5. V
This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to lead.
As the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world of
whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster and stretch
further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a panorama
fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour and
accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to at this
period was a picture of how London could amuse itself; and that, with the
running commentary of a witness so exclusively a witness, turned for the
most part to a hardening of the heart. The nose of this observer was
brushed by the bouquet, yet she could never really pluck even a daisy.
What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the immense
disparity, the difference
and contrast, from class to class, of every
instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in the
country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she plied
for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of
"forms," the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the counter,
the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting
together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of,
kept up before her their long procession and rotation. What twisted the
knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them,
in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an
amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her
frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and
lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime. During her
first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to pay
for the stuff they transmitted--the "much loves," the
"awful" regrets,
the compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that cost the
price of a new pair of boots. She had had a way then of glancing at the
people's faces, but she had early learnt that if you became a
telegraphist you soon ceased to be astonished. Her eye for types
amounted nevertheless to genius, and there were those she liked and those
she hated, her feeling for the latter of which grew to a positive
possession, an instinct of observation and detection. There were the
brazen women, as she called them, of the higher and the lower fashion,
whose squanderings and graspings, whose struggles and secrets and love-
affairs and lies, she tracked and stored up against them till she had at
moments, in private, a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and ease, a
sense of carrying their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her small
retentive brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them than they
suspected or would care to think. There were those she would have liked
to betray, to trip up, to bring
down with words altered and fatal; and
all through a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs, by their
accidents of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation she
always happened instantly to feel.
There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined by
the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special enjoyment
in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too grand to
touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety greater, she
flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the subject; and
though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this it brought her
endless small consolations and revenges. She recognised quite as much
those of her sex whom she would have liked to help, to warn, to rescue,
to see more of; and that alternative as well operated exactly through the
hazard of personal sympathy,
her vision for silver threads and moonbeams
and her gift for keeping the clues and finding her way in the tangle. The
moonbeams and silver threads presented at moments all the vision of what
poor
she might have made of happiness. Blurred and blank as the whole
thing often inevitably, or mercifully, became, she could still, through
crevices and crannies, be stupefied, especially by what, in spite of all
seasoning, touched the sorest place in her consciousness, the revelation
of the golden shower flying about without a gleam of gold for herself. It
remained prodigious to the end, the money her fine friends were able to
spend to get still more, or even to complain to fine friends of their own
that they were in want. The pleasures they proposed were equalled only
by those they declined, and they made their appointments often so
expensively that she was left wondering at the nature of the delights to
which the mere approaches were so paved with shillings. She quivered on
occasion into the perception of this and that one whom she
would on the
chance have just simply liked to
be. Her conceit, her baffled vanity,
was possibly monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant
conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better. But her
greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the men; by whom
I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no interest in the
spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the poor. She could have
found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance of want; but her fancy, in
some directions so alert, had never a throb of response for any sign of
the sordid. The men she did track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one
relation, the relation as to which the cage convinced her, she believed,
more than anything else could have done, that it was quite the most
diffused.
She found her ladies, in short, almost always in communication with her
gentlemen, and her gentlemen with her ladies, and she read into the
immensity of their intercourse stories and meanings without end.
Incontestably she grew to think that the men cut the best figure; and in
this particular, as in many others, she arrived at a philosophy of her
own, all made up of her private notations and cynicisms. It was a
striking part of the business, for example, that it was much more the
women, on the whole, who were after the men than the men who were after
the women: it was literally visible that the general attitude of the one
sex was that of the object pursued and defensive, apologetic and
attenuating, while the light of her own nature helped her more or less to
conclude as to the attitude of the other. Perhaps she herself a little
even fell into the custom of pursuit in occasionally deviating only for
gentlemen from her high rigour about the stamps. She had early in the
day made up her mind, in fine, that they had the best manners; and if
there were none of them she noticed when Captain Everard was there, there
were plenty she could place and trace and name at other times, plenty
who, with their way of being "nice" to her, and of
handling, as if their
pockets were private tills loose mixed masses of silver and gold, were
such pleasant appearances that she could envy them without dislike.
They never had to give change--they only had to get it. They ranged
through every suggestion, every shade of fortune, which evidently
included indeed lots of bad luck as well as of good, declining even
toward Mr. Mudge and his bland firm thrift, and ascending, in wild
signals and rocket-flights, almost to within hail of her highest
standard. So from month to month she went on with them all, through a
thousand ups and downs and a thousand pangs and indifferences. What
virtually happened was that in the shuffling herd that passed before her
by far the greater part only passed--a proportion but just appreciable
stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away, lost themselves in the
bottomless common, and by so doing really kept the page clear. On the
clearness therefore what she did retain stood sharply out; she nipped and
caught it, turned it over and interwove it.