In the Cage

CHAPTER XIII

He never brought Cissy back, but Cissy came one day without him, as fresh as before from the hands of Marguerite, or only, at the season’s end, a trifle less fresh.  She was, however, distinctly less serene.  She had brought nothing with her and looked about with impatience for the forms and the place to write.  The latter convenience, at Cocker’s, was obscure and barely adequate, and her clear voice had the light note of disgust which her lover’s never showed as she responded with a “There?” of surprise to the gesture made by the counter-clerk in answer to her sharp question.  Our young friend was busy with half a dozen people, but she had dispatched them in her most businesslike manner by the time her ladyship flung through the bars this light of re-appearance.  Then the directness with which the girl managed to receive the accompanying missive was the result of the concentration that had caused her to make the stamps fly during the few minutes occupied by the production of it.  This concentration, in turn, may be described as the effect of the apprehension of imminent relief.  It was nineteen days, counted and checked off, since she had seen the object of her homage; and as, had he been in London, she should, with his habits, have been sure to see him often, she was now about to learn what other spot his presence might just then happen to sanctify.  For she thought of them, the other spots, as ecstatically conscious of it, expressively happy in it.

But, gracious, how handsome was her ladyship, and what an added price it gave him that the air of intimacy he threw out should have flowed originally from such a source!  The girl looked straight through the cage at the eyes and lips that must so often have been so near as own—looked at them with a strange passion that for an instant had the result of filling out some of the gaps, supplying the missing answers, in his correspondence.  Then as she made out that the features she thus scanned and associated were totally unaware of it, that they glowed only with the colour of quite other and not at all guessable thoughts, this directly added to their splendour, gave the girl the sharpest impression she had yet received of the uplifted, the unattainable plains of heaven, and yet at the same time caused her to thrill with a sense of the high company she did somehow keep.  She was with the absent through her ladyship and with her ladyship through the absent.  The only pang—but it didn’t matter—was the proof in the admirable face, in the sightless preoccupation of its possessor, that the latter hadn’t a notion of her.  Her folly had gone to the point of half believing that the other party to the affair must sometimes mention in Eaton Square the extraordinary little person at the place from which he so often wired.  Yet the perception of her visitor’s blankness actually helped this extraordinary little person, the next instant, to take refuge in a reflexion that could be as proud as it liked.  “How little she knows, how little she knows!” the girl cried to herself; for what did that show after all but that Captain Everard’s telegraphic confidant was Captain Everard’s charming secret?  Our young friend’s perusal of her ladyship’s telegram was literally prolonged by a momentary daze: what swam between her and the words, making her see them as through rippled shallow sunshot water, was the great, the perpetual flood of “How much I know—how much I know!”  This produced a delay in her catching that, on the face, these words didn’t give her what she wanted, though she was prompt enough with her remembrance that her grasp was, half the time, just of what was not on the face.  “Miss Dolman, Parade Lodge, Parade Terrace, Dover.  Let him instantly know right one, Hôtel de France, Ostend.  Make it seven nine four nine six one.  Wire me alternative Burfield’s.”

The girl slowly counted.  Then he was at Ostend.  This hooked on with so sharp a click that, not to feel she was as quickly letting it all slip from her, she had absolutely to hold it a minute longer and to do something to that end.  Thus it was that she did on this occasion what she never did—threw off a “Reply paid?” that sounded officious, but that she partly made up for by deliberately affixing the stamps and by waiting till she had done so to give change.  She had, for so much coolness, the strength that she considered she knew all about Miss Dolman.

“Yes—paid.”  She saw all sorts of things in this reply, even to a small suppressed start of surprise at so correct an assumption; even to an attempt the next minute at a fresh air of detachment.  “How much, with the answer?”  The calculation was not abstruse, but our intense observer required a moment more to make it, and this gave her ladyship time for a second thought.  “Oh just wait!”  The white begemmed hand bared to write rose in sudden nervousness to the side of the wonderful face which, with eyes of anxiety for the paper on the counter, she brought closer to the bars of the cage.  “I think I must alter a word!”  On this she recovered her telegram and looked over it again; but she had a new, an obvious trouble, and studied it without deciding and with much of the effect of making our young woman watch her.

This personage, meanwhile, at the sight of her expression, had decided on the spot.  If she had always been sure they were in danger her ladyship’s expression was the best possible sign of it.  There was a word wrong, but she had lost the right one, and much clearly depended on her finding it again.  The girl, therefore, sufficiently estimating the affluence of customers and the distraction of Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk, took the jump and gave it.  “Isn’t it Cooper’s?”

It was as if she had bodily leaped—cleared the top of the cage and alighted on her interlocutress.  “Cooper’s?”—the stare was heightened by a blush.  Yes, she had made Juno blush.

This was all the greater reason for going on.  “I mean instead of Burfield’s.”

Our young friend fairly pitied her; she had made her in an instant so helpless, and yet not a bit haughty nor outraged.  She was only mystified and scared.  “Oh, you know—?”

“Yes, I know!”  Our young friend smiled, meeting the other’s eyes, and, having made Juno blush, proceeded to patronise her.  “I’ll do it”—she put out a competent hand.  Her ladyship only submitted, confused and bewildered, all presence of mind quite gone; and the next moment the telegram was in the cage again and its author out of the shop.  Then quickly, boldly, under all the eyes that might have witnessed her tampering, the extraordinary little person at Cocker’s made the proper change.  People were really too giddy, and if they were, in a certain case, to be caught, it shouldn’t be the fault of her own grand memory.  Hadn’t it been settled weeks before?—for Miss Dolman it was always to be “Cooper’s.”

CHAPTER XIV

But the summer “holidays” brought a marked difference; they were holidays for almost every one but the animals in the cage.  The August days were flat and dry, and, with so little to feed it, she was conscious of the ebb of her interest in the secrets of the refined.  She was in a position to follow the refined to the extent of knowing—they had made so many of their arrangements with her aid—exactly where they were; yet she felt quite as if the panorama had ceased unrolling and the band stopped playing.  A stray member of the latter occasionally turned up, but the communications that passed before her bore now largely on rooms at hotels, prices of furnished houses, hours of trains, dates of sailings and arrangements for being “met”; she found them for the most part prosaic and coarse.  The only thing was that they brought into her stuffy corner as straight a whiff of Alpine meadows and Scotch moors as she might hope ever to inhale; there were moreover in especial fat hot dull ladies who had out with her, to exasperation, the terms for seaside lodgings, which struck her as huge, and the matter of the number of beds required, which was not less portentous: this in reference to places of which the names—Eastbourne, Folkestone, Cromer, Scarborough, Whitby—tormented her with something of the sound of the plash of water that haunts the traveller in the desert.  She had not been out of London for a dozen years, and the only thing to give a taste to the present dead weeks was the spice of a chronic resentment.  The sparse customers, the people she did see, were the people who were “just off”—off on the decks of fluttered yachts, off to the uttermost point of rocky headlands where the very breeze was then playing for the want of which she said to herself that she sickened.

There was accordingly a sense in which, at such a period, the great differences of the human condition could press upon her more than ever; a circumstance drawing fresh force in truth from the very fact of the chance that at last, for a change, did squarely meet her—the chance to be “off,” for a bit, almost as far as anybody.  They took their turns in the cage as they took them both in the shop and at Chalk Farm; she had known these two months that time was to be allowed in September—no less than eleven days—for her personal private holiday.  Much of her recent intercourse with Mr. Mudge had consisted of the hopes and fears, expressed mainly by himself, involved in the question of their getting the same dates—a question that, in proportion as the delight seemed assured, spread into a sea of speculation over the choice of where and how.  All through July, on the Sunday evenings and at such other odd times as he could seize, he had flooded their talk with wild waves of calculation.  It was practically settled that, with her mother, somewhere “on the south coast” (a phrase of which she liked the sound) they should put in their allowance together; but she already felt the prospect quite weary and worn with the way he went round and round on it.  It had become his sole topic, the theme alike of his most solemn prudences and most placid jests, to which every opening led for return and revision and in which every little flower of a foretaste was pulled up as soon as planted.  He had announced at the earliest day—characterising the whole business, from that moment, as their “plans,” under which name he handled it as a Syndicate handles a Chinese or other Loan—he had promptly declared that the question must be thoroughly studied, and he produced, on the whole subject, from day to day, an amount of information that excited her wonder and even, not a little, as she frankly let him know, her disdain.  When she thought of the danger in which another pair of lovers rapturously lived she enquired of him anew why he could leave nothing to chance.  Then she got for answer that this profundity was just his pride, and he pitted Ramsgate against Bournemouth and even Boulogne against Jersey—for he had great ideas—with all the mastery of detail that was some day, professionally, to carry him afar.

The longer the time since she had seen Captain Everard the more she was booked, as she called it, to pass Park Chambers; and this was the sole amusement that in the lingering August days and the twilights sadly drawn out it was left her to cultivate.  She had long since learned to know it for a feeble one, though its feebleness was perhaps scarce the reason for her saying to herself each evening as her time for departure approached: “No, no—not to-night.”  She never failed of that silent remark, any more than she failed of feeling, in some deeper place than she had even yet fully sounded, that one’s remarks were as weak as straws and that, however one might indulge in them at eight o’clock, one’s fate infallibly declared itself in absolute indifference to them at about eight-fifteen.  Remarks were remarks, and very well for that; but fate was fate, and this young lady’s was to pass Park Chambers every night in the working week.  Out of the immensity of her knowledge of the life of the world there bloomed on these occasions as specific remembrance that it was regarded in that region, in August and September, as rather pleasant just to be caught for something or other in passing through town.  Somebody was always passing and somebody might catch somebody else.  It was in full cognisance of this subtle law that she adhered to the most ridiculous circuit she could have made to get home.  One warm dull featureless Friday, when an accident had made her start from Cocker’s a little later than usual, she became aware that something of which the infinite possibilities had for so long peopled her dreams was at last prodigiously upon her, though the perfection in which the conditions happened to present it was almost rich enough to be but the positive creation of a dream.  She saw, straight before her, like a vista painted in a picture, the empty street and the lamps that burned pale in the dusk not yet established.  It was into the convenience of this quiet twilight that a gentleman on the doorstep of the Chambers gazed with a vagueness that our young lady’s little figure violently trembled, in the approach, with the measure of its power to dissipate.  Everything indeed grew in a flash terrific and distinct; her old uncertainties fell away from her, and, since she was so familiar with fate, she felt as if the very nail that fixed it were driven in by the hard look with which, for a moment, Captain Everard awaited her.

The vestibule was open behind him and the porter as absent as on the day she had peeped in; he had just come out—was in town, in a tweed suit and a pot hat, but between two journeys—duly bored over his evening and at a loss what to do with it.  Then it was that she was glad she had never met him in that way before: she reaped with such ecstasy the benefit of his not being able to think she passed often.  She jumped in two seconds to the determination that he should even suppose it to be the very first time and the very oddest chance: this was while she still wondered if he would identify or notice her.  His original attention had not, she instinctively knew, been for the young woman at Cocker’s; it had only been for any young woman who might advance to the tune of her not troubling the quiet air, and in fact the poetic hour, with ugliness.  Ah but then, and just as she had reached the door, came his second observation, a long light reach with which, visibly and quite amusedly, he recalled and placed her.  They were on different sides, but the street, narrow and still, had only made more of a stage for the small momentary drama.  It was not over, besides, it was far from over, even on his sending across the way, with the pleasantest laugh she had ever heard, a little lift of his hat and an “Oh good evening!”  It was still less over on their meeting, the next minute, though rather indirectly and awkwardly, in the middle, of the road—a situation to which three or four steps of her own had unmistakeably contributed—and then passing not again to the side on which she had arrived, but back toward the portal of Park Chambers.

“I didn’t know you at first.  Are you taking a walk?”

“Ah I don’t take walks at night!  I’m going home after my work.”

“Oh!”

That was practically what they had meanwhile smiled out, and his exclamation to which for a minute he appeared to have nothing to add, left them face to face and in just such an attitude as, for his part, he might have worn had he been wondering if he could properly ask her to come in.  During this interval in fact she really felt his question to be just “How properly—?”  It was simply a question of the degree of properness.

CHAPTER XV

She never knew afterwards quite what she had done to settle it, and at the time she only knew that they presently moved, with vagueness, yet with continuity, away from the picture of the lighted vestibule and the quiet stairs and well up the street together.  This also must have been in the absence of a definite permission, of anything vulgarly articulate, for that matter, on the part of either; and it was to be, later on, a thing of remembrance and reflexion for her that the limit of what just here for a longish minute passed between them was his taking in her thoroughly successful deprecation, though conveyed without pride or sound or touch, of the idea that she might be, out of the cage, the very shop-girl at large that she hugged the theory she wasn’t.  Yes, it was strange, she afterwards thought, that so much could have come and gone and yet not disfigured the dear little intense crisis either with impertinence or with resentment, with any of the horrid notes of that kind of acquaintance.  He had taken no liberty, as she would have so called it; and, through not having to betray the sense of one, she herself had, still more charmingly, taken none.  On the spot, nevertheless, she could speculate as to what it meant that, if his relation with Lady Bradeen continued to be what her mind had built it up to, he should feel free to proceed with marked independence.  This was one of the questions he was to leave her to deal with—the question whether people of his sort still asked girls up to their rooms when they were so awfully in love with other women.  Could people of his sort do that without what people of her sort would call being “false to their love”?  She had already a vision of how the true answer was that people of her sort didn’t, in such cases, matter—didn’t count as infidelity, counted only as something else: she might have been curious, since it came to that, to see exactly what.

Strolling together slowly in their summer twilight and their empty corner of Mayfair, they found themselves emerge at last opposite to one of the smaller gates of the Park; upon which, without any particular word about it—they were talking so of other things—they crossed the street and went in and sat down on a bench.  She had gathered by this time one magnificent hope about him—the hope he would say nothing vulgar.  She knew thoroughly what she meant by that; she meant something quite apart from any matter of his being “false.”  Their bench was not far within; it was near the Park Lane paling and the patchy lamplight and the rumbling cabs and ‘buses.  A strange emotion had come to her, and she felt indeed excitement within excitement; above all a conscious joy in testing him with chances he didn’t take.  She had an intense desire he should know the type she really conformed to without her doing anything so low as tell him, and he had surely begun to know it from the moment he didn’t seize the opportunities into which a common man would promptly have blundered.  These were on the mere awkward surface, and their relation was beautiful behind and below them.  She had questioned so little on the way what they might be doing that as soon as they were seated she took straight hold of it.  Her hours, her confinement, the many conditions of service in the post-office, had—with a glance at his own postal resources and alternatives—formed, up to this stage, the subject of their talk.  “Well, here we are, and it may be right enough; but this isn’t the least, you know, where I was going.”

“You were going home?”

“Yes, and I was already rather late.  I was going to my supper.”

“You haven’t had it?”

“No indeed!”

“Then you haven’t eaten—?”

He looked of a sudden so extravagantly concerned that she laughed out.  “All day?  Yes, we do feed once.  But that was long ago.  So I must presently say good-bye.”

“Oh deary me!” he exclaimed with an intonation so droll and yet a touch so light and a distress so marked—a confession of helplessness for such a case, in short, so unrelieved—that she at once felt sure she had made the great difference plain.  He looked at her with the kindest eyes and still without saying what she had known he wouldn’t.  She had known he wouldn’t say “Then sup with me!” but the proof of it made her feel as if she had feasted.

“I’m not a bit hungry,” she went on.

“Ah you must be, awfully!” he made answer, but settling himself on the bench as if, after all, that needn’t interfere with his spending his evening.  “I’ve always quite wanted the chance to thank you for the trouble you so often take for me.”

“Yes, I know,” she replied; uttering the words with a sense of the situation far deeper than any pretence of not fitting his allusion.  She immediately felt him surprised and even a little puzzled at her frank assent; but for herself the trouble she had taken could only, in these fleeting minutes—they would probably never come back—be all there like a little hoard of gold in her lap.  Certainly he might look at it, handle it, take up the pieces.  Yet if he understood anything he must understand all.  “I consider you’ve already immensely thanked me.”  The horror was back upon her of having seemed to hang about for some reward.  “It’s awfully odd you should have been there just the one time—!”

“The one time you’ve passed my place?”

“Yes; you can fancy I haven’t many minutes to waste.  There was a place to-night I had to stop at.”

“I see, I see—” he knew already so much about her work.  “It must be an awful grind—for a lady.”