“Ah, the butter!” It still poured steadily; but after a moment’s hesitation she decided to go and fetch it. Anything was better than sitting alone, in the chilly parlor, listening to the drip of the rain.
There would be people in the streets. The mere thought of speaking to the grocer’s young man was a relief. Half an hour afterwards, she returned wet through, with the butter and the least dirty of the novels from a dingy circulating library she had discovered. Her landlady, a thin-lipped, bony woman, with a high color and a dirty cap, came out into the narrow, oil-clothed passage at the sound of the opening door, and eyed her wet waterproof resentfully. “Stand on the mat, please, Miss, and take it off carefully. I’ve just scrubbed this passage. You ’adn’t any call to go out sech weather. I’d ’ave sent Matilda if you’d only waited patiently,” she observed in a high-pitched, irritable voice. She seized the shiny mackintosh, down which sundry streams meandered, and bore it off to the kitchen, grumbling in an undertone. “Please to take off your boots ’ere, Miss. I don’t want the stairs cluttered up,” she turned at the door to say.
Bridget meekly obeyed, and crept softly upstairs, feeling like a criminal. Her bedroom, which she entered to take off her hat, struck a dreary pang to her heart, as though she saw its sordid ugliness for the first time. She hastened out of it into the sitting-room, which at least was lighter, and first wrapping herself in the crocheted wool coverlet from the sofa, after a shivering glance at the vernal decoration in the fireplace, she resolutely opened her book. It was Wuthering Heights. The weird, uncanny atmosphere of the story oppressed her with a painful fascination. The strange inhuman characters lived and moved for her. Catherine’s wailing cry outside in the storm rang in her ears, and made her tremble with fear and pity. At the same time she never lost vivid consciousness of her own surroundings,—of the cold, gloomy parlor, and the dripping of the rain on the window sill.
She put the book aside when Matilda came in with her dinner, feeling completely exhausted. The blackened mutton-chop was taken out again half an hour later by the silent little maid, almost untasted; and now there remained the afternoon and evening.
Bridget drew the slippery horse-hair arm-chair up to the window, and leant her head against the window frame. The little street on to which she looked had the suburban air characteristic of thousands of London streets. It was respectable, and absolutely featureless. She shut her eyes and her thoughts wandered back over the past two years. She remembered all the opposition she had encountered, and conquered,—her father’s grudging consent to her plans, her mother’s tears and reproaches. She thought of all her hours of lonely, unaided study and preparation for her work, of her days of despair, and moments of exultation. Well, that was all over and done with now. She had reached the goal for which she had striven: she was a High School teacher, earning eighty pounds a year, living in furnished apartments in Wentworth Street, Hackney. Bridget opened her eyes, and looked all round the room. The impassive, hideous furniture, the pictures that looked down on her from the walls, filled her with a kind of unreasoning, impotent frenzy of despair. She sprang from her seat and began to walk wildly from end to end of the narrow room.
“All for this—for this,” she whispered hoarsely. In the wave of misery that engulfed her for the moment, everything was black, hateful, out of proportion. She forgot the real pleasure her work gave her; the fact that she was free from the daily, hourly friction of her home life no longer seemed important,—worth anything. Her loneliness, the blankness of the social side of her life, was all her mind had room for. Her whole nature cried out against it in hopeless, passionate protest. She longed, desperately, childishly, for the warm cosiness of the sitting-room at home, for her mother’s face, for the feel of her dress. She felt that to sit over the fire with her and discuss Mary Wilby’s chances of catching Charlie Downs, would be bliss, even with the prospect of the inevitable misunderstanding at the end of half an hour. She stopped in her hurried pacing of the room to take her mother’s last letter out of her pocket, and to read it for the twentieth time with blinding tears.
“I am, my dearest little Bid, your loving old mother,” the letter ended, and Bridget put the paper impetuously to her lips.
“And I hoped so much; I thought, somehow, life would be so different,” she whispered to herself. “Oh, it’s all wrong,—hateful, unjust!” She stopped once before the glass, and looked at herself wistfully.
“What is the use of being pretty?” she cried, and turned away with a hasty gesture.
“And my writing; I can’t get on with it! How could any one in this cramped, unnatural life?” She pulled open a drawer, and flung a heap of papers upon the table, glancing over a sheet here and there.