the next morning lilian left her lodging at the customary hour of 8.15, to join one of the hundreds of hastening, struggling, preoccupied processions of workers that converged upon central london. she had slept for ten hours without a break on the previous day, risen hungry to a confused and far too farinaceous tea, done some dressmaking by the warmth of an oil-stove, and gone to bed again for another enormous period of heavy slumber. she was well refreshed; her complexion was restored to its marvellous perfectness; and life seemed simpler, more promising, and more agreeably exciting than usual.
she had convinced herself that the irish lord would call at the office in person to pay his bill; the mysterious and yet thoroughly understood code that governs certain human relations would forbid him either to post a cheque or to send his man with the money. her only fear was that he might already have called. but even if he had already called, he would call and call again, on one good pretext or another, until ... anyhow they would meet.... and so on, according to the inconsequent logic of day-dreams in the everlasting night of the tube.
the dreamer had a seat in the train--one of the advantages of living near the terminus--but strap-hangers of both sexes swayed in clusters over her, and along the whole length of the car, and both the platforms were too densely populated. she could not read; nobody could read. as the train roared and shook through down street station, she jumped up to fight her way through straphangers towards the platform, in readiness to descend at dover street. on these early trains carrying serious people, if you sat quiet until the train came to your station you would assuredly be swept on to the next station. these trains taught you to meet the future half-way.
as it happened the train stopped about a hundred yards short of dover street, and would not move on. seconds and minutes passed, and the stoppage became undeniably a breakdown. the tunnels under the earth from dover street back to hammersmith were full of stopped trains a few hundred yards apart, and every train was full of serious people who positively had to be at a certain place at a certain time. lilian's mood changed; the mood of the car changed, and of the train and of all the trains. no one knew anything; no one could do anything; the trains were each a prison. the railway company by its officials maintained a masterly silence as to the origin of the vast inconvenience and calamity. rumours were born by spontaneous generation. a man within lilian's hearing, hitherto one of god's quite minor achievements, was suddenly gifted with divination and announced that the electricians at the power station in lots road had gone on strike without notice and every electric train in london had been paralysed. half an hour elapsed. the prisoners, made desperate by the prospect of the fate which attended them, spoke of revolution and homicide, well aware that they were just as capable of these things as a flock of sheep. then, as inexplicably as it had stopped, the train started.
two minutes later lilian, with some scores of other girls, was running madly through dover street in vain pursuit of time lost and vanished. not a soul had guessed the cause of the disaster, which, according to the evening papers, was due to an old, unhappy man who had wandered unobserved into the tunnel from dover street station with the ambition to discover for himself what the next world was like. this ambition had been gratified.
as lilian, in a state of nervous exhaustion, flew on tired wings up the office stairs she of course had to compose herself into a semblance of bright, virginal freshness for the day's work, conformably with the employer's theory that until he reaches the office the employee has done and suffered nothing whatever. and miss grig was crossing the ante-room at the moment of lilian's entry.
"you're twenty-five minutes late, miss share," said miss grig coldly. she looked very ill.
"so sorry, miss grig," lilian answered with unprotesting humility, and offered no explanation.
useless to explain! useless to assert innocence and victimization! excuses founded on the vagaries of trains were unacceptable in that office, as in thousands of offices. employers refused to take the least interest in trains or other means of conveyance. one of the girls in the room called "the large room" had once told lilian that, living at ilford, she would leave home on foggy mornings at six o'clock in order to be sure of a prompt arrival in clifford street at nine o'clock, thus allowing three hours for little more than a dozen miles. but only in the book of doomsday was this detail entered to her credit. miss grig, even if she had heard of it--which she had not--would have dismissed it as of no importance. yet miss grig was a just woman.
"come into my room, miss share, will you, please?" said miss grig.
lilian, apprehending she knew not what, thought to herself bitterly that lateness for a delicious shopping appointment or a heavenly appointment to lunch at the savoy or to motor up the river--affairs of true importance--would have been laughed off as negligible, whereas lateness at this filthy office was equivalent to embezzlement. and she resolved anew, and with the most terrible determination, to escape at no matter what risks from the servitude and the famine of sentiment in which she existed.
