THEY ARRIVE 33

he was their Mr. Smeeth. When he entered the office,
he did not dwindle, he grew; he was more himself than
he was in the street outside. Thus, he had a gratitude,
a zest, an eagerness, that could not be found in the
others, resenting as they did at heart the temporary loss
of their larger and brighter selves. They merely came
to earn their money, more or less. Mr. Smeeth came to
work.

His appearance was deceptive. He looked what he
ought to have been, in the opinion of a few thousand
hasty and foolish observers of this life, and what he was
not—a grey drudge. They could easily see him as a drab
ageing fellow for ever toiling away at figures of no im-
portance, as a creature of the little foggy City street,
of crusted ink-pots and dusty ledgers and day books, as
a typical troglodyte of this dingy and absurd civilisa-
tion. Angel Pavement and its kind, too hot and airless
in summer, too raw in winter, too wet in spring, and too
smoky and foggy in autumn, assisted by long hours of
artificial light, by hasty breakfasts and illusory lunches,
by walks in boots made of sodden cardboard and rides
in germ-haunted buses, by fuss all day and worry at
night, had blanched the whole man, had thinned his hair
and turned it grey, wrinkled his forehead and the space
at each side of his short grey moustache, put eyeglasses
at one end of his nose and slightly sharpened and red-
dened the other end, and given him a prominent
Adam's apple, drooping shoulders and a narrow chest,
pains in his joints, a perpetual slight cough, and a hay-
fevered look at least one week out of every ten. Never-
theless, he was not a grey drudge. He did not toil on
hopelessly. On the contrary, his days at the office were
filled with important and exciting events, all the more