It is easy, now that I am doing it for you, to get on with this business of writing. I can tell you anything and everything. But everything is too big an order, so I must try to pick and choose, telling you a little here and a little there so that the woman who is me will emerge clearly from the pages—the real me, with all my faults, and all my mistakes. I must choose carefully, for I have not much time and my leisure for writing is stolen from my sleep.
From nine-thirty in the morning until six o’clock at night I work in a library, docketing the books, reading them through and recommending them to those people I think they will suit. The library is not one of those bright modern places where books, waiting to be bought, smile at you from tastefully arranged tables in gay paper jackets, but a musty dusty room on the ground floor of an ancient building, visited principally by old gentlemen with gold-rimmed spectacles and elderly ladies with woolen stockings—sometimes a little wrinkled about the ankles. You know the type, Clare. We have often laughed at them together, laughed at them quite kindly, even a little tenderly; they are so anxious and serious and polite, polite even to the library assistant at Wentworth’s. Occasionally an author drifts into the library and peers round at the dusty shelves in dismay. “Oh—er—I was told that this was a geographical library,” he says. “Have you—er—up-to-date travel books here?” “Any book that adds to the geographical knowledge of the world,” he is informed. “A book about Borneo,” he says deprecatingly (or Canada or the Antarctic perhaps). “A book about Borneo—something not too—er—heavy. Just to give one an idea of the—er—country and its inhabitants. A little local color—perhaps you can advise—”
Perhaps I can, because I make a point of reading all the books that come into the library—or at least glancing through them—and because this is my job and I have been at it for twelve years. Twelve years is a long time to spend among books about Borneo and Canada and the Antarctic. “Ah, thank you,” he says, flipping over the leaves and examining the illustrations with studied carelessness. “This does seem the kind of thing—this seems exactly—”
Authors often leave their sentences unfinished like that—at least the kind who come to Wentworth’s do—and they are always men. Women authors seem to bother less about local color, or perhaps they bother more. Perhaps they actually pack a couple of suitcases and trek off to Borneo or Canada or wherever it may be, before they send their hero there to hob-nob with head-hunters or to track moose.
Twelve years I have been there, with kind little Mr. Wentworth and his books. I was twenty-three when I went, and now I am thirty-five. The twelve best years of my womanhood have been given to Wentworth’s. At first I rebelled against the imprisonment, and the monotony of my days. I watched the shafts of sunlight struggle through the dim windows and move slowly from shelf to shelf and across the wooden floor. The same golden sun was shining in the meadows at Hinkleton, glancing with dazzling sparkles upon the river; the flowers were growing under its warm touch, turning their faces, their small bright faces, toward their God; the trees were busy too, opening fat buds and spreading their tender green leaves to catch its rays. Birds were singing in the woods and the small woodland animals were throwing off their winter languor and hurrying about their summer ploys. Often and often the slow difficult tears formed upon my lids and were brushed hastily aside lest they should fall upon my ledger and leave immortal trace of my weakness and misery. But that has passed, and now I am resigned to the life; I even find pleasure in it. The books—I have always loved books and I love them better now—are my greatest solace. I can take a travel book in my hands and voyage across the world. China, Burma, Jamaica—the very sound of the words is an enchantment bringing me sights and sounds, and odors that my senses have never savored.
So the day passes, and it is six o’clock. Mr. Wentworth comes out from his dark, poky little office and closes the door.
“Time, Miss Dean,” he says, smiling at me pleasantly. “No more voyages tonight, except in dreams.”
I smile, too, because I like the little man, he is kind and considerate, he does not interfere with me, he lets me alone to do things in my own way—an admirable employer.
I take my coat down from the nail behind the office door and fare forth on the last voyage of the day, the voyage through London’s streets with London’s multitudes jostling at my elbows.
We will walk home together, Clare, for you are coming to tea with me today. We will take a bus to Hyde Park Corner—a crowded bus I’m afraid, for this is one of London’s busiest hours—and walk across the park. It is autumn now, the leaves upon the trees are beginning to change color. Jack Frost has been here in the night and touched them lightly, so that here and there a patch of flame glows among the green. It is my birthday today, Clare, and I have bought a tiny cake. Perhaps you will think it rather a foolish thing for a woman of thirty-five to do—to buy a birthday cake and eat it all by herself with a dream companion, for her birthday tea; but I have missed so much in life that other women take as their due that you must forgive me my foolishness.
And now we have turned up France Street and reached the main door of No. 71. There is no lift here to take us up to the top floor which has been my home for twelve years. A tiny flat it is, high up among the chimney pots, two rooms and a tiny kitchen and a bathroom all my very own. I have tried to make it bright with distempered walls, and gaily colored chintz, but the smuts of London wage a continual war upon cleanliness and brightness, and I have neither the time nor the money to fight them with success. Mrs. Cope, my “daily woman,” comes in and does battle while I am at my work, but although she uses an incredible quantity of cleaning material—the sinews of her war—the result is indecisive, to say the least of it. There are some good pieces of furniture here, the grandfather’s clock which blocks my tiny hall came from my old home at Hinkleton. Its large pale face is one of my earliest recollections, so too the melodious chime of its hours. It stood in the hall at the Parsonage, and served us faithfully for many years, the whole timetable of that large rambling understaffed old house depended upon its slowly moving hands. My father gave it to me when he died because he knew I loved it, because I had wound it for him when he became too frail to climb upon a chair and attend to it himself, and because I understood its idiosyncrasies. He always called it Jeremiah, for its chime was melancholy, set in a minor key. Everybody knew it as Jeremiah; even Mother, who thought the joke was unbecoming in a parson, had been heard to refer to it as Jeremiah in times of stress. “It’s a quarter to one by Jeremiah, and Martha has not got the potatoes on!”
So Jeremiah came to me, in spite of the fact that Kitty wanted him, and that he would have looked well in Kitty’s spacious mansion, and blocked the hall of my tiny flat. Kitty had so much, she had taken so much from me, that I felt I was justified in refusing her Jeremiah—she did not want Jeremiah as much as I did.
I took a few other things when the old home was broken up; things that Kitty didn’t want; shabby things that had been in my life ever since I could remember—the old schoolroom chair, with its creaking basketwork frame and knobby cushions, the old schoolroom bureau, scored with the thoughtless kicks of childish feet—these were the things I wanted. They were familiar things, kind and friendly, I took them with me to cheer my loneliness and lighten my exile. It is curious, isn’t it, that things you know well never look dirty and dilapidated—other people’s old furniture looks shabby and moth-eaten. “I would never have that horrible old couch in my room,” you say. But your own old couch is every bit as bad and you are not disgusted with its appearance; it is your friend, you see, and you remember it when it was new and smart. Friends that you have known for a long time and love very dearly never seem to grow old.
I’m afraid my flat must look very shabby in your eyes, Clare, but I hope it looks comfortable and cozy. Mrs. Cope lighted the fire before she left, there is a nice red glow in its heart and the yellow flames shoot up cheerfully. Pull in your chair, my dear, and let us be comfortable. It is cozy, isn’t it, Clare? Tonight, it seems to me more comfortable and cozy than it has ever done, because I may be leaving it. I may be leaving all these things which have been in my life for twelve years—I’ve got to decide whether I am leaving it or not and I haven’t very long.
If this had happened ten years ago—even five years ago—I should not have needed anybody’s help to decide what to do. I was a rebel then; I pined for freedom. I would have shaken the dust of Wentworth’s from my feet at anybody’s bidding and fared forth to any job which promised luxury and leisure and the right to walk out of doors when the sun shone. But now I am deeply sunk in a groove and I shrink from any change. I have led the life of a hermit in the heart of a city—you can, you know—and I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I don’t want to leave my cell.