Another landlady was quite distressed by the suggestion that Nancy should have a bedroom for ten shillings a week.
“A nice-looking girl like you doesn’t want to come down to that,” she exclaimed. “You trust your luck a bit, my dear. Why don’t you take my two nice rooms on the ground floor and cheer up? They’ve always been lucky rooms to girls like you. The last one who had them got off with a wine-merchant somewhere up North, and he’s fitted her out with a lovely little flat of her own. He only comes up to London for a day or two every month, so she has a nice easy time of it. I’m sure I don’t know whether it’s me or my rooms, but certainly I’ve seen a lot of luck come the way of girls like you.”
At last after a peregrination of various apparently economical quarters Nancy found a tiny garret at the top of a tumbledown house in Unicorn Street, which joined Red Lion Square to Theobalds Road. This was the third time in succession that she had taken lodgings in a thoroughfare for foot passengers only, and superstition began to suggest a hidden significance in this collocation. The third time? It might be from here that she would discover the main thoroughfare of her future life.
Unicorn Street was dark and narrow, and the upper portions of several of the houses overhung the pavement so far as almost to meet. These relics of London before the Great Fire had by this date already been condemned, although they were not actually pulled down for another ten years. The majority of the shops belonged to second-hand booksellers, whose wares seemed as tattered and decrepit as the mouldering old houses above. Their trade was mostly done from shelves outside the shops containing books labelled at various prices from one penny to a shilling. There were of course other books inside, but these were usually stacked anyhow in tottering heaps and simply served to replenish the shelves and boxes on the contents of which, when the weather allowed it, seedy men of various ages browsed slowly, humping their backs from time to time like caterpillars when they thought they had caught sight of a rarity. Mr. Askin, the owner of the shop high above which Nancy found her cheap room, resembled the English idea of an elderly German professor before the war destroyed that pleasantly sentimental conception. His lanky white hair hung over his collar like greasy icicles; he wore blue glasses, carpet slippers, and a frock coat; he even smoked a long china pipe. The prospect of seeing his shop pulled down to make way for blocks of eligible offices did not disturb him, because he had made up his mind that within two years he was going to be drowned. As he apparently never moved a yard away from his shop, Nancy was puzzled by this confident belief, and ventured to ask him on what it was based.
“Have you studied the effects of the moon?” he inquired contemptuously.
Nancy admitted that she never had.
Whereupon he put his forefinger against his nose and said very solemnly:
“Then don’t meddle in what you don’t understand. If I say I’m going to be drowned before two years are out, then it means I’ve studied the question and come to my own conclusions and resigned myself to what must be. And that’s that, isn’t it? So try and not talk so silly, young lady.”
Mr. Askin had bought enough books, according to his calculations, to outlast him and leave a trifle over for his widow. These had at one time filled every room in the house; but as soon as they were sold the empty rooms were furnished with a few odds and ends and let. The top stories were now completely void of books, which was how Nancy managed to rent one of the garrets in the roof for the sum of seven shillings a week. The other garret was inhabited by Maudie Pridgeon, the Askins’ maid-of-all-work, who could not do enough for Nancy once she heard she was a real actress.
“Oh, Miss O’Finn,” she begged. “I wonder if you’d be kind enough to hear me recite The Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter some afternoon, and tell me if I’ve got a chance to get on the stage myself. It’s the dream of my life. I may not be a Sarah Burnhard or an Elling Terry, but it’s in me, Miss O’Finn. I feel shore it’s in me. Sometimes I feel I could burst with what’s in me. I was afraid it might be wind for a time after I’d been reading about some medicine or other. But it ain’t, Miss O’Finn, it’s acting. It is reelly. So some time, when we have a moment to ourselves, I do wish you’d hear me recite and give me a bit of good advice. And of course I can rely on you not to say a word to Mrs. Askin about my ambishing or she might pass some nasty remark about it. She never moves out of the back room behind the shop herself, and she’d never believe as I might be a star hiding my light under a bushel.”