CHAPTER V

________________________________________________
_ This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her

experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to

lead. As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the

world of whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster

and stretch further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure

heightened, a panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a

torrent of colour and accompanied with wondrous world-music. What

it mainly came to at this period was a picture of how London could

amuse itself; and that, with the running commentary of a witness so

exclusively a witness, turned for the most part to a hardening of

the heart. The nose of this observer was brushed by the bouquet,

yet she could never really pluck even a daisy. What could still

remain fresh in her daily grind was the immense disparity, the

difference and contrast, from class to class, of every instant and

every motion. There were times when all the wires in the country

seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she plied for

a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of

"forms," the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the

counter, the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering

and fitting together with others, and of having her theories and

interpretations of, kept up before her their long procession and

rotation. What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the

profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over

their extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would

have held the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her

poor pinched mother and tormented father and lost brother and

starved sister, together for a lifetime. During her first weeks

she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to pay for the

stuff they transmitted--the "much love"s, the "awful" regrets, the

compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that cost the

price of a new pair of boots. She had had a way then of glancing

at the people's faces, but she had early learnt that if you became

a telegraphist you soon ceased to be astonished. Her eye for types

amounted nevertheless to genius, and there were those she liked and

those she hated, her feeling for the latter of which grew to a

positive possession, an instinct of observation and detection.

There were the brazen women, as she called them, of the higher and

the lower fashion, whose squanderings and graspings, whose

struggles and secrets and love-affairs and lies, she tracked and

stored up against them till she had at moments, in private, a

triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a sense of carrying

their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small retentive

brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they

suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have

liked to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and

fatal; and all through a personal hostility provoked by the

lightest signs, by their accidents of tone and manner, by the

particular kind of relation she always happened instantly to feel.

 

There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe,

to which she was constitutionally accessible and which were

determined by the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on

the article of making the public itself affix its stamps, and found

a special enjoyment in dealing to that end with some of the ladies

who were too grand to touch them. She had thus a play of

refinement and subtlety greater, she flattered herself, than any of

which she could be made the subject; and though most people were

too stupid to be conscious of this it brought her endless small

consolations and revenges. She recognised quite as much those of

her sex whom she would have liked to help, to warn, to rescue, to

see more of; and that alternative as well operated exactly through

the hazard of personal sympathy, her vision for silver threads and

moonbeams and her gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in

the tangle. The moonbeams and silver threads presented at moments

all the vision of what poor SHE might have made of happiness.

Blurred and blank as the whole thing often inevitably, or

mercifully, became, she could still, through crevices and crannies,

be stupefied, especially by what, in spite of all seasoning,

touched the sorest place in her consciousness, the revelation of

the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself.

It remained prodigious to the end, the money her fine friends were

able to spend to get still more, or even to complain to fine

friends of their own that they were in want. The pleasures they

proposed were equalled only by those they declined, and they made

their appointments often so expensively that she was left wondering

at the nature of the delights to which the mere approaches were so

paved with shillings. She quivered on occasion into the perception

of this and that one whom she would on the chance have just simply

liked to BE. Her conceit, her baffled vanity, was possibly

monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant

conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better.

But her greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the

men; by whom I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no

interest in the spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the

poor. She could have found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance

of want; but her fancy, in some directions so alert, had never a

throb of response for any sign of the sordid. The men she did

track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation

as to which the cage convinced her, she believed, more than

anything else could have done, that it was quite the most diffused.

 

She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with

her gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into

the immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without

end. Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best

figure; and in this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a

philosophy of her own, all made up of her private notations and

cynicisms. It was a striking part of the business, for example,

that it was much more the women, on the whole, who were after the

men than the men who were after the women: it was literally

visible that the general attitude of the one sex was that of the

object pursued and defensive, apologetic and attenuating, while the

light of her own nature helped her more or less to conclude as to

the attitude of the other. Perhaps she herself a little even fell

into the custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating only for

gentlemen from her high rigour about the stamps. She had early in

the day made up her mind, in fine, that they had the best manners;

and if there were none of them she noticed when Captain Everard was

there, there were plenty she could place and trace and name at

other times, plenty who, with their way of being "nice" to her, and

of handling, as if their pockets were private tills loose mixed

masses of silver and gold, were such pleasant appearances that she

could envy them without dislike. THEY never had to give change--

they only had to get it. They ranged through every suggestion,

every shade of fortune, which evidently included indeed lots of bad

luck as well as of good, declining even toward Mr. Mudge and his

bland firm thrift, and ascending, in wild signals and rocket-

flights, almost to within hail of her highest standard. So from

month to month she went on with them all, through a thousand ups

and downs and a thousand pangs and indifferences. What virtually

happened was that in the shuffling herd that passed before her by

far the greater part only passed--a proportion but just appreciable

stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away, lost themselves

in the bottomless common, and by so doing really kept the page

clear. On the clearness therefore what she did retain stood

sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over and interwove

it. _

Read next: CHAPTER VI

Read previous: CHAPTER IV

Table of content of In the Cage


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book