In the Cage | Page 9

bloom of
his beatitude. He was sometimes Everard, as he had been at the Hotel
Brighton, and he was sometimes Captain Everard. He was sometimes
Philip with his surname and sometimes Philip without it. In some
directions he was merely Phil, in others he was merely Captain. There
were relations in which he was none of these things, but a quite
different person- -"the Count." There were several friends for whom he
was William. There were several for whom, in allusion perhaps to his
complexion, he was "the Pink 'Un." Once, once only by good luck, he
had, coinciding comically, quite miraculously, with another person also
near to her, been "Mudge." Yes, whatever he was, it was a part of his
happiness--whatever he was and probably whatever he wasn't. And his
happiness was a part--it became so little by little--of something that,
almost from the first of her being at Cocker's, had been deeply with the
girl.

CHAPTER V

This was neither more nor less than the queer extension of her
experience, the double life that, in the cage, she grew at last to lead. As
the weeks went on there she lived more and more into the world of
whiffs and glimpses, she found her divinations work faster and stretch
further. It was a prodigious view as the pressure heightened, a
panorama fed with facts and figures, flushed with a torrent of colour
and accompanied with wondrous world-music. What it mainly came to
at this period was a picture of how London could amuse itself; and that,
with the running commentary of a witness so exclusively a witness,
turned for the most part to a hardening of the heart. The nose of this
observer was brushed by the bouquet, yet she could never really pluck
even a daisy. What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the
immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of
every instant and every motion. There were times when all the wires in
the country seemed to start from the little hole-and-corner where she
plied for a livelihood, and where, in the shuffle of feet, the flutter of
"forms," the straying of stamps and the ring of change over the counter,
the people she had fallen into the habit of remembering and fitting
together with others, and of having her theories and interpretations of,
kept up before her their long procession and rotation. What twisted the
knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them,
in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an
amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her
frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father
and lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime. During her
first weeks she had often gasped at the sums people were willing to pay
for the stuff they transmitted--the "much love"s, the "awful" regrets, the
compliments and wonderments and vain vague gestures that cost the
price of a new pair of boots. She had had a way then of glancing at the
people's faces, but she had early learnt that if you became a telegraphist
you soon ceased to be astonished. Her eye for types amounted
nevertheless to genius, and there were those she liked and those she
hated, her feeling for the latter of which grew to a positive possession,
an instinct of observation and detection. There were the brazen women,
as she called them, of the higher and the lower fashion, whose
squanderings and graspings, whose struggles and secrets and
love-affairs and lies, she tracked and stored up against them till she had

at moments, in private, a triumphant vicious feeling of mastery and
ease, a sense of carrying their silly guilty secrets in her pocket, her
small retentive brain, and thereby knowing so much more about them
than they suspected or would care to think. There were those she would
have liked to betray, to trip up, to bring down with words altered and
fatal; and all through a personal hostility provoked by the lightest signs,
by their accidents of tone and manner, by the particular kind of relation
she always happened instantly to feel.
There were impulses of various kinds, alternately soft and severe, to
which she was constitutionally accessible and which were determined
by the smallest accidents. She was rigid in general on the article of
making the public itself affix its stamps, and found a special enjoyment
in dealing to that end with some of the ladies who were too grand to
touch them. She had thus a play of refinement and subtlety greater, she
flattered herself, than any of which she could be made the subject; and
though most people were too stupid to be conscious of this it brought
her