When they emerged from the dusty shabbiness of the Euston Road it was suddenly a perfect June morning. Now was the moment. She opened the letter unnoticed, with her eyes on the sunlit park-lined vista...... “London owes much to the fact that its main thoroughfares run east and west; walk westward in the morning down any one of them, or in the afternoon towards the east and whenever the sun shines you will see” ..... and without arousing his attention hurriedly read the few lines. Was that man still in London, trying to explain it to himself, or had he been obliged to go away, or perhaps to die? London is heaven and can’t be explained. To be sent away is to be sent out of heaven.
“I’ve been telling,” useless words, coming thin and helpless out of darkness and pressing against darkness .... a desperate clutching at a borrowed performance to keep alive and keep on ... “my employers what I think of them just lately.”
“Excellent. What have you told?”
His unconscious voice steadied her; as the darkness drove nearer bringing thoughts that must not arrive. The morning changed to a painted scene, from which she turned away, catching the glance of the leaves near-by, trickily painted, as
she turned to steer the eloquence flowing up in her mind.
“Well, it was a whole point of view I saw suddenly in the train coming back after Easter. I read an essay, about a superannuated clerk, an extraordinary thing, very simple and well written, not in the least like an essay. But there was something in it that was horrible. The employers gave the old man a pension, with humorous benevolence. He is so surprised and so blissfully happy in having nothing to do but look at the green world for the rest of the time, that he feels nothing but gratitude. That’s all right, from his point of view, being that sort of old man. But how dare the firm be humorously benevolent? It is no case for humour. It is not funny that prosperous people can use up lives on small fixed salaries that never increase beyond a certain point, no matter how well the employers get on, even if for the last few years they give pensions. And they don’t give pensions. If they do, they are thought most benevolent. The author, who is evidently in a way a thoughtful man, ought to have known this. He just wrote a thing that looks charming on the surface and is beautifully written and is really perfectly horrible and disgusting. Well, I suddenly thought employers ought to know. I don’t know what can be done. I don’t want a pension. I hate working for a salary as it is. But employers ought to know how fearfully unfair everything is. They ought to have their complacency smashed up.” He was engrossed. His foreign intelligence sympathised. Then she was right.
“Anyhow. The worst of it is that my employers are so frightfully nice. But the principle’s the same, the frightful unfairness. And it happened that just before I went away, just as Mr. Hancock was going off for his holiday, he had been annoyed by one of his Mudie books going back before he had read it, and no others coming that were on his list, and he suddenly said to me in a grumbling tone ‘you might keep an eye on my Mudie books.’ I was simply furious. Because before I began looking after the books—which he had never asked me to do, and was quite my own idea—it was simply a muddle. They all kept lists in a way, at least put down books when they hit upon one they thought they would like, and then sent the whole list in, and never kept a copy, and of course forgot what they’d put down. Well, I privately took to copying those lists and crossing off the books as they came and keeping on sending in the rest of the list again and again till they had all come. Well, I know a wise person would not have been in a rage and would meekly have rushed about keeping more of an eye than ever. But I can’t stand unfairness. It was the principle of the thing. What made it worse was that for some time I have had the use of one of his books myself, his idea, and of course most kind. But it doesn’t alter the principle. In the train I saw the whole unfairness of the life of employees. However hard they work, their lives don’t alter or get any easier. They live cheap poor lives in anxiety all their best years and then are expected to be grateful for a pension, and generally get no pension. I’ve left off living in
anxiety; perhaps because I’ve forgotten how to have an imagination. But that is the principle and I came to the conclusion that no employers, however generous and nice, are entitled to the slightest special consideration. And I came back and practically said so. I told him that in future I would have nothing to do with his Mudie books. It was outside my sphere. I also said all sorts of things that came into my head in the train, a whole long speech. About unfairness. And to prove my point to him individually I told him of things that were unfair to me and their other employees in the practice; about the awfulness of having to be there first thing in the morning from the country after a week-end. They don’t. They sail off to their expensive week-ends without even saying good-bye, and without even thinking whether we can manage to have any sort of recreation at all on our salaries. I said that, and also that I objected to spend a large part of a busy Monday morning arranging the huge bunches of flowers he brought back from the country. That was not true. I loved those flowers and could always have some for my room; but it was a frightful nuisance sometimes, and it came into the principle, and I wound up by saying that in future I would do only the work for the practice and no odd jobs of any kind.”
“What was his reply?”
“Oh well, I’ve got the sack.”
“Are you serious” he said in a low frightened tone. The heavens were clear, ringing with morning joy; from far away in the undisturbed future she
looked back smiling upon the episode that lay before her growing and pressing.
“I’m not serious. But they are. This is a solemn, awfully nice little note from Mr. Orly; he had to write, because he’s the senior partner, to inform me that he has come to the conclusion that I must seek a more congenial post. They have absolutely made up their minds. Because they know quite well I have no training for any other work, and no resources, and they would not have done this unless they were absolutely obliged.”
“Then you will be obliged to leave these gentlemen?”
“Of course long before I had finished talking I was thinking about all sorts of other things; and seeing all kinds of points of view that seemed to be stated all round us by people who were looking on. I always do when I talk to Mr. Hancock. His point of view is so clear-cut and so reasonable that it reveals all the things that hold social life together, and brings the ghosts of people who have believed and suffered for these things into the room, but also all kinds of other points of view..... But I’m not going to leave. I can’t. What else could I do? Perhaps I will a little later on, when this is all over. But I’m not going to be dismissed in solemn dignity. It’s too silly. That shows you how nice they are. I know that really I must leave. Anyone would say so. But that’s the extraordinary thing; I don’t believe in those things; solemn endings; being led by the nose by the necessities of the situation. That may be undignified. But dignity is silly; the back view.
Already I can’t believe all this solemnity has happened. It’s simply a most fearful bother. They’ve managed it splendidly, waiting till Saturday morning, so that I shan’t see any of them again. The Orlys will be gone away for a month when I get there to-day and Mr. Hancock is away for the week-end and I am offered a month’s salary in lieu of notice, if I prefer it. I had forgotten all this machinery. They’re perfectly in the right, but I’d forgotten the machinery..... I knew yesterday. They were all three shut up together in the den, talking in low tones, and presently came busily out, each so anxious to pass the dismissed secretary in hurried preoccupation, that they collided in the doorway, and gave everything away to me by the affable excited way they apologised to each other. If I had turned and faced them then I should have said worse things than I had said to Mr. Hancock. I hated them, with their resources and their serenity, complacently pleased with each other because they had decided to smash an employee who had spoken out to them.”
“This was indeed a scene of remarkable significance.”
“I don’t know..... I once told Mr. Hancock that I would give notice every year, because I think it must be so horrible to dismiss anybody. But I’m not going to be sent away by machinery. In a way it is like a family suddenly going to law.”
But with the passing of the park and the coming of the tall houses on either side of the road, the open June morning was quenched. It retreated to balconies, flower-filled by shocked condemning
people, prosperously turned away towards the world from which she was banished. Wimpole Street, Harley Street, Cavendish Square. The names sounded in her ears the appeal they had made when she was helplessly looking for work. It was as if she were still waiting to come.....
Within the Saturday morning peace of the deserted house lingered the relief that had followed their definite decision. They were all drawn together to begin again, renewed, freshly conscious of the stabilities of the practice; their enclosed co-operating relationship.....
She concentrated her mental gaze on their grouped personalities, sharing their long consultations, acting out in her mind with characteristic gesture and speech, the part each one had taken, confronting them one by one, in solitude, with a different version, holding on, breaking into their common-sense finalities.... It was all nothing; meaningless ..... like things in history that led on to events that did not belong to them because nobody went below the surface of the way things appear to be joined together but are not ..... but the words belonging to the underlying things were far away, only to be found in long silences, and sounding when they came out into conversations, irrelevant, often illogical and self-contradictory, impossible to prove, driving absurdly across life towards things that seemed impossible, but were true ..... there were two layers of truth. The truths laid bare by common-sense in swift decisive conversations, founded on apparent facts, were incomplete. They shaped the surface,
made things go kaleidoscoping on, recognisable, in a sort of general busy prosperous agreement; but at every turn, with every application of the common-sense civilised decisions, enormous things were left behind, unsuspected, forced underground, but never dying, slow things with slow slow fruit ..... the surface shape was powerful, everyone was in it, that was where free-will broke down, in the moving on and being spirited away for another spell from the underlying things, but............