1. I
It had occurred to her early that in her position--that of a young person
spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a
magpie--she should know a great many persons without their recognising
the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively--though
singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much
smothered--to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called
it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her
function was to sit there with two young men--the other telegraphist and
the counter-clerk;
to mind the "sounder," which was always going, to dole
out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions,
give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as
numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust,
from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across
the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This
transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the
narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a
shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas,
and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap,
varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know
perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.
The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the
grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the
professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite
remarkable,
had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly
to bridge. When Mr. Cocker's young men stepped over from behind the
other counter to change a five-pound note--and Mr. Cocker's situation,
with the cream of the "Court Guide" and the dearest furnished apartments,
Simpkin's, Ladle's, Thrupp's, just round the corner, was so select that
his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems--she
pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than
one of the momentary, the practically featureless, appearances in the
great procession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the
connexion (only recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself
with ridiculous inconsequence. She recognised the others the less
because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr.
Mudge. However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to
admit to herself that Mr. Mudge's removal to a higher sphere--to a more
commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood
--would
have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere
simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself
with calling it. He had at any rate ceased to be all day long in her
eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a
Sunday. During the three months of his happy survival at Cocker's after
her consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was
marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already to
have scraped the platter so clean. Opposite there, behind the counter of
which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls
and more present, too present,
h's had been for a couple of years the
principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small
sanded floor of their contracted future. She was conscious now of the
improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once.
They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.
She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had
again
written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an
office quite similar--she couldn't yet hope for a place in a bigger--under
the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every
minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, "hourly," and in a
part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on
their two rooms alone nearly three shillings. It would be far from
dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it wore upon her much
that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn't wear as things
had
worn, the worries of the early times of their great misery, her own, her
mother's and her elder sister's--the last of whom had succumbed to all
but absolute want when, as conscious and incredulous ladies, suddenly
bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and faster down
the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had rebounded. Her
mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way; had
only rumbled and grumbled
down and down, making, in respect of caps,
topics and "habits," no effort whatever--which simply meant smelling much
of the time of whiskey.