Courage by Malachi Whitaker. Part 5.
Watch on KineScope.
Go back to Part 4
She went back to her manual work, wiping up the water, wringing her dusters, looking brightly round for more wet places.
‘Good morning!’
Suddenly, the whole place was alive. Mr Palfreyman was a devoted old slave, with his ‘Good morning, Mr Julian. The office boy was a kind of tolerated worm. Mr Bentley was simply Mr Bentley, the stranger who had been with the firm for fourteen years, and no more.
‘Why, Miss Allat, whatever are you doing?’
Mr Julian had taken off his hat with a sweeping bow. ‘What a long bald head. But what a nice bald head, she thought. ‘I’m clearing up after the fire, she said in a clear voice.
‘Don’t trouble, please. Mrs Withy will do that.’
He looked in a very pleasant way at her young, fresh face, at her thin coat hanging on the peg, at her small hands competently wringing out the duster, and smiled. She smiled back widely, delightedly.
Yet she kept on wiping up the pools of water and hearing the droning voice of Mr Palfreyman, the hard, harsh cough of the friendly Bentley. Behind her, the boy Reggie sat at a dried desk cutting open the old envelopes, saving the smooth sides for the old man to make notes on. She felt little gusts of wind coming from the broken window, and every moment a little more of Jem and the girls and the scent and the coloured paper fell away from her memories.
“They’ll be going on, close all together, feeling well, or ill, or hungry, or good-tempered or bad, and Jem’ll be at the big machine waiting for them all to come up and flatter him and praise him’ She felt alone and exhilarated. ‘But I’ve got away. I’m going to be my own self. There’s no Jem here to take all the responsibility. I’m going to work well, and do exactly what they tell me. I’d love, yes, I’d simply love to be dignified.
But nice, too. So many people are like marshes, slopping sluggishly about!’ She laughed, and tried to whisper ‘slopping sluggishly’ to herself. ‘But I’d rather be a lake,’ she went on thinking, ‘a lake with good, straight edges. A lake mightn’t do much, really, but it is nice to look at, and marshes are such treacherous things. They run into one another, and rot everything that gets in the way’
She went on thinking as she worked, about the dusters, about Mr Julian, about the copy of The Times on her desk, about her home and her family.
‘I’m going to learn something here. Not business, not good arithmetic, not even shorthand. But some day, I’ll – what will I do some day?’
She had not the remotest idea what she would do some day, but when she had washed down her wet desk and put away the dusters and the bucket, she opened her typewriter, got some paper from the top drawer and began typing figures, long columns of figures that she could add up. She did not add so very well. She began tapping, at first slowly, then with more and more confidence; and soon she was pulling out the filled paper, bending her head to it, frowning, looking the very picture of somebody who had plenty of fine work to do in the world and who knew exactly what she was doing.
Go back to Part 4