“Yes, imagine! She hasn’t read it!”
“I’ve read _The Vicar of Wakefield_,” I said. And then I was annoyed
that I had shown I was annoyed. But at once Miss Howe helped me. Miss
Howe was always nice to me.
“How far have you got? Where the man tires of her? Ah, yes! Well, after
that it’s just her struggle. She—she earns her living—in the inevitable
way. She grows into a miser. She hoards.”
Mr. Flood looked acute.
“That’s what upset them. They don’t mind a Magdalen; but Magdalen
unaware, unrepentant, Magdalen preserving her ill-gotten gains—no,
that’s not quite nice.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Miss Howe. “If anyone can’t feel the spirit
it’s written in, the passion of pity—I think it’s the most pitiful thing
I’ve ever read. It made me shiver. That wretched creature, saving and
sparing——” And then to me, for I suppose I showed I was interested—“She
wants to get away, you know, to get back into the country. It’s her
dream. The homesickness——”
“I suppose such a woman could——?” said the Baxter girl.
“I used to argue it with Madala. Madala always said that, with some
people, that animal craving for some special place was like love—a
passion that could waste you. She said that every woman must have some
devouring passion, for a man, or a child, or a place—_every_ woman. And
that for a beaten creature like that, it would be _place_—the homing
instinct of a cat or a bird. And mixed up with it, religion—the vague
shadowy ideal of peace and cleanly beauty—all that the wretched creature
tries to express in her phrase—‘getting out and living quiet’—that
Madala typifies in the word ‘Eden.’ It meant much to Madala. Don’t you
remember that passage towards the end of the book where she meets the
man, the first man, and brings him home with her—and he doesn’t even
recognize her, and she doesn’t even care.” She picked up a bundle of
tattered proofs and turned them over. “Where is it? What an appalling
hand she had!” She stood a moment, reading a page and pursing her lips.
“Oh, well, what’s the use of reading it? We all know it.” She flung it
down.
“Let me see,” I said to the Baxter girl. She drew it towards me. It was
the first proof I’d ever seen. It was corrected till it was difficult to
read. But I made it out at last.
With the closing of the door she dismissed him with one phrase
for ever from her mind—
“And that’s that!”
She had long been accustomed thus to summarize her clients,
dispassionately, as one classes beasts at a show; and she judged
them, not by their clothing or their speech, not by the dark
endured hours of their love or by the ticklish after-moment of
the reckoning, but rather, as she hovered at the door with her
provocative night smile dulled to a business friendliness, by
their manner of leaving her.
Always there was the fever to be gone; but some went furtively,
with cautious, tiptoe feet that set the stairs a-squeak with
mockery. Her smile did not change for the swaggerer who stayed
long and took his luck-kiss twice, but her eyes would harden.
Mean, cheating mean, to kiss again and never pay again! And some
she watched and smiled upon who left her in a brutal silence.
For them she had no resentment, rather the sullenness beneath
her smile reached out to the revulsion of their bearing as to
something welcomed and akin. And some gave back her smile with
kindly words—and those she hated.
But when, after his manner, the man had gone, she had, as
always, her ritual.
She locked her easy door and pulling out the key, put it before
her on the table at the bedside. Left and right of it she laid
her money down, adding to the night’s gains the meagre leavings
of her purse. Left and right the little piles grew, one heaped
high for the needs of her day and her night, for food and roof
and livery, and one a thin scatter of coppers and small silver
that took long weeks to change into the dear, the exquisite, the
Eden-opening gold. It was the bigger pile that she thrust so
carelessly back into her bag, and the scattered ha’pence that
she warmed in the cup of her two hands, holding them,
jingle-jingle, at her ears, dropping them to her lap again to
count anew, piling them before her to a little, narrowing tower,
before she opened the child’s jewel-case beside her, and,
lifting the sheaf of letters that she never read but kept still
and would always keep, for the savage pain they gave her when
her eyes saw them and her fingers touched them, she poured out
the new treasure upon the sacred hoard beneath.
Tenpence saved—and yesterday a shilling! Five shillings last
week. Fifty pounds! She would soon have fifty pounds!
She put away the box of money, and so, surrendering at last to
the awful bodily fatigue, lay down again upon the tousled bed,
not to sleep—her sleeping time was later in the day—but to shut
her eyes.
For, by the amazing pity of God, a secret that is not every
man’s, was hers—the secret of the refuge appointed, behind
shut eyes, of the return into eternity that is the shutting
down of lids upon the eyes. The window glare, the screaming
street below, the blank soiled ceiling with the flies, the
walls, the unending pattern of the hateful walls, the clock,
the finery, the beastly scents, the loathed familiars of stuff
and wood and brass that blinked and creaked at her like voices
crying—“Misery! misery! misery!”—these were her world. Yet
not her only world. She, who was so dim and blunted a
woman-thing, could pass, with the warm dark velvet touch of
dropping lids, not into the nullity of sleep, but into the
grey place, limitless, timeless, where consciousness knows
nothing of the flesh.
She shut her eyes with the sigh of a tired dog, and instantly
her soul lay back and floated, resting.
There was no time, no thought, no feeling. There was
peace—quiet—greyness. At unmeasured intervals realization washed
over her like waves, waves of peace—quiet—greyness. Greyness—she
worshipped the blessed greyness. She wanted to give it a beloved
name and knew none. ‘When I am dead!’—‘For ever and ever,
Amen!’—So she came nearest to ‘Eternity.’
Peace—quiet—greyness: greyness enduring for ever, that could yet
be rent asunder like a temple veil and let in misery—the window
glare, the reeking room, the clodding footsteps, the fingers
tapping at her door—a frail eternity whose walls were slips of
flesh.