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This etext was prepared by David Price
[email protected], from
the 1919 Martin Secker.
In the Cage
CHAPTER I
It had occurred to her early that in her position--that of a young person
spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or
a magpie--she should know a great many persons without their
recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more
lively--though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity
still very much smothered--to see any one come in whom she knew
outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the
meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young
men--the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the
"sounder," which was always going, to dole out stamps and
postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult
change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the
sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to
night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered
shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen
fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on
which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded
not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by
the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and
other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells
without consenting to know them by their names.
The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the
grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the
professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite
remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly
to bridge. When Mr. Cocker's young men stepped over from behind the
other counter to change a five-pound note--and Mr. Cocker's situation,
with the cream of the "Court Guide" and the dearest furnished
apartments, Simpkin's, Ladle's, Thrupp's, just round the corner, was so
select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these
emblems--she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no
more to her than one of the momentary, the practically featureless,
appearances in the great procession; and this perhaps all the more from
the very fact of the connexion (only recognised outside indeed) to
which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence. She
recognised the others the less because she had at last so unreservedly,
so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge. However that might be, she
was a little ashamed of having to admit to herself that Mr. Mudge's
removal to a higher sphere--to a more commanding position, that is,
though to a much lower neighbourhood--would have been described
still better as a luxury than as the mere simplification, the corrected
awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it. He had at any
rate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little
fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday. During the three months of his
happy survival at Cocker's after her consent to their engagement she
had often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a
familiarity that seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean.
Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his
whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present,
H's had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had
moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their
contracted future. She was conscious now of the improvement of not
having to take her present and her future at once. They were about as