24. XXIV
If life at Cocker's, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something
of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had
fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs. Jordan.
With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs. Bubb all out of town, with the
blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well
have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands. She bore up,
however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend's
esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed
less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion,
carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that
consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back. Each waited for
the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the
limits of low
horizons. Mrs. Jordan was indeed probably the more
reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless
it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence. Her account of her
private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind--sometimes the
bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes. This our young woman
took to be an effect of the position, at one moment and another, of the
famous door of the great world. She had been struck in one of her
ha'penny volumes with the translation of a French proverb according to
which such a door, any door, had to be either open or shut; and it seemed
part of the precariousness of Mrs. Jordan's life that hers mostly managed
to be neither. There had been occasions when it appeared to gape
wide--fairly to woo her across its threshold; there had been others, of
an order distinctly disconcerting, when it was all but banged in her
face. On the whole, however, she had evidently not lost heart; these
still belonged to the class of things in spite of which she
looked well.
She intimated that the profits of her trade had swollen so as to float
her through any state of the tide, and she had, besides this, a hundred
profundities and explanations.
She rose superior, above all, on the happy fact that there were always
gentlemen in town and that gentlemen were her greatest admirers;
gentlemen from the City in especial--as to whom she was full of
information about the passion and pride excited in such breasts by the
elements of her charming commerce. The City men did in short go in for
flowers. There was a certain type of awfully smart stockbroker--Lord Rye
called them Jews and bounders, but she didn't care--whose extravagance,
she more than once threw out, had really, if one had any conscience, to
be forcibly restrained. It was not perhaps a pure love of beauty: it was
a matter of vanity and a sign of business; they wished to crush their
rivals, and that was one of their weapons. Mrs. Jordan's
shrewdness was
extreme; she knew in any case her customer--she dealt, as she said, with
all sorts; and it was at the worst a race for her--a race even in the
dull months--from one set of chambers to another. And then, after all,
there were also still the ladies; the ladies of stockbroking circles were
perpetually up and down. They were not quite perhaps Mrs. Bubb or Lady
Ventnor; but you couldn't tell the difference unless you quarrelled with
them, and then you knew it only by their making-up sooner. These ladies
formed the branch of her subject on which she most swayed in the breeze;
to that degree that her confidant had ended with an inference or two
tending to banish regret for opportunities not embraced. There were
indeed tea-gowns that Mrs. Jordan described--but tea-gowns were not the
whole of respectability, and it was odd that a clergyman's widow should
sometimes speak as if she almost thought so. She came back, it was true,
unfailingly to Lord Rye, never, evidently, quite losing sight of
him even
on the longest excursions. That he was kindness itself had become in
fact the very moral it all pointed--pointed in strange flashes of the
poor woman's nearsighted eyes. She launched at her young friend
portentous looks, solemn heralds of some extraordinary communication. The
communication itself, from week to week, hung fire; but it was to the
facts over which it hovered that she owed her power of going on. "They
are, in one way and another," she often emphasised, "a tower of
strength"; and as the allusion was to the aristocracy the girl could
quite wonder why, if they were so in "one way," they should require to be
so in two. She thoroughly knew, however, how many ways Mrs. Jordan
counted in. It all meant simply that her fate was pressing her close. If
that fate was to be sealed at the matrimonial altar it was perhaps not
remarkable that she shouldn't come all at once to the scratch of
overwhelming a mere telegraphist. It would necessarily present to such a
person
a prospect of regretful sacrifice. Lord Rye--if it
was Lord
Rye--wouldn't be "kind" to a nonentity of that sort, even though people
quite as good had been.
One Sunday afternoon in November they went, by arrangement, to church
together; after which--on the inspiration of the moment the arrangement
had not included it--they proceeded to Mrs. Jordan's lodging in the
region of Maida Vale. She had raved to her friend about her service of
predilection; she was excessively "high," and had more than once wished
to introduce the girl to the same comfort and privilege. There was a
thick brown fog and Maida Vale tasted of acrid smoke; but they had been
sitting among chants and incense and wonderful music, during which,
though the effect of such things on her mind was great, our young lady
had indulged in a series of reflexions but indirectly related to them.
One of these was the result of Mrs. Jordan's having said to her on the
way, and with a certain fine significance, that Lord Rye had
been for
some time in town. She had spoken as if it were a circumstance to which
little required to be added--as if the bearing of such an item on her
life might easily be grasped. Perhaps it was the wonder of whether Lord
Rye wished to marry her that made her guest, with thoughts straying to
that quarter, quite determine that some other nuptials also should take
place at Saint Julian's. Mr. Mudge was still an attendant at his
Wesleyan chapel, but this was the least of her worries--it had never even
vexed her enough for her to so much as name it to Mrs. Jordan. Mr.
Mudge's form of worship was one of several things--they made up in
superiority and beauty for what they wanted in number--that she had long
ago settled he should take from her, and she had now moreover for the
first time definitely established her own. Its principal feature was
that it was to be the same as that of Mrs. Jordan and Lord Rye; which was
indeed very much what she said to her hostess as they sat together later
on. The
brown fog was in this hostess's little parlour, where it acted
as a postponement of the question of there being, besides, anything else
than the teacups and a pewter pot and a very black little fire and a
paraffin lamp without a shade. There was at any rate no sign of a
flower; it was not for herself Mrs. Jordan gathered sweets. The girl
waited till they had had a cup of tea--waited for the announcement that
she fairly believed her friend had, this time, possessed herself of her
formally at last to make; but nothing came, after the interval, save a
little poke at the fire, which was like the clearing of a throat for a
speech.