In the Cage E-Book

Henry James

• Herausgeber: Youcanprint Self-Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

“In the Cage” is a novella about a woman who works in London as a telegraphist. The unnamed protagonist of this story do display a lively imagination and a nearly photographic memory, and a particular attitude in reading other people’s telegrams, being aware of many secrets… This book was first published in 1898 in London by Ducworth Overlook. This book contains a special note on Henry James by Joseph Conrad (Henry James. An appreciation, 1905) and a detailed bibliography including all the publications of the Author. This interactive digital edition includes: Interactive Notes and Chapters, News about the Author, News about the Book, a very interesting Tag cloud of the Book and a link to connect to the Goodreads community to ask questions and share comments and opinions.

Leseprobe

Author's Best Works

Henry James

— 9 —

FdBooks offers in the series Author’s Best Works a selection of great authors of World Literature, at a very affordable price. Each book has interactive notes and chapters and is paginated so elegant and clear. Because Culture is priceless, almost always…

“In the Cage” is a novella about a woman who works in London as a telegraphist. The unnamed protagonist of this story do display a lively imagination and a nearly photographic memory, and a particular attitude in reading other people’s telegrams, being aware of many secrets… This book was first published in 1898 in London by Ducworth Overlook.

This book contains a special note on Henry James by Joseph Conrad (Henry James. An appreciation, 1905) and a detailed bibliography including all the publications of the Author.

This interactive digital edition includes: Interactive Notes and Chapters, News about the Author, News about the Book, a very interesting Tag cloud of the Book and a link to connect to the Goodreads community to ask questions and share comments and opinions.

Henry James (1843–1916), who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912 and 1916, was american but he spent the most of his career in Britain. He is still one of the most important writers of the 19th-century.

The text of this book is available on www.gutenberg.org

© Fabio Di Benedetto, 2015. Edition 3.0

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Start reading

In the Cage

With an Appreciation by Joseph Conrad

Index

Tagcloud of this book

News about Henry James

Ask the Goodreads community a question about this book

Henry James

In the Cage

With an Appreciation by Joseph Conrad

Henry James

In the Cage

Chapter I

It had occurred to her early that in her position — that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea-pig or a magpie — she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance.  That made it an emotion the more lively — though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered — to see any one come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function.  Her function was to sit there with two young men — the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the “sounder,” which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing.  This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

The barrier that divided the little post-and-telegraph-office from the grocery was a frail structure of wood and wire; but the social, the professional separation was a gulf that fortune, by a stroke quite remarkable, had spared her the necessity of contributing at all publicly to bridge.  When Mr. Cocker’s young men stepped over from behind the other counter to change a five-pound note — and Mr. Cocker’s situation, with the cream of the “Court Guide” and the dearest furnished apartments, Simpkin’s, Ladle’s, Thrupp’s, just round the corner, was so select that his place was quite pervaded by the crisp rustle of these emblems — she pushed out the sovereigns as if the applicant were no more to her than one of the momentary, the practically featureless, appearances in the great procession; and this perhaps all the more from the very fact of the connexion (only recognised outside indeed) to which she had lent herself with ridiculous inconsequence.  She recognised the others the less because she had at last so unreservedly, so irredeemably, recognised Mr. Mudge.  However that might be, she was a little ashamed of having to admit to herself that Mr. Mudge’s removal to a higher sphere — to a more commanding position, that is, though to a much lower neighbourhood — would have been described still better as a luxury than as the mere simplification, the corrected awkwardness, that she contented herself with calling it.  He had at any rate ceased to be all day long in her eyes, and this left something a little fresh for them to rest on of a Sunday.  During the three months of his happy survival at Cocker’s after her consent to their engagement she had often asked herself what it was marriage would be able to add to a familiarity that seemed already to have scraped the platter so clean.  Opposite there, behind the counter of which his superior stature, his whiter apron, his more clustering curls and more present, too present, h’s had been for a couple of years the principal ornament, he had moved to and fro before her as on the small sanded floor of their contracted future.  She was conscious now of the improvement of not having to take her present and her future at once.  They were about as much as she could manage when taken separate.

She had, none the less, to give her mind steadily to what Mr. Mudge had again written her about, the idea of her applying for a transfer to an office quite similar — she couldn’t yet hope for a place in a bigger — under the very roof where he was foreman, so that, dangled before her every minute of the day, he should see her, as he called it, “hourly,” and in a part, the far N.W. district, where, with her mother, she would save on their two rooms alone nearly three shillings.  It would be far from dazzling to exchange Mayfair for Chalk Farm, and it wore upon her much that he could never drop a subject; still, it didn’t wear as things had worn, the worries of the early times of their great misery, her own, her mother’s and her elder sister’s — the last of whom had succumbed to all but absolute want when, as conscious and incredulous ladies, suddenly bereft, betrayed, overwhelmed, they had slipped faster and faster down the steep slope at the bottom of which she alone had rebounded.  Her mother had never rebounded any more at the bottom than on the way; had only rumbled and grumbled down and down, making, in respect of caps, topics and “habits,” no effort whatever — which simply meant smelling much of the time of whiskey.

Chapter II

It was always rather quiet at Cocker’s while the contingent from Ladle’s and Thrupp’s and all the other great places were at luncheon, or, as the young men used vulgarly to say, while the animals were feeding. She had forty minutes in advance of this to go home for her own dinner; and when she came back and one of the young men took his turn there was often half an hour during which she could pull out a bit of work or a book — a book from the place where she borrowed novels, very greasy, in fine print and all about fine folks, at a ha’penny a day. This sacred pause was one of the numerous ways in which the establishment kept its finger on the pulse of fashion and fell into the rhythm of the larger life. It had something to do, one day, with the particular flare of importance of an arriving customer, a lady whose meals were apparently irregular, yet whom she was destined, she afterwards found, not to forget. The girl was blasée; nothing could belong more, as she perfectly knew, to the intense publicity of her profession; but she had a whimsical mind and wonderful nerves; she was subject, in short, to sudden flickers of antipathy and sympathy, red gleams in the grey, fitful needs to notice and to “care,” odd caprices of curiosity. She had a friend who had invented a new career for women — that of being in and out of people’s houses to look after the flowers. Mrs. Jordan had a manner of her own of sounding this allusion; “the flowers,” on her lips, were, in fantastic places, in happy homes, as usual as the coals or the daily papers. She took charge of them, at any rate, in all the rooms, at so much a month, and people were quickly finding out what it was to make over this strange burden of the pampered to the widow of a clergyman. The widow, on her side, dilating on the initiations thus opened up to her, had been splendid to her young friend, over the way she was made free of the greatest houses — the way, especially when she did the dinner-tables, set out so often for twenty, she felt that a single step more would transform her whole social position. On its being asked of her then if she circulated only in a sort of tropical solitude, with the upper servants for picturesque natives, and on her having to assent to this glance at her limitations, she had found a reply to the girl’s invidious question. “You’ve no imagination, my dear!” — that was because a door more than half open to the higher life couldn’t be called anything but a thin partition. Mrs. Jordan’s imagination quite did away with the thickness.