Part 8 (2/2)
I skate beautifully, but not so well as I dance. However, I am saving the I's out of my autobiography for further practice.
Some people perhaps have better memories. But that's no reason why they should write to the ”Sunday Times” about it.
I cannot write Chinese as fluently as English, though I might conceivably write it more correctly.
I think I have mentioned everything in which I am not perfectly accomplished. Truth and modesty make me do it.
I would conclude this estimate of myself as follows. If I had to confess and expose one opinion of myself which would record what I believe to be my differentiation from other people, it would be the opinion that I am a law unto myself and a judgment to everybody else.
LATE EXTRA
TRAGIC DISAPPEARANCE OF MARGE ASKINFORIT
I sometimes think that it must have been a sense of impending autobiography which made me seek employment in the Lightning Laundry.
After all, the autobiographist merely does in public what the laundry does in the decent seclusion of its works at Wandsworth or Balham.
The princ.i.p.al difference would appear to be that a respectable laundress does know where to draw the line.
But I admit that I had other motives in seeking a new career. My attempt to reclaim baronets in their dinner-hour had broken down completely; in spite of everything I could do, the dirty dogs would persist in eating their dinner at that time. Then again, the beautiful and imaginative essays which dear Casey wrote, under different names and with varying addresses, on my suitability for domestic service, had begun to attract too much attention; and a censorious world stigmatized as false and dishonest what was really poetical. I wanted too, a position of greater independence.
Of course, I had to learn the work. At first I was taught the leading principles of b.u.t.ton-removal. Then I went on to the rough-edging. This consists in putting a rough edge on starched collars and cuffs with a coa.r.s.e file. Afterwards I was promoted to the mixing department. This is where the completed articles are packed for delivery. It requires great quickness and a nice sense of humour. For instance, you take up a pair of socks and have to decide instantly whether you will send them both to an elderly unmarried lady, or divide them impartially between two men.
Our skill in creating odd socks and stockings was gratefully recognized by the Amalgamated Hosiers' Inst.i.tution, who paid the laundry an annual subsidy. A good memory was essential for the work. Every girl was required to memorize what size in collars each male client took, so that the fifteen-inch collars might be sent to the man with the seventeen-inch neck and vice-versa. As the manager said to me once: ”What we are here for is to teach people self-control. The rest is merely incidental.”
I did not remain very long in the mixing department. My head for figures soon earned me a place in the office. Much of it was routine work. Four times every year we had to send out the notices that owing to the increased cost of labour and materials we were reluctantly compelled to increase our prices 22- per cent. We made it 22- per cent. with the happy certainty that very few of our customers would be able to calculate the amount of the increase, and still fewer would take the trouble; this left a little room for the play of our fancy. As one of our directors--a man with a fine, scholarly head--once said to me: ”Bring the larger vision into the addition of a customer's account. The only natural limit to the charge for was.h.i.+ng a garment is the cost of the garment. Keep your eyes ever on the goal. Our present prices are but milestones on the road.” He had a beautiful, ecclesiastical voice.
n.o.body would have guessed that he was an engineer and the inventor of the b.u.t.ton-pulper and Hem-render which have done so much to make our laundries what they are.
From the very first day that I took up my work in the office I became conscious that Hector, the manager, had his eye upon me. He would generally read a page or two of Keats or Sh.e.l.ley to us girls, before we began to make out the customers' accounts. This was all in accord with the far-seeing and generous policy of the laundry. The reading took a little time, but it filled us with the soaring spirit. It made pedantic precision and things-that-are repulsive to us. After I heard Hector read the ”Ode to a Nightingale” I could not bring myself to say that two and two were four; nothing less than fourteen seemed to give me any satisfaction. Hector knew how quickly responsive and keenly sentient I was. A friend once told me that he had said of me that I made arithmetic a rhapsody. ”This,” I replied quietly, ”means business.”
It did. One Sat.u.r.day afternoon I had tea with him--not on the Terrace, as the A.B.C. shop in the High Street was so much nearer. He was very wonderful. He talked continuously for two hours, and would have gone on longer. But the waitress pointed out that the charge for a cup of tea and a scone did not include a twenty-one years' lease of the chair you sat on.
He was, of course, a man of great scientific attainments. His work on the use of acids in fabric-disintegration has a reputation throughout the laundries of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said that afternoon.
In reply to some remark of mine, he said with authority and conviction: ”Marge, you really _are_.”
And, indeed, I had to admit that very often I am.
He was saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: ”In the ordeal by laundry the soft-fronted often outlasts the starched.”
Later, I led him on to speak of ambition.
”I am ambitious. That is to say, I live not in the present, but in the future. At one time I had a bicycle, but in imagination I drove a second-hand Ford; and now I possess the Ford, and in imagination I have a Rolls-Royce. I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet Longfellow so wisely said--Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the heart of the ambitious are these words: 'And the next article?' At this present moment I am having a cup of tea with by far the most brilliant and beautiful girl of my acquaintance, but in imagination----”
And it was just there that the tactless waitress interrupted us so rudely. It was in vain that I tried to lead him back to the subject.
Almost his last words to me that afternoon were:
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