Chapter III: Environment Wins

It was a wrench to tear myself away from my old men and women in the Isle of Dogs, for I truly loved them. The operation left a scar that was slow to heal. I felt I did them good: my visits cheered them, unlike the curate’s; my whimsical talk broke the monotony of old age and the East-End. But doing good is a luxury, and I was now face to face with the strict necessity of earning my livelihood. Yet hope lies still at the bottom of Pandora’s box. Though I had but six and sevenpence in the world, and starvation wages, I started blithely to my work at Flor and Fingelman’s.

I had found a room meanwhile to which my purse consented. The normal difficulties of lodging-hunting had been aggravated in my case by the need for finding a house where I should not be separated from Commissioner Lin; which made a back-yard a necessity: but I succeeded in surmounting them. Commissioner Lin, I may say, to allay your fears, is my mongrel Chinese bull-pup. Like Ulysses, I have a dog; he is ugly, but _a beauty_, and, oh, such a dear! I may starve, but the Commissioner shares my last crust.

Geographically, my post was in the Outer Office. Early each morning I went in to the inner recess of Shushan the palace to receive Ahasuerus’s instructions, and to take down from his royal lips my shorthand notes, which I afterwards expanded on the type-writer in the anteroom. Ahasuerus was graciously pleased to like me. I found favour, also, in the eyes of the Grand Vizier; he was good enough to say my work was intelligent. I had doubts in my own mind as to the Vizier’s competence to form an opinion on this head; but was he not a man—a vote-wielding citizen, empowered to take his share (vicariously) in the counsels of the nation? and was not I but a Shorthand and Type-writer (female)? I bowed to the wisdom of the superior sex, and answered with a modest blush that I rejoiced to have earned his approval.

The morning and afternoon were taken up in expanding letters and copying drafts of documents. Their style was execrable. The principal verb adroitly concealed itself: the principal adjective was usually “aforesaid.” Now, regarded as an epithet, I find “aforesaid” colourless. Its monotony bored me. I suggested to Ahasuerus that his prose might be enriched by a greater variety of graphic adjectives such as “amethystine,” “prismatic,” “opalescent,” “empyrean,” or even “colossal;” but he stared at me coldly, and replied in a curt voice that legal phraseology was necessarily limited. The Grand Vizier, also, cavalierly rejected my mild suggestions for an enlarged vocabulary. He contended that I should model my composition on _Chitty on Contract_. He was right, of course; but I found the iteration of “provided always” in that well of legal English intensely irksome.

The anteroom where I clicked was shared by the Grand Vizier and the two other clerks. They talked incessantly; I was forced to continue my transcription without interruption, in spite of their voices. I will admit that their discourse, as such, by no means distracted me, in virtue either of its intrinsic attractiveness or of the nature of its subjects. It circled chiefly round the noble quadruped, with divergences on Rugby and Association football. I did not gather that the Vizier and his satellites knew much at first hand about the breed of race-horses, nor could they have distinguished with ease between a fetlock and a cannon-bone. They loved sport from afar: they were platonically horsey. But they were diligent students of a daily journal in the interest of manly pastimes: and they extracted from its pages many charming speculations as to the numerical chance of first and second favourites. They also spoke freely of the ladies of the music-hall. As their tongues rippled on, with peculiar London variants on the vowels of our native language, my type-writer continued to go click, click, click, till I was grateful for its sound as a counter-irritant to their inanity.

That click, click, click became to me like music—if only because it drowned the details of the Lewes Spring Meeting. I saw in it all a trail of Ibsenesque atavism. The horse was the sacred beast of the English in the days of Woden, and, in spite of St. Augustine and John Wesley, his worship still survives, its festivals attracting thousands of pilgrims each year to the centres of the cult at Epsom and Newmarket. Devotees may be known by their badge, a pink paper, which blushes itself, and is a cause of blushing in others.

Another peculiarity of the Outer Office was its richness in dust—the dust specific to a solicitor’s premises. I think, in this age of sanitation, I have kept my head tolerably unprejudiced on the subject of germs; I do not speak evil of bacteria with the reckless extravagance of the world at large; I am prepared to live and let live; nor do I deny to the bacilli of typhoid fever the common right to the struggle for existence. But the bacilli at Flor and Fingelman’s, I must admit, were obtrusively aggressive. They carried the war into Africa. They flew about me visibly whenever I lifted a book; they settled in myriads on my poor black dress; they invaded my hair, and required to be daily dislodged by violent hostilities. The three clerks seemed to me to disregard them altogether; and when I ventured timidly to suggest a duster, they were almost as horrified as when I proposed to vary the bald language of a writ by the introduction of a few graceful chromatic adjectives. Fustiness and mustiness are part of the profession, it seems; you must no more attempt to sweep the Augean stables than to carry out that other Herculean task—the simplifying and codification of the law of England.

For three mornings and three afternoons I endured Flor and Fingelman’s. It was a question of self _versus_ environment. I am a unit of the proletariat, and dear Sister Agatha had impressed upon me often, with her sad, sweet smile, the fundamental truth that beggars must not be choosers. So I continued to click, click, click, like a machine that I was, and to listen as little as possible to the calculated odds upon King Arthur for the Ascot Cup, till I was tired of the subject. On the fourth day, however, the rebel in my blood awoke. Not for nothing had my fathers fought at Lexington. I felt I must strike one blow for freedom. The aforesaid office failed to respond to the needs of the party of the first part. I went out to lunch, half resolved in the whirligig I call my mind never to go back again.

It was not the Grand Vizier, with his hairy hands, his goggle eyes, and his false diamonds; though a certain insolent condescension in the creature’s manner made me shrink from his presence. It was not the junior clerks; though the tone of voice with which they addressed me as “Miss” reminded me of the accent in which I had often heard men of their type bespeak a defenceless barmaid; while their demeanour varied from the haughty to the condescending. It was Ahasuerus himself whose Oriental leer drove me from the office. I felt sure Ahasuerus considered his manner killing—a three-tailed bashaw, with a natural gift of captivating Circassians. His smile was the smile that knows itself irresistible. He had not as yet ventured anything rude to me; but I scented prospective rudeness in the way he watched me come in and out—the way he beamed on me benignly, with his small pig’s eyes, as who should say, “See how bland and how pleasant I am; you must rejoice, mere female, to have secured the favour of so genial a gentleman, who revels in semi-detached affluence at Balham.” I fled from his oily face, assured that the law was not my proper sphere. I would diverge into paths of more commonplace business.

All this time I had been living upon Capital. If you judge such conduct imprudent, remember that I could hardly have lived upon its interest. My six and sevenpence was almost spent. I owed my landlady (at the single room I had taken) for bread and rent. I had nothing left for my own food or for Mr. Commissioner. The outlook was serious. Dimly aware of failure in the Struggle for Life—inability to succeed in Adaptation to the Environment—I retired for lunch to a little shop close by, whose merits the Grand Vizier had from the first impressed upon me.

At the table by my side sat two middle-aged men. They were talking earnestly. I detected at once in the mellow tone of the better-looking of the two that he was a Cambridge man and a political economist. The Moral Sciences Tripos has its special aroma. After the rippling tittle-tattle of the noble quadruped I was glad to listen even to the voice of economics. I strained my ears. It was pleasant to hear educated men speak again. And their talk was full of interest.

“You have been to see them?” the first voice said.

“Yes,” the Cambridge man answered. “It is an interesting experiment, though foredoomed to failure. They say they want to try anarchy in practice. They have bought ten acres of wild land very cheap; they are getting it into tillage; and they mean to manage it upon Kropotkine’s system of intensive culture.”

Intensive culture! I saw at once what that meant. What a capital plan! Till the land to the utmost, so as to make the largest possible amount of food or roses come out of it. And anarchists, too! Why, I was born an anarchist. Never could I endure being ordered about by anyone. After Flor and Fingelman’s—click, click, click, all day—what a vista of Eden! I sat a postulant at the gate of that Paradise. Just to go out into the fields and till them anarchically!

“And have they no organisation?”

“None at all. He told me it was a band of brothers. I asked him by what rule they worked. He said each man or woman laboured when he or she chose! If he didn’t feel inclined he left off for that day and sat in the sun, basking. They cultivate in common; each member of the community receives food and clothes; and at the end of the week, if any surplus remain, they divide it between them by way of pocket-money.”

“Then it acts, so far.”

“Yes, apparently. But ’tis new. They look healthy enough, though pallid, and they are certainly enthusiastic. I asked Rothenburg how he liked it; he said it was delightful—ten thousand times better than being a tailor in Paris.”

I could no longer restrain myself. A caprice seized me. I leaned across the table. “Pardon me,” I said, “but may I venture to ask, as an anarchist in the grain, where shall I find this Utopia, this Eldorado of anarchy?”

The Cambridge man smiled.

“Near Horsham,” he answered. “But—excuse curiosity—are you _really_ an anarchist?”

“I will join them!” I cried, clasping my hands. “I have every qualification. I am alone in the world, and penniless—splendid material for anarchy. Such idyllic anarchy, too! Do they receive mere women?”

“I think,” the Cambridge man replied, “they would be charmed to take you. But remember, they are uncultivated—the raw material of a state, rough working men and women. Go down and see them by all means. But when you have inspected their home I venture to hazard a guess that you will decide it is not meant for ladies.”

“I am young,” I answered; “I have tolerable strength and abundant energy. Misfortunes are nothing if one takes them in the spirit of camping out. Hardships cease to be hardships when you talk of them as roughing it. After all, it is only what we voluntarily do at a picnic up the river. At least, I will go down and interview your anarchists.”

He scribbled their precise address on the back of an envelope, with a smile for my enthusiasm. I went home to my solitary room at once, and sat down to my private and particular Barlock—the same on which I am inditing these present memoirs—to write out my resignation to Flor and Fingelman.

“GENTLEMEN,

“WHEREAS I, the undersigned, have worked for three days
and upwards, be the same more or less, to my great discomfort,
in your dingy, stingy, musty, and fusty office; and WHEREAS I
have found the post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female) which
you have deigned to bestow upon me, in the aforesaid office,
highly disagreeable to my mind and brain, owing as well to the
impurity of the air as to the dulness and monotony of the terms
employed in it; and WHEREAS I am now desirous of seeking other
and more congenial employment elsewhere than in the aforesaid
dinginess, stinginess, mustiness, and fustiness, as herein
designated, NOW THEREFORE, This Indenture Witnesseth and know
all men by these presents, that I have made up my mind not to
return to your messuage or tenement this afternoon, nor on any
subsequent date, but to relinquish entirely the aforesaid post
of Shorthand and Type-writer (female) with all and sundry the
emoluments or salaries thereto pertaining, and to say good-bye
to you, the aforesaid Flor and Fingelman, and to your Grand
Vizier and other faithful satellites. In witness whereof I have
hereto set my hand and seal, this twenty-first day of May, in
the year of our Lord, &c., &c.

“JULIET APPLETON.”

I put it into an envelope and dropped it into the post; then I turned again on my way, a Free Woman.

Free, but penniless.

Hurrah for anarchy! flowery, bowery anarchy, in a careless-ordered garden, run wild with eglantine! Could a Peri hope to storm that Eden?