Walter Besant - All Sorts and Conditions of Men - An Impossible Story

It was a small but well-proportioned room with low ceiling, furnished sufficiently. There were clean white curtains with rose-colored ribbons. The window was open, and in it stood a pot of mignonette, now at its best. At the window sat, on one side, an old gentleman with silvery white hair and spectacles, who was reading, and on the other side a girl with work on her lap, sewing.

"Now, Cap'n Sorensen," said Mr. Bunker, without the formality of greeting, "I've got you another chance. Take it or leave it, since you can afford to be particular. I can't; I'm not rich enough. Ha!" He snorted and looked about him with the contempt which a man who has a banker naturally feels for one who hasn't, and lives in an almshouse.

"What is the chance?" asked the inmate meekly, looking up. When he saw Angela in the doorway he rose and bowed, offering her a chair. Angela observed that he was a very tall old man, and that he had blue eyes and a rosy face – quite a young face it looked – and was gentle of speech and courteous in demeanor.

"Is the chance connected with this young lady, Mr. Bunker?"

"It is," said the great man. "Miss Kennedy, this is the young woman I told you of. This young lady" – he indicated Angela – "is setting herself up, in a genteel way, in the dressmaking line. She's taken one of my houses on the Green, and she wants hands to begin with. She comes here, Cap'n Sorensen, on my recommendation."

"We are obliged to you, Mr. Bunker."

The girl was standing, her work in her hands, looking at Angela, and a little terrified by the sight of so grand a person. The dressmakers of her experience were not young and beautiful; mostly they were pinched with years, troubles, and anxieties. When Angela began to notice her, she saw that the young work-girl, who seemed about nineteen years of age, was tall, rather too thin, and pretty. She did not look strong, but her cheeks were flushed with a delicate bloom; her eyes, like her father's, were blue; her hair was light and feathery, though she brushed it as straight as it would go. She was dressed, like most girls of her class, in a frock of sober black.

Angela took her by the hand. "I am sure," she said kindly, "that we shall be friends."

"Friends!" cried Mr. Bunker, aghast. "Why, she's to be one of your girls! You can't be friends with your own girls."

"Perhaps," said the girl, blushing and abashed, "you would like to see some of my work." She spread out her work on the table.

"Fine weather here, cap'n," Mr. Bunker went on, striking an attitude of patronage, as if the sun was good indeed to shine on an almshouse. "Fine weather should make grateful hearts, especially in them as is provided for – having been improvident in their youth – with comfortable roofs to shelter them."

"Grateful hearts, indeed, Mr. Bunker," said the captain quietly.

"Mr. Bunker" – Angela turned upon him with an air of command, and pointed to the door – "you may go now. You have done all I wanted."

Mr. Bunker turned very red. "He could go!" Was he to be ordered about by every little dressmaker? "He could go!"

"If the lady engages my daughter, Mr. Bunker," said Captain Sorensen, "I will try to find the five shillings next week."

"Five shillings!" cried Angela. "Why, I have just given him five shillings for his recommendation."

Mr. Bunker did not explain that his practice was to get five shillings from both sides, but he retreated with as much dignity as could be expected.

He asked, outside, with shame, how it was that he allowed himself thus to be sat upon and ordered out of the house by a mere girl. Why had he not stood upon his dignity? To be told he might go, and before an inmate – a common pauper!

There is one consolation always open, thank Heaven, for the meanest among us poor worms of earth. We are gifted with imaginations; we can make the impossible an actual fact, and can with the eye of the mind make the unreal stand before us in the flesh. Therefore, when we are down-trodden, we may proceed, without the trouble and danger of turning (which has been known to bring total extinction upon a worm), to take revenge upon our enemy in imagination. Mr. Bunker, who was at this moment uncertain whether he hated Miss Kennedy more than he hated his nephew, went home glowing with the thought that but a few short months would elapse before he should be able to set his foot upon the former and crush her. Because, at the rate she was going on, she would not last more than that time. Then would he send in his bills, sue her, sell her up, and drive her out of the place stripped of the last farthing. "He might go!" He, Bunker, was told that he might go! And in the presence of an inmate. Then he thought of his nephew, and while he smote the pavement with the iron end of his umbrella, a cold dew appeared upon his nose, the place where inward agitation is frequently betrayed in this way, and he shivered, looking about him suddenly as if he was frightened. Yet what harm was Harry Goslett likely to do him?

"What is your name, my dear?" asked Angela softly, and without any inspection of the work on the table. She was wondering how this pretty, fragile flower should be found in Whitechapel. O ignorance of Newnham! For she might have reflected that the rarest and most beautiful plants are found in the most savage places – there is beautiful botanizing, one is told, in the Ural Mountains; and that the sun shines everywhere, even, as Mr. Bunker remarked, in an almshouse; and that she herself had gathered in the ugliest ditches round Cambridge the sweetest flowering mosses, the tenderest campion, the lowliest little herb-robert.

"My name is Ellen," replied the girl.

"I call her Nelly," her father answered, "and she is a good girl. Will you sit down, Miss Kennedy?"

Angela sat down and proceeded to business. She said, addressing the old man, but looking at the child, that she was setting up a dressmaker's shop; that she had hopes of support, even from the West End, where she had friends; that she was prepared to pay the proper wages, with certain other advantages, of which more would be said later on; and that, if Captain Sorensen approved, she would engage his daughter from that day.

"I have only been out as an improver as yet," said Nelly. "But if you will really try me as a dressmaker – O father, it is sixteen shillings a week!"

Angela's heart smote her. A poor sixteen shillings a week! And this girl was delighted at the chance of getting so much.

"What do you say, Captain Sorensen? Do you want references, as Mr. Bunker did? I am the granddaughter of a man who was born here and made – a little – money here, which he left to me. Will you let her come to me?"

"You are the first person," said Captain Sorensen, "who ever, in this place, where work is not so plentiful as hands, offered work as if taking it was a favor to you."

"I want good girls – and nice girls," said Angela. "I want a house where we shall all be friends."

The old sailor shook his head.

"There is no such house here," he said sadly. "It is 'take it or leave it' – if you won't take it, others will. Make the poor girls your friends, Miss Kennedy? You look and talk like a lady born and bred, and I fear you will be put upon. Make friends of your servants? Why, Mr. Bunker will tell you that Whitechapel does not carry on business that way. But it is good of you to try, and I am sure you will not scold and drive like the rest."

"You offended Mr. Bunker, I learn, by refusing a place which he offered," said Angela.

"Yes: God knows if I did right. We are desperately poor, else we should not be here. That you may see for yourself. Yet my blood boiled when I heard the character of the man whom my Nelly was to serve. I could not let her go. She is all I have, Miss Kennedy" – the old man drew the girl toward him and held her, his arm round her waist. "If you will take her and treat her kindly, you will have – it isn't worth anything, perhaps – the gratitude of one old man in this world – soon in the next."