CHAPTER I. INTRODUCES A LATTER-DAY HEROINE.

I was twenty-two, and without employment.

I would not say by this that I was without occupation. In the world in which we live, set with daisies and kingfishers and undeciphered faces of men and women, I doubt I could be at a loss for something to occupy me. A swallow’s back, as he turns in the sunshine, is so full of meaning. If you dwell in the country, you need but pin on a hat and slip out into a meadow, and there, in some bight of the hedgerow, you shall see spring buds untwisting, sulphur butterflies coquetting; hear nightingales sing as they sang to Keats, and streamlets make madrigal as they wimpled for Marlowe. Nay, even here in London, where life is rarer, how can I cruise down the Strand without encountering strange barks—mysterious argosies that attract and intrigue me? That living stream is so marvellous! Whence come they, these shadows, and whither do they go?—innumerable, silent, each wrapped in his own thought, yet each real to himself as I to my heart. To me, they are shooting stars, phantoms that flash athwart the orbit of my life one second, and then vanish. But to

themselves they are the centre of a world—of the world; and I am but one of the meteors that dart across their horizon.

I cannot choose but wonder who each is, and why he is here. For one after another I invent a story. It may not be the true story, but at least it amuses me. Every morning I see them stream in from the Unknown, by the early trains, and disperse like sparks that twinkle on the thin soot of the chimney-back—men with small black bags, bound for mysterious offices. What happens in those offices I have no idea: they may lend money, or buy shares, or promote Christian knowledge. I only know I see them come in the morning and flit again at night, sometimes the same figures, recognisably identical. They rush back, absorbed, to catch the train to the Unknown, as they rushed up from it earlier. So, day after day, the tide sets and ebbs; while I stand on the shore of the vast sea of London like a child that watches. And Commissioner Lin guards me.

I have always been grateful to Mr. Samuel Butler for his eccentric theory that a woman wrote the Odyssey. I do not say that I agree with him; if I did, I am not aware that any critic would attach the least importance to my opinion. But it is a soothing theory for us latter-day women. Without thinking it true, I love to believe it. The Odyssey, you will grant, is the epic of the imagination. It is the epic of mystery. In the Iliad, which is the epic of fact, everything is clear-cut, distinct, commonplace. I do not conceive that a woman could have written the Iliad. Its theme would fail to interest her. That hard handplay of battle counts for nought to our sex. Clang of bronze sword on ringing shield rouses no echo in our heart or brain. It is a masculine poem. How practical it is, how cold, how everyday, how mannish! Considering its august age, how little it gleams with the glamour of antiquity! Ulysses in the Iliad is just a shifty politician, an adroit public speaker. Achilles is just a petulant, ill-disciplined young warrior—I have met him

in London, fresh home from the Transvaal. The whole mighty saga is a saga of men’s ideas, so sharp is it in its outlines, so historical, so definite. But the Odyssey!

Yes, I read in it clearly the fine hand of a woman. It has the vagueness, the elusiveness, the melting, hazy charm of feminine craft. It thrills with mystery; and woman is the mystic. Look at its glorious dimness. You descry its geography in veiled outline only, as one beholds the Paps of Jura on a day of sea-fog through swaying sheets of white cloud from a fisherman’s boat on the Bay of Oban. It is a Celtic dreamland. From morning to night, in that enchanted poem, on and on we sail, past uncertain isles or dubious blue headlands, begirt with fantastic forms, and in perils of the sea more awesome than the real. Architects have reconstructed Priam’s palace, I believe, from the description in the Iliad. That is man’s way of describing. But who could reconstruct, from the rapt words of the Odyssey, Circe’s island or the gardens of Alcinous? Peering and prying Schliemann found in the battle-epic a whole plan of the Troad; or, at least, read one into it: fancy even imagining you could construct a chart of the Mediterranean to show the homeward maze of the much-travelled

wanderer from Ilion to Ithaca! The bare idea would indicate a misconception of the Odyssey. For those are the seas and islands that never were; they live but in the ghost-geography of poets and women.

As arguments, indeed, the proofs adduced seem to me preposterous. It is nonsense to say that in the Odyssey the chief rôle is played by women. Do women’s books deal exclusively, or even mainly, with their own sex? Is not the Titan man, the strong, sardonic, woman-quelling hero, a recognised commonplace of women’s fancy? I do not believe an Ithacan lady wrote the Odyssey because of the relative importance of Penelope and Nausicaa. Surely even a man might have set Penelope at her web, or Nausicaa at her tennis. In that I see nothing occult or esoterically feminine. Men must be aware that every Circe has the power of turning men into swine. They ought to know; they have seen it done daily. No, those are not the reasons that weigh with me. It is the wonder, the magic, the purple mystery, of the Odyssey that tells to my mind in favour of its female authorship. And though I know Mr. Samuel Butler’s theory is not true, I thank God I am woman enough none the less to embrace it.

But what has all this to do with my story—the story I am setting out in my own fashion to tell you? A great deal; and besides, unless you let me tell it in my own wayward way, I can never get through with it. In that respect also I hold myself true woman. And this is the connection. “If only we could have lived in those days!” people say. I answer, “You are living in them.” It is not the days, not the places, not the things that change, but we who see them otherwise. Consider, the Mediterranean is the same sea to-day as when the Ithacan lady who wrote the Odyssey looked out upon its blue zones to behold it peopled with strange forms and wizard shadows. For that nameless Sappho, that prehistoric Charlotte Brontë, that inchoate Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Ionian main swarmed alive with Gorgons and Harpies as Loch Fyne with herrings. Sirens sang on every rock to lure the seaman; promontories glowed red at set of sun with the forges of the Cyclops. You may steam down the prosaic Adriatic to-day in an Austrian Lloyd steamer—a fearsome Behemoth, bellowing,

snorting, flame-breathing—and identify those charmed shores of Hellenic fancy, as laid down, with soundings, in the Admiralty surveys. But that is your blindness. Scylla and Charybdis are there as of old: ’tis you who turn them into the Straits of Messina. Polyphemus still haunts his seaward cave: ’tis you who transform him into a custom-house officer. Adventures are to the adventurous. Go through the world in search of Calypso, and you will surely find her. Be modern, and you will find only Willesden Junction. That may suffice for you. I live in “those days,” as all lovers of the mystical have always lived in them.

And I will go forth into the world in search of adventures. They are sure to come to me; for faith moves mountains. In every age, when the Princess Cleodolind is sent out from the city as a prey for the dragon, some youthful St. George, in celestial armour, rides by in the nick of time, on his snow-white steed, and draws his trusty blade, and fights for her, and rescues her from the loathly thing. Else what were the use of faith and of poetry? In every age we fashion the story anew in our passing manner, dressing it up in our own clothes, and fitting it to our particular modes and morals. But ’tis the same to the end through all disguises. The Greeks told it as the tale of Perseus and Andromeda; they made their hero purely Greek, a triumphant young son of immortal Zeus, who rescues a beautiful princess, with fair nude limbs like Parian marble, from the devouring sea-monster. Mediæval Italy made the sign of the cross, turned the son of Danaë into a Christian martyr, and clad the beautiful nude maiden in clinging silk robes, as it would fain have clad Melian Aphrodite

herself when it converted her image into a crowned Madonna. The Renaissance came, and Cellini unclothed her again, in his revived paganism, to set her polished bronze limbs, where every eye might see and stare, in the Piazza at Florence. Our modern novelists dress her up afresh in the princess robe of the day (sage green or crushed strawberry), and turn her loose on that slimy old dragon the world, till Prince Charming comes by, as a baronet in a tennis suit, to lay at her feet ten thousand a year and the title of My Lady. But ’tis the old tale still, and who lists to tell it may trick it out once more in his own heart’s fashion. For though there be nothing new under the sun, the old wonder is there, as marvellous as ever, if you choose to marvel at it. Each spring brings it back, a perpetual miracle.

So I set forth into the world, a Princess Cleodolind of the nineteenth century, ready to face the dragons that, as I well know, abound in it, and full of faith in the St. George who will come to rescue me. I mean to sail away on my Odyssey, unabashed, touching at such shores as may chance to beckon, yet hopeful of reaching at last the realms of Alcinous.

From all which you may guess that I am a Girton girl.

CHAPTER II. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE.

You may guess it, I say; for it is no part of my plan to tell you. Being a woman, I throw out this hint to pique your curiosity.

Let us return to the point that I was twenty-two, and had no employment. Commissioner Lin and I were alone and friendless.

Four months earlier I had suffered a great loss. How great a loss I am not careful to assure you. It is far from my desire to make capital out of my inmost heart. I cannot spin phrases about my dead father. But by this time the first fierce numbness of my sorrow had worn away; I was no longer a stone; I was beginning to smile, and to feel the sunshine. A certain quicksilver light-heartedness in the veins of my race helps to conceal a background of feeling. Besides, I had my livelihood to earn. That is a great resource. The need for bread served to edge out my grief. My first four months had been assured me beforehand in the Settlement; for we paid in advance, half-yearly, our Warden being a prudent soul who disliked bad debts, and preferred the safe side. But when the four months of my deepest mourning were over, it was absolutely necessary for me to find employment.

How it all came about I need not inform you: the bank that broke, the electric light that failed: I was told the details in terms so crabbed that if I tried to repeat them I could but show my ignorance.

It was not hard for me to be poor; for in the Settlement we lived as the other East-Enders live, and I had learned from my match-girls how to be hungry and merry. But my poverty hitherto had been that of the amateur; I had now to learn professional indigence. When I shook hands with Sister Phyllis and Sister Agatha at the door of the guild, leaving Commissioner Lin in their charge for the moment, and went forth into the world to earn my living, I had six and elevenpence as available assets. I was a capitalist in my way. That formed my capital.

“Under these circumstances,” I said to myself, “the first thing for a prudent girl to do is to look out for lunch; the second thing is to look out for a situation.”

I do not pretend to prevision; on the contrary, I was born to take no heed for the morrow. I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant. But I had been so deeply impressed by Sister Phyllis’s exhortations during my last four months in the guild that I had taken pains to learn shorthand and type-writing. I did not then know that every girl in London can write shorthand, and that type-writing as an accomplishment is as diffused as the piano; else I might have turned my hand to some honest trade instead, such as millinery or cake-making. However, a type-writer I was, and a type-writer I must remain. So I set forth on my Odyssey by walking down the phantom-haunted channel of the Strand, and cast anchor for my first halt in an aërated bread shop.

Luxury, we are told, demoralises this age, and (while I remain a type-writer) I am absolute to set my face against it. But a cup of coffee and a slice of seed-cake (not too luxuriously sweetened) lay well within the compass of my capital. I am a poor arithmetician, but I arrive by finger-lore at the net result that fourpence from six and elevenpence leaves six and seven. I took up an evening paper, which some recklessly extravagant customer had bequeathed to his successors, and my eye scanned the advertisements. Hands that waved a signal seemed to catch my glance. “A sail on the horizon!” I cried to myself. And this is what I read—

“Shorthand and Type-writer wanted (female). Legal work.—Apply Flor and Fingelman, 27b, Southampton Row.”

I felt myself already on the road to fortune. A glance at the date: it was to-day’s paper! In matters of business, promptitude is everything. I would be the first to apply. I tossed off my hot coffee with unbecoming haste, and, deeply impressed with the fact that in this age the struggle for existence has become one of the rights of woman, I hurried with all speed to Flor and Fingelman’s.

I was a Shorthand and Type-writer (female); and I was fully prepared to be as legal as they desired of me.

I do not say that “female” is a poetical description. I have never heard it applied to Heloise or to Ophelia—not even by the grave-digger; though Touchstone, to be sure, uses it once of Audrey. But the nineteenth century has a chivalry all its own, which I scruple to depreciate. If it speaks of us as females, it has given us the bicycle, and it almost admits that we are as fit for the franchise as the forty-shilling lodger. It puts us a little lower than the navvies. I call that magnanimity.

I had made haste to run up Charing Cross Road, and when I reached Southampton Row, impressed by the importance of the Struggle for Existence, I believe I was absolute winner in the race against time for the position of Shorthand and Type-writer (female).

Up two pair of stairs, where a notice led, I entered the Outer Office. Its keynote was fustiness. Three clerks (male), in seedy black coats, the eldest with hair the colour of a fox’s, went on chaffing one another for two minutes after I closed the door, with ostentatious unconsciousness of my insignificant presence.

No doubt they inferred that I was a candidate for the post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female), and they treated me as such persons may look to be treated. Their talk turned upon that noble animal, the horse.

They spoke also of the turf; by which I understood them to allude, not so much to the greensward of the downs, as to the imperceptible moral turf of Fleet Street. The two younger were indeterminate young men, with straight black hair, and features modelled on an oyster’s. As they appeared to be loftily unaware of my intrusion, I signified my presence by coughing slightly. It was the apologetic cough that stands for “I beg your pardon, but will you kindly attend to me?” They did not permit even the cough, however, to hurry them unduly. The youngest of the three, a pulpy youth, adjusted his cuffs, and completed some deep remarks upon two-year-old form before he turned to stare at me. I suppose he was kind enough to be satisfied with my personal appearance, for after a while he wheeled round on his high stool, and broke out with the chivalry of his age and class, “Well, what’s your business?”

My voice trembled a little, but I mustered up courage and spoke. “I have called about your advertisement for a Shorthand and Type-writer (female).”

He eyed me up and down. I am slender, and, I will venture to say, if not pretty, at least interesting-looking.

“How many words a minute?” he asked after a long pause.

I stretched truth as far as its elasticity would permit. “One ninety-seven,” I answered with an affectation of the precisest accuracy. To say “Two hundred” were commonplace.

The pulpy youth ran his eyes over me as if I were a horse for sale. I was conscious of my little black dress and hat; conscious also of a fiery patch in the centre of my cheek; but if you struggle for life you must expect these episodes. “That’s good enough,” he said slowly, with a side-glance at his fellow-clerks. I had a painful suspicion that the words were intended rather for them than for me, and that they bore reference more to my face and figure than to my real or imagined pace per minute.

The eldest clerk, with the foxy head, wheeled round, and took his turn to stare. He had hairy hands and large goggle eyes.

“Got your own machine?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What sort?”

“A Barlock.”

“That’ll do,” he said, eyeing the rest. And again I detected an undercurrent of double meaning. He seemed to be expressing modified satisfaction at my outer personality.

They questioned me for some minutes with equal grace and charm. Then the eldest rose slowly. “I’ll tell the governor,” he murmured, and disappeared through a dingy door marked in large letters “Mr. Fingelman.”

In a short time he came back and beckoned me mysteriously. I followed him, trembling. He waved his hairy hand towards me as if to show me off to the man at the table. I felt disagreeably like Esther in the presence of Ahasuerus—a fat and oily Ahasuerus of fifty. “This is the young person,” he said, by way of introduction.

Ahasuerus—otherwise Mr. Fingelman—inspected me in turn. I quailed before his glance; he was a commissioner for oaths, and wore large round spectacles. “Had experience?” he asked at last. In person he was rotund and obviously wealthy, though ’twas a third-rate solicitor’s.

“A little,” I replied. I had made up my mind to say “Lots” beforehand; but when it came to the pinch, the ingrained bad habit of speaking the truth reasserted itself partially.

Ahasuerus stared. “What name?” he asked, after a long stony gaze.

I stammered out “Juliet Appleton.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-two.”

He perused me up and down with his small pig’s eyes, as if he were buying a horse, scrutinising my face, my figure, my hands, my feet. I felt like a Circassian in an Arab slave-market. I thought he would next proceed to examine my teeth. But he did not. Having satisfied himself as to externals, he went on to put me through my paces.

“Sit down there,” he said, pointing to a seat. “Have you pen and note-book?” I produced my stylograph.

He grunted approbation, and dictated for a few minutes a short business-letter. Then he waved me to the type-writer. “Transcribe,” he said curtly. I sat down and transcribed.

The chief clerk meanwhile stood by, with his hairy hands crossed in a curved attitude of ostentatious servility, which contrasted strangely with his Outer Office manner. When I had finished, he peered at my work, nodded, and handed it over to Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus ran his eye up and down, grunting again. “She’ll do?” he said interrogatively.

The chief clerk signed yes.

“She’s the first we’ve seen,” Ahasuerus interposed, with caution in his tone.

“Saves trouble,” said the chief clerk. I was aware with a rush of hot blood that the chief clerk approved of me, and that to his lordly approbation (as of the Sultan’s Vizier) I owed my appointment.