front in France?” protested Figgins.
“I'll give France six months if war is declared,” snapped Jim, “and after that the Fascists will take over! You talk to some of the Spanish refugees about France, and see if that gives you any confidence in the Popular Front!”
He realised that he was losing his temper, and reached for his cap. Whenever he lost his temper he upset his digestion, which had never quite recovered from uninterrupted months on bully beef and biscuits in the trenches of 1917, and whenever he had a bout the wind packed into his stomach, and made it feel like a distended balloon. Nothing would move it but continual doses of bicarbonate of soda. Deciding that this apology for a committee was not worth a teaspoonsful of bicarbonate, he strode out into the street, leaving them to shake their heads over his increasingly sour temper, so alien to the old Jim they remembered, in the campaigning days of the 'twenties. Sometimes they thought he was wandering off to the extreme left, and at other times he seemed more in line with the Tories, particularly when he had brazenly supported their rearmament programme. They did not quite know what to make of him these days.
Sometimes Jim did not know what to make of himself. He hated the torpor that seemed to paralyse thought among the people he met in the train, and at work. He was appalled by their collective lack of imagination, and the cynicism of the ordinary voter, people of his own Avenue, whose grasp of the situation seemed to be confined to clichés, like “Hitler is turning East”, and “Hitler is doing good in Germany”. He could never understand why everybody did not share his horror at what was going on over there, how they could listen, without howls of protest, to Tory M.P.s telling them it was “none of our business”, any more than the crucifixion of the Spanish people had been “our business”. To him it was all so clear, and so menacing, a simple case of a megalomaniac, in league with Continental capitalism, setting out to absorb the entire world, state by state, and put back the clock to somewhere around the time the first Saxon invasions had crept up the East coast estuaries, and taken possession of Roman Britain.
He went home and called the dog, and they went off into the woods, following the winding path along as far as the old Manor, where he sat on the terrace near the gazebo, and tossed sticks into the shallow water.
The stillness of the scene soothed him. He looked back into the crumbling forecourt and wondered, as Esme had often wondered, who had lived here, and how much it had cost to maintain such a vast, sprawling place. Built about 1780 he imagined, a year or two before the French Revolution, in an era of carriages pulled by matched greys, a time of doeskin top-boots, and Fencibles, and jokes about Napoleon, encouraged by the grotesque cartoons he had seen in the London Museum, an age as remote now as that of Agincourt, and the Armada. People would never live in houses like this again, not with present taxation, and the costs of staffing and heating. What would happen to this one? Would it fall down, or would it be cleared away to make room for a new housing estate? Not for a long time yet at any rate. There would be little enough home building for the next decade and perhaps, when it was all over, they would all be living in caves again. Perhaps he should have accepted Jacob's offer. These people weren't going to fight, so what was the sense of staying to watch them enslaved?
He got up, and called sharply to the dog. Over in the Avenue beyond the trees, a hundred wireless sets were tuned in to dance music, and people who had sat up to hear the midnight news for a week or more, were telling themselves that they would make an early night of it, and sleep safely tonight under Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella.
CHAPTER XXVII
Archie Under An Umbrella
MUNICH caused serious reflection elsewhere in the Avenue that September.
In the converted loft, above the store of his corner shop, Archie Carver had his own figuring to do and, in his own way, he was just as grateful for the temporary shelter of Mr. Chamberlain's umbrella as anyone along the crescent.
Although not the slightest bit concerned with the state of the world as such, Archie was nonetheless a keen observer of the effect the successive alarms of the 'thirties had had upon the Stock Market.
He was not an investor, owning no single stock or share. He was not that sort of gambler, preferring to gamble on absolute certainties, but he used the Stock Market as a weathercock, and his weathercock now told him that the steady drip of depressing events would stop in a year or so, and would be, succeeded by a scorching wind liable to cause a severe drought in the suburb! Droughts meant shortages, all kinds of shortages, and shortages meant big profits for those with sufficient foresight to stock up against the day when it was impossible to replenish.
Archie had no need to go to the Book of Genesis to learn what happened when a drought caught a community on the hop. He had already engaged in the grocery trade during a big war, and had by no means forgotten the late Mr. Cole's closing-time zeal, at Coolridge's. If the war was coming, and by now Archie was quite convinced of the fact, then it behoved any intelligent tradesman who sold goods that suburbs could not do without, to buy, and buy, and buy, to stock, and stock, and stock, until every cellar, every odd corner of his premises, was full to overflowing with reserves.
Having finally made up his mind on this, Archie went to work with his customary thoroughness He closeted himself in his office for days on end, and compiled a list of every wholesaler with whom he had had dealings in the past fourteen years. Having completed the list, he made out his orders, and offered C.O.D., in this way establishing confidence among suppliers, and also getting the benefit of their two-and-a-half per cent cash discounts. There was nothing niggardly about Archie. He went at the task wholeheartedly, laying out every penny he had to his credit at the bank, and sometimes dipping into the oil drums, that he kept in a padlocked cavity under the floor of his Avenue premises.
Not another living soul knew of the existence of these oil drums, not even Maria, or his eldest boy, Tony, now away at boarding school in the West. There were four oil drums now, and two, which were sealed, were chock full of silver (nothing under a florin), and far too heavy for one man to lift.
Archie was not a miser. He never gloated over the drums and bathed his hands in the coins like Silas Marner. He forgot the sealed drums for months together, for these held his iron rations, the fruit of systematic till abstractions over the years.
Archie consistently robbed his own tills, and had now perfected a system calculated to deprive the Department of Inland Revenue of a steady two to three thousand a year. Only now did Archie reap the full reward of his original planning, the tiny shops, the handy housing estates, particularly the small staffs, and carefully-screened branch managers, for his sort of husbandry would have been impossible in a large, busy shop, with half-a-dozen assistants on the lookout.
Nowadays Archie took his ease in the early afternoons, and went b
riskly back to work at four p.m. His system required split-second timing, based on his arrival, at his five busiest shops, round about closing time. As soon as the manager had gone, and the blinds were down, he went to work with devilish speed, making out a counterfeit till roll, and pocketing the difference between the old and new totals. Once a week, at each shop in the chain, he extracted thirty shillings from the petty-cash box. This was his levy, his fixed fee for the visit, and thus he began each week with a tax-free income of thirty shillings, multiplied by the number of shops he possessed. He never put his money into the oil-drums. They were fed by a number of tributaries, the chief being the till balances, supplemented by sale of damaged stock, sale of equipment charged against tax, and various other minor sources. This money went into the drums kept for notes, and this amount he did check from time to time, because he regarded it not as an emergency reserve, but as floating capital, with which he might want to acquire fresh premises at short notice.
One way and another Archie was doing pretty well, but he had his share of worries, and he made his small quota of mistakes. One mistake was the fire that broke out in the corner store, with all that money, largely in paper, directly underneath the blazing crates. No fireman ever worked more heroically to quench a fire and he put it out without even calling the Brigade, but the incident led to his purchase of fireproof cash-boxes, each small enough to go inside the oil-drums.
Another error was his sad misjudgment of character regarding Alf Blissaker, who got away with six cases of tinned goods. But by far his worst mistake, and one for which he could never really forgive himself, was that of trying to combine business with pleasure in the person of Gloria Hazelwood, a girl who graduated from counter-hand to concubine, and achieved the unique distinction of being the only person who ever got the better of Archie, and succeeded in laughing in his face.
Gloria was a cheerful, red-headed girl from Thornton Heath, where her father was a lamp-lighter, and there was something about her that lit lamps in the hearts of all the people she met, even on drizzling Mondays in November. This, and her habit of performing duties at a brisk, tireless trot, recommended her to Archie's attention, when he pulled up at a set of traffic lights, opposite her place of employment, that he happened to pass every day during his rounds. Once or twice he caught her eye, and she winked at him, not provocatively, but in the most friendly way imaginable, so that it was not long before she was installed as manageress of a little branch he had opened near the Addington estate, and was soon doing her trotting on his behalf, at first during the day, and later during occasional week-ends, when Archie, unable to earn money, was bored and lonely.
She was a lusty, open-hearted girl, with a strong sense of fun, and had she been less successful in the shop, Archie would probably have regularised the association by setting her up permanently in a little houseboat he had bought, and moored at Thames Ditton. Indeed, this is what Gloria hoped he would do, and when he did not, when it became painfully obvious to her that, notwithstanding her broadmindedness and pink curves, he valued her far more highly with her overall on than off, she made up her mind to settle for a cash bonus and try elsewhere.
Had she known about the oil-drums it is probable that Archie would have found her the most expensive frolic he had ever engaged upon, but fortunately she was unaware of the cache although, as events were to prove, she was extremely well-informed about the methods he used in building it up.
She knew, also, that Archie was in the habit of carrying large sums of money about with him. It was not always convenient for him to make deposits in his Avenue vault as soon as he had accumulated money, and so, at times, Archie's wallet was stuffed with the week's gleanings. She had seen the wallet often, during their week-ends at the houseboat, and its very thickness fascinated her, so much so that she was sometimes unable to take her eyes off his jacket when it was hanging on the chair beside the bed.
When he began talking of transferring her to the newest of his premises, and using her as a kind of new broom at each branch he opened, she began making her own plans She chose her time well, selecting the evening of Whit Monday, when Archie had been unable to complete his customary round the previous Saturday, and had something over a hundred pounds folded into his wallet.
It had been a sultry day, and Archie had gone off into the village for drinks, leaving her to lay out supper in the airless little cabin. Because it was so hot he had gone in his shirtsleeves, leaving his sport's-coat on the bed.
It was all done in less than five minutes. Gloria extracted the money from the inner flap of the wallet, and replaced it with wads of toilet paper. To be on the safe side she camouflaged the paper with one of the two five-pound notes she found. She did not touch the odd pound notes in the outer flap.
She knew that he was unlikely to require money until they parted the following morning, and that even if he did he was certain to have loose change in his trouser pockets.
Her plan was flawless. When he came back with the drinks she was waiting, with cold supper laid. They had their meal, bathed, listened to the radio, and went to bed as usual. He did not put his jacket on again until they climbed into his big, black Austin, and began their drive back to work the following morning.
He had intended dropping her off at her shop, for this was their usual practice, but as they were passing through Nor-bury she asked him to stop outside East Croydon Station. Her request irritated him. He liked his shops to open sharp on time.
“It's twenty to nine now,” he warned her. “What the devil do you want to stop at the Station for?”
“I've got a train to look up,” she told him.
He grunted, and pulled in outside the booking-hall.
“Hurry up then,” he said, and began to light a cigarette.
But she did not hurry into the hall to make an enquiry, neither did she examine the trains advertised on the boards. Instead she stood looking at him from the pavement, with an expression of mild concentration, and when he glared back at her, all she said was:
“I'm going now, Archie.”
“Going? Going where?”
“I don't know exactly,” she said; “abroad, I think, for a little while. I've always wanted to go to the Riviera, but they say it's terribly expensive, and I'll have to leave myself enough to get back, and keep me going till I get another job. Perhaps it'll be somewhere nearer.”
He stared at her, his unlit cigarette hanging on his lip.
“Are you out of your head?” he demanded.
“Archie,” she said very softly, “you'd better look in your wallet before we say ‘goodbye'.”
He braced up on the word “wallet”, and tore it from his inside pocket, plunging his hand into the silk folds, and bringing out a five-pound note and a fistful of toilet paper.
For a moment he said nothing, but simply stared and stared at the wallet on his knees, and then at Gloria, who still stood meekly alongside the car, now regarding him with mild amusement.
“Why you ... you bloody little fool,” he shouted at length, “you'll never get away with this! There was more than a hundred in that wallet. Give me my money, you bitch!” And he jerked the handle of the car, so that the door swung open, and the breeze swept a few sheets of toilet paper into the gutter under the feet of people hurrying in and out of the hall.
She shook her head very slowly, and something in the unconcerned way in which she stood there, gently swinging the handbag he had given her last Christmas, stopped him from leaping out of the car.
“You won't miss that much, Archie,” she said, speaking deliberately, “and if you try and get it back I'll explain how you got it, and then everything'll come out, won't it—you know ... all that fiddling you do!”
“Fiddling?” was all he could manage.
“I kept some of the old till rolls,” she explained. “You ought to have burned them. They always burn that kind of evidence in thrillers, but you didn't, you just screwed them up, and tossed them in the yard incinerator, before it was lit Yo
u can make a hundred almost every week one way or another, with all the mugs there are about to make it for you. You wouldn't want all the fuss of a police court over one hundred, and anyway, it isn't a hundred, it's only ninety-odd. I put a fiver back, it isn't all toilet paper!”
He could say nothing to this. There was nothing one could say to such a monstrous confession. He could only sit there, with the car door swinging open, the wallet on his knee, and the toilet paper eddying about on the floor. After looking at him for a moment more she hitched her handbag higher up her arm, and smiled.
“Well, goodbye, Archie,” she said, and, turning into the stream of travellers, disappeared almost immediately.
For a long time he sat there, hunched and brooding, like a glowering husband awaiting an overdue wife, but he was not thinking about Gloria. His thoughts concerned himself, and his monumental folly in laying himself open to such an ambush. He did not really blame Gloria for taking such an advantage of him. When he stood aside, and carefully reviewed his own errors, there was no blame left over for her, it was all used up on himself. Those till-rolls! Irrefutable evidence! Thrown into an unlit incinerator, for anyone to smooth out and keep, as a weapon against which there was no defence! And this wallet on his knee! How many times had he taken off his jacket, and flung it down on a crate, or a chair, when he had been working among men and women who counted their pocket money in sixpences? It was a miracle that he had not been blackmailed or robbed of thrice the sum years ago, and here was a devastating object lesson that had cost him a mere ninety-seven pounds. Damn it, he ought to be grateful to the little bitch!
As he thought this his face cleared, and slowly he let in his clutch, and moved off into the Upper Road. He discovered that be could close the door on Gloria and her ninety-seven pounds, not slam it perhaps, but close it. He was a man who was well accustomed to weighing profits against losses, and it seemed to him that this was a cheap enough price to pay for an invaluable lesson. And it was not all loss either, not when one took into account Gloria's company over several weekends.
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