In the Cage

CHAPTER XX

It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard again, and on that occasion—the only one of all the series on which hindrance had been so utter—no communication with him proved possible.  She had made out even from the cage that it was a charming golden day: a patch of hazy autumn sunlight lay across the sanded floor and also, higher up, quickened into brightness a row of ruddy bottled syrups.  Work was slack and the place in general empty; the town, as they said in the cage, had not waked up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to something than in happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint Martin’s summer.  The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner; she herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of which she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.

He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she saw him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness.  It was a confession of awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he knew he ought better to have kept his head, ought to have been clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till he should have found her free.  Mr. Buckton was a long time with him, and her attention was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed between them but the fulness of their silence.  The look she took from him was his greeting, and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent her before going out.  The only token they exchanged therefore was his tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn’t attempt a certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all.  This was her intense preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when that was the sole solution.

Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants struck her as marking a step: they were built so—just in the mere flash—on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was she would do for him.  The “anything, anything” she had uttered in the Park went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china that interposed.  It had all at last even put on the air of their not needing now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former little postal make-believes, the intense implications of questions and answers and change, had become in the light of the personal fact, of their having had their moment, a possibility comparatively poor.  It was as if they had met for all time—it exerted on their being in presence again an influence so prodigious.  When she watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk away from him as if she were making an end, she found something too pitiful in the primness of such a gait.  Hadn’t she precisely established on the part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?

It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an irritation, after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton, who, on her friend’s withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to the sounder and left her the other work.  She knew indeed she should have a chance to see them, when she would, on file; and she was divided, as the day went on, between the two impressions of all that was lost and all that was re-asserted.  What beset her above all, and as she had almost never known it before, was the desire to bound straight out, to overtake the autumn afternoon before it passed away for ever and hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with him there again on a bench.  It became for an hour a fantastic vision with her that he might just have gone to sit and wait for her.  She could almost hear him, through the tick of the sounder, scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves of October.  Why should such a vision seize her at this particular moment with such a shake?  There was a time—from four to five—when she could have cried with happiness and rage.

Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake up; she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with little sharp stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal-orders fairly snap while she breathed to herself “It’s the last day—the last day!”  The last day of what?  She couldn’t have told.  All she knew now was that if she were out of the cage she wouldn’t in the least have minded, this time, its not yet being dark.  She would have gone straight toward Park Chambers and have hung about there till no matter when.  She would have waited, stayed, rung, asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs.  What the day was the last of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the group of golden ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine slant at that angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for his wishing still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park scarcely let him bring out.  “See here—see here!”—the sound of these two words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew.  What was it they then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see?  She seemed, whatever it was, perfectly to see it now—to see that if she should just chuck the whole thing, should have a great and beautiful courage, he would somehow make everything up to her.  When the clock struck five she was on the very point of saying to Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill and rapidly getting worse.  This announcement was on her lips, and she had quite composed the pale hard face she would offer him: “I can’t stop—I must go home.  If I feel better, later on, I’ll come back.  I’m very sorry, but I must go.”  At that instant Captain Everard once more stood there, producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence, the strangest, quickest revolution.  He stopped her off without knowing it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt herself saved.

That was from the first minute how she thought of it.  There were again other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the situation could only be expressed by their silence.  It was expressed, of a truth, in a larger phrase than ever yet, for her eyes now spoke to him with a kind of supplication.  “Be quiet, be quiet!” they pleaded; and they saw his own reply: “I’ll do whatever you say; I won’t even look at you—see, see!”  They kept conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that they wouldn’t look, quite positively wouldn’t.  What she was to see was that he hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton’s end, and surrendered himself again to that frustration.  It quickly proved so great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned away before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking, looking about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker’s own counter and appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or three orders and put down money, stood there a long time with his back to her, considerately abstaining from any glance round to see if she were free.  It at last came to pass in this way that he had remained in the shop longer than she had ever yet known to do, and that, nevertheless, when he did turn about she could see him time himself—she was freshly taken up—and cross straight to her postal subordinate, whom some one else had released.  He had in his hand all this while neither letters nor telegrams, and now that he was close to her—for she was close to the counter-clerk—it brought her heart into her mouth merely to see him look at her neighbour and open his lips.  She was too nervous to bear it.  He asked for a Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a new one; whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to consult one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced, he once more wandered off.

What was he doing to her?  What did he want of her?  Well, it was just the aggravation of his “See here!”  She felt at this moment strangely and portentously afraid of him—had in her ears the hum of a sense that, should it come to that kind of tension, she must fly on the spot to Chalk Farm.  Mixed with her dread and with her reflexion was the idea that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed to show, it might be after all simply to do for him the “anything” she had promised, the “everything” she had thought it so fine to bring out to Mr. Mudge.  He might want her to help him, might have some particular appeal; though indeed his manner didn’t denote that—denoted on the contrary an embarrassment, an indecision, something of a desire not so much to be helped as to be treated rather more nicely than she had treated him the other time.  Yes, he considered quite probably that he had help rather to offer than to ask for.  Still, none the less, when he again saw her free he continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his thumbed Guide it was Mr. Buckton he caught—it was from Mr. Buckton he obtained half-a-crown’s-worth of stamps.

After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought, for a postal-order for ten shillings.  What did he want with so many stamps when he wrote so few letters?  How could he enclose a postal-order in a telegram?  She expected him, the next thing, to go into the corner and make up one of his telegrams—half a dozen of them—on purpose to prolong his presence.  She had so completely stopped looking at him that she could only guess his movements—guess even where his eyes rested.  Finally she saw him make a dash that might have been toward the nook where the forms were hung; and at this she suddenly felt that she couldn’t keep it up.  The counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a slavey, and, to give herself something to cover her, she snatched it out of his hand.  The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return an odd look, and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it.  The latter personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to wonder whether his snatching it in his turn mightn’t be the thing she would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism by the frankest glare she had ever given him.  It sufficed: this time it paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of the sounder.

CHAPTER XXI

It was repeated the next day; it went on for three days; and at the end of that time she knew what to think.  When, at the beginning, she had emerged from her temporary shelter Captain Everard had quitted the shop; and he had not come again that evening, as it had struck her he possibly might—might all the more easily that there were numberless persons who came, morning and afternoon, numberless times, so that he wouldn’t necessarily have attracted attention.  The second day it was different and yet on the whole worse.  His access to her had become possible—she felt herself even reaping the fruit of her yesterday’s glare at Mr. Buckton; but transacting his business with him didn’t simplify—it could, in spite of the rigour of circumstance, feed so her new conviction.  The rigour was tremendous, and his telegrams—not now mere pretexts for getting at her—were apparently genuine; yet the conviction had taken but a night to develop.  It could be simply enough expressed; she had had the glimmer of it the day before in her idea that he needed no more help than she had already given; that it was help he himself was prepared to render.  He had come up to town but for three or four days; he had been absolutely obliged to be absent after the other time; yet he would, now that he was face to face with her, stay on as much longer as she liked.  Little by little it was thus clarified, though from the first flash of his re-appearance she had read into it the real essence.

That was what the night before, at eight o’clock, her hour to go, had made her hang back and dawdle.  She did last things or pretended to do them; to be in the cage had suddenly become her safety, and she was literally afraid of the alternate self who might be waiting outside.  He might be waiting; it was he who was her alternate self, and of him she was afraid.  The most extraordinary change had taken place in her from the moment of her catching the impression he seemed to have returned on purpose to give her.  Just before she had done so, on that bewitched afternoon, she had seen herself approach without a scruple the porter at Park Chambers; then as the effect of the rush of a consciousness quite altered she had on at last quitting Cocker’s, gone straight home for the first time since her return from Bournemouth.  She had passed his door every night for weeks, but nothing would have induced her to pass it now.  This change was the tribute of her fear—the result of a change in himself as to which she needed no more explanation than his mere face vividly gave her; strange though it was to find an element of deterrence in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in the world.  He had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to propose to her to sup; but he had put away the lesson by this time—he practically proposed supper every time he looked at her.  This was what, for that matter, mainly filled the three days.  He came in twice on each of these, and it was as if he came in to give her a chance to relent.  That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that he did.  There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her, and other particular ways as to which she meant that her silence should be full to him of exquisite pleading.  The most particular of all was his not being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the night.  This he might so easily have been—so easily if he hadn’t been so nice.  She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her dumb supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the harmless freedom of being able to appear to say: “Yes, I’m in town only for three or four days, but, you know, I would stay on.”  He struck her as calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he exaggerated to the point of putting it that there were only two days more, that there was at last, dreadfully, only one.

There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special intention; as to the most marked of which—unless indeed it were the most obscure—she might well have marvelled that it didn’t seem to her more horrid.  It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting down redundant money—sovereigns not concerned with the little payments he was perpetually making—so that she might give him some sign of helping him to slip them over to her.  What was most extraordinary in this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some incoherence, she found for him.  He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her for.  He wanted to offer her things he knew she wouldn’t take.  He wanted to show her how much he respected her by giving her the supreme chance to show him she was respectable.  Over the dryest transactions, at any rate, their eyes had out these questions.  On the third day he put in a telegram that had evidently something of the same point as the stray sovereigns—a message that was in the first place concocted and that on a second thought he took back from her before she had stamped it.  He had given her time to read it and had only then bethought himself that he had better not send it.  If it was not to Lady Bradeen at Twindle—where she knew her ladyship then to be—this was because an address to Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood was just as good, with the added merit of its not giving away quite so much a person whom he had still, after all, in a manner to consider.  It was of course most complicated, only half lighted; but there was, discernibly enough, a scheme of communication in which Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Dr. Buzzard at Brickwood were, within limits, one and the same person.  The words he had shown her and then taken back consisted, at all events, of the brief but vivid phrase “Absolutely impossible.”  The point was not that she should transmit it; the point was just that she should see it.  What was absolutely impossible was that before he had setted something at Cocker’s he should go either to Twindle or to Brickwood.

The logic of this, in turn, for herself, was that she could lend herself to no settlement so long as she so intensely knew.  What she knew was that he was, almost under peril of life, clenched in a situation: therefore how could she also know where a poor girl in the P.O. might really stand?  It was more and more between them that if he might convey to her he was free, with all the impossible locked away into a closed chapter, her own case might become different for her, she might understand and meet him and listen.  But he could convey nothing of the sort, and he only fidgeted and floundered in his want of power.  The chapter wasn’t in the least closed, not for the other party; and the other party had a pull, somehow and somewhere: this his whole attitude and expression confessed, at the same time that they entreated her not to remember and not to mind.  So long as she did remember and did mind he could only circle about and go and come, doing futile things of which he was ashamed.  He was ashamed of his two words to Dr. Buzzard; he went out of the shop as soon as he had crumpled up the paper again and thrust it into his pocket.  It had been an abject little exposure of dreadful impossible passion.  He appeared in fact to be too ashamed to come back.  He had once more left town, and a first week elapsed, and a second.  He had had naturally to return to the real mistress of his fate; she had insisted—she knew how to insist, and he couldn’t put in another hour.  There was always a day when she called time.  It was known to our young friend moreover that he had now been dispatching telegrams from other offices.  She knew at last so much that she had quite lost her earlier sense of merely guessing.  There were no different shades of distinctness—it all bounced out.