Produced by Ron Swanson
SALLY BISHOP
A ROMANCE
BY
E. TEMPLE THURSTON
NEW AND CHEAPER EDITION
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1912
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_.
THE APPLE OF EDEN.
TRAFFIC.
THE REALIST.
THE EVOLUTION OF KATHERINE.
MIRAGE.
THE CITY OF BEAUTIFUL NONSENSE.
THE GREATEST WISH IN THE WORLD.
THE PATCHWORK PAPERS.
THE GARDEN OF RESURRECTION.
THIRTEEN.
THE FLOWER OF GLOSTER.
THE ANTAGONISTS.
_Copyright in the United States of America by E. Temple Thurston,
1909_.
To
GERALD DU MAURIER
_MY DEAR GERALD,_
_Amongst the many things which I anticipate in the reception of this
book, is the shrug-shoulder smile of critics at my sub-title--a
Romance. There are canons and rubrics to be observed, it would seem,
in the slightest action that a man attempts in this Great World's
Fair of Conventionality, whose every sideshow is hedged around with
the red-tape of the Law. Witness even that delusive proverb--there
is honour amongst thieves. So is there an unwritten canon in
literature and the making of books, that a Romance must end with a
phrase to convey another illusion--namely, the happiness that is
ever after._
_And so, in this respect, I throw canons to the winds--it sounds a
herculean feat--wash out the printed red of the rubric, and call,
perhaps the saddest story I shall write, a Romance._
_Yet I profess to have a reason beyond mere contrariness. The world
of Romance must be at all times an elusive star--never capable of
being put in the exact same place on any one's calendar. And to me
it conveys no fixed beginning, no fixed end, so long as it possesses
that quality of dreaming imagination in the mind of the character
with whom the circumstances are first concerned. All that we know
certainly of life is reality, and of all those myriad things which
combine to make up the one great scheme, of which we know nothing,
there is the quality of Romance--free to any one who cares to let
his mind drift upon the sea of conjecture._
_In that this was the case with Sally; in that she made her dream
out of Reality itself--I have called it a Romance. The Romance that
remains a Romance until the end, is not as yet within the reach of
my pen. If it ever should be--then I promise you that book as well._
_On all my other anticipations--the attitude of the critical mind
towards Chapter IV. in Book I., the sensitiveness of the delicate
mind when it closes its eyes on Chapter VI. of Book II.--I will keep
silent. As I have said, I anticipate many things, but I only hope
for your approval._
_Yours always,_
_E. TEMPLE THURSTON._
_LONDON,_
_January 31st, 1908._
CONTENTS
BOOK I. THE CONSCRIPT
BOOK II. THE DESERTER
BOOK III. DERELICT
BOOK IV. THE EMPTY HORIZON
SALLY BISHOP
BOOK I
THE CONSCRIPT
CHAPTER I
It was an evening late in November. The fog that during the afternoon
had been lying like a crouching beast between the closely built
houses had now risen. It was as though it had waited till nightfall
for its prey, and then departed, leaving a sense of sulkiness in the
atmosphere that weighed persistently on the spirits. A slight
drizzling rain was wetting the pavements. It clung in a mist to the
glass panes of the street lamps, dimming the glow of the light within.
In the windows of all the houses the electric lights were burning.
You could see clerks, male and female, bent up over their desks
beneath them. Some worked steadily, never looking up from their
occupations; others gazed with expressionless faces out into the
street. Occasionally the figure of a man would move out of the
apparent darkness of the room beyond. The light would fan in patches
on his face. You could see his lips moving as he spoke to the occupant
of the desk; you might even trace the faint animation as it crept
into the face of the person thus addressed. But it would only last
for a few moments. The man would move away and the look of tired apathy
settle itself once more upon the clerk's features as soon as he or
she were left alone.
As it grew later, there might be seen men with hats on their heads,
moving about--in the light one moment, lost in the darkness the next.
Some of them were pulling gloves on to their hands, or lighting
cigarettes, others would be pinning a bunch of violets into their
button-holes, or brushing the shoulders of their coats. These were
the ones who had finished for the day. It could always be known when
they had taken their departure. The heads of the clerks would twist
towards the interior of the room. You could almost imagine the
wistful expression on their faces from the bare outlines of their
attitudes as they turned in their chairs. Then, a minute later, the
main door of the house would open, the figure of a man emerge; for
a moment he would turn his face up to the sky, then the umbrella would
go up and he would walk away into the darkness of the street, for
one brief moment an individual with an identity; the next, a mere
unit in the great herd of human beings.
There were many departures such as these before, at last, the clerks
rose from their chairs. When finally they did move, it was with a
lethargy that almost concealed the relief which the cessation of work
had brought them. One might have expected to see the slamming of books
and the rushing for hats like children released from school. But
there was no such energy of delight as that. Ledgers were closed
wearily, as though they were weighted with leaden covers; papers were
put in tiny heaps as if they were a pile of death-warrants.
Typewriters were covered with such slowness and such care that one
might think they were delicate instruments of music with silver
strings, instead of treadmills for tired hands.
Some reason must explain why these young men and girls, when their
superiors took their departure, showed so plainly the envy that they
felt and now are apparently unmoved by the prospect of their own
freedom. It is simply this. Vitality is an exhaustible quality. It
may last up to a certain moment, then it burns out like the hungry
wick of a candle that has no more grease to feed it. You can
incarcerate a man for such a length of time that when at last you
do give him his liberty he has no love left for it. It is much the
same with these creatures who are imprisoned in the barred cells of
London offices. By the time their day's work is ended their vitality
for enjoyment has been exhausted. They take their liberty much as
a man takes the sentence of penal servitude when he had expected to
be hanged.
Stand for a moment in this street that runs out from the Covent Garden
Market and watch the office windows before the lights are
extinguished. Is there one attitude, one movement, one gesture that
betrays the joy of freedom now that the day's work is over? Scarcely
one. That boy with the long dark hair drooping on his forehead,
contrasting so vividly against his sallow skin--you might imagine
from the listlessness of his actions that the day's work was just
beginning. At lunch time, when the vitality was yet in store, he might
have been seen, running out from the building in the gleeful
anticipation of an hour's rest. But now, when all the hours of the
night are before him, his nervous energy has been sapped away. You
get no spirit in a tired horse. It shies at nothing, but drags one
foot wearily after another until the stable door is reached.
This is the actual condition of things that the young men and women
find when they have burnt their boats, have left the country for the
illusory joys of the town. There may be greater possibilities of
enjoyment; but this huge, carnivorous plant--this gigantic city of
London--has only displayed its attractions in order to gain its prey.
They are drawn by the colours of the petals, they come to the honeyed
perfume of its scent; but once caught in the prison of its embrace,
there is only the slow poison of forced labour that eats its deadly
way into the very heart of their vitality.
In one of these offices off Covent Garden, under a green-shaded lamp
that cast its metallic rays on to the typewriting machine before her,
sat one of the young lady clerks in the establishment of Bonsfield
& Co., a firm of book-buyers. They carried on a promiscuous trade
with America and the Colonies, and managed, by the straining of ends,
to meet their expenses and show a small margin of profit. You
undertake the labour of a slave in Egypt, and run the risk of a forlorn
hope when you try to make a living wage in London as your own master.
The price of freedom in a free country is beyond the reach of most
pockets.
The hour of six had rung out from the neighbouring clocks, yet this
girl showed no signs of finishing her work. From down in the street
you could see her bent over the machine, her fingers pounding the
keys--human hammers monotonously striving to beat out a pattern upon
metal, a pattern that would never come. The light from the
green-shaded lamp above her, fell obliquely on her head. It lit up
her pale, golden hair like a sun-ray; it drew out the round, gentle
curve of her face and threw it up against the darkness of the room
beyond. So well as it could, with its harsh methods, it made a picture.
One instinctively paused to look at it. A man coming out of the
shadows of the Covent Garden Market stopped as he passed down King
Street and gazed up at the window.
For five minutes he stood and watched her, assuming, by looking up
and down the street when anybody passed him by, the attitude of a
person who is waiting for some one.
It is impossible to say whether it is really the woman herself, or
a combination of the woman and the moment, which seizes and drags
a man's attention towards her. In this case it may have been the
combined result of the two. The girl was pretty. In the ray of that
electric light, the soft, childish outline of her face and the pale,
sensuous strands of her hair were probably lent a glamour such as
that given by the footlights. The man, too, was on his way back to
companionless chambers. The lower end of Regent Street may be a far
from lonely spot in which to take up one's abode; but there is nothing
so empty as an empty room, no matter on to what crowded thoroughfare
it may look. Say, then, it was a combination of impulses, the woman
and the moment--the girl pretty and the man oppressed by a sense of
loneliness. Whatever it was, he stood there, without any apparent
intention of moving, and watched her.
She was the last, amongst all those workers who could be seen within
the lighted apertures of the windows, to leave her post. One by one
they performed their weary play of actions, the shutting up of
ledgers, the putting away of papers--out went the lights, and a
moment later dim figures stole out of the darkened doorways into the
drizzling rain, and hurried away into the shadows of the streets.
But she still remained, and the man, with a certain amount of dogged
persistence, continued to watch her movements. Once he took out his
watch, as his impatience became more insistent. Then, with the
continual watching of her, the continual sight of her hands dancing
laboriously on those keys, the noise of the typewriter at last
reached the ears of his imagination. He could hear, above the sounds
of the street, that everlasting metallic tapping.
"God! What a life!" he exclaimed to himself.
If there is anything in telepathy; if thoughts, by reason of their
concentration, can be borne from one mind to another utterly
unconscious of them, then what followed his exclamation might well
have been an example of it. For a moment the girl buried her face
in her hands. He could see her pressing her fingers into the sockets
of her eyes. Then, sitting upright, she stretched her arms above her
head. Every action was expressive of her exhaustion. The glancing
at her watch, the critical inspection of the bundle of papers, yet
untyped, that lay beside her on the desk; all these various movements
were like the gestures of a dumb show. Was she going to give in? From
the size of the bundle of papers which she had looked at, there was
apparently still a great deal of work left for her to do.
The thought passed across his mind that he would give her until he
had counted twenty; if she showed no signs of moving by that time,
he decided to wait no longer.
One--two--three--four--she stood up from the desk. He still watched
her until he had seen her place the wooden cover over the machine;
then he crossed to the other side of the road and began walking up
and down the pavement, passing the door of Bonsfield & Co. About every
twenty yards or so, he turned and passed it again.
Five minutes elapsed. At last he heard the door of the premises
close--the noise of it rattled in the street; then he turned and faced
her as she came towards him.
Her head was down; her feet were moving quickly, tapping on the
pavement. He prepared himself to speak to her, his hand getting ready
to lift his hat. If she had given him half the encouragement that
he imagined he required, he would have found courage; but without
lifting her head, as though she were utterly unconscious of his
presence, she hurried by in the direction of Bedford Street and the
West.
Was that to be the end of it? Had he waited that full quarter of an
hour in the drizzling rain for nothing? The man of fixed intent is
hardly beaten so easily as that. There was no definite evil purpose
in his mind. He was caught in that mood when a man must talk to some
one, and a woman for preference. The waiting of fifteen minutes in
that sluggish atmosphere had only intensified it. The fact that in
the first moment of opportunity his courage had failed had had no
power to move him from his purpose, or to change the prompting of
his mood.
As soon as she had passed him on the pavement, he turned resolutely
and followed her.