 CHAPTER 9 I PLAY CARMAN ST. George joined tacked to his chivalry. When we pulled up at the station he handed us both out, unloaded our iron steeds, raised his hat with an amicable smile, and then, before we had time to thank him, cracked a merry whip and drove away hurriedly. My bandaged condition forbade me even to grasp his hand. He vanished into the past, and was once more a phantom. I never saw him again. Yet I have always been grateful to that brief vision of a knight who saved me for one moment from a passing dragon. If per adventure he happened to read these words, will he accept my thanks for it? On the platform, as Chancellor of my own Exchequer, I had time to bring in my private budget. It showed an obvious deficit. Had I been leader of the opposition, I could have risen with scorn from the front bench, and subjected it to a scathing, nay a crushing criticism. In plain words I saw that I had not money enough to pay my way back to London, to take a dog-ticket for the Commissioner, and also to carry my bicycle with me. Zone 50, one shilling. This collision had proved even more disastrous to my finances than to my hands. Two courses were now open to me. I must cloakroom my machine, with little chance of redeeming it, or else resolve to spend the residue of my days at Homewood. The latter alternative, being the more original of the two, naturally I made up my mind to adopt it. I felt so poor and desolate that I looked for the police to step in and disperse me. I won't go up to town, I said currently to Makayla. I will spend the night here. I said the night only instead of my life, lest she should suspect me of exaggeration. To my vast surprise this resolution, which I fancied of no importance to anyone save myself, threw my companion into a tremor of anxiety. Then I can't go either, she cried, wetting her lips with fear. If you stop, I must stop with you, and telegraph up for my father. I stared at her in astonishment. Why so, I asked at last? Why because—because of this dreadful murder? That murder I inquired, reverting instinctively to Leon and his lips. She stared in turn. You must have heard of it, she exclaimed. It has been in all the papers. I remember that at pinfold we had been too much absorbed by the future of Europe, and the affair of the new glass-house ever to trouble our minds with what chance to be happening in the mere provincial world of London. So I assured her I knew not of it. She went on to explain to me that a woman had been found killed in a first-class carriage, stabbed to the heart, and stuffed under the seat only three days before. I dare not travel alone, she said, clasping her hands and opening her blue eyes wide. Do please come with me. This forced me to explain my financial position. My new friend declared that that did not matter. Despite she lend me a sovereign, a sovereign, I gasped at the idea of such wealth. But I had further to make it clear that my chance of repaying it was a vanishing quantity. She listened to my explanation with open-mouthed astonishment. I think she had never heard of such poverty before, in one of her own sort, though to me it was commonplace. But you must let me lend it to you, she said, drawing out the daintiest little lizard-skin purse I have ever seen, or rather you must let me pay you for the harm I have done to your bicycle, and the difficulty I have brought upon you. That is only fair. I ought to settle for your ticket up to town and for the mending. I was compelled to confess my duplicity had failed. It was more my fault than yours, I faltered out. I was reckless in my pace. You were mounting a slight rise with the wind against you. I was descending, and had it in my favour. If anybody is to blame, it is I. Pray, pray, forgive me. She insisted in spite of me, I shall take two first-class tickets. My democratic gorge rose. Never I cried firmly, St. Nicholas for fend. Not in my palmiest and most unregenerate days did I travel first class. If you consent to take two-thirds, I will owe you for the amount. You can give me your address, and whenever I am rich enough I will repay you all. I have sufficient of my own to buy a ticket for my dog and bicycle. It went against the grain with me to receive this favour from a stranger unseen till today. But I recognized that there was no help for it. She took the tickets under protest. Such dreadful people travel third, drunken soldiers and sailors. Brave defenders of our country, I answered, remembering my father's profession. It's thank you, Mr. Atkins, when the band begins to play. The liquid blue eyes stared at me in blank amazement. Rudyard Kipling, one could see, was a sealed book to her. I think she had doubts of my perfect sanity. Perhaps you share them. We arranged for our maimed mounts. I hold it one of the best points of a bicycle as compared with the noble animal, that it considerably refrains from ringing your heart in the matter of sympathy. It has no nerves. The train panted into the station. We explored an empty carriage, free from the contamination of soldiers and sailors, drunk or sober, and started off comfortably. Makayla took the precaution to peer under the seats beforehand. I am not sure which of the two she expected to find, a corpse or a murderer. This is nice, she said at last, smiling, and recovering her spirits for the first time since the collision. We shall have the carriage to ourselves all the way to Victoria. I gave the guard half a crown. I couldn't travel with a man. I should be quite too frightened. Some devil entered into me. I am subject to devils. My new acquaintance was so insipidly fair, so medievally shrinking, while I am dark and modern, that I had an irresistible impulse to play Carmen to her Makayla. Have you reflected, I said dryly, that a woman may have committed that murder? It was heartless of me, I admit. My little companion was so timid and shrinking, but the bolt fell flat. She clasped her hands and looked at me. I never thought of that, she said. How dreadfully clever you must be to discover it. Dreadful as well as clever. But I am sure you are not a murderous. She had a trick of emphasizing one word in each sentence. You are a great deal too nice. You behaved so sweetly about the ticket, you know, and the accident. Anyone else in your place would have pretended it was my fault and made me pay for the damages. That was only common honesty, I objected. Murderers need not be deficient in common honesty. Oh, but they must be awful people. Murderers are not a class, said I. They are you and me, acting under pressure of powerful impulses. She glanced at me more amazed than frightened. I know you would not murder me, she replied, less alarmed than I might have expected. You are so kind, though you are so queer. I feel quite safe in your hands. With those honest eyes I am certain you would not hurt me. I could have crept under the seat. I felt such a brute. I took her two small hands in my bandaged foams. You dear little thing, I exclaimed. Nobody could ever hurt you. Then seven other devils entered into me again. Worse than the first ones, and I could not help adding. So if I wanted to murder, this is a unique opportunity. My bleeding hands and the evidence about the bicycle accident would suffice to account for any number of bloodstains. Still to stuff you under the seat would be bad taste and vulgar. She caught my eye and laughed. What a funny girl it is, she cried. You are so comical. But it isn't the least use you are trying to frighten me. I can see the twinkle in your big black eyes, and I like you in spite of your trying to be horrid. Do you know I liked you from the first moment I saw you. It was impossible not to be taken by such charming childishness. She cooed so prettily, one was forced to love her. Before we reached Victoria we were fast friends. Micaela thought me the queerest person she had ever met. But oh so nice. Her tongue was loosed. She told me a great deal about what a dear fellow she was engaged to. She spoke of him as Toto. She also wanted to lend me a pound. But I sternly refused. I must work out my own salvation, in fear and trembling. This biblical trick descends to me, no doubt, from the Pilgrim Fathers. Micaela gave me her card at Clapham Junction. Miss Allerdice, it said, and begged me to call upon her. I was driven to explain that in the rank of life to which I now belonged, people did not call upon one another. More particularly that the Jews of Onslo Gardens, I am dropping into it again, had no dealings with the Soho Samaritans. Micaela dissented from this finding. Her position was that a lady was a lady. I granted the truth of that identical proposition. But flatly disallowed that all ladies had time for calling. I also pointed out that my first consideration was bread, which brought tears again into her tender blue eyes. We parted the best of friends. We even kissed one another, though I am an infrequent kisser. She thanked me mightily for my company, which made me feel small again, for I had upset her nerves, broken her machine, and borrowed some shillings, which I scarcely dared to hope I might have the luck to repay her. However, I took her address, and added one small square to the mosaic design, with which I am paving my possible future residence. CHAPTER 10 BEAK MAY SERWAWEET APOLLO Perhaps you think I have made too much of these ancestors of mine, who fought and bled at Lexington. That is always possible. If so, on further thought you will feel that there are excuses for me. My ancestors bequeathed me nothing save the memory of their courage. Had I inherited from them an estate in Middlesex, or even in Massachusetts, I might dwell less on their valor. But since they have left me heiress of their glory alone, it is natural that I should magnify the one legacy I have received from them. To deprive me of that pittance were to leave me poor indeed. Let me sav my indigence with the honor of the family. And in truth, when I got back to my rooms in Soho, I stood in need of every ghost among my ancestral warriors. All the dragons in London flapped wings together in that narrow lodging. Picture my position. I had no money in hand and no machine to work upon. Besides with my maimed fingers it would be impossible for me to typewrite for three days at least. I had no prospect of food till my wounds recovered. Even then much must depend upon the chance of an engagement. And for record of my last place, what had I but my mocking letter to this indenture witness. Must I fall back on the aunt with her black thread gloves and her Xenana missions? I glanced at Commissioner Lynn. No, a bone and freedom. However, petty troubles are the mustard of life. They add pungency. Besides, we are all Cinderella's with a fairy godmother. Her name is Edetois Edue Téderat. I have never failed to find much efficacy in Citizen Danton's prescription. In hopeless circumstances our three best allies are Audacity, Audacity, and again Audacity. I made up my mind to be audacious. I have big black eyes as Makayla had truly observed. Though Audacity comes easily to me, celestial blue is always shrinking. I presented myself at the door of my lodgings, with the air of one who had merely gone away for a few days bicycling trip, and had thousands at her bankers. I think my jauntiness impressed the landlady. I spoke in vague terms of a tour in Sussex, and of its premature close through the accident of a collision. Item, the knees of my knickerbockers, had distinctly suffered. However, as I had paid a fortnight's rent before I left, out of St. Nicholas's benefaction, and had been away for a week and a day, besides four days more or less spent at floor and fangleman's, I was still entitled to two clear night's lodging. If the worst came, I might even stop on for another week without paying. The mere fact of my return was a guarantee of respectability, which in the lodging-house acceptation is a synonym for probable continuous solvency. I commanded supper with my lordliest air. My landlady was too much taken aback to refuse me. I suggested a chop as though chops grew wild. She acquiesced without a murmur. I have remarked already that I belong to a generation, which has analyzed conscience away. But I am sorry to say analysis is not really one with annihilation. Conscience resembles nature in that. When driven out with a pitchfork, it recurs in spite of you. My enjoyment of that excellent chump chop, grilled brown to a turn, was sadly interfered with by the floating fear that I might never be able to pay for it. I had painful qualms. Had my landlady been rich, I might have swallowed them with the chop. But she was a reduced widow with one invalid daughter. Conscience, however, though it makes cowards of us all, does not within my experience produce insomnia. I slept the sleep of the just, and woke up an anteus, or rather an antea. This remark I offer as a contribution to the unsolved problem, whether or not I have been to Gertan. The sun was shining. The thrushes at the bird fancier's opposite were bent on justifying browning by singing twice over each careless light motif. I ordered breakfast with an undaunted face, like Leonidas at Thermopylae. The landlady completely subdued, brought up coffee and rolls as if I had been a duchess. I almost soared to an egg. As the word hung on my lips, conscience stepped in with, necessities yes, but luxuries that were an infamy. I forwent the egg, though my long ride had begotten in me a noble hunger. And I rather flatter myself, that in saying forwent, I am enriching the language with a new preterite. Oxford Dictionary, please copy. Breakfast inspired me with fresh hope. There is much virtue in a breakfast. I began to surmise that I might have misjudged St. Nicholas, not the bland old bishop of the National Gallery. He was a humbug, I felt sure, but that charming young benefactor in Fra Angelico's panel, could he be equally untrustworthy? And with so innocent a face, I for one could scarce credit it. He seemed like the masculine counterpart of Makayla, and Makayla was too mild not to be really guileless. At least I would stroll round to the Strand and seek another interview with the Holy Man. For the next two days it were futile to hunt for work. Those bandaged hands must tell against me. So for force I took holiday. On Monday morning I sallied forth. I wore my little black dress and hat, in which even to myself I looked absurdly proper. I loved trudging down the Strand. It may sound ungrateful to confess it, after the pains that have been taken to make London ugly for us. But I find a weird charm in its picturesque ugliness. When I reached the window of which I was in search, a sudden thrill ran through me. It seemed as though I had suffered some personal loss. My patron saint had disappeared, not a trace of St. Nicholas, if the embalmed body of the Holy Bishop had been missing from the Shrine where it lies at Bari, still exuding manna. I could not have been more disconcerted. In my surprise and alarm I even ventured into the shop. The little fra Angelico I cried. In the window what has become of it? My anxious manor made the astute proprietor sent a possible purchaser. Put up to auction today, he answered. You must be quick, if you want it. Where? He mentioned a firm of picture-dealers in the West End. I know not what possessed me, unless it were the fairy godmother. But I hurried off to the sale-rooms. I had never attended an auction before, yet I wedged my way to the front with the assured air of a buyer. I was only just in time. My patron saint was in the hands of the slave-dealer, who expatiated after the usual fashion of slave-dealers on his chattel's youth, simplicity, and beauty. He also called attention to the innocence and charm of the three sleeping maidens. His language was florid. I could not help wondering whether, from some calm cell in the heavenly monastery overhead, the angelic friar looked down with a pitying smile on the specificitude of his handicraft. How lovingly he laid on his cinnabar and his cobalt. He painted that picture with holy joy, for some dim niche in a florentine nunnery. Could he have foreseen how it would be bandied about, with unsympathetic remarks as to its drawing and coloring, in the unsanctified hands of far northern heretics? It was hateful to behold that lovely youth, with his long, fair hair and his delicate trunk-hose, held up for competition to the highest bidder. The desecration sickened me. There he stood on tiptoe, his back half turned to us, with his three purses of gold, a rich and noble saint, yet not wealthy enough to redeem himself from such last dishonor. O strange craft of the brush, which could so give life to a dead thing, that ages after its fashioner had moldered into dust, my heart still went forth to it as to a living lover. Men began to bid for St. Nicholas. Thirty, forty, fifty, sixty guineas, seventy guineas for the saint. Slower, slower, slower. At last the auctioneer reached a hundred, then came a long pause. I could not bear to think that that coarse-looking dealer, with a vulgar laugh, fat, sleek, materialized, should possess my patron. A young man with a sweet voice, on whose forehead I seemed to see the red star of St. Dominic, had bid up to ninety-five. How I hoped he would continue. But he was silent at the hundred. I could no longer contain myself. The fairy godmother at my elbow impelled me, with an effort I gasped out. A hundred and five, just to keep up the bidding. Going at a hundred and five, a hundred and five guineas, a genuine fra angelico, this exquisite work, so small a price. Does no other gentleman offer? He made a dramatic pause. Then down came the hammer. The lady has it. In a second it rushed over me. What I had done. I gasped in my embarrassment. A clerk drew near and murmured something inaudible about conditions of sale. Through a mist of words I caught faint echoes of five percent at once, and a balance before tomorrow. My face was fiery red. I had dim dreams of prison. The young man, with a sweet voice, stole quietly up to me. Excuse me, he said, in my ear, one moment before you complete this purchase. I want that picture. Will you take five guineas for your bargain? Five guineas, I cried aghast. For a picture worth more than a hundred? You misunderstand me, he corrected. I want that work very much, though I doubt its authenticity. I believe it to be only a contemporary replica. However, if you will cede it to me, I will pay the money down and give you five guineas over. I did not care to go on bidding further against the dealer. He was running up the price, but I will buy it from you. Do you accept my offer? Sick may serve while we'd Apollo. Thus St. Nicholas saved me. I repented of my distrust. Twice was he tried at a pinch, and twice not found wanting. In a haze I assented. The stranger paid me the money, which I handed over to the clerk, lest my own profit. Then I went forth into the street, a rich woman wants more, with an almost inexhaustible capital of five guineas. Was it St. Nicholas, I wonder, or the fairy godmother? The question is important, from the doctrinal point of view, for it involves the conflict between the faith and paganism. But my own opinion is that the young man, with the star of Dominic on his brow, was St. Nicholas himself, come down to earth, yet another time with a purse of five guineas, for a maiden's dour. So have I seen him more than once descending from solid clouds in Exvotos in Italy. CHAPTER XI This story, you say, is deficient in love interest. My dear critic, has anybody more reason to regret that fact than its author? I have felt it all along, yet reflect upon the circumstances. Ten thousand typewriter girls crowd London today, and is precisely in this that their life is deficient. Love interest. Remember, I am only telling you my own poor little story. And I am but an amateur storyteller. The professional novelist keeps in stock, in her study, a large number of vats, each marked, like drinks in a refreshment room, with the names of their contents in gilt letters, sensation, character sketches, humor, and so forth. She turns on the taps mechanically as they are needed. But by far the biggest vat is labeled love interest, no matter what plot the professional novelist may invent. She lets this tap run as soon as her puppets are devised, and drenches the whole work with an amatory solvent, exactly as the chemist dilutes his mixtures with distilled water, to eight ounces. I, however, who am narrating to you the actual history of one stray girl among ten thousand in London. What can I do but wait for the love interest to develop itself? My name is Juliet. You may well believe I have had moments when I thrilled with the expectation of a Romeo. But Romeo's do not grow on every gooseberry bush. It were unreasonable to expect that any mere man is sufficient. You will admit, for instance, that neither the Grand Vizier nor Rothenberg of the watery eyes was precisely the ideal night my fancy painted. St. George, to be sure, was a deer, but I suspected him of one fatal flaw, being married. I waited and watched for that not-impossible he, and the not-impossible he, still worked, unmaterialized. When I came into my fortune, of five guineas, my first impulse was naturally to repay Makayla, which I did at once by post-office order, and thus to transfer that particular square of mosaic pavement from its nether abode to some celestial mansion. My second was to buy a bunch of tea roses for my lodgings, and my third to redeem my typewriter, so as to return to St. Nicholas as some small mark of my gratitude, thirty shillings from his latest benefaction. On further thought, however, it occurred to me that thirty shillings in the hand are worth more at a crisis than a typewriter in the bush, a mixed metaphor which not even the printer's reader, with his officious query, shall prevail upon me to rectify. When no work came, I could live upon capital once more. Meanwhile the machine could be of no possible service. After three days my hands were so far recovered that I began to look about me for a situation again. I took up a daily paper and, in a column of mixed wants, read another wanted advertisement. Lady typewriter, with good knowledge of shorthand, apply messers, blank and sons, publishers, and the address followed. I liked the idea of a publisher's office, and I liked that advertisement. My theory is that a typewriter girl should call herself a typewriter girl, but that an advertiser should do her the courtesy to speak of her as a lady typewriter, or something of the sort. Certainly not as a parenthetical female. Also I must have literature. The literate shred my aunts consisted of ladies' newspapers, Bishop Jackson on The Sinfulness of Little Sins, and books about the Holy Land. Here I should have access to the springs of culture. So I hastened to apply for the vacant post. I was not the first this time. I met a girl on the stairs, less strong than myself, coming down from the office with the most dejected countenance. If this were the struggle for life it made my heart ache, for her sake, to think I must engage in it. However I continued on my way and boldly stated my errand to the young man in attendance. That young man struck a keynote. He was neat, well-dressed, and had a black fringe of moustache, in spite of which advantages he was not supercilious. His voice was a gentleman's. He told me Mr. Blank would be disengaged in a moment. Meanwhile would I take a seat. I sank into one and waited. The office was quite unlike Messer's floor in Fingleman's. The ante-room where I sat was exquisitely clean, and neatly fitted up with polished shelves and woodwork. An air of quiet culture pervaded the whole. It seemed to communicate itself even to the clerks. In the pigeon-holes round the room stood rows of books in glazed paper-covers, looking as spotless and as tidy as if a woman had arranged them. Well-known names adorned their backs, as for dust it was not. In a few minutes came the word, Mr. Blank will see you. I followed my guide, expecting to be ushered into a rather bare room with a venerable gentleman seated at a table. I pictured him, in fact, as the exact original of the hail-old greybeard who testifies in the omnibuses to the merits of Eno's fruit-salt, for the firm is one of the most dignified in London. Instead of that I found myself in a neat study, too cozy for an office, too severe for a boudoir. It had curtains of silken samarkand and fittings of cedar-lebanon. It had also a tawny oriental carpet and an old oak desk, at which sat a young man of modest and statuesque countenance. I guessed his age at twenty-seven. He rose undecided as I entered, like one whom native politeness impels to an act which he half fears is ill-suited to the occasion. As he turned towards me I saw a face of notable strength and culture, a finely-modeled nose, firm yet soft, in outline, acute brown eyes, piercing but gentle, abundant dark eyebrows that hung slightly over them and gave a masterful air to their keenness and penetration. His hair was black and shaggy, like a retriever's. He was tall but well-knit. His eyes met mine as he gave a little inclination. A thrill ran through me. I knew him by instinct. I said to myself, a Romeo. I suppose I was the only person in London at the time who did not know that the head of the firm had lately died and been succeeded by his son, an Eaton Boy, an Oxford man, who had taken high honors. Romeo waved me to a chair. You have come, I think, he said, in a rich, clear voice, pausing for a minute out of instinctive courtesy. Before he seated himself, in answer to our advertisement, Yes, I replied, I understand you want a typewriter girl. His eyebrows moved up at the words. I could see they produced a favourable impression. He was accustomed to the formula, a lady to typewrite for you. Exactly he answered folding his hands and trying to assume the official tone of a man of business, though I was aware that he was unobtrusively observing my dress and appearance, not as Ahasuerus had done, like a cross between an oriental monarch and a horse dealer, but like a gentleman of keen insight accustomed to take things in at a glance without disconcerting the object of his scrutiny. He put me a few stereotyped questions as to speed and qualifications, which I was fortunately able to answer to his satisfaction. When he went on in a deprecatory way, I must ask you, I am afraid, to write a little to my dictation and then transcribe what you have written. Excuse this detail. One must test your ability. Of course I assented, producing my stylograph. We have had applicants already who did not suit my requirements. One left as you arrived. I—I was sorry not to be able to engage her, or I judged her to be in want, but she was quite incompetent. He spoke apologetically. I met her on the stairs, I replied. She appeared to be downcast. He gave me a hurried glance, for there was pity in my tone. It is so unfortunate, he said, that one must insist on competence. For often the incompetent most need employment. There is a beautiful story I answered about Robert Owen when somebody patted the head of a very pretty child at his school at Harmony Hall. You are like all the rest, Sid Owen. You pat the prettiest. But it is the ugly ones that need encouragement. That was true philanthropy. He looked me through and through. I took out my notebook and assumed a business like air. He reached down a volume of some history of Greece and began dictating rapidly. The passage chosen of set purpose was full of Greek names, and rather recondite words of technical import. I saw he had selected it as a test of knowledge as well as of speed. I was glad I had been at it, but that would be confessing. I wrote rapidly and well, more rapidly, I think, than I had ever before done, and I knew why. He was a Romeo. Do I go too fast? He asked at length. Coming up at me suddenly with a gentle smile, not at all, I replied. You might try a little faster, if you like, as you really wish to test me. And you know the names? He inquired with an incredulous accent. Perfectly. Please go on. The hegemony of thieves was the last clause you dictated. He continued to the end. Biosha thus lost the flower of her hoplites, were the words with which she finished. I wrote it all out in long hand, very clearly and distinctly. He ran his eye over it. But this is excellent, he said at last, glancing at it close. You have all the words right. You must have studied Greek, haven't you? I temporized. A little. He paused again. Then after a few questions to draw me out, especially as to attainments, he began rather timidly. This is precisely what I want. I require a lady of education who can take down instructions and write letters to authors on the subject matter of their works without need for correction. But I'm afraid the post would hardly suit you. If you will excuse my saying so, you are too good for the place. I do not mean as to salary. That no doubt I could arrange, in accordance with qualifications. He glanced quickly at my black dress again. But I fear, I fear you will find the work beneath you. You can set your mind entirely at rest on that score, I answered frankly. I will tell you the plain truth. I am in need of a situation, and shall be glad to get one. He hesitated once more. Still I feel doubts of conscience he went on. I will be quite open with you. You may think me quixotic, but I have ideas of my own. Social ideas. Some people might even say, socialistic. Here is this work which I have it in my hands to bestow. Which I hold as a trust almost. It would suffice to keep some poor ladies' wants supplied. Some lady who is in need of actual necessaries. Now I do not think it right that young gentlewomen, who have all they need already found them at home, should compete in the market against poor girls in search of a bare subsistence. They ought not to deprive such girls of bread in order to add to their own pin-money. This movement for doing something on the part of well-to-do women is pressing hard on the girls of the lower middle class. Pardon my putting it so, but you come from a home, no doubt, where you have all you require, and you seek this work just to increase your income. I thought it was sweet of him. I could see I was exactly the person he wanted, yet for a matter of principle he was prepared to take someone possibly less suited to his special requirements. I was glad that I could answer with a ring of truth. There you are quite mistaken. I am one of the class whom you desire to employ. In fact, a girl in search of a bare subsistence. I do not say so in order to appeal to your generosity. I only wish to obtain work on my merits, for what my services are worth in the open market. But if, as you say, I prove a suitable person for your purpose in other respects, you need have no scruple on the grounds you suggest about employing me, I have nothing to live upon, save what I can earn by typewriting. He blushed like a girl of eighteen. He was distressed that he had driven me into making this avowal. Oh, forgive me, he said, rising again from his chair. Eh, it was awkward of me to put it thus bluntly. But you are so evidently a lady of education that I took it for granted. You will understand my natural error. I only hesitated to give a post, which might be filled by a person in need of employment, to an amateur who wanted occupation and pocket money. I quite understand, I answered. Out bicycling last week I passed a common where shaggy donkeys with unkempt coats stood in the sunshine, dejected, hanging their heads as if they had been reading Schopenhauer. He looked up suddenly at the name with an inquiring glance. But their mood was justified, for geese were tugging at the short grass hard by, nibbling it close to the root. When I felt the four-footed beasts might well be melancholy at the struggle for life, when birds, winged creatures that make career over the world, took to competing with them by grazing like cattle, and snatched the bread out of the donkey's mouth. His face wore an amused smile. But you are learned, he put in. You might obviously be engaged in so much higher work. A teacher's, for instance. I should hate teaching, I cried vehemently. I prefer freedom. I am prepared for the drudgery of earning my livelihood in a house of business, but I must realize myself. I understand that, he answered, and sympathized with it. Well I apologize for my mistake. Under the circumstances we need only proceed to arrange the business part of this transaction. He named a weekly sum. It was my turn to blush. That is too much, I exclaimed. I could see he was fixing it not by the market price, but by what he thought a sufficient income for a person of my presumed position in society. It was all so alien from a hazardous way of hiring a shorthand and typewriter female. Not for so competent an assistant, he answered, still nervous. Awkward as it might be to begin one's relations with a new employer by an apparent contest of generosity. Yet I could not accept the sum he proposed. I told him so in plain words. He insisted. I beat him down. After a brief but well contested skirmish I camped on the field as Victor, though we compromised for a wage a little less than half way between what he wished to give and what I was prepared to accept. That escaped me at the time, however, that such a first step almost of necessity entailed a certain sentimental tinge in our relations. They would scarce be those of employer and employed, as regulated by custom and political economy. When all protocols were settled he went on. Can you come in at once? Today if you wish it. Oh, that would be such a convenience to me. I have matters to settle which I do not wish to hand over just now to my clerks. It was my desire that you should act as confidential letter-writer in my dealings with authors quite outside the business. I will begin this afternoon, I said. Our type-rating machine, the one I intended for you, is, I forget precisely which make he mentioned, but it was one to whose keyboard I was unaccustomed. Can you work with it? No, I answered, but I have my own. I will bring it. How kind of you, though you must not continue to use it, of course. We have no right to impose upon you the wear and tear. If you will tell me which sort you prefer, it shall be here tomorrow. Meanwhile, for today, if you would bring round your own, I should be greatly obliged to you. I will go and fetch it, I said, remembering that it laid close by in St. Nicholas's safekeeping. Wow! In a cab? I smiled, his politeness positively embarrassed me. No, in my hands, I replied, I am accustomed to carry it. But type-writers are so heavy, he remonstrated. I felt his anxiety to treat me like a lady was leading to complications, and I have regretted the Grand Vizier's lofty sense of masculine superiority. Had you not better take a cab? No, I answered with firmness, for I felt I must put a stop to the strain at the outset. An employer should know his place. I can carry it easily, thank you. He looked at me with a curious look. I suppose I have the average endowment of feminine intuition, and I felt sure he was debating in his own mind whether or not he should tell me to call a handsome and charge it to the office. It was my own old duolog of inclination and duty. Men said, Make her take it. Duty interposed. You must begin as you mean to go on. This is an office matter. If she cannot work your machine, and wishes to bring her own, she must convey it at her own expense. You have no ground to stand upon. After a pause in which, as I could see, either impulse got the upper hand alternately, he compromised the matter. Is it far, he inquired? Close by. I can fetch it in five minutes. Then one of my clerks will step round with you and carry it for you. I blushed bright crimson. I had imagined shyness to be like sensibility, hysterics, and fainting, an obsolete disease of the early Victorian epoch. I now knew that it survived into our own time. I could feel the hot blood flooding my ears and cheeks and running down my neck. What on earth could I answer? I'll let the clerk see where I had left my machine. How confess to Romeo to whose keeping I had confided it? He could never understand that. To a girl of my temperament those golden balls were but the mystic symbol of the saint of Myra. I knew not what to answer. I stood still and blushed, and my blush it was that betrayed yet saved me. Seeing my eyes one second in a mute appeal I saw right into his soul as he stood there, facing me, more nervous, more embarrassed than ever. I saw he devined that I lived in some poor quarter, or had a drunken mother, or something equally discreditable, and was ashamed to let his clerk know it. But he withdrew, like a gentleman that he was, to the finger ends. How stupid of me he went on. I see, of course, it would be unpleasant for you to walk down the street with one of my clerks, though they are nice young men, all of them. Excuse my gochery, but you are coming in at once to oblige me. I ought to have arranged to have a machine here to sue to. Won't you please take a cab and allow me to, to charge it to the office? He had got it out at last. I changed color once more. To hide my shyness, or to my vast surprise, I was speechlessly shy by this time. I pulled out my handkerchief. As fate would have it, fate that mocks at human souls, I drew with it from my pocket a little square of blue paper, which fell face downward on the floor. How can I confess the truth? It was the counter-foil or ticket I had received from my machine from the representative of St. Nicholas. CHAPTER XII A Cavalier Makes Advances I grieve to hint a doubt of my chosen patron, but enlarged experience of St. Nicholas has led me to believe that he lacks consistency. His action is jerky, though he will often sweep down as of old. In a pale haze of glory, to rescue some votary from instant shipwreck, he is hardly a saint in whom a girl can repose implicit confidence. At tight places of social trial he is apt to fail one. I had but one consolation. The ticket had fallen on the floor face downward. I stooped to pick it up. My cheeks, I felt sure, must have glowed with crimson. Shame tingled in my ears, but Romeo was beforehand with me. He raised the scrap of paper and handed it to me. Still face downward with a faint inclination. I lifted my lowered eyelids. My swimming eyes parlayed with his for a second. I cannot say whether he was aware what manner of thing he was passing me, but I fancy he did know. If he knew I felt sure he interpreted the episode aright, for his glance was one of mute respect and sympathy. I crushed the unspeakable pasteboard into my pocket, never uttering a word, and rushed hot and red from the room without daring to speak to him. On the stairs I debated whether I could ever come back. Prudence and shame fought it out between them. Prudence won. I determined to go on as if not untoward had happened. I might have failed even so in my resolution. Had it not chanced that my road to the depository of my machine lay past the eating-house where I was want to retire for bodily refreshment from floor and fingle-mans, as I reached the door a hand touched my arm. I looked round, startled, and saw the Grand Vizier outward bound from luncheon, with his hairy hands, his goggle eyes, his shiny black coat grown green on the seams, and his false diamond pin shaped like a shoe of the noble animal. Good morning, Miss, he said in a pert tone. I echoed his salute and made as though I would pass on hurriedly, but I noted in his accent, even from the three words he had spoken, a change of mean. He was almost what for him might be deemed respectful. Look here he went on, striding after me, and keeping a breast of me against my will. That was a devilish clever letter of yours, to the governor, you know. A devilish clever letter. I am proud to have earned the approbation of so competent a critic I answered in my chilliest voice. Praise from Sir Hubert Stanley. He glanced at me with suspicion. I think his first and most flattered idea was that I mistook him for a distinguished baronet, his second neutral intent, that I was mad, his third and most reluctant, that I was poking sly fun at him. Look here he began again. It was his formula for introducing a fresh paragraph in his converse. I have an invitation for you. I've been looking about for you everywhere. Will you come with me on Thursday night, dress-circle, at the Olympic? He rolled it out impressively as one who felt sure that the solemnity of the dress-circle would subdue my stubborn neck. No thanks, I answered. I never go to theaters with casual acquaintances. Then I walked on still faster, for I foresaw that I must often meet him in future, since our offices lay close together, and I judged it best to let him see it once I did not crave the honor of his society. Oh, but this is on the square he went on. You don't understand. You think I don't mean right by you, because I am a gentleman in a position of trust and responsibility, and you are, he was about to say, a typewriter girl, but he checked himself in time and substituted for it the phrase, a lady's stenographer. While you were at the office he went on, I couldn't treat you on equal terms, of course, because of my official position. But when I read that letter I saw at one glance you had brains, and I like a girl with brains, and I mean to walk out with one. Indeed, I answered, then I advise you not to waste your valuable time on a woman who does not pant for that privilege. He let his mouth drop open, but it's a ticket for two he expostulated, given me by a friend of mine, who takes a part in the peace. You'd better think twice. It isn't every day one gets a chance of a seat in the dress circle. And if I go at all, I like to take a young lady. This marked advance. I had gone up in the world. At Southampton Row I had been a young person. He continued to talk, and I continued to turn my coldest shoulder. At last we reached the door of the depository. The goggle eyes ogled me. I saw that some violent act was needful if I were to escape persecution at the man's hands in future. I paused by the step. I am going in here, I said bravely. The vizier did not observe the peculiar character of the shop as a shrine of St. Nicholas. I will wait for you, he answered, waving one hairy hand with cheerful promptitude. I braced myself up for a deadly thrust. I have left my machine here. I went on in a clear cold voice. And I am going in to redeem it. I shall then carry it home. A gentleman in a position of trust and responsibility will not like to be seen by my side as I carry it. He glanced up at the mystic sign. One glance, no more. I saw his face grow pale. To so respectable a man such conduct was inexplicable. Choose a ticket for the dress-circle, and yet I darted in with the same fierce flush of shame and repugnance as before. But this time the need for getting rid of him had given me false courage. When I emerged with the machine, a limp, flaccid creature, half dead with disgust, the grand vizier had melted away, disappeared among the phantoms. Though again Apollo or St. Nicholas had saved me, our courses crossed afterwards in the street many times, but his tolerance of typewriter girls had its proper limits. He tacked across to the other side as I hove in sight lest he should be exposed to the risk of having to acknowledge a salute from so compromising a person. I will say for St. Nicholas that though he has curious methods of bringing about the deliverance of those who trust him, he is a gentleman at heart, and he usually succeeds, in the end, in giving effect to his benevolent intentions. End of CHAPTER XII CHAPTER XIII OF THE TYPEWRITER GIRL. This Levervox recording is in the public domain. THE TYPEWRITER GIRL by Grant Allen CHAPTER XIII CONCERNING ROMEO It is a far cry from Verona to London. The ways of the Corso are not the ways of Paul Maul. Therefore when I admit that my heart cried a Romeo, you are not to infer that I had fallen in love with him. I merely mean that I recognized in my new friend the type of man who might conceivably command my heart and me should fate so well it. When Romeo of Verona first saw his Juliet at the Capulet's mask, tis on record that at first sight of her he forgot Fair Rosalind, for whose sake but one hour earlier he was dying to die, and seizing his new goddess's hand assured her without preamble or introduction, that his lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stood to smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss, while Juliet in return was prepared to avow at a glance, that if the stranger were married her grave was like to be her wedding-bed. Those be the modes of Verona, as vouched by Shakespeare. Our northern hearts, however, have not the instant electric responsiveness of Italian breasts. Love with us is the child not the mother of acquaintance, and though I thought of my Romeo as Romeo from the first moment I beheld him, never calling him in my soul by any other name, yet twas but some prophetic fancy on my part. For many weeks he figured as no more than my employer, Juliet of Verona, if I recollect a rite, when she flung herself upon Romeo, was not yet full fourteen till Lama's night, at her age our northern maid, with her fair hair down, has conceived a romantic attachment for chocolate creams and the prettiest of her governesses. I was twenty-two, and twenty-two that mature age takes time to consider. Moreover it waits till its Romeo asks it. For pretend as we will, the plain truth is this. Woman is plastic till the predestined man appears. Then she takes the mould he chooses to impose upon her. Men make their own lives. Women's are made for them. Why one of my dearest friends at the Guild, an ethereal being, does want to pace the garden with a vellum-covered rosette or pater in her pocket, composing Sean Royale to the moon and to divine love till a man loomed on the horizon, a man in a Norfolk jacket with a commission in the guards and estates in the Midlands, whereupon she exchanged the rosette all at once for a bleer-eyed ferret and strolled about the lanes, accompanied by a fox terrier and a Cuban bloodhound. This is not poetical, but tis life as I have noted it. To cut moralizing short, I settled down at once to work at my Romeo's. When I arrived there with my machine, more dead than alive with shame, the good-looking clerk carried it upstairs for me, reverently. He was a comely youth, with a clean round face, Devonshire apple cheeks, and pleasant parsonage manners. He came, indeed, as I discovered later, from an exmor, rectory. A table was set for me in Romeo's own room. I feared to invade that sanctum. Am I to sit right here, I asked. He smiled and answered, right there. So I took my place under protest. Then sporth I was part of the furniture of his study. My life at Romeo's was a life of routine. Now routine, varied by outbreaks, is excellent for the nerves, but it does not afford material for romance. It is the drab of life. Art insists rather on the purple and scarlet. So I make no apology for dealing with it here, only in a few brief episodes. All our history is episode, with blanks between, which just serve conveniently to divide the chapters. At home my social circle was limited to Mr. Commissioner Lynn. My conversation to diddums then, diddums. At occasional intervals I dined with my aunt, who abode at Paddington. But I did not yearn to make that joy too common. My revered relation has all the vices of the decayed gentlewoman, unheroic vices, which interest nobody. She hoards bits of string and half sheets of note paper. Her table, her ideas, and her discourse are meager. She entertains angels disguised as curates, and as a prop of the Deaconesses Institute. At the office I had my seat in Romeo's own room. Poverty emancipates. It often occurred to me how different things would have been, had my dear father lived, and had I remained a young lady. In that case I could have seen Romeo at intervals only, under shelter of a chaperone. As it was no one hinted the faintest impropriety in the fact that the typewriter girl was left alone with him half the day in the privacy of his study. Not that this freedom gave me much occasion, at first, for talk with Romeo. He was courtesy itself, and by nature conversable, but his chivalrous feelings and his sense of my isolation made him charry of speaking. He dictated all day, or left me to transcribe, but he seldom broke silence save on matters of business. Nevertheless from the outset he was markedly kind to me. I had two nice boys at hand to run errands and carry my notes. Then a skimpy London imp, compact of saucy humor, I called him Puck, the other a slender lad of fifteen, pale, delicate, girlishly pretty, with long straw-colored hair and a distracted manor, whom I rechristened aerial. Romeo gradually adopted this trick of speech from me. It is a habit of mine, as you may have observed, to invent names for my friends. And these generally stick, I suppose, because I borrow them as a rule from the poets, who have classified us into types which recur perennially. After I had been at the office a few weeks, I happened one day to slip into some Americanism, though I have seen little of America, having gone there but once on a visit to my father's folk at Salem. When I was not quite fifteen, I have inherited from my ancestry not a few Massachusetts idioms, one or other of which I sometimes let drop unconsciously to myself in the course of conversation. Romeo snapped at the word at once, Why, you must be a New Englander. Not quite, I answered, flushing. My father was born at Salem, an American citizen, but he became naturalized in England young and was a British officer. Not in the army, Romeo cried, surprised. Yes, I answered, why not? A colonel. I grew hot as I spoke, for the first and only time I think Romeo doubted me. Then you must have a pension, he broke out slowly. It was partly desire to avoid telling the truth, partly a certain native love of mystification, or rather a peaking other people's curiosity, but I answered with a touch of defiance. An officer's daughter loses her pension on marriage. I may be married, perhaps, or separated, or a widow, and I bent down over my work to hide my heightened color. He gazed at me for a second. His eye fell on my left hand, then he glanced away. I could see him saying to himself, he had no right to cross-question me, but interest in me prevailed. He drew near and stood over me. You must forgive my persistence, he said, gently in his modulated voice. Each syllable clear as crystal, but I feel constrained to ask you, have you really a pension? Or if so, you have misled me. I looked up at him with proud eyes. My father's blood rose hot in me. I must tell you the truth, I said, or you will think I am ashamed of my father. I am not ashamed. I am proud of him. He was an English colonel, but I have no pension. He was a very brave man. He threw up his commission, in time of war, at a moment of danger, almost in face of the enemy, because he would not carry out orders which seemed to him unjust. And he died of anxiety and fever just after, on the west coast of Africa. I remember the case. Pray forgive me. It was cruel of me to drive you. Not at all. I am glad you did. Now you will understand better. I rose, flushed, and faced him. They say a soldier should resign his conscience into the keeping of the Queen's advisors. My father could not. He felt wrong was being done. He would not make his judgment blind. He left me poor by it. And I am proud of it. Proud of him. You have reason to be proud, Romeo answered. I recall it all now. His previous record showed it was courage, not cowardice. I honoured him for it at the time, though the world thought otherwise. Thank you, I said in a low voice. May I go now? It is nearly five, and I feel after this. I can do no more work this evening. He opened the door for me, and bowed even more respectfully than usual. There was sympathy in every movement. I felt he understood. I felt I had made a friend. I felt, still more surely than before, that this was my Romeo. CHAPTER XIV I regret to say that from that day forth Romeo was more marked in his courtesy to me than ever. His manner had always a tinge of sweet antique courtliness, but now he surpassed himself. I regret it, I say, because I was afraid I recognised in this courtesy some lingering undercurrent of class feeling. The dear fellow would have been polite to a typewriter girl from the dregs of the people, no doubt. He did not know how to be less than polite to anyone, but he was politer still when he understood that I was an officer's daughter, and as he learned a week later that my mother had sprung from a great Anglo-Indian family, this was treason to his principles. For Romeo, as he had said, was more than half a socialist, but I condoned that fault for the sake of his unvarying kindness. Besides I think he thought well of me, because I was loyal to my father's memory. As though anyone who had known my dear father could have been otherwise, Romeo published for Sidney Trevelyan. From the moment when I first noticed an air of the plantagenets among the rows of books in glazed paper covers in the pigeonholes, I had always longed to be present some day when the famous novelist came in to discuss royalties or addition de luxe with his publisher. Sidney Trevelyan's name was like Charing Cross or Hyde Park Corner, a familiar piece of public property. One afternoon I had my will. I was seated at my table, clicking away at some letters. When I heard on the stairs a rich strident voice, diffusing itself very loud in clear shrill accents, I know not which struck me most its richness or its stridentcy. It was a sonorous voice, which one turn of a note would have made unendurable. He is in his lair, it said, filling the room, plotting schemes to suck my blood. Then I will track him to his earth, young vampire. My dear Barabbas, how are you? He burst into the sanctum, a whirlwind of a man, large, loose-limbed masterful, with a restless gray eye, and a huge mop of brown hair, shot with threads of russet. Romeo rose to greet him. He flung himself into a chair. It creaked beneath his elephantine weight. I left off clicking at once and went on with a piece of long-hand transcription. Or rather to be frank, I feigned to transcribe, though my pen was inkless. As a rule when authors came, it was my place to leave the study for a while and take refuge with Puck and Ariel in the ante-room. But as the great man entered, two yards of humanity, double width, Romeo signed to me to remain, with a quick movement of the eyebrow. He knew my wish and was kind enough to remember it. I counted it to him for righteousness. Sidney Trebellion sniffed and scanned the room, with its oriental hangings and its scent of cedar wood. A nice den, Barabbas, a nice den he observed in a condescending tone. In Alibaba's cave, rich with bones of authors, vastly improved since the days of the old robber, Romeo winced. Like myself, he respected his father. You have garnished it afresh, the great novelist continued, from the spoils of the Egyptians. You have decked yourself in purple and fine linen. Well, tis well you should be comfortable in this world, no doubt. You're in the next. But I refrain from painting a tartarian picture. Dante has done it so well before me, that like the grocer in my street, he defies competition. I see you, my dear Barabbas. He raised his voice still louder, almost lapsing into a falsetto. I see you lolling here in eastern opulence, bathed in Cyprian perfumes, and fanned by obsequious Circassian odalisks. I felt him glance my way, though my eyes were fixed on my paper. I see you, like the sultan in Shelley's hellas, surrounded by large-eyed whorries of voluptuous bosoms, who strew your restless pillow with opiate flowers. I call your pillow restless, my dear fellow, partly because that was Shelley's epithet, if memory serves me, but partly also because a publisher, especially a young one, scarcely expects to enjoy sound slumber. Later on, no doubt, as he becomes hardened in crime, he sleeps as well, as a digestion impaired by old port permits. But at first remorse must disturb his fitful rest. I see you, I say, with opiate flowers on your couch stripped. What was the rhyme? Ah, yes, flowers, pillow. Hooked from orient bowers by the Indian billow. That is the picture here. But at last comes the awakening. He struck a dramatic attitude and held up one hand. He had impressive, fat hands, which seemed always in evidence. You start from your sleep, like Mahmud, man the soraleo, guard, make fast the gate. You dream yourself still lapped in eastern magnificence. Then, ha, what's this? An odour of brimstone, a pallid whiff of blue flame. Mephistopheles smiling grimly on the victim he has landed. You know where you are, unlike the current hero of musical romance. You stretch dim hands of fear and grope. You sink down, down, down, on a couch of liquid fire. All is lost. Why was I ever a publisher? In which of his circles did Dante place publishers? Was it not close between the avaricious and the prevericators? But aloft, in the Empyrean, pillowed on purple cloud, meanwhile, I enjoy that delight upon which Tertullian insisted as a prime element in the ecstasy of the blessed. The delight of beholding you. But your satellites overhear me. Subdiscipline forbids. Barabbas, he waved his hand, I draw a veil over your future condition. He paused for want of breath. Most fat men are sluggish. This mountain of flesh was alive and volcanic in every atom. Romeo began in his soft voice. And on what particular conspiracy of crime have you come to date to consult the habitual criminal? Sidney Trevelyan smiled. He liked to be taken in his mood. Well, my business, he said, is, as you anticipate, a fresh raid against the purses of the Philistines. We must spoil them, my dear Barabbas. We must spoil them in unison. Here our interests are identical. They have taken two thousand dicey of the three-volume Mahatmas. That's not enough. We must issue at once a six-chilling addition, groveling beasts prone in the mud they love. What do they mean by rejecting this so great salvation? Let Moody's see to it. I shall answer their neglect by flinging back Mahatmas in their teeth for six shillings. I know whence it comes, this rebuff, those ignorant parrots, the critics. They toss at me ever their parrot cry of, Artificial, artificial, their own thoughts, grub and grunt in the mud of their sty, and they blame it to the eagle that he should circle about gleaming icy peaks in clear ether. Unnatural, they say, overloaded. That man's snig, or snag, or snog, something teutonic and unlovely. I decline to remember his honored name. He reviewed me in the Parthenon. He has no wings himself, and therefore he thinks flight an indecent gambling. But what do I care for the whole crew? Not an obelisk. Not a doit. Neither for snag nor bag. Neither for archer nor parcher. He paused again to catch breath. In the lull, Romeo, put in quietly. It is too soon, in my opinion, for a cheap addition. No bravice it is not. It is the psychological moment. The world awaits it with hushed breath, six shillings, bound in cloth, Irish linen, dark green, a subtle shade, a shade I have in my mind's eye, like lavender leaves in spring, when the sap mounts emerald through sea-horry stems. You catch my idea? A green, not holy green. Not altogether blue, not gray, not glockus, but something of all, and more than all, with a cunning design by that mad young Belgian, withy bands that twist into interlacing dragons. The title in their midst, in somewhat Celtic letters, he broke off abruptly. Once more I could feel him glance my way. I seemed to see through the back of my head. I was sensitive to his movements. Suddenly he burst out in a quite different voice, snorting like a war-horse. Send that young woman away, he cried, executing a sort of ponderous rhinoceros dance. Before me. Send her away, I tell you. I can't stand her. I won't have her scribbling there and making notes of all I say. She's a paragraphist. A paragraphist. The vilest spawn on God's earth. A paragraphist. What do you mean by setting spab and shorthand writers to report my obiter dicta? He advanced towards me striding. I had risen hurriedly. Go off, he cried, waving his hands at me as if I were a gadfly. Go off. I won't be listened to and paragraphed. I could feel you paragraphing me. Away, young woman, away with you, and by dint of sheer bulk he drove me before him. Romeo opened the door for me. He spoke with deference. I think Miss Appleton, he said, you had better take a seat in the anti-room for the moment, as your presence here seems to disturb Mr. Trevelyan. I went out mystified. As the door closed behind me, I heard the great man snort again. Now really, Barabbas, if you choose to keep dusky Samian slaves chained in your lair for your hours of leisure, you should have the decency to unchain them when fellow conspirators come in with proposals for a joint campaign against Ascalon. I sat in the anti-room for half an hour. Ariel gazed in my face with sympathetic inquiry. The old bear was rude, he asked at last, in a low voice. I might almost call him so. It is his way, Ariel replied. He seems to wipe his shoes on one. But he's not a bad old chap, either, puck put in. He chucked me half a crown once for going a message for him, and called you a tartar-nosed imp, Ariel added, and hit you in the eye with it. He is a very great genius, I observed sententiously, half to sav my own offended dignity. But a genius is a man, Ariel remarked, and I felt he had reason. Twenty minutes later the famous writer emerged. He cast a scowl at me in passing. Sure typewriter woman, he said curtly to Romeo. Good-bye, my dear Barabbas. Rob on, Rob ever. His broad back vanished down the staircase, like a sinking hippopotamus. Well, Romeo asked, with an anxious face as I returned to my post, when the tornado had passed. Now you have seen him. What do you think of Sidney Trevelyan? I think, I said, I would rather be a Barabbas than a Byron. End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15 of The Typewriter Girl. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The typewriter girl by Grant Allen. Chapter 15. Fresh light on Romeo. Sidney Trevelyan is a great man, Romeo said to me later. But his ideas are too great. Especially his idea of his own greatness. His taint's life for him. He moves in an atmosphere of social suspicion. Tis his fixed belief that all the world is always thinking of him. When it is really doing as he does, thinking of itself, he imagines reporters as assault and imagines poison, or as a czar imagines nihilists. He sense a paragraph in every hedge and a critic in every stranger, which explains, I suppose, his odd behavior. My own opinion is that he needed an audience. I could catch it in his voice that he meant me to overhear. Because I affected to be absorbed in my work he thought I was not listening, and that made him angry. Romeo was kindness itself to me, yet I dare say I might never have grown to know him better had it not been for the special providence of an accident, or the accident of a special providence, put it whichever way best suits your philosophy. Straying one afternoon through the Cretan labyrinth of Soho, I happened to note a young girl, very poorly dressed, but with the air of a lady, staring in at a confectioner's. Her face struck a chord. I ransacked my memory for it in vain. Then I recalled in a flash where I had met her before. She was the girl whom I had passed on the stairs at Romeo's on the day when I went to apply for the situation, the girl whom I had supplanted in the struggle for existence. Her shrinking figure, her whipped air, made me turn to ask an inevitable question. Have you found work yet? No, none, she said dejectedly. How came you to know I wanted it? I explained where I had seen her and how I had heard or guessed her errand. She seemed unduly grateful. My heart was touched, for though I doubt not you think me, on my own evidence, a heartless young woman, I have a heart, after all, when ought occurs to rouse it. I reflected at once how even my gentle Romeo had said of this poor child, that she was hopelessly incompetent. Still the incompetent have malice to feed and bodies to clothe, and possibly also souls to save like the rest of us. The struggle for life has not quite choked out my soul, if I have one. I invited her to my room for a cup of tea and an ounce of sympathy. Her gratitude was a satire on Christian charity in this town of London. I found she could type fairly well, though quite unintelligently, like a well-trained Chinaman, but she had no machine of her own and no money to buy one. Or could she undertake work where dictation was necessary, though given a copy she could reproduce each word with mechanical fidelity. It flashed across me at once that all day long I was away at Romeo's and did not need my machine. Better come here, I said, and use it. I will find you manuscripts to transcribe. We have plenty of such work to give away at the office. She fawned on me like a dog accustomed to ill treatment, and for once used kindly. The ravenous way in which she ate bread and butter would have satisfied even the charity organization society. As to the genuineness of her hunger, she was painfully grateful. Her gratitude distressed me. After that we became fast friends. It is true she was terrified at the first smell of tobacco, but I forget that delinquency I have hitherto concealed from you. However she used my machine every day and I helped her in the evenings. Pale blue-eyed colorless with thin hair tied up in a knot the size of a nutmeg. She was built on the same lines as Makayla, whom I always remembered, but with this trifling difference that Makayla was rich, while my new little friend had not assent to bless herself with. One was bound in Morocco with gilt edges, the other a cheap addition in paper covers. Her name was Elsie, her front name, that is to say. For she had another, I suppose, a surname, but I took no heed of it. Surnames lie on the surface of things, and do not interest me. They are of this age utilitarian, while I, who dwell over in wants upon a time, bear little save for the persons in dates of fairyland. We give each other surnames, indeed, only so long as we are mutual phantoms. Wants pierced to the underlying realities of human life, and we call one another by pet names, like so many children. In time Elsie became to me a sort of adopted daughter. She was older than I, to be sure, but her helplessness and an incompetence inspired in me, at last, a sense of motherliness, which we women love. Does it not come out in us even toward our dolls in childhood? Her affection was canine. I found work for her from a typewriting office, hard by. Simple work, selected with a special eye to her limitations. She toiled at it with that patience, which one observes in the squirrel who turns the unceasing treadmill of his cage, for minds of a certain caliber prefer routine, which would kill a thinking animal, to any task that calls for the slightest exercise of intelligence. As long as she was permitted to go on copying, like a machine, Elsie was perfectly happy. A doubt or a query seemed, as she said, to comb her brain. She lost heart before an alternative. I spent little time in my room myself, save for the strict necessaries of sleep and breakfast. At other times I was driven out of it by a work of art on the walls, the portrait of a locket. It represented, or rather represents, for doubtless it still exists, a gold locket and chain, reposing on an ample black silk bosom with a woman's face and hands in the background. The face and hands, so far as can be seen, are fat and placid. The hands crossed, the face featureless, flesh-tints and modeling, however, cast much rude work upon the imagination. I had not courage enough to suggest the removal of this gem to my landlady, who valued it highly as a real oil painting, but it and two vases drove me out, I will not say to the public house, but to the public buildings. I retired at odd moments, to my drawing-room, in the National Gallery, or to the hospitable electric light of the British Museum. Elsie, on the other hand, was not repelled by the locket or the lady. I had now no use for my machine, and she worked on it constantly. She and the Commissioner struck up a violent friendship. It did her good to have some living creature at hand in the room, to whom she could talk in the intervals of click-clicking. To enlarge her circle, I added in time a starling and a canary, whom we christened beef and mustard. The canary was mustard because of his color, and the starling beef, because there was so much more of him. One of the points which had barred Elsie's way, in the matter of obtaining employment, she felt profoundly convinced, was her religious opinions, which were soundly narrow. This happily enabled her, like Rothenburg, to gild her penury with a halo of the martyr. For myself, I suspect that incompetence had more to do with her failure than religious prejudice, but that is a private conviction. She was a positivist, or a Plymouth sister, or a member of some other uncanny small sect. I will plead guilty to discriminating ill these minor brands of creed. I am hazy as to the true distinction between general and particular Baptists, though perhaps a particular Baptist uses soap. And I always mix up Swedenborgians with Irvingites. It was a surprise to Elsie to find that her form of faith seemed to me a question of small import, either way. I hold that most men are human, and still more, most women. My tolerance astonished her, when I suggested that perhaps, at that very minute, Swedenborg and Irving, John Knox and Thomas Akampus, might perchance be gazing down upon us with kindly eyes and an amused smile from some sequestered garden bench in one of the spacious pleasure grounds of the celestial city, where they sat in rapt converse with the soul of John Gloss, who first prospected her own strictly provincial path to paradise. She turned her face to me with mingled delight and terror. My view seemed to her sweet but highly heterodox. She refused to her god a breath of sympathy which she instinctively admired in a fellow creature. One evening I came home and found Elsie at work on a piece of transcription which was evidently too deep for her. It was poetry, she said, in an odd whisper. She had been given it at the office under a promise of secrecy, but the arrangement of the long and short lines of complicated stanzas which needed some care in the adjustment of margins was evidently beyond her. She looked tired and worried and was mildly tearful. Besides, dear, she said, smoothing my hair, there are such difficult words in it, words nobody could spell, not even you, I believe, such as myrrh with two Rs and an H. I can't manage them anyhow. Dictate to me, I said, I can write for a bit. I've not done much today, and I'm hardly the least bit tired. She dictated several strophes. I was not surprised that she found the words hard. Chris-a-praise, mandragora, anaglyph, libatina. These lay some miles outside poor little Elsie's vocabulary. At first I noticed only the rare richness of the language. The many faceted words set like jewels, so as to show their full beauty, gradually as she dictated I began to be aware that the verses she read aloud to me in her infantile sing-song were not merely rhyme but also poetry. I did not pretend to the name of critic, but I judged them to be written with limpid felicity. They had that artlessness which comes of the apt use of the perfect word without show of effort. Each noun and adjective fell so naturally into its place that one fancied the writer could have used no other, till one began to reflect that only studious care results in so absolute a sense of inevitability. And the poems were statuesque. They had none of the tropical exuberance of our time. They were Greek in their austerity. Who is the author, I asked? Curious to know the name of the poet, with this ionic note, new to our English helicon. They didn't tell me. They wished me not to know. He particularly desired that his verses should be kept secret. She went on dictating in her mechanical way. My hands struck the keys rapidly. At last she paused near the close of a curious variant on the Spenserian stanza. There's a word I can't make out, she murmured. True woman has the magic something. I took the manuscript from her hands. True woman has the magic Midas gift. Touched by her hand, dull clay transmutes to molten gold. But that was not what made me give a sudden cry of surprise. And then turned red as a peony. The verses were written in Romeo's hand. And Romeo was their author. In a second I was buried in them, like a bee and a crocus. I felt he was even more to me than before. I had believed him a publisher. Now I knew him a poet. No Barabbas, but a Byron. How long I lay awake in my garret that night, thinking of whom but of Romeo. End of chapter 15. Chapter 16 of the typewriter girl. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The typewriter girl, by Grant Allen. Chapter 16. I Tried Literature. Next morning at lunchtime as I crossed Longacre, I caught a glimpse of Macaela in the gondola of London, steering rapidly northward. A big summer hat, all wild roses and gossamer, half hid her face, like a wild rose itself, pink and white and delicate. At sight of me she recognized me and stopped her handsome, short for a second to grasp my hand. I was pleased at her remembrance. She had come from Waterloo, she said, and was hurrying now to catch a train at Euston. She looked radiantly happy. I told her so. Her face flushed with pleasure. She leaned forward and confided to me in a thrilling whisper that she was to be married in the autumn, to the friend whom she had lost on the day I first met her. I wished her joy and waved my hand. She vanished smiling towards Euston and the unknown, a phantom once more among the flickering phantoms. Happy at her happiness I tripped back to Romeo's. She was an airy little thing of gauze and bergamot, like a breath of fairyland. That afternoon Romeo's talk to me was more human than usual. It was always plain that he wanted to talk, but a sense of the official nature of our relation restrained him often. Today he spoke much of woman's place in literature. So many women, he said, wrote of life with a note of personality rare among men. They put more heart in it. Even squalor or crime grew less base when they handled it. Half unconsciously to myself I murmured under my breath, true woman has the magic Midas gift. Touched by her hand, dull clay transmutes to molten gold. I murmured it quite low, but he caught at the words with a sharp gasp. Where did you see that, he asked quickly. I was forced to confess. The lines occurred in some verses a little friend of mine. I told you of her some days since. Had for copy yesterday, from a typewriting office. I tried not to let him know more. But for a woman I am a poor dissembler. My color, or the trembling of my lips, betrayed me. Did you see the manuscript, he inquired? Yes, I helped her to transcribe it. They promised secrecy, he cried. And you shall have it, I answered. He paused a moment. But you were the last person I would have wished to see them. He went on, his face twitching. I knew why. In some of them an illusion, a description. Here a blue veined eyelid, there a gloss like a squalor's wing on a woman's smooth hair, had seemed to me familiar. He paced up and down the tawny carpet for a while. Then he broke out once more. I have written verse since I was a boy, he said. It has ever been my ambition to be found worthy of the crown of poet. But if I printed these lyrics under my own name, what use? I could but give a handle for Sydney Trevelyan to ask in the Saturday review. Is Barabbas also among the prophets? Nobody will take a publisher's rhyme seriously. So I decided to issue mine under an assumed name. And with another firm. That critics might at least be rude to them on their merits. For that purpose I had them typewritten, and not by you. I am sorry you have seen them. And I am glad, I answered. You may not care for my opinion. But these verses are masterpieces of handicraft. You have the rare gift of reticence. Besides, you understand the fitness of words. You appreciate their melting shades of tone. You feel the emotional atmosphere with which each is girdled. Thank you, he said, checking himself. And you are one of the few whose praise I value. You speak well of my work, for the qualities I strive to have. Not for those I know I have not. From that day forth he was much more at home with me. You see, we shared a secret in common. When his volume came out several months later, it made no stir in the world. But it gained the approbation of five or six out of the twenty-three men and women in England who love poetry. It will yet be known, I think, for though the public often flock together like sheep after some noisy imposter, true poetry is always forced upon them from above by the chosen few who can discover and impose it. The few are frequently obscure and bear no hallmark. They know one another by the two gifts which make a critic—insight and foresight. My knowledge of this book drew me nearer to Romeo. Have they once accepted the fact that I knew of his work? He consulted me time and again as to type and paper, sometimes also as to the choice of an epithet or a point of cadence, when two equally balanced alternatives divided his preference. Should it be lurid or livid? Was ruddy or russet the better? This led us into talks not altogether official. Though always reticent, he began to treat me less as a typewriter and more as a woman. This quality of reticence, which I observed in Romeo's self no less than in his work, impressed me profoundly. I admired his quiet strength, his calm, his urbanity. I am not urbane myself, and I fear I must grant that I am rather vehement than strong. Therefore I respected all the more these traits in Romeo. One honors one's compliment above one's counterpart. He never spoke strongly. He reserved strength for action. A week or two after Sidney Trevelyan's visit I asked him one day whether the cheap addition of Mahatmas was going forward. He smiled his restrained smile and answered, No, certainly not. I never intended it. But Mr. Trevelyan was so urgent, so instant. He had quite made up his mind. Yes, that is unimportant. The moment had not arrived, and I told him so calmly. He is a rock when opposed, but calmness like faith can move mountains. I did not oppose him at the time. And just then could only have irritated him. I saw the state of his soul. He came to me seething internally with suppressed wrath at the critics. I let him blow off steam. In such circumstances I judge it unwise to sit upon the safety valve. He opened his heart and had it out, flinging many hard jibes at me and at the public. That relieved the tension. I let three days pass then I wrote an ultimatum, stating quietly what I thought. He gave in at once. The cheap addition shall not appear till the autumn. Such masculine absence of fussiness pleased me, once or twice when I discussed with him. He asked me seriously why I had never written. I laughed off his assault. He returned to the charge. So much racy material going to waste in my own adventures. I told him of my work among the East End Slopmakers. Readymade stories was his verdict. I doubted my own faculty. He was sure I possessed it. This encouraged me to narrate my experience at Pinfold, anarchists, and they blamed me because I could not fall in love to order. You are an intrepid young lady, Romeo said. Do you know I doubt if you quite realize always in what galleys you have embarked? I think I do, I answered, but I have confidence in myself and my guardian angel. He urged me to try my hand at a short story of the modern girl who earns her own living in London. For example, this little friend who uses your typewriter, he added with a clever side thrust. I was grateful to him for thus diverting the theme from my own personality. There is no more pathetic figure in our world today than the common figure of the poor young lady, crushed between classes above and below, and left with scarce a chance of earning her bread with decency. I fear, I said, I have no knack of pathos. Even at difficult turns I am apt to see rather the humorous than the tragic side of things. So I note, but why not try, your own late adventures, for instance. I felt that the romance had not yet reached its denouement, but I refrained from telling him so. I promised to make an attempt, however, with one of my earlier East End reminiscences, or else with a little vignette of the infant anarchists, unsullied by soap, pulling Commissioner Lynn's tail, while their sisters turned the house that Jack built into Czech and Yiddish. For a week or two I worked hard in my stray moments at this my poor little literary first born. I put its phrases in curlpapers, till I was sick of twisting them. When it was ripe for the birth, I confess I thought meanly of it. Mine own, but a poor thing, to reverse touchstone saying. I brought it to Romeo trembling. He read it, and was enthusiastic. For the first time now I felt sure he really cared for me. What else could have so blinded his critical faculty? For he was a judicious reader. He praised it as if it were the work of a consummate artist. His encouragement was unstinted. I will not repeat what he said as to my style. You who are reading my second effort in that line would be painfully aware how much personal partiality must have warped his judgment. It is so breezy, he said. You write open-air English. I learned it on the moors, among the winds. I answered. This eclog must go into the magazine, he cried, for like most other great houses the firm published one of its own. I drew a line at that. Oh, no, I cried flushing. You are too kind, too generous. I will not allow it to be printed where—where personal acquaintance and your recommendation may disturb the editor's calmer opinion. I must send it to someone else. Then it will be weighed for what it is worth. And if it is accepted, I shall know on what grounds, but I shall be sorry to lose it, he exclaimed, for the magazine's own sake. When one discovers a new writer, one wishes to keep the full credit of the discovery. I looked down to hide my burning cheeks. No, no, I said firmly. You are too flattering, too good. Your—I paused to think how I could best word it. Your knowledge of me predisposes you too much in my favor. He looked at me and hesitated. Not my knowledge alone, he corrected. My friendship, my—he did not say affection. But we raised our eyes in unison. And in a flash of those eyes, each knew that he meant it. There was a long pause. I was aware of my heart, which called attention to its existence, by a violent throbbing. I went back to my machine and began typing mechanically. Then he added all at once. But quite apart from that, I want this story. I want the honor of publishing it, because I see it is a good one. I went on clicking. You cannot separate these things, I said, without looking up. A person is a totality. We do not know ourselves how much of any feeling is due to this cause and how much to that. Nothing ever goes wholly free from either fear or favor. But I have made up my mind. I shall send it to the Pimlico. I sent it in the end, and to my great joy, not unmixed with surprise, the editor accepted it in a chastening letter. He did not say like Romeo a jam of English. He called it on the contrary, high-spirited if flippant. But he printed it nonetheless, and forwarded me a check for twelve guineas. Twelve guineas? Such wealth seemed to me almost incredible. I felt like an Argonaut. Still Romeo was vexed. We ought to have had it, he said. For after all, you were my discovery. End of chapter 16