6. VI
She met Mrs. Jordan when she could, and learned from her more and more
how the great people, under her gentle shake and after going through
everything with the mere shops, were waking up to the gain of putting
into the hands of a person of real refinement the question that the shop-
people spoke of so vulgarly as that of the floral decorations. The
regular dealers in these decorations were all very well; but there was a
peculiar magic in the play of taste of a lady who had only to remember,
through whatever intervening dusk, all her own little tables, little
bowls and little jars and little other arrangements, and the wonderful
thing she had made of the garden of the vicarage. This small domain,
which her young friend had never seen, bloomed in Mrs. Jordan's discourse
like a new Eden, and she converted the past into a bank of violets by the
tone in which she said "Of course you always knew my one passion!" She
obviously met now, at any rate, a big contemporary need, measured what it
was rapidly becoming for people to feel they could trust her without a
tremor. It brought them a peace that--during the quarter of an hour
before dinner in especial--was worth more to them than mere payment could
express. Mere payment, none the less, was tolerably prompt; she engaged
by the month, taking over the whole thing; and there was an evening on
which, in respect to our heroine, she at last returned to the charge.
"It's growing and growing, and I see that I must really divide the work.
One wants an associate--of one's own kind, don't you know? You know the
look they want it all to have?--of having come, not from a florist, but
from one of themselves. Well, I'm sure
you could give it--because you
are one. Then we
should win. Therefore just come in with me."
"And leave the P.O.?"
"Let the P.O. simply bring you your
letters. It would bring you lots,
you'd see: orders, after a bit, by the score." It was on this, in due
course, that the great advantage again came up: "One seems to live again
with one's own people." It had taken some little time (after their
having parted company in the tempest of their troubles and then, in the
glimmering dawn, finally sighted each other again) for each to admit that
the other was, in her private circle, her only equal, but the admission
came, when it did come, with an honest groan; and since equality was
named, each found much personal profit in exaggerating the other's
original grandeur. Mrs. Jordan was ten years the older, but her young
friend was struck with the smaller difference this now made: it had
counted otherwise at the time when, much more as a friend of her
mother's, the bereaved lady, without a penny of provision and with
stopgaps, like their own, all gone, had, across the sordid landing on
which the opposite doors of the pair of scared miseries opened and to
which they were bewilderedly
bolted, borrowed coals and umbrellas that
were repaid in potatoes and postage-stamps. It had been a questionable
help, at that time, to ladies submerged, floundering, panting, swimming
for their lives, that they were ladies; but such an advantage could come
up again in proportion as others vanished, and it had grown very great by
the time it was the only ghost of one they possessed. They had literally
watched it take to itself a portion of the substance of each that had
departed; and it became prodigious now, when they could talk of it
together, when they could look back at it across a desert of accepted
derogation, and when, above all, they could together work up a credulity
about it that neither could otherwise work up. Nothing was really so
marked as that they felt the need to cultivate this legend much more
after having found their feet and stayed their stomachs in the ultimate
obscure than they had done in the upper air of mere frequent shocks. The
thing they could now oftenest say to each other was that they
knew what
they meant; and the sentiment with which, all round, they knew it was
known had well-nigh amounted to a promise not again to fall apart.
Mrs. Jordan was at present fairly dazzling on the subject of the way
that, in the practice of her fairy art, as she called it, she more than
peeped in--she penetrated. There was not a house of the great kind--and
it was of course only a question of those, real homes of luxury--in which
she was not, at the rate such people now had things, all over the place.
The girl felt before the picture the cold breath of disinheritance as
much as she had ever felt it in the cage; she knew moreover how much she
betrayed this, for the experience of poverty had begun, in her life, too
early, and her ignorance of the requirements of homes of luxury had
grown, with other active knowledge, a depth of simplification. She had
accordingly at first often found that in these colloquies she could only
pretend she understood. Educated as she had rapidly been by her chances
at Cocker's
there were still strange gaps in her learning--she could
never, like Mrs. Jordan, have found her way about one of the "homes."
Little by little, however, she had caught on, above all in the light of
what Mrs. Jordan's redemption had materially made of that lady, giving
her, though the years and the struggles had naturally not straightened a
feature, an almost super-eminent air. There were women in and out of
Cocker's who were quite nice and who yet didn't look well; whereas Mrs.
Jordan looked well and yet, with her extraordinarily protrusive teeth,
was by no means quite nice. It would seem, mystifyingly, that it might
really come from all the greatness she could live with. It was fine to
hear her talk so often of dinners of twenty and of her doing, as she
said, exactly as she liked with them. She spoke as if, for that matter,
she invited the company. "They simply give me the table--all the rest,
all the other effects, come afterwards."