“As sure as all that, are you!” he said, with a sneering grimace. He stood eyeing her insolently up and down.
“Good-night,” she said. His sneering made her furious. Putting her umbrella between him and her, she walked off.
“Good-night then,” he replied, unseen by her. But his voice was sneering and impotent.
She went home quivering. But her soul was burning with satisfaction. She had shaken them off.
Later she wondered if she had been unkind to him. But it was done—and done for ever. Vogue la galère.
CHAPTER VI
HOUGHTON’S LAST ENDEAVOUR
The trouble with her ship was that it would not sail. It rode water-logged in the rotting port of home. All very well to have wild, reckless moods of irony and independence, if you have to pay for them by withering dustily on the shelf.
Alvina fell again into humility and fear: she began to show symptoms of her mother’s heart trouble. For day followed day, month followed month, season after season went by, and she grubbed away like a housemaid in Manchester House, she hurried round doing the shopping, she sang in the choir on Sundays, she attended the various chapel events, she went out to visit friends, and laughed and talked and played games. But all the time, what was there actually in her life? Not much. She was withering towards old-maiddom. Already in her twenty-eighth year, she spent her days grubbing in the house, whilst her father became an elderly, frail man still too lively in mind and spirit. Miss Pinnegar began to grow grey and elderly too, money became scarcer and scarcer, there was a black day ahead when her father would die and the home be broken up, and she would have to tackle life as a worker.
There lay the only alternative: in work. She might slave her days away teaching the piano, as Miss Frost had done: she might find a subordinate post as nurse: she might sit in the cash-desk of some shop. Some work of some sort would be found for her. And she would sink into the routine of her job, as did so many women, and grow old and die, chattering and fluttering. She would have what is called her independence. But, seriously faced with that treasure, and without the option of refusing it, strange how hideous she found it.
Work!—a job! More even than she rebelled against the Withams did she rebel against a job. Albert Witham was distasteful to her—or rather, he was not exactly distasteful, he was chiefly incongruous. She could never get over the feeling that he was mouthing and smiling at her through the glass wall of an aquarium, he being on the watery side. Whether she would ever be able to take to his strange and dishuman element, who knows? Anyway it would be some sort of an adventure: better than a job. She rebelled with all her backbone against the word job. Even the substitutes, employment or work, were detestable, unbearable. Emphatically, she did not want to work for a wage. It was too humiliating. Could anything be more infra dig than the performing of a set of special actions day in day out, for a life-time, in order to receive some shillings every seventh day. Shameful! A condition of shame. The most vulgar, sordid and humiliating of all forms of slavery: so mechanical. Far better be a slave outright, in contact with all the whims and impulses of a human being, than serve some mechanical routine of modern work.