“Ann Clapham’s offered to scrub floors for me as a start off!” Martha Jane laughed. “That’ll give me a leg-up!...” She changed her tone suddenly to the professional whine, as if for the benefit of somebody not present. “Folks isn’t all as hard as you folks seem to think. There’s Mr. Andland promised somebody should see to me if I was ill; and his lordship’ll send me one of his own gardeners if him as belongs almshouses is overpressed.” She caught Mrs. James’s sniff from under the feathers, and grew in defiance. “Right kind about it his lordship was, I’m sure! Says I’m a deal too delicate to lift a finger myself.”
“No use counting on it, and so I tell you!” Mrs. Tanner put in briskly. “Ann Clapham’s going to get yon house—not you!”—and Mrs. James snorted “Ay, I should think so, indeed!” terribly rankled about the lordship; and other comments followed at which Martha bridled and brazened and wilted by turn. When they had all finished, Emma began again in her expressionless tones.
“Ay, Ann Clapham ’ll get it; there’s no doubt about that.... I don’t say but what I couldn’t have had it myself, but there, thanks be, I don’t need other folks’ brass. Ann Clapham’s had a hard life, though, and deserves a bit o’ quiet. I don’t know as she’ll take to it just at first—being a lady and all that; but there, I reckon she knows her own business best.... She isn’t as young as she was, neither, and folks as works over hard wear out ter’ble fast. Ay, she’ll get t’ house, will Ann Clapham; there’s no doubt about that.”
There was another uncomfortable pause when she had finished, and Mrs. Clapham cast an uneasy glance at her over her shoulder. What Emma was saying sounded all right—at least, for Emma—so she was at a loss to understand why it should fill her with apprehension. Yet, instead of strengthening her own conviction of coming fortune, in some mysterious fashion it undermined it. She began to feel that, if Emma continued to say that sort of thing, she would not only lose all confidence in her luck, but would find it lacking in flavour if established. She really wished now that she had been patient enough to await the news indoors, and was even beginning to turn on her heel when she was called to attention by Mrs. James. “There he is!” the latter was saying from under the feathers, disappointed yet thrilled. “Look ye! Look ye, Mrs. Clapham! There he is! There’s t’ post!”
The uniformed figure of the postman had suddenly appeared round the curve of the street, and at once Mrs. Clapham and Martha drew together, as if conscious that neither for the lucky nor the unlucky would it be possible to meet this moment alone. Mrs. James slipped her hand through Mrs. Clapham’s arm and gave it an excited squeeze, and the charwoman flushed a deep crimson and paled slowly again. Martha Jane, however, to whom excitement was the breath of life itself, looked for the moment strangely brisk and young. A hint of the old rose-colour came into her cheek, and a youthfully brilliant sparkle into her eye. Mrs. Tanner and her colleagues broke into little twitters and chirps.... “Eh, but he’s taken his time!... Which on ’em will it be?... Eh, but I’m right thrilled!...” While at the back of them all, where she stood silent and still a little apart, Emma uncrossed her hands and let them drop to her sides.
And still the postman was taking his time, rapping at this door, and poking papers through that; handing in letters, when he did hand them, as if he were meting out orders of execution. He was a dour, silent person, who seemed to regard letters as an unnecessary luxury, for which the recipients should be made to pay; and though during the War he had gone so far as to admit the need of the post to mothers and wives, he seemed to expect them to do without it now that the War was over. It was impossible that he should not have noticed the thrilled group of waiting women, even if he had not felt the current of excitement sweeping towards him down the street; but, for all the attention he paid them, they might not have existed. He stayed quite a long time at Mr. Baines’s office at the foot of the street, grumpily handing in document after document, and (apparently) concealing the last of them in his bag. Even the gaze of seven passionately interested females did not seem able to hurry him by a second.
“Ay, he’s taking his time!” Mrs. Tanner repeated sardonically, after a short pause, and in the tenseness of the atmosphere every one of the others jumped. The electric tremors passing between them ran and raced like sunlight on flashing wires as the postman finally turned and came heading towards them. Even now, however, he seemed quite oblivious of their existence, and on a sudden impulse Mrs. James stepped out from under the feathers as if to block the way with her arms. But before anything could be said he was up to them, by them, and then unmistakably past. “Nowt for none o’ ye!” he snapped, without even turning his head, and vanished up the alley that led to the “Black Bull.”
Martha Jane’s laugh led the chaos of sound into which the disgruntled Chorus broke, but, brazen though it was, it was also slightly relieved. The passing of the post left her with still another chance, still another moment in which to preen herself on her possible success.
Mrs. James was asseverating—“Didn’t I say it wouldn’t be t’ post? You mark my words now!... It’ll be Mr. Baines ...” and Mrs. Tanner was chirping—“Did you ever see such manners? He might ha’ given us a word!” with the twittering anger of a furious wren. Mrs. Clapham said nothing, but her mouth dropped at the corners like that of a disappointed child, and behind her Emma lifted her arms and folded them slowly again across her waist....
“I always said he’d bring it himself!” Mrs. James’s voice was happy and high. “Not because of the stamp and suchlike rubbish—Mr. Baines ain’t the sort to stick at a stamp—but because he’s a gentleman and likes everything just so. Folks can’t be more than gentlemen, nohow,” she finished, glaring at Martha Jane, “even if they do happen to be lordships an’ all!”