She would have admitted indeed that it consisted of little more than
the fact that his absences, however frequent and however long, always
ended with his turning up again. It was nobody’s business in the world
but her own if that fact continued to be enough for her. It was of
course not enough just in itself; what it had taken on to make it so
was the extraordinary possession of the elements of his life that
memory and attention had at last given her. There came a day when this
possession on the girl’s part actually seemed to enjoy between them,
while their eyes met, a tacit recognition that was half a joke and half
a deep solemnity. He bade her good morning always now; he often quite
raised his hat to her. He passed a remark when there was time or room,
and once she went so far as to say to him that she hadn’t seen him for
“ages.” “Ages” was the word she consciously and carefully, though a
trifle tremulously used; “ages” was exactly what she meant. To this he
replied in terms doubtless less anxiously selected, but perhaps on that
account not the less remarkable, “Oh yes, hasn’t it been awfully wet?”
That was a specimen of their give and take; it fed her fancy that no
form of intercourse so transcendent and distilled had ever been
established on earth. Everything, so far as they chose to consider it
so, might mean almost anything. The want of margin in the cage, when he
peeped through the bars, wholly ceased to be appreciable. It was a
drawback only in superficial commerce. With Captain Everard she had
simply the margin of the universe. It may be imagined therefore how
their unuttered reference to all she knew about him could in this
immensity play at its ease. Every time he handed in a telegram it was
an addition to her knowledge: what did his constant smile mean to mark
if it didn’t mean to mark that? He never came into the place without
saying to her in this manner: “Oh yes, you have me by this time so
completely at your mercy that it doesn’t in the least matter what I
give you now. You’ve become a comfort, I assure you!”
She had only two torments; the greatest of which was that she couldn’t,
not even once or twice, touch with him on some individual fact. She
would have given anything to have been able to allude to one of his
friends by name, to one of his engagements by date, to one of his
difficulties by the solution. She would have given almost as much for
just the right chance—it would have to be tremendously right—to show
him in some sharp sweet way that she had perfectly penetrated the
greatest of these last and now lived with it in a kind of heroism of
sympathy. He was in love with a woman to whom, and to any view of whom,
a lady-telegraphist, and especially one who passed a life among hams
and cheeses, was as the sand on the floor; and what her dreams desired
was the possibility of its somehow coming to him that her own interest
in him could take a pure and noble account of such an infatuation and
even of such an impropriety. As yet, however, she could only rub along
with the hope that an accident, sooner or later, might give her a lift
toward popping out with something that would surprise and perhaps even,
some fine day, assist him. What could people mean moreover—cheaply
sarcastic people—by not feeling all that could be got out of the
weather? _She_ felt it all, and seemed literally to feel it most when
she went quite wrong, speaking of the stuffy days as cold, of the cold
ones as stuffy, and betraying how little she knew, in her cage, of
whether it was foul or fair. It was for that matter always stuffy at
Cocker’s, and she finally settled down to the safe proposition that the
outside element was “changeable.” Anything seemed true that made him so
radiantly assent.
This indeed is a small specimen of her cultivation of insidious ways of
making things easy for him—ways to which of course she couldn’t be at
all sure he did real justice. Real justice was not of this world: she
had had too often to come back to that; yet, strangely, happiness was,
and her traps had to be set for it in a manner to keep them unperceived
by Mr. Buckton and the counter-clerk. The most she could hope for apart
from the question, which constantly flickered up and died down, of the
divine chance of his consciously liking her, would be that, without
analysing it, he should arrive at a vague sense that Cocker’s was—well,
attractive; easier, smoother, sociably brighter, slightly more
picturesque, in short more propitious in general to his little affairs,
than any other establishment just thereabouts. She was quite aware that
they couldn’t be, in so huddled a hole, particularly quick; but she
found her account in the slowness—she certainly could bear it if _he_
could. The great pang was that just thereabouts post-offices were so
awfully thick. She was always seeing him in imagination in other places
and with other girls. But she would defy any other girl to follow him
as she followed. And though they weren’t, for so many reasons, quick at
Cocker’s, she could hurry for him when, through an intimation light as
air, she gathered that he was pressed.
When hurry was, better still, impossible, it was because of the
pleasantest thing of all, the particular element of their contact—she
would have called it their friendship—that consisted of an almost
humorous treatment of the look of some of his words. They would never
perhaps have grown half so intimate if he had not, by the blessing of
heaven, formed some of his letters with a queerness—! It was positive
that the queerness could scarce have been greater if he had practised
it for the very purpose of bringing their heads together over it as far
as was possible to heads on different sides of a wire fence. It had
taken her truly but once or twice to master these tricks, but, at the
cost of striking him perhaps as stupid, she could still challenge them
when circumstances favoured. The great circumstance that favoured was
that she sometimes actually believed he knew she only feigned
perplexity. If he knew it therefore he tolerated it; if he tolerated it
he came back; and if he came back he liked her. This was her seventh
heaven; and she didn’t ask much of his liking—she only asked of it to
reach the point of his not going away because of her own. He had at
times to be away for weeks; he had to lead his life; he had to
travel—there were places to which he was constantly wiring for “rooms”:
all this she granted him, forgave him; in fact, in the long run,
literally blessed and thanked him for. If he had to lead his life, that
precisely fostered his leading it so much by telegraph: therefore the
benediction was to come in when he could. That was all she asked—that
he shouldn’t wholly deprive her.
Sometimes she almost felt that he couldn’t have deprived her even had
he been minded, by reason of the web of revelation that was woven
between them. She quite thrilled herself with thinking what, with such
a lot of material, a bad girl would do. It would be a scene better than
many in her ha’penny novels, this going to him in the dusk of evening
at Park Chambers and letting him at last have it. “I know too much
about a certain person now not to put it to you—excuse my being so
lurid—that it’s quite worth your while to buy me off. Come, therefore;
buy me!” There was a point indeed at which such flights had to drop
again—the point of an unreadiness to name, when it came to that, the
purchasing medium. It wouldn’t certainly be anything so gross as money,
and the matter accordingly remained rather vague, all the more that
_she_ was not a bad girl. It wasn’t for any such reason as might have
aggravated a mere minx that she often hoped he would again bring Cissy.
The difficulty of this, however, was constantly present to her, for the
kind of communion to which Cocker’s so richly ministered rested on the
fact that Cissy and he were so often in different places. She knew by
this time all the places—Suchbury, Monkhouse, Whiteroy, Finches—and
even how the parties on these occasions were composed; but her subtlety
found ways to make her knowledge fairly protect and promote their
keeping, as she had heard Mrs. Jordan say, in touch. So, when he
actually sometimes smiled as if he really felt the awkwardness of
giving her again one of the same old addresses, all her being went out
in the desire—which her face must have expressed—that he should
recognise her forbearance to criticise as one of the finest tenderest
sacrifices a woman had ever made for love.