It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from
Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon,
or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were
feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her
own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his
turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit
of work or a book—a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very
greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day.
This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the
establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the
rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the
particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose
meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she
afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was _blasée;_ nothing could
belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her
profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was
subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red
gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to “care,” odd caprices
of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new career for
women—that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the
flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion;
“the flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes,
as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of them, at
any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly
finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the
pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating
on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her
young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses—the
way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for
twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole
social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only
in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque
natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations,
she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question. “You’ve no
imagination, my dear!”—that was because a door more than half open to
the higher life couldn’t be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs.
Jordan’s imagination quite did away with the thickness.
Our young lady had not taken up the charge, had dealt with it
good-humouredly, just because she knew so well what to think of it. It
was at once one of her most cherished complaints and most secret
supports that people didn’t understand her, and it was accordingly a
matter of indifference to her that Mrs. Jordan shouldn’t; even though
Mrs. Jordan, handed down from their early twilight of gentility and
also the victim of reverses, was the only member of her circle in whom
she recognised an equal. She was perfectly aware that her imaginative
life was the life in which she spent most of her time; and she would
have been ready, had it been at all worth while, to contend that, since
her outward occupation didn’t kill it, it must be strong indeed.
Combinations of flowers and green-stuff, forsooth! What _she_ could
handle freely, she said to herself, was combinations of men and women.
The only weakness in her faculty came from the positive abundance of
her contact with the human herd; this was so constant, it had so the
effect of cheapening her privilege, that there were long stretches in
which inspiration, divination and interest quite dropped. The great
thing was the flashes, the quick revivals, absolute accidents all, and
neither to be counted on nor to be resisted. Some one had only
sometimes to put in a penny for a stamp and the whole thing was upon
her. She was so absurdly constructed that these were literally the
moments that made up—made up for the long stiffness of sitting there in
the stocks, made up for the cunning hostility of Mr. Buckton and the
importunate sympathy of the counter-clerk, made up for the daily deadly
flourishy letter from Mr. Mudge, made up even for the most haunting of
her worries, the rage at moments of not knowing how her mother did “get
it.”
She had surrendered herself moreover of late to a certain expansion of
her consciousness; something that seemed perhaps vulgarly accounted for
by the fact that, as the blast of the season roared louder and the
waves of fashion tossed their spray further over the counter, there
were more impressions to be gathered and really—for it came to
that—more life to be led. Definite at any rate it was that by the time
May was well started the kind of company she kept at Cocker’s had begun
to strike her as a reason—a reason she might almost put forward for a
policy of procrastination. It sounded silly, of course, as yet, to
plead such a motive, especially as the fascination of the place was
after all a sort of torment. But she liked her torment; it was a
torment she should miss at Chalk Farm. She was ingenious and uncandid,
therefore, about leaving the breadth of London a little longer between
herself and that austerity. If she hadn’t quite the courage in short to
say to Mr. Mudge that her actual chance for a play of mind was worth
any week the three shillings he desired to help her to save, she yet
saw something happen in the course of the month that in her heart of
hearts at least answered the subtle question. This was connected
precisely with the appearance of the memorable lady.