The Typewriter Girl
Read The Typewriter Girl Online
Authors: Alison Atlee
Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General
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Contents
For my family
It is very important that you should learn the key-board so thoroughly that you can see it with your eyes shut, and can strike each letter without the least hesitation.
—Mrs. Arthur J. Barnes,
How to Become Expert in Type-writing
T
ype-writer girls, they oughtn’t think too much.
Betsey knew it was so. She understood the detached and nimble attention required for speed and accuracy; she had learned to sustain such attention for pages and pages at a time. When it faltered, she was able to remind herself:
Concentration, not contemplation.
The words in her mind had the patted-down accent of Miss Slott of the London Working Women’s Training Institute.
Miss Slott had been imported from America, just like the Remington Standards her students used in their lessons, and as she chanted over the violent clatter of the typing machines, she might touch her pointing stick to your back, just beneath your shoulder blades, or slip it under your wrists to lift them. Posture worked toward efficiency, just as it did toward attractiveness, another important detail. Miss Slott had ever advised each pupil to consider how she must be like a beautifully made clock, not only functional and constant but also a complement to the surroundings—pleasing to the eye, should the eye happen to notice more than the hour.
Betsey understood. She had mastered it all, and she was fast. Fast and accurate, more so than most of the type-writer girls at Baumston & Smythe, Insurers, where she worked now. She’d had to be: Word had gone round not long after her hire at the insurance firm that Betsey Dobson had not finished her course at the Institute. Betsey Dobson had been
dismissed
. Not even a fortnight from the finish, and with no character given her! But truly, what could be done? What sort of character could be written for a girl who’d had a love affair with one of the
instructors
? That was the word that went round.
So she’d had to be good. Impeccable posture. Efficient, accurate.
Truth be told, that affair with Avery Nash had helped her improve at least as much as Miss Slott’s instruction, for Avery owned a type-writing machine. He was something vain of this treasure, but certain favors could persuade him to let her practice upon it—half-strikes, to save ribbon.
That she dragged the thing out to the stairwell on a blanket each night she spent in his flat, he never knew. A fuck made him a sound sleeper, and she always brought her own paper.
And while typing in a stairwell wasn’t conducive to good posture, those middle-of-the-night drills had served her well otherwise. Except for the expulsion, of course. And the gossip.
Concentration, not contemplation.
It was a good motto, and not just for type-writer girls. It could save you from brooding over stale if mostly true gossip.
Or suppose you needed to pull some dodgy deed, right in the open—why, then the advice was wise indeed, for in such a case, you had no business contemplating the shoulds or shouldn’ts, the dodginess of the deed. Such self-consciousness could only draw attention. There was room only for concentration in such a case: Mind your posture. Pay attention. Be efficient. Do the deed.
Dear Mr. Jones,
An image of him flickered in her mind longer than it took to type his name. Mr. Jones, her hero, if he didn’t turn out mad, or a liar—
Regarding the character of one Miss Elisabeth Dobson, we at the firm of Baumston & Smythe, Insurers have found her a skilled and valued employee these eight months past.
It might have been tricky, but she had prepared. Avery’s type-writing machine was long gone (a card game, just the way he’d come to possess it), but he had helped with the wording of the letter and laughingly encouraged her whenever her conscience had bristled. Three evenings she’d spent with her fingers poised over imaginary keys, committing the words and motions to memory. Now, she pasted her eyes to a fire policy and did not pause once to lift the carriage to check her work. It was finished in moments. She folded the letter without looking at it and slipped it inside her black type-writer’s smock, into the waistband of her skirt, doing her best to make the movement appear as no more than a simple shift in weight.
Load more paper. Glance at the dais at the front of the office.
Mr. Wofford was not there.
Hell. And hell twice more, for Mr. Wofford, the least junior of the junior clerks in this office, was nowhere within her range of vision. Had he gone out altogether? Betsey dared not lift her eyes from her work again, not until the bell for the afternoon rest period rang.
The din of hammering words eased away. The words came in shushes now, the type-writer girls softly continuing conversations they’d suspended at the end of the lunch period.
Betsey risked a half-turn toward the three tiers of desks behind her, where the junior clerks perched on their stools. They were
not permitted to take their breaks alongside the women, but that did not keep them from pausing in their work to watch the type-writer girls exit.
Finest part of the day,
Betsey had heard them jest more than once. Only Avery, a junior clerk for far briefer a time than he had been a composition instructor at a working women’s college, seemed determined not to be distracted. The smart thing, of course. The two of them acted as strangers here in the office, and though Cora Lester had whispered her knowledge of Miss Dobson’s expulsion, when she asked Avery to speculate as to which of his fellow teachers had been
in league
with her, Avery obliged, noting how suddenly the elocution tutor had departed.
Oh, but Mr. Hadfield went with the Baptists to the West Indies,
Miss Lester had protested, but it took only a shrug from Avery to make her breath catch and her eyes light. The elocution tutor! No wonder Miss Dobson was so well-spoken!
The smart thing. Betsey might have wished Avery had told Cora Lester to mind her own business, just as she wished now he would meet her eye and give her a fortifying nod, but such wishes were foolish, so she didn’t permit her gaze to rest, and made certain it avoided James Chesney, who’d taken to leering at her since Cora Lester had done her whispering. Well, he was not the only one, and not even the boldest. No, that distinction belonged to Mr. Wofford.
Who, she saw now with a swoop in her belly, stood waiting near the wall of coat pegs. Waiting for her, plain enough, waiting at her peg, the one labeled with her name, adorned with her tweed jacket, though whether he’d noticed her, or only wished her to notice him, she couldn’t tell.
She’d dodge him, she decided. She would stick herself to the far side of Maude Rudwicke’s little group and duck out with them. Laugh at her own absentmindedness when they pointed out she had left the office still in her smock.
But ducking out wasn’t easy. Betsey was taller than Maude Rudwicke and every other girl in the office; she was taller than Mr. Wofford himself, though she hardly felt so as he intercepted her at the door and said, “I’ll have it, Miss Dobson.”
She stared for a moment at his hand outstretched, the squared-off tips of his fingers, bulging pinkly in comparison to the pale line of skin peeking out from his shirt cuff. The bustle around them ceased, the girls suddenly uninterested in taking their break.
Mr. Wofford’s two middle fingers twitched, beckoned.
“It is personal, sir, if you please.” Useless, her low tone in this tight knot of girls. Mr. Wofford seemed to have no intention of bidding the girls on through the door, nor of prompting the clerks to put their heads back over their work.
No, when she looked up, he was trying not to smile too broadly, as successful at that as he was at growing a beard. She judged the scraggly blond mess had another ten days before he gave up again and shaved. He was young, Mr. Wofford. Old for a junior clerk, true—three junior clerks had been passed ahead of him since Betsey’s hire—but still young, and anxious about this condition.
“I cannot see how that’s possible,” he said. Only his bottom teeth showed when he spoke. “What you have folded away there came straight from a Baumston and Smythe machine.”
“Begging your pardon, Mr. Wofford, are you certain?”
“Miss Dobson.”
A whisper wormed its way through the knot:
What’s she done? Hush,
came the answer, for no one wished to miss a thing by taking time to explain. Plenty of time later to poke it over, plenty of lunches, plenty of breaks, plenty of arm-in-arm walks to the omnibus.
Mr. Wofford’s fingers twitched again.
A moment.
Betsey set the letter on his pink fingertips.
After he finished reading the first few lines (aloud, of course), the attentive silence in the office remained. Mr. Wofford asked, “You’ve composed your own character, Miss Dobson?” and then he got the stir of shock he wanted, slight exchanges of glances, the softest of gasps here and there. Her first months with the firm, she had imagined him shy. But the gossip about her had
emboldened him, somehow released him, just as an eager audience did now.
“Efficient, I grant you,” he said, “but not likely to be very objective, is it?”
“There’s nothing untrue in it.”
“Oh? But so often, the deceit is in the omission, is it not?” He looked down at the paper again but, thankfully, read to himself now. “And such is the case here, I see—you’ve neglected the key portion of the typical character letter, that being the
character
. Though I do suppose that’s implicit, considering the blatant fraud of the younger Mr. Smythe’s name appearing at the bottom of this letter. As though he himself had dictated it and intended to put his signature upon it.”
Another ripple of movement. The younger Mr. Smythe was abroad for the next three months, everyone knew it.
“And look.” Mr. Wofford held out the letter. “The paper. The ink and machinery. The very
time
taken to produce this forgery. More dishonesty. Thieving, really. That would be the more precise term, would it not? Theft?”
Theft and forgery. Betsey kept a steady eye on Mr. Wofford but realized with a fresh grip of fear the man could make a lot of trouble for her. He could do more than merely utterly humiliate her, more than get her dismissed on the spot. For those things, she’d tried to prepare herself, though really, she’d believed she could carry this off.
She tried to calculate: What fraction of her weekly wage of eight shillings had she stolen in the five minutes it took to type that letter? How much ink diverted from company business to those few sentences telling her skills and experience? As for the paper—naturally, she’d bought her own.
That added together, plus forgery—no, only
intended
forgery, that was the most Wofford could claim with an unsigned letter—was it enough to interest the law? She didn’t know. Certainly Baumston & Smythe was no Covent Garden coster complaining about a filched apple. And there was Richard to consider, toiling
in an office on a floor below, still ignorant to this mull of his sister-in-law’s making.
