"No one has any more right to go about unhappy than he has to go
about ill bred."
R. L. STEVENSON.
Joan was not to start her new work till the following Monday. She was to
be typist--her first real post filled her with some degree of
self-conscious pride--to the Editor of the _Evening Herald_. Rose had
herself worked on the paper some years ago and was a friend of the
Editor's.
"I want you to give a girl I know a chance, Mr. Strangman," she had
pleaded; "she is clever and well-educated, but she needs experience.
Take her, there is a good man, while your slack time is on, and she will
be game for anything when you get busy again."
Mr. Strangman twisted long nervous fingers into strange positions.
"I don't know about this girl," he said; "we are never slack at the
office."
It was a pet fallacy of his that he was the hardest-worked man in
London. Rose smiled. "But her typing is quite good," she argued, "and
you are such an easy dictator, I am sure she will get on all right."
She had been exceptionally pleased when Mr. Strangman reluctantly gave
way. Joan would, she hoped, take kindly to newspaper work, and it might
open up new roads to her.
Meanwhile Joan had been out on her own and taken a room for herself in a
house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of
King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a title to
which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety
flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the
ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest
glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so
terribly common-place as had been that of the other rooms which Joan had
seen that morning. The sloping roofs, the small pane of glass which
looked out higher than the neighbouring chimney-tops, were in their way
attractive. She would take it, she told a somewhat surprised landlady,
and would pay--everything included--ten shillings a week for the noble
apartment. The "everything included" swept in breakfast--"Such as a
young lady like yourself would eat, Miss"--the woman told her, and
attendance. Suppers and fires she would have to provide for herself,
though Mrs. Carew was prepared to cook for her; lunch, of course, fell
in office hours.
On Saturday, therefore, and having forestalled Miss Nigel's request by
announcing that she was leaving for good, Joan moved her luggage over to
her new home and took possession.
"I am going to like it better than I liked being at Shamrock House," she
told Rose, who had come to assist in the moving. "It is more my own, I
can do just as I like here."
Rose was craning her neck to see out of the window's limited compass.
"Just as you like," she repeated, laughing as she spoke, "on twenty-five
shillings a week and an attic. You are not ambitious, my child."
She turned round to face the room; even in mid afternoon, with the sun
shining outside, it was dim--the corners in positive darkness. "I don't
think I should have chosen it," she said; "there is no sun, and"--she
shook the thought off--"who else is in the house, did you ask?"
"There was not any need to," Joan answered. "Mrs. Carew, that is my
landlady, you know, told me all their family histories while I was
making up my mind whether I would come or not. Wait a minute," she
paused in her unpacking to tick them off on her fingers. "There is the
ground floor lady, who is an artist's model. No need to work just now
though, for the last gentleman that painted her took a fancy to her and
is paying for her at present. Drawing-room floor, old foreign lady who
never seems to get out of bed. Second floor, retired army officer, 'fond
of drink, more's the pity,'" she mimicked Mrs. Carew's voice, "and
second floor back, young lady actress, who is not perhaps as good as she
might be, 'but there, you can't always be blaming people'; and third
floor, me! Doesn't sound respectable does it? But after Miss Nigel I am
afraid of respectability."
Rose watched her with narrowed eyes. "It sounds anything but
respectable," she agreed; "do not make a fool of yourself, kid, it won't
be worth it, it never is."
"I am not likely to," Joan answered her. "My one real regret in leaving
Shamrock House is that I shall not have you to talk to, oh, and the
baths. Mrs. Carew does not hold with carrying too much water up these
stairs."
"I am glad I rank before the baths," Rose laughed. She extricated
herself from behind the luggage. "I will come and look you up
sometimes," she announced, "though it probably won't be often; I am a
bad hand at stirring myself out to see anyone in the evenings.
Good-night, and I hope you will get on all right with Strangman, he is a
kind little man really."
She went. Joan sat listening to her feet echoing down the stairs; a
mouse could set the whole house creaking. She felt very much alone;
Shamrock House, full as it had been of uncongenial companions, had yet
been able to offer some distraction from one's own society.
The new office, to which she wended her way on the Monday morning, lay
in a side alley opening off Fleet Street, a rickety old building, busy
as a hive of bees in swarming time. The steep, wooden stairs, after she
had been asked her business by the janitor in the box office and put in
charge of a very small, very dirty boy, led her up and up into the heart
of the building--past wide-open doors where numerous men sat at desks,
the floor round them strewn with papers; up again, past rooms where the
engines throbbed and panted, shaking the building with their noisy
vibrations; up still further, till they landed her at that withdrawn and
sacred sanctum, the Editor's room. Here worked Mr. Strangman
and his satellites; spiders, in fact, in the centre of their
cleverly-constructed web, throwing out feelers in search of news to all
quarters of the globe.
Anything less like a spider than Mr. Strangman it would have been
difficult to imagine. He was an alert, nervous man, with bright, kind
eyes, a flexible mouth and very restless hands. His whole nature hung on
wires, as if--which was indeed the case--his mental capacity was too big
and overpowering for his physical strength. His manners under the strain
of work were jerky and abrupt, but otherwise he was a very kindly and
genial man. To Joan he was excessively polite, and so afraid that her
capabilities might not come up to his expectations that for the first
few days he left her practically with no work to do. She sat in a large,
well-lit--if draughty--room, opposite Mr. Strangman at his table.
It was one of her duties, she discovered, to keep the aforesaid table
tidy, and in time she learned that here more than anywhere else she
could be of service to the man. He had an awe-inspiring way of piling up
his desk with scraps of paper, cuttings, and slips, and stray
manuscripts, and it was always under the most appalling muddle that the
one small, indispensable news-slip would hide itself.
The Magazine Page-faker and the News-gleaner sat in the same room, the
latter at a table next Joan. He was a stout man with a beaming smile and
an inexhaustible supply of good temper. He would sit over his work,
which as far as she could see consisted solely of running his eye over
the day's papers and cutting out what appeared to be workable news,
making a great deal of noise with his feet on the floor, a gigantic
cutting-out scissors in his hand and a whistle which never varied its
tune from early morning till late in the evening--a soft, subdued,
under-his-breath whistle, Joan never even discovered what the tune was.
He was, despite this disadvantage, an indefatigable worker and an
ever-ready helper, always willing to do other people's work for them if
necessary.
Of the other people on the staff Joan saw very little; the reporters
came early in the morning to take their orders for the day, and threw in
their copy downstairs in the evening. Sometimes they would come upstairs
to discuss some feature of their day's work with Mr. Strangman, or to
put in an article to the Literary Editor, but, as a whole, she hardly
learned to know them, even by name. Then there were the office boys, a
moving, fluctuating crowd; always in mischief, always dirty, always
irrepressibly cheerful. For the rest, her work--one might almost say her
life--lay between the four walls of the office room, with the shaking
vibrations of the engines under her feet and the musty, curious smell of
papers in the making and pile upon pile of papers that had been made all
round her.
She arrived at 9.30 and left about 6 p.m., and by then she was too
numbed--for the working of a typewriter is monotonous work--to do
anything save walk with the hurrying crowds as far as Charing Cross and
take a bus from there to Montague Square. But since work filled her days
she had less time for discontent or depression. Sometimes she would be
tempted to wander off the direct route on her way home and she would
walk up to Piccadilly and past the region of brightly-lighted shops,
watching the faces in the crowd round her, envying those who met friends
and stopped to talk to them, following with rather wistful eyes the
couples who passed, hand clasped in hand; but generally speaking she was
too tired in the evenings to do anything save go straight home, eat a
hasty supper and tumble into bed.
Of Rose she saw, as the other had prophesied, very little. Joan realized
that friendship, if their brief companionship could have been called
such, counted for very little in Rose's life. The girl seemed entirely
to ignore her once she was from constant sight, and since Joan could not
herself call at Shamrock House and Rose habitually forgot to pay her
promised visits, the friendship, such as it had been, faded away into
the past.
The other inhabitants of 6, Montague Square, she saw very rarely.
Occasionally she would encounter Miss Drummond, the downstairs tenant,
paying off her taxi at the door--a tall, handsome girl, rather overblown
in her beauty, who invariably stared at Joan with haughty defiance and
stalked into her own room, calling loudly for Mrs. Carew. Once Joan had
stumbled over the retired military gentleman from the second floor,
sound asleep, in a very undignified position, half way up her own little
stairs. The incident had brought with it a shudder of fear, and from
that day onwards Joan was always careful to lock her door at night.
Miss Fanny Bellairs, the erring damsel on the second floor back, kept
such strange hours that she was never visible; but Mrs. Carew had a
large stock of not very savoury anecdotes about her which she would
recount to Joan during the process of laying supper. As not even an
earthquake would have stopped Mrs. Carew's desire to impart information,
Joan gave up the attempt to silence her. Indeed, she sometimes listened
with a certain amount of curiosity, and Fanny Bellairs assumed a
marvellous personality and appearance in her mind's eye.
That the original did not in the least come up to her expectations was
something of a surprise. About three months after her first arrival at
Montague Square Joan reached home rather late one evening to find her
room already occupied. A girl sat, her feet tucked underneath her, on
the principal chair under the lamplight; she had been crying, for a
tight, damp ball of a handkerchief lay on the floor, and at the sound of
Joan's entry she turned a tear-stained face to greet her.
"I thought you were never coming"--the voice held a plaintive sob in
it--"and I am that down-hearted and miserable."
Joan put down her things hastily and came across. "I am so sorry," she
said, groping through her mind to discover who her visitor might be;
"did Mrs. Carew tell you I was in?--how stupid of her."
The girl in the chair gulped back her tears and laughed. "No, she
didn't," she contradicted; "she told me that you wouldn't want to see me
if you were in; that the likes of you did not know the likes of me, and
that I was not to come up. But I came"--she held out impulsive hands. "I
guess you aren't angry," she said; "when I get the silly hump, which
isn't often, I go mad if I have to stay by myself. I'll be as good
as"--she glanced round the room--"as good as you," she finished, "if you
will let me stay."
"Why, of course," said Joan. "I don't know what Mrs. Carew can have been
talking about. I don't know you, so I can't see how she can have thought
I would not want to see you."
"I can though." The girl shook forward a sudden halo of curls and
laughed in a way which it was impossible to resist. "I am Fanny, from
downstairs, and Mrs. Carew is a silly old woman who talks a lot, but she
is not stupid enough not to know the difference between a girl like you
and a fly-by-night like me. Now I have shocked you," she went on
breathlessly, seeing Joan's flush, "just when I was setting out to be
good. I'll bite my tongue out and start again."
She coughed once with alarming intensity. Joan moved slowly away and
took off her hat and coat. So this was Fanny Bellairs, the girl whose
doings provided such a purple background for her own dull existence. She
looked again at the little figure, lying back now, eyes closed, lips
tremulous from the struggle for breath which her fit of coughing had
brought her. It was a perfectly-fashioned face, though when Joan had
time to study it, she could see that the colouring was just a little
crudely put on and that it had smudged in the shadows under her eyes
where the tears had lain. She was such a thin, small slip of a girl,
too, little dimpled hands and a baby face under the gold curls. Fanny
opened her eyes at that moment, wide and innocent, and answered Joan's
glance with a wistful smile.
"Thinking of all Mrs. Carew ever said about me?" she asked. "I am not as
bad as she sometimes paints me. Still"--she stood up--"I'll go, if you
would rather I did. Hate to make a nuisance of myself."
She moved slowly--it was, in reality, reluctantly--towards the door, and
Joan came out of her reverie with a start.
"Please don't go," she said quickly. "You must think I am awfully rude,
but really I was not thinking about Mrs. Carew or anything so
disagreeable. I was thinking how pretty you were, and wondering how old
you could be."
The girl at the door stopped and turned back. Laughter filled her eyes,
yet there was a little hint of mockery behind the mirth.
"Go on!" she said, "you and your thoughts! I know just what they were,
my dear; but it doesn't matter to me, I am used to it. Twenty-two, at
your service, mum"--she came a little away from the door and swept Joan
a curtsey--"and everything my own, even my hair, though you mayn't
believe it."