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 love”s, 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.