|
IN THE CAGE
IN THE CAGE HENRY JAMES 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 blasee; 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 Hotel 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.
...
|
