CHAPTER XX
It was not till the end of October that she saw Captain Everard
again, and on that occasion--the only one of all the series on
which hindrance had been so utter--no communication with him proved
possible. She had made out even from the cage that it was a
charming golden day: a patch of hazy autumn sunlight lay across
the sanded floor and also, higher up, quickened into brightness a
row of ruddy bottled syrups. Work was slack and the place in
general empty; the town, as they said in the cage, had not waked
up, and the feeling of the day likened itself to something than in
happier conditions she would have thought of romantically as Saint
Martin's summer. The counter-clerk had gone to his dinner; she
herself was busy with arrears of postal jobs, in the midst of which
she became aware that Captain Everard had apparently been in the
shop a minute and that Mr. Buckton had already seized him.
He had as usual half a dozen telegrams; and when he saw that she
saw him and their eyes met he gave, on bowing to her, an
exaggerated laugh in which she read a new consciousness. It was a
confession of awkwardness; it seemed to tell her that of course he
knew he ought better to have kept his head, ought to have been
clever enough to wait, on some pretext, till he should have found
her free. Mr. Buckton was a long time with him, and her attention
was soon demanded by other visitors; so that nothing passed between
them but the fulness of their silence. The look she took from him
was his greeting, and the other one a simple sign of the eyes sent
her before going out. The only token they exchanged therefore was
his tacit assent to her wish that since they couldn't attempt a
certain frankness they should attempt nothing at all. This was her
intense preference; she could be as still and cold as any one when
that was the sole solution.
Yet more than any contact hitherto achieved these counted instants
struck her as marking a step: they were built so--just in the mere
flash--on the recognition of his now definitely knowing what it was
she would do for him. The "anything, anything" she had uttered in
the Park went to and fro between them and under the poked-out china
that interposed. It had all at last even put on the air of their
not needing now clumsily to manoeuvre to converse: their former
little postal make-believes, the intense implications of questions
and answers and change, had become in the light of the personal
fact, of their having had their moment, a possibility comparatively
poor. It was as if they had met for all time--it exerted on their
being in presence again an influence so prodigious. When she
watched herself, in the memory of that night, walk away from him as
if she were making an end, she found something too pitiful in the
primness of such a gait. Hadn't she precisely established on the
part of each a consciousness that could end only with death?
It must be admitted that in spite of this brave margin an
irritation, after he had gone, remained with her; a sense that
presently became one with a still sharper hatred of Mr. Buckton,
who, on her friend's withdrawal, had retired with the telegrams to
the sounder and left her the other work. She knew indeed she
should have a chance to see them, when she would, on file; and she
was divided, as the day went on, between the two impressions of all
that was lost and all that was re-asserted. What beset her above
all, and as she had almost never known it before, was the desire to
bound straight out, to overtake the autumn afternoon before it
passed away for ever and hurry off to the Park and perhaps be with
him there again on a bench. It became for an hour a fantastic
vision with her that he might just have gone to sit and wait for
her. She could almost hear him, through the tick of the sounder,
scatter with his stick, in his impatience, the fallen leaves of
October. Why should such a vision seize her at this particular
moment with such a shake? There was a time--from four to five--
when she could have cried with happiness and rage.
Business quickened, it seemed, toward five, as if the town did wake
up; she had therefore more to do, and she went through it with
little sharp stampings and jerkings: she made the crisp postal-
orders fairly snap while she breathed to herself "It's the last
day--the last day!" The last day of what? She couldn't have told.
All she knew now was that if she WERE out of the cage she wouldn't
in the least have minded, this time, its not yet being dark. She
would have gone straight toward Park Chambers and have hung about
there till no matter when. She would have waited, stayed, rung,
asked, have gone in, sat on the stairs. What the day was the last
of was probably, to her strained inner sense, the group of golden
ones, of any occasion for seeing the hazy sunshine slant at that
angle into the smelly shop, of any range of chances for his wishing
still to repeat to her the two words she had in the Park scarcely
let him bring out. "See here--see here!"--the sound of these two
words had been with her perpetually; but it was in her ears to-day
without mercy, with a loudness that grew and grew. What was it
they then expressed? what was it he had wanted her to see? She
seemed, whatever it was, perfectly to see it now--to see that if
she should just chuck the whole thing, should have a great and
beautiful courage, he would somehow make everything up to her.
When the clock struck five she was on the very point of saying to
Mr. Buckton that she was deadly ill and rapidly getting worse.
This announcement was on her lips, and she had quite composed the
pale hard face she would offer him: "I can't stop--I must go home.
If I feel better, later on, I'll come back. I'm very sorry, but I
MUST go." At that instant Captain Everard once more stood there,
producing in her agitated spirit, by his real presence, the
strangest, quickest revolution. He stopped her off without knowing
it, and by the time he had been a minute in the shop she felt
herself saved.
That was from the first minute how she thought of it. There were
again other persons with whom she was occupied, and again the
situation could only be expressed by their silence. It was
expressed, of a truth, in a larger phrase than ever yet, for her
eyes now spoke to him with a kind of supplication. "Be quiet, be
quiet!" they pleaded; and they saw his own reply: "I'll do
whatever you say; I won't even look at you--see, see!" They kept
conveying thus, with the friendliest liberality, that they wouldn't
look, quite positively wouldn't. What she was to see was that he
hovered at the other end of the counter, Mr. Buckton's end, and
surrendered himself again to that frustration. It quickly proved
so great indeed that what she was to see further was how he turned
away before he was attended to, and hung off, waiting, smoking,
looking about the shop; how he went over to Mr. Cocker's own
counter and appeared to price things, gave in fact presently two or
three orders and put down money, stood there a long time with his
back to her, considerately abstaining from any glance round to see
if she were free. It at last came to pass in this way that he had
remained in the shop longer than she had ever yet known to do, and
that, nevertheless, when he did turn about she could see him time
himself--she was freshly taken up--and cross straight to her postal
subordinate, whom some one else had released. He had in his hand
all this while neither letters nor telegrams, and now that he was
close to her--for she was close to the counter-clerk--it brought
her heart into her mouth merely to see him look at her neighbour
and open his lips. She was too nervous to bear it. He asked for a
Post-Office Guide, and the young man whipped out a new one;
whereupon he said he wished not to purchase, but only to consult
one a moment; with which, the copy kept on loan being produced, he
once more wandered off.
What was he doing to her? What did he want of her? Well, it was
just the aggravation of his "See here!" She felt at this moment
strangely and portentously afraid of him--had in her ears the hum
of a sense that, should it come to that kind of tension, she must
fly on the spot to Chalk Farm. Mixed with her dread and with her
reflexion was the idea that, if he wanted her so much as he seemed
to show, it might be after all simply to do for him the "anything"
she had promised, the "everything" she had thought it so fine to
bring out to Mr. Mudge. He might want her to help him, might have
some particular appeal; though indeed his manner didn't denote
that--denoted on the contrary an embarrassment, an indecision,
something of a desire not so much to be helped as to be treated
rather more nicely than she had treated him the other time. Yes,
he considered quite probably that he had help rather to offer than
to ask for. Still, none the less, when he again saw her free he
continued to keep away from her; when he came back with his thumbed
Guide it was Mr. Buckton he caught--it was from Mr. Buckton he
obtained half-a-crown's-worth of stamps.
After asking for the stamps he asked, quite as a second thought,
for a postal-order for ten shillings. What did he want with so
many stamps when he wrote so few letters? How could he enclose a
postal-order in a telegram? She expected him, the next thing, to
go into the corner and make up one of his telegrams--half a dozen
of them--on purpose to prolong his presence. She had so completely
stopped looking at him that she could only guess his movements--
guess even where his eyes rested. Finally she saw him make a dash
that might have been toward the nook where the forms were hung; and
at this she suddenly felt that she couldn't keep it up. The
counter-clerk had just taken a telegram from a slavey, and, to give
herself something to cover her, she snatched it out of his hand.
The gesture was so violent that he gave her in return an odd look,
and she also perceived that Mr. Buckton noticed it. The latter
personage, with a quick stare at her, appeared for an instant to
wonder whether his snatching it in HIS turn mightn't be the thing
she would least like, and she anticipated this practical criticism
by the frankest glare she had ever given him. It sufficed: this
time it paralysed him; and she sought with her trophy the refuge of
the sounder.
