Bennett Arnold
Lilian
VI
The Telephone
"Hello, hello! Who is it?"
"Is that Regent 1067?"
"Yes."
"Is that Lord Mackworth?"
"Speaking. Who is it?"
"Grig's Typewriting Office. I'm so sorry to wake you up, but you asked us to. It's just past six o'clock."
"Thanks very much. Who is it speaking?"
"Grig's Typewriting Office."
"Yes. But your name? Miss-Miss-?"
"Oh! I see. Share. Share. Lilian Share… Not Spare, S-h-a-r-e."
"I've got it. Share. I recognized your voice, Miss Share. Well, it's most extraordinarily good-natured of you. Most. I can't thank you enough. Excuse me asking your name. I only wanted it so that I could thank you personally. Article finished?"
"It's all finished and ready to be delivered. It'll be dropped into your letter-box in about a quarter of an hour from now. You can rely on that."
"Then do you keep messengers hanging about all night for these jobs?"
"I'm going to deliver it myself; then I shall know it is delivered."
"D'you know, I half suspected all along you meant to do that. You oughtn't really to put yourself to so much trouble. I don't know how to thank you. I don't, really!"
"It's no trouble at all. It's on my way home."
"You're just going home, then? You must be very tired."
"Oh, no! I sleep in the daytime."
"Well, I hope you'll have a good day's rest." A laugh.
"And I hope now I've wakened you you won't turn over and go to sleep again." Another laugh, from the same end.
"No fear! I'm up now."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I'm up. Out of bed." A laugh from the Clifford Street end.
"Good-bye, then."
"Good-bye. And thanks again. By the way, you're putting the bill with it?"
"Oh, yes."
"And the carbon?"
"Yes. Good-bye."
"Good-bye, Miss Share."
Lilian hung up the receiver, smiling. And she continued to smile as she left the room and went to her own room and took her street things out of the cupboard and put them on. Nothing could have been more banal, more ordinary, and nothing more exquisite and romantic than the telephone conversation. The secret charm of it was inexplicable to her… She saw him standing in the blue-and-crimson pyjamas by the bedside, a form distinguished and powerful… She revelled in his gratitude. How nice of him to ask her name so that he might thank her personally! He did not care to thank a nameless employee. He wanted to thank somebody. And now she was somebody to him.
Perhaps she had not been well-advised to give him her Christian name. The word, however, had come out of itself. Moreover, she liked her Christian name, and she liked nice people to know it. She certainly ought not to have said "that" about his not turning over and going to sleep again. No. There was something "common" in it. But he had accepted the freedom in the right spirit, had not taken advantage of it.
She extinguished the gas-stove, restored the stolen typewriter, loosed the catch of the outer door, banged the door after her, and descended, holding the foolscap envelope in her shabbily-gloved hand. The forsaken solitude of the office was behind her.
Outside, an icy mist floated over wet pavements in the first dim, sinister unveiling of the London day! Lilian wore a thick, broad, woollen scarf which comforted her neck and bosom, and gave to beholders the absurd illusion that she was snugly enveloped; but the assaulting cold took her in the waist, and she shivered. Her feet began to feel damp immediately. There was the old watchman peeping out of his sentry-box by his glowing brazier! He recognized her quickly enough, and without a movement of the gnarled face held up her matchbox as a sign of the bond between them. How ridiculous to have classed him with burglars! She threw her head back and gave him a proud, bright and rather condescendingly gracious smile.
Along Clifford Street and all down Bond Street the heaped dustbins stood on the kerb waiting for the scavengers. In Piccadilly several Lyons' horse-vans, painted in Oxford and Cambridge blues, trotted sturdily eastwards; one of them was driven by a woman, wrapped in a great macintosh and perched high aloft with a boy beside her. Nothing else moving in the thoroughfare! The Ritz Hotel, formidable fortress of luxury, stood up arrogant like a Florentine palace, hiding all its costly secrets from the scorned mob. No. 6a Jermyn Street was just round the corner from St. James's Street: a narrow seven-storey building of flats, with a front-door as impassive and meaningless as the face of a footman. Lilian hesitated a moment and relinquished her packet into the brass-bordered letter-slit. She heard it fall. She turned away with a jerky gesture. She had not walked ten yards when a frightful lassitude and dejection attacked her with the suddenness of cholera. Scarcely could she command her limbs to move. The ineffable sadness, hopelessness, wretchedness, vanity of existence washed over her and beat her down. Only a very few could be glorious, and she was not and never could be of the few. She was shut out from brightness, – no better than a ragamuffin looking into a candy window.
She descended into the everlasting lamplit night of the Tube at Dover Street, where there was no dawn and no sunset. And all the employees, and all the meek, preoccupied travellers seemed to be her brothers and sisters in martyrdom. Her train was nearly empty; but the eastbound trains-train after train-were full of pathetic midgets urgently engaged upon the problem of making both ends meet. After Earl's Court the train ran up an incline into the whitening day. She got out at the next station, conveniently near to which she lodged.
The house was one of the heavily porched erections of the 'fifties and 'sixties, much fallen in prestige. The dirty kitchenmaid was giving the stone floor of the porch a lick and a promise, so that fortunately the front door stood open. Lilian had the tiny mean bedroom on the second floor over the hall; in New York it would have been termed a hall-bedroom. Nobody except the gawky, frowsy, stupid, good-natured maid had seen her. She shut her door and locked it. The room was colder even than the street. She looked into the mirror, which was so small that she had had to arrange a descending series of nails for it in order that piece by piece she might inspect the whole of herself. Her face was as pale as a corpse. Undressing and piling half her wardrobe on to the counterpane she slipped into the narrow bed, ravenous for sleep and oblivion, and drew the clothes right over her head. In an instant she was in a paradise of divine dreams.
PART II
I
The Suicide
The next morning Lilian left her lodging at the customary hour of 8.15, to join one of the hundreds of hastening, struggling, preoccupied processions of workers that converged upon central London. She had slept for ten hours without a break on the previous day, risen hungry to a confused and far too farinaceous tea, done some dressmaking by the warmth of an oil-stove, and gone to bed again for another enormous period of heavy slumber. She was well refreshed; her complexion was restored to its marvellous perfectness; and life seemed simpler, more promising, and more agreeably exciting than usual.
She had convinced herself that the Irish lord would call at the office in person to pay his bill; the mysterious and yet thoroughly understood code that governs certain human relations would forbid him either to post a cheque or to send his man with the money. Her only fear was that he might already have called. But even if he had already called, he would call and call again, on one good pretext or another, until … Anyhow they would meet… And so on, according to the inconsequent logic of day-dreams in the everlasting night of the Tube.
The dreamer had a seat in the train-one of the advantages of living near the terminus-but strap-hangers of both sexes swayed in clusters over her, and along the whole length of the car, and both the platforms were too densely populated. She could not read; nobody could read. As the train roared and shook through Down Street station, she jumped up to fight her way through straphangers towards the platform, in readiness to descend at Dover Street. On these early trains carrying serious people, if you sat quiet until the train came to your station you would assuredly be swept on to the next station. These trains taught you to meet the future half-way.
As it happened the train stopped about a hundred yards short of Dover Street, and would not move on. Seconds and minutes passed, and the stoppage became undeniably a breakdown. The tunnels under the earth from Dover Street back to Hammersmith were full of stopped trains a few hundred yards apart, and every train was full of serious people who positively had to be at a certain place at a certain time. Lilian's mood changed; the mood of the car changed, and of the train and of all the trains. No one knew anything; no one could do anything; the trains were each a prison. The railway company by its officials maintained a masterly silence as to the origin of the vast inconvenience and calamity. Rumours were born by spontaneous generation. A man within Lilian's hearing, hitherto one of God's quite minor achievements, was suddenly gifted with divination and announced that the electricians at the power station in Lots Road had gone on strike without notice and every electric train in London had been paralysed. Half an hour elapsed. The prisoners, made desperate by the prospect of the fate which attended them, spoke of revolution and homicide, well aware that they were just as capable of these things as a flock of sheep. Then, as inexplicably as it had stopped, the train started.
Two minutes later Lilian, with some scores of other girls, was running madly through Dover Street in vain pursuit of time lost and vanished. Not a soul had guessed the cause of the disaster, which, according to the evening papers, was due to an old, unhappy man who had wandered unobserved into the tunnel from Dover Street station with the ambition to discover for himself what the next world was like. This ambition had been gratified.
As Lilian, in a state of nervous exhaustion, flew on tired wings up the office stairs she of course had to compose herself into a semblance of bright, virginal freshness for the day's work, conformably with the employer's theory that until he reaches the office the employee has done and suffered nothing whatever. And Miss Grig was crossing the ante-room at the moment of Lilian's entry.
"You're twenty-five minutes late, Miss Share," said Miss Grig coldly. She looked very ill.
"So sorry, Miss Grig," Lilian answered with unprotesting humility, and offered no explanation.
Useless to explain! Useless to assert innocence and victimization! Excuses founded on the vagaries of trains were unacceptable in that office, as in thousands of offices. Employers refused to take the least interest in trains or other means of conveyance. One of the girls in the room called "the large room" had once told Lilian that, living at Ilford, she would leave home on foggy mornings at six o'clock in order to be sure of a prompt arrival in Clifford Street at nine o'clock, thus allowing three hours for little more than a dozen miles. But only in the book of doomsday was this detail entered to her credit. Miss Grig, even if she had heard of it-which she had not-would have dismissed it as of no importance. Yet Miss Grig was a just woman.
"Come into my room, Miss Share, will you, please?" said Miss Grig.
Lilian, apprehending she knew not what, thought to herself bitterly that lateness for a delicious shopping appointment or a heavenly appointment to lunch at the Savoy or to motor up the river-affairs of true importance-would have been laughed off as negligible, whereas lateness at this filthy office was equivalent to embezzlement. And she resolved anew, and with the most terrible determination, to escape at no matter what risks from the servitude and the famine of sentiment in which she existed.
II
The Malady
Miss Grig's Christian name was Isabel; it was somehow secret, and never heard in the office; and Felix, if he ever employed it, could only have done so in the sacred privacy of the principals' room. Like her brother, Miss Grig might have been almost any age, but only the malice of a prisonful of women could have seriously asserted her to be older than Felix. Although by general consent an authentic virgin, she had not the air of one. Rather full in figure, she was neither desiccated nor stiff, and when she moved her soft body took on flowing curves, so that clever and experienced observers could not resist the inference, almost certainly wrong, that in the historic past of Isabel lay hidden some Sabine episode or sublime folly of self-surrender. She had black hair, streaked with grey, and marvellous troubled, smouldering black eyes that seemed to yearn and appeal. And yet in an occasional gesture and tone she would become masculine.
She went wrong in the matter of clothes, aspiring after elegance and missing it through a fundamental lack of distinction, and also through inability to concentrate her effects. Her dresses consisted of ten thousand details held together by no unity of conception. Thin gold chains wandered, apparently purposeless, over her rich form; they would disappear like a railway in a cutting and then pop out unexpectedly in another part of the lush rolling countryside. The contours of her visible garments gave the impression that the concealed system of underskirts, cache-corsets, corsets, lingerie, hose and suspenders was of the most complicated, innumerable and unprecedented variety. And indeed she was one of those women who, for the performance of the morning and the evening rites, trebly secure themselves by locks and bolts and blinds from the slightest chance of a chance of the peril of the world's gaze.
The purchase of the typewriting business by Felix had changed Miss Grig's life from top to bottom. It had transformed her from a relic festering in sloth and frustration into the eager devotee of a sane and unassailable cult. The business was her perversity, her passion. It was her mystic husband, fecundating her with vital juices, the spouse to whom she joyously gave long nights of love. Apart from the business, and possibly her brother, she had no real thoughts. The concern as it existed in Lilian's time was her creation. She would sacrifice anything to it, her own health and life, even the lives and health of tender girls. Yes, and she would sacrifice her conscience to it. She would cheat for it. The charges for typewriting were high-for she had established a tradition of the highest-class work and rates to match-but this did not prevent her from seizing any excuse to inflate the bills. The staff said that her malpractices sufficed every year to pay the rent. And she was never more priestess-like, more lofty and grandiose, than when falsifying an account.
Lilian found her seated alone in fluent dignity at the great desk.
"Yes, Miss Grig?"
"May I enquire," asked Miss Grig in grave accents not of reproach but of pain, "why you did not put in an appearance yesterday, Miss Share?"
"Well, madam," Lilian answered with surprise and gentle rebuttal, "I stayed here all the night before and I was so tired I slept all day. I didn't wake up until it would have been too late to come."
"But you knew I was unwell, and that I should count on you upper girls to fill my place. Or you should have known. What if you were tired? You are young and strong; you could have stood it easily enough, and there was much work to be done. In a crisis we don't think about being tired. We just keep on. And even if you did sleep all day, I suppose it never occurred to you in the evening that someone would be needed to take charge during last night. The least you could have done would have been to run up and see how things were. But no! You didn't even do that! Shall I tell you who did take charge last night? Miss Jackson. She'd been on duty the whole day yesterday. She stayed all night till six o'clock. And she was back again at nine o'clock this morning-twenty-five minutes before you. And when I told her to go back home, she positively refused. She defied me. That's what I call the true spirit, my dear Lilian."
Miss Grig ceased; only her lustrous reproachful eyes continued the harangue. She had shown no anger. She had appealed to Miss Share's best instincts.
The address "my dear Lilian" caused misgivings in the employee's bosom. Lilian knew that it was Felix and not Miss Grig who had admitted her to employment, and that Miss Grig had been somewhat opposed to the engagement. She also guessed that Miss Grig objected to her good looks, and was always watchful for an occasion to illustrate her theory that a girl might be too good-looking. And the tone of the words "my dear Lilian" had menace in its appealing, sad sweetness. Miss Grig had been known to deviate without warning into frightful inclemency, and she always implacably got the last ounce out of her girls.
The culprit offered no defence. There was no defence. Assuredly she ought to have run up on the previous evening. Miss Grig had spoken truth-the notion of running up had simply not occurred to the preoccupied Lilian. Nevertheless, while saying naught, she kept thinking resentfully: "Here I worked over twenty hours on end and this is my reward-a slating! This is my reward-a nice old slating!" With fallen face and drooping lower lip she moved to leave. She was ready to cry.
"And there's something else, Miss Share. Now please don't cry. When Mr. Grig came up the night before last to tell you that I was unwell, you ought not to have allowed him to stay. You know that he can't stand night-work. Men are not like us women-"
"But how could I possibly-" Lilian interrupted, quite forgetting the impulse to cry.
"You should have seen that he left again at once. It would have been quite easy-especially for a girl like you. The result is that he's been a wreck ever since. It seems he stayed till four o'clock and after. I tried my best to stop him from coming at all; but he would come… Please, please, think over what I've said. Thank you."
Lilian felt all the soft, cruel, unopposable force of Miss Grig's individuality. She vaguely and with inimical deference comprehended the secret of Miss Grig's success in business. Youth and beauty and charm, qualities so well appreciated by Felix, so rich in promise for Lilian, were absolutely powerless against the armour of Miss Grig. To Miss Grig Lilian was no better than a cross-eyed, flat-bosomed spinster of thirty-nine. Not a bit better! Perhaps worse! Miss Grig actually had the assurance to preach to Lilian the nauseous and unnatural doctrine that men are by right entitled to the protection and self-sacrifice of women.
Moreover, Miss Grig, without knowing it, had convinced Lilian that her ideas concerning Lord Mackworth were the hallucinations of an excessively silly and despicable kind of brain. And even if Lord Mackworth did playfully attempt to continue the divertissement begun in the romantic night, Miss Grig by the sureness of her perceptions and the bland pitilessness of her tactics would undoubtedly counter him once and for all. The two women, so acutely contrasted in age, form and temperament, had this in common-that they secretly and unwillingly respected each other. But the younger was at present no match at all for the elder.
And yet Lilian was not cast down-neither by the realization of her awful silliness and of her lack of the sense of responsibility, nor by her powerlessness, nor by the awaking from the dream of Lord Mackworth. On the contrary, she was quite uplifted and agreeably excited, and her brain was working on lines of which Miss Grig had absolutely no notion whatever. Miss Grig, obviously truthful, had said that she had tried to prevent her brother from coming to the office on the last night but one. Miss Grig had been ready enough to let Lilian stay till morning without a word. But Felix had told Lilian that he had come to the office to warn her at his sister's urgent request. Why had Felix lied?
The answer clearly was that he had had a fancy to chat with Lilian alone, without Lilian suspecting his fancy. And in fact he had chatted with Lilian alone, and to some purpose… The answer was that Felix was genuinely interested in Lilian. Further, Miss Grig suspected this interest. If Gertie Jackson had happened to be on duty that evening, would Miss Grig have opposed her brother's coming? She would not. Finally, Miss Grig herself had confessed, perhaps unthinkingly, that Lilian was not without influential attributes. The phrase "especially for a girl like you" shone in the girl's mind.
She went into the small room, which was at the moment empty. The cover had not been removed from her own machine, but the other two machines were open, and Millicent's was ammunitioned with paper. Lilian could hear Milly, who shared the small room with herself and Gertie Jackson, dividing work and giving instructions in an important, curt voice to the mere rabble of girls in the large room. To Lilian's practised sense there was throughout the office an atmosphere of nervous disturbance and unease. Mr. Grig being absent, she felt sure that before the end of the day-probably just about tea-time-the electrical fluid would concentrate itself in one spot and then explode in a tense, violent, bitter and yet only murmured scene between two of the girls in the large room-unless, of course, she herself and Millicent happened to get across one another.
She took off her things and put them in the clothes cupboard. Gertie's hat and jacket were absent, which meant that Gertie was already out somewhere on the firm's business. Millicent's precious boa was present instead of her thick scarf, which meant that Millicent was to meet at night the insufferably pert young man from the new branch of Lloyds Bank in Bond Street. The pert young man would dine Millicent at the Popular Café in Piccadilly, where for as little as five shillings two persons might have a small table to themselves, the aphrodisiac of music, and the ingenuous illusion of seeing Life with a capital. Now Lilian never connected Life with anything less than the Savoy, the Carlton, and the Ritz. Lilian had been born with a sure instinct in these high matters. She looked at the contents of the clothes-cupboard and despised them, furiously-and in particular Millicent's boa; anybody could see what that was; it would not deceive even a bank clerk. Not that Lilian possessed any article of attire to surpass the boa in intrinsic worth! She did not. But she felt no envy in regard to the boa, and indeed never envied any girl the tenth-rate-no, nor the second-rate! Her desire was for the best or nothing; she could not compromise. The neighbouring shop-windows had effectively educated her because she was capable of self-education. Millicent and Gertie actually preferred the inferior displays of Oxford Street. She gazed in froward insolence at the workroom full of stitching girls on the opposite side of the street. They were toiling as though they had been toiling for hours. Customers had not yet begun to be shown into the elegant apartment on the floor below the workrooms. Customers were probably still sipping tea in bed with a maid to help them, and some of them had certainly never been in a Tube in their lives. Yet the workgirls, seen broadly across the street, were on the average younger, prettier, daintier and more graceful than the customers. Why then…? Etc.
The upper floors of all the surrounding streets were studded with such nests of heads bent over needles. There were scores and scores of those crowded rooms, excruciatingly feminine. "Modes et Robes" – a charming vocation! You were always seeing and touching lovely stuff, laces, feathers and confections of stuffs. A far more attractive occupation than typewriting, Lilian thought. Sometimes she had dreamt of a change, but not seriously. To work on other women's attire, knowing that she could never rise to it herself, would have broken her heart.
Quickly she turned away from the window, still uplifted-passionately determined that one day she would enter the most renowned and exclusive arcana in Hanover Square, and not as an employee either! Then, on that day, would she please with the virtuosity of a great pianist playing the piano, then would she exert charm, then would she be angelic and divine; and when she departed there should be a murmur of conversation. She smiled her best in anticipation; her fingers ran smoothingly over her blouse.
Gertie Jackson came in and transformed the rehearsed smile into an expression of dissatisfaction and hostility far from divine; the fingers dropped as it were guiltily; and Lilian remembered all her grievances and her tragedy. Gertie Jackson's bright, pleasant, clear, drawn face showed some traces of fatigue, but no sign at all of being a martyr to the industrial system or to the despotism of individual employers. She was a tall, well-made girl of twenty-eight, and she held herself rather nicely. She was kindly, cheerful and of an agreeable temper-as placid as a bowl of milk. She loved her work, regarding it as of real importance, and she seemed to be entirely without ambition. Apparently she would be quite happy to go on altruistically typing for ever and ever, and to be cast into a typist's grave.
Lilian's attitude towards her senior colleague was in various respects critical. In the first place, the poor thing did not realize that she was growing old-already approaching the precipice of thirty! In the second place, though possessed of a good figure and face, she did nothing with these great gifts. She had no desire to be agreeable; she was agreeable unconsciously, as a bird sings; there was no merit in it. She had no coquetry, and not the slightest inclination for chic. Her clothes were "good," and bought in Upper Street, Islington; her excellent boots gave her away. She was not uninterested in men; but she did not talk about them, she twittered about them. To Lilian she had the soul of an infant. And she was too pure, too ingenuous, too kind, too conscientious; her nature lacked something fundamental, and Lilian felt but could not describe what it was-save by saying that she had no kick in either her body or her soul. In the third place, there was that terrible absence of ambition. Lilian could not understand contentment, and Gertie's contentment exasperated her. She admitted that Gertie was faultless, and yet she tremendously despised the paragon, occasionally going so far as to think of her as a cat.
And now Gertie straightened herself, stuck her chest out bravely, according to habit, and smiled a most friendly greeting. Behind the smile lay concealed no resentment against Lilian for having failed to appear on the previous evening, and no moral superiority as a first-class devotee of duty. What lay behind it, and not wholly concealed, was a grave sense of responsibility for the welfare of the business in circumstances difficult and complex.
"Have you seen Miss Grig?" she asked solemnly.
"Yes," said Lilian, with a touch of careless defiance; she supposed Gertie to be delicately announcing that Miss G. had been lying in wait for her, Lilian.
"Doesn't she look simply frightfully ill?"
"She does," admitted Lilian, who in her egotism had quite forgotten her first impression that morning of Miss G.'s face. "What is it?"
Gertie mentioned the dreadful name of one of those hidden though not shameful maladies which afflict only women-but the majority of women. The crude words sounded oddly on Gertie's prim lips. Lilian was duly impressed; she was as if intimidated. At intervals the rumour of a victim of that class of diseases runs whisperingly through assemblages of women, who on the entrance of a male hastily change the subject of talk and become falsely bright. Yet every male in the circle of acquaintances will catch the rumour almost instantly, because some wife runs to inform her husband, and the husband informs all his friends.
"Who told you?" Lilian demanded.
"Oh! I've known about it for a long time," said Gertie without pride. "I told Milly just now, before I went out. Everybody will know soon." Lilian felt a pang of jealousy. "It means a terrible operation," Gertie added.
"But she oughtn't to be here!" Lilian exclaimed.
"No!" Gertie agreed with a surprising sternness that somewhat altered Lilian's estimate of her. "No! And she isn't going to be here, either! Not if I know it! I shall see that she gets back home at lunch-time. She's quarrelled already with Mr. Grig this morning about her coming up."
"Do you mean at home they quarrelled?"
"Yes. He got so angry that he said if she came he wouldn't. He was quite right to be angry, of course. But she came all the same."
"Miss G. must have told Gertie all that herself," Lilian reflected. "She'd never be as confidential with me. She'd never tell me anything!" And she had a queer feeling of inferiority.
"We must do all we can to help things," said Gertie.
"Of course!" agreed Lilian, suddenly softened, overcome by a rush of sympathy and a strong impulse to behave nobly, beautifully, forgivingly towards Miss G.
Nevertheless, though it was Gertie's attitude that had helped to inspire her, she still rather disdained the virtuous senior. Lilian appreciated profoundly-perhaps without being able to put her feeling into words-the heroic madness of Miss G. in defying common sense and her brother for the sake of the beloved business. But Gertie saw in Miss G.'s act nothing but a piece of naughty and sick foolishness. To Lilian Miss G. in her superficial yearning softness became almost a terrible figure, a figure to be regarded with awe, and to serve as an exemplar. But in contemplating Miss G. Lilian uneasily realized her own precariousness. Miss G. was old and plain (save that her eyes had beauty), and yet was fulfilling her great passion and was imposing herself on her environment. Miss G. was doing. Lilian could only be; she would always remain at the mercy of someone, and the success which she desired could last probably no longer than her youth and beauty. The transience of the gifts upon which she must depend frightened her-but at the same time intensified anew her resolves. She had not a moment to lose. And Gertie, standing there close to her, sweet and reliable and good, in the dull cage, amid the daily circumstances of their common slavery, would have understood nothing of Lilian's obscure emotion.
