Somebody at the Door

by Raymond Postgate

  Fremont, who was killed soon after in a raid, was a man likely to provoke confidence. Grey-haired, fifty-two, placid, the father of a grown-up family, he had already struck up a friendship with Ransom. Now the editor and part owner of the Croxburn Weekly Argus and Guardian, he had spent most of his life in daily journalism, from London to Shanghai. He was, in Ransom’s verdict, “broadminded”; he had travelled pretty close to the edge of the legally permissible more than once; he was very kind and obliging; he had retired to his present occupation from Fleet Street with the same sort of deliberation as a prize-fighter once would leave the ring while still unconquered and take over a little “Physical Academy for Young Gentlemen” in a small provincial town.

  The two men took up their position as ten struck in the church clock one block away. Headquarters were the premises of the Croxburn County School (pupils partly evacuated, partly transferred to another school), only partially occupied by the Home Guard. It was surrounded on two sides by an asphalt playground. The two sentries stood as usual between the main doorway and the entrance gate. Fremont had bayonet and rifle; Ransom rifle only. From time to time one or the other would walk round the side of the building and cast his eye over the length of the playground. Mostly they stood still and watched; or talked in low voices.

  There was not much yet to be seen, or heard. The moon had not yet indicated her coming. The sky was clear black, with a wild scattering of stars. From time to time a sudden low flash of faintly green light would appear on the eastern horizon: the sentries debated, as they did every night, whether these were very distant gun flashes from the estuary or less distant flashes from electric trains passing points. Once, a sudden illumination occurred: from all around (as it seemed) pillars of light arose, ending sometimes in blurs, when the beam caught a wisp of cloud, but mostly towering away without end into the high sky. The searchlight beams moved and crossed, stiffly as if they were performing a ceremonious dance; and then abruptly, on some unseen order, vanished instantaneously, leaving an even deeper darkness.

  It was like village life, Ransom thought; not only had the red glow of London wholly vanished, along with the local bright lights of cinemas and street lamps, but the noise had gone too. The continuous hum and bumble, the great unindividual grumble which had been the unending voice of pre-war London was silenced. It was possible, now, to hear separate noises; and sometimes to hear nothing at all. A late bus, starting, running, and stopping, could be identified from many streets away. Every five minutes the toilets across the playground automatically flushed themselves, and that was a major noise. Far away, on some steam railway, an engine shrieked its complaint against an opposing signal; the noise came through as distant and clear as if nothing but hills and trees intervened. No sound of bombers or of guns was yet to be heard.

  Fremont was telling a trivial anecdote of a device by which he had jumped himself into a chief reporter’s job in 1919. Then he asked Ransom, carelessly and with no special interest:

  “What did you do when you got out of the army, last time?”

  Ransom hesitated for a moment, listened to the lavatories swishing water down and ending in a satisfied gurgle, and then began to speak.

  3

  It’s a long story (began Ransom), and I’m not sure it will interest you. However, I’ll tell you a bit of it.

  You being born a Londoner won’t easily understand the atmosphere I was brought up in, and I daresay my ambition will seem to you a pretty poor one. I wanted to keep a shop for the gentry. I was born in a village called Brengton; that’s a very small place and it hasn’t got any character of its own; hardly an existence of its own. It depends on the little town next it (he gave the name, but as the people are easily recognizable it cannot be given here), and that is very small too. I never realized how small till I left it. For us—I was one of eight children—it was the centre of the universe. Father was a farm labourer, by the way. Well, this town is one of the oldest boroughs in England and among the smallest, too, I think. It’s very proud of its antiquity and it’s very snobbish. It’s got no industries of its own, and it’s not even a market town now. It’s populated by rich families and their dependents, who keep up carefully the eighteenth-century customs and stop all new building. Or any pulling down of insanitary old cottages. Of course, there are grades inside the rich; the town was really run when I was a boy by three families: old Mrs. Graves with her descendants, Lord and Lady Reedham, and Colonel Wolsey-Woollis. That really was his name; he was very vexed by the advertisements of Wolseley underwear and you had to remember that his name was pronounced Woolsey-wolls, or there was trouble. To me these people were demigods. I didn’t think anything could be a more desirable life than to supply them with what they needed, bowing and scraping like Mr. Wilkins the chemist—he called himself Chymist—in the High Street. I couldn’t get a job with him because I wasn’t properly educated—I can’t spell even now—but when I left school I was taken on as an errand boy by Mr. Black, of Black and Scrawns, the grocers. And even seeing the way they were treated by their customers didn’t teach me anything. I was a proper little lackey; I didn’t want to do anything but wait on my betters. The war didn’t teach me anything about that either. I didn’t see much service, you know; nothing to teach me anything about life. I went into it a kid, and I came out a kid. The one thing I did learn in it was, of all things, how to mend shoes. I was a snob already; they made me a snob in the other sense. Snob’s what we call a cobbler down there at home you know. I don’t remember now, why it was I got put in the snob’s shop in the army. There must have been some reason. Or maybe not. You know the army. Anyway, I had learnt a trade.

  (The darkness of the sky had been lightening as he spoke; the moon still invisible, must have been rising above the horizon. The disputed flashes had been occurring more frequently; now there came an unmistakable irregular hum. Barumba, barumba, barumba; it is not exactly that, but it is a sound that once heard is not again mistaken. The bombers were on their way. Soon there began the distant crump, crump of guns. Bright, large sparks occurred among the stars and vanished; they were bursting shells. The thud of guns seemed to bear no relation to them, which was a sign that the firing was still a long way away. But both men, following instructions, withdrew under the overhanging archway of the main door. It was a protection at least against shell splinters.

  Fremont pressed him; and Ransom went on, some slight embarrassment now in his tone.)

  The end of the war, too, I got a gratuity. Not very much, as you know. Also I was stronger and healthier than I’d ever been before, or was after. And I married a girl, too, and she had fifty pounds. I don’t mean I married for money. Betty and I always got on all right, and we had ideas of what we were going to do. (Ransom skirted round the word “love” and refused it.) But it seemed all right to start a cobbler’s shop. We had the luck to find empty a small house in the High Street, very old I expect. It was as narrow as ever you saw; I can remember every bit of it now. It just had a front room with a window, which was my workshop, and a back room which was a small dark kitchen—really nothing more than a scullery. Upstairs there was just one room, with a sloping ceiling, right under the roof. The stairs went from it down into the kitchen. The doings, the earth closet, was out in the yard, and that was all there was. The house was squeezed right in between two big shops; it had a narrow, pointed roof; you’d think they really were pinching it in. It was dirty enough, and only one tap of water was laid on. But we made it lovely. I suppose all newly married kids do something of the same, but I tell you after all these years I don’t like to think of the wallpaper we put on, and some of the other work we did, especially what she did. It brings back to me too much. She stained every board in the floor herself; and right up to the end she polished them every day. They were getting a real dark brown by then.

  We couldn’t afford to get much stock in, but that didn’t matter. My job was shoe-mending, and the money went on the tools and leather. We just had a few shoes in the window mor
e for show than anything else; if anyone wanted to buy shoes I’d try and persuade them to let me make them. I don’t suppose I was very good, but I wasn’t bad. I was better with men’s than women’s, naturally.

  The gentry started off being very kind. I was a returned hero, you see. And I knew how to behave. Colonel Wolsey-Woollis used to come in and talk and talk, and it was the most stupid rubbish, most times: but I never said a word but “Yes, sir,” and “Quite so, sir,” or maybe, “Well, really.” There was a certain amount of political discussion went on in the British Legion Club, but I kept off it. There were always a few who said that the gentry were the curse of the town, but it all amounted to very little and I knew which side my bread was buttered. My chief cross was Mrs. Graves; she interfered so. She drove about the town still—she was well past seventy—in a horse and carriage, and she liked everything to be as it had been when she was young. It was quite a sensation when she ordered and actually drove about in a thing called an electric brougham. I’ve never seen one since. It was very quiet and very high up. But it didn’t work or something, and she went back to the horses. Well, she looked to everything herself; including the shoe-mending for the Hall, and there was a great deal of it. She wouldn’t actually bring the shoes herself, but she would drive down with any complaints or remarks. I was expected to know instantly what she referred to. If she said: “The stillroom maid’s shoes were not satisfactory,” I must know at once which pair she meant out of a sackful, and be able to suggest rubber heels, or a blakey, or whatever she would like. Of course, I always came out of the shop and stood by the carriage door to receive her orders. Once, I remember, she sent me back to call Betty out; and when Betty came she demanded to know in a loud voice in the open street why we hadn’t had any children.

  Still, as I say, I knew my place, and after a year and a bit we really were doing not too badly at all. The town was so small that I had very little competition. Old Mr. Mansdell was getting very old, and he couldn’t cope with any more work. The only other place was Fieldman’s shop—Fieldman the multiple people. They had bought up an old firm and opened a branch which offered to do repairs. But actually it mostly sold new shoes and didn’t trouble me. Not then. Afterwards it did; and then when they had busted me, their head office declared the turnover wasn’t sufficient and closed the whole shop down. What a laugh.

  It was the depression, they said; but it wasn’t the depression did me in; not directly, anyway. People want their boots cobbled anyhow; I should think my trade was the least affected by a depression that you could mention. It was prosperity did me down. I got an idea of expansion and I’d have been better advised to leave it alone.

  I remember one morning the man coming into my shop. He had a small bright saloon car—and that wasn’t usual about 1924; most cars were still tourers then, you know. He gave me his card; it said Jarndis and Touran, Ltd., with an address in the City of London. In the corner, “Mr. A. Touran, Travelling Manager and Director.” He was pretty tall, had a good manner, and I think a slight foreign accent, but the thing that struck me most was that he was dressed up to the nines. Blue suit with a crease you could shave with; everything just right so that I automatically classed him with the Colonel and the rest of the real gentry.

  I at least ought to have known better, especially when it turned out that he wanted to sell me something. But I didn’t. He said he was managing director of a new company, and he had decided to supervise personally the sales in the provinces, as it was far too important a branch of work to be left to subordinates. Once he had laid down the main lines and got the business going, he would, of course, hand over the running to branch managers. I believed him; I even admired his common sense. Well, the result was that after a second visit and a correspondence I bought an electric shoemakers’ machine. There are such things, and they’re perfectly good. A great deal of the sewing, nailing and cutting out that shoemakers do has no business to be done by hand at all, and a machine’s actually better. I’d just taken the plunge of installing electric light and a telephone—one of those old-fashioned things like a black pillar, with the earpiece separate; in the shop I kept it—and I decided to be right up to date and have a machine. I was going to take on an apprentice to work it, I remember.

  The thing was to cost £175. The terms seemed to be all right. £75 down and the rest by easy payments; delivery in four weeks as there was such a rush on the machines that the factory could not keep pace with the demand, and orders were taken in rotation. Free servicing for a year after delivery. Of course, I didn’t have £75 to my hand, especially after putting the money down for the electricity and the telephone. I had only £15. But I had been carrying on a steady business and the bank manager up the street knew all about it, naturally, and in a small town like that, of course, the fact that the best people supported my shop counted for quite a bit. The bank allowed me an overdraft of £60.

  Well, I paid the £75, the four weeks passed and nothing happened. I wrote and complained; and I got a letter from Mr. Touran, very apologetically written, saying that they had some breakdowns at the factory, and had got badly behind with deliveries, but that my machine should be sent to me on the Wednesday next. Nothing came. So I wrote again; and Mr. Touran answered that it had been despatched to me by road on the Thursday. And still nothing came. I was a bit suspicious, but even then I thought that everything was O.K. I was still one of the natural victims of the wide boys; I’ve learnt better since. But at least I went up to town to see Mr. Touran; even so I hadn’t sense enough to draw conclusions from what I saw. I was still a country boy; and it seemed to me perfectly all right that the head of a big business should have an office with only two rooms, and one typist and receptionist. And, by God, what a typist and receptionist. Make-up’s common now, and I don’t suppose she’d stand out like she did. She had painted nails and painted cheeks and absolutely brilliant pale gold hair, almost white; and she had a short bright blue skirt on, which showed halfway up her thighs, and as far as I could see no undergarments at all. She crossed and uncrossed her legs at me till I didn’t know where to look. Her voice was horrible; I will say that for the B.B.C. and the talking films, you won’t find any of the girls running around now who talk as hideously as any working-class girl did then. Still, that’s not the point. I got in to see Mr. Touran and he was shocked and horrified. “Mr. Jarndis,” he said, “is in sole charge of the manufacturing end. I deal with sales and service only here. But naturally I have been telephoning continuously about your machine; and I had it confirmed only to-day that it left on Thursday last, and everything was in order. I will telephone again at once. Pola,” he called out, “get me the Crouch End works. Or no, put the line through to me.” He began to dial. It was the first automatic telephone I’d ever seen, and he was on the first automatic exchange.

  “The line’s so frequently engaged now, we do so much business,” he said. “I hope we get through quickly. There’s just a chance that there was an error in the delivery chit. If the address was wrong, and it was delivered to some dishonest person, they might have sold the machine. I hope not. Or there may have been a theft on the road. But that ought to have been reported. Tck, tck. Number engaged. We must leave it a minute.”

  He dialled again in a minute. His face showed the same surprise and grief as he announced “number engaged” again; mine must have shown suspicion, because he raised his eyebrows: “Listen for yourself, Mr. Ransom,” he said, and handed me the instrument. There was no doubt; it was the engaged signal all right.

  He dialled several times, always with the same result, and generally I heard the signal myself. I was convinced then that he was really trying to telephone his factory. I didn’t see how else he could have arranged it; it did flash through my mind that perhaps he might have arranged for someone at the other end to leave the receiver off; but as he hadn’t known when I should come that didn’t seem at all likely. At last I agreed to come back at half-past five when, he said, he would have the whole matter clear for me, or
anyway we would be sure then to get on to the factory as the traffic was much less at the end of the day.

  Of course, when I came back, he was gone, and the place was locked up. I never saw him or his tart again. The police caught him in the end, but it was too late for me. I never got my money back; and, as for the machine, there never was a machine. No factory, no firm, no anything at all. He had been going about the country with a catalogue and illustrations that he had got hold of from some American firm, I believe, and some letters which he’d written himself; and he’d sold quite a number of these non-existent machines. Mostly to small people like me. The police inspector told me how he worked the telephone; it’s very simple. I’ve done it myself since. You just dial your own number. Nobody would ever suspect it; and there’s no other way of being sure the number is engaged. It’s a good trick.

  I didn’t find out what had happened at once; there was a week or two of doubt, and of course it would be just then that Betty told me we’d been careless and there was going to be a baby. And it was just about then, too, that Mrs. Graves chose, for some reason or other, to get out of her carriage one day and walk into my shop. She was annoyed about something, I don’t know what, I believe her eldest grandson had been doing something or somebody, and she wanted to be troublesome. Anyway, she poked around without finding anything and then noticed the telephone.

  “Have you had the telephone installed, Ransom?” she said in her usual manner. “That is very extravagant of you.” I answered, rashly I suppose, that I found it useful for my customers. “Not for me, I think,” the old bitch said. “It seems to me a piece of ostentation that hardly fits your circumstances.” I did manage to refrain from telling her to mind her own business, but I suppose I asked her a little abruptly if there was anything else I could do for her. The butler came down two days later and collected the shoes, mended or unmended. He said that Madam had told him to ask if I had arranged to have the telephone taken away. Just literally that; I told you you’d be surprised. I swear I never knew of anything else at all that the old woman had against me. I know she told some of the others that I had been impertinent to her; and I lost quite a bunch of the good reliable trade on which I relied. It all went to Fieldman’s new shop up the road. I asked the butler in the end if he’d tell Madam that I was arranging to give up the telephone; I did really; but he said Madam had made other arrangements and had said she did not wish to hear any more about the matter.