The service had come to an end, the organist was playing a voluntary, rather longer than usual, and the congregation was leaving, some of them passing near Madge and Frank, and casting idle glances on the young couple who had evidently come neither to pray nor to admire the architecture. Madge recognised the well-known St Ann’s fugue, and, strange to say, even at such a moment it took entire possession of her; the golden ladder was let down and celestial visitors descended. When the music ceased she spoke.
‘It would be a crime.’
‘A crime, but I—’ She stopped him.
‘I know what you are going to say. I know what is the crime to the world; but it would have been a crime, perhaps a worse crime, if a ceremony had been performed beforehand by a priest, and the worst of crimes would be that ceremony now. I must go.’ She rose and began to move towards the door.
He walked silently by her side till they were in St Paul’s churchyard, when she took him by the hand, pressed it affectionately and suddenly turned into one of the courts that lead towards Paternoster Row. He did not follow her, something repelled him, and when he reached home it crossed his mind that marriage, after such delay, would be a poor recompense, as he could not thereby conceal her disgrace.
CHAPTER XVIII
It was clear that these two women could not live in London on seventy-five pounds a year, most certainly not with the prospect before them, and Clara cast about for something to do. Marshall had a brother-in-law, a certain Baruch Cohen, a mathematical instrument maker in Clerkenwell, and to him Marshall accidentally one day talked about Clara, and said that she desired an occupation. Cohen himself could not give Clara any work, but he knew a second-hand bookseller, an old man who kept a shop in Holborn, who wanted a clerk, and Clara thus found herself earning another pound a week. With this addition she and her sister could manage to pay their way and provide what Madge would want. The hours were long, the duties irksome and wearisome, and, worst of all, the conditions under which they were performed, were not only as bad as they could be, but their badness was of a kind to which Clara had never been accustomed, so that she felt every particle of it in its full force. The windows of the shop were, of course, full of books, and the walls were lined with them. In the middle of the shop also was a range of shelves, and books were stacked on the floor, so that the place looked like a huge cubical block of them through which passages had been bored. At the back the shop became contracted in width to about eight feet, and consequently the central shelves were not continued there, but just where they ended, and overshadowed by them were a little desk and a stool. All round the desk more books were piled, and some manœuvring was necessary in order to sit down. This was Clara’s station. Occasionally, on a brilliant, a very brilliant day in summer, she could write without gas, but, perhaps, there were not a dozen such days in the year. By twisting herself sideways she could just catch a glimpse of a narrow line of sky over some heavy theology which was not likely to be disturbed, and was therefore put at the top of the window, and once when somebody bought the Calvin Joann. Opera Omnia, 9 vol. folio, Amst. 1671—it was very clear that afternoon—she actually descried towards seven o’clock a blessed star exactly in the middle of the gap the Calvin had left.
The darkness was very depressing, and poor Clara often shut her eyes as she bent over her day-book and ledger, and thought of the Fenmarket flats where the sun could be seen bisected by the horizon at sun-rising and sun-setting, and where even the southern Antares shone with diamond glitter close to the ground during summer nights. She tried to reason with herself during the dreadful smoke fogs; she said to herself that they were only half-a-mile thick, and she carried herself up in imagination and beheld the unclouded azure, the filthy smother lying all beneath her, but her dream did not continue, and reality was too strong for her. Worse, perhaps, than the eternal gloom was the dirt. She was naturally fastidious, and as her skin was thin and sensitive, dust was physically a discomfort. Even at Fenmarket she was continually washing her hands and face, and, indeed, a wash was more necessary to her after a walk than food or drink. It was impossible to remain clean in Holborn for five minutes; everything she touched was foul with grime; her collar and cuffs were black with it when she went home to her dinner, and it was not like the honest, blowing road-sand of Fenmarket highways, but a loathsome composition of everything disgusting which could be produced by millions of human beings and animals packed together in soot. It was a real misery to her and made her almost ill. However, she managed to set up for herself a little lavatory in the basement, and whenever she had a minute at her command, she descended and enjoyed the luxury of a cool, dripping sponge and a piece of yellow soap. The smuts began to gather again the moment she went upstairs, but she strove to arm herself with a little philosophy against them. ‘What is there in life,’ she moralised, smiling at her sermonising, ‘which once won is for ever won? It is always being won and always being lost.’ Her master, fortunately, was one of the kindest of men, an old gentleman of about sixty-five, who wore a white necktie, clean every morning. He was really a gentleman in the true sense of that much misused word, and not a mere tradesman; that is to say, he loved his business, not altogether for the money it brought him, but as an art. He was known far and wide, and literary people were glad to gossip with him. He never pushed his wares, and he hated to sell them to anybody who did not know their value. He amused Clara one afternoon when a carriage stopped at the door, and a lady inquired if he had a Manning and Bray’s History of Surrey. Yes, he had a copy, and he pointed to the three handsome, tall folios.
‘What is the price?’
‘Twelve pounds ten.’