Part 9 (1/2)
”I thought there was something. Turn your head round. About time you did, wasn't it? But why don't you make it stick out more? Other girls do, don't they?”
Katharine had not seen any other girls, and said so; whereupon Ted supposed it was all right, if she thought it was, and added conciliatingly, that at all events her new coat was ”all there.” They chattered in the same trivial manner all the rest of the way; it was like the old days, when they had never thought of making up a quarrel formally, but had just resumed matters where they had been broken off.
”Do you feel bad?” he asked, in his sympathetic way, when they stood at last on the well-worn doorstep of number ten, Queen's Crescent, Marylebone.
”Oh, I don't know! I've got to go through with it now, haven't I? It's just like you and me not to have touched on anything really important all the way; isn't it? And I've got such a heap of things to tell you,” said Katharine, in a nervous tone; and she gave a little s.h.i.+ver as an east wind came rus.h.i.+ng up the street and blew dirty pieces of paper against the dingy iron railings, whence they fluttered down into the area.
”Never mind; I'll look you up some evening soon. Let me know if you want bucking up or anything. Good-bye, old chum.”
And she found herself inside a dimly lighted, distempered hall, face to face with a kindly looking maid, who was greeting her with the air of conventional welcome she had been told to a.s.sume towards strangers.
It was supposed to support the advertis.e.m.e.nt that this was a home.
”Miss Jennings? No, miss; she won't be in, not before supper. And the lady what's in your cubicle ain't cleared out yet, miss, so I can't take your box up, neither. Will you come and have your tea, miss? This way, if you please.”
Katharine followed her mechanically. The heroic notions that had sustained her for weeks were vanis.h.i.+ng before this pleasant-faced maid and the dreary, distempered hall. For the first time in her life a feeling of shyness suddenly overwhelmed her, as the servant held open a door, and a hum of voices and clatter of plates came out into the pa.s.sage. For the moment, she hardly knew where to look or what to do.
The room into which she had been ushered was a bare-looking one, though clean enough, and better lighted than the hall outside. Long tables were placed across it, and around these, on wooden chairs, sat some twenty or thirty girls of various ages, some of whom were talking and others reading, as they occupied themselves with their tea. They all looked up when Katharine came into the room, but the spectacle did not present enough novelty to interest them long, and they soon looked away again and went on with their several occupations. ”_She_ won't be here long,--not the sort,” Katharine overheard one of them saying to another, and the casual remark brought the colour to her cheeks, and made her a.s.sume desperately some show of courage.
”May I take this chair?” she asked, moving towards a vacant place as she spoke.
”It isn't anybody's; none of them are unless the plate is turned upside down,” volunteered the girl in the next chair. She was reading ”Pitman's Phonetic Journal,” and eating bread and treacle.
”You have to get your own tea from the urn over there, and collect your food from all the other tables,” she added in the same brusque manner, as Katharine sat down and looked helplessly about her.
However, by following out the instructions thus thrown at her, she managed, with a little difficulty, to procure what she wanted from the food that was scattered incidentally about the room, and then returned to her seat by the girl who was eating bread and treacle.
”Isn't it rather late for tea?” she asked of her neighbour, who at least seemed friendly in a raw sort of way.
”It always goes on till seven; most of them don't get back from the office before this, you see.”
”What office?” asked Katharine, who did not see.
”Any office,” returned the girl, staring round at her. ”Post office generally, or a place in the city, or something like that. Some of them are shorthand clerks, like me,--it's shorter hours and better paid as a rule; but it's getting overcrowded, like everything else.”
”Do you like it?” asked Katharine. The girl stared again. The possibility of liking one's work had never occurred to her before.
”Of course not; but we have to grin and bear it, like the food here and everything else. I'm sorry for you if you mean to stop here long; you don't look as though you could stand it. I've seen your sort before, and they never stop long.”
”Oh, I mean to stop,” said Katharine decidedly. But her heroic mood had been completely dissipated by the leaden atmosphere of the place, and she could not repress a sigh.
”b.u.t.ter bad?” asked her neighbour cheerfully. ”Try the treacle; it's safer. You can't go far wrong with treacle. The jam's always suspicious; you find plum stones in the strawberries, and so on.”
Katharine was obliged to laugh, and the shorthand clerk, who had not meant to make a joke, seemed hurt.
”I beg your pardon,” said Katharine, ”but your cynical view of the food is so awfully funny.”
”Wait till you've been here three years, like I have,” said the shorthand clerk, and she returned to her newspaper.
Katharine tried to stay the sinking at her heart, and made a critical review of the room. What impressed her most was the tw.a.n.g of the girls' voices. Not that they were noisy,--for they seemed a quiet set on the whole; either daily routine or respectability had succeeded in subduing their spirits; but for all that they did not look unhappy, and Katharine supposed, as her neighbour had remarked, that it was possible to get used to it after a time.
”And the room is certainly clean,” she reflected, as she made an effort to see the brighter side of things; ”and the girls don't stare, or ask questions, or do anything unpleasant. I _couldn't_ tell them anything about myself if they did. And I do wish, though I know it's awfully sn.o.bbish, that some of them were ladies.”