Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

The normal terms were fifteen shillings a week and every other Sunday afternoon and evening off, and one free night a week. But Lucinda did not try to bargain. She offered Mrs Smith sixteen shillings a week and agreed to her terms. Mrs Smith said she would give the extra shilling to the Lord.

The arrangement was not cheerful but it was practical. The silver was properly cleaned and there was none of that bitter tasting crust on the fork tines that had so distinguished the tenure of the ninth maid.

The bathroom smelt of bright and pungent patent formulae. Waves of ammonia seemed to emanate from the waterside windows which were always, no matter what the weather, sparkling clean. And if the house became slightly hostile and chemical by day, this was conquered in the night by the rich aromas of the stews which were Mrs Smith's great skill. The stews were a surprise. There is something wild and

Oscar and Lucinda

generous abut the better stews. They are best put together on the winds of impulse, guided by the compass of intuition. These were all qualities that Mrs Smith would have appeared to lack. You would expect something thin and watery from her pot. There was no indication that this was a woman who threw her herbs in by the stalkful, cut her meat big and would know whether the fungus she found on the borders of Whitefield's paddocks could be eaten even if it were a poisonouslooking yellow and shaped like a lady's fan.

When Oscar Hopkins was brought into the house, Mrs Smith, similarly, showed herself to be not mean as her mouth suggested but both compassionate and practical. It did not occur to her to question the propriety of introducing a man into a house occupied by single women. She saw nothing untoward with him being attended to on the diningroom table. She fetched towels from the linen press and she got good thick ones lest the heat from the water she had been asked to boil should damage the French polishing.

Of course, she did not know who Oscar Hopkins was. She did not know he was a scandal. She saw his hands and, having more experience of the agonies of prayer than her mistress, recognized those half-moon-shaped infections. She tore up a cotton chemise-really still too good to throw away, but of the right softness and texture for cleaning wounds-and then she stood back, her arms folded, her head on one side, her eyes apparently as neutral of expression as a bird's and watched her mistress tend to the man.

She did not say anything in front of the man, but her face softened a fraction as she fitted her bigfingered hands together, rocking one hand back and forth on the tines of the other. In the kitchen she whispered to Lucinda: "Them cuts was made by praying," And she demonstrated how this might be done, shutting her eyes while doing so. Lucinda was repulsed and excited by this fervent prayerfulness. It seemed alien, popish, like Italian paintings of the torture of saints. She felt judged by it. She respected it, perhaps excessively, she who thought the kneelers at Balmain not soft enough. She found the iodine behind the cochineal where Prucilla Twopenny had hidden it.

The iodine hurt him, and when Lucinda would not bear to be the agent of more torture, it was Mrs Smith who took over the medication. She bound the young man's hands and asked him did he think he could manage to hold a mug of cocoa.

It was also Mrs Smith who made up the bed for Oscar. It would seem

I

Mrs Smith

the question of it being sinful had not entered her mind at that stage. Indeed it did not enter until she had been to church on Sunday.

On the Saturday she waited on them both, bringing toast and porridge to the little room upstairs, which looked through the thin grey veil of gum trees to the cobalt blue of the Parramatta River. Mrs Smith was in no way censorious. Indeed Lucinda was touched to see how bright and excited she was. You could imagine how she might be as a wife with a husband, or a mother with a son. She bullied him gently into taking golden syrup on his porridge and, with her luscious spoon held above the young man's plate, smiled conspiratorially at her mistress across the table. In this nectar drop of time, Lucinda was moved. She thought: I am happy. There were cockatoos on Cockatoo Island in those days, and they brought their shrieks and tearing beaks to breakfast on the Monday. They gathered in the Morton Bay fig on the south side of the house and made Lucinda laugh when they raised their yellow crests or waddled selfimportantly along its smooth-skinned, wrinkly-elbowed branches. It was then that Mrs Smith requested a word and Lucinda, having no indication from the face, went with her innocently, imagining that they were to confer on some domestic matter or that she was being asked to declare a holiday for Pentecost or Ash Wednesday. She went, still holding her napkin.

Mrs Smith could not carry her emotions as far as the front parlour. She got as far as the bottom of the stairs when she turned abruptly and said: "I cannot stay, mum. Not while you comport youself in such a way, mum."

"In what way?" Lucinda felt nothing but confusion as though she had been riding a trap which has, quite silently, lost a wheel, and there she was tipped over in the rock-studded roadside when the minute before she had been reclining on a cushion and thinking dreamy thoughts about the shape of clouds.

"The 'gentleman,' " said Mrs Smith. It was all she could manage. It was as if the word itself would choke her.

"But, Mrs Smith, it was you who made up his bed. And as you are in the house yourself, it seems to be perfectly proper."

"Your morals are your own affair, mum. As are my own."

"Have your friends at church been speaking to you?"

But Mrs Smith would not answer so direct a question and her eyes took on a dark and hard and glittering righteousness. She lifted her

Oscar and Lucinda

chin and clasped her hands in front of her pinafore. The passage where they stood was a dank place. Neither of them moved for a good two minutes.

When Lucinda returned to sit opposite Oscar at the table, he did not immediately notice the distress in her face. He noticed, rather, that she had tied her napkin in a large hard knot which she could not, no matter how she plucked at it, untangle.

73

Judge Not

If you saw Mrs Smith with her dun-coloured shawl around her shoulders, her cane basket in the crook of her wiry arm, saw her come up the hill past the butcher's in Mort Street, Balmain, you might remark, if you remarked anything at all, that here was a woman that kept the shutters of her life screwed shut, who kept herself close to the wall as she walked, and thus occupied that thin strip of dry shadow when all the rest of the street was wet with sunshine. A private women, you would think, until you found something livelier to interest you (therea tinker sitting in the gutter mending a tiny saucepan with a burnt black handle) and then you could forget her. And yet, three days after Mrs Smith had left Luanda's employ, there was not a maid in Sydney who did not know of the unorthodox situation out at Whitfield's Farm. This did not mean that there were no further maids or cooks available, but rather than the ones who put themselves forward were opportunists who imagined that they could, given the impropriety in the house, request a premium for their services. There was not one who asked for less than a guinea a week. This was offensive enough. But there were other things, not easily graspable, about their attitude-for while they swindled, or attempted swindling, they adopted an expression (all in the eyes and mouth) of moral superiority.

Judge Not

These interviews left Lucinda feeling soiled and angry, and she would have had no help at all had not Mrs Froud stepped forward.

Mrs Froud was the wife of Lucinda's second gatherer. She came to "do" two afternoons a week. Mrs Froud was jolly and friendly, but you could see-or so it seemed to Lucinda-that she had made an assumption. This assumption was quite incorrect. There was nothing to make an assumption about.

Oscar lay in his room and sucked his sheet. He wrote to Mr Stratton about the dangers of gambling life.

My dear Patron, [he wrote] 1 cannot help but have the greatest reservations about the serpent I have placed in your trusting at a time when I knew too well the effects of its poison. I sent my journals to you because I promised you, and now I beg you to make a promise: burn them. I regret the day 1 ftrst set foot upon the track. Opium, surely, would not be so great a curse. This will all seem far-fetched to you, but let me tell you that at this moment I am kindly lodged by a fellow sufferer, and although we inhabit a small house, no bigger than my father's cottage, we hardly speak to one another for fear that something that we say or do will lead to a horse, a game of cards and we shall, without intending to, hnd ourselves once more in that state of mad intoxication.

There were pages of it, all pretty much the same. They reflected Oscar's idea of what was happening in the house, but what was so obvious to him was not obvious to Lucinda at all. While he shrank from conversation, wary of where it might lead, she had hoped for it. While he tried to diminish himself, to make himself small and inoffensive, she sat at table and waited for him to join her. She did not like to go running to his room continually, and yet she could not leave him there alone. She imagined he was gripped by loneliness. She saw he did not hate her, and yet she felt him pulling back. The reason for this presented itself to her one night while she was preparing for bed.

He thinks I have him in mind for a husband.

It was only to set his mind at rest that she invented the romantic story of her passion for a clergyman whom Bishop Dancer had so cruelly exiled to Boat Harbour. She wished to make him imagine that her heart was already spoken for, that all she required from him was company and conversation. She wished him calm, steady, and to quit all this nervous scuttling about the house. But she told her story to a man whose emotions were in such a state that he could barely hold the load they carried, let alone the unhappy

?RH

Oscar and Luanda

story she asked him to lash on atop. He was much moved, too moved. It was ridiculous, he knew-he hardly knew her-but it took everything in him to stop bursting into tears. He chewed his lip, he grimaced, he excused himself while there was still sultana cake uneaten on the plate. She heard him creaking up the stairs. The door shut to his room. She picked up her tea-cup and threw it at the wall.

74

A Degree from Oxford

"This chap, Miss Leplastrier, is he any good?"

Mr d'Abbs held her eye quite fiercely for a minute, but he could not sustain. He had a small smile, quite ironic, and it twisted his thin moustache and made him look not quite respectable. And while he enjoyed being thought of in this way-it was no commercial liability in Sydney-it was not the truth at all. He might let her glassworks go cold through timidity or cautiousness, but he would not break the law.

"He has a degree from Oxford."

"Oxford," said Mr d'Abbs. He was pleased, but did not wish to appear impressionable. His hands-large hands for such a small manplayed briefly with his blue silk tie, then held the edge of the desk, then slid until they found the drawer, and in the drawer a cigar. The cigar was such a big one that Lucinda, when she saw it, thought it made him look like a caricature in Punch.

"Oriel," she offered.

Mr d'Abbs blinked. He leaned forward a little as if he expected her to say more. When there was obviously no more to say, he frowned. "It is not just a question of clever men," he said. He fussed with some grey ash which had landed on his green corduroy jacket. "Really, there is no cleverness required. The work itself would drive him mad with boredom. All it requires is neatness. So why do you come to me with a man from Oxford?"

A Degree from Oxford

Mr d'Abbs really wanted to be flattered. He prided himself on his employees as he prided himself on the paintings and lithographs that crowded his walls at home. He was an artist himself. He liked artists. He was a philosopher. He liked philosophers. He provided them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

He could not tell anyone, not even his wife, what pleasure it gave him to know that now, at this instant, in the clerk's room next door, he had Mr Jeffris the poet and surveyor, Mr Trevis-Dawes the pianist, Mr Coyle the water-colourist whose views of Pittwater and the Hawkesbury adorned the cedar panels of his office. He did not wish to talk to them, and he certainly did not socialize with them. But he was very pleased, more pleased about this than anything, that they were there.

"So why come to me?"

"Oh, Mr d'Abbs," said Lucinda, "do not tease me." 'Tease?" said Mr d'Abbs, looking pleased. He relit his cigar and sent clouds of smoke into the air. "You told me yourself about your Mr Cloverdale." "Speaks Hindi, that's correct. It is absolutely no use to him in Sydney. But he is an honest man, Miss Leplastrier, and neat."

Lucinda assured him of Oscar's character. She said nothing of gambling. (She should say. She would not.) Mr d'Abbs was now explaining that money was kept in the office. He stood, took out a big bunch of noisy keys from his pocket, and opened the safe with one of them. He showed her money. There was ten thousand pounds in his safe. He showed her the money to stress the importance of honesty, but the other reason, the real reason, was that he could not believe it was him, little Jimmy Dabbs, Ditcher Dabbs's boy, who was standing in his own office in the colony of New South Wales, a cigar in one hand, ten thousand pounds in the other. "Fancy that," he said.

The things that moved Mr d'Abbs were clear to Lucinda. Sh was embarrassed for him, not that he should be so pleased about himself, but that he should reveal his pleasure so clearly, that he should stand naked at his bathroom window, not knowing he had an audience for all his imperfections.

"He knows Latin," she said, "and Greek." Mr d'Abbs looked up at her and blinked. He smiled and tapped a wad of banknotes against the back of his wrist.

"He has excellent references from his London employer. He was a schoolteacher." She spoke quickly, leaning forward, listing his achievements until she had said Greek three times and Latin twice. She spoke

7R7

Oscar and Lucinda

on and on, not because she wished to exaggerate Oscar Hopkins's attainments, but in order that she be too busy to notice the private reverence Mr d'Abbs showed the wad of currency-the one bright colour in this room of sombre water-colours.

Lucinda held her hands together. It gave her the appearance of "imploring." Her little shoulders were uncharacteristically rounded and Mr d'Abbs, without knowing quite what had triggered it, felt a stirring of the loins.

Others found Miss Leplastrier attractive. Absalom had taken a fancy to her. Old Gerald MacKay had dubbed her the "Pocket Venus" and sworn he would have her for wife. But Mr d'Abbs, if you discount that unfortunate occasion when he had placed his hand on her knee, had forgotten how to see her in this light. Their friendship at the card table had continued, but in business he found her the complete shrew. When she had returned from England she had thumped his desk with her little fist.

But today he found her very "girlish." He could imagine this young Hopkins being smitten with her. She had a soft white neck.

He tossed the banknotes into the safe-thwack, ding, money's nothing to me-and locked its door with a heavy brass key. He returned to his new squeaky leather chair to hear how she would manage to tell the story of her involvement with this defrocked priest whom she now sought to recommend to him.

Well, she could not tell it, of course. She might slam her fist on his desk or drink Scotch whisky from a crystal tumbler, but she could not tell him about this one face to face. Jimmy d'Abbs knew the story. Of course he did. He was not a member of Tattersall's, the Masons and the Sydney Club for nothing. He smiled and nodded encouragement, but she told him nothing, and there was no hint, no rumpling of her white starched collar to suggest the amours he imagined her conducting with the priest in the tangled privacy of her bed. Lucinda found it hard to look Mr d'Abbs in the eye. She felt her cheeks colouring but could not stop them. She told Oscar's story without mentioning cards or horses. Mr d'Abbs noted the omission but was unconcerned. One could gamble and be honest. He gambled. He played most games a gentleman would play.

He asked her would she be so kind as to have Mr Hopkins supply a sample of his handwriting.

"What shall I have him write?"

"Some Latin," he said, "a little arithmetic." He placed the

Heads or Tails cigar in the ashtray so it might go out. "Some Greek." ••«*• •>": f'j

"Greek?"

Don't frown at me, young lady. "Greek," he said. He would like the Greek as he had once liked Mr Jeffris's trigonometry. What other accountant would demand a sample of your trigonometry?

The thought of Mr Jeffris-who was his head clerk these days-made him uneasy. Mr Jeffris did not like him to employ new clerks without consultation. This was fair. They had agreed on it. But was it not Mr d'Abbs's own practice? Was not that his own name on the door? Did he not have the right to employ whomever he liked without there being doors slammed and ultimatums issued?

"There is no hurry," he told Lucinda.

But when she arrived at Longnose Point that night, she brought a present with her. It was wrapped in maroon tissue paper from a Pitt Street stationer's-ink, a new nib, and three loose sheets of ledger paper.

75

Heads or Tails

Lucinda had painted a picture of Mr d'Abbs. She had made him a shy creature, a dormouse with a waistcoat and a gold chain. Oscar had imagined a small pink nose all aquiver, seen his hands go to his face as he attended to his nervous toilet. He had gone to the meeting full of tenderness for Mr d'Abbs, not merely for his timidity, but for his Christian charity, that he should risk his own business name by employing a man in such public disgrace. But when he came, at last, to sit in Mr d'Abbs's office, he found that Mr d'Abbs was not a shy man at all, or if he was, his shyness was of a highly selective quality, was sensitive to distinctions of sex, perhaps, and rank, certainly, just as the Chinese are so attuned to the pitch of the human voice that one can ask directions to

Oscar and Lucinda

Li-Po, for instance, and not be understood until one's pitch is perfect. It was the eleventh day of October and early in the afternoon. Rain drove against Mr d'Abbs's window and although the Venetian blinds were fully hoisted the sky was so dark and bruised that it was necessary to light a lamp. The office looked across at the windows of other offices in which there were also lamps lit. Oscar listened to the thunder and imagined he would soon have his shirt sodden and clinging to his skin.

"You have no hand," said Mr d'Abbs. "You have no hand that would be worth a damn to anyone."

Oscar sat on the edge of his chair. He was aware of the spots on his trousers. His attempts at cleaning them had made them worse. They were dark spots ringed with watermarks. He felt them to be visible badges of his disgrace. And although he had warned himself about the dangers of fidgeting, when Mr d'Abbs peered bad-temperedly across the desk, Oscar could not stop himself from rubbing at his trousers with the back of his thumbnail.

He put his head on one side and looked at Mr d'Abbs.

Mr d'Abbs was accustomed to unconventional men. Indeed he collected them-artists, poets, philosophers-it was the great pride of his life that he could provide them, in the midst of commerce, with a refuge.

But this was not an artist. This was a clergyman. He had expected someone at once broader and tidier. He had not expected "artistic" qualities in a sacked clergyman. This was a very queer chap, and Mr d'Abbs gazed at him quite openly, astonished to think that it was this uncombed stick-limbed fellow, this grasshopper, who had finally cracked the defences of she whom Gerald MacKay had dubbed "our pocket Venus."

White hailstones danced on the window ledge. There was a wild whinny from a panicked horse in the laneway below. Mr d'Abbs stretched his legs under the desk, crossed his thin white ankles, and wished he had never been so rash as to promise anything to Miss Lucinda Leplastrier. The priest's sample penmanship was still uncrumpling-he could hear it now-in the wastepaper basket beside his chair.

"I have seen some bad hands," said Mr d'Abbs.

"Indeed," said Oscar, crossing his ankle over his knee, then realizing that it showed his stocking and that, in any case, it was not the correct pose for an employee, he put his foot squarely on the floor. "Indeed, I would imagine you had."

Heads or Tails

"Well, before all this," said Mr d'Abbs, waving his hand grandly although there was not a great deal in the office to wave grandly at. "My own brother, now there's a fellow." And Mr d'Abbs saw, with his mind's eye, what Oscar could not even guess, a boy with his arms all itchy from those tiny red mites that were known as "harvesters" they came at harvest time and dug deep into the skin. They were a great discomfort. They were worse than thistles bound up in the oat sheaves.

"He was left-handed, like yourself," said Mr d'Abbs, recreating his brother contorted around his pen. "But they changed him over, you see. He was perhaps a little.old when they tried, for although my mater was a determined woman, it never really took. It mattered not so greatly to my brother, but for you, sir, in your previous profession. ." Oscar blushed bright and painful red at the memory of his "profession." He had thought it a secret in this context. Now he bowed his head under the weight of the shame. "Yes," he said, making himself look Mr d'Abbs in the eye, "it is a great inconvenience." Mr d'Abbs named this look a "glare." He thought it quite alarming. Oscar smiled.

Mr d'Abbs found a cigar in his drawer. It was crumbly, decidedly crumbly. He brought it out anyway and placed it on the blotter. "An inconvenience, sir. Indeed, a great inconvenience. I knew a parson in Basingstoke who was left-handed and could never hold a living, for once they saw him hold the sacrament in his left hand, they would not have him, and they would be off to the bishop, clipclop, and back again with a new chap."

Oscar saw Mr Judd riding off down the road, Mrs Judd behind on a big-bellied sway-back. Clipclop.

"Ah, now you smile, you see, but I warrant you never had a living in the English countryside." "I never did."

"I know you never did, sir. You would not have smiled had you done so. I met a witch in Mousehole, in Cornwall. She shook hands with me as though she were a man. You could not be a left-handed parson in those parts. You know your Latin? Sinister?" "Sinister, sinistu, sinistu, sinistrum, sinistris." "Sinistartorium, said Mr D'Abbs. He got his left hand into his drawer. He found the cigar clipper. "The ablative?" Mr d'Abbs did not answer, but he looked up, he appeared most

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Oscar and Lucinda

pleased. "Well/' he said, "there is no Latin here, although my head clerk, Mr Jeffris, has a fondness for the classics. But what will we do with you? You smudge. I may possibly tolerate you, but Jeffris is a fiend. He will box your ears. No, sir, I am not assuming the poetic. I describe the action. It is prehistoric. It is proof of the ape in us if ever I saw it. One moment a civilized man and the next an animal. And yet he is such a genius at this work that I must permit him, for a good clerk is the secret of any successful practice. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It is the poor clerks with their celluloid cuffs who allow us gentlemen time for our club or leisure to dine at Government House. It is the clerks, sir, and I am not a radical. My observation is scientific. My task is to stand at the wheel, to tip the rudder a smidgin this way, a fraction that, and yet what will I do? Are you up to the job? It is different work from praying." Oscar could think of no way to answer such a question. He rubbed his hair. He found a piece of twig in it, caught there from his morning walk on Longnose Point. He pulled it out and looked at it-a gum twig three inches long.

"I hope you are up to it," said Mr d'Abbs, gazing at the twig and cocking his head. There was a little silence. Oscar put the twig in his pocket.

"I hope you are up to it, because if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man-and you probably won't see that, in your position, eh, that the act of employment is itself unpleasant?if there is one thing more unpleasant than employing a man, it is telling him that he can be employed no more."

Mr d'Abbs's leather chair was new and slippery and he had, whilst talking, slipped down in it, but now he sat up, fussed with his lapels, tugged at his silk tie and placed his corduroy elbows on the desk.

"You would not believe the scenes this little room has witnessed, Mr Hopkins. Men you would imagine civilized, men from Merton and Oriel, astronomers, masters of poetics-they have sat there, exactly where you sit and have threatened attacks on me, my chldren, my property. Gentlemen, too, or so they pretended, and next thing you know they are threatening me with litigation and saying they have friends in Government House and so on. And it does not matter that I have long before, well before, had a calm chat with just as I am having one with you, that I have explained the unpleasantness and worry. It all makes no difference in the end. But, please, write this down when you leave here today. Make a note of what I say to you, and when 292

Heads or Tails

Mr Jeffris finds that you do not meet his standards and you feel the inclination to throw a brick through my bedroom window, refer to your notes."

It was only when Mr d'Abbs stood up and held out his hand that Oscar realized he had been employed as a clerk. He should have been happy, but he was not. He felt no elation, only anxiety as to what would befall him.

"Well," said Mr d'Abbs and picked up the bell from his desk. He swung it, and he hoped the impression was that he swung it gaily. He did not, however, feel at all gay. For now he would have to endure Mr Jeffris's revenge for employing the chap. There would be days, perhaps months, of doors slammed, papers thrown, compressed lips, monosyllabic answers, a series of jarring chords and drumbeats, which would lead, in the end, to the scarecrow's dismissal. He put the bell back on his desk and looked at his new clerk. The fellow was tapping his left foot and jiggling the coins in his right pocket-a combination of activities which gave him an unusual stance, the pelvis forward, the right shoulder dropped down, and the whole of this topped by a gruesome smile, the intention of which was not at all clear.

Oscar had very few coins in his pocket. There were two pennies, great big coins-six would make an ounce-and three threepencescoins so light you would never feel their weight in an empty pocket. Now he pulled out a penny and looked at it. He did this so innocuously that Mr d'Abbs, who was staring at him, imagined that the simpleton was merely curious to see what had been making the din in his pocket. Mr d'Abbs hardly thought about it. But when the lopsided clerk jerked the penny in the air and caught it-snap-Mr d'Abbs thought about it then, by Jove he did. But as the only thing the action resembled was a person tossing heads or tails and, even though this might fit the character of a gambler, it did not match his demeanour, nor did it sit with the situation, the office, the interview, the money in the safe, the cigar in the drawer, the clerks next door, and so even when Oscar examined the coin on the back of his hand, Mr d'Abbs concluded that it was simply a nervous habit, like jiggling a leg or pulling sticks out of your head, unfortunate, but no more than the sort of eccentricity Miss Leplastrier would find-who could doubt it? – a positive recommendation of character. He sighed.

Oscar heard the sigh. He let it stand for the one he would like to make. The penny was a sign from God.

Heads.

He had to take the job.

293

76

Mr Smudge

Mr Jeffris did not biff him. He had expected to be biffed and yet he was not, not all the time he worked there. Neither did he see any of the other clerks-there were twenty of them in that long thin roomreceive anything more than-and this was in one case only-a sharp tug to the nose and as this assault was inflicted on the very youngest of the clerks and occasioned great laughter, even from the victim, it might not seem, in the telling, so bad a thing.

And yet there was about that room an almost unbearable tension, and if there was no actual biffing, one lived with the possibility of a biffing and it was this, Oscar thought when the whole nightmare was ended, that made working under Mr Jeffris such a tiring business that no sooner had he eaten his evening meal than he wished to sleep and would, if circumstances permitted, go a full ten hours without stirring.

His muscles were kept tense and tight all day, and yet no one threatened, and there was not a word to say on the subject of biffing. There were, in fact, very few words said on any subject at all, and although Mr Jeffris did not declare a policy to him, it was obvious after the first hour that he did not wish one clerk to talk to another and Oscar had the feeling, on entering the office, that it was not unlike an omnibus in which people travel every day and the passengers, having become familiar with each other, may exchange a nod (or perhaps not) but will not really acknowledge their community until there is a tragedy or a humorous mishap. When this arrives they will express their solidarity through laughter. Oscar provided an opportunity almost immediately.