Chapter II: The Struggle for Life

You may guess it, I say; for it is no part of my plan to tell you. Being a woman, I throw out this hint to pique your curiosity.

Let us return to the point that I was twenty-two, and had no employment. Commissioner Lin and I were alone and friendless.

Four months earlier I had suffered a great loss. How great a loss I am not careful to assure you. It is far from my desire to make capital out of my inmost heart. I cannot spin phrases about my dead father. But by this time the first fierce numbness of my sorrow had worn away; I was no longer a stone; I was beginning to smile, and to feel the sunshine. A certain quicksilver light-heartedness in the veins of my race helps to conceal a background of feeling. Besides, I had my livelihood to earn. That is a great resource. The need for bread served to edge out my grief. My first four months had been assured me beforehand in the Settlement; for we paid in advance, half-yearly, our Warden being a prudent soul who disliked bad debts, and preferred the safe side. But when the four months of my deepest mourning were over, it was absolutely necessary for me to find employment.

How it all came about I need not inform you: the bank that broke, the electric light that failed: I was told the details in terms so crabbed that if I tried to repeat them I could but show my ignorance.

It was not hard for me to be poor; for in the Settlement we lived as the other East-Enders live, and I had learned from my match-girls how to be hungry and merry. But my poverty hitherto had been that of the amateur; I had now to learn professional indigence. When I shook hands with Sister Phyllis and Sister Agatha at the door of the guild, leaving Commissioner Lin in their charge for the moment, and went forth into the world to earn my living, I had six and elevenpence as available assets. I was a capitalist in my way. That formed my capital.

“Under these circumstances,” I said to myself, “the first thing for a prudent girl to do is to look out for lunch; the second thing is to look out for a situation.”

I do not pretend to prevision; on the contrary, I was born to take no heed for the morrow. I belong to the tribe of the grasshopper, not that of the ant. But I had been so deeply impressed by Sister Phyllis’s exhortations during my last four months in the guild that I had taken pains to learn shorthand and type-writing. I did not then know that every girl in London can write shorthand, and that type-writing as an accomplishment is as diffused as the piano; else I might have turned my hand to some honest trade instead, such as millinery or cake-making. However, a type-writer I was, and a type-writer I must remain. So I set forth on my Odyssey by walking down the phantom-haunted channel of the Strand, and cast anchor for my first halt in an aërated bread shop.

Luxury, we are told, demoralises this age, and (while I remain a type-writer) I am absolute to set my face against it. But a cup of coffee and a slice of seed-cake (not too luxuriously sweetened) lay well within the compass of my capital. I am a poor arithmetician, but I arrive by finger-lore at the net result that fourpence from six and elevenpence leaves six and seven. I took up an evening paper, which some recklessly extravagant customer had bequeathed to his successors, and my eye scanned the advertisements. Hands that waved a signal seemed to catch my glance. “A sail on the horizon!” I cried to myself. And this is what I read—

“Shorthand and Type-writer wanted (female). Legal work.—Apply Flor and Fingelman, 27B, Southampton Row.”

I felt myself already on the road to fortune. A glance at the date: it was to-day’s paper! In matters of business, promptitude is everything. I would be the first to apply. I tossed off my hot coffee with unbecoming haste, and, deeply impressed with the fact that in this age the struggle for existence has become one of the rights of woman, I hurried with all speed to Flor and Fingelman’s.

I was a Shorthand and Type-writer (female); and I was fully prepared to be as legal as they desired of me.

I do not say that “female” is a poetical description. I have never heard it applied to Heloise or to Ophelia—not even by the grave-digger; though Touchstone, to be sure, uses it once of Audrey. But the nineteenth century has a chivalry all its own, which I scruple to depreciate. If it speaks of us as females, it has given us the bicycle, and it almost admits that we are as fit for the franchise as the forty-shilling lodger. It puts us a little lower than the navvies. I call that magnanimity.

I had made haste to run up Charing Cross Road, and when I reached Southampton Row, impressed by the importance of the Struggle for Existence, I believe I was absolute winner in the race against time for the position of Shorthand and Type-writer (female).

Up two pair of stairs, where a notice led, I entered the Outer Office. Its keynote was fustiness. Three clerks (male), in seedy black coats, the eldest with hair the colour of a fox’s, went on chaffing one another for two minutes after I closed the door, with ostentatious unconsciousness of my insignificant presence.

No doubt they inferred that I was a candidate for the post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female), and they treated me as such persons may look to be treated. Their talk turned upon that noble animal, the horse.

They spoke also of the turf; by which I understood them to allude, not so much to the greensward of the downs, as to the imperceptible moral turf of Fleet Street. The two younger were indeterminate young men, with straight black hair, and features modelled on an oyster’s. As they appeared to be loftily unaware of my intrusion, I signified my presence by coughing slightly. It was the apologetic cough that stands for “I beg your pardon, but will you kindly attend to me?” They did not permit even the cough, however, to hurry them unduly. The youngest of the three, a pulpy youth, adjusted his cuffs, and completed some deep remarks upon two-year-old form before he turned to stare at me. I suppose he was kind enough to be satisfied with my personal appearance, for after a while he wheeled round on his high stool, and broke out with the chivalry of his age and class, “Well, what’s your business?”

My voice trembled a little, but I mustered up courage and spoke. “I have called about your advertisement for a Shorthand and Type-writer (female).”

He eyed me up and down. I am slender, and, I will venture to say, if not pretty, at least interesting-looking.

“How many words a minute?” he asked after a long pause.

I stretched truth as far as its elasticity would permit. “One ninety-seven,” I answered with an affectation of the precisest accuracy. To say “Two hundred” were commonplace.

The pulpy youth ran his eyes over me as if I were a horse for sale. I was conscious of my little black dress and hat; conscious also of a fiery patch in the centre of my cheek; but if you struggle for life you must expect these episodes. “That’s good enough,” he said slowly, with a side-glance at his fellow-clerks. I had a painful suspicion that the words were intended rather for them than for me, and that they bore reference more to my face and figure than to my real or imagined pace per minute.

The eldest clerk, with the foxy head, wheeled round, and took his turn to stare. He had hairy hands and large goggle eyes.

“Got your own machine?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“What sort?”

“A Barlock.”

“That’ll do,” he said, eyeing the rest. And again I detected an undercurrent of double meaning. He seemed to be expressing modified satisfaction at my outer personality.

They questioned me for some minutes with equal grace and charm. Then the eldest rose slowly. “I’ll tell the governor,” he murmured, and disappeared through a dingy door marked in large letters “Mr. Fingelman.”

In a short time he came back and beckoned me mysteriously. I followed him, trembling. He waved his hairy hand towards me as if to show me off to the man at the table. I felt disagreeably like Esther in the presence of Ahasuerus—a fat and oily Ahasuerus of fifty. “This is the young person,” he said, by way of introduction.

Ahasuerus—otherwise Mr. Fingelman—inspected me in turn. I quailed before his glance; he was a commissioner for oaths, and wore large round spectacles. “Had experience?” he asked at last. In person he was rotund and obviously wealthy, though ’twas a third-rate solicitor’s.

“A little,” I replied. I had made up my mind to say “Lots” beforehand; but when it came to the pinch, the ingrained bad habit of speaking the truth reasserted itself partially.

Ahasuerus stared. “What name?” he asked, after a long stony gaze.

I stammered out “Juliet Appleton.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-two.”

He perused me up and down with his small pig’s eyes, as if he were buying a horse, scrutinising my face, my figure, my hands, my feet. I felt like a Circassian in an Arab slave-market. I thought he would next proceed to examine my teeth. But he did not. Having satisfied himself as to externals, he went on to put me through my paces.

“Sit down there,” he said, pointing to a seat. “Have you pen and note-book?” I produced my stylograph.

He grunted approbation, and dictated for a few minutes a short business-letter. Then he waved me to the type-writer. “Transcribe,” he said curtly. I sat down and transcribed.

The chief clerk meanwhile stood by, with his hairy hands crossed in a curved attitude of ostentatious servility, which contrasted strangely with his Outer Office manner. When I had finished, he peered at my work, nodded, and handed it over to Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus ran his eye up and down, grunting again. “She’ll do?” he said interrogatively.

The chief clerk signed _yes_.

“She’s the first we’ve seen,” Ahasuerus interposed, with caution in his tone.

“Saves trouble,” said the chief clerk. I was aware with a rush of hot blood that the chief clerk approved of me, and that to his lordly approbation (as of the Sultan’s Vizier) I owed my appointment.

The Oriental monarch waved his pen towards the door. “Very well,” he answered. “Settle terms with her outside. You know what I give. Bother me no more with it.” And wheeling round his swivel-chair, he buried himself in his writing.

The terms the Vizier proposed were not wholly superior to the dreams of avarice; but they were a modest starvation; and after my East-End experiences, I looked for no more. I accepted them without demur, and went forth into Southampton Row an engaged type-writer.

I have a mercurial temperament. My spirits rise and fall as if they were consols. This success exalted me. I walked down Charing Cross Road (by no means, as a rule, an exhilarating thoroughfare) in the seventh heaven. I had justified myself before the impartial tribunal of political economy. I could earn my own bread—butter doubtful. In the Struggle for Life I had obtained a footing. This magnificent post of Shorthand and Type-writer (female) had been thrown open by advertisement to public competition. In that competition I had won the day. My energy, my promptitude, the rapid resolution with which I had gulped down my coffee, burnt my tongue, and rushed off to Southampton Row, had secured for me the prize of a modest starvation. I had proved myself fittest by the mere fact of survival. Matthew Arnold had taught me, indeed, with much sweet reasonableness, that there was not any proper reason for my existing; but I like to exist. The sole remaining question was, Could I adapt myself to my environment? If so, I had fulfilled the whole gospel of Darwinism.