CHAPTER V
Itwas Saturday morning. Bridget was awakened by the sound of the rain beating heavily against the windows of her room. From where she lay she could see a neglected slip of back-garden, which seemed to exist solely for the purpose of providing a convenient area for an avenue of clothes-props, terminating ineffectively at the point where the steeply-sloping roofs of the opposite buildings touched the top of the garden wall.
Streams of water poured continuously over the roofs, and ran in dirty streaks down the whitewashed wall. The quick falling drops made a dreary splashing on the tiles of the yard below the bedroom window. Bridget surveyed the inspiring prospect miserably. Her half awakened thoughts connected it with her yesterday’s geography lesson to the Second Form. “Look at the streams of water running down a roof, the next time it rains,” she found herself repeating; and then she stirred restlessly.“I’m in the groove already. Lessons on the brain!”
She turned her eyes resolutely from the window, and they began to wander over the dull lodging-house bedroom.
There was a high mahogany chest of drawers opposite the bed, its top concealed by a crocheted cover in coarse cotton, of doubtful whiteness. Above it hung a picture of a lady with a crinoline, a pink tarlatan dress, and long ringlets, her head drooping at the appropriate angle for stroking the inevitable dove.
Curtains of cretonne, with a hopeless design in crimson on a drab ground, hung in a corner of the room over a row of dress pegs. In the fireplace there was a paper screen, representing a sylvan landscape ornamented with swans.
The dressing-table was adorned by several woolly mats of a violent green shade; and on the mantel-piece there was a row of mourning cards with chaste designs of silver urns, willows, and weeping angels. Bridget gazed at them all with weary indifference. “What am I to do with this day, and to-morrow, and Monday? Three whole days to be passed between this room and the next, if it rains like this all the time,—and it probably will. At least there are the children on working days. I wish there werenoholidays. When you’re working you can’t think.The sole use of Saturday and Sunday, as far as I can see, is to make one glad of Monday. It seems an expensive way of forcing one to recognize the blessings of employment.”
She rose listlessly from her little narrow bed.
“I must begin the day some time, I suppose,” she said, half aloud, as she twisted up her loosened hair before the glass, “though why, I don’t know. There’s absolutely no point in it.”
All the time she was dressing the monotonous drip, drip, drip of the rain made a tearful accompaniment to her gray thoughts.
When she was ready, she opened her bedroom door, and entered the room next to it facing the stairs. She rang the bell, and sat down in the bow window to wait for breakfast.
The cloth was already laid on a round table in the middle of the room. It was much too long, and touched the floor all round. A plated cruet, with most of the plate worn off, stood in the middle of the table. There was a cracked teapot-stand near the edge, behind which a thick glass sugar basin and one white cup and saucer stood sentinel. A crooked knife and one yellow fork were disposed at opposite angles at some little distance from the solitary teacup.
Bridget glanced drearily at these appetizingpreparations for breakfast, then at the empty grate, and shivered. It was early autumn, and Mrs. Fowler hadn’t begun fires yet. A paper fan covered with bunches of aggressively yellow primroses stood in the fender.
The sound of panting on the stairs, and a sharp blow on the door, caused by its violent contact with the bacon dish, announced the approach of Matilda, the grimy little “general.” She came in, holding a plate surmounted by a rattling dish-cover in one hand, and in the other a tarnished teapot. These she set on the table, incidentally spilling most of the bacon fat as she did so. She then shambled towards the door, where she stood looking back over her shoulder.
“Anythin’ more yer want, Miss?”
“Bread, please, Matilda, and mustard. Oh! and you’ve forgotten the butter again,” Bridget said, a trifle huskily, coming to the table.
“Oh, if you please, Missus says there ain’t no more butter. You ’ad the last with yer tea last night.”
“Why didn’t Mrs. Fowler tell me before? But it doesn’t matter,” Bridget added hastily, beginning to pour out the tea. She bent a little lower over the teapot than was altogether necessary. Matilda closed the door by means of the primitively ingenious fashion of dragging itafter her with one foot, the process requiring such a curve of leg as to reveal the gaping holes in her stockings.
Bridget poured some milk out of the cracked jug into her tea, with a shaking hand, and raised the cup half way to her lips. Then she put it down with a sudden rattle into the saucer. Her tears choked her. She pushed away her plate, with the dried-up piece of bacon upon it, rested her elbows on the corner of the table, and covered her face with both hands. For a minute or two her tears fell fast, then she raised herself with a hasty movement, and pushed her hair back from her face impatiently. “What a fool you are to cry like a baby, at your age, because you are dull!” she said to herself. “Did you suppose you were going to have a wildly exciting time as a teacher? Youwantedto teach,—at least, you wanted to be independent. Well, you have what you wanted; thisisbeing independent.”
She glanced round the room, at the gilt looking-glass, supported by corpulent cupids, at the marble-topped sideboard, at the rickety table in the corner, draped by a magenta cloth, on which at regular intervals the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Fox’s Book of Martyrs,” and Miss Braddon’s “Vixen” were disposed, and then she broke into a short, bitter laugh.
She drank her tea, and kept her eyes discreetly on her plate, when Matilda re-entered with the bread.
As soon as the table was cleared after her solitary meal she dragged a great pile of exercise-books from the cupboard under the sideboard, and began to correct them, trying to make her mind work with machine-like precision as she erased or underscored words with a red pencil.
By eleven o’clock the last book was finished. Twelve—one—two—still three hours before dinner.
“Ah, the butter!” It still poured steadily; but after a moment’s hesitation she decided to go and fetch it. Anything was better than sitting alone, in the chilly parlor, listening to the drip of the rain.
There would be people in the streets. The mere thought of speaking to the grocer’s young man was a relief. Half an hour afterwards, she returned wet through, with the butter and the least dirty of the novels from a dingy circulating library she had discovered. Her landlady, a thin-lipped, bony woman, with a high color and a dirty cap, came out into the narrow, oil-clothed passage at the sound of the opening door, and eyed her wet waterproof resentfully. “Stand on the mat, please, Miss, and take it off carefully. I’ve just scrubbed this passage. You’adn’t any call to go out sech weather. I’d ’ave sent Matilda if you’d only waited patiently,” she observed in a high-pitched, irritable voice. She seized the shiny mackintosh, down which sundry streams meandered, and bore it off to the kitchen, grumbling in an undertone. “Please to take off your boots ’ere, Miss. I don’t want the stairs cluttered up,” she turned at the door to say.
Bridget meekly obeyed, and crept softly upstairs, feeling like a criminal. Her bedroom, which she entered to take off her hat, struck a dreary pang to her heart, as though she saw its sordid ugliness for the first time. She hastened out of it into the sitting-room, which at least was lighter, and first wrapping herself in the crocheted wool coverlet from the sofa, after a shivering glance at the vernal decoration in the fireplace, she resolutely opened her book. It wasWuthering Heights. The weird, uncanny atmosphere of the story oppressed her with a painful fascination. The strange inhuman characters lived and moved for her. Catherine’s wailing cry outside in the storm rang in her ears, and made her tremble with fear and pity. At the same time she never lost vivid consciousness of her own surroundings,—of the cold, gloomy parlor, and the dripping of the rain on the window sill.
She put the book aside when Matilda came in with her dinner, feeling completely exhausted. The blackened mutton-chop was taken out again half an hour later by the silent little maid, almost untasted; and now there remained the afternoon and evening.
Bridget drew the slippery horse-hair arm-chair up to the window, and leant her head against the window frame. The little street on to which she looked had the suburban air characteristic of thousands of London streets. It was respectable, and absolutely featureless. She shut her eyes and her thoughts wandered back over the past two years. She remembered all the opposition she had encountered, and conquered,—her father’s grudging consent to her plans, her mother’s tears and reproaches. She thought of all her hours of lonely, unaided study and preparation for her work, of her days of despair, and moments of exultation. Well, that was all over and done with now. She had reached the goal for which she had striven: she was a High School teacher, earning eighty pounds a year, living in furnished apartments in Wentworth Street, Hackney. Bridget opened her eyes, and looked all round the room. The impassive, hideous furniture, the pictures that looked down on her from the walls, filled her with a kind of unreasoning, impotent frenzy of despair. Shesprang from her seat and began to walk wildly from end to end of the narrow room.
“All for this—forthis,” she whispered hoarsely. In the wave of misery that engulfed her for the moment, everything was black, hateful, out of proportion. She forgot the real pleasure her work gave her; the fact that she was free from the daily, hourly friction of her home life no longer seemed important,—worth anything. Her loneliness, the blankness of the social side of her life, was all her mind had room for. Her whole nature cried out against it in hopeless, passionate protest. She longed, desperately, childishly, for the warm cosiness of the sitting-room at home, for her mother’s face, for the feel of her dress. She felt that to sit over the fire with her and discuss Mary Wilby’s chances of catching Charlie Downs, would be bliss, even with the prospect of the inevitable misunderstanding at the end of half an hour. She stopped in her hurried pacing of the room to take her mother’s last letter out of her pocket, and to read it for the twentieth time with blinding tears.
“I am, my dearest little Bid, your loving old mother,” the letter ended, and Bridget put the paper impetuously to her lips.
“And I hoped so much; I thought, somehow, life would be so different,” she whisperedto herself. “Oh, it’s allwrong,—hateful, unjust!” She stopped once before the glass, and looked at herself wistfully.
“What is the use of being pretty?” she cried, and turned away with a hasty gesture.
“And my writing; I can’t get on with it! How could any one in this cramped, unnatural life?” She pulled open a drawer, and flung a heap of papers upon the table, glancing over a sheet here and there.
Presently she thrust them back in disgust.
“I believe it’s all bad, foolish, aimless; and I hoped once—”
She flung herself back in the arm-chair, and her face grew rigid. “Well, there’s nothing to be done but to go on living—till I die!” she thought, with the hopeless finality of youth.
Some twenty minutes later she was startled by a voice in the passage below, and then by the sound of a footstep on the stairs.
There was a knock at her door, and she sprang up.
“Come in,” she called.—“Oh, Miss Miles, it’syou. How nice of you to come!” She ran to her, and seized her two hands impulsively. “Do sit down. Here’s the least uncomfortable chair, and here’s a cushion for your head. Oh, there isn’t a footstool. I’m so sorry! You left your waterproof downstairs, I suppose.Was Mrs. Fowlerfurious? I’m sogladto see you.”
Miss Miles sank into the arm-chair a trifle bewildered. She hardly understood the warmth of her greeting. A lady not remarkable for her imaginative qualities, she would have been surprised and puzzled at the suggestion that Bridget’s many hours of loneliness in any way accounted for its fervor.
“Ihadto go out to get some Cambridge examination papers I ordered,” she began, “and as I was passing I thought you might like to see the new time-table; there are some changes in it.” She began to unfold a document on foolscap, as she spoke.
“Oh, thank you, never mind,” Bridget returned with haste. “Let us talk. I feel like sitting up and beginning to play, now you’ve come,” she said gayly. “Oh, it’s been ten thousand ages since yesterday morning. What haveyoubeen doing?I’vebeen bored to death. Two minutes ago I was wondering whether a fall from this window would be fatal, but I decided not to trythatform, because the rain might take my hair out of curl, and that is so unbecoming, you know.”
She spoke in a laughing, tremulous tone, from which tears were not far removed. Miss Miles looked at her blankly.
“I can’t stop long,” she said. “I haven’t finished my Euclid lesson for Tuesday, and—”
“Oh, youmuststop.Dostop and have tea with me, and never mind your conscience. You should really make an effort to get rid of that conscience of yours, Miss Miles; it must be awfully in your way!” Bridget said with an air of concern.
Miss Miles regarded her with a puzzled frown.
She was a dumpy little woman, with a broad round face, near-sighted eyes, and a pursed-up mouth. She wore square-toed boots, which her rather short skirt displayed to great advantage. There was no collar band on her somewhat infantile gathered bodice. It was finished at the neck by a turned-over piece of white lace, which revealed too much of a thick-set neck to be quite becoming.
“But a conscience is a great safeguard,” she began, in a tentative, uncertain fashion.
“What is there to be saved from?” inquired Bridget, recklessly, with a shrug of the shoulders. “There isn’t much chance for the devil inourlives, I’m afraid. I wish there was. It would at least be exciting to yield to temptation! Did I sayyield? I meant, of course, toresist. How stupid of me! Resist,—yes,resist, that’s the right word; but the two things are so much alike, that one confuses the words sometimes.”
Miss Miles seemed a little dazed.
“I don’t understand,” she urged. “How can toresisttemptation be like yielding?”
“The same thing by a different name, you know! One’s a short cut to the other; but I don’t know which,” Bridget said. “And now let us talk of something else,” she added hastily.
“But we haven’ttalkedat all yet,” Miss Miles protested, still preserving her earnest, serious expression.
“You’re just like the Hatter,” Bridget observed; she sat nonchalantly on the arm of the sofa, and tapped the floor with one foot. “‘Have some wine?’ said the Hatter. ‘I don’t see any wine,’ Alice replied. ‘There isn’t any,’ said the Hatter.”
Miss Miles half rose from her seat.
“I don’t know what you mean. What Hatter?”
Bridget laughed.
“Now you look like the March Hare.WhatHatter, indeed? Where have you been educated? I thought Scripture was taught in every school.”
Miss Miles managed to reach her feet; but Bridget sprang up and threw herself upon her.
“No, no, you mustn’t go,” she cried earnestly, through her laughter. “I’ll be serious; I willindeed. I’ll even talk about the Ethical Society if you’llonlystay. I’ll ring for tea. By ordering it at three, we shall get it at four; and that is really quick work for Matilda.”
Miss Miles allowed herself to be placed once more in the arm-chair. She made a great effort to collect her somewhat disturbed thoughts, watching Bridget with a sort of dull, uncomprehending admiration, as she moved about the room, putting exercise-books away, and pushing all the ugliest ornaments out of sight.
Presently she drew a chair near her visitor, and sat down at the table, propping her chin in the hollow of both hands.
“Tell me,” she said suddenly, leaning forward, “is life herealwayslike this? Does one pass one’s time forever between the school and lodgings”—she swept the room with her swift glance,—“like these?”
Miss Miles started a little, and stared at the girl blankly.
“Yes. I—I think so,” she stammered. “I go to lectures sometimes, and to the Ethical Society. There’s the theatre, of course, when one can afford it.”
“How long have you been here?” Bridget asked.
“Six years.”
“Six years!” she echoed, with a long breath.“Six years ofthis. How have you borne it? What have you done with yourself?”
“I have worked. What does the Council engage us for, but to work?”
Bridget shrank, as though from a blow. “Worked,” she repeated. “Yes, of course, but—but life isn’t—can’t be all work,” she urged pitifully. “Surely—”
“When you have to get different classes through the Cambridge junior and senior, the Board examination, and the matriculation in one year, you will find there isn’t much time for anything else.”
Bridget looked at her a moment in silence.
“Have you never had a good time?” she asked at last, softly. “What have you done all your life? Ah, you won’t think me rude, will you?” she added hastily. She bent over and touched her hand gently as she spoke.
“Oh, no! I don’t mind being interviewed,” said Miss Miles, with an attempt at sprightliness.
“I went to a high school, and got a scholarship to Girton, and then I went to a training college, and then I came here.”
Bridget was silent.
“And that has been your life?” she said gently, after a moment or two. “And have you enjoyed it?” she asked, fixing her eyes on Miss Miles’s face intently.
“Enjoyed it?” she echoed. “I—I don’t know. I’ve always worked hard, but I’ve been rewarded, of course. I’ve had several scholarships, and I’m a successful teacher.” Miss Miles flushed a little, and moved nervously.
“It is very clever of you,” Bridget murmured.
Miss Miles glanced at her sharply; but she was gazing thoughtfully out of the window.
“We had relaxation, of course, at Girton. We often had great fun,” pursued Miss Miles.
“Educational fun; I know it. ‘Women only admitted,’” Bridget said drearily.
“Well, we didn’twantmen, I’m sure. We enjoyed ourselves quite as well without them,” returned Miss Miles, with some show of spirit. “Don’t you admit the equality of women with men, then? Look at Miss Fawcett. Look at—”
“I don’t want to look at any of them,” replied Bridget, flippantly. “I’ve looked at enough women in the two months I’ve been here to last me my natural life. I wish with all my heart an epidemic of men would break out!”
“Miss Ruan!” cried Miss Miles, deprecatingly, with a nervous smile.
“I know nothing of life either,” Bridget said absently. “We’ve been alike in that respect. But I’ve always wanted it—madly. You haven’t, it seems?”
“I don’t understand. What do you mean bylife?”
“Oh!” Bridget answered with a deep breath, rising restlessly as she spoke. “I don’t know. People, experience, opportunities,—love, perhaps.”
The elder woman started and reddened. She glanced apprehensively at Bridget.
“There! you are shocked because I even mention the wordlove, and yet, is it abadthing? Why shouldn’t I want it? Idowant it!” she cried.
“There’s nothing likeworkfor making one forget all that sort of thing,” Miss Miles began.
“But why should I forget it?” Bridget turned swiftly and faced her. “You don’t understand. I like my work; but it isn’t all my life. There’s room for more than that. If one had alife—a real life outside, with joys and sorrows of one’s own, one— Because I’m a teacher, am I to cease to be a woman?” she broke off passionately.
“You will not be likely to get what you want, as a teacher,” Miss Miles said slowly, “unless you know outsiders. Why don’t you join the Ethical Society?” she asked after a moment. “I think you want amotive—a purpose—in your life. You would get to know people too, and—”
Bridget made a swift gesture of dissent.
“No, it’s notthatset I want,” she replied with a little smile. “They exasperate me. Oh, I know they are very good. I daresay they are nice, but they are so depressing. They all look as though they have been shipwrecked, and are clinging desperately to their last raft. No, no! I’d rather plunge into the sea at once, and be done with it. Besides, I always want to say awful things to them,” she added, with a change of tone and a laugh. “They look deliciously shockable, and theyallhave sad, reproachful eyes.”
The entrance of Matilda with the tea-tray interrupted Miss Miles’s serious challenge of the last assertion, and Bridget steadily refused to return again to the subject.
They talked of time-tables, of the iniquities of the Third Form, and of the chances of the Examinations, during tea.
“What are you going to do on Monday?” Miss Miles said, as she rose to go. Monday was a holiday in the schools. “Won’t you come to an extension lecture with me in the evening?”
“Thank you. I’ve saved half-a-crown, and I’m going to the Wagner concert,” Bridget answered smiling, as she shook hands. “Good-bye. Thank you so much for stopping.” Shewent down to the front door, and waved a farewell to her from the doorstep. Then she slowly mounted the stairs again, and re-entered the sitting-room. The little glow of excitement had faded from her eyes.
She crossed over to the mantel-piece, and stood leaning against it for some time, her head buried on her arm. “What a fool I was to say anything to her!” she thought bitterly. “The need of speaking tosome onemakes meabject. Oh, it’s awful—awful, to live like this. I feel as though some one had wrapped me round in a damp, gray veil.” She shuddered. After a moment she roused herself, lighted the lamp, and fetched some needlework from the bedroom. With this she resolutely employed herself till ten o’clock, her usual bedtime.