[Illustration]
In the Cage
by Henry James
Contents
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
XVII.
XVIII.
XIX.
XX.
XXI.
XXII.
XXIII.
XXIV.
XXV.
XXVI.
XXVII.
CHAPTER 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.