To Love Part 16

"I don't know about this girl," he said; "we are never slack at the office."

It was a pet fallacy of his that he was the hardest-worked man in London. Rose smiled. "But her typing is quite good," she argued, "and you are such an easy dictator, I am sure she will get on all right."

She had been exceptionally pleased when Mr. Strangman reluctantly gave way. Joan would, she hoped, take kindly to newspaper work, and it might open up new roads to her.

Meanwhile Joan had been out on her own and taken a room for herself in a house standing in a quiet, withdrawn square in the neighbourhood of King's Road, Chelsea. To call it a room was to dignify it by a t.i.tle to which it could lay no real claim. It was an attic, up the last rickety flight of stairs, with roofs that sloped down within two feet of the ground, and a diminutive window from which one could get but the barest glimpse of the skies. Still it had possibilities, its aspect was not so terribly common-place as had been that of the other rooms which Joan had seen that morning. The sloping roofs, the small pane of gla.s.s which looked out higher than the neighbouring chimney-tops, were in their way attractive. She would take it, she told a somewhat surprised landlady, and would pay--everything included--ten shillings a week for the n.o.ble apartment. The "everything included" swept in breakfast--"Such as a young lady like yourself would eat, Miss"--the woman told her, and attendance. Suppers and fires she would have to provide for herself, though Mrs. Carew was prepared to cook for her; lunch, of course, fell in office hours.

On Sat.u.r.day, therefore, and having forestalled Miss Nigel's request by announcing that she was leaving for good, Joan moved her luggage over to her new home and took possession.

"I am going to like it better than I liked being at Shamrock House," she told Rose, who had come to a.s.sist in the moving. "It is more my own, I can do just as I like here."

Rose was craning her neck to see out of the window's limited compa.s.s.

"Just as you like," she repeated, laughing as she spoke, "on twenty-five shillings a week and an attic. You are not ambitious, my child."

She turned round to face the room; even in mid afternoon, with the sun shining outside, it was dim--the corners in positive darkness. "I don't think I should have chosen it," she said; "there is no sun, and"--she shook the thought off--"who else is in the house, did you ask?"

"There was not any need to," Joan answered. "Mrs. Carew, that is my landlady, you know, told me all their family histories while I was making up my mind whether I would come or not. Wait a minute," she paused in her unpacking to tick them off on her fingers. "There is the ground floor lady, who is an artist's model. No need to work just now though, for the last gentleman that painted her took a fancy to her and is paying for her at present. Drawing-room floor, old foreign lady who never seems to get out of bed. Second floor, retired army officer, 'fond of drink, more's the pity,'" she mimicked Mrs. Carew's voice, "and second floor back, young lady actress, who is not perhaps as good as she might be, 'but there, you can't always be blaming people'; and third floor, me! Doesn't sound respectable does it? But after Miss Nigel I am afraid of respectability."

Rose watched her with narrowed eyes. "It sounds anything but respectable," she agreed; "do not make a fool of yourself, kid, it won't be worth it, it never is."

"I am not likely to," Joan answered her. "My one real regret in leaving Shamrock House is that I shall not have you to talk to, oh, and the baths. Mrs. Carew does not hold with carrying too much water up these stairs."

"I am glad I rank before the baths," Rose laughed. She extricated herself from behind the luggage. "I will come and look you up sometimes," she announced, "though it probably won't be often; I am a bad hand at stirring myself out to see anyone in the evenings.

Good-night, and I hope you will get on all right with Strangman, he is a kind little man really."

She went. Joan sat listening to her feet echoing down the stairs; a mouse could set the whole house creaking. She felt very much alone; Shamrock House, full as it had been of uncongenial companions, had yet been able to offer some distraction from one's own society.

The new office, to which she wended her way on the Monday morning, lay in a side alley opening off Fleet Street, a rickety old building, busy as a hive of bees in swarming time. The steep, wooden stairs, after she had been asked her business by the janitor in the box office and put in charge of a very small, very dirty boy, led her up and up into the heart of the building--past wide-open doors where numerous men sat at desks, the floor round them strewn with papers; up again, past rooms where the engines throbbed and panted, shaking the building with their noisy vibrations; up still further, till they landed her at that withdrawn and sacred sanctum, the Editor's room. Here worked Mr. Strangman and his satellites; spiders, in fact, in the centre of their cleverly-constructed web, throwing out feelers in search of news to all quarters of the globe.

Anything less like a spider than Mr. Strangman it would have been difficult to imagine. He was an alert, nervous man, with bright, kind eyes, a flexible mouth and very restless hands. His whole nature hung on wires, as if--which was indeed the case--his mental capacity was too big and overpowering for his physical strength. His manners under the strain of work were jerky and abrupt, but otherwise he was a very kindly and genial man. To Joan he was excessively polite, and so afraid that her capabilities might not come up to his expectations that for the first few days he left her practically with no work to do. She sat in a large, well-lit--if draughty--room, opposite Mr. Strangman at his table.

It was one of her duties, she discovered, to keep the aforesaid table tidy, and in time she learned that here more than anywhere else she could be of service to the man. He had an awe-inspiring way of piling up his desk with sc.r.a.ps of paper, cuttings, and slips, and stray ma.n.u.scripts, and it was always under the most appalling muddle that the one small, indispensable news-slip would hide itself.

The Magazine Page-faker and the News-gleaner sat in the same room, the latter at a table next Joan. He was a stout man with a beaming smile and an inexhaustible supply of good temper. He would sit over his work, which as far as she could see consisted solely of running his eye over the day's papers and cutting out what appeared to be workable news, making a great deal of noise with his feet on the floor, a gigantic cutting-out scissors in his hand and a whistle which never varied its tune from early morning till late in the evening--a soft, subdued, under-his-breath whistle, Joan never even discovered what the tune was.

He was, despite this disadvantage, an indefatigable worker and an ever-ready helper, always willing to do other people's work for them if necessary.

Of the other people on the staff Joan saw very little; the reporters came early in the morning to take their orders for the day, and threw in their copy downstairs in the evening. Sometimes they would come upstairs to discuss some feature of their day's work with Mr. Strangman, or to put in an article to the Literary Editor, but, as a whole, she hardly learned to know them, even by name. Then there were the office boys, a moving, fluctuating crowd; always in mischief, always dirty, always irrepressibly cheerful. For the rest, her work--one might almost say her life--lay between the four walls of the office room, with the shaking vibrations of the engines under her feet and the musty, curious smell of papers in the making and pile upon pile of papers that had been made all round her.

She arrived at 9.30 and left about 6 p.m., and by then she was too numbed--for the working of a typewriter is monotonous work--to do anything save walk with the hurrying crowds as far as Charing Cross and take a bus from there to Montague Square. But since work filled her days she had less time for discontent or depression. Sometimes she would be tempted to wander off the direct route on her way home and she would walk up to Piccadilly and past the region of brightly-lighted shops, watching the faces in the crowd round her, envying those who met friends and stopped to talk to them, following with rather wistful eyes the couples who pa.s.sed, hand clasped in hand; but generally speaking she was too tired in the evenings to do anything save go straight home, eat a hasty supper and tumble into bed.

Of Rose she saw, as the other had prophesied, very little. Joan realized that friendship, if their brief companionship could have been called such, counted for very little in Rose's life. The girl seemed entirely to ignore her once she was from constant sight, and since Joan could not herself call at Shamrock House and Rose habitually forgot to pay her promised visits, the friendship, such as it had been, faded away into the past.

The other inhabitants of 6, Montague Square, she saw very rarely.

Occasionally she would encounter Miss Drummond, the downstairs tenant, paying off her taxi at the door--a tall, handsome girl, rather overblown in her beauty, who invariably stared at Joan with haughty defiance and stalked into her own room, calling loudly for Mrs. Carew. Once Joan had stumbled over the retired military gentleman from the second floor, sound asleep, in a very undignified position, half way up her own little stairs. The incident had brought with it a shudder of fear, and from that day onwards Joan was always careful to lock her door at night.

Miss f.a.n.n.y Bellairs, the erring damsel on the second floor back, kept such strange hours that she was never visible; but Mrs. Carew had a large stock of not very savoury anecdotes about her which she would recount to Joan during the process of laying supper. As not even an earthquake would have stopped Mrs. Carew's desire to impart information, Joan gave up the attempt to silence her. Indeed, she sometimes listened with a certain amount of curiosity, and f.a.n.n.y Bellairs a.s.sumed a marvellous personality and appearance in her mind's eye.

That the original did not in the least come up to her expectations was something of a surprise. About three months after her first arrival at Montague Square Joan reached home rather late one evening to find her room already occupied. A girl sat, her feet tucked underneath her, on the princ.i.p.al chair under the lamplight; she had been crying, for a tight, damp ball of a handkerchief lay on the floor, and at the sound of Joan's entry she turned a tear-stained face to greet her.

"I thought you were never coming"--the voice held a plaintive sob in it--"and I am that down-hearted and miserable."

Joan put down her things hastily and came across. "I am so sorry," she said, groping through her mind to discover who her visitor might be; "did Mrs. Carew tell you I was in?--how stupid of her."

The girl in the chair gulped back her tears and laughed. "No, she didn't," she contradicted; "she told me that you wouldn't want to see me if you were in; that the likes of you did not know the likes of me, and that I was not to come up. But I came"--she held out impulsive hands. "I guess you aren't angry," she said; "when I get the silly hump, which isn't often, I go mad if I have to stay by myself. I'll be as good as"--she glanced round the room--"as good as you," she finished, "if you will let me stay."

"Why, of course," said Joan. "I don't know what Mrs. Carew can have been talking about. I don't know you, so I can't see how she can have thought I would not want to see you."

"I can though." The girl shook forward a sudden halo of curls and laughed in a way which it was impossible to resist. "I am f.a.n.n.y, from downstairs, and Mrs. Carew is a silly old woman who talks a lot, but she is not stupid enough not to know the difference between a girl like you and a fly-by-night like me. Now I have shocked you," she went on breathlessly, seeing Joan's flush, "just when I was setting out to be good. I'll bite my tongue out and start again."

She coughed once with alarming intensity. Joan moved slowly away and took off her hat and coat. So this was f.a.n.n.y Bellairs, the girl whose doings provided such a purple background for her own dull existence. She looked again at the little figure, lying back now, eyes closed, lips tremulous from the struggle for breath which her fit of coughing had brought her. It was a perfectly-fashioned face, though when Joan had time to study it, she could see that the colouring was just a little crudely put on and that it had smudged in the shadows under her eyes where the tears had lain. She was such a thin, small slip of a girl, too, little dimpled hands and a baby face under the gold curls. f.a.n.n.y opened her eyes at that moment, wide and innocent, and answered Joan's glance with a wistful smile.

"Thinking of all Mrs. Carew ever said about me?" she asked. "I am not as bad as she sometimes paints me. Still"--she stood up--"I'll go, if you would rather I did. Hate to make a nuisance of myself."

She moved slowly--it was, in reality, reluctantly--towards the door, and Joan came out of her reverie with a start.

"Please don't go," she said quickly. "You must think I am awfully rude, but really I was not thinking about Mrs. Carew or anything so disagreeable. I was thinking how pretty you were, and wondering how old you could be."

The girl at the door stopped and turned back. Laughter filled her eyes, yet there was a little hint of mockery behind the mirth.

"Go on!" she said, "you and your thoughts! I know just what they were, my dear; but it doesn't matter to me, I am used to it. Twenty-two, at your service, mum"--she came a little away from the door and swept Joan a curtsey--"and everything my own, even my hair, though you mayn't believe it."

CHAPTER XVI

"Pale dreams arise, swift heart-beats yearn, Up, up, some ecstasy to learn!

The spirit dares not speak, afar Youth lures its fellow, like a star."

ANON.

f.a.n.n.y was a real daughter of joy. The name is given to many who in no sense of the word near its meaning. To f.a.n.n.y, to be alive was to laugh; she had a nature which shook aside the degradation of her profession much as a small London sparrow will shake the filthy water of the gutters from off his sky-plumed wings. She brought such an atmosphere of sunshine and laughter into Joan's life that the other girl grew to lean on it. The friendship between them ripened very quickly; on f.a.n.n.y's side it amounted almost to love. Who knows what starvation of the heart side of her went to build up all that she felt for Joan? Through the dreary days that followed, and they sapped in pa.s.sing at Joan's health and courage, f.a.n.n.y was nearly always at hand, with fresh flowers for the attic, with tempting fruit for Joan to eat in place of the supper which night after night she rejected. f.a.n.n.y would sometimes be away for weeks at a time. She still followed her profession as an actress, Mrs. Carew would tell Joan, and on those occasions Joan missed her intolerably. But f.a.n.n.y herself never spoke about her life, and Joan never questioned her.

Autumn faded into winter; winter blew itself out in a cold and boisterous March, and spring crept back to London. Nowhere else in the world does she come so suddenly, or catch at your heart with the same sense of soft joy. You meet her, she catches you unawares, so to say, with your winter clothes on.

"What is this?" she whispers, blowing against your cheeks. "Surely you have forgotten my birthday, or you would never have come out in those drab old clothes."

Then with a little shake of her skirts she is gone, and your eyes are opened to the fact that the trees have put forth brave green buds, and that yellow crocuses and white snowdrops are dancing and curtseying to you from odd corners of the Park.

Joan's life at the _Evening Herald_ Office, once the first novelty had worn off, and because it was spring outside, became very monotonous and very tiring. She nearly always ended the days conscious of a ridiculous desire to cry at everything. Because the buses were crowded, because the supper was greasy and unappetizing, or because f.a.n.n.y was not at home to welcome her.

There was one afternoon in particular, on a hot, airless day in June, when Joan reached the last point of her endurance. Everything had combined to make the office unendurable. One of Mr. Strangman's most agitated moods held him. Early in the morning he had indulged in a wordy argument with Chester, the Literary Page editor, on the question of whether or not the telephone was to be used by the office boys to 'phone telegrams through to the post office. It was a custom just founded by Strangman and it saved a certain amount of time, but Chester--a thin, over-worked, intellectual-ridden gentleman, was driven nearly mad by occult messages, such as the following:

"Hulloa, hulloa, is that telegrams? Take a message please for the _Evening Herald_. What, can't hear? That's your fault, I am shouting and my mouth is near the tube. Look alive, miss. Listening? Well: to Davids.

D for daddy, a for apples, v for varnish, i for I. I said I for i! Got it now? D for daddy again," and so on.

"The truth of it is," said Mr. Chester, during a pause in one of these wordy tussles, "I, or that telephone, will have to go, Strangman. I cannot work with it going on."