Part 5 (1/2)
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 s.e.xes swayed in cl.u.s.ters over her, and along the whole length of the car, and both the platforms were too densely populated. She could not read; n.o.body 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 a.s.suredly 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 pa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d'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 un.o.bserved 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 a.s.sert 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 princ.i.p.als' room. Like her brother, Miss Grig might have been almost any age, but only the malice of a prisonful of women could have seriously a.s.serted 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 una.s.sailable cult. The business was her perversity, her pa.s.sion. 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-cla.s.s 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 reb.u.t.tal, ”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.”