The following story was told to a friend—with leave, conditionally,
to make it public—by a well-known physician who died last year.
I was in Paul’s type-writing exchange (says the professional
narrator), seeing about some circulars I required, when a young lady
came in bearing a box, the weight of which seemed to tax her strength
severely. She was a very personable young woman, though looking ill, I
fancied—in short, with those diathetic symptoms which point to a
condition of hysteria. The manager, who had been engaged elsewhere,
making towards me at the moment, I intimated to him that he should
attend to the new-comer first. He turned to her.
“Now, madam?” said he.
“I bought this machine second-hand of you last week,” she began, after
a little hesitation. He admitted his memory of the fact. “I want to
know,” she said, “if you’ll change it for another.”
“Is there anything wrong with it, then?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said; “No!” she said; “Everything!” she said, in a
crescendo of spasms, looking as if she were about to cry. The manager
shrugged his shoulders.
“Very reprehensible of us,” said he; “and hardly our way. It is not
customary; but, of course—if it doesn’t suit—to give
satisfaction——” he cleared his throat.
“I don’t want to be unfair,” said the young woman. “It doesn’t suit
_me_. It might another person.”
He had lifted, while speaking, its case off the type-writer, and now,
placing the machine on a desk, inserted a sheet or two of paper, and
ran his fingers deftly over the keys.
“Really, madam,” said he, removing and examining the slip, “I can
detect nothing wrong.”
“I said—perhaps—only as regards myself.”
She was hanging her head, and spoke very low.
“But!” said he, and stopped—and could only add the emphasis of
another deprecatory shrug.
“Will you do me the favour, madam, to try it in my presence?”
“No,” she murmured; “please don’t ask me. I’d really rather not.”
Again the suggestion of strain—of suffering.
“At least,” said he, “oblige me by looking at this.”
He held before her the few lines he had typed. She had averted her
head during the minute he had been at work; and it was now with
evident reluctance, and some force put upon herself, that she
acquiesced. But the moment she raised her eyes, her face brightened
with a distinct expression of relief.
“Yes,” she said; “I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it’s
all my fault. But—but, if you don’t mind. So much depends on it.”
Well, the girl was pretty; the manager was human. There were a dozen
young women, of a more or less pert type, at work in the front office.
I dare say he had qualified in the illogic of feminine moods. At any
rate, the visitor walked off in a little with a machine presumably
another than that she had brought.
“Professional?” I asked, to the manager’s resigned smile addressed to
me.
“So to speak,” said he. “She’s one of the ‘augment her income’ class.
I fancy it’s little enough without. She’s done an occasional job for
us. We’ve got her card somewhere.”
“Can you find it?”
He could find it, though he was evidently surprised at the
request—scarce reasonably, I think, seeing how he himself had just
given me an instance of that male inclination to the attractive, which
is so calculated to impress woman in general with the injustice of our
claims to impartiality.
With the piece of pasteboard in my hand, I walked off then and there
to commission “Miss Phillida Gray” with the job I had intended for
Paul’s. Psychologically, I suppose, the case interested me. Here was a
young person who seemed, for no _practical_ reason, to have quarrelled
with her unexceptionable means to a livelihood.
It raised more than one question; the incompleteness of woman as a
wage earner, so long as she was emancipated from all but her
fancifulness; the possibility of the spontaneous generation of
soul—the _divina particula auræ_—in man-made mechanisms, in the
construction of which their makers had invested their whole of mental
capital. Frankenstein loathed the abortion of his genius. Who shall
say that the soul of the inventor may not speak antipathetically,
through the instrument which records it, to that soul’s natural
antagonist? Locomotives have moods, as any engine-driver will tell
you; and any shaver, that his razor, after maltreating in some fit of
perversity one side of his face, will repent, and caress the other as
gently as any sucking-dove.
I laughed at this point of my reflections. Had Miss Gray’s
type-writer, embodying the soul of a blasphemer, taken to swearing at
her?
It was a bitterly cold day. Snow, which had fallen heavily in
November, was yet lying compact and unthawed in January. One had the
novel experience in London of passing between piled ramparts of it.
Traffic for some two months had been at a discount; and walking, for
one of my years, was still so perilous a business that I was long in
getting to Miss Gray’s door.
She lived West Kensington way, in a “converted flat,” whose title,
like that of a familiar type of Christian exhibited on platforms, did
not convince of anything but a sort of paying opportunism. That is to
say, at the cost of some internal match-boarding, roughly fitted and
stained, an unlettable private residence, of the estimated yearly
rental of forty pounds, had been divided into two “sets” at
thirty-five apiece—whereby fashion, let us hope, profited as greatly
as the landlord.
Miss Gray inhabited the upper section, the door to which was opened by
a little Cockney drab, very smutty, and smelling of gas stoves.
“Yes, she was in.” (For all her burden, “Phillida,” with her young
limbs, had outstripped me.) “Would I please to walk up?”
It was the dismallest room I was shown into—really the most
unattractive setting for the personable little body I had seen. She
was not there at the moment, so that I could take stock without
rudeness. The one curtainless window stared, under a lid of fog, at
the factory-like rear of houses in the next street. Within was scarce
an evidence of dainty feminine occupation. It was all an illustration
of the empty larder and the wolf at the door. How long would the bolt
withstand him? The very walls, it seemed, had been stripped for sops
to his ravening—stripped so nervously, so hurriedly, that ribbons of
paper had been flayed here and there from the plaster. The ceiling was
falling; the common grate cold; there was a rag of old carpet on the
floor—a dreary, deadly place! The type-writer—the new one—laid upon
a little table placed ready for its use, was, in its varnished case,
the one prominent object, quite healthy by contrast. How would the
wolf moan and scratch to hear it desperately busy, with click and
clang, building up its paper rampart against his besieging!
I had fallen of a sudden so depressed, into a spirit of such
premonitory haunting, that for a moment I almost thought I could hear
the brute of my own fancy snuffling outside. Surely there was
something breathing, rustling near me—something——
I grunted, shook myself, and walked to the mantelpiece. There was
nothing to remark on it but a copy of some verses on a sheet of
notepaper; but the printed address at the top, and the signature at
the foot of this, immediately caught my attention. I trust, under the
circumstances (there was a coincidence here), that it was not
dishonest, but I took out my glasses, and read those verses—or, to be
strictly accurate, the gallant opening quatrain—with a laudable
coolness. But inasmuch as the matter of the second and third stanzas,
which I had an opportunity of perusing later, bears upon one aspect of
my story, I may as well quote the whole poem here for what it is
worth.
Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme,
As courtlier gallants woo,
With utterances sweet as thyme
And melting as the dew.
An arm to serve; true eyes to see;
Honour surpassing love;
These, for all song, my vouchers be,
Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.
Bid me—and though the rhyming art
I may not thee contrive—
I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart,
A poem that shall live.
It may have been derivative; it seemed to me, when I came to read the
complete copy, passable. At the first, even, I was certainly conscious
of a thrill of secret gratification. But, as I said, I had mastered no
more than the first four lines, when a rustle at the door informed me
that I was detected.
She started, I could see, as I turned round. I was not at the trouble
of apologizing for my inquisitiveness.
“Yes,” I said; “I saw you at Paul’s Exchange, got your address, and
came on here. I want some circulars typed. No doubt you will undertake
the job?”
I was conning her narrowly while I spoke. It was obviously a case of
neurasthenia—the tendril shooting in the sunless vault. But she had
more spirit than I calculated on. She just walked across to the empty
fireplace, collared those verses, and put them into her pocket. I
rather admired her for it.
“Yes, with pleasure,” she said, sweetening the rebuke with a blush,
and stultifying it by affecting to look on the mantelpiece for a card,
which eventually she produced from another place. “These are my
terms.”
“Thank you,” I replied. “What do you say to a contra account—you to
do my work, and I to set my professional attendance against it? I am a
doctor.”
She looked at me mute and amazed.
“But there is nothing the matter with me,” she murmured, and broke
into a nervous smile.
“O, I beg your pardon!” I said. “Then it was only your instrument
which was out of sorts?”
Her face fell at once.
“You heard me—of course,” she said. “Yes, I—it was out of sorts, as
you say. One gets fancies, perhaps, living alone, and typing—typing.”
I thought of the discordant clack going on hour by hour—the dead
words of others made brassily vociferous, until one’s own
individuality would become merged in the infernal harmonics.
“And so,” I said, “like the dog’s master in the fable, you quarrelled
with an old servant.”
“O, no!” she answered. “I had only had it for a week—since I came
here.”
“You have only been here a week?”
“Little more,” she replied. “I had to move from my old rooms. It is
very kind of you to take such an interest in me. Will you tell me what
I can do for you?”
My instructions were soon given. The morrow would see them attended
to. No, she need not send the copies on. I would myself call for them
in the afternoon.
“I hope _this_ machine will be more to the purpose,” I said.
“_I_ hope so, too,” she answered.
“Well, she seems a lady,” I thought, as I walked home; “a little
anæmic flower of gentility.” But sentiment was not to the point.
That evening, “over the walnuts and the wine,” I tackled Master Jack,
my second son. He was a promising youth; was reading for the Bar, and,
for all I knew, might have contributed to the “Gownsman.”
“Jack,” I said, when we were alone, “I never knew till to-day that you
considered yourself a poet.”
He looked at me coolly and inquiringly, but said nothing.
“Do you consider yourself a marrying man, too?” I asked.
He shook his head, with a little amazed smile.
“Then what the devil do you mean by addressing a copy of love verses
to Miss Phillida Gray?”
He was on his feet in a moment, as pale as death.
“If you were not my father”—he began.
“But I am, my boy,” I answered, “and an indulgent one, I think you’ll
grant.”
He turned, and stalked out of the room; returned in a minute, and
flung down a duplicate draft of _the_ poem on the table before me. I
put down the crackers, took up the paper, and finished my reading of
it.
“Jack,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It does credit to your heart—you
understand the emphasis? You are a young gentleman of some prospects.
Miss Gray is a young lady of none.”
He hesitated a moment; then flung himself on his knees before me. He
was only a great boy.
“Dad,” he said; “dear old Dad; you’ve seen them—you’ve seen her?”
I admitted the facts. “But that is not at all an answer to me,” I
said.
“Where is she?” he entreated, pawing me.
“You don’t know?”
“Not from Adam. I drove her hard, and she ran away from me. She said
she would, if I insisted—not to kill those same prospects of mine. My
prospects! Good God! What are they without her? She left her old
rooms, and no address. How did you get to see her—and my stuff?”