In the Cage

CHAPTER I

It had occurred to her early that in her position—that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie—she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance.  That made it an emotion the more lively—though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered—to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function.  Her function was to sit there with two young men—the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the “sounder,” which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing.  This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly to bridge.  When Mr. Cocker’s young men stepped over from behind the other counter to change a five-pound note—and Mr. Cocker’s situation, with the cream of the “Court Guide” and the dearest furnished apartments, Simpkin’s, Ladle’s, Thrupp’s, just round the corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems—she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary, the practically featureless, appearances in the great procession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connexion (only recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence.  She recognised the others the less because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge.  However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to admit to herself that Mr. Mudge’s removal to a higher sphere—to a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood—would have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it.  He had at any rate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday.  During the three months of his happy survival at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean.  Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present, h’s had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future.  She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once.  They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.

She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an office quite similar—she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a bigger—under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, “hourly,” and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on their two rooms alone nearly three shillings.  It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn’t wear as things had worn, the worries of the early times of their great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s—the last of whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious and incredulous ladies, suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had rebounded.  Her mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down, making, in respect of caps, topics and “habits,” no effort whatever—which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.

CHAPTER II

It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding.  She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book—a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day.  This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life.  It had something to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found, not to forget.  The girl was blasée; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to “care,” odd caprices of curiosity.  She had a friend who had invented a new career for women—that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the flowers.  Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion; “the flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes, as usual as the coals or the daily papers.  She took charge of them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the pampered to the widow of a clergyman.  The widow, on her side, dilating on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses—the way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole social position.  On its being asked of her then if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations, she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question.  “You’ve no imagination, my dear!”—that was because a door more than half open to the higher life couldn’t be called anything but a thin partition.  Mrs. Jordan’s imagination quite did away with the thickness.

Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it good-humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it.  It was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret supports that people didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn’t; even though Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and also the victim of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom she recognised an equal.  She was perfectly aware that her imaginative life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would have been ready, had it been at all worth while, to contend that, since her outward occupation didn’t kill it, it must be strong indeed.  Combinations of flowers and green-stuff, forsooth!  What she could handle freely, she said to herself, was combinations of men and women.  The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of her contact with the human herd; this was so constant, it had so the effect of cheapening her privilege, that there were long stretches in which inspiration, divination and interest quite dropped.  The great thing was the flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and neither to be counted on nor to be resisted.  Some one had only sometimes to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon her.  She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the moments that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did “get it.”

She had surrendered herself moreover of late to a certain expansion of her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted for by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there were more impressions to be gathered and really—for it came to that—more life to be led.  Definite at any rate it was that by the time May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost put forward for a policy of procrastination.  It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to plead such a motive, especially as the fascination of the place was after all a sort of torment.  But she liked her torment; it was a torment she should miss at Chalk Farm.  She was ingenious and uncandid, therefore, about leaving the breadth of London a little longer between herself and that austerity.  If she hadn’t quite the courage in short to say to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth any week the three shillings he desired to help her to save, she yet saw something happen in the course of the month that in her heart of hearts at least answered the subtle question.  This was connected precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.

CHAPTER III

She pushed in three bescribbled forms which the girl’s hand was quick to appropriate, Mr. Buckton having so frequent a perverse instinct for catching first any eye that promised the sort of entertainment with which she had her peculiar affinity.  The amusements of captives are full of a desperate contrivance, and one of our young friend’s ha’pennyworths had been the charming tale of “Picciola.”  It was of course the law of the place that they were never to take no notice, as Mr. Buckton said, whom they served; but this also never prevented, certainly on the same gentleman’s own part, what he was fond of describing as the underhand game.  Both her companions, for that matter, made no secret of the number of favourites they had among the ladies; sweet familiarities in spite of which she had repeatedly caught each of them in stupidities and mistakes, confusions of identity and lapses of observation that never failed to remind her how the cleverness of men ends where the cleverness of women begins.  “Marguerite, Regent Street.  Try on at six.  All Spanish lace.  Pearls.  The full length.”  That was the first; it had no signature.  “Lady Agnes Orme, Hyde Park Place.  Impossible to-night, dining Haddon.  Opera to-morrow, promised Fritz, but could do play Wednesday.  Will try Haddon for Savoy, and anything in the world you like, if you can get Gussy.  Sunday Montenero.  Sit Mason Monday, Tuesday.  Marguerite awful.  Cissy.”  That was the second.  The third, the girl noted when she took it, was on a foreign form: “Everard, Hôtel Brighton, Paris.  Only understand and believe.  22nd to 26th, and certainly 8th and 9th.  Perhaps others.  Come.  Mary.”

Mary was very handsome, the handsomest woman, she felt in a moment, she had ever seen—or perhaps it was only Cissy.  Perhaps it was both, for she had seen stranger things than that—ladies wiring to different persons under different names.  She had seen all sorts of things and pieced together all sorts of mysteries.  There had once been one—not long before—who, without winking, sent off five over five different signatures.  Perhaps these represented five different friends who had asked her—all women, just as perhaps now Mary and Cissy, or one or other of them, were wiring by deputy.  Sometimes she put in too much—too much of her own sense; sometimes she put in too little; and in either case this often came round to her afterwards, for she had an extraordinary way of keeping clues.  When she noticed she noticed; that was what it came to.  There were days and days, there were weeks sometimes, of vacancy.  This arose often from Mr. Buckton’s devilish and successful subterfuges for keeping her at the sounder whenever it looked as if anything might arouse; the sounder, which it was equally his business to mind, being the innermost cell of captivity, a cage within the cage, fenced oft from the rest by a frame of ground glass.  The counter-clerk would have played into her hands; but the counter-clerk was really reduced to idiocy by the effect of his passion for her.  She flattered herself moreover, nobly, that with the unpleasant conspicuity of this passion she would never have consented to be obliged to him.  The most she would ever do would be always to shove off on him whenever she could the registration of letters, a job she happened particularly to loathe.  After the long stupors, at all events, there almost always suddenly would come a sharp taste of something; it was in her mouth before she knew it; it was in her mouth now.

To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light of eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt consideration of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent habit and of the very essence of the innumerable things—her beauty, her birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors—that its possessor couldn’t have got rid of even had she wished.  How did our obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad moment?  How did she guess all sorts of impossible things, such as, almost on the very spot, the presence of drama at a critical stage and the nature of the tie with the gentleman at the Hôtel Brighton?  More than ever before it floated to her through the bars of the cage that this at last was the high reality, the bristling truth that she had hitherto only patched up and eked out—one of the creatures, in fine, in whom all the conditions for happiness actually met, and who, in the air they made, bloomed with an unwitting insolence.  What came home to the girl was the way the insolence was tempered by something that was equally a part of the distinguished life, the custom of a flowerlike bend to the less fortunate—a dropped fragrance, a mere quick breath, but which in fact pervaded and lingered.  The apparition was very young, but certainly married, and our fatigued friend had a sufficient store of mythological comparison to recognise the port of Juno.  Marguerite might be “awful,” but she knew how to dress a goddess.

Pearls and Spanish lace—she herself, with assurance, could see them, and the “full length” too, and also red velvet bows, which, disposed on the lace in a particular manner (she could have placed them with the turn of a hand) were of course to adorn the front of a black brocade that would be like a dress in a picture.  However, neither Marguerite nor Lady Agnes nor Haddon nor Fritz nor Gussy was what the wearer of this garment had really come in for.  She had come in for Everard—and that was doubtless not his true name either.  If our young lady had never taken such jumps before it was simply that she had never before been so affected.  She went all the way.  Mary and Cissy had been round together, in their single superb person, to see him—he must live round the corner; they had found that, in consequence of something they had come, precisely, to make up for or to have another scene about, he had gone off—gone off just on purpose to make them feel it; on which they had come together to Cocker’s as to the nearest place; where they had put in the three forms partly in order not to put in the one alone.  The two others in a manner, covered it, muffled it, passed it off.  Oh yes, she went all the way, and this was a specimen of how she often went.  She would know the hand again any time.  It was as handsome and as everything else as the woman herself.  The woman herself had, on learning his flight, pushed past Everard’s servant and into his room; she had written her missive at his table and with his pen.  All this, every inch of it, came in the waft that she blew through and left behind her, the influence that, as I have said, lingered.  And among the things the girl was sure of, happily, was that she should see her again.

CHAPTER IV

She saw her in fact, and only ten days later; but this time not alone, and that was exactly a part of the luck of it.  Not unaware—as how could her observation have left her so?—of the possibilities through which it could range, our young lady had ever since had in her mind a dozen conflicting theories about Everard’s type; as to which, the instant they came into the place, she felt the point settled with a thump that seemed somehow addressed straight to her heart.  That organ literally beat faster at the approach of the gentleman who was this time with Cissy, and who, as seen from within the cage, became on the spot the happiest of the happy circumstances with which her mind had invested the friend of Fritz and Gussy.  He was a very happy circumstance indeed as, with his cigarette in his lips and his broken familiar talk caught by his companion, he put down the half-dozen telegrams it would take them together several minutes to dispatch.  And here it occurred, oddly enough, that if, shortly before the girl’s interest in his companion had sharpened her sense for the messages then transmitted, her immediate vision of himself had the effect, while she counted his seventy words, of preventing intelligibility.  His words were mere numbers, they told her nothing whatever; and after he had gone she was in possession of no name, of no address, of no meaning, of nothing but a vague sweet sound and an immense impression.  He had been there but five minutes, he had smoked in her face, and, busy with his telegrams, with the tapping pencil and the conscious danger, the odious betrayal that would come from a mistake, she had had no wandering glances nor roundabout arts to spare.  Yet she had taken him in; she knew everything; she had made up her mind.

He had come back from Paris; everything was re-arranged; the pair were again shoulder to shoulder in their high encounter with life, their large and complicated game.  The fine soundless pulse of this game was in the air for our young woman while they remained in the shop.  While they remained?  They remained all day; their presence continued and abode with her, was in everything she did till nightfall, in the thousands of other words she counted, she transmitted, in all the stamps she detached and the letters she weighed and the change she gave, equally unconscious and unerring in each of these particulars, and not, as the run on the little office thickened with the afternoon hours, looking up at a single ugly face in the long sequence, nor really hearing the stupid questions that she patiently and perfectly answered.  All patience was possible now, all questions were stupid after his, all faces were ugly.  She had been sure she should see the lady again; and even now she should perhaps, she should probably, see her often.  But for him it was totally different; she should never never see him.  She wanted it too much.  There was a kind of wanting that helped—she had arrived, with her rich experience, at that generalisation; and there was another kind that was fatal.  It was this time the fatal kind; it would prevent.

Well, she saw him the very next day, and on this second occasion it was quite different; the sense of every syllable he paid for was fiercely distinct; she indeed felt her progressive pencil, dabbing as if with a quick caress the marks of his own, put life into every stroke.  He was there a long time—had not brought his forms filled out but worked them off in a nook on the counter; and there were other people as well—a changing pushing cluster, with every one to mind at once and endless right change to make and information to produce.  But she kept hold of him throughout; she continued, for herself, in a relation with him as close as that in which, behind the hated ground glass, Mr. Buckton luckily continued with the sounder.  This morning everything changed, but rather to dreariness; she had to swallow the rebuff to her theory about fatal desires, which she did without confusion and indeed with absolute levity; yet if it was now flagrant that he did live close at hand—at Park Chambers—and belonged supremely to the class that wired everything, even their expensive feelings (so that, as he never wrote, his correspondence cost him weekly pounds and pounds, and he might be in and out five times a day) there was, all the same, involved in the prospect, and by reason of its positive excess of light, a perverse melancholy, a gratuitous misery.  This was at once to give it a place in an order of feelings on which I shall presently touch.

Meanwhile, for a month, he was very constant.  Cissy, Mary, never re-appeared with him; he was always either alone or accompanied only by some gentleman who was lost in the blaze of his glory.  There was another sense, however—and indeed there was more than one—in which she mostly found herself counting in the splendid creature with whom she had originally connected him.  He addressed this correspondent neither as Mary nor as Cissy; but the girl was sure of whom it was, in Eaten Square, that he was perpetually wiring to—and all so irreproachably!—as Lady Bradeen.  Lady Bradeen was Cissy, Lady Bradeen was Mary, Lady Bradeen was the friend of Fritz and of Gussy, the customer of Marguerite, and the close ally in short (as was ideally right, only the girl had not yet found a descriptive term that was) of the most magnificent of men.  Nothing could equal the frequency and variety of his communications to her ladyship but their extraordinary, their abysmal propriety.  It was just the talk—so profuse sometimes that she wondered what was left for their real meetings—of the very happiest people.  Their real meetings must have been constant, for half of it was appointments and allusions, all swimming in a sea of other allusions still, tangled in a complexity of questions that gave a wondrous image of their life.  If Lady Bradeen was Juno it was all certainly Olympian.  If the girl, missing the answers, her ladyship’s own outpourings, vainly reflected that Cocker’s should have been one of the bigger offices where telegrams arrived as well as departed, there were yet ways in which, on the whole, she pressed the romance closer by reason of the very quantity of imagination it demanded and consumed.  The days and hours of this new friend, as she came to account him, were at all events unrolled, and however much more she might have known she would still have wished to go beyond.  In fact she did go beyond; she went quite far enough.

But she could none the less, even after a month, scarce have told if the gentlemen who came in with him recurred or changed; and this in spite of the fact that they too were always posting and wiring, smoking in her face and signing or not signing.  The gentlemen who came in with him were nothing when he was there.  They turned up alone at other times—then only perhaps with a dim richness of reference.  He himself, absent as well as present, was all.  He was very tall, very fair, and had, in spite of his thick preoccupations, a good-humour that was exquisite, particularly as it so often had the effect of keeping him on.  He could have reached over anybody, and anybody—no matter who—would have let him; but he was so extraordinarily kind that he quite pathetically waited, never waggling things at her out of his turn nor saying “Here!” with horrid sharpness.  He waited for pottering old ladies, for gaping slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp’s; and the thing in all this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was the possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a particular way appeal.  There were moments when he actually struck her as on her side, as arranging to help, to support, to spare her.