FullReads

From the very first day that I took up my work in the office I became conscious that Hector, the manager, had his eye upon me. He would generally read a page or two of Keats or Shelley to us girls, before we began to make out the customers’ accounts. This was all in accord with the far-seeing and generous policy of the laundry. The reading took a little time, but it filled us with the soaring spirit. It made pedantic precision and things-that-are repulsive to us. After I heard Hector read the “Ode to a Nightingale” I could not bring myself to say that two and two were four; nothing less than fourteen seemed to give me any satisfaction. Hector knew how quickly responsive and keenly sentient I was. A friend once told me that he had said of me that I made arithmetic a rhapsody. “This,” I replied quietly, “means business.”

It did. One Saturday afternoon I had tea with him–not on the Terrace, as the A.B.C. shop in the High Street was so much nearer. He was very wonderful. He talked continuously for two hours, and would have gone on longer. But the waitress pointed out that the charge for a cup of tea and a scone did not include a twenty-one years’ lease of the chair you sat on.

He was, of course, a man of great scientific attainments. His work on the use of acids in fabric-disintegration has a reputation throughout the laundries of Europe. But he had not the habit of screaming blasphemies which my Great Example failed to convince anybody that she had discovered in Huxley. In brief, he did not conform to the unscientific idea of what a scientific man must be like. He was a cultured idealist. I will try to recall a few of the marvellous things he said that afternoon.

In reply to some remark of mine, he said with authority and conviction: “Marge, you really are.”

And, indeed, I had to admit that very often I am.

He was saying that in this world gentle methods have effected more than harsh, and added this beautiful thought: “In the ordeal by laundry the soft-fronted often outlasts the starched.”

Later, I led him on to speak of ambition.

“I am ambitious. That is to say, I live not in the present, but in the future. At one time I had a bicycle, but in imagination I drove a second-hand Ford; and now I possess the Ford, and in imagination I have a Rolls-Royce. I once held a subordinate position in the laundry, but in imagination I was the manager; and now I am the manager, and in imagination am asked to join the Board of Directors. As the poet Longfellow so wisely said–Excelsior. Engraved in letters of gold on the heart of the ambitious are these words: ‘And the next article?’ At this present moment I am having a cup of tea with by far the most brilliant and beautiful girl of my acquaintance, but in imagination—-“

And it was just there that the tactless waitress interrupted us so rudely. It was in vain that I tried to lead him back to the subject. Almost his last words to me that afternoon were:

“I suppose you don’t happen to know what the time is?”

Nor did I. It was just an instance of his subtle intuition. He understood me at once and without effort. Many men have made a hobby of it for years and never been within three streets of it.

The clock at the post-office gave him the information he required, and, raising his hat, he said: “Well, I must be getting on.”

The whole of the man’s life was in that sentence. Always, he was getting on–and always with a compulsion, as of destiny, shoving behind.

Knowing my keen appreciation of art, of which I have always been a just and unfailing critic, he took me on the following Saturday to see the pictures. It was not a good show–too many comics for my taste, and I’d seen the Charlie Chaplin one before. However, in the dim seclusion of the two-shilling seats just as the eighteenth episode of “The Woman Vampire” reached its most pathetic passage, and the girl at the piano appropriately shifted to the harmonium, Hector asked me if I would marry him.