Diana of Dobson's

Front matter

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Chapter I

D iana MASSINGBERD sat with her elbows on the table staring at the yellow-brown paper that disfigured the wall of the assistants’ dining-room. Here and there the yellow-brown paper was stained with smears and dirt, and upon one of these smears Diana’s eyes had fixed themselves. She usually sat opposite that particular smudge at meals and she knew the shape of it nearly by heart — triangular but rounded ofif a little at the top. Just over it hung a text — ‘'He shall feed His Flock like a Shepherd” — in thick black letters on a ground that had once been white; and a little to the left 3 was a large square of cardboard displaying the one hundred and twenty-seven rules which Mr. Septimus Dobson had laid down for the guidance of his assistants.

‘'I wonder/’ Diana said suddenly, breaking the silence that had hitherto been ruffled only by the hissing of the gas-jets and the scratching of a steel pen upon a shiny sheet of paper; wonder what Dobson would do if I were to break all the rules in one day — every one of them, straight off the reel, from the beginning of the list to the end?”

Half a dozen heads were lifted to look at the speaker. Kitty Brant’s pen ceased to scribble, Miss Whitehead, a stoutish, anaemic-looking girl, raised a pair of meekly astonished blue eyes from the perusal of the latest number of the Mayfair Novelettes, Miss Jay giggled and Miss Smithers’ needle hung poised for a 4 '

moment in mid-air. Then, with a sharp click of the thimble, she drove it home.

''He ’d give you the sack,’’ she said with curt decision.

"Of course,” Diana retorted, "but I should have floored him all the same. He couldn’t make me pay for all the rules I ’d broken — for obvious reasons. I totalled up the amount payable in fines the other day and I discovered that the exact sum which it would cost to break every rule on that card is one pound fifteen shillings and ninepence. Now I haven’t got one pound fifteen shillings and ninepence in the world — so I should have to leave Dobson’s drapery establishment owing the proprietor that amount. The probability is that I should go on owing it. I wonder if he ’d send me in a bill and county-court me if I didn’t pay?”

This time a vapid giggle from the fluffyhaired Miss Jay was the only response. 5

Miss Smithers did not deign one; she merely pressed her lips together, shrugged her shoulders and dug her needle into the skirt she was braiding. Miss Massingberd’s moods irritated her; though she could not have expressed her feelings in words, she realized, half unconsciously, that Diana’s outspoken rebellion against the routine of her daily life was making its slow monotony less easy for herself to bear. She had never felt Diana’s fierce and passionate resentment against the system that aimed at transforming living flesh and blood into the mechanism of a profit-mongering drapery machine; but her own vague and impotent discontent had been a bitter thing in its time and was bitter still when she allowed herself to dwell on the possibilities of wider lives ; and Diana’s anger, Diana’s pain, Diana’s longings, stirred her uncomfortably, and 6 threw upon her mind a pale reflection of their own turbulence.

Diana guessed Miss Smithers’ attitude towards herself and the system that molded their common lives — and despised it. There was rebel blood in her — Irish blood — and to her the submission that Miss Smithers cultivated not only as a shield but as a virtue was the sin of sins. She came of the class that breeds revolutionists — the class that knowing itself gentle by birth and education, finds itself lacking in the means to maintain the one and gratify the other and realizes, as perhaps no other class can do, the sheer brute power of money.

Her lips straightened themselves a little disdainfully as she surveyed Miss Smithers’ stubbornly bent head ; her nerves were on edge to-night and she was in the mood for a wrangle with anybody. But Miss 7

Smithers was just as well aware of that fact as Diana herself — further, like the rest of her fellow-toilers, she had a wholesome respect for Miss Massingberd’s sharp-edged tongue. So it was Diana herself who took up the tale again.

Ve only treated myself to six-pennyworth of fines to-day,’’ she said, folding her arms behind her head and staring defiantly at the card beside the text. 'Threepence for being late at the counter and threepence for unbusiness-like conduct. It was the Pringle woman each time. According to her every single thing I do comes under the heading of unbusiness-like conduct. I should like to smother her and dance on her corpse.”

A giggle from Miss Jay, a significant glance at the door from Miss Smithers, and then Kitty Brant’s plaintive little voice chimed in:

“Di, I wish you did n’t hate her so.”

‘Why — don’t you hate her and her nagging and spying? don’t we all? Even Miss Smithers loathes the Pringle' though she does cringe to her and lick her boots — ”

This time the challenge was too direct to be ignored and Miss Smithers raised a reddened face.

“You ’ve no business to say that of me, Miss Massingberd. I would n’t lick anybody’s boots, Miss Pringle’s least of all; but I ’m not such a fool as to risk my bread and butter in the way you do. Why this morning you all but contradicted Mr. Dobson himself, about those suede gauntlets.”

“Miss Smithers, I wish I had had the pluck to contradict Mr. Dobson right down — flat — direct, about those suede gauntlets. I was right and he was wrong — and the old beast knew it. He just wanted the pleasure of bullying me before 9 you all; he ’s got his knife into me just as much as Miss Pringle has. Wonder how long it will be before I get the sack, Kit?''

''Oh, Di, you must n't." Kitty Brant's voice was almost tearful, her eyes round and anxious. Alone of her fellows she liked Diana Massingberd, pitied and understood why it was that her fetters cut so deeply into her soul. The elder girl's flat rebellion against the dull system which ground out lives in return for a pitiful wage would have been impossible to Kitty; but she secretly admired what sh6 dared not imitate. And the one dark spot in her future — ^her pen had been scraping out a foolish little outburst of affection to the man who in three months time was to give her a home — was the regret that while she herself was about to escape from the toils of Dobson's, Di would be left entangled in them still.

"Oh, Di, you must n't."

Diana thrust back her rumpled hair with a curt laugh.

‘^What ’s the good of saying that to me, Kit? You must talk to Dobson. I can’t help getting the sack if he gives it to me, can I ? I’d bet a shilling, if I had a shilling, that I get kicked out within a fortnight. For one thing, I was caught sitting down to-day.”

‘‘Who caught you?”

“Need you ask? Miss Emily Pringle, of course — which means you may bet your life, that I ’ve been reported to Dobson. It was just my luck. There wasn’t a sou} at our counter, and nobody about, and I was feeling dead beat, so I thought I ’d chance it and sit down for a moment on one of the seats which the Government insists shall be provided — for us to look at. I ’d hardly pulled it out when the Pringle came sweeping back from her dinner, five minutes before I expected her. She made

II straight for me, of course — trust her for that — smiling her most acid smile and enquired tenderly if I was feeling tired? I told her I was dog-tired — and that my feet ached; one may just as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and I knew I was dead sure to be reported for sitting down in business hours — government regulations notwithstanding/’

Miss Smithers, still justly smarting under the remarks anent Miss Pringle and the licking of boots, lifted her eyebrows and twisted her lips into a pucker of contempt which might have been intended either for the framers of the Shop Assistants’ Seating Act or for Miss Massingberd’s folly in taking advantage of the Act’s provisions. To be caught sitting down in business hours in Mr. Septimus Dobson’s premises was little short of a disaster; according to Mr. Dobson’s unspoken, but well understood, theory, such a display of idleness on the part of an assistant was liable to give customers the impression that trade was slack and the “young lady” on that account unoccupied.

“Oh dear,” Kitty sighed regretfully; “you must be careful, Di, you really must, if you want to stay on.”

“The question is,” Diana returned recklessly, “do I want to stay on?”

Remembering the state of her friend’s finances Kitty’s eyes grew wide with horror and she clutched at Diana’s hand.

“Oh, Di, you do — for the present you do, dear!”

“For the present,” Diana echoed sullenly. “It ’s all very well for you to talk about the present. Kit, you ’ve got a future —I have n’t.”

Kitty’s lip trembled and her eyes shone in silent reproach and then fell. It was

Miss Smithers who, still resentful and seeing her opportunity for a hit, chimed in in her most practical tones —

''Miss Brant ’s quite right. Miss Massingberd; you’ll have to mind your p’s and q’s if you don’t want to go. Of course, you know your own business best — but as I ’ve heard you say you ’re all alone in the world, with nobody to look to ; and as I don’t suppose you’ve been able to save very much since you were taken on here—”

"Save — good Lord, me save !” Diana jeered. "On thirteen pounds a year — five bob a week — with my clothes to find and my fines to pay !”

There was an instant’s uncomfortable silence. For the second time that day Miss Massingberd had transgressed an unwritten law.

"I suppose you know. Miss Massingberd,” Miss Smithers said stiffly, "that the firm prefers that the assistants shoulcfh't discuss the amount of their salaries/'

''Yes, I know it," Diana flared, "and I don’t wonder — I ’m glad the firm has the grace to be ashamed of itself sometimes. Well, I ’m not bound to consider its feelings and I shall discuss the amount of my salary — my totally inadequate salary — as often as I like! I get five bob a week — with deductions — and I don’t care who knows it; I only wish I could proclaim it from the housetops. Five bob a week for fourteen hours’ work a day — five bob a week for the use of my health and strength — five bob a week for my life! And I have n’t the shadow of a doubt that a good many others here are in the same box.’’

Miss Smithers snapped her thread viciously, stuck her needle into the front of her bodice and rose to her feet.

''Well, I 'm going to bed. I don 't know if you Ve found it out or not, but that clock ’s slow — I believe it ’s a good bit past the half-hour really.^’

"Is it?’' There was a general pushing back of chairs — the gas in the dormitories had to be out on the stroke of eleven. A good many of the girls, wearied with the long day’s work, had already slipped off to their beds and, on Miss Smithers’ hint, everyone, except Diana Massingberd, prepared to follow their example. She, alone, as if she had not heard the words, sat on at the table with her chin resting on her hand and her eyes staring downwards at the soiled tartan cloth.

Kitty Brant lingered, folding her unfinished letter and wiping her scratchy pen, until Miss Whitehead had shuffled • through the door yawning good night, extracting hair-pins from her coiffure ; then, with a sudden pitying impulse, she

i6 sidled up to Diana and slipped an arm round the elder girl’s neck.

‘‘Di, what ’s the matter — what ’s come over you lately? You use n’t to be like this. I know you always hated the work but it ’s only the last week or two you ’ve been so terribly discontented.”

Diana laughed drearily.

"Dh, it ’s been coming on a great deal longer than that. I ’m a brute, Kitty, to worry you with my growlings — but I can’t help myself. I have fits of this sort of thing; they come and take hold of you, every now and then, when you realize what your life might be — and what it is — all the squalor and the meanness and the grind and the hopelessness. I ’m about at the end of my tether, Kit.”

^'But why?” Kitty pe^isted gently. ''What is the matter just now — in particular ?”

"There is n’t anything particular the matter. That's just it. Everything is going on the same as usual. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen."

She swung round suddenly in her chair and took Kitty's thin little face almost fiercely between her two hands.

‘'You lucky little devil — you lucky little devil — ^you 're going to get out of it all. How I envy you — how we every one of us envy you, Kitty! In three months’ time you 'll be married — and, however your marriage turns out, it will be a change from Dobson's hosiery department. . . . Oh, I did n't mean to hurt you, dear. I 'm a beast to say such a thing — I only said it because I 'm hideously jealous of you. You can afford to forgive me. Kit, for in three months' time you'll have done with Dobson's. Think of it — think of it — you 'll have done with the nagging and the standing and this horrible bare room, i8 smelling of gas and dinners — and the dormitory with the damp oozing through the walls. You dl have done with Pringle’s sour face — ^you ’ll have done with the rules — the hateful, niggling rules — and the whole starved, petty life. But I have n’t done with it and it does n’t seem to me I ever shall.”

Her hands slipped from Kitty’s face and she turned her head away and swallowed the lump in her throat. Racking her brain in vain for a word of comfort, Kitty stood beside her in dumb perplexity and pity. Diana’s fingers tattooed fiercely on the table for a moment and then she flung back her head and went on —

‘Df course I know I sha’n’t be here much longer — I can quite see that. Dobson will sack me, as Grinlay’s and half a dozen others have sacked me, because I can’t help showing them how I loathe them and their tyrannies. But when I ’m fired out from here, I shall only start the same old grind somewhere else — all over and over again. The delectable atmosphere of Dobson’s will follow me about wherever I go — oh, you know it will, Kitty, you know it will. I shall crawl round, cringing to be taken on somewhere else at the same starvation salary and then settle down in the same stuffy dormitory with the same mean little rules to obey. I shall serve the same stream of unintelligent customers, and bolt my dinner off the same tough meat in the same depressing dining-room with the same mustard-colored paper on the walls. And that ’s what I was born for. Kit, that ’s all that life has to give me. And there are people out in the world, people only a little way off, no better and no worse than I am — who get up in the morning and say to themselves T will do this because I want and like to do it — because / want to do it/ mind you. Those are the people who live. Kitty, I only exist. I sometimes feel — I feel to-night — as if I would give my immortal soul to live — just live — for a week

She jerked back her chair from the table, and, with a gesture of impatient misery, strode across the room and leaned her head upon the mantelpiece, hiding her face in her hand.

''You ’d better go up to bed, Kitty,’' she said after a moment’s silence. "It ’s close on a quarter to eleven. I ’m coming in a moment, but I don’t want the others to see I ’ve been crying. I ’m sorry I ’ve talked to you like this. You can’t do any good and I only make you miserable — it ’s disgustingly selfish of me. Now, run along, or you won’t have time to do your hair before the light goes out.”

"You won’t be long,” Kitty pleaded, as she gathered up pen, ink and blottingpaper. ‘‘Miss Pringle may come in, and she does n’t like it if we are not in our rooms by a quarter to eleven.”

“No, I won’t be long — less than five minutes.”

The door closed behind Kitty Brant and Diana stood staring down into the grate. What she had said to the younger girl was true; every now and then an overwhelming passion of resentment at the hardships of her daily life boiled up fiercely within her and had to find an outlet. As often as not that outlet had been found in a reckless defiance of the powers that be — ^with the result that the powers that be had speedily decided to dispense with her services. The very violence with which her feelings were expressed on such occasions usually brought about a reaction — a phase of nervous exhaustion and dull submission, more or less sullen, to the conditions of her narrow routine. Then, gradually, the sore would chafe again, the narrow round become more hateful and more hideous, the day’s unvaried toil more intolerable — and when the iron had entered deeply enough into her soul another outburst would be due. Of all women in the world Diana Massingberd was the least fitted by nature to live under an order of things which gives scope to petty tyranny; and the regulations of the ‘diving-in” system which, to more orderly natures, might have been merely vexatious and unpleasant, to her were an insult and an injury combined.

It was not alone an inborn independence of temperament which utterly unfitted her for a life hemmed in by regulations; her training had been everything that a shop assistant’s ought not to be. The only child of a country doctor — a hard-worked, improvident, good-natured Irishman — from the age of thirteen she had ruled his household, after his own improvident fashion, to her complete satisfaction and the detriment of her education. She was over twenty-one when Dr. Massingberd took to his bed with an attack of double pneumonia and died within a week, leaving to his daughter, as her sole heritage, a few unpaid debts.

There had been a consultation of the dead man’s solicitor and an unknown cousin or two who had turned up for the funeral and who made no secret of their desire to repudiate responsibility for Diana’s future, as soon as the position was made clear for them. Before her father was laid in the ground Diana had begun to realize what it meant to be a superfluous woman, and, with a bitter resentment that divided her heart with grief, she listened to her relatives’ emphatic pronouncements on the duty of earning her own living and the impos- 24 sibility of expecting aid from others. She acquiesced readily enough in the suggestion — with a scorn but partially disguised for the motives of those who proffered it, but without any serious misgivings as to her powers of self-support. Those came later, when it had been borne in upon her that a course of miscellaneous reading, a habit of independent thinking and a capacity for apt and sarcastic speech are not the best qualifications for a wage-earning machine.

She was still numb from the shock of her father’s death when she found herself installed behind the counter of a large London draper’s. The establishment was a fairly good one of its class, which was not the highest. In one belonging to a higher grade a heavy premium would have been demanded, and Diana’s relatives were anxious to get her off their hands as inexpensively as possible. The girl fell in with their arrangements unresistingly — and exchanged her careless, unordered life for an existence whose every hour was mapped out and confined, where liberty was not and every harmless impulse came in contact with a rule. To her, from the first, the place was a prison ; it was not only that she suffered physically from the close confinement, lack of air, bad food and long hours of weary standing; the mental atmosphere at the same time stifled and irritated her. She held on for something over six months and then, with a pound or two in her pocket, broke out, in the hope of bettering herself.

The hope was vain. By the time her funds had melted away and she had secured another berth, she found that she had merely exchanged the frying-pan for the fire and, before long, was looking back regretfully upon her first experience of ^fliving-in.’^ And so life had gone on for 26 her during the past six years — a thing to be resented and endured. She had made one or two efforts to extricate herself from the toils of the drapery trade, always without success. Always, for lack of funds, she had drifted back to her place behind the counter, to the common bedroom and the common dining-room, to the subjection that her individuality loathed and rebelled against. She was twentyeight now, and the unreasoning hopes of early youth had died in her soul; she felt that life was slipping from her, with its beauties unknown and its passions and possibilities unfathomed; and her heart cried out within her against the fate that had denied to her the exercise of the power she felt she possessed — the power of living, and living to the uttermost.

Chapter II

T he allotted five minutes and more had gone by when Diana roused herself, glanced at the clock, gave her reddened eyes a final dab with her crumpled handkerchief, and made for the dormitory which she shared with Kitty Brant, Miss Smithers, Miss Jay and Miss Morton. As she flung open the door Miss Jay's voice broke off suddenly in the middle of a sentence and Miss Smithers began to hum as she brushed out the twist of hair she had removed from the top of her head to her knee. Diana smiled sarcastically; even if Kitty's face had not worn a troubled, resentful expression, she would have guessed that the other two had been discussing her in uncomplimentary terms.

‘Whereas Miss Morton?’’ Miss Jay demanded, as she added another to the row of steel curling-pins which encased her yellow head like a helmet.

‘^It ’s her evening out,” Kitty returned from the folds of a pink flannelette nightgown. ''If she is n’t back soon she ’ll have to go to bed in the dark — it ’s close on eleven. Hurry up, Di.”

"All right — I ’m hurrying,” Diana returned as she seated herself on the battered tin box at the foot of her bed — the box that contained all her earthly possessions, with the exception of a shabby black jacket hanging on the door. Four other boxes, of varying shapes and sizes, were ranged at the foot of the four other beds — and beds and boxes together comprised the greater part of the furniture of the dormitory. A couple of small iron washstands were planted one at each end of the room, a chair, rickety by rea- 29 son of a shortened leg, stood before a shabby dressing-table placed beneath the one gas-jet; and a wooden-framed looking-glass, with a crack across the whole face, hung above it. The same paper — the mustard-colored paper abhorred by Diana — that adorned the dining-room likewise adorned the dormitory and, as in the dining-room was diversified by damp, and dirt stains. There were no pictures on the walls ; one of the hundred and twenty-seven rules of the establishment forbade the driving in of a nail under the penalty of a fine of threepence; and the only attempt at decoration consisted of a couple of cheaply framed photographs of two badly posed and undecor ative young men which Miss Jay had arranged upon the mantelpiece above the walled-in grate. The sole adornment provided by the firm was a large notice in close proximity to the gas-bracket stating that a fine of five shillings would be inflicted on any young lady found using a '‘jigger” — a ''jigger” being a contrivance on which, when attached to the gas-bracket, a tired or chilly assistant might presume to boil herself a cup of cocoa at her own expense.

To the cold, comfortless atmosphere of the dormitory Diana’s presence had added a touch of antagonism and, after Miss Jay’s query and Kitty’s reply, silence reigned for the space of three or four minutes. Miss Smithers, in black corsets and a striped moirette petticoat, finished arranging her artificial tresses for the morrow and applied herself to the combing of those that grew on her head; and Miss Jay, having completed the composition of the helmet, had begun hurriedly to divest herself of her petticoat and bodice when the carpetless stairs creaked to the tread of hurried footsteps and a breathless girl dashed into the room, pulling off her jacket as she ran.

''Just in time,” she gasped. Ve run all the way from the ’bus. I was afraid I should n’t get in till after eleven, and I do so hate going to bed in the dark — I never can find my things. Oh, Miss Massingberd, did n’t you see this letter for you? It was on the hall table. Here you are.”

She tossed the letter to Diana, jerked her coat onto a peg on the door, flung her hat on the bed and began to wrench at her refractory bootlaces, pouring out meanwhile a flood of chatter on the evening’s doing with her cousins in Balham. Miss Jay chimed in with eager, nasal questions. On a previous evening out she had made the acquaintance of Miss Morton’s cousin Albert, and was not without hopes of adding a third to the photographic collection on the mantelpiece.

Meanwhile, Diana, under the gas-jet, had surveyed and then opened her letter — slowly and with interest, a letter being an unusual event in her life. The handwriting of the address was formal, clerkly, uninviting; the inside to all appearances equally so. She glanced at the signature — Hubert Crampton — unknown; and began to read.

''Re E. C. Cooper deceased. Dear Madam — ”

Miss Jay and Miss Morton at the other end of the room were chattering volubly; Kitty was about to bestow herself between the sheets, and Miss Smithers had just drawn her nightgown from its hidingplace under the pillow, when a sharp, almost frightened cry from Diana turned every head in her direction.

‘^Girls— girls!’’

She was standing erect under the gas-jet, her eyes wide and shining and her face white except for two red spots that had suddenly appeared on her cheekbones. Kitty was at her side in an instant amid a rush of exclamations from the others.

''What ’s the matter, Miss Massingberd?”

"Di, are you ill?”

"Has anything happened?”

"What on earth is it?”

"The letter — the letter 1” Diana gasped. "Read it someone — read it to me. No, no” — and she snatched it back from Kitty’s outstretched hand — "Let me read it again myself first.”

"Is it bad news, dear — oh, I hope it ’s not bad news.”

"Bad news — bad news?” Diana’s voice went up in a trembling laugh that, 34 to her hearers, betokened hysterics and Miss Morton dashed to the washstand to fill the tooth-glass with water.

‘‘No, no, I ’m all right — I ’m all right,” Diana laughed, thrusting it aside. “Only I feel as if I can’t believe it. It ’s this letter — the letter Miss Morton brought me. Fancy, it must have been lying in the hall since the last post came in, and I never noticed — never knew. If I had, how I should have dashed for it — ”

“But what ’s it all about — who is it from? What does it say?” Miss Smithers interposed.

“It ’s from a lawyer — a solicitor in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It says that a cousin of my father’s — Edward Chamberlain Cooper, a distant cousin whom I never knew and who was in some sort of business in Manchester — died suddenly a little while ago without leaving a will. That ’s the point — he didn’t leave a will, so his 35 money had to be divided up among the next of kin. And I ’m one of them — one of the next of kin — and they Ve been trying to trace me for weeks — and I get three hundred pounds.’’