Chapter XI: A Sail on the Horizon

“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 type-writer girls crowd London to-day, and ’tis 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 story-teller. 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,” “Humour,” and so forth. She turns on the taps mechanically as they are needed. But by far the biggest vat is labelled “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 Romeos 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 Rothenburg of the watery eyes, was precisely the ideal knight my fancy painted. St. George, to be sure, was a dear: 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 lurked unmaterialised.

When I came into my fortune (of five guineas) my first impulse was naturally to repay Michaela (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 type-writer, 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 type-writer in the bush—a mixed metaphor which not even the printer’s reader with his officious query shall prevail upon me to rectify. If 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 type-writer, with good knowledge of shorthand. Apply, Messrs. 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 type-writer girl should call herself a type-writer girl; but that an advertiser should do her the courtesy to speak of her as a Lady Type-writer, or something of the sort: certainly not as a (parenthetical) female. Also, I must have literature. The literature at my aunt’s 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 a 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 Messrs. Flor and Fingelman’s. The anteroom where I sat was exquisitely clean, and neatly fitted up with polished shelves and wood-work. 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 hale old grey-beard 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 cosy for an office, too severe for a boudoir. It had curtains of silken Samarcand, and fittings of cedared 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-modelled 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 as 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 Eton boy and Oxford man, who had taken high honours.

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 type-writer 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 type-write 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. Then 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; for 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,’ said 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 note-book, 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——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 last, looking 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 Thebes’ was the last clause you dictated.”

He continued to the end. “Bœotia thus lost the flower of her hoplites,” were the words with which he 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 temporised. “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 lady’s 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 the 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 type-writing.”

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. “I—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; and I felt the four-footed beasts might well be melancholy at the struggle for life when birds, winged creatures that may 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 realise myself.”

“I understand that,” he answered; “and—and sympathise with it. Well, I apologise 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 Ahasuerus’s way of hiring a Shorthand and Type-writer (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. It did not escape 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?”

“To-day, 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-writing 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 to-morrow. Meanwhile, for to-day, 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 lay close by in St. Nicholas’s safe keeping.

“How? 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 half 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 this 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 hansom and charge it to the office. It was my own old duologue of Inclination and Duty. Inclination 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 enquired.

“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? How 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.

Lifting 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 divined 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 _gaucherie_. But—you are coming in at once to oblige me; I ought to have arranged to have a machine here to suit you. 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 colour once more. To hide my shyness—for 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 counterfoil or ticket I had received for my machine from the representative of St. Nicholas.