His Official Fiancée

“‘A girl without a sweetheart,’ girls—(I was readin’ something about it this very morning ’s I was coming along in the Toob),” chattered little Miss Holt over her work. “A girl without a sweetheart is like a ship at sea, without knowing what port she’s to put in at——”

“Accounts for the way a lot of ’em seem to pick their sweethearts on the principle ‘Any port in a storm!’” said Miss Robinson, with her little sniff.

“Well! Seems to me there’s a good deal in the idea that a poor husband is better than none,” came philosophically from Miss Holt, whose back is always curved like a banana over her typing-table, and who “smarms” her dull brown hair down under a hair-net until her head looks like a chocolate. “After all, my dear, if you’re married, you’re married; and nobody can say you aren’t. But if you aren’t married, you aren’t. And nobody can say you are!”.

“How true,” said Miss Robinson dreamily. “Got that, Miss Trant?”

And she gave a sardonic glance towards me, to see if I was thoroughly taking this in. I was trying not to. The buzz of Cockney whispering which goes on, intermittently, all day long in our murky “typists’-room” was beginning to get on my nerves again almost as badly as it did in the first week that I worked at the Near Oriental Shipping Agency. I didn’t raise my eyes. Then, above the click and the buzz, came a shriller:

“Miss Trant, if you please?”

My fingers fell from the typewriter, and I looked up with a start into the sharp little South-London face of our smallest office-boy.

“Yes? What is it, Harold?”

“Miss Trant, Mr. Waters says he wishes to see you in his private room at two o’clock.”

“To see me?” I asked in a panic; hoping that it might not be true, that by some lucky chance my ears had deceived me. They hadn’t.

“Yes; at two o’clock sharp, miss.”

“Very well, Harold,” I heard myself say in a small, dismayed voice.

Then I heard the door of our room shut upon the office-boy’s exit.

I turned, to meet the shrewd, sympathetic brown eyes of Miss Robinson over her machine.

“Governor sent for you?”

I nodded dismally.

“Any idea what it’s about, Miss Trant?”

“Oh, it might be about anything this last week,” I sighed. “It might be about my forgetting to enclose those enclosures to the Western Syndicate. Or for leaving out the P.T.O. at the bottom of that Budapest letter. Or for spelling Belgium B-e-l-g-u-i-m. Or half a dozen other things. I knew Mr. Dundonald was going to complain of me. It’s been hanging over me for the last three days. Anyhow I shall know the worst to-day.”

“P’raps he’ll give you another chance, dear,” said little Miss Holt.

“That’s not very likely,” I said. “He’s such an abominably accurate machine himself that he’s ‘off’ anybody in this office who isn’t a machine too, girl or man.”

“D’you suppose the Governor even knows which of us is a girl and which is a man? because I don’t,” put in Miss Robinson. “I bet you he——”

“Talking in theyairr!” interrupted the grating Scotch accent of Mr. Dundonald, as he passed through to the Governor’s room, where, alas! I, Monica Trant, was soon to present myself.

A deathly silence, broken only by the clicking of the four typewriters, fell upon our department.

But I’m pretty sure that all the work I did from then on until lunch-time was of very little good.

That gloomy typists’ room, looking over the “well” of the great buildings in Leadenhall Street, and so dark that we worked always by electric lights, switched on one over each machine, faded away from me. I ceased to know I was breathing in that familiar smell of fog and mackintoshes and dust and stuffiness. I ceased to hear the muffled roar of the City outside, and the maddening “click! click-a-click-pprring!” of the typewriters within, as I shut myself into my own mind.

Dismally I reviewed my own situation.

Here was I, “alone in London,” all my poor little capital spent on the business-training which I had joyfully hoped was going to bring me in a nice “independent-feeling” income of at least two pounds a week. At the offices of William Waters and Son, of the Near Oriental Shipping Agency, a post I had obtained after weeks of weary searching for work, my salary was twenty-five shillings a week. Now, in all probability, I was going to lose even that. And then what was I to do? How was I to go on contributing my half of the rent of the Marconi Mansions flat; how was I to pay for even my cheap meals and my “these’ll-have-to-do” clothes? Howwas I to earn my living?