CHAPTER XI

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_ She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more

than the fact that his absences, however frequent and however long,

always ended with his turning up again. It was nobody's business

in the world but her own if that fact continued to be enough for

her. It was of course not enough just in itself; what it had taken

on to make it so was the extraordinary possession of the elements

of his life that memory and attention had at last given her. There

came a day when this possession on the girl's part actually seemed

to enjoy between them, while their eyes met, a tacit recognition

that was half a joke and half a deep solemnity. He bade her good

morning always now; he often quite raised his hat to her. He

passed a remark when there was time or room, and once she went so

far as to say to him that she hadn't seen him for "ages." "Ages"

was the word she consciously and carefully, though a trifle

tremulously used; "ages" was exactly what she meant. To this he

replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on

that account not the less remarkable, "Oh yes, hasn't it been

awfully wet?" That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed

her fancy that no form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled

had ever been established on earth. Everything, so far as they

chose to consider it so, might mean almost anything. The want of

margin in the cage, when he peeped through the bars, wholly ceased

to be appreciable. It was a drawback only in superficial commerce.

With Captain Everard she had simply the margin of the universe. It

may be imagined therefore how their unuttered reference to all she

knew about him could in this immensity play at its ease. Every

time he handed in a telegram it was an addition to her knowledge:

what did his constant smile mean to mark if it didn't mean to mark

that? He never came into the place without saying to her in this

manner: "Oh yes, you have me by this time so completely at your

mercy that it doesn't in the least matter what I give you now.

You've become a comfort, I assure you!"

 

She had only two torments; the greatest of which was that she

couldn't, not even once or twice, touch with him on some individual

fact. She would have given anything to have been able to allude to

one of his friends by name, to one of his engagements by date, to

one of his difficulties by the solution. She would have given

almost as much for just the right chance--it would have to be

tremendously right--to show him in some sharp sweet way that she

had perfectly penetrated the greatest of these last and now lived

with it in a kind of heroism of sympathy. He was in love with a

woman to whom, and to any view of whom, a lady-telegraphist, and

especially one who passed a life among hams and cheeses, was as the

sand on the floor; and what her dreams desired was the possibility

of its somehow coming to him that her own interest in him could

take a pure and noble account of such an infatuation and even of

such an impropriety. As yet, however, she could only rub along

with the hope that an accident, sooner or later, might give her a

lift toward popping out with something that would surprise and

perhaps even, some fine day, assist him. What could people mean

moreover--cheaply sarcastic people--by not feeling all that could

be got out of the weather? SHE felt it all, and seemed literally

to feel it most when she went quite wrong, speaking of the stuffy

days as cold, of the cold ones as stuffy, and betraying how little

she knew, in her cage, of whether it was foul or fair. It was for

that matter always stuffy at Cocker's, and she finally settled down

to the safe proposition that the outside element was "changeable."

Anything seemed true that made him so radiantly assent.

 

This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious

ways of making things easy for him--ways to which of course she

couldn't be at all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not

of this world: she had had too often to come back to that; yet,

strangely, happiness was, and her traps had to be set for it in a

manner to keep them unperceived by Mr. Buckton and the counter-

clerk. The most she could hope for apart from the question, which

constantly flickered up and died down, of the divine chance of his

consciously liking her, would be that, without analysing it, he

should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker's was--well, attractive;

easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more picturesque, in

short more propitious in general to his little affairs, than any

other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that

they couldn't be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she

found her account in the slowness--she certainly could bear it if

HE could. The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices

were so awfully thick. She was always seeing him in imagination in

other places and with other girls. But she would defy any other

girl to follow him as she followed. And though they weren't, for

so many reasons, quick at Cocker's, she could hurry for him when,

through an intimation light as air, she gathered that he was

pressed.

 

When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the

pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact--

she would have called it their friendship--that consisted of an

almost humorous treatment of the look of some of his words. They

would never perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by

the blessing of heaven, formed some of his letters with a

queerness--! It was positive that the queerness could scarce have

been greater if he had practised it for the very purpose of

bringing their heads together over it as far as was possible to

heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had taken her truly

but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the cost of

striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them when

circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was

that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned

perplexity. If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he

tolerated it he came back; and if he came back he liked her. This

was her seventh heaven; and she didn't ask much of his liking--she

only asked of it to reach the point of his not going away because

of her own. He had at times to be away for weeks; he had to lead

lets life; he had to travel--there were places to which he was

constantly wiring for "rooms": all this she granted him, forgave

him; in fact, in the long run, literally blessed and thanked him

for. If he had to lead his life, that precisely fostered his

leading it so much by telegraph: therefore the benediction was to

come in when he could. That was all she asked--that he shouldn't

wholly deprive her.

 

Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn't have deprived her even

had he been minded, by reason of the web of revelation that was

woven between them. She quite thrilled herself with thinking what,

with such a lot of material, a bad girl would do. It would be a

scene better than many in her ha'penny novels, this going to him in

the dusk of evening at Park Chambers and letting him at last have

it. "I know too much about a certain person now not to put it to

you--excuse my being so lurid--that it's quite worth your while to

buy me off. Come, therefore; buy me!" There was a point indeed at

which such flights had to drop again--the point of an unreadiness

to name, when it came to that, the purchasing medium. It wouldn't

certainly be anything so gross as money, and the matter accordingly

remained rather vague, all the more that SHE was not a bad girl.

It wasn't for any such reason as might have aggravated a mere minx

that she often hoped he would again bring Cissy. The difficulty of

this, however, was constantly present to her, for the kind of

communion to which Cocker's so richly ministered rested on the fact

that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew by

this time all the places--Suchbury, Monkhouse, Whiteroy, Finches--

and even how the parties on these occasions were composed; but her

subtlety found ways to make her knowledge fairly protect and

promote their keeping, as she had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch.

So, when he actually sometimes smiled as if he really felt the

awkwardness of giving her again one of the same old addresses, all

her being went out in the desire--which her face must have

expressed--that he should recognise her forbearance to criticise as

one of the finest tenderest sacrifices a woman had ever made for

love. _

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