able to play the piano, Sally, because you'd have to practise every day
for hours to do that; but you've got a big voice for your body. I
suppose your lungs are good. Ever heard me sing? It's like a baby
crying. But that song 'The Love Path' suits you. You might do something
with your voice. Not much, I expect; but something. You just try and get
hold of somebody who knows about such things. Might do a turn on the
Halls. You never know. If I come across anybody I'll ask them; but I
don't see many people now, and what I do are all in the 'public' line.
It's worth thinking about, for a girl like you, with your way to make.
Unless you marry, of course; and you say you're not going to do that in
a hurry. So there you are. Make the most of yourself, I say; and let the
Devil go hang himself if he's a mind to it."
Sally, who had never thought of such a thing, promised. For a time she
was flattered by the vision of singing to audiences. But that soon
faded. She met nobody outside Madame's, except for one or two young men
who spoke to her on the way home; and so she kept to her sewing and
machining for Miss Jubb. It pleased her to be able to tell Toby, who,
however, frowned, and did not seem pleased.
"Seems to me you're always thinking you'll do something wonderful," he
said sourly. "Doesn't seem to come to much, as fur as I can see."
"Oh, doesn't it!" cried Sally. She shook herself free from him, and
marched off in anger. And Toby did not follow. It was a tiff. By the
next evening both were contrite, and the matter was never spoken of
again. All the same, Sally remembered it. She remembered it the more
unforgivingly because Toby's remark had been true. Nothing so far had
happened to prove definitely that her confidence in exceptional powers
was justified. He was jealous of her! Sally laughed almost scornfully.
Fancy a big fellow like Toby being jealous of a little thing like her.
Men! They were all alike. All right as long as they were playing first
fiddle! That was it: Toby didn't want her to have a chance at all. He
wanted her always to be number two. Sally shook her head obstinately.
"All right, Master Toby!" she said to herself. There was no more in it
than that--a momentary revolt;--but once the notion had arisen it began
to revolve in her mind. She could not remember if she had ever told Toby
of her plan to be a successful dressmaker; but what would he say to
that? Would he like his wife to make money, and to have real ladies
coming to her as they did to Madam? It seemed from this that he would
not. He preferred to be top dog. Sally was to be nothing upon her own
account--merely to fetch and carry, and do what she was told, and
husband his paltry little earnings. He'd rather be poor than owe
anything to his wife, in case she became bigger than himself. Was that
it? Was that Master Toby's idea? If so, it was not Sally's. She suddenly
understood that Toby thought of her as his wife, as his chattel; and
that she had never ceased, except in the passionate excitement of their
early relations, to think of herself as one who belonged to herself and
was going to make some sort of life for herself. This came as a shock to
Sally. She had never thought of it before. She was beginning to grow up.
From that time she first began to criticise Toby. Until then he had been
the burly man she loved. Her thoughts of him, as her love for him, had
been merely physical. She was now to search more deeply into the needs
of life, still crudely, but examiningly. It was not enough, then, to
love a man if you were going to have something else to do in life
besides love him. The idea was new. It puzzled her. It was something
outside the novelettes she had read, and outside her own precocious
thoughts. Love was love--all knew that. She loved Toby; she had given
herself to him; they were practically married; and now it appeared that
something was wrong somewhere. Toby did not want her to be Sally: he
wanted her to be just a sort of moon-Toby. Another girl would have
wanted nothing better. Sally told herself that she was different. She
went out by herself, one evening, instead of working; and walked up to
Highgate. And as she went up the hill she sang to herself the ballad
"The Love Path." It began:
"When you and I go down the love path together,
Birds shall be singing and the day so long,"
and she could play the simple accompaniment to it with very few
mistakes. She remembered Mrs. Perce's words. What if she _could_ do
something with her voice? Did she sing well? She allowed herself to
glimpse another glorious future.
In the middle of the walk Sally stopped dead.
"Oh, _doesn't_ it...." she said aloud. "Well, we'll just _see_. We'll
just see about it. That's all." And having as it were made her formal
protest she resumed the journey, and arrived home tired out, ready for
bed; and before she had been in bed more than two minutes she was fast
asleep, dreaming of motor cars and footmen standing on the pavement with
fur rugs in their hands. In her dream she was alone in the cars. Even
the chauffeur had no smallest resemblance to Toby. And yet she still
loved him with all her heart, and when she was with him she felt that
she extraordinarily belonged to him. Love had again at last encountered
ambition, and battle was joined.
iii
Dreams of luxurious motor-cars, and footmen with fur capes and long
fawn-coloured overcoats, holding fur rugs to cover her knees, were now
constant in Sally's mind. She saw such things occasionally in Regent
Street, and loved to look in at the windows of motor broughams
upholstered in fawn-coloured corduroy, with arm straps and little
hanging vases of fresh flowers. The freshness of these cars was her
delight. She had no notion of the income it was necessary to have in
order to possess such cars, with their attendant footman and chauffeur;
but that income, whatever it was, became her ideal. Money! Lots of
money! With money you could have comfort. When she said that, and was
warned by conventional wiseacres that money did not produce happiness,
she sneered at the timid ones. "Bet _I'd_ be happy," she said. "What's
happiness?" She wondered what it was. For her it had been oblivion in
Toby's arms. It was so no longer. That was not all she desired. It was
not by any means all. And she shrank more and more strongly from a life
of squalid toil such as her mother had had--such as she would still have
had if Mr. Minto had been a sober man. All her life she had slaved and
slaved, and now she was worn out with it. Not for Sally! She had other
plans. She had gone to the West End, and the West End was in her blood.
She was looking round at life with some of her old calculating
determination to exploit it. The death of her father, the passion for
Toby,--these had distracted her. With increasing confidence in her
position at Madam's, and a new sense of what money could actually do in
the way of procuring food and clothes and ordinary or extraordinary
physical comforts, Sally had returned to her old faith. She began to
have a little money to buy things for herself. Once or twice Miss
Summers gave her quite good-sized pieces of material, and there were
always scraps to be gathered and utilized. And Sally was enabled to
dress carefully. She became the smartest of the girls in the room, for
she had a natural sense of smartness. The other girls did not like her,
but they all envied her and admired her. It was not that she was
unpopular; but that they felt in her the hard determination to get on,
and were resentful of her manifest ability to achieve what she meant to
do.
The other girls were all sorted out in Sally's mind. There was not one
of them into whose nature she had not some biting insight. She had
become so practised that she knew all their dresses (as of course all
the others did, so that a new one was an event), and knew what
everything they owned had cost. She could recognise anything that had
been dyed, any brooch or adornment, any stockings. She would have made a
good house-detective. But she never told tales. If she knew, she knew,
and that was all. It was not for Sally to play the policeman. All
knowledge went into her memory. It would be devastatingly produced on
the occasion of a row, but Sally rarely quarrelled. With her, nothing
ever came to a quarrel. There was no need for it to do so. She was
neither jealous nor censorious. One does not quarrel with one who
neither loves nor blames nor is stupid or too anxious to show
cleverness. Sally merely "was," and the other girls knew it. For this
reason she was not liked, but neither was she feared or unpopular. They
did not hide things from her, but they did not show them eagerly. Sally
was Sally. She enjoyed being Sally. She meant always to be Sally.
And at last there came into Sally's life, when she had been at Madame
Gala's for about six months, a new interest, and a singular one. One
day, when they were all working very hard, and the electric light was
on, Madame came into the workroom with another person. And this person
was a young man with a grey, thin face, rather tall and stooping, with a
hesitating manner, and a general air of weakness. He followed Madame
Gala round the room in an idle way, nodding to several of the girls; and
Sally thought he had a very attractive smile. She found him looking at
herself with a pair of large soft brown eyes, like chocolate which has
been in a warm place. It was a rather dumb look. A little nick came
between Sally's brows. She was busy making an inventory of the young man
visitor's traits, his features, his clothes. He dressed well, and he was
not bad-looking. With more stamina he might have been almost handsome;
but he was obviously not in good health. The stoop, the vagueness of all
his movements, his soft eye, all betokened as much. Sally turned to
Muriel Barrett, who worked next to her.
"Who's he?" she asked, indicating the stranger.
"That's Bertram ... Madame's son. Mr. Merrick, his real name is. But we
call him Gaga."
"Wodjer call him that for?" asked Sally. "Isn't he right in his head?"
"Oo, well one of the gels--she's gone now, Mary Smith,--made it up. She
said he was Mr. Gala, you know. Then she called him Bertie Gaga, for
fun; and it got to Gaga. I never spoken to him, so I don't know. Look
out, he's looking at us. Oo, I believe he's got a crush on you, Sally."
Presently the young man followed his mother out of the room, and there
was a little buzz when they were gone. The girls leaned together, and
whispered, laughing among themselves. Muriel Barrett turned again to
Sally, and became confidential. She herself was a pink, snub-nosed
blonde, with untidy hair, who was always sniffing over her work. She
jerked her head at Rose Anstey, the tall dark girl whom Sally had
noticed when first she came.
"Rose thought he was in love with her once," Muriel said. "Well, he was,
a bit; but not as much as she thought. I mean, he used to look at her,
and all that, but he never give her anything, or took her out. I think
... you know ... she's a bit struck on him. That's more like it. She
thinks he's a very tall handsome man. Well, he's not my taste. Funny, if
you're tall, I s'pose you want a tall man to fall in love with you. It's
different, being small, I suppose. My Elf's only about inch taller than
me. You can't hardly see there's any difference between us. If I've got
my hair frizzed he looks...."
Muriel went on talking. Sally took a glance at Rose, who, with eyes
downcast, was sewing rapidly. Sally wished she had known that about Rose
and Gaga while he was in the room: then she would have been able to look
at Rose and make up her mind about that affair. She did not suppose
really that there was anything in it, either way. Muriel was a little
fool--like a little pink pig. That was just what she was like. And she
chattered like a monkey. She had said that because he looked at her
twice Gaga had got a crush on Sally. Well, Sally didn't mind. He could
have any old crush he liked, for all she cared. Gaga was dismissed from
her immediate attention, although she sometimes recollected a pair of
soft brown eyes, that made her want to say "Moo" as if in response to
their dumb longing.
The outcome of this visit, which occurred towards the end of May, was a
day's outing for the girls at the beginning of June. They all went into
the country by train, on a day which at first promised to be typical of
all days unfortunately chosen for staff outings, but which cheered up
later and became brilliantly fine. Only the girls were there, with Miss
Summers and another forewoman, Miss Rapson, to see that nobody fell
into mischief. They had a good picnic lunch in woods, and ran or walked
or sat about all the afternoon, until it was time for tea. They then
trooped into an hotel in which a room had been engaged, and scrimmaged
for places round a big table. The tea was an enormous meal: Sally, who
had not hitherto enjoyed herself any more than most of the other girls
had noisily done, felt herself grown to twice her normal size. It was
the biggest meal she had ever eaten, and there were cream and milk and
sugar, and there were cakes and lettuce and jam and all sorts of other
encouragements to appetite. And every time anybody laughed the sound
went up to the varnished rafters, and billowed so much that the two
elder women had at last to break in upon a laughter competition. Sally
held aloof from the laughter, scornfully regarding the laughers. She had
been rather serious all day.
And when the noise and fun were at their height Madam and Gaga and
another man and woman came into the room, having motored to the hotel,
taken their tea in another room, and determined to join the party. The
tea had been so late, and so prolonged, that it was already nearly eight
o'clock, and as the sky had grown overcast and the day was drawing to a
close the lights suddenly popped up to illumine the faces of both
feasters and visitors. A piano was opened at the far end of the room,
and the woman who was with Madam sat down at it and began to play. But
only one or two of the girls danced: the others had eaten too much to be
able to do so. Then Rose sang a song, in which she said that her heart
was aching and breaking at somebody's forsaking, and the girls looked at
one another significantly; and there were more songs, and the girls sat
back in their chairs with flushed faces, and each of them in turn seemed
to be doing something to entertain the party. With a bored feeling,
Sally was sipping her last cup of tea, when she became aware that Gaga
had taken the chair next to her, and with his chocolate eyes was looking
pleadingly into her face.
"Don't _you_ sing?" he asked. "I wish you'd sing."
"I got no music," said Sally.
"Mrs. Roach would be able to make an accompaniment. She understands
music very well--if you hummed her a song. I wish you'd sing."
Sally rose to her feet. The other girls all watched her with narrowed
eyes. She was wearing such a pretty dress of light grey cotton poplin
that she looked smarter than ever, they thought--in fact, almost pretty.
She went close to the piano, and spoke to the pianist. "_Oo, swank!_"
whispered the girls, when they saw that Sally was to play her own
accompaniment. It was a thing none of them could have done.
"'When you and I go down the love path together,
Birds shall be singing and the day so long....'"
sang Sally, in her clear voice, and made everybody arch their brows in
surprise.
"'Your heart mine, and mine in your keeping,
List while I sing to you love's tender song.
Ah, love, have done with your repining,
See how the day is clear;
Heart of my heart,
On your fond heart reclining
Dear, oh my Dear....'"
She played with care, and struck no false notes. She sang her best. Her
voice was the best voice of the afternoon, a mezzo-soprano, but with
clear upper register and a fulness that suggested training. It was not
a great performance, but it thrilled the others. Sally had triumphed.
With one accord the girls clapped.
"My best worker," said Miss Summers, rubbing her cold nose and turning
to the accompanist of the afternoon.
"A clever little girl," agreed her neighbour.
But Gaga was stupefied. He had remained in the chair next to Sally's,
and when she resumed her place his mouth was still open with delight and
admiration. Again he leaned forward, and she met his melting chocolate
eyes.
"That was beautiful," he said, in a low tone of commendation.
"Beautiful!"
"Glad you liked it," she said, almost brusquely. Instinctively she shot
a glance in Rose's direction. Rose, her cheeks mantling, was observing
the two with interest. Sally's brain clicked an impression, and she
listened to a stammering from Gaga which aroused her contempt. "He's
hardly a man at all," she thought. "He's soppy. Rose can have him. I
wish her joy of him. She can have him--and twenty like him, if she
wants.... I don't know so much about that. Why should she? She's stuck
up. Why shouldn't I have some fun, if I want to? It's nothing to do with
Rose Anstey what I do, and what Gaga does...."
Her demand was unanswerable, because it was addressed to one who did not
habitually withdraw herself lest she should give pain to others. If Rose
was jealous, that showed the sort of cat she was. And in any case, who
was Rose? Sally was bright in her responses to the soft voice, so that
Gaga was pleased; but the girls could all see that her manner was cool,
and not the flustered eagerness of a beggar. Rose's neighbour whispered.
When the evening was over and Gaga and his mother had gone, and the
girls had all piled into two railway compartments, somebody, whose
voice was unrecognisable in the darkness, called from the other
carriage:
"What price Gaga on the love path? Whey!"
There was great laughter. Even Sally joined in it. Going home, the other
girls in her carriage all insisted upon hearing the song again, and as
they all had the quick ear of Cockneys they could sing it in chorus by
the time the train reached its journey's end. Sally had become, for a
time, the heroine of the occasion. Only Rose, in the other carriage, had
made her protest against the song and its singer.
"Love path!" she said, in a warm voice of indignation. "She's nothing
but a cocket--a white-faced cocket. That's what she is. She nothing but
a white-faced cocket, that Sally Minto!"
From that time onward that was Sally's name among the girls--"Cocket,"
or "White-faced Cocket." Rose had coined the phrase which would stick.
When Sally heard her name the next day, through Muriel's indiscretion,
she looked over at Rose with pinched nostrils and a little dry smile.
She was flattered. The name was the product of Rose's jealousy and
injured vanity; but it was life to Sally, for it was a testimony--the
first she had ever had--to her charm and her dangerousness.
iv
She did not tell Toby the next night about her singing. She rather
carefully refrained from telling him, not out of considerateness, but
from a sort of scorn for his jealousy. To herself she said "Anything for
a quiet life." Toby never dreamed that such a person as Gaga existed,
any more than he guessed at any of Sally's encounters with young men on
the way home. Sally had discretion. Had he been a lover, she might have
told him; but as he was more to her than that she saw no reason to
arouse his jealousy. And really, if a man spoke to her, and looked all
right, where was the harm in letting him walk a little way with her? She
never made appointments, and after a time, when they found she could
take care of herself, and did not want a non-committed male friend,
these fellow-pedestrians soon left her alone. For Sally, each of them
was practice. To mention them to Toby would have been to give them all
too great importance. And he might have made a fuss, and unnecessarily
interrupted her fun. "Where ignorance is bliss," thought Sally, "'tis
folly to call out the guard." And, further, "Let sleeping dogs lie until
the milk is stolen." And so Toby pursued his own path, and never knew a
tenth of what went on in Sally's life and mind. Compared with Sally, he
knew nothing at all. She grew each day more _rusee_, more cunning in
knowledge of the world. And Toby blundered where he should have been
most astute. It was his fate.
Sally told him about the outing, because she saw he was in a gloomy mood
on the day--a Sunday--after the girls' treat. She described it at length
as they walked in Waterlow Park, hanging on to his arm, and all the time
searching his tell-tale face and guessing at the cause of his manifest
depression. She told about the picnic and the woods, and the tea, and
the journey home; and she saw his mouth slightly open as he grunted. She
could see the tiny points of hair that were beginning to make a
perceptible blueness upon his chin, and the moulding of his cheek, and a
little patch of fine down upon his cheek bone, and the hair at his
temples which she had so often kissed. And she knew by his averted eye
that something was the matter with him. She began to try drawing him on
the subject--his aunt, had he heard from his mother (who had married
again when Toby was a baby, and lived with her husband in the North),
what had he been doing at the Works? Ah! That was it. Toby had started,
and frowned. It was something at the Works. Oh, he was easy for Sally to
read!
"What's the matter?" she suddenly asked. Toby flushed and scowled down
at her, very dark and ugly in his irritation, his mouth twisted.
"Matter?" he demanded. "What d'you mean? Nothing's the matter."
"That's why you're so cheerful, I suppose," retorted Sally--"At the
Works, I mean." Toby gave her a quick, angry look in which there was an
admixture of fear and suspicion.
"There's _nothing_ the matter," he said, in a tyrannic voice.
"Have you got the sack?" Sally was merciless. She replied to his
tyrannic voice with one as hard and stabbing as a gimlet. "Ah, I thought
that was it. What you been doing?"
"Nothing," said Toby. "And anyway, what's it to do with you?"
"Well, I'm out walking with you. See? And I got to do all the talking.
See? And if you're going to be surly I'll go home by myself. That's what
it's got to do with me. And, besides, it _is_ something to do with me,
and don't you forget it. You got no right to keep things from me."
Toby was cowed by her handling of him. He might be strong, but brains
are always more potent than muscle in such circumstances. And men are
always afraid of the women they love.
"Yes, I got the push," he defiantly said.
"And what's _that_ for?" demanded Sally, with the severity of a mother
to her baby. There was no answer. "What's _that_ for?" she repeated.
"Come on, Toby, you'll feel better if you tell me about it. Toby, d'you
love me? Well, there's nobody about ... quick!" They kissed, and her
arms had been round his neck, and Toby was her sheepish, scowling,
smiling slave. Sally had a faint consciousness of joy in her power.
"Well, you see...." he began, haltingly. "Jackson and I ... we been ...
well, we wanted to make a bit, you see. And--tiddent _his fault_, but
he...."
"Been pinching stuff," said Sally. "Clumsy. Got found out. Well?"
"Well, they found out about me, too."
"What had _you_ been doing?"
"I never took anything; but I found a lot of old things among the
rubbish, and I showed them to Jackson. Well, they asked him if anybody
had been with him; and he said 'no.'"
"That was all right," Sally said. "I like Jackson."
"But then the man he'd been dealing with said Jackson had talked about
his 'mate.' And they knew that was me. And I ... told 'em a tale."
"_I_ bet!" cried Sally, scornfully. "And got caught in it, too. Badly!"
"Well, they fired us both yesterday, and said we was lucky they didn't
prosecute."
"Did they pay you? What you going to do now?"
"I dunno." Toby stared stubbornly before him. "Get something else, I
suppose. Jackson's going for a sailor. Guess I'll do that, too."
"Go for a sailor?" demanded Sally, with a heart that went dump into her
boots. "What d'you want to do that for?"
"I'd be with Jackson, see, if I went for a sailor."
"And what about me?" Sally's voice was no longer hard or dry. "D'you
want to leave me? Are you tired of me, Toby? I believe you are. Are
you?"
"No, I'm not. And I don't want to leave you. But if I went for a sailor
I'd make a bit of money, perhaps, and then after a little while I could
come back and begin again. It would get over having no reference. They'd
say 'Where you been working?' and I'd say 'Been at sea for the last
year.' Then they wouldn't know anything but what I told 'em. I wouldn't
go long voyages, Sally. Only just short ones. I'd often come home, and
we'd have a spree."
Sally's quick brain was at work. She did not want him to go; but if he
went, and if she saw him often, in spite of his being away, perhaps it
would not be so bad.
"But suppose you got wrecked?" she exclaimed.
"Rot. D'you suppose every ship gets wrecked? Don't be a fool!"