This Is the End | Page 8

wrong?"
"What did you do, tell me, and what are you going to do?"
"Oh well, I felt something like frost in the air, and I couldn't define it.
Really, it was work waiting to be done. Not work for the poor, but
work with the poor. At home I talked about work, and Anonyma wrote
about it, and Cousin Gustus shuddered at it. You were doing it all right,
but where was I? Three days a week with soldiers' wives. My brow
never sweated a drop. I thought there must be something better than a
bird's-eye view of work. So I took a job at a bolster place.... Oh well, it
doesn't matter now. I earned ten shillings a week, and paid
half-a-crown for a little basement back. On Saturdays I got my Sunday

clothes out of pawn, and came to tea with Nana. Do you remember the
scones and the Welsh Rarebit that Nana used to make? I believe those
things were worth the terror of the pawnshop. Oh, Kew, those
pawnshops! Those little secret stalls that put shame into you where
none was before. The pawn man--why is it that when you're already
frightened is the moment that men choose to frighten you? Because
weakness is the worst crime. That I have proved. My work was putting
fluff into bolsters. There was a big bright grocers' calendar--the Death
of Nelson--and if I could see it through the fog of fluff I felt that was a
lucky day. I had to eat my lunch there, raspberry jam sandwiches--not
fruit jam, you know, but raspberry flavour. It wasn't nice, and it used to
get fluffy in that air. The others sat round and munched and picked
their teeth and read Jew newspapers. Have you ever noticed that
whichever way up you look at a Jew newspaper, you always feel as if
you could read it better if you were standing on your head? My
governor was a Jew too. He wasn't bad, but he looked wet, and his hair
was a horror to me. His voice was tired of dealing with fluff--though he
didn't deal with it so intimately as we did--and it only allowed him to
whisper. The forewoman was always cross, but always as if she would
rather not be so, as if she were being cross for a bet, and as if some one
were watching her to see she was not kind by mistake. She looked
terribly ill, because she had worked there for three months, which was a
record. I stood it five weeks, and then I had a hemorrhage--only from
the throat, the doctor said. I wanted to go to bed, but you can't, because
the panel doctors in these parts will not come to you. My doctor was
half an enormous mile away, and it seemed he only existed between
seven and nine in the evenings. So I stayed up, so as not to get too
weak to walk. I went and asked the governor for my stamps. I had only
five stamps due to me, only five valuable threepences had been stopped
out of my wages. But I had a silly conviction at that time that the
Insurance Act was invented to help working people. What an absurd
idea of mine! I went to the Jew for my card. He said mine was a hard
case, but I was not entitled to a card; nobody under thirty, he said, was
allowed by law to have a card. So I said it was only fair to tell him I
was going to the Factory and Insurance Inspectors about him. I told
him lots of things, and I was so angry that I cried. He was very angry
too, and made me feel sick by splashing his wet hair about. He said it

was unfair for ladies to interfere in things they knew nothing about. I
said I interfered because I knew nothing about it, but that now I knew. I
said that ladies and women had exactly the same kind of inside, and it
was a kind that never thrived on fluff instead of food. I told him how I
spent my ten shillings. He couldn't interrupt really, because he had no
voice. Then I fainted, and a friend I have there, called Mrs. Love, came
in. She had been listening at the door. She was very good to me.
"Then, when I was well again, I found another job, but I shan't tell you
what it is. As for the Inspectors, I complained, but--what's the use? So
long as you must put fluff of that pernicious kind into bolsters, just so
long will you kill the strength and the beauty of women. It looked so
like a deadlock that it frightened me, and