Courage by Malachi Whitaker. Part 2.
Watch on KineScope.
Isabel crossed over the station and looked at the bookstall. People were buying morning papers so quickly that the two men could scarcely cope with them. She could not understand why they should buy or want these papers. And yet, suddenly she took twopence out of her bag and bought The Times.
As soon as she had done it, the thrill that had entered left her. Why had she spent her only twopence? She had no more, not a cent. Each morning her mother gave her her expenses for the day. From Saturday’s spending money (she had had to buy gloves and a scarf) there had been nothing left but this twopence. Why, then, have bought a Times? And the station clock said six minutes to nine. Folding the paper under her arm, she ran through Forster Square again and up the hill.
This, then, was the street? This was the office in which she had had her interview, in which she had said she could type (having practised on a friend’s typewriter but five times), in which she had said, no, she could not do any shorthand, but she would learn; the office in which she had been praised for her clear writing (but I don’t always write as nicely as this, she had said in a burst of frankness, I took a lot of trouble with that letter), the office in which she had grinned, and felt pleased, and sure at the moment that she could do anything that was asked of her.
There was a wide red door at the bottom of the steps. Isabel went through the doorway and upstairs, passing a woman who was kneeling on a rubber mat and wiping up water with a black cloth.
‘Good morning,’ she said politely, remembering that in the old fairy tales one had to be polite to everybody. But she did not like the look of the woman, who was young and fair and strong, and had an angry glare in her eye.
‘Good morning,’ said the woman abruptly.
Then something very strange happened. There were two entrances to the building. She had taken the nearer one, and had to walk along corridors. At the far end of the last corridor everything was in confusion. The girl kept skipping over streams of water which gushed along the linoleumed corridor. Men and boys were walking about with wet red ledgers in their arms. She simply stared at the things around her and then went and knocked at the glassed door of the suite of offices in which she was to be employed. It was certainly quieter here.
Nobody answered, so she opened the door and went inside. There should have been an office-boy (‘the office-boy comes at half-past eight, Miss Allat’). The floor was not only wet and sodden, but the brown linoleum was ridged. Water was even in standing on the level backs of the sloping desks.
‘I must be dreaming,’ she thought. ‘Or perhaps the angry charwoman does this every Monday morning.’
There was a small desk in the middle of the room, holding a typewriter with a tin cover on it. That was wet, too. There were six windows. One was broken. Also, water was trickling down the greenwashed walls.
Isabel put down her Times and her black bag on the desk and took off her small blue coat and purple silk hat and the white, thin scarf she had bought on Saturday, and hung them up. Underneath, she was wearing a cotton blouse with dark blue spots on it. She looked with some dismay at the very shiny, round wooden stool she was to sit on, and wondered how soon her skirt would match its brightness. Then she looked slowly round the room again.
‘It is a wet place, she thought, ‘but I suppose I shall get used to it!’