Lilian Part 6

She had no coquetry, and not the slightest inclination for _chic_. Her clothes were "good," and bought in Upper Street, Islington; her excellent boots gave her away. She was not uninterested in men; but she did not talk about them, she twittered about them. To Lilian she had the soul of an infant. And she was too pure, too ingenuous, too kind, too conscientious; her nature lacked something fundamental, and Lilian felt but could not describe what it was--save by saying that she had no kick in either her body or her soul. In the third place, there was that terrible absence of ambition. Lilian could not understand contentment, and Gertie's contentment exasperated her. She admitted that Gertie was faultless, and yet she tremendously despised the paragon, occasionally going so far as to think of her as a cat.

And now Gertie straightened herself, stuck her chest out bravely, according to habit, and smiled a most friendly greeting. Behind the smile lay concealed no resentment against Lilian for having failed to appear on the previous evening, and no moral superiority as a first-cla.s.s devotee of duty. What lay behind it, and not wholly concealed, was a grave sense of responsibility for the welfare of the business in circ.u.mstances difficult and complex.

"Have you seen Miss Grig?" she asked solemnly.

"Yes," said Lilian, with a touch of careless defiance; she supposed Gertie to be delicately announcing that Miss G. had been lying in wait for her, Lilian.

"Doesn't she look simply frightfully ill?"

"She does," admitted Lilian, who in her egotism had quite forgotten her first impression that morning of Miss G.'s face. "What is it?"

Gertie mentioned the dreadful name of one of those hidden though not shameful maladies which afflict only women--but the majority of women.

The crude words sounded oddly on Gertie's prim lips. Lilian was duly impressed; she was as if intimidated. At intervals the rumour of a victim of that cla.s.s of diseases runs whisperingly through a.s.semblages of women, who on the entrance of a male hastily change the subject of talk and become falsely bright. Yet every male in the circle of acquaintances will catch the rumour almost instantly, because some wife runs to inform her husband, and the husband informs all his friends.

"Who told you?" Lilian demanded.

"Oh! I've known about it for a long time," said Gertie without pride.

"I told Milly just now, before I went out. Everybody will know soon."

Lilian felt a pang of jealousy. "It means a terrible operation," Gertie added.

"But she oughtn't to be here!" Lilian exclaimed.

"No!" Gertie agreed with a surprising sternness that somewhat altered Lilian's estimate of her. "No! And she isn't _going_ to be here, either! Not if I know it! I shall see that she gets back home at lunch-time. She's quarrelled already with Mr. Grig this morning about her coming up."

"Do you mean at home they quarrelled?"

"Yes. He got so angry that he said if she came he wouldn't. He was quite right to be angry, of course. But she came all the same."

"Miss G. must have told Gertie all that herself," Lilian reflected.

"She'd never be as confidential with me. She'd never tell me anything!"

And she had a queer feeling of inferiority.

"We must do all we can to help things," said Gertie.

"Of course!" agreed Lilian, suddenly softened, overcome by a rush of sympathy and a strong impulse to behave n.o.bly, beautifully, forgivingly towards Miss G.

Nevertheless, though it was Gertie's att.i.tude that had helped to inspire her, she still rather disdained the virtuous senior. Lilian appreciated profoundly--perhaps without being able to put her feeling into words--the heroic madness of Miss G. in defying common sense and her brother for the sake of the beloved business. But Gertie saw in Miss G.'s act nothing but a piece of naughty and sick foolishness. To Lilian Miss G. in her superficial yearning softness became almost a terrible figure, a figure to be regarded with awe, and to serve as an exemplar.

But in contemplating Miss G. Lilian uneasily realized her own precariousness. Miss G. was old and plain (save that her eyes had beauty), and yet was fulfilling her great pa.s.sion and was imposing herself on her environment. Miss G. was _doing_. Lilian could only _be_; she would always remain at the mercy of someone, and the success which she desired could last probably no longer than her youth and beauty. The transience of the gifts upon which she must depend frightened her--but at the same time intensified anew her resolves. She had not a moment to lose. And Gertie, standing there close to her, sweet and reliable and good, in the dull cage, amid the daily circ.u.mstances of their common slavery, would have understood nothing of Lilian's obscure emotion.

III

Shut

The two girls had not settled to work when the door of the small room was pushed cautiously open and Mr. Grig came in--as it were by stealth.

Milly, prolonging her sweet hour of authority in the large room, had not yet returned to her mates. By a glance and a gesture Mr. Grig prevented the girls from any exclamation of surprise. Evidently he was secreting himself from his sister, and he must have entered the office without a sound. He looked older, worn, worried, captious--as though he needed balm and solace and treatment at once firm and infinitely soft. Lilian, who a few minutes earlier had been recalcitrant to Miss Grig's theory that women must protect men, now felt a desire to protect Mr. Grig, to save him exquisitely from anxieties unsuited to his temperament.

He shut the door, and in the intimacy of the room faced the two girls, one so devoted, the other perhaps equally devoted but whose devotion was outshone by her brilliant beauty. For him both typists were very young, but they were both women, familiar beings whom the crisis had transformed from typists into angels of succour; and he had ceased to be an employer and become a man who demanded the aid of women and knew how to rend their hearts.

"Is she in there?" he snapped, with a movement of the head towards the princ.i.p.als' room.

"Yes," breathed Lilian.

"Yes," said Gertie. "Oh! Mr. Grig, she ought never to have come out in her state!"

"Well, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, of course she oughtn't!" retorted Mr. Grig. His language, unprecedented in that room, ought to have shocked the respectable girls, but did not in the slightest degree. To judge from their demeanour they might have been living all their lives in an environment of blasphemous profanity. "Didn't I do everything I could to keep her at home?"

"Oh! I know you did!" Gertie agreed sympathetically. "She told me."

"I made a hades of a row with her about it in the hope of keeping her in the house. But it was no use. I swore I wouldn't move until she returned. But of course I've got to do something. Look here, one of you must go to her and tell her I'm waiting in a taxi downstairs to take her home, and that I shall stick in it till she gives way, even if I'm there all day. That ought to s.h.i.+ft her. Tell her I've arranged for the doctor to be at the house at a quarter to eleven. You'd better go and do it, Miss Jackson. She's more likely to listen to you."

"Yes, do, Gertie! You go," Lilian seconded the instruction. Then: "What's the matter, Gertie? What on earth's the matter?"

The paragon had suddenly blanched and she seemed to s.h.i.+ver: first sign of acute emotion that Lilian had ever observed in the placid creature.

"It's nothing. I'm only---- It's really nothing."

And Gertie, who had not taken off her street-things, rose resolutely from her chair. She, who a little earlier had seemed quite energetic and fairly fresh after her night's work, now looked genuinely ill.

"You go along," Mr. Grig urged her, ruthlessly ignoring the symptoms which had startled Lilian. "And mind how you do it, there's a good creature. I'll get downstairs first." And he stepped out of the room.

The door opening showed tall, thin Millicent returning to her own work.

Mr. Grig pushed past her on tiptoe. As soon as Gertie had disappeared on her mission into the princ.i.p.als' room, Lilian told Millicent, not without an air of superiority, as of an Under-secretary of State to a common member of Parliament, what was occurring. Millicent, who loved "incidents," bit her lips in a kind of cruel pleasure. (She had a long, straight, absolutely regular nose, and was born to accomplish the domestic infelicity of some male clerk.) She made an excuse to revisit the large room in order to spread the thrilling news.

Lilian stood just behind the still open door of the small room. A long time elapsed. Then the door of the princ.i.p.als' room opened, and Lilian, discreetly peeping, saw the backs of Miss Grig and Gertie Jackson. They seemed to be supporting each other in their progress towards the outer door. She wondered what the expressions on their faces might be; she had no clue to the tenor of the scene which had ended in Gertie's success, for neither of the pair spoke a word. How had Gertie managed to beat the old fanatic?

After a little pause she went to the window and opened it and looked out at the pavement below. The taxi was there. Two foreshortened figures emerged from the building. Mr. Grig emerged from the taxi. Miss Grig was induced into the vehicle, and to Lilian's astonishment Gertie followed her. Mr. Grig entered last. As the taxi swerved away, a little outcry of voices drew Lilian's attention to the fact that both windows of the large room were open and full of cl.u.s.ters of heads. The entire office, thanks to that lath, Millicent, was disorganized. Lilian whipped in her own head like lightning.

At three o'clock she was summoned to the telephone. Mr. Grig was speaking from a call-office.

"Miss Jackson's got influenza, the doctor says," he announced grimly.

"So she has to stay here. A nice handful for me. You'd better carry on. I'll try to come up later. Miss Grig said something about some accounts--I don't know."

Lilian, quite unable to check a feeling of intense, excited happiness, replied with soothing, eager sympathy and allegiance, and went with dignity into the princ.i.p.als' room, now for the moment lawfully at her mercy. The accounts of the establishment were always done by Miss Grig, and there was evidence on the desk that she had been obdurately at work on bills when Gertie Jackson enticed her away. In the evening Lilian, after a day's urgent toil at her machine, was sitting in Miss Grig's chair in the princ.i.p.als' room, at grips with the day-book, the night-book, the ledger and some bill-forms. Although experiencing some of the sensations of a traveller lost in a forest (of which the trees were numerals), she was saturated with bliss. She had dismissed the rest of the staff at the usual hour, firmly refusing to let anybody remain with her. Almost as a favour Millicent had been permitted to purchase a night's food for her.

Just as the clock of St. George's struck eight, it occurred to her that to allow herself to be found by Mr. Grig in the occupation of Miss Grig's place might amount to a grave failure in tact; and hastily--for he might arrive at any moment---she removed all the essential paraphernalia to the small room. She had heard nothing further from Mr.

Grig, who, moreover, had not definitely promised to come, but she was positive that he would come. However late the hour might be, he would come. She would hear the outer door open; she would hear his steps; she would see him; and he would see her, faithfully labouring all alone for him, and eager to take a whole night-watch for the second time in a week. For this hour she had made a special toilette, with much attention to her magnificent hair. She looked spick-and-span and enchanting.

Nor was she mistaken. Hardly had she arranged matters in her own room when the outer door did open, and she did hear his steps. The divine moment had arrived. He appeared in the doorway of the room. Rather to her regret he was not in evening dress. (But how could he be?) Still, he had a marvellous charm and his expression was less worried. He was almost too good to be true. She greeted him with a smile that combined sorrow and sympathy and welcome, fidelity and womanly comprehension, the expert a.s.sistant and the beautiful young Eve. She was so discomposed by the happiness of realization that at first she scarcely knew what either of them was saying, and then she seemed to come to herself and she caught Mr. Grig's voice clearly in the middle of a sentence:'

"... with a temperature of 104. The doctor said it would be madness to send her to Islington. This sort of influenza takes you like this, it appears. I shall have it myself next.... What are you supposed to be doing? Bills, eh?"

He looked hard at her, and her eyes dropped before his experienced masculine gaze. She liked him to be wrinkled and grey, to be thirty years older than herself, to be perhaps even depraved. She liked to contrast her innocent freshness with his worn maturity. She liked it that he had not shown the slightest appreciation of her loyalty. He spoke only vaguely of Miss Grig's condition; it was not a topic meet for discussion between them, and with a few murmured monosyllables she let it drop.

"I do hope you aren't thinking of staying, Mr. Grig," she said next. "I shall be perfectly all right by myself, and the bills will occupy me till something comes in."