Sally Bishop | Page 3

when
you try to make a living wage in London as your own master. The price
of freedom in a free country is beyond the reach of most pockets.
The hour of six had rung out from the neighbouring clocks, yet this girl
showed no signs of finishing her work. From down in the street you
could see her bent over the machine, her fingers pounding the
keys--human hammers monotonously striving to beat out a pattern
upon metal, a pattern that would never come. The light from the

green-shaded lamp above her, fell obliquely on her head. It lit up her
pale, golden hair like a sun-ray; it drew out the round, gentle curve of
her face and threw it up against the darkness of the room beyond. So
well as it could, with its harsh methods, it made a picture. One
instinctively paused to look at it. A man coming out of the shadows of
the Covent Garden Market stopped as he passed down King Street and
gazed up at the window.
For five minutes he stood and watched her, assuming, by looking up
and down the street when anybody passed him by, the attitude of a
person who is waiting for some one.
It is impossible to say whether it is really the woman herself, or a
combination of the woman and the moment, which seizes and drags a
man's attention towards her. In this case it may have been the combined
result of the two. The girl was pretty. In the ray of that electric light, the
soft, childish outline of her face and the pale, sensuous strands of her
hair were probably lent a glamour such as that given by the footlights.
The man, too, was on his way back to companionless chambers. The
lower end of Regent Street may be a far from lonely spot in which to
take up one's abode; but there is nothing so empty as an empty room,
no matter on to what crowded thoroughfare it may look. Say, then, it
was a combination of impulses, the woman and the moment--the girl
pretty and the man oppressed by a sense of loneliness. Whatever it was,
he stood there, without any apparent intention of moving, and watched
her.
She was the last, amongst all those workers who could be seen within
the lighted apertures of the windows, to leave her post. One by one they
performed their weary play of actions, the shutting up of ledgers, the
putting away of papers--out went the lights, and a moment later dim
figures stole out of the darkened doorways into the drizzling rain, and
hurried away into the shadows of the streets. But she still remained, and
the man, with a certain amount of dogged persistence, continued to
watch her movements. Once he took out his watch, as his impatience
became more insistent. Then, with the continual watching of her, the
continual sight of her hands dancing laboriously on those keys, the

noise of the typewriter at last reached the ears of his imagination. He
could hear, above the sounds of the street, that everlasting metallic
tapping.
"God! What a life!" he exclaimed to himself.
If there is anything in telepathy; if thoughts, by reason of their
concentration, can be borne from one mind to another utterly
unconscious of them, then what followed his exclamation might well
have been an example of it. For a moment the girl buried her face in her
hands. He could see her pressing her fingers into the sockets of her eyes.
Then, sitting upright, she stretched her arms above her head. Every
action was expressive of her exhaustion. The glancing at her watch, the
critical inspection of the bundle of papers, yet untyped, that lay beside
her on the desk; all these various movements were like the gestures of a
dumb show. Was she going to give in? From the size of the bundle of
papers which she had looked at, there was apparently still a great deal
of work left for her to do.
The thought passed across his mind that he would give her until he had
counted twenty; if she showed no signs of moving by that time, he
decided to wait no longer.
One--two--three--four--she stood up from the desk. He still watched her
until he had seen her place the wooden cover over the machine; then he
crossed to the other side of the road and began walking up and down
the pavement, passing the door of Bonsfield & Co. About every twenty
yards or so, he turned and passed it again.
Five minutes elapsed. At last he heard the door of the premises
close--the noise of it rattled in the street; then he turned and faced her
as she came towards him.
Her head was down;