motion made by hands, all those tops
of heads were still, as if they took no part in it; through the
intensity of their absorption they were detached. Every now and then one
of them would lift and hold up a face among those tops of heads, and it
was like the sudden uncanny insurgence of an alien life.

That stillness was abhorrent to young Ransome. So was the bowing of his
head, the cramping of his limbs, and his sense of imprisonment in his
pen.

And all his life he would go on sitting there in that intolerable
constraint. He had no hope beyond exchanging a larger pen at the bottom
of the room for a smaller one at the top. He had begun at the very
bottom as an invoice clerk at a pound a week. He was now a statement
clerk at eight pounds a month. Working up through all his grades, he
would become a ledger clerk at twelve pounds a month. He might stick at
that forever, but if he had luck he might become a petty cashier at
sixteen pounds. That couldn't happen before he was thirty, if then. He
was bound to get his rise in the autumn. But that was no good. It
wouldn't be safe, not really safe, to marry until he had become a petty
cashier. To end in the petty cashier's narrow pen by the door, that was
the goal and summit of his ambition.

* * * * *

Day in day out he worked now with desperate assiduity. He bowed his
young head; he cramped his glorious limbs; he steeped his very soul in
statements of account for furniture. Furniture bought with hideous
continuity by lucky devils, opulent beasts, beasts that wallowed
inconsiderately; worst of all by beasts, abominable beasts, who couldn't
afford it and were yet about to marry and to set up house. Woolridge's
offered a shameless encouragement to these. It lured them on; it laid
out its nets for them and caught and tangled them and flung them to
their ruin. All over London and the provinces Woolridge's posters were
displayed; flaunting yet insidious posters where a young man and a young
woman with innocent, idiotic faces were seen gazing, fascinated, into
Woolridge's windows. Woolridge's artist had a wild humor that gave the
show away by exaggerating the innocence and idiocy of Woolridge's
victims. It appealed to Ransome by the audacity with which it had defied
Woolridge's to see its point. Woolridge's itself was a perpetual
tempting and solicitation. Ranny wondered how in those days he ever
resisted its appeal to him to be a man and risk it an