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Title: My fair lady
Author: Louis Hémon
Translator: William Aspenwall Bradley
Release date: November 7, 2026 [eBook #79939]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1923
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79939
Credits: Charlene Taylor, chenzw, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY FAIR LADY ***
MY FAIR LADY
[Illustration]
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA. LTD.
TORONTO
MY FAIR LADY
BY
LOUIS HÉMON
AUTHOR OF
“MARIA CHAPDELAINE,” ETC.
[Illustration]
TRANSLATED BY
WILLIAM ASPENWALL BRADLEY
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1923
_All Rights Reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
COPYRIGHT, 1923,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published, November, 1923.
Reprinted December, 1923.
THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MY FAIR LADY 1
II. HE-WHO-SEES-THE-GODS 16
III. THE LAST EVENING 45
IV. THE OLD WOMAN 73
V. THE DESTINY OF MISS WINTHROP-SMITH 89
VI. TRUTH FAIR 111
VII. FEAR 130
VIII. LIZZIE BLAKESTON 143
MY FAIR LADY
MY FAIR LADY
They looked at each other across the little round table of the café,
smiling with exaggerated cordiality; and, in spite of the old familiar
forms of speech into which they had fallen, without reflection, in the
first surprise of their meeting, they really found nothing to say.
His hands on his knees, opened to make room for his paunch, Thibault
repeated vaguely:
“Good old Raquet! What do you think of that! How small the world is!”
Raquet, shrivelled up on his chair, his legs crossed, his back bent,
replied wearily:
“Yes ... yes.... Fifteen years since we’ve seen each other, eh? Fifteen
years! That’s a long time!”
And when they had said so much, they turned away with a common accord,
and watched the people passing on the pavement.
Thibault thought: “There’s a chap who looks as if he doesn’t have a
square meal every day!”
Raquet furtively regarded the prosperous mien of his former comrade,
and an involuntary expression of bitterness wrinkled his thin face.
The boulevard was still glistening with rain, but the clouds scattered
little by little, revealing the pale evening sky. Beyond the dusk which
deepened between the buildings, the eye could almost follow the course
of the light which withdrew into the sky, fleeing, fleeing desperately,
the sad surface of the earth.
Separated by the little marble table, the two men continued to exchange
vague exclamations.
“Good old Raquet! Good old Thibault!”
And they glanced away.
* * * * *
Now night had come and, in the warm light of the café, they talked
without embarrassment, almost with animation. They fished up in their
memories, one after another, all those whom they had known in the past,
and each common recollection brought them a little closer, as if they
were growing young again together.
“So-and-so? Settled somewhere ... tradesman ... official.... That other
fellow? Married money; big fortune; lives with his wife’s family in
Touraine.... Little What-do-you-call-her? Married too; don’t quite know
to whom.... Her brother? Disappeared. Never been heard of....”
“And the little Marcheval ...” said Thibault. “You surely remember the
little Marcheval ... Liette ... whom we used to find when we came back
for vacation. She’s dead; you knew?”
“I heard,” said Raquet, and they fell silent.
The rattle of saucers on the marble tops of the tables, the voices, the
footsteps, the confused noises of the boulevard--they no longer heard
any of these things; and they no longer saw each other. A memory had
swept everything away; one of those memories so real, so poignant, that
you stretch yourself when you emerge from it, as from a dream. The
memory of a great garden, of a lawn girdled with trees, bathed with
sunlight, where children played.... On this lawn there were sometimes
many children, a whole host of children, boys and girls, and, at other
times, there were two or three only. But Liette, little Liette, was
always there. The days when Liette was not there, had never been worth
remembering....
Thibault dusted his knee with a mechanical gesture:
“It was a fine estate the Marchevals had,” he said. “They always
arrived from Paris on July 13, and they did not leave until October.
You saw them in Paris, it is true! But we country fellows had them
scarcely three months a year.
“Everything is sold now, and it is so changed you would scarcely know
it any longer. When Liette died, you see, it was all turned upside
down. It is possible you never saw her after her marriage, since she
went to live in the Midi. She had changed very quickly, though she was
still pretty, and the last time she came yonder....”
“No!” exclaimed Raquet, with an abrupt gesture. “I ... I’d rather not
know.”
Under the astonished look of his old comrade, his pale face took a
purplish tinge.
“It’s always the same thing,” he said. “The women you used to know as
children or girls, and come across later, married, with children of
their own, perhaps, are quite changed, naturally. I wouldn’t have cared
about another, but Liette, ... I never saw her again, and I’d rather
not know.”
Thibault continued to look at him and, on his heavy face, the
astonished air disappeared little by little, giving place to another
expression, almost pathetic.
“Yes!” he said in a low voice. “It’s true Liette was not like the
others! There was something....”
The two men remained silent, absorbed in their memories.
That garden!... The gray stone house; the tall trees beyond and,
between the two, the lawn with its long grass, never cut, where you
chased grasshoppers! And the sunlight! There was always sunlight those
days. Children arrived by the path which skirted the house, or else
descended the steps, one by one, prudently, but with eager haste, and
ran towards the lawn as fast as they could. Once there, nothing further
was forbidden. You were in a fairy realm, protected on every side by
walls, trees, all sorts of benevolent powers you felt about you, and
there were cries and races--a drunken saraband in honor of liberty and
of the sunlight. Then Liette stopped and said, with a serious air:
“Now, we’re going to play!”
Liette.... She wore a great straw hat which shadowed her eyes, and
when you spoke to her, to say some of those childish things which are
so extraordinarily important, you came quite close to her and bent a
trifle down and forward to get a good look at her face deep in this
shade. When, all of a sudden, she became grave, you stopped short and
approached to take her hand, in order to make sure she was not angry;
and, when she laughed, she had the somewhat gentle, mysterious air of a
fairy preparing happy surprises.
You played all sorts of splendid games, with princesses and queens,
and that princess or that queen was naturally Liette. She had come to
accept the title always offered her, without further demurring; but
she surrounded herself with a prodigious number of ladies-in-waiting,
whom she overwhelmed with unheard-of favours, for fear they might be
jealous. At other times she gently forced the boys to play “girls’
games,” singing and dancing games, which they despised. As they went
round and round, holding each others’ hands, they were at first sullen
and mocking. But, as they looked at Liette standing in the center of
the ring, her little white face shaded by the great straw hat, her eyes
softly shining, her young lips shaping the old words of the song like
so many tender kisses, little by little they stopped making fun, and
sang too, without ceasing to look at her:
“_We shall go no more to the woods,
The laurels are cut,
My fair lady...._”
They had separated and they had grown old, many among them never having
seen each other again. But those who met many years later, had only
to pronounce one name in order to recall in common the dead years and
their poignant perfume of youth, to see again the little girl with
tender eyes who held her court between the house and the tall, somber
trees, on the lawn marbled with sunlight.
* * * * *
Thibault sighed and murmured, as if speaking to himself:
“The human heart is surely a strange machine! Here am I, married,
father of a family, and all the rest! Well! When I think of that
little girl, and of the time when we were young together, it brings
back suddenly all the silly things one thinks of at sixteen: noble
sentiments, big words, such stories as you find in books. All that
doesn’t mean a thing; but, just to think of her is like seeing her, and
then all those ideas come back into one’s head, just as if they were
things which counted!”
He stopped an instant, and looked curiously at his comrade.
“And you!” he said. “You who must have seen her more than I. I’d wager
you were a little in love with her once?”
Raquet remained bending over the table, his elbows on his knees, and
regarding the bottom of his glass. After some moments of silence, he
replied softly:
“I’m neither married nor father of a family, and I’ve never forgotten
all the things which haunt one at sixteen, and which sensible men
forget afterwards.
“Yes, I was in love with Liette, as you say. I don’t mind its being
known now. What no one will ever know, is all that meant for me, and
still means. I loved her when she was only a little girl, and our
parents must have known it and laughed at it. I loved her when she
grew up and I was a young man; but no one knew anything about it. And
how I still loved her, after that, through all these years, until her
death and after her death--if I tried to tell this, people would never
understand it at all.
“Childish love is only a jest, and a young man’s romantic love counts
for hardly more. An ordinary man passes through it, suffers a little
and ages a little, then ends by smiling at it and enters for good into
life. But there are certain men who are not quite like the others, and
who go no further. For these, the little love-affairs of childhood and
youth never become the kind of things people laugh at; they are images
which remain incrusted in their lives like saints in their niches,
like statues of saints, painted with tender colors, towards which one
returns later, when one has followed all the rest of the great sad
wall, without finding anything.
“I had always loved Liette from afar, timidly, shyly. When she married
and went away, nothing, all told, was changed for me. My life was only
just beginning. It was a hard life. I had to struggle and make my way,
so that I had little time for memories. Then I was still very young,
and I expected all sorts of marvelous things from the future.... Years
passed.... I learned of her death.... Still more years, and then one
day I learned that the things I used to expect would never arrive; that
the best I could hope for was a succession of other years, all alike,
sad and hard; a long dull battle, without glory, without joy, without
anything noble or sweet, with just enough to eat, and that I had left
in the strife all the youth there was in me, almost all the life.
“I felt I should never love again, I had nothing left but a poor heart,
on a scale with my life, which kept closing a little more each day.
The noble sentiments, the big words, as you say--all those things which
so many men let die without a regret--I felt escape me also, and that
was the most terrible of all. I remembered what I had been, what I
had desired, what I had believed, and the thought that all that was
finished, and that soon I should, perhaps, be unable even to remember
it any longer, was like a first hideous death, long before the second.
I felt I should never love again.
“Then it was that the memory of Liette returned to me; of Liette when
she was little, with her great straw hat shadowing her eyes; with her
ways like those of a tender sovereign, playing with us on the lawn;
of Liette a woman grown, full of soft grace, and keeping something or
other which showed that she had never lost her childish heart. And I
said to myself that I had loved at least once, and for a long time, and
that, as long as I could recall that, I should have something left.
“She belonged to me as much as to anyone else in the world, since she
was dead! And I turned back, I retraced the road of other days and
collected all the memories which were already fleeting, all my memories
of her--a thousand little things which would make most people laugh if
I spoke of them--and I review them every evening, when I am alone, for
fear of forgetting anything. I remember almost every gesture and every
word of hers, the touch of her hand, of her hair flung by the wind
across my face; that time when we exchanged a long look; that other day
when we were alone and when we told each other stories; her presence
close to me, and the mysterious sound of her little voice.
“I come home at evening; I sit at my table, my head between my hands;
I repeat her name five or six times, and she comes.... Sometimes it
is the grown girl I see, her face, her eyes, her way of saying ‘Good
evening,’ in a very low voice, slowly, with a smile, holding out her
hands.... Other times it is the little girl, the one who played with
us in that garden; the one who gave us a presentiment of life as a
sunny, magnificent thing, a soft and gorgeous fairy-land, because she
belonged to that world, and because she held our hands in the games....
“But, little girl or big girl, as soon as she comes, all is changed.
With her memory, I recover all the quivering excitement of old, the
august burning borne in the heart, that great soul-hunger which makes
one live ardently, and all the ridiculous, touching little weaknesses
which become precious also. The years vanish, the scales fall; it is my
palpitating youth which returns--all the warm life of the heart which
begins again.
“Sometimes it is slow in coming, and a great fear seizes me. I say: it
is finished! I am too old; my life has been too ugly and too hard, and
I have nothing left. I can still remember her, but I shall see her no
more....
“Then I take my head in my hands, I close my eyes, and I sing to
myself the words of the old song:
“_We shall go no more to the woods,
The laurels are cut,
My fair lady...._”
“How the others would laugh if they heard me! But my fair lady hears
me, and does not laugh. She hears me and emerges from the magic past,
with my youth in her little hands.”
HE-WHO-SEES-THE-GODS
“There will be no one tonight, Timmy,” said Father Flanagan, with a
sigh; and he went back to his place at the shop-window, peering out
into the street through the ground-glass.
Two hundred yards away the electric trams passed incessantly, stopping
a few seconds and then, clanging their gongs, starting off again
towards Aldgate or Poplar. At the corner of West India Dock Road, the
broad straight avenue along which the tracks extended, widened into a
square surrounded by several international “Sailors’ Homes,” a hotel,
and a public-house which displayed, in immense letters, its name
effulgent with splendour and mystery, “The Star of the East.” But the
street-cars and, indeed, every other symbol of a frenzied civilization,
recovered its exact sense and its true importance, when viewed from
the corner of Limehouse Causeway--from the precise point indicated
by the freshly painted front of a shop. It was a tiny shop, almost a
stall; but the new lettering across it stood out like a declaration of
faith, and it seemed to turn with indifference from the bright, wide
streets where progress passed with its upstart clamour, to open on the
narrow alley where wiser races had sought refuge.
The new sign consisted of a single word: “Dispensary”; but in the
show-window hung a more ambitious placard which read: “Several
languages spoken here, and all men understood.”
This assertion, blazoned as it was on the outskirts of London’s Asiatic
quarter, might have seemed boastful; and yet it but feebly expressed
the boundless goodwill of its authors. Every evening they waited there,
behind the ground-glass, for some one to come and ask them for what
they had to give; and every evening they lamented having been asked
so little. One was disconsolate at seeing his store of bandages and
remedies, assembled with love, scarcely diminish in the too perfect
order which bespoke its uselessness; the other, because the too
infrequent patients were all infidels who, hardened in the error of
their ways, came, suspicious and hostile, to have their bodies cared
for, but jealously steeled against the voice of the true God their
souls headed for the abyss.
On the pavement opposite, a group of Chinese sailors were smoking
indolently, their narrow eyes wandering over everything in this corner
of a barbarous town which had ceased to astonish them. Long ago they
had learned what was good to take in this strange civilization; and,
contemptuously, mockingly, they watched the white barbarians about them
avidly grasping at things which they, the yellow men, judged good to
leave.
Father Flanagan contemplated them through the window with a sort of
melancholy covetousness. Certain of these, or others like them, would
probably enter his dispensary sooner or later. They would come to have
a dressing made or to ask for medicine, with many marks of respect and
of gratitude. They would listen willingly enough to his advice and
accept some of his tracts, tucking them away deferentially, before his
eyes, in an inner pocket of their jackets; and they would depart, with
reiterated thanks and an inscrutable smile, never to come again.
The care his nephew gave them, the magic philtres he put up for
them, without charge, in little bottles, were among the things they
considered good; but the care which he, Father Flanagan, would gladly
have given their souls, the salutary formulas he sought to teach them,
were, it seemed, good only to leave. And they allowed themselves to be
exhorted, in vain, with all the indulgent patience, all the disdainful
wisdom, politely dissimulated, of a race which had grown weary of
believing before other races had invented their creeds.
“There will be no one tonight, Timmy,” repeated Father Flanagan, and
he sighed again. His nephew rose in his turn, glanced around the room
to make sure that everything was ready should anyone chance to come,
opened the cabinet for the tenth time to inspect its contents, then he
too took his stand, his hands behind his back, before the window, and
gazed out upon the street with a discouraged air.
When the generous philanthropists whose money maintained this combined
crusade of hygiene and Catholic faith, asked them for an accounting,
how would it be possible to make them understand that so many
efforts should have produced such meager results? A few Norwegian
sailors--Protestants, naturally--who, when Father Flanagan insinuated,
with infinite tact, that the oldest of Christian religions might, after
all, be the best, fled abruptly, trailing after them their unfinished
bandages! Some Wapping Irishmen--Catholics, these--who came, with
repeated professions of faith, to be treated for vague maladies,
and ended by begging the wherewithal to go and drink to the “ould
counthry!” And a handful of Asiatics who, proudly proclaiming an
earlier conversion, stood aghast at learning that they had abandoned
the faith of their fathers for another which was not the true one! A
wretched balance-sheet which might well have discouraged less robust a
faith!
For the third time Father Flanagan sadly repeated: “There’ll be no one
tonight, Timmy,” and glued his forehead to the pane to see farther
along Limehouse Causeway, where numberless infidels were preparing
to sleep in peace, full of a lamentable confidence in the efficacy
of their idols. In every one of the seventeen Chinese lodging-houses
behind the walls of Wang-Ho’s restaurant and Chong-Chu’s shop, and
in Pennyfields, on the other side of West India Dock Road, there was
scarcely a building that did not serve as a refuge for several sons of
the Middle Empire. During the day, when they wearied of seeking a ship
in the neighboring docks, they loafed along the streets, played with
the gutter urchins, or paid court to some white beauty; but now that
night had come, they put, one by one, a wall between themselves and the
barbarians, in order to recover the atmosphere of the sacred soil, and
its profound peace.
Father Flanagan’s eyes followed the vague forms moving about in the
darkness of the street. From time to time a door opened, casting a pale
gleam on the wall opposite, then closed again. Every time one of these
spots of light made a rent in the darkness, momentarily sketching a
silhouette that was instantly effaced, he knew that one more unbeliever
was escaping him, for that night at least, and he sighed sadly.
The sound of the door opening made him turn sharply; and when he saw it
was a woman who had entered, he stepped forward with his most welcoming
smile, while his nephew settled himself at his table.
They gave the visitor a chair and, while the priest strove to set her
at ease with words of kindly greeting, the doctor noted the wounded
hand and gently unwound the stained bandages about it. When he had
examined the sore, he said gently, as if to a child:
“It’s nothing but an abscess, a little abscess. I’ll have to hurt you a
bit, but it won’t take long.”
While he was lancing the swelling, Father Flanagan stood beside him,
handing him bandages and vials and, as he smiled encouragingly at the
patient, tried to guess who she was, and where she came from. Neither
a Malay nor a Hindu, but too dark for a Levantine.... Her black, oiled
hair, fine, with no trace of kinkiness, was hidden under a shawl that
covered her shoulders and the upper part of her body, falling low on
her fringed skirt, and her beaded and spangled slippers seemed to have
left in the London mud all the sparkle and glitter of their early days.
Yet she had none of the beast-of-burden look peculiar to certain women
of the Orient. Under her sordid clothing, she even retained a certain
easy grace of bearing and movement, and all the crushing oppression
of a grim city, so harsh to the poor, had been unable to kill the
expression of her warm eyes and of her ingenuous smile, or the naïve
vanity of a woman conscious of her body’s price.
When the sore finger had been treated and dressed, Father Flanagan
himself poured her a glass of cordial, invited her to draw near the
fire, and talked with her as a friend. She understood English very
well, but spoke it haltingly, and once or twice employed words which
he asked her to repeat. Timmy, who was putting away his instruments,
exclaimed suddenly: “Why, it’s French!” and she nodded vigorously.
Proudly she explained that she had been taught by the
missionaries--had, indeed, been their best pupil. Her name? Taoufa.
Catholic? Why, of course! Roman Catholic. And she had learned to sew,
to read and to sing in the choir; in short, everything that a woman
should learn to become the equal of her white sisters, to be desired
by young men, and finally to gain Paradise--the real Paradise, of the
saints and the angels--she had learned with the greatest diligence in
the island of her birth, somewhere between Samoa and the Marquesas....
His hands on his knees, Father Flanagan leaned towards her with an
enchanted air and, in a lower tone, asked:
“I hope you haven’t neglected the practice of your religion since you
left your country?”
She confessed, quite simply, that she had, a little; because, in spite
of herself, she couldn’t somehow believe that the God yonder was really
the God who was needed here, where everything was so different.... And
then she didn’t know where to go.... She knew no one who could continue
to teach her....
Father Flanagan took one of her hands in his and explained to her, very
gently, half as a confessor, half as a friend, that she had done very
wrong, that she had endangered her salvation and that, clearly, it was
the hand of God which had, that evening, led her to him.... The very
next day she must come back to see him, and everything would promptly
be set right.
She had listened to him with respect, and even a little fear. To
comfort her, he questioned her about the island where she was born. Was
it a pleasant, fertile island, where life was good? Her only answer was
to heave a deep, ecstatic sigh, while her hands made a vague gesture of
tenderness; and, when she tried to describe the blessed island, she was
forced to stop at every word, hesitating, to repeat this gesture which
sought to express so many things!
In truth, the island was fair and sweet, the pearl of the Pacific, a
marvel which the Lord kept jealously, almost secretly, in a corner of
the world, for his chosen children alone! There were deep forests,
heavy with perfumes, and paths traced in these forests, like defiles;
two springs; a hilltop whence, on all sides, could be seen the blue
ocean lashing itself into foam, the coral girdle, and the lagoon,
smooth as a leaf, where the fishing pirogas passed. There were also
long beaches peopled with rose-colored crabs and swept by soft
breezes, and these beaches descended, in a gentle slope, from the shade
of the mango-trees down to the transparent water where fish of every
hue darted to and fro. And the women singing in the woods! And the
bridal processions which sang also as they passed, waving palms and
flowers! And the baths in the warm sea, whence one emerged laughing to
dry one’s self in the sun and to weave garlands of purple flowers which
seemed to find new life in the black hair, washed and anointed with oil!
Yes, the father had read books about such lands, though not about the
marvelous island. The fathers yonder, when they had wished to describe
the delights of Paradise, had said that it would be an immense island,
like her own, but still more beautiful, where there would be neither
typhoons nor death. And surely the anguish of the damned, dreaming
of Paradise, could be no more terrible than the sadness of those who
dreamed of their island, in the cold, muddy streets, between the high
gray houses, under a sky heavy with rain!
The fire smoked and smouldered. Between the coals spurted tongues of
flame and each, before it died, cast a warmer glow on the fine brown
skin, on the liquid, coffee-colored eyes which rested now on the
bandaged hand, now on the sad reality about her, with the same pathetic
expression. Through the glass in the door, the group of Chinese
sailors could be seen, motionless and almost silent, around a street
lamp, shivering but stoical, under the upturned collars of their thin
jackets. Now and then the distant, muffled clang of the tram gongs
sounded, then silence again, broken another time by the shrill laugh of
an Asiatic, or the shuffle of sandals in the street. Taoufa gazed at
the bandage on her hand and dreamed of her island. Her ragged shawl had
fallen back, uncovering her hair which shone in the gas-light. To warm
her feet, she thrust her slippers, covered with tarnished spangles,
towards the fire, and sadly watched the little flickering flames spring
up and die, like burning regrets.
At a glance from his uncle, Timmy got up, walked indifferently to the
door and stood there drumming a march on the pane as he looked out.
Father Flanagan leaned towards Taoufa and asked her, very gently:
“And ... what are you doing here, my child?”
She looked at him with an astonished air and shook her head. He
hesitated a trifle, and changed the form of his question.
“Who are you with here, my child?”
She explained, without a trace of embarrassment, that she was with two
men of her race, whom she could not leave because they needed her. One
was sick, the other very old. But some day, a little later, they would
return together. If one of them died, those who were left would return
just the same.
Who were these men? One was very old, and full of wisdom--her
grandfather, perhaps, though she was not very sure of it. She
pronounced the name that was his yonder, and it was long and sonorous,
like the verse of a canticle. And the other? The other was her husband.
Father Flanagan asked again in a low voice:
“Was it a priest yonder who married you?”
She shook her head without a word. It seemed to her quite natural,
evidently, that he should question her thus. She had nothing to
reproach herself with. Her bearing and the serene expression of her
eyes indicated a clear conscience; but she seemed to fear that, like
the fathers yonder, he might view certain things as incomprehensible.
Yet, when he insisted, she explained to him that she had been married,
as was fitting, by a priest, and with all the proper ceremonies, but
that her husband had not been kind to her, and that she had left him.
She had left him for this man, who was kind to her, and who loved her.
Only, he was going to die.
The priest’s hands rose in a gesture which, even before he spoke, bore
witness to the blackness of the sin she had committed. So not all the
teachings of the fathers yonder, and the privilege of having been
admitted to the faith, and the promises of eternal joys distributed by
the ministers of the Lord, and their threats of unending punishments
had been able to protect her! More fortunate than so many others, she
had been saved by powerful intercessors and, guiltier than they, she
had fallen back into the slime of sin. The bonds forged by the white
fathers could not be dissolved. They lasted as long as life--longer
even--and to break them was to pass about one’s neck, and the neck of
one’s accomplice, the fetters of the damned!
Taoufa answered, shaking her head, that, if there was any sin in it,
the sin wouldn’t last very long, because her present husband was going
to die. If he had not been near death, they would have returned
together to the island, and they would have been happy.
Father Flanagan straightened up and became severe. Invoking an
authority equal to that of the fathers who had instructed her in the
Christian religion, he told her the way in which she lived was a grave
and terrible state of sin; that each look from the man who said he
loved her was not what it seemed to be, but an insult and a stain,
and that each day she tolerated this stain was a new crime against
the goodness of the Lord and the majesty of the Church. Taoufa merely
looked at the fire, and again shook her head.
She drew her shawl more closely about her shoulders, and her eyes
betrayed a childlike distress. A hard land, this, without pity, as
without sunlight, where one had to give up everything to purchase
problematic happiness which would come, for her at least, only much
later! She held the corners of her shawl in her uninjured hand and
cowered beneath the divine threats, fearful and yet hostile, as if she
would have defended, against all, something precious, to which she had
a right.
When the priest repeated sternly: “It is a terrible sin!” she raised
her eyes and replied in a clear voice, as if but one word were needed
to exculpate her:
“He said that I must not listen to the white fathers, and that it was
not a sin, because we loved each other so greatly.”
She said again, with a sort of warm devotion, the name she had
pronounced before, and looked at Father Flanagan with an air of
innocent triumph.
“Who said that?” he asked.
For the third time she pronounced the name, adding:
“That old man--he is very old, and he has seen many things....”
Father Flanagan repeated the syllables one by one, and asked:
“What does that name mean?”
This time she hesitated a little, sought her words, and ended by
translating slowly, with several pauses:
“He ... who sees ... the gods.... He said it was not a sin because we
loved each other so greatly!”
Timmy drummed on the window, and pretended not to hear. In the street,
periods of silence alternated with the distant brawling of a drunken
sailor and the soft shuffle of sandals on the pavement. In the little
room of the dispensary, the gas was burning bravely, as if ambitious
also to do its bit of good, attracting by its light, from afar, some
shivering Oriental, and giving him a feeble illusion of warmth and
sunshine. And, near the fire, from which little stillborn flames
continued to spring, Father Flanagan carried on a strange combat
against the powers of evil, for the possession of the still pagan soul
of Taoufa.
She wrapped herself closely in her shawl, jealously and fearfully
clutching its corners in her hands, as if to protect herself against
all the cold things which surrounded her: the fog, the damp, dreary
wind, the frozen ooze of the streets, and these pitiless laws one
sought to impose upon her. Sometimes she bent over, drawing her
shoulders together, placing her bandaged hand conspicuously upon her
breast, raising eyes full of childish distress and supplication towards
the priest. Sometimes she simply stared at the fire and obstinately
shook her head; or else she assumed an air of assurance, almost of
defiance, and invoked an authority so lofty that it cast a kind of
protecting shadow over all that she, Taoufa, might do, holding in check
even the solemn orders of the white father.
He-Who-Sees-the-Gods had said that it was not wrong, because they
loved each other so greatly! When she had repeated this, she seemed to
believe herself absolved in advance, and received the reproaches with
the air of a martyr. He-Who-Sees-the-Gods was so old that there was no
one on the island who could remember having seen him young, and so full
of wisdom that no one would have dared to consult him without obeying
him afterwards. It was long, long since he had ceased to work and walk
like other men; and, when he was still on the island, he remained
seated all day beside the stone monuments raised by the heroes and
gods of old, whom he saw and whose voices he heard. When his advice
was asked, he waited before answering until the gods had come to his
call and enlightened him with a supernatural wisdom; and those who
consulted him stood at a distance, troubled and struck with fright,
while the invisible powers assembled about him and spoke to him through
miraculous, awesome signs. And when, at last, he let his counsels be
heard, they were so just and so wise that, clearly, it was the voices
of the immortals which dictated them.
Even here, in the heart of the sunless lands, over which, it would
seem, morose gods must rule, he remained all day sunk in mysterious
contemplation, and nothing could disturb his peace.
When the fathers yonder had attempted to speak to him of their God, he
had answered them that this God had never been among those who came to
hold counsel with him; and even the most docile of the white fathers’
pupils, and the most faithful believers in the new religion, had agreed
that the white God must be too young for a man so prodigiously old, and
that it was better to leave him in peace among the gods of his youth,
who had long since left the earth....
Father Flanagan listened, his eyes never leaving the brown face lighted
by reflections from the dancing flames, and he was saddened to see
so clearly that she had become again an idolatrous little savage,
and that perhaps, at bottom, she had never been anything else. The
pious teachings and the efforts of devoted missionaries, the lessons
unwearyingly repeated to a ring of big, simple-hearted children yonder,
on the margin of the world--all this had been as quickly effaced as
the water which the sun drew in fine mist from moist locks, after the
bath, on long beaches scurried over by rose-colored crabs, and without
leaving any more trace. God’s commandments and the Church’s weighed for
nothing in the scales because, on the other side, an idolatrous old
man had let fall a sort of savage absolution.
“If He-Who-Sees-the-Gods is still a pagan,” he said suddenly, “there is
only just time for him to learn to know the truth, and to hear the true
God spoken of, before being called to confront him. Where do you live,
Taoufa?”
Taoufa turned on him the rapid glance of a tracked animal, and hid her
face in her shawl. When he repeated his question, she replied in a
terrified voice:
“We live in Pennyfields, Father, in the house next to the shop of
Yum-Tut-Wah; but you must not come! The two men who are there ... you
must leave them in peace! There is my present husband, who is going to
die soon because the cold has crept into his chest ... and he says that
if I were not with him ... I whom he loves so greatly--the cold would
creep into his very heart, and his blood would stop flowing.... And
He-Who-Sees-the-Gods, Father ... he is so old!... If you tell him that
his gods are not the true gods, surely he will die also!”
Her look of frantic supplication wavered under the priest’s eyes. In a
firm voice he replied:
“It is better to die of having seen the truth, Taoufa, than to live in
error. Didn’t the fathers yonder teach you that, or have you forgotten
everything? I am going to see He-Who-Sees-the-Gods this very night, to
show him the true God, before it is too late!”
Taoufa had gone and Father Flanagan took his greatcoat down from the
hook to follow her. Into one of his pockets he put a crucifix, some
pious leaflets, a colored engraving showing negroes, Polynesians and
Asiatics kneeling at the feet of the Saviour. Then, having done so,
he addressed his nephew who had remained near the door, his forehead
pressed against the pane, saying:
“A little savage, Timmy! That’s what she’s stayed, a little savage, who
would have to be converted over again every day! And that other savage
who’s with her--the young one--will be better off at the hospital, if
he’s sick, much better! Won’t he, Timmy?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Timmy answered slowly, and remained dreaming.
“Yet,” continued the priest, “these brown folk are easier to influence
than the yellow. They’re barbarians, if you like, but tender-hearted
barbarians.... They can be reached, appealing to their senses first,
by showing them Him who died for them, as for us, and by telling them
about His death in such a way as to make them understand how greatly He
loved them.
“A father once told me that he had arrived in a Pacific island where
no missionary had ever been seen, and that, the very first day, he had
gathered them about him, and told them, through an interpreter, and as
simply as a story, the life and death of Christ, and the torments he
had suffered for love of us. Before he had finished, all the women were
weeping and crying, asking if He were really dead; and when he showed
them the crucifix, and told them it was His image, one of them begged
him, with tears, to take Him down, at length, from his cruel cross, and
let him rest on their mats.
“And that, Timmy, is why we are called, far more than the Protestants,
to speak to these people and touch their hearts. They can only
expound to them laboriously a colorless, verbal faith, while we place
ceaselessly before their very eyes the effigy of Him they must adore;
and when they see on His face, and in the wounds of His body, what he
suffered for them, they always come to love Him, like savages, perhaps,
but to love Him. And those people know how to love!”
As he was leaving, he stopped short and said:
“It just occurs to me, Timmy--that man who’s sick--perhaps it would be
better for you to come, too.”
Timmy nodded without replying, took his bag, and went out with him.
As they crossed West India Dock Road, Father Flanagan repeated to
himself aloud:
“In Pennyfields, the house next to Yum-Tut-Wah’s shop.... A woman who
is only a child, a dying man, and a hallucinated old idolator, hailing
all three from the South Seas, God knows why and how! London’s a queer
place, Timmy!... _He-Who-Sees-the-Gods_.... Poor heretics! There’s only
just time; but at least he will have seen the true God before he dies!”
* * * * *
When they knocked at the door of the house next to Yum-Tut-Wah’s shop,
there was a sound of steps in the hall and on the stairs, then a
silence, and Taoufa came to open for them. She said nothing, but looked
at them with great, terrified eyes, and led the way up the stairs.
On the landing, a half-open door was slammed noisily, raising a heavy
puff of pungent, blue smoke, and Taoufa opened another door.
They entered a very small room, bare and stifling, where the fire which
burned must, for weeks, have been accumulating poisonous gases. The
furniture seemed to consist of ragged mats, rugs worn to the warp, and
a little tin trunk which served as a table. From a pallet which had
been drawn into the middle of the room, close to the fire-place, a
young man, little more than a skeleton, watched them with burning eyes.
On another pallet, a very old man, squatting, had his back turned to
them.
Father Flanagan said in a loud voice:
“Tell them who I am, Taoufa, and why I have come.”
Taoufa shook her head without answering, then pointed to the squatting
old man, and murmured:
“He-Who-Sees-the-Gods!”
The priest continued:
“Tell him I have come to show him the true God, Taoufa!”
He placed his hand on the crucifix in the pocket of his greatcoat, and
took a step forward; but Timmy stopped him short with a gesture, and
shook his head. Then the priest, too, looked, leaning over, and knew
not what to say.
For He-Who-Sees-the-Gods was blind; and whether the vision he bore
within him showed him the stone gods of his island, or the fiery gods
he had forged in his own heart, he would never have any other vision,
he would never see the god of ivory.
THE LAST EVENING
They had met at the corner of Brick Lane and Bethnal Green Road, and
were now waiting for Sal, both standing motionless on the pavement.
Bill turned his back on the roadway. His hands in his pockets, his cap
tilted, he watched the passers-by and whistled. Tom faced the street
and stared with dull eyes at the shops opposite, without seeing them.
He, too, had his hands thrust into his pockets. His head starting
forward, his back bent, he seemed to be following something which
drifted away, without understanding it. His yellowish hair, well
greased and carefully smoothed, emerged from his cap in a regular
fringe on his forehead, and in glistening curls on his temples. On
his chest floated the ends of a cherry-colored scarf, escaping from
his waistcoat; his yellow shoes, broken in several places, but shiny
across the toes, overhung the muddy water in the gutter. From time to
time he straightened up and squared his shoulders with a mechanical
gesture, throwing his head back and compressing his lips; then, little
by little, he relapsed into his depressed attitude.
Bill turned, spat into the gutter and asked, with an important air:
“When are you going to join your regiment, Tom?”
Tom answered without looking at him, his eyes fixed:
“Day after tomorrow.... The sergeant said they didn’t want anything to
do with us tomorrow, Thursday, because everybody would still be under
the weather after Boxing Day....”
Bill paid homage to this sagacity with a nod.
“Chaps who know their business, those sergeants,” he said. “Better make
the best of the last evening you can have a good time without going to
the guardhouse afterwards, eh?”
Tom, too, spat to express his ineffable bitterness, and said nothing
further. Turning on his heel, Bill addressed a conquering wink to two
little girls, acquaintances of his, who passed, arm-in-arm, dragging
velvet skirts in the mud, and singing a doleful love-song; then he
whistled the air, made a face at them as they turned around, and said
suddenly:
“There’s Sal!”
Tom sighed and turned to see Sal approach.
She arrived with a mincing gait, her arms swinging, her head waggling
under a gigantic black-plumed hat. When she saw that Tom and Bill were
looking at her, she stopped and saluted them with a sweeping gesture
and a sharp “Ha, ha!” after which she threw back her head till the
great feathers of her hat caressed her waist; then, her arms graciously
outstretched, her body swaying, she advanced executing a languorous
step.
When she stood before them, she ended her dance with a skip, stopped,
and, extending one arm dramatically towards Tom, she demanded:
“Well, Tom! It’s done?”
Tom nodded “yes.” She laughed stridently, gave a sudden toss of her
head, which made her feathers dance, and cried:
“So they’ve taken him! Must have been short of men!”... “Oh, Tom! My
handsome Tom! How I should have loved to see you in your red coat!”
Tom looked at her, open-mouthed, and kept looking at her. Already, for
a long time, he had cherished an obscure conviction that, in all the
world, there existed no one who could be compared to Sal. Now he was
sure of it; and seeing her thus, in her finest array, decked out for
this holiday--their last day--was as if a troop of nameless things
awoke within him, and began to kick, to thrust and to bite....
She had very red lips in a very white face, had Sal, and very light
blue eyes with very black lashes, so that her scarlet mouth was all the
more striking in the midst of this touching pallor, and so that her
eyes, to which the somber lashes, as distinct as though painted, gave
a hard, almost savage expression, surprised you all the more when you
looked at them and saw that they were the eyes of a little child.
Her dress was of violet, with golden bands across the bodice, and a
belt with a golden buckle; over her dress she wore a long cloak of
embroidered black velvet; around her neck she had a five-stranded pearl
necklace, and a second necklace with numerous pendants which hung on
her breast; from each ear swung, at the end of a gold wire, a big
pale blue stone. Thus clad and thus adorned, she naturally assumed a
slightly haughty, hieratic air, partly for the sake of the effect, and
partly in honor of the holiday; but when her eyes rested on Tom and on
Bill, and she spoke to them, they had no trouble in recognizing their
Sal of everyday.
And Tom continued to gaze at her, sighing heavily, his eyes lost in
longing, and his look drank in the splendour of the golden bands on the
violet of her dress, the sparkle of her jewels, the proud grace of the
long black cloak, and the poignant appeal of the little white face, of
the red mouth, of the ingenuous, timid eyes....
Yet Bill was the first to express his admiration.
“Oh, Sal!” he said. “How fine you look this evening!”
Sal replied: “Ah, go on!” with a modest little smile, turned completely
round on her heel, making the skirts of the velvet cloak fly, and
looked at them both with a mocking air.
Tom heaved a heavy sigh and said:
“Come, let’s have a glass!”
It was an offer which required no answer, so they went, all three,
to the corner “pub.” There they succeeded in finding a seat for Sal,
brought her two fingers of gin in a slender, very distinguished goblet,
and she drank with little sips while, standing beside her, they gulped
their beer.
They were alone in this corner, and the sudden intimacy, or perhaps the
fraternal libations, caused the careless mask which Sal had worn until
then, to fall. She raised her eyes and asked, in a hesitating voice:
“So ... it’s tomorrow, then, you leave, Tom?”
Tom replied:
“No! Not till the day after.”
All three fell silent a moment, then Bill spoke up suddenly:
“After all, it’s me that’s most to be pitied in all this, you know.
Sal’s going into service; it’s no great fun, perhaps, but it doesn’t
prevent that she’s going to be in clover, well fed and so on, just
enough work not to get bored, and all the customers a-courting her! And
there’s Tom, who’s off to be a soldier, see the world and all the rest!
But the poor devil who stays in the corner, after all his pals have
flew the coop, what about him, eh?”
Tom looked at Sal, who listened, head raised and thrown back, her moist
lips shining on the enamel of her teeth, her chin outlined against the
high pearl necklace with its soft sheen, and against the sparkling
pendants; then he lowered his eyes and looked down at his shoes,
without a word. It was Sal who replied in a low, drawling voice which
hesitated a little:
“It’s no fun for anyone, Bill. We were so happy, all three of us
together ... now there’s Tom going away, and I’m going too ... and
what’s going to happen to us?”
Again all three fell silent, because they had been taught only just
enough words to express their every-day thoughts, and because they had
no speech to tell their dull heart-break, the heavy resentment which
the force of things inspired in them, the harshness of the lot which
separated them.
The winter was cruel in Bethnal Green. It had brought even more
misery than preceding winters, and the charity subscriptions, the
aid funds, the government donations--so large, so magnificent in the
newspaper columns--had melted without leaving a trace in the midst
of all this dispossessed population. Tom, long out of work, had
lived by vague makeshifts, half-day jobs in the markets or in the
warehouses--infinitesimal sums, chance gleanings of the street; and
now, since November, the factory where Sal worked had shut down. It
is true that she had a home, where she almost always had enough to
eat, and that she knew where to sleep; but her step-father had quickly
grown tired of feeding her and had passed, without transition, from
reproaches to blows; work remained unfindable, winter advanced, harder
each week. After days spent in the icy mud out of doors, in fruitless
search, she had to return to the hostile abode and eat her supper
hastily on a corner of the table, her eyes open for probable acts of
violence, before her mother who, hidden in a corner, saw everything,
without daring to say a word, fearful for the child about to come!
When she had been offered a place in a Yarmouth restaurant, she
had well understood that she could not say “no”; and besides, her
step-father, on being consulted, had promptly accepted for her; but
she knew what awaited her. It was an evil place, where she was going.
The owner, a big, black, crinkly-haired man, had already had “trouble”
with his servants; he had generally come out of it all right, but the
servants had not always been so successful. When Tom had learned this,
and when he had seen the man--the cousin of a shop-keeper in Brick
Lane--he had gone without a word to the nearest recruiting-station,
where he had taken the King’s shilling.
This had happened on Christmas Eve; and now, two days afterwards,
they had met for this last holiday evening. The next morning Sal was
going away, mocking and brave; while, twenty-four hours later, Tom was
leaving in his turn, for seven years, to serve his Majesty the King
and Emperor, beyond the seas. Both knew all this: what forced them
to leave, and what awaited them; but now, at the last moment, they
discovered that it was a far greater misfortune than they had imagined.
Tom--perhaps he was thinking of it--groaned dully and started
listlessly towards the bar; but, half-way, he changed his mind and
returned, out of politeness, to wait until Sal had finished. She
thanked him, holding out her glass with a gracious smile, and said,
very gently:
“The same, Tom, if you please!”
Bill looked at them both, one after the other, held out his glass also,
and glanced down at the floor.
This time Tom and Bill had gin in their beer, and they began to feel
that it was, after all, a holiday, whatever the morrow might bring.
“What sort of Christmas did you have, Sal?” Bill demanded.
Sal turned her head indifferently, and replied with a drawl:
“Oh, not so bad.... Except that the old boy began by breaking plates
over my head when I wanted a second helping of pudding; but he calmed
down when I took the poker.... He said to me, just so: ‘All right! All
right, little girl! Go ahead! In your new place you’ll get broken in!’”
“I’d jolly well like to square accounts with that bloke before going
away!”
“And let mother and the kids starve,” said Sal. “Yes, that would be
smart!”
They said no more till it was Bill’s turn to pay his round. The bar was
now filled with the voices and laughter of drinkers. Near them a group
were jostling each other facetiously. Bill contemplated their gaiety
with a superior air.
“That doesn’t come up to our last Whitsuntide, eh, Tom?” he remarked.
“Lord! What a day we had of it!”
Tom nodded and Sal looked up at the ceiling with a smile of
introspective ecstasy. That Whitsuntide a well-to-do friend had taken
them to Wanstead Flats in his cart, and there they had had one of those
glorious days whose tender memory had made many hard years pass without
a complaint. The great turquoise sky, the swings, the ardent conquest
of the cocoanuts, the innumerable bottles of ginger beer drunk on the
grass, and the long siesta, flat on their backs, in full sunlight,
hand in hand, a blade of grass in each mouth! And the snack of smoked
sausage, of shellfish eaten standing about the little carts heaped with
almonds and candy! The numerous pilgrimages to the neighboring “pub,”
where they drank without reckoning! And, above all, the return in the
twilight, the six of them piled into the little cart, whose axles gave
and ground, drawn by the tiny pony, miraculously strong and willing,
who understood that it was a holiday, and trotted madly; the return in
the night under a sky still tender in the west, all intertwined, heads
shaking on shoulders, hats exchanged, singing, at the top of their
lungs, a delirious, sorrowful love-song! Before and behind them were
similar carts, all full of entwining couples, witless, heavy-headed,
drunk with poor men’s drink and a poor men’s joy, pressing closely
against each other and howling into the night, for fear of remembering
the coming morrow. And the glory of the cool breeze raised by the mad
trot, the wild jolts and the swayings, the hug with which one clings
confidently to a waist, as if to the sole thing of which one is sure,
and for an evening only!
They remembered that, all three of them, but without sadness, because,
as long as one drinks, nothing seems irreparable. And then the great
hall with its high ceiling, warm, well lighted; the close-packed, noisy
crowd; the incessant clinking of glasses and of coins on the bar; the
view of the compartments opposite which people entered each instant
with animated, jovial air, certain at least of several minutes of fun
and enjoyment--all this contributed to remind them that they were
enjoying themselves, that they were spending their holiday evening
befittingly, clad in their best clothes, and drinking together.
But when they left the bar for the street, the shock of the night upset
them a trifle, and Sal, always brave, began to sing.
She sang:
“_A lovely picture in a lovely golden frame...._”
and Bill’s voice joined hers. Tom sang a verse with them from time
to time, or else a word or two only, and then stopped. They walked
in the middle of the street, Sal with a hand on a shoulder of each
of the boys, and abandoning herself to the two arms which surrounded
her waist. Her head thrown back and swaying a little at each step
under the great, black-plumed hat, she seemed plunged in a sort of
sacred ecstasy, and raised heavenwards her nasally entoned lament,
like a solemn incantation. So often had they strode thus along Bethnal
Green Road, all three, holding each other by the neck and waist, and
singing at the top of their voices! So often had they raised towards
the impassive gods the offering of their harmonies: love-songs, sad
or tender, all chanted in unison, at the top of cracked voices,
religiously, without stopping or faltering, and here, at last, was what
fate had sent them!
The street was very wide, and the houses were very low, so that they
might have thought themselves on a vast open plain, alone between the
earth and the overwhelming sky. This sky was strewn with very low
clouds, curiously patterned, like stage clouds, so near that they
emphasized still further the enormous depth which separated them from
the vault powdered with stars; and they marched from one end of this
vault to the other in solemn file, keeping their stately formation, as
if conscious of the festal evening.
Under this sumptuous ceiling, the houses of Bethnal Green, the
sparse, poorly lighted shops, even the crowded public-houses with
flaming fronts, seemed disproportionately small and petty, and the
folk who peopled this street, the couples singing on the roadway, the
groups assembled near the doors, the bands passing on the pavement,
all holding each other round the waist, to the shrill sounds of a
mouth-organ, were clearly pitiful, misshapen beings, apparently struck
with madness and blindly celebrating a barbarous cult.
Sal sang with all her might, in a nasal voice, without inflections, and
the two boys sometimes sang with her and sometimes stopped to listen
to her. The strophes of her ballad celebrated, one after the other, the
astounding splendours of
“_the lovely picture in a lovely golden frame_”
a glorious vision, merely to speak of which inundated the whole poor,
counterfeited world with superior distinction. She sang as one recites
a prayer, eyes fixed, head thrown back; and, on each side of her wan
little face, the great blue stones suspended from her ears swayed
softly. She had made herself beautiful for this last night, had Sal;
and now she sang her loveliest ballad, in such wise that, if the morrow
which separated them, should bring them ill luck and long sadness, it
would be the morrow which was to blame!
Tom had ceased singing. Suddenly he stopped short and said, choking:
“Oh, let’s drink, what do you say! It’s already getting late!”
The public-house which they entered was crowded to the doors, and Bill
had to push and edge his way through the groups to reach the bar.
In each violently lighted hall, on coming out of the darkness, Sal
appeared giddy, and staggered. She steadied herself with a hand on the
wall, and looked at Tom with a stupid smile.
“Oh, Tom!” she said, “It’s really true we’re both going away? Bill
and you, and then me, we were so happy together, but especially you,
Tom, especially you.... What’s going to happen to us?... And all we’ve
forgotten to say to each other!”
Tom also looked at her an instant, before turning away, his hands
plunged into his pockets, panting like a frightened beast. Then Bill
arrived with the glasses. They drank together, several times, and
little by little the soft warmth, the pleasant taste of the drinks, and
the uproar in which they shared, shed over them once more a very soft
drowsiness.
A holiday evening! It was a holiday evening, and they had to have a
good time. All those who filled this bar enjoyed themselves bravely,
drinking, laughing, and jostling each other, or else touching glasses
with solemn politeness. Tom looked about him mechanically, and suddenly
the idea came to him, for the first time, that certain of them were
gay like himself, in appearance, and, at bottom, frightened, deadened
by some incomprehensible distress.... This man standing in a corner,
tall, strong, tanned--a fine, massive, wholesome type--who held himself
quite straight, his neck stiff, and drank alone, with an air of dearly
purchased wisdom.... These two broken little old men, emaciated, almost
in rags, who seemed to be telling each other antiquated stories, and
showed drooling gums when they laughed.... And this girl, scarcely a
woman, pregnant, alone with another woman, older than she, to whom she
listened, turning her glass round and round between her fingers....
But when he looked at Sal again, he understood that all the grievances
of others were as nothing compared with his own. It was tomorrow she
was leaving! ... and the face of the man she was going to serve!...
There had never been anyone like Sal: the distinguished elegance of
her dress, the display of her pearls and precious stones, her air
of sharp assurance, which seemed heroic, because of her pathetic
fragility! He looked at the clock, and saw that time was galloping
madly. Then he hastened to carry his glass to his lips, perceived that
it was empty, and felt confusedly that it was a bad sign.
When they went out, he took Sal by the waist, masterfully, almost
brutally, and pressed her against him. She yielded without a word.
Bill hesitated, then thrust his hands into his pockets, and walked
beside them. They went thus as far as Cambridge Road, and stopped in
the middle of the street, undecided, not knowing what to do. But now,
from a neighboring public-house, came a guttural sound of banjo and
voice, which attracted them. Three black-face artists, drawn up near
the door, strummed their instruments and sang negro songs which told
of long, deserted rivers in the heart of a fairy continent, of happy
plantations, of black idylls under the tropic sun. The white of their
eyes and of their teeth, the red of their lips, spotted the sooty
faces; they wagged their heads, shivering slightly in the cold, as
real, exiled negroes would have shivered, and a picturesque melancholy
filled their refrains from far-off countries, sounded in the vibrations
of the plucked strings and in their metallic voices.
Sal leaned more heavily on Tom’s arm and listened to the music with
a ravished smile. The marvellous foreign landscapes which swept by
in their ballads, the loves of sentimental Africans and tender,
faithful quadroon girls, which nothing very serious hindered--all
this transported her to a delicious world of plays, of songs and of
books--the world where everything is set to music, and where everything
ends well. The sharp clang of the banjos had for her the sweetness
of celestial harps, and the worn, nasal voices of the black-faced
minstrels carried her away with one bound towards blissful regions.
Tom, looking up suddenly, saw the clock through the window of the
“pub,” and jumped.
“Quick!” he said, “It’s going to close! We’ve only just time for a
glass!”
They hastened to enter, and drank hurriedly. Bill still had money, and
offered a second round. The drinkers were just beginning to leave; the
waiter, his eye on the clock, was getting ready to expel the lingerers
before the fatal hour sounded. Tom leaned towards Sal, a great fear in
his eyes, and mumbled:
“Hurry, Sal, hurry! Another....”
And Sal, quickly tossing off the contents of her glass, held it out for
more.
Several moments later, ejected, they found themselves outside, and this
time the night closed down on them like a catastrophe. All evening
they had passed from the street into a bar, again into the street,
and then into still another bar. They had drunk and sung and done
all that had occurred to them to celebrate fittingly the holiday and
their departure; but this time their exit into the dark had about it
something definitive, irremediable. They could no longer do anything.
Fate already carried them along, and the refuges closed behind them.
Tom again clung to Sal’s waist, and Bill followed them stumbling. Amid
the dispersing groups, they went along Bethnal Green Road, as far as
the corner of a somber little street, and sat down on the steps of a
house.
Above them the white clouds continued to march in stately parade from
one end of the heavens to the other. Sal, from the top of the steps,
looked at them an instant, dull-eyed, then leaned her swaying head
against the wall. Seated on the first step, Tom remained motionless,
but his eyes wavered, riveting themselves, turn by turn, on the
paving-stones, on the wall opposite him, on the people passing. He
seemed to be trying to remember something--something important, which
he had forgotten to say.
And Bill began to lament. He enumerated burning grievances, one after
the other, in a thick voice. Turn by turn he accused Fate, malevolent
third persons, Sal herself, who had treated him badly.
“I’ve been your pal, too, Sal!” said he. “Just as much as Tom! And here
you’re going away, both of you. It’s our last evening together, and
there’s nothing except for him!... I’ve been a good pal for you, Sal,
just as much as Tom!... And it’s me who’s paid oftenest for the drinks!”
A group passed, some one made fun of his groaning voice, and he rose
staggering, steadied himself with a hand on the wall, and suddenly
rushed straight ahead of him, lunging wildly. There was a prolonged
uproar, curses and cries, the dull thud of fists bruising the flesh
of faces, confused encounters of drunken men, two combatants rolling
together on the pavement, then separated with kicks and blows. Tom
flung himself into the fray, reeling and ferocious, and Sal scratched
something ... and then, a little later, they found themselves alone,
without quite knowing how, and the solemn calm of the night enveloped
them once more.
Drunk, Tom felt himself, little by little, growing numb, and struggled
instinctively, as if abandonment would have been the end of everything.
He looked at Sal, and each time he was seized with a new terror.
Tomorrow morning she would leave ... worse still, it was already long
past midnight, and in several hours it would be day. In the midst
of the stupor which descended upon him, he understood, however, a
thing which had remained hidden until then: that, throughout the hard
years--interminable years of misery, strewn with rare orgies--from one
end of his man’s life to the other, and from the top of his heart to
the bottom, there had never been anything but Sal which counted....
Seated on the highest step, she leaned her head against the wall. Her
fine hat had toppled a bit in the fray, and a strand of hair hung down
her ear as if to hide a bruise. Her eyes were half closed, her lips
half open as she panted slightly; beyond the shadow of the doorway,
the light of the neighboring lamp-post laid a terrible lividness upon
her face. Tom continued to watch her with troubled eyes, and struggled
to keep back a little longer the unconsciousness which he felt
approaching, and also to try to understand, to see clearly this great,
shapeless, urgent--atrociously urgent--thing which escaped him. Sal was
going away--there you were! It was intolerable and nothing could be
done about it. Perhaps there were things he might have done, or other
things he might have said, and then all would have been different. But
how to behave? In life, everything happened pell-mell, by chance, by
accident, and nothing could ever be done.... Sal was going away and,
when she had gone, nothing would be left.... Nothing would be left;
the world would be empty, and he, Tom, would be empty too.... He would
go away through the streets in his red tunic and, under his red tunic,
there would no longer remain anything.... And she!
The wan little face leaning against the door-post was terribly
motionless, calm and fixed, as if all her real life had left her,
leaving only a mask of flesh--flesh that anyone could handle
carelessly. The dark night became an accomplice, and suddenly a hideous
shadow seemed to descend upon her livid face.
“Sal! Sal!”
Did he cry, or did he merely think he cried? Was it his voice, or was
it but a howl from his drunken heart? Sal reopened her eyes, looked
about her and said, in a somewhat thick voice, with a laugh:
“Look, Bill’s sick!”
Bill was, in fact, leaning against the wall, his head between his arms,
and vomiting, with heavy groans and with hiccoughs. Mechanically, Tom
drew his hand across his face and, on the back of his hand, there was
a red smear, which he regarded with a stupid air, because he did not
understand where the blood came from. And Sal half sat up, steadying
herself with one hand against the wall, swayed two or three times, and
began to sing once more:
“_Beside the mill-stream I am dreaming, Nellie Dean...._”
Then the long-suspended oblivion descended slowly upon Tom, like a
shroud, and created a confused mirage of all that surrounded him. He no
longer saw Sal, even--only the white spot of her face--and he scarcely
heard the words she was singing. But he heard her voice, which was very
sweet, yet which wrung his heart. He no longer even remembered why.
“_All the world seems sad and lonely, Nellie Dean,
For I love you and love you only, Nellie Dean.
I wonder if you love me yet, and if you sometimes regret
The happy days now past, Nellie Dean...._”
Tom longed for a still deeper oblivion, which would efface everything,
and which would last a long time; and he let himself fall backwards,
the length of the step, from which he rolled to the pavement.
Sal had closed her eyes again, but continued to sing:
“_I recall the day we parted, Nellie Dean...._”
Bill hiccoughed against the wall.
THE OLD WOMAN
_Let me fall asleep with the earth’s sleep._
“This is the museum here?”
“Yes! Come in.”
Grand-Grégoire hastily drew aside to let the strangers pass, and they
crossed the threshold, one after the other, groping with their feet,
lowering their heads, and grouped themselves anew in the dark interior.
“This way,” said Grand-Grégoire.
Before a tiny window, through which penetrated a little gray light, had
been placed a sort of crudely constructed glass case closely resembling
a market-gardener’s cold-frame. Grand-Grégoire wiped the glass with his
sleeve; the visitors drew near and bent over, examining the incongruous
objects arranged in it. There were two cannon-balls, a piece of
bomb, several sabres, a helmet and two shakos, some pistols, a long
flint-lock, and, in the middle, spread out its full width, a frogged
dolman pierced with two holes--the round one made by a bullet, the
narrow slit by a sword-thrust--around which spread rust-colored stains.
“At your left,” recited Grand-Grégoire, “a ball which had lodged in the
wall of the house; you can still see the dent outside, above the door.
The other ball was picked up on the battle-field, on the spot where
the last square was formed. The bomb, too. The tunic belonged to a
_chasseur de la garde_, who was killed charging the Austrian infantry;
see the marks of the two wounds and the blood-stains; the curved sabre
beside it belonged to him, too, and he still held it in his hand when
he was picked up. The other sabre was the French general’s.”
He lied serenely, because his peasant shrewdness told him that these
relics of the great battle, and the battle itself, were very old
things, of which the living could know naught.
The visitors listened to the end, then talked together in low voices.
“Do you believe all that is authentic?”
A sceptic made an indulgent grimace. Another glanced about him.
“In any case, it’s a very old house.”
They seemed a trifle disappointed, but Grand-Grégoire did not care,
because he had kept for the last the capital object of the museum, the
living relic whose effect was certain.
“Perhaps you’d rather talk with the old woman,” he said suddenly.
“She’s sitting there next the fire. Folks like mighty well to warm
themselves at her age.”
Good-naturedly he led them to the great high-backed arm-chair where
the old woman had been installed in the morning, and where, for long
hours, she had sat huddled up and seemed to want to slip to the floor,
remaining seated, in short, merely because her stiff legs refused to
bend and let her fall, and because her worn-out body no longer had any
weight to speak of.
“Hey, Mother!”
He placed a hand on her shoulder and shook her a little, but not
roughly, with the precaution due a century-old organism which a
miracle alone had kept alive.
“Here are some strangers who’d like to talk to you a little about the
battle.... You recollect the big battle ... and the Emperor ... eh? You
were there?”
The visitors had formed a half-circle before the old woman’s arm-chair,
and were regarding her with expressions of curiosity and compassion.
A pleated bonnet mercifully hid her head, but the little that could
be seen of her face indicated a touching age. There were deep hollows
between the cheek-bones and the jaws; her white eyes ran with continual
tears which rolled and clung to the thousand folds of her skin; for her
face was no longer anything but a mass of wrinkles, like deep cuts.
Precocious hard work, harassing poverty, maternity, and then a whole
length of harsh and sordid life thereafter, had come, year after year,
to corrode and to gash that thing which had been a woman’s face, to
make a heart-rending example of it. And what could be divined of her
body, beneath the shapeless clothes, was such as to make one ill even
to think of.
“Hey, Mother!”
A last push woke in her a quiver of life, and suddenly she began to
recite her lesson, without moving or turning her head, in a voice which
trembled and faltered between her gums.
“Yes, yes.... It’s the solemn truth I was there, and I remember it
right enough.... The cannon and the guns made a lot of noise, and the
horses, too, running all together, and I tell you I was fair afraid....
There were men who were all torn to bits and who were tended here, and
the cannon came nigh to destroying the house. It’s true....”
“And the Emperor, mother? Don’t forget the Emperor!”
“It’s true I saw the Emperor, too. He passed behind the house with a
lot of men on horseback, generals and I don’t know what all. There,
behind the house, he passed on the road, and I saw him as I see you ...
as I see you.”
When she had reached this point, she recalled the pantomime she had
learned, and turned her outworn, unseeing eyes to the visitors, shaking
her head.
“It’s the truth ... I saw him.”
“How old is she, then?” asked a voice.
“A hundred and seven years,” replied Grand-Grégoire, with assurance.
From the other corner of the hearth arose another quavering voice.
“A hundred and seven years, yes, that’s right.”
It was Aunt Ferdinand who spoke, and all eyes turned in her direction.
Like the ancestress, she was seated in a straight-backed chair, on
which her bent body slumped and swayed; her face was almost exactly
like that of the other woman, marked with the same numberless deep
wrinkles which seamed the yellow skin, and appeared almost as old; but,
in her, life was still strong, and her sharp little eyes travelled and
shone.
“I’m eighty-four, I am, and I’m her daughter! There now! One hundred
and seven years, I tell you. That’s her age!”
With exclamations of astonishment the visitors had turned and were
contemplating once more the survivor of the heroic epoch, the woman who
had seen, with her own eyes, the great men and the great wars. They
would have liked to ask her questions, but pity arrested them; they saw
the pathetic ruin of her face, her dead eyes, the dry slit which had
been her mouth; they divined the exhaustion of her meagre, sunken body,
and were silent. Alone Grand-Grégoire spoke, and declared that the old
woman was still solid, whatever one might think, and full of life; she
was a little deaf, and no longer had the same eyes as when she was
twenty; but she understood everything, and ate heartily.
“You wouldn’t believe it to look at her, but she eats pretty near as
much as I do. Oh! I tell you she’s nowhere near dying! She’s taken
mighty good care of....”
The disappointing poverty of the museum was forgotten; the visitors
went towards the door, impressed, a little moved; silver coins issued
from vest-pockets. Grand-Grégoire accepted them with an awkward
gesture, and followed the group as far as the threshold. Outside, one
of the strangers turned, and looked at the hole which the cannon-ball
had made in the wall; others stopped several moments by the side of the
road--the road where, ninety-eight years ago, a little girl had watched
the Emperor and his escort pass by. Then they moved slowly away.
Grand-Grégoire returned to the old woman and looked at her with a shade
of uneasiness.
“She had a hard time waking up to-day!”
“Yes!” said Aunt Ferdinand. “It’s worse every day, and when strangers
come, she tells them a little less each time.”
Silence filled the house. Outside, the wind whipped the vast, brown
plain, the gray clouds flocked from one end of the gray sky to the
other, and all the objects which stood out along the countryside--the
black-roofed houses and granges, the trees stripped bare by the autumn
and brutalized by the wind--looked as if they were bored or suffering.
The badly seasoned logs smoked on the hearth; the old woman had sunk
on her hard chair before the fire, and she was no longer conscious of
anything but the fatigue which crushed her, and no longer had any other
desire than that of death.
Some years earlier--fifteen or twenty, perhaps: what was that to
her?--her great age inspired her with a sort of senile vanity, and she
feared to die. But, since then, other years--too many of them--had
come, and still others, and the whole mass had charged her with a
burden such as a merciful god should never have imposed upon one of
his creatures. The weight crushed her, gripped her old bones in their
worn-out joints, turned her breath and her heart-beats into painful
spasms whose cessation would, however, cause another intolerable pain;
and what remained of her flesh had lost its life and ceased to be more
than a cold, inert shroud which oppressed her.
She was seated in such a way that she could not fall, yet it seemed
to her that this was her sole desire: to leave forever the eternal
motionless attitude which hurt her, to lean over and fall face forward
on the floor, shaking off at once the burden which crushed her down
upon herself, and the pain in her bones. She felt that the earth was
calling her and that, if she could fling herself forwards, lay her
worn-out body on the cool soil and stay there several moments, the
intolerable weariness of her members would turn into repose.
But several times an hour some one came to lift her up on her hard
chair, to shake her shoulder, to dispel the sweet unconsciousness
which always seemed on the point of arriving, and she had to force her
dried chest and throat to pronounce once again the words which she had
learned formerly, which no longer had any meaning for her, and which
her own ears no longer heard. If only--O pitiful God!--she could find
the strength to lean over and let herself fall forward, to reply to the
call of the earth!
The silence lasted a long time. The logs burned out, Grand-Grégoire
came to cast others on the fire, and turned to sit down. The clouds
continued to march past in the saddened sky, and the gray light
remained always the same through the long hours.
But something approached slowly on the plain. Grand-Grégoire rose and
looked out of the little square window. It was a long-bodied automobile
bringing several persons, four or five; now they had got out and were
coming nearer, stopping often and speaking to each other with gestures
indicating the distance. Strangers? They were going to come to the
museum, without any doubt, and their appearance promised a harvest of
silver coins.
Grand-Grégoire again polished the glass of the show-case with his
sleeve, approached the old woman, and touched her shoulder.
“Hey, mother! Here’s some folks coming!”
He waited several moments and shook her again:
“Hey!”
He had never been brutal with her; but suddenly he was seized with a
fear, and his fist grew heavy.
“Hey! Wake up!”
The push had made the slight body sway. It sank back on itself even
more than usual, and began to slide to the floor in a singular posture.
He lifted it up at once and leaned it against the back of the chair;
but the spineless inertia of this body and of the wagging head, and the
look which he bestowed upon the wrinkled face, had all told him the
same thing at the same time.
Aunt Ferdinand saw him recoil a step, and understood at once.
“She’s gone.”
Grand-Grégoire remained mute and shook his head.
Through the window he could see the groups of strangers approaching
slowly, and the sight caused him to grasp instantly the extent of the
disaster. Without the centenarian, his museum was no longer anything
but a crude, ineffective cheat, which would attract no one. It was
their means of living which had departed with her. The agony of the
coming poverty seized him by the throat, and Aunt Ferdinand, who had
also understood, leaned over and looked at the corpse with incredulous,
terrified eyes. The wood crackled on the hearth, marking the anxious
moments.
Another glance through the little window looking out over the plain,
and suddenly Grand-Grégoire, having decided, made haste. He took the
inert body in his arms, lifted it from the high-backed arm-chair, and
motioned wildly with his head to the other old woman.
“You! Come here, you.”
Aunt Ferdinand rose with difficulty, wavering on her stiff legs, and
dragged herself to the arm-chair, where she sank in her turn. Nothing
was changed; the fire on the hearth lighted up another withered face
which revealed a touching age, and the desiccated hands, with swollen
veins, which trembled on the black skirt, sufficed to excite pity.
But Grand-Grégoire went round and round the one room of the house,
bearing in his arms the slight, slender corpse which old age was
already beginning to stiffen also, and he sought desperately a
hiding-place. The bed? But the print curtains did not close. Some dark
corner? He looked and shook his head.
Voices were already heard near the door, and he, in turn, began to
tremble and to lose his head, when his look suddenly fell upon the
great walnut wardrobe. One arm, one hand, were enough to support the
withered corpse of the centenarian. With the other hand, he opened the
great door, and he took in at a glance the whole interior. The meager
piles of linen, the broadcloth garments carefully folded, occupied the
two shelves; below there were only a few coverlets, empty sacks, and
the worn-out harness of the horse they had been obliged to sell when
the son died. Would there be room?
The pitiful body, doubled up, disappeared in the bottom of the great
wardrobe; the head rolled on a woolen coverlet, and one of the dried
hands seemed to make a last gesture, coming to rest against the
wall. Grand-Grégoire shut the door as swiftly as his trembling hands
permitted, and turned round just in time.
“Is this the museum?”
“Yes, come in.”
There were five of them: three men and two women with rich cloaks.
Grand-Grégoire pointed out the show-case; they approached and began
to examine the weapons and the dolman with the holes in it; in the
arm-chair facing the hearth, Aunt Ferdinand struggled against her
agony, and sought to recall what she should say. And Grand-Grégoire,
feeling as yet incapable of reciting the daily lesson, remained
stupidly backed up against the wardrobe, his hands spread against
the doors, as if to prevent the sinister secret which he had shut up
inside, from coming out.
If he had known ... if he had been able to divine what infinite
contentment the old woman had found in death, and how sweet to her
who had waited too long, was the abandonment of the body flung there,
without respect, bent and twisted on the coverlets and bits of leather,
her head against the wood of the wardrobe!
THE DESTINY OF MISS WINTHROP-SMITH
It was only after changing cars at Stratford that Miss Winthrop-Smith
opened her bag to take out and re-read once more the letter which she
had received that very morning, and which had been uppermost in her
mind ever since.
She settled well back in her seat, sitting very straight, her head
against the car window; then, casting a glance of haughty distrust at
her neighbors, she unfolded the sheet of paper. In the upper left-hand
corner was a somewhat complicated design showing several flower-pots, a
double row of hedges disappearing toward the horizon, and the corner of
a greenhouse with a slender fountain playing among climbing plants. In
the right-hand corner the name of the owner of all these things: _W. G.
FIRKINS_, stood forth in bold type. Below, in smaller type, the words:
“_Nurseryman and Florist_,” indicated his calling.
A painstaking hand had traced, in round, regular characters, at the top
of the sheet:
“_Dear Miss Winthrop-Smith_:
and then continued, a line lower:
“I am aware I am taking a great liberty....”
The rest of the letter was merely humble devotion and the desperate
audacity of the timid.
Three times recurred the expression, “_I take the liberty_ ...” “_the
liberty I take_ ...” “_this liberty_ ...” and Miss Winthrop-Smith
underscored these faults of style with quick strokes of an imaginary
pencil. When she had read the letter entirely over again as far as the
signature, which also was round and regular, like a copperplate, she
examined, for a moment, the vignette with the neatly trimmed hedges
disappearing in the distance, and the fountain among the leaves and
softly curving stems. Then, folding the letter carefully, she looked
up and stared straight ahead, a faint smile on her lips.
Poor Mr. Firkins! He hadn’t found the courage to speak! He had had to
write; and even his formal proposal, carefully worded and written,
read like an apology! Each phrase betrayed his inmost conviction that
for him to aspire to the hand and heart of Miss Winthrop-Smith was
the height of audacity, a mad ambition, perhaps impudence; and Miss
Winthrop-Smith, holding the folded letter in her hand, and watching
the houses of Bow and Mile End race by the car window, was inclined to
share this opinion.
A whole section of Leytonstone, the congregation of the little Baptist
chapel on the Square, and, in general, all those who happened to talk,
however briefly, with Mrs. Winthrop-Smith, were no longer ignorant
of the fact that Miss Winthrop-Smith had a most rare and desirable
situation with the firm of _Harrison, Harrison & Co., Ltd., Shipping
Brokers_. Of course, Mrs. Winthrop-Smith might have consented to admit
that this position had originally been, and still was, nominally,
nothing more than that of stenographer; but what counted was the
competence which Miss Winthrop-Smith had acquired in this business, the
intelligent zeal which she had displayed from the start, and the blind
confidence which her capacity and her judgment had inspired in the
leaders of this colossal enterprise. New acquaintances, presented to
Mrs. Winthrop-Smith coming out of church Sunday morning, during the few
minutes when rigid frock coats and stiff silk dresses exchange solemn
amenities, always bore away from these conversations the strange vision
of a blushing, somewhat embarrassed Miss Winthrop-Smith, hymn-book in
hand, sitting in the centre of a system of cables and telephone lines,
ruling and directing the merchant fleets of the whole world in their
courses. So that to marry Mr. W. G. Firkins, Nurseryman, would have
been something of a comedown. She did not pronounce the word, but she
felt it.
Although evil tongues pretended that he really belonged to the
Primitive Methodist sect, and not to the Baptists, he often came to
their chapel and always wore exceedingly high, stiff collars and blue
serge suits which seemed eternally new. He seemed to make a point of
being impeccably dressed, as if wishing to exalt the character of his
calling by his personal elegance. He had even appeared once or twice,
recently, in a frock coat with silk lapels, and with a top hat, beneath
which his pink, boyish face shone with cleanliness and honest candor.
Poor Mr. Firkins! She repeated the words several times mentally, with
a pitying smile, then suddenly asked herself why she instinctively
called him “poor.” She came to the conclusion that it was because
she was going to refuse him. Poor Mr. Firkins! In his neat, correct
Sunday clothes he might be presentable, prosperous looking; but she
remembered having seen him one day at work in his garden. He was in his
shirt-sleeves, and from the pockets of his huge apron protruded the
implements of his calling: pruning shears, packages of seeds, wooden
pegs, string, and a funny little plant which seemed to hide its head
and show the world only several inches of stem and a mass of stout,
short, brown roots.
He had blushed at being discovered in this costume; but she had
shown herself gaily and affably condescending, and she had visited
the whole establishment with him, listening to his explanations,
asking intelligent questions and praising each clever device in
tactful appropriate terms. He had shown her everything with the
ingenuous respect of a vassal: the strictly ordered shrubs, imposing
by their number but touching in their frail nudity; the hothouses
filled with flowers, whose colors she praised in gracious terms; all
sorts of plants whose Latin names he cited without vanity, almost
apologetically; and, above all, a little, isolated greenhouse where he
was trying timidly to raise grapes.
The walls were hung with slender, naked, anæmic stems whose tendrils
held themselves out like suppliant hands; but, in a corner, by some
inexplicable miracle, a plant more robust than the others bore a bunch
of grapes. It was a nice bunch, not very big, ripe or beautiful, but
full of promise--a nice, little bunch, all told, with round, hard,
violet grapes. Silently he had nodded in its direction, and he had
remained lost in contemplation, his hands plunged into the pockets of
his apron, like an artist dreaming before a budding masterpiece. The
damp soil smelt good, the air was soft and languid; and, all at once,
a pale ray of sunlight had filtered through the glass roof, like a
friend, to gild and glorify the single pretty bunch of grapes....
Miss Winthrop-Smith looked up with a tight little laugh, which was
almost a sigh, and saw that the car was entering dark night. Behind,
Mile End Road stretched out interminably, barely veiled by a slight
mist, while fifty yards ahead everything had disappeared, and they
advanced gropingly, with infinite precautions, enveloped by a dark,
suffocating, almost palpable atmosphere which seemed to mystify all
the senses at the same time. A few stray, feeble gleams penetrated it
vaguely. They were distant, detached from the world; but they were
divined to be quite close, and the clanging of bells came from infinite
distances to announce the approach of sombre masses which loomed up
immediately.
“The fog again!” thought Miss Winthrop-Smith, and she consulted
her watch with irritation. The lighted interior of the car gave an
impression of the Ark steered slowly through the shades. With resigned
countenances, the passengers regarded the opaque air through the
windows, and the motor-man, who cut off the current every second and
sounded the unknown with incessant clanging, seemed, lost himself, to
lead them towards adventurous destinies.
She again mechanically opened the letter which she held in her
hand, and this time the vignette with the neatly clipped hedges,
the flower-pots and the greenhouse, and also the humble phrases so
carefully written, filled her with emotion. William George Firkins....
What a good, honest face he had! What a clean, healthy color, at
once rosy and tanned! And how straightforward his pale blue eyes
were! Everybody said that he was doing well, that he was sober and
conscientious. He would make a faithful, devoted husband, full of
respectful consideration, whom it would be pleasant to rule without
arrogance and to recompense nicely; and life would be tranquil and
sweet, on the edge of the shrubberies....
* * * * *
The car stopped, the conductor fathomed the fog, called out: “_Aldgate,
all change!_” and the passengers, getting out one by one, groped their
way to the pavement. It was late, and Miss Winthrop-Smith had to take
the short cut through Middlesex Street, which she hated. Happily, this
morning the fog spared her the spectacle of the sordid activity of
shops and factories, of mouldy house-fronts and of the windows of the
Jewish bakeries where the cakes displayed seemed to be merely viscous,
agglutinated balls. At last she reached Bishopsgate Street and the
offices of _Harrison, Harrison & Co., Ltd._
Scarcely had she arrived when a sharp ring summoned her to the office
of Mr. Harrison, Jr., a very young man who strove to disguise his
youth and touching inexperience under a rigidly solemn aspect. Without
wasting a glance on the virginal grace of Miss Winthrop-Smith, or
the neat way in which she patted a stray lock of hair into place, he
repeated in a monotonous tone, without pauses or inflexions:
“Good morning. Cable. ‘Muller, Odessa. Have firm offer steamer 3,600
tons. Prompt delivery....’”
Already Miss Winthrop-Smith’s precise, agile pencil skimmed across
her notebook, tracing in sure hieroglyphics the probable fate of a
shipload of barley, billed to Liverpool, which, in the end, would
furnish nourishment for millions of little babies. At Leytonstone,
Mrs. Winthrop-Smith, ignorant of the grandiose task which her daughter
was zealously performing, sat peacefully reading her “_Daily Mirror_,”
while William George Firkins oiled his pruning shears absent-mindedly,
sighing deeply.
And so, all the morning, the traffic of the world filtered through
Miss Winthrop-Smith’s pink fingers in the form of letters, circulars,
cables, which had to be coded, de-coded, taken down, typewritten
and submitted to Mr. Harrison, Jr., who sat alone in his sanctuary,
imposing, motionless, austere, yet caressing, perhaps, some ingenuous
dream behind his impenetrable mask.
* * * * *
At one o’clock Miss Winthrop-Smith went to lunch. Outside, darkness
still reigned, but the fog blanket had left the earth. It now hung
above the housetops like a celestial menace, or the effect of some
terrible enchantment, intercepting all light and leaving uncovered the
surface of the earth, where men and vehicles swarmed like insects
threatened by a gigantic sole, hurrying to their tasks before the
scourge descended upon them again.
At the marble table of the “Lyons,” where she lunched, Miss
Winthrop-Smith looked almost with disgust at the portion of cold meat
she had ordered, and even at the flour-dusted roll and the halved
tomato which accompanied it. Perhaps it was the fog, or else Mr.
Harrison, Jr.’s sharp irony in correcting a few minor mistakes, which
took away her appetite. Or was it, again, the unconscious effect of the
vision which had haunted her from time to time this morning, slipping
between her eyes and the keyboard of her typewriter the corner of a
greenhouse, tufted with leaves and with green shoots, a square of glass
through which entered the sun, and rows of shrubs, stretching out
infinitely under the tender sky.... She sighed again, holding her fork
with her finger-tips, stared out through the plate-glass windows at the
street lights dancing under the opaque sky, and felt the ugliness of
the world.
The tinned beef, drying up on her plate, reminded her of the horrors of
the Chicago stockyards; in the innocent tomato, a shade over-ripe, she
saw a rotting, tasteless fruit, whose center was no longer anything but
a brownish mass powdered with seeds.
As for the waitresses who came and went, joking with the regular
patrons, they appeared to her quite definitely coarse creatures,
with neither tact nor decency, more intent on flirting with men
customers than on performing their service properly. And the gardens
at Leytonstone, the little house hung with climbing plants, the
cold-frames and the nurseries, the grape hothouses, the paths about the
beds which seemed to invite to peaceful, proprietary promenades, stick
in hand, hair blowing in the breeze, heavy-soled shoes sinking into the
soft soil--all this came back to Miss Winthrop-Smith and seemed to form
a sort of rustic Eden, a haven of peace offered her by William George
Firkins, brimming over with respectful love, and beseeching her with
his ingenuous eyes.
* * * * *
From two till five the pendulum swung back and forth unceasingly.
Sometimes Miss Winthrop-Smith’s eye fell on the parallel rows of desks,
lined up the length of the office; on the high stools scattered here
and there; on the numerous employees of all ages harnessed to carefully
distributed tasks. She heard the incessant ringing of telephones, the
banging of doors, the indistinct mumble of messenger-boys as they
hurriedly tossed their orange envelopes upon the counter, the click of
other typewriters in the adjoining room, and her heart swelled with
pride. _Harrison, Harrison & Co., Ltd.!_ She had her part in it--in
this complex, powerful organization; in this name which spread itself
on letterheads, on envelopes, on every page of the Shipping Gazette,
on the huge brass plate which decorated the entrance of the building
in Bishopsgate Street, alone, without other information, without
commentaries, nothing but the name, majestic, solitary, in grave,
sonorous words like the sounds of a great cathedral bell: _Harrison,
Harrison & Co., Ltd._! And, when she thought of it, the idea of the
presumption of Mr. William George Firkins, nurseryman, in offering her
his heart and his hand, seemed positively comic.
And then, suddenly, a little later, an impertinent office boy brought
her a copy of a circular to manifold on her machine. For an hour her
fingers danced on the keyboard, while her lips repeated mechanically,
phrase by phrase, the same tedious words. The air was overheated, the
floating dust irritated her throat, the ringing of the telephone and
the banging of the doors fell like hammer-blows on her exasperated
nerves, while the pile of papers to be typed seemed scarcely to
diminish....
She stopped a second in her work, stretched to drive the cramps from
her shoulders, closed her eyes under the blinding light of the electric
bulbs, and visions came to haunt her a moment--visions of greenhouses,
with leaves patterning the panes, and of pretty, light green stalks
springing up from the mould, of ordered shrubs bending one after the
other in the breeze, like a series of courtly curtsies; of a neat,
orderly little house, half hidden by vines, in the springtime; and
still other visions as well, all gentle and refreshing, symbolic of a
quiet, simple life, close to the earth, of freedom, of little tasks
accomplished at leisure....
* * * * *
The day drew to its close. Mr. Harrison, Jr., having signed his
mail, consulted his watch and was about to leave, when a messenger
boy suddenly brought into the peaceful Bishopsgate Street office an
echo of the quarrel which, at that very moment, was, in the harbor of
Hong-kong, engaging the captain of the _Arundel Castle_ (4,500 tons,
Class A-1, at Lloyd’s) and the manager of a German firm. In a cable
several lines long, at five shillings the word, the honest British
sailor had tried to condense his vehement indignation at the conduct
of these unscrupulous strangers who, on some insignificant pretext,
claimed the right to break a duly signed contract, and refused him his
cargo.
Caught by his chief clerk just as, at last, he felt free to go, Mr.
Harrison, Jr. had no trouble in sharing this indignation. Immediately
he called upon the main house at Hamburg, and its Hong-kong branch, to
respect their given word and fill the hold of the _Arundel Castle_ with
rice and earth-nuts, under threat of colossal indemnities. Meanwhile
the captain received orders to insist on his rights, and to submit
a full list of expenses; in addition to which, as a precautionary
measure, five brokers in London and on the Continent were invited to
offer other cargoes.
From one end of the office to the other, employees who had been
secretly preparing to leave, remained seated on their stools and
pretended to be very busy arranging unimportant papers, while Miss
Winthrop-Smith, her eyes shining, a feverish glow in her cheeks,
spread across the world the majestic ire of _Harrison, Harrison & Co.,
Ltd._ The cables gushed from her machine, one after the other, correct,
complete, in long, unintelligible code-words which the chief clerk,
standing by her side, checked up one by one; and scarcely were the
cables finished, when the letters confirming them already began to take
shape beneath her fingers, in lines scanned by the click of keys worked
at top speed, blending in an uninterrupted clatter which, every twenty
seconds, stopped short and began again after the sharp ratchet sound
which announced the passing from one line to another.
She had just begun the last letter, when Mr. Harrison, Jr. himself, his
hat on his head, came to see how things were going. By the time he had
signed the letters already written, Miss Winthrop-Smith was finishing
the last line; and, standing beside her, he watched, for a moment,
her slender fingers hammer the keyboard, nimble, sure, disciplined,
manœuvring without error or loss of time under Miss Winthrop-Smith’s
zealous eyes and her pursed-up mouth. When the letter was finished, she
tore it out of the machine and handed it to him with an assured gesture.
The chief clerk who, blotting-paper in hand, hovered by, remarked
obsequiously:
“Now that’s what I call quick work! And it isn’t every stenographer who
can write at that speed without making mistakes!”
Mr. Harrison, Jr. signed the letter with an august smile, and replied,
as he rose:
“Yes! Miss Winthrop-Smith is a wonder, a real wonder!”
Alone, the “wonder” pressed her hands to her temples, closed her eyes a
moment, and then remembered she still had something to do.
Mr. Harrison, Jr.’s praise still rang in her ears, like the sweetest
music. In spite of the headache which was beginning to grip her
temples, she felt singularly alert, tense, over-excited, yet lucid.
Each of her movements seemed to her prodigiously exact, calculated,
like clockwork.
She stretched out her hand, took a sheet of paper, slipped it into the
machine and tapped the date. Then she jumped two or three lines, set
the margin at “15,” and stopped, her hands raised.... But she quickly
made her decision, and it was worthy in every way of the important
part she played in the firm of _Harrison, Harrison & Co., Ltd._, which
menaced German firms with a fiery sword. “_Dear Mr. Firkins_,” she
wrote at one go, jumped a line, paused once more briefly, then began:
“_I fully appreciate the...._”
Now and then she hesitated an instant to find the elegant, polite
expressions which, without being arrogant, would nevertheless give Mr.
Firkins to understand that he had aimed a little too high.... And when
she had finished the letter, re-read and signed it, she said to herself
that it would be difficult to improve upon it.
Five minutes later she left the office, envelope in hand, went to drop
it into the nearest box, and turned back toward Aldgate.
And then suddenly, before she had taken a step, the panorama of
Bishopsgate Street filled her eyes with its dismal ugliness: the
drizzling rain, the sticky mud on the pavements, the melancholy
gaslights which seemed to stand guard, like sentinels, over the sombre
buildings, the discouraged gait of the tired horses on the wet asphalt,
the people pouring out from every door, with sunken eyes, drawn
features, hurrying, backs bent beneath the drizzle.
With an involuntary grimace of fatigue and relief, she recalled what
the rain was like in the Leytonstone nurseries, where it fell in fresh
drops, driven by the wind, like wholesome little kisses on the leaves
and on the skin; and she thought of heavy-soled boots treading the
elastic soil, of the great fire burning behind closed blinds.... Or
else of the shelter of the greenhouses, where the air is soft and mild,
sometimes perfumed, as in a little fairy world, much better ordered
than the outside world, and of the grapes, ripening under the glass....
She remained standing, her feet in the mud, her heart sinking, as she
thought of all the inestimable things which are thrown away in a day,
and which never return.
TRUTH FAIR
The passage led to a narrow court, a sort of truncated alley with
place for two low, mouldy houses on each side and, at the end, a shed
where stood several push-carts in the last stages of dilapidation.
The first door in the passage, on leaving Brick Lane, opened into the
room behind the shop of Patricus, the baker; a little farther along
opened a second door and a broken window adorned with a large patch of
gray paper in the center. Above the paper, swung a sign which bore, in
golden letters, the words: _S. Gudelski, Shoemaker_; below, a line of
Hebrew characters and, lower still, written clumsily in chalk, _Repairs
done_. Two pairs of shoes, worn but polished, one on either side of
the paper square, constituted the window display, and the door, always
open, revealed the scaling plaster walls of the shop where the old man
bent from morning to evening over his block, handling the shoes with
hurried gestures--seeking to make up, by industrious application, for
the weariness which caused his worn hands to tremble on the tools and
the bits of leather.
The room was two feet below the level of the passage, and was reached
by three stone steps. It was extraordinarily low-ceiled, but large
enough so that the single gas-jet could not light it entirely. The
bright glow embraced the old man’s polished skull, the slanting line
of his yellow, wrinkled face bent over his work, his arms, bare to
the elbows, on which the swollen veins stood out; it cast also its
cruel light on the frock-coat hung on the wall--a shabby old levite,
threadbare, covered with spots, and prodigiously ancient; but, two
steps away, began the darkness which half shrouded the opposite
extremity where nothing was distinguished but an old leather armchair
occupied by a vague form almost entirely enveloped in odd pieces of
cloth. A more attentive examination revealed this to be a human
form--a heavy form, in which nothing lived but two tarnished onyx
eyes, a quick breath, and a hand which travelled lazily, but without
stopping, between the face and a paper bag placed on a stand. All this
was seen with some difficulty; but those who visited the shop did not
need to see. Everyone knew that the thick form in the armchair was Leah
Gudelsky, who was slowly dying. She was monstrously fat, with a fat
which cushioned her hands and which stretched the waxen skin taut on an
enormous face; but it was easy to see that her life was ebbing away.
This was detected by her weak, rapid breathing, the deep rings round
her dull eyes, the extreme lassitude indicated by each gesture of her
monstrous hands.
All the matrons of Brick Lane had said, turn by turn with a knowing
air: “It’s consumption, the doctors don’t understand anything about
it!” Gudelsky and Leah herself had invariably repeated: “Yes, it’s
consumption!” and all knew that the end could not be slow in coming.
The only human thing left in her was her passion for sweetmeats, and
these were about all she lived on.
Every morning her father went to a neighboring shop to lay in a store
of bonbons at three-pence a pound, and of caramel crumbs swept up after
the day’s sale. Sometimes a sympathetic neighbor brought her offering
in a paper twist.
Then, until evening, the old cobbler worked without respite, cutting,
nailing, paring the leather, worrying the shoes wedged between his
knees, stressing each busy gesture with a swing of his body, with a
quick jerk, as if to accelerate the lagging motions of his worn-out
hands; and, until evening also, Leah sucked the candies without a word,
filling the great leathern armchair with her already almost insensible
mass, seeming always to listen, to await from moment to moment, as she
munched, the call which was bound to come.
Outside, at the entrance to the dark passage, were Brick Lane and
the corner of Thrasol Street. The first shop on the left was that
of Rappoport, the tailor; then came Agelowitz, the pork butcher;
Pomerantz, hairdresser and perfumer, and Sunasky, whose window
displayed prayer shawls and Hebrew pamphlets. A little farther along,
ran Dean and Flower Street with its two rows of sordid houses, where
the submerged throng of the East End went to seek asylum at the rate of
four-pence a night. Those who had been unable to raise this sum, and
who wandered aimlessly through the streets, awaiting the dawn, dragged
between Whitechapel and Hoscton their bruised feet and their confused
dream of an Eden where there would be a great fire and mattresses to
stretch out on. Backs bent, they limped along the pavement, keeping
close to the wall, letting scraps of their soliloquies fall in the
deserted porches, and regarding with the same sly, hostile look the
shops and the passers-by--all that other portion of humanity which
had eaten and knew where to sleep; and, if degrees were possible in
their jealous malevolence, the best hated must have been those whose
names, so little British, were inscribed on the shop-fronts; for these,
surely, were not among the submerged. Only yesterday, it seemed, they
had been seen disembarking from the hold of German or Russian steamers,
ragged and miserable, watching with an anxious eye the bales and the
boxes which held all their belongings; and the second generation found
them solidly established in these streets of the overflowing Ghetto,
certain among them still needy, others already comfortably off, but
almost all well fed, fat and prolific, friends of law and order. They
were at home in Brick Lane. The shops displayed for them the familiar
commodities, the very posters spoke to them in their own tongue. It was
their young men who, work over, smoked cigarettes indolently in the
doorways of the shops; and it was their daughters who passed by twos
and threes, in their newest dresses, on the Friday evening pilgrimages,
westward bound, to seek finer, better-lighted streets, to gaze on the
palaces which might one day be the abode of their race, to choose the
camping-place of the hordes of the future, the multitudinous tribes
promised by their vast haunches.
Two steps from the street, in the basement where the old cobbler wore
out his hands on the hard shoes of the poor, the future was not among
the things which counted. It was the present which counted, the present
which was born anew with the ticking of each second, and against which
he had to struggle endlessly. For the old man, it represented an
alternative of poorly paid work and of repose, the precursor of famine,
and the exorbitant claims of his customers who, poor themselves,
thrifty and hard on others, demanded much leather and much hard labor
to be finished without fail for the morrow, the Sabbath--all for a
trifling sum; while for Leah, each minute of the present represented
still a little light and breath gained, a motion which was an effort,
and, on her palate, the sweet sensation of the candy which revived
once more her numbed nerves. The swift, hurried strokes of the hammer
fell dully on the leather; when they stopped for an instant, nothing
else was heard but the distant sound of people passing in Brick Lane
with, nearer at hand, the murmur of the gas and the feeble panting
which came from the obscurity; and soon the tapping began again,
faster than before, hurriedly, frantically, for fear the first moment
of idleness might seem a desertion--might open the door to all the
irreparable things which must still be held back a little longer.
Outside, there was a sound of light, almost furtive steps. A shadow
filled the doorway, descended two steps, stopped on the third, in the
full glow, and, when the tapping of the hammer had stopped, a clear,
sweet woman’s voice was heard. It said: “I come to you in the name of
Christ, who died for us.”
Old Gudelsky looked up at the apparition, regarded it an instant, and
bent anew over his work. At each motion, he shook his head a trifle
with the lurking smile of an old man full of experience, and the
hammer-strokes fell faster and stronger as if to drown the echo of the
childish words.
The unknown woman remained motionless on the threshold, standing very
straight, in an attitude of peaceful assurance. She took in, at a
single glance, the scaling, sweating walls, the foul earth floor, the
broken silhouette of the old man, and made an offering of this misery
and of her piety to Him who sent her. Her voice arose once more,
assured and sweet:
“I come to you in the name of Christ, who died for us.”
The cobbler shrugged his shoulders with a weary gesture, and said,
without anger:
“You are sure you have not mistaken the street? We are all heretics
about here.”
She replied gently:
“There is room for all in the peace of the Lord!”
He sighed an instant without saying anything, and turned in his hands
the shoe he had just finished. He held it quite close to his face to
get a good look at it. For his sight was no longer very good, and his
lips moved gently. Perhaps he was congratulating himself on a piece of
work well done. Perhaps it was a timid protest against the visits of
importunate apostles. This tall, slender figure, standing full in the
light on the threshold, embarrassed him. From the evangelist issued
an appeal which refused to be stifled, a sort of silent _hallelujah_.
A boundless faith shone in her clear eyes, clad her still childish
features with a confident dignity. She knew that she was charged with
an irresistible message, that she bore an elixir which healed all ills,
and seemed to await, at any moment, a certain miracle. Respect for her
mission held her straight, almost motionless, for fear a graceless
gesture might disfigure her divine burden.
She spoke anew, in a gentle voice which rose at the end of each
sentence, as if reciting the verses of a psalm.
“Just now,” she said, “you are in the darkness; but if you come to
Christ, you will be in the light, for the truth is there.”
The old man laid down on his knees the tool he was holding, and drew
his hand across his forehead. In the yellow gleam of the gas, his
wrinkled face had an expression of ingenuous simplicity, the naïvely
attentive air of a man who seeks painstakingly to do what is right.
“Surely!” he said, “the truth! Surely! But do we ever know it? It is so
hard!”
The girl shook her head and replied indulgently:
“What is hard is to leave the ways of error; but if you follow Christ,
the ways are easy, for He has said: My yoke is easy and my burden is
light. And there is no merit save in Him.”
He sighed once more, chose another shoe in the heap and, installing
it between his knees, looked at it with a dreaming air; then he spoke
to himself, wrinkling his forehead, and from time to time raising his
candid eyes to the light.
“That is it,” said he, “surely! We are all seeking the truth; but it
is so hard! There are all sorts of truths, little and big, and there
is a truth for everyone, but how many of them last? I myself have seen
the truth face to face, like you, several times, even, and each time
it was a different truth; but I have lived too long and my truths are
dead. Yes! You are going to tell me that there is but one truth, which
is yours; and that you are sure of it; but I, too, was sure; I was sure
several times!”
He leaned forward a little, his hands on his knees, and across his old,
yellow, wrinkled face passed a look of touching distress, the pang of
an unappeased hunger which would suddenly awake.
“In Warsaw,” he said, “in Warsaw, I was sure, and the truths yonder
are stronger than those here. Those here are not so important, after
all--they can wait; but yonder it seemed that, if everything were not
changed without delay, the world would crumble in its own rottenness,
and that there was so much injustice and misery, so many lies, it
could not last a day longer. Yes! I was sure, and there were many like
me. We had meetings, you see, in a shop, secretly, and all those who
came there were sure. They were peasants and workmen, and university
students, and even their professors; and there were some among them who
could talk in such a way that they made us weep and cry with anger,
because of the injustice and wickedness of those in power. And when
they said how it was bound to come to an end, and how the people’s
cause was going to triumph inevitably, because justice and truth were
with it; and how the new age was about to dawn, and tyranny to fall;
and how each would live his life freely and without strife, this seemed
so simple and so easy to understand that it would be enough to repeat
it outside for everything to be changed at a single stroke. Or else
they read us books, and then it was clearer still. There were sentences
which leaped into your head, which sprang from the pages like flames,
just as the sheen of a sword flashes from the sheath; and even when
those of us who could not talk so well, insisted on making speeches, we
understood them without listening to the words they said. It was like
a hymn whose refrain was sung by our hearts: ‘Liberty ... corruption
conquered ... an end to poverty ... the end at hand ... irresistible
propaganda ... the army with us ... the end at hand ... Liberty!’”
The old man stopped short and sighed softly; then he leaned forward and
took a handful of nails. The evangelist, still motionless, looked at
him with eyes opened in surprise. In the silence, Leah’s feeble panting
and the crackling of the paper bag as she touched it, announced that
the appeal had not yet come, that the gods tolerated her yet a little
longer.
In a lower voice, continuing to speak to himself, the old man began
again:
“That was the truth, nevertheless. We were sure, but such things never
happen as they should! They come too soon, before you are ready, and
never as you had foreseen them; some are surprised and are silent,
while others act too soon and go too far. At the last moment, it is
discovered that the other side has, perhaps, its arguments, too, or
at least its excuses; that all the misery does not come from the same
side; and then there was too much blood--blood shed by our comrades,
also--which did not seem to help matters much, and we belong to a race
which does not like blood. Cries and shots, answering bombs, and then
more cries; gutters running with burning kerosene which swept the
ruin from house to house, our shops burned or pillaged, and our girls
shrieking with horror in the hands of soldiers.... That evening, my
truth died; too many terrible things had happened, which were not all
the fault of the same men. It is dead. So long as it lasted, it was a
fine, strong truth; but after that, I was unable to see it again.”
The hammer beat with a dull thud on the leather, drove in one nail,
then another, and still others; and, at each nail, the old man shook
his head and sighed a little, as if he were nailing the coffin of the
glorious dreams he had had to bury. Silently he pared, filed, polished
the leather, contemplated the completed task with a dreaming air, and
placed the shoe beside him; then he took another, and spoke anew:
“That truth I have never seen again; but when I left Warsaw and came
here, I saw another, and this also was a real truth, and I was sure of
it. It was merely a matter now of working hard and obeying the laws;
for this time I was in a free country, where one man was as good as
another, and there was justice for all, with a chance for everyone.
“While I worked, my truth was there with me, and kept repeating to me
that this was the kingdom of peace which had been promised us, and that
if I was brave and patient, I should have my inheritance; and once
again I was sure. But that is dead, too. It has taken years to die,
fading a little every day. My first truth died in an evening, amid
cries and bloodshed, and the other wore itself out slowly, because the
things which I awaited were too slow in coming. I worked and worked,
and waited, and every morning, when I sat down to my work, it was a
little farther from me, and each time less certain and less clear.
“Now I am old, and I no longer await anything--anything but that which
must necessarily come. But I have seven children. They will take their
turn, and perhaps they will find what I have been unable to find. They
will have better luck or they will see more clearly. You see, one
seeks, one seeks with all one’s might, as long as one can; but those
who find are rare, because life is not long enough, and that is the
reason why one must have children. They try in their turn; often they
see scarcely any further, because they are obliged to begin over again,
and then it will be for their own children. I have seven.”
The evangelist opened wide her pale eyes on an obscure complicated
world. She knew she was right, but she felt also that there were things
she could neither explain nor understand. She shook her head and said
simply:
“There is truth only in Christ!”
And after that, she found nothing further to say. She put a tract on
a chair, near the old man, among his tools; crossed the room and put
another on Leah’s lap, then went out.
For a long time still, the noise of the work resounded under the low
ceiling; for a long time burned the light which announced to all the
existence of a weary old man for whom the hour of repose had not yet
arrived; and whenever he stopped for an instant to straighten his
aching back or to rub his eyes, he wondered which of the seven children
to whom he had given life, and who had left him, would successfully
accomplish the heavy task, would attain the certitude which had escaped
him. Would it be Benjamin who had left for America, where he was making
much money? Would it be Lily or else Deborah, two handsome girls, wary
and prudent? A little later he cast a rapid glance towards the shadowed
corner where Leah had dozed away in the great leathern armchair,
open-mouthed but scarcely breathing, monstrous and petrified, so little
like a living creature that it seemed impossible for her ever to awake.
Perhaps it was she, he mused, who would soonest find the truth!
And he said to himself that he, too, would soon find it, no doubt, and
that thus his great hunger would be appeased.
FEAR
I am going, as one of Kipling’s characters, the naturalist Hans
Breitmann, puts it, to tell you a story which you will not believe.
It is about a man who lived very peaceably on his income, was
considered all his life to be perfectly normal and well balanced,
enjoyed to the very end the esteem of his equals and the respect of his
trades-people, and died in a singular manner.
I made his acquaintance at Hastings, a city which gave its name to a
celebrated battle, an elegant watering-place which, of all the places I
know, is perhaps the one where man has most scientifically disfigured
the sea. It would be costly, and far from practicable, to bring the
sea to Piccadilly; but there is a very simple solution, which is to
transport Piccadilly to the sea-shore. The result is an admirable
promenade five miles long, as wide as the Champs-Elysées, lined on
one side by villas, hotels and shops of all sorts, and on the other
by a fine masonry wall which, at low tide, forms a very satisfactory
background for the beach and, at high tide, holds in check the
waves, turn by turn humbled and raging. It is an unequalled spot for
smoking a cigar in a well-cut flannel suit, between the splash of the
domesticated waves and the harmonies of a Hungarian orchestra; but for
those who love the free water and quiet cliff corners, “it is not the
thing.”
“It was not the thing,” apparently, for a smart-looking man whom I
met day after day, on this beach-boulevard, and it was probably that
which attracted us to each other. We exchanged severe opinions, one
afternoon, concerning the locality and its inhabitants; and next day,
happening to meet at bath-time, we swam together, with easy strokes,
out to where the sea, far from the little children playing on the
sand, from the over-dressed young ladies and from the befrogged
orchestras, really resembles the sea and recovers its independence.
He swam perfectly, with neither the impeccable style of a Hoggarty,
nor the formidable foot-thrust of a Jarvis, but like a man who is
accustomed to the water and is at home in it. Thereafter we took our
baths together regularly. He was not talkative and I was even less
curious, so that several weeks passed without either of us bothering
to find out about the other anything more than he had volunteered. He
announced to me one morning that he was leaving that very evening,
adding, somewhat to my surprise, that he lived on a little property
in Devon, and that he would be happy to see me there if I could find
time to go and spend several days with him. He dazzled me with the
delights of smoking a pipe face down in the thick grass, and spoke to
me of a pond which belonged to him and compared with which the sea,
at Hastings, was merely a dirty basin, without charm. I accepted his
invitation and acted upon it a month later.
He lived in an absolutely commonplace brick and plaster house, built
on the side of a hill. He showed me, behind it, a garden which ran
down the slope and pointed out, with a vague gesture, the valley below
us, saying that the water was there. I proposed an immediate bath, but
he replied, in an embarrassed tone, that it was better to wait until
evening and that, besides, it was tea-time. We returned to the house.
His tea consisted of brandy and soda, half and half. He drank three
glasses and we talked of bathing and swimming. Races and records did
not interest him; he swam the “over-hand” stroke perfectly--I had seen
him do it--but he did not even know how it was called. He told me,
with a meditative air, that all the men of his family had been very
fond of the water. His father had died of a congestion at the age of
seventy-two, while bathing in the neighborhood of Maidenhead, and his
brother had been drowned as a child in the water-grass--he did not say
where. I wanted, as a matter of courtesy, to tell him a story, too,
and spoke to him of a man I had known who, while swimming in a bay
on the coast of Ireland, had distinctly seen, several yards away, an
octopus measuring six feet, attached to a rock. It inspired him with so
terrible a fear that he made for the shore, with frantic strokes, tried
to hoist himself to the top of a boulder which turned, breaking his
leg, and he remained in the water a quarter of an hour, clinging to the
boulder, incapable of stirring, and shrieking with fright.
My host listened to me with wild eyes, his mouth open and his hands
clenched on the table. I asked him if he was nervous; he answered no,
poured out two fingers of brandy--his hand trembled a trifle--drank it
and looked out of the window with a stupefied air.
The sun was on the point of setting when we descended into the valley.
We had to cross a rough covert, then go to the bottom of a steep slope
in order to reach the water.
It was a big, wild-looking pond, completely surrounded with brush and
thickets, and somewhat curiously shaped. It was about a hundred and
fifty yards long and, at the point where we stood, at least sixty wide.
But the other end narrowed progressively and ended in a sort of canal
which measured scarcely four or five yards from bank to bank, and was
completely shaded by the foliage of a clump of trees overhanging it.
The water appeared perfectly clear, and yet was so singularly lacking
in transparency that, save right inshore, it was impossible to see the
bottom.
I began to undress tranquilly, enjoying in advance the luxury of half
an hour in the cold water, after a hot day. My host remained several
seconds without stirring, then abruptly removed his clothes, flung them
on the ground, drew on his bathing-togs, and again stood still, facing
the pond and panting slightly. I attributed his evident nervousness to
the influence of the brandy, and could not help thinking that there
was a good chance of his coming to an end some day through the same
unfortunate congestion which had finished his father.
I entered the water with a bound and, several minutes later, he
followed me. After a little hesitation, he first advanced slowly, with
prudent strides; then, when the depth was sufficient, he let himself
go gently, noiselessly and without splashing, and started at once
towards the narrow part of the pond, swimming with singular force and
precision. He stopped before the entrance to this sort of passage
of which I have spoken, and for several instants remained almost
motionless, moving about in the water with infinite precaution, his
face turned to the surface, under which he seemed to be scrutinizing
something invisible to me. His actions struck me as so strange that I
asked him what there could be at that end of the pond. He answered in
a low voice: “There’s ... there’s a spring,” and again became silent.
I, too, strove to distinguish what lay beneath us, and it was not long
before I perceived that the depth was much greater than I had at first
supposed.
All I could see of the bottom was the ends of the tall grasses which
stopped at about a yard and a half from the surface and swayed
perpetually, although the water was perfectly calm in appearance.
The existence of a spring at the end of this narrow canal which was,
perhaps, eight or ten yards long, did, indeed, explain the movement
which agitated them. They parted occasionally and then left between
them a sort of channel whose depth it was difficult to determine, and
which continued, like a path suddenly traced, to the vertical bank
at the end. There I could vaguely make out a hole--the spring, very
likely--which a new movement of the grasses screened a moment later. It
was quite the strangest corner of a pond I have ever seen.
I turned my head to make a remark to this effect to my companion,
but the sight of his face made me instantly forget what I was going
to say. He was pale--a fact which could be explained by the extreme
coldness of the water--but, above all, drawn and marked with sudden
wrinkles, and wore a curiously occupied, troubled expression. I was
still looking at him when he swam slowly towards me, always with
cautious strokes, and asked me, in a frightened whisper: “There isn’t
anything, eh?” I was about to answer him gently that there was nothing
at all, and that perhaps we would do well to dress, when I felt the
deep layers of the pond stirred with a mysterious urge. The tall
bottom-grasses opened abruptly as if parted by the passing of a body,
and my host, whirling around convulsively, with a sort of groan, fled
towards the other end of the pond, stretching out in the water like a
hunted animal. His panic must have been contagious, for I followed him
at once with the same haste; but I had kept enough presence of mind to
note that he employed the “trudgeon” (double-over-arm stroke with a
single kick)--a stroke which I had never seen him use before--and with
so much power and skill that, far from overtaking him, I saw him, in
spite of all my efforts, gain on me each instant. When I reached the
shore, he had already left the water and, seated on the muddy grass,
open-mouthed, was panting and gasping in such a manner that I believed
he was about to die then and there.
He pulled himself together, however; and, a quarter of an hour later,
having dressed, we returned to the house.
I refrained from asking my companion any question concerning the day’s
incidents, having already catalogued him as an alcoholic, afflicted
with nervous disorders, and contented myself with observing him out of
the corner of my eye. He was, however, perfectly calm and normal all
the evening, drank only a few glasses of beer at dinner and, although
not particularly communicative, discussed various topics in the most
reasonable manner.
The next morning was equally peaceful. At luncheon I asked him if it
would not be preferable to take our bath a little earlier than the
previous evening. He acquiesced, but later found some trivial pretext,
and it was almost dusk when we left. He was, as before, not precisely
drunk, but unbalanced by the continuous over-excitation produced by
the alcohol and, as we approached the pond, gave signs of morbid
nervousness. He performed the same pantomime of abject fear and of
curiosity in front of the obscure hole where the spring was located,
advancing nearer, then nearer still, until, at the sudden recoil of the
grasses, he started abruptly in the water before turning to flee.
But I had taken care to place myself a little behind him and, seizing
him by the arm as he passed, I stopped him short. I was still holding
him, when the water seemed to become agitated behind him and, with a
sort of panting, he gave a sharp kick which threw him against me. Then
I distinctly felt on my leg the brushing of a long, swift thing which
passed close to my body--a thing which seemed to have started up from
among the thick grasses and whose sudden spring shook the deep layers
of the pond. I am not easily frightened, and not in the least nervous;
but, at this simple contact, fear, frightful fear, clutched at my
throat. I can recall nothing but a frantic flight, side by side with a
man who, at each stroke, gave a desperately agonized groan. I remember
confusedly that he still employed the “trudgeon”--a stroke which he had
always told me he did not know--and the strength of his effort left
a deep wake behind him in the troubled water; but this time the same
force urged us both, and I reached the bank before him.
When we had dressed, I turned a second to look at the pond, before
re-traversing the thicket. Its surface was marvelously calm and
shone under the dying light like a pewter plate; but it seemed to me
that I saw, at the far end, the inexplicable eddies which swayed the
bottom-grasses.
Not a word was pronounced between us concerning what had passed,
either that evening or the day following; but, when evening came, I
firmly refused to accompany him to the pond and gave him to understand
that, seeing the state of his nerves, he would do better to follow my
example. He shook his head without saying anything, and went off alone.
During his absence I was seized with a sense of the colossal absurdity
of the situation and, leaving him a word, I packed my bag and departed
without further formalities.
A month and a half later, I chanced to read in the paper a brief item
announcing that Mr. Silver, of Sherborne (Devon), had been found dead
in a pond belonging to him. When the corpse was discovered, it was
half out of the water, the hands clung desperately to the branches of
an overhanging willow, and the face was frozen in a mask of frightful
horror. The death was attributed to heart failure.
My own version was ... slightly different; but I did not deem it my
duty to give it at the time, for the simple reason that no one would
have believed me, any more than you will believe me now.
LIZZIE BLAKESTON
Faith Street falls into Cambridge Road, and Cambridge Road meets Mile
End Road. At number 12 Faith Street, lived the Blakeston family.
The father and mother had come from Lancashire shortly after their
marriage, and the new generation of Blakestons had never known any
other horizon than the rows of dirty houses and doubtful shops which
stretched between Mile End and Bethnal Green. To the east were Bromley
and Bow; to the west, Whitechapel, then the City and, farther still,
surrounded by a cloud of unreal splendour, the West End, where a
legendary aristocracy lived amid gold and purple, in self-indulgence
and pleasure.
The young Blakestons had only rather vague notions regarding the
existence of this far-off aristocracy, and bothered very little about
it. The interest of life was wholly concentrated for them in the
ceaselessly recurring question of things to eat--a question which
the cruelly irregular resources of the family too often rendered an
insoluble problem. When funds were low and credit was exhausted,
meals consisted uniformly of weak tea and bread thinly spread with
oleomargarine; moreover, the slices were sometimes criminally thin.
These mischances were particularly painful for Bunny, a fat, melancholy
boy whose eight years were haunted with dreams of abundant nourishment.
During periods of famine, he walked sadly up and down before the shop
which sold fried fish and potatoes, or else in front of the one where
massive suet puddings, strewn with occasional currants, were displayed
side by side with quarters of meat; and the delicious odor of hot
grease heightened his despair. In days of abundance, he ate with a
fierce resolution; and, even when stuffed, he lacked cheerfulness,
foreseeing the fastings to come.
His sister Lizzie was, as befits her sex, less exclusively preoccupied
with things of this sort. She did not in the least hesitate, on
occasion, to repel violently the incursions attempted by her young
brother on her share of the victuals; but when the victuals were
wanting, she readily and without great effort affected a lightness
of heart which filled Bunny with admiration. He could not understand
that his sister had, to sustain her, in the midst of privations and
tribulations, her art, which was for her an ideal and a consolation.
Lizzie was a dancer.
In any populous corner of London, may be seen, about the Italians and
their mechanical pianos, little girls who go through their evolutions
in pairs, with solemn determination, and lightly lift their run-down
shoes on the greasy asphalt. They despise the childish polka and the
languorous waltz. Their dance is a curious mixture of jig, of pavanne
and of cakewalk; but the cadence is impeccable, the suppleness of knees
and ankles reveals long years of practice, and they bring to the
accomplishment of the rite a gravity which commands respect.
Lizzie Blakeston was, at the age of twelve, the best dancer of Faith
Street, of Cambridge Road and perhaps, in a word, of all Mile End. Let
an organ be heard in a radius of a quarter of a mile of her abode,
and she arrived running and holding on with her hand a dilapidated
sailor hat. She rapidly repaired the disorder of her dress, tugged up a
stocking, pulled back a sleeve, pushed into place a mass of rebellious
locks; then she danced and the local ballerinas withdrew into the shade.
Not a mechanical piano in London played a tune on which she was unable
to embroider several ingenious steps: _Genevieve_, _Blue Bell_, the
_Miserere_ from _Trovatore_, or the _Marseillaise_--all, indifferently,
served her young genius. The mincing pace of the minuet and the
audacious eccentricity of the cakewalk blended in the evolutions of
her slender legs encased in tattered stockings. The excessive harmony
which escaped in floods from the mechanical piano took possession of
her like an imperious hand, lifted heavenwards her thin yellow shoes
with an offering gesture, rhythmed the movement of her swaying arms,
bent her and raised her again, enveloped her slightest movements in
an irresistible cadence; and, seized with a glorious intoxication,
Lizzie leaped, pirouetted and frisked about in the vise of the measure,
offering to the dimmed world a vague smile and hallucinated eyes.
Then silence fell. The Italian resumed his place between the shafts and
went away. There remained only a few belated passers-by, a handful of
mocking street-urchins, Bunny who, seated on the sidewalk, periodically
produced unexpected victuals from invisible pockets, and Mile End Road
of a winter’s evening, the sticky roadway, and the lights winking in
the fog.
* * * * *
The years passed; but years scarcely count in Faith Street. Without,
the tumult of catastrophes or of wars may break loose, sovereigns or
ministers may launch proclamations, banks crash, manufacturers make
fortunes, and actresses marry peers of the realm; none of these things
penetrates the heart of Faith Street. Far away in the west passes the
pomp of coronations and of funerals, the candidates at the coming
elections implore the votes of the sovereign people on flaming posters,
the newsboys run along Cambridge Road, crying tidings of defeat, but
Faith Street has no heed; and when night falls, it emerges from the
houses, renewing, from door to door, with wailing voice, the eternal
themes: the scarcity of work, the dearness of bacon, and the iniquity
of husbands.
Not that husbands are in reality guiltier there than elsewhere; only
they are generally without work--it is a curious circumstance that all
the men are without work in Faith Street--and, as there is nothing
in their homes which inclines them to joy, they depart to pursue
their ideal in the only way open to them, two-pence a glass, over a
wooden bar. When they have no money, they lean against the wall of
the “pub” and smoke resigned pipes while watching the traffic; or
else they go looking for work without ever finding it, and return at
evening--thirsty, naturally, and full of a legitimate sadness. They
are received with reproaches and insults, give free course to their
indignation, and Faith Street is filled with sharp outcries and the
clatter of overturned chairs.
The children are out-of-doors. They pick up bits of wood and paper in
the adjacent streets, build a fire right in the middle of Faith Street,
and play at trying to push one another into it. At irregular intervals
they return to the houses to see if there is something to eat, but
without much hope.
Lizzie Blakeston grew up among all these things. At thirteen, she was
entrusted with the entire work of the household, while her mother
cleaned the shops in Bethnal Green. The summary upkeep of the four
rooms of the house, the daily seduction of the grocer and the baker
who refused to extend their credit, occupied henceforth the greater
part of her time, and she had scarcely any leisure left to devote
to her art. Moreover, Lizzie took her duties seriously and derived
from them a dignity of bearing which provoked bitter raillery among
her acquaintances in Cambridge Road. When she returned home, Bunny
following close at her heels, carrying a loaf or the paternal pot of
beer, she lent but vague attention to the young persons who performed
about the mechanical piano, exhibiting to a rather jeering audience the
whole gamut of their steps and their attitudes. Invariably one of the
dancers stopped and said in a half-friendly, half-mocking tone: “Hello,
Lizzie!” Lizzie repressed a last pang of regret, replied graciously:
“Hello!” and passed on with a smile. This smile said as clearly as
words could have done: “Have a good time, girls, but life is not a
game, as you will discover sooner or later. Besides, if my father, Mr.
Blakeston, does not find anything to eat when he returns, there’ll be
a row!”
Life had, however, its agreeable moments. Saturday evening Lizzie put
on a currant-colored velvet dress, too old to be pawned or sold, but
still capable of producing a certain impression of splendour. Her
hair, done up in curl-papers all the week, was finally freed, forming
a graciously waved fringe which hid her forehead, not to mention two
well-disciplined waves above each ear. The remains of her sailor hat
were collected on her head and held there by means of a long pin whose
glass ball sparkled in the shop lights like an authentic diamond. If
her shoes happened to have holes or to have lost their soles, she was
content not to notice it. Bunny, disdaining these frivolities, did
not even dream of modifying his costume; but he followed her blindly,
and both went together in the direction of Mile End Road, whose broad
pavements were, on Saturday evenings, lined with marvels.
Nothing was changed in the shops. They were always the same shop
windows which, from Monday to Friday, had presented the same
merchandise in the same immutable order; but Saturday evening lent them
a special majesty. Five days out of seven they were, after all, merely
shops where people who had money could enter and buy, for cash, things
that were certainly desirable; Saturday evening their vulgar shop
character disappeared, and each window became one of the attractions of
a great, marvelous fair.
Certain of these windows, however, excited in Lizzie and Bunny a
directly covetous spirit which was not without bitterness. There was
a restaurant in Whitechapel Road the sight of which held them captive
for a long time, as they slowly sucked in their saliva and sighed at
intervals. Behind the glass were displayed a row of square tin dishes
which an invisible fire warmed gently from beneath. In one of these
dishes, sausages lay browning in grease; in another were portions of
meat of various forms; still others contained mashed potatoes or
fried onions. On a sheet-iron plate, boiled or baked puddings, studded
with currants, smoked slowly. Behind the dishes, moved an august,
apron-clad man in his shirt-sleeves, his cuffs turned up to the elbows,
who pricked the meat with an attentive fork, reared or demolished the
mountains of onions as the fancy took him, grasped the puddings bodily
in order to carve them. Placards on the wall boasted the lowness of the
prices: sausage and mashed potato two-pence half-penny; vegetables or
pastry, a penny the portion; tea, coffee or cocoa, a penny the cup.
After a long contemplation, Lizzie invariably said, in a detached tone:
“Bah! you’re not really hungry, Bunny!” Bunny replied, “No,” without
conviction, and ended by persuading himself. Not being really hungry,
he could thus contemplate with an indifferent eye the little carts of
the itinerant merchants who sold shellfish heaped up in a saucer and
sprinkled with vinegar, or pieces of eel floating in a soft jelly; and
also the pile of bananas and apples, the sugar-covered cakes, and the
broken Swiss chocolate sold at reduced prices.
Moreover, there were many other things to see in Mile End Road. Before
the doors of the “Pavilion,” posters pictured the most tragic phases
of the play then running. One of them showed the society bandit, in a
scarlet hunting-coat, making a hideous grimace as he pressed to his
bosom the heroine, whose face was convulsed with indignation. Another
represented the “ring” and two pugilists, bare above the waist. One
of them, who had just floored his adversary, stretched out his arms
towards a man in the crowd and announced in a terrible voice: “There
is the man who stole my wife!” The abject terror of the wretch and the
just anger of the boxer were strikingly reproduced in vivid tones.
Finally, there was the crowd: the incessant flood of humanity which
oscillated between Whitechapel and Stepney, passing, looking,
bargaining, without respite. It seemed as if all the light was
concentrated on the pavement, and the rest was only a great, deep
darkness. People emerged from the obscurity. Under the lights from the
windows, or the smoky flames of the lamps on the pushcarts, their faces
lighted up, became near and living for an instant, then disappeared
once more. The majority offered no interest for Lizzie. They were
people such as are seen every day, even in Faith Street: workmen who
passed with their wives, clay pipes in their mouths and children
in their arms, lovers, mothers buying their Sunday provisions, the
gilt-edged youth of Mile End, loitering indolently under the arch of
the brewery, where beer is sold through two windows. Lizzie paid no
attention to them. But when a group of young Jewesses passed, wearing
easily their costly dresses, she followed them with a look that was
hostile yet filled with admiration.
Mr. Blakeston, in his moments of eloquence, enjoyed thundering against
these strangers, evidently imported from half-savage countries, who
came to settle by thousands in the East End and snatch their means of
livelihood from honest workers. He never tired of stigmatizing them,
together with the government which tolerated them. The hereditary
contempt of the English workmen for the “forriner” was coupled, in him,
with the harsh resentment of the disinherited for more thrifty or more
skillful rivals. Lizzie had heard him treat this theme many times, and
she embraced all the emigrants of Whitechapel and its surroundings in
the same crushing disdain, mingled with almost superstitious fear.
Towards the men, the disdain predominated. Their fleshy noses, their
still uneasy eyes, their thick lips sometimes arrogant, sometimes
servile, marked them, for her, with the indisputable seal of the
inferior, ill-known races, Latin, Turkish, or Negro, who swarm in the
vague countries of the South, on which the British peace does not yet
reign. But when plump, deep-eyed, robust girls of the second generation
passed in groups, copiously powdered, a suspicion of rouge on their
lips, with an insolent air, Lizzie’s heart overflowed with bitterness
and envy. It was the overwhelming injustice of fate, the heart-break of
the undeserved happiness of others, the burden of extravagant desires
and the certitude of their futility. For Lizzie had very little faith
in miracles. And she went away.
Faith Street opened in the night like a dark passage. There was a
prudent wait at the foot of the staircase, ear alert, in order to learn
whether Mr. Blakeston was not, this evening, in a bad humor; and, if
nothing indicated an immediate danger, they went to bed without making
a noise.
* * * * *
A day came when the currant-colored velvet dress was seen to be
altogether too inadequate; Lizzie had grown and as, very naturally, she
continued to grow, leaving behind her the dazzling ornaments which had
been the sole pride of her childhood, she entered upon the maturity of
her fifteenth year.
Lizzie’s fifteenth year had nothing either impertinent or frivolous
about it. At this age, the young beauties of Mile End Road prepare
for love by exchanging grimaces and slaps with the representatives of
the opposite sex as they chance to meet, or yelling facetious remarks
at them across the street; and when, yielding to the ineluctable, they
enter, vanquished and docile, the “pays du tendre,” the first halts are
made before the little cart of the ice-cream merchant, in the orange
shop, or in the six-penny gallery of the “Pavilion.”
In the midst of these maddening temptations, Lizzie passed like a
sonnet heroine, mildly indifferent, calculating the price of bacon and
the quantity of bread necessary for the family. To tell the truth, she
took no pride in fulfilling conscientiously her housewifely functions.
She was simply very much afraid of scenes and brutalities, and strove
to avoid them. Once the indispensable was done, she contemplated the
disorder and the dilapidation of the dwelling with perfect serenity.
She had always known it thus, and felt not the slightest desire of
reform. She preferred to sit by the window and let the minutes and
the hours glide by, without thinking of anything, with the obscure
sentiment that each moment represented something gained, a little life
passed without serious annoyance, one more stage accomplished, without
effort, towards that thing which she awaited and which could not fail
to come.
It was not the Blue Prince whom she awaited. If the event which
was on the way had revealed itself as the apparition of a young
and marvellously handsome cavalier, Lizzie would have been cruelly
disappointed. It would be something much better--something which would
change everything, which would change, at one and the same time, Lizzie
herself, the color of the sky, Faith Street, the whole world and the
humanity which inhabited it. It would underscore a certain moment
of life with a heavy, definite stroke, and a great exultant voice
would announce: “Now we are going to begin everything again!” And the
beginning again would be something so marvellous that she did not even
try to imagine it.
When she was tired of sitting, Lizzie rose and stretched herself
gently. She had neither a morose return to life, nor a bitter
awakening. For she had not dreamed. She had done nothing but wait. And
as nothing had come this time either, and as it was getting late, she
lit the kerosene stove to prepare the evening meal.
* * * * *
It was a monotonous life, but it did not occur to her to complain of
it; and when a change came at last, it was under a form which brought
her nothing but annoyance. Mr. Blakeston, to whom his life-long
experience had, doubtless, taught the dangers of idleness, took it
into his head that the household concerns did not really constitute a
sufficiently serious occupation to absorb all his daughter’s time; and,
after some aphorisms on the sanctity of toil, he set out in quest. His
efforts were crowned with unexpected success; for, after some weeks
of research carried on with a fine activity, he was able to announce
to Lizzie that he had obtained her an employment in a rope-walk, in
Commercial Road, at eight shillings a week.
Lizzie showed no joy. She was satisfied to obey. She had henceforth to
get up very early, something which she did not like, and to go out,
still only half awake, in the cold of the wan morning. She had to toil
eleven hours a day in a workshop darkened with floating dust, between
walls vibrating perpetually with the roar of the machines whirring
below, and Lizzie did not like the work. She resigned herself, however;
first, because she was rich in all the passive virtues, and then
because there was nothing else she could do.
Her factory companions regarded her at first with distrust. Lizzie
made but feeble attempts to heighten her natural charms by artificial
means. She preferred, to every other sort, the simple amusements which
demand only a trifling effort, the placid pleasures of a lazy little
girl; finally, she found no other response to the facetious or gallant
remarks of the young men than a pale smile or a phrase of derisive
politeness. She experienced no confusion, and they were all very nice
... but such things were of no consequence. The belles of the rope-walk
judged her speedily and without appeal: she would never be anything but
a little goose. Others took her candid detachment for haughtiness, and
spoke with a disdainful curl of the lips of this child who put on airs.
But rancour and disdain little by little lost their edge against
Lizzie’s unalterable simplicity. They grew tired of wasting arrogant
sneers on some one who seemed not to be offended by them; and Lizzie
was offended by nothing. Her principal concern was not to be late in
the morning and to avoid trouble; and she was also ready to render a
service, not so much through desire to oblige, as because her own grief
left her almost indifferent. When the hostilities of the beginning
disappeared, and her comrades formed the habit of giving her friendly
taps on the shoulder, saying in a half-tender, half-mocking tone: “Bah,
Lizzie isn’t a bad girl!” these testimonials of friendship touched her
scarcely more deeply than the insults had done. She received them with
the same weak smile, which seemed a façade of gentle, inoffensive charm
before vague spaces, obscure limbos, which she herself did not know.
* * * * *
The Saturday when she received her week’s salary for the first time,
the working-day had been short, so that when she left the factory, it
was still broad daylight, and Commercial Road had a festal air. All
these people who passed her on the pavement had, like her, finished
their work, and were going home. The carriages and the trucks passed
very quickly, noisily, in haste to finish their last trip, and all the
faces had already assumed a holiday expression. Lizzie went along the
streets, happy to feel the warm sunshine on her neck, and thinking of
the eight shillings which she held in her closed hand. Pockets were not
safe enough; there would probably be some unsuspected hole in them, and
the idea of her week’s work scattered in the gutter gave her a shiver
of horror. It was at once more prudent and more agreeable to hold the
money in a very tight fist.
It took her a little time to realize that this money was really hers.
She could wonder how she was going to spend it, and it occurred to her
almost immediately that her parents would certainly expect to receive
part of it. She was not very sure that it was just, and she knew very
well that it would be disagreeable; but she also knew it would be
useless to resist.
She stopped a moment and, opening her hand, she contemplated her
treasure. There were two half-crowns and three separate shillings. Then
a wave of heroism swept over her, and she suddenly decided that she
would keep only the three shillings for herself. Thus she sacrificed
all idea of magnificent purchases, for you cannot get very much for
three shillings; but there would be sufficient to buy portions of
fried fish and potatoes for Bunny and herself, then two ice-creams,
two theatre tickets, and perhaps there would still remain enough to
acquire a pearl necklace next morning, in Middlesex Street.
When she reached home, she found Mr. Blakeston, who seemed to be
waiting. He remarked that it was really very nice to be free like this
a whole half day; then he demanded artlessly:
“Where’s the money?”
Lizzie handed him the two half-crowns. He looked at them a moment,
raising his eyebrows, slipped them into his left palm, and held out his
hand once more.
If Lizzie had spoken, she would probably have formulated a vain appeal
to justice, an indignant protest, perhaps also remarks which would
have called for punishment; but she said nothing. She opened her left
hand, her poor moist hand where the three silver pieces had left
their imprint on the clenched fingers; and when her hand was empty,
she understood, once for all, that this world was only an error, the
product of a gigantic misunderstanding from which she was forced to
suffer. Blakeston jingled the money in his hand, gave two shillings to
his wife to buy provisions, then, dropping the rest into his pocket,
went out whistling.
Lizzie, remaining alone in the room, with Bunny, sat down on a chair
and looked out of the window. A big piece of cardboard, leaned against
one side of the glass, served at once as blind and as curtain. On the
other half, there was a blue rag fastened with two pins and partly
raised. The sun had already disappeared from Faith Street. It must
still be shining somewhere, on the other side of the houses; but its
light had abandoned the two rows of mouldy house-fronts, brought
closer together, and there already reigned a mournful half-light which
announced, in advance, the approach of evening. After a silence, Lizzie
said in a trembling voice:
“If they’d left me the money, I’d have bought you a big dinner, Bunny,
and a ticket for the theatre.”
Bunny replied feebly:
“That doesn’t make any difference.”
And Lizzie began to cry.
She cried gently, almost noiselessly, like a tired child. The dusk
arrived slowly to conceal the dirty walls and to fill the chamber.
From the next room came, first, a noise of banging doors, then that of
grease sizzling as it melted. Bunny, in spite of himself, pricked up
his ears; and Lizzie, ceasing to cry, crossed her arms on the back of
the chair, and leaned her chin on her clasped hands.
“Their dirty factory!” she said. “They needn’t think I’m going to stay
there all my life!”
Bunny replied:
“Sure!”
After a pause, she resumed with greater assurance:
“What difference does it make, after all? Their dirty factory! It isn’t
as if it could last always, what?”
And Bunny, finding nothing better to say, repeated:
“Sure!”
* * * * *
Lizzie had been at the factory for some time, when the monotonous
course of her life was interrupted by an event, a great event: Uncle
Jim came to London. She had scarcely suspected his existence. He
had never been for her anything but a distant legendary personage,
obstinately attached to the black country, the cradle of her family;
then suddenly, entering one evening, she found him installed on the
best chair in the house, sharing a pot of beer with Blakeston, and
proclaiming in a loud voice, with a prodigious Lancashire accent,
his utter contempt for the capital and its inhabitants. He excepted,
however, his sister’s family. In his eyes, the Blakestons were, like
him, merely colonists, constrained, by the necessities of life, to
exile among the barbarians. At the first glance, he discerned that
Lizzie had remained a true daughter of Lancashire, and he contented
himself with that affirmation.
All the virtues which he deemed to be the exclusive appanage of the
northern counties, were found united in Lizzie, and on her evident
defects he closed his eyes. The truth was he had at once conceived for
his niece a solitary old man’s profound tenderness, and the advantages
of his protective affection promptly made themselves felt. In the first
place, he let it be known to all that he would allow no one to annoy
Lizzie; and the authority of a man who earns five shillings a day is a
thing which Faith Street does not discuss. Moreover, he decreed that he
was taking in hand his niece’s education, and that, first and foremost,
it was urgent and indispensable for her to learn to play the accordion.
He possessed one of these instruments and handled it with an
astonishing virtuosity. It was his unique talent and his principal
distraction; and he himself was quite ready to remark that, to have
attained such mastery, without musical instruction, his natural
aptitude must have been very far above the ordinary. When he played
sacred music, the tunes of the hymns and the psalms issued from the
accordion with so much force and majesty, it seemed it must be the
voice of the Eternal Himself thundering among the clouds; and when
he descended again to the sentimental melodies of the moment, the
dragging complaint of the instrument became so touching, so tender,
one was forced to believe that the green leather bellows contained an
imprisoned soul which, kneaded between his pitiless palms, exhaled its
harmonious pain to an appropriate rhythm.
When, for the first time, Lizzie heard him execute _Genevieve, Sweet
Genevieve_, with languorous _ralentando_ at the right places, she held
her breath and thought she would faint. She had always kept a secret
tenderness for mechanical pianos, organs, and brass bands, but this was
different. It was the miraculous linking of sounds, the true music,
enchanting and poignant, which was revealed to her; and the very idea
that she, Lizzie, could aspire to produce these quasi-divine harmonies,
filled her with a profound agitation. So it was not willingness that
she wanted, and she had, in Uncle Jim, an admirable professor, full
of sacred fire and of infinite patience. Yet her progress was almost
imperceptible, and her uncle himself, though encouraging her to
persevere, had to admit that Lizzie did not seem destined ever to
become one of the glories of the accordion.
Even after she had pretty nearly mastered the subtle management of
the handles and of the holes, the first rudimentary rhythms which she
succeeded in evoking were entirely wanting in life. The instrument
which, under the expert fingers of the professor, had roared with
majesty or sighed with tenderness, produced, between her hands, only
an anæmic complaint, a poor, feeble, uneven melody, less a song than
a weak lamentation, interrupted, unskilful, the appeal of a little
soul, elementary and sad. Uncle Jim took over the accordion, gave a
demonstration, offered a few counsels, preached force and audacity;
and Lizzie began again courageously, pressing her lips and opening
astonished eyes at her failures.
When he saw her ready to become discouraged, her uncle ended the
lesson and played one of the tunes of his repertory, to terminate the
evening agreeably. At other times he condescended to amuse Bunny by
reproducing, with his instrument, bird-calls, peals of thunder, and the
piercing cries of a crushed dog; and Lizzie, forgetting her despair,
laughed to the point of tears.
One evening he attacked a Cakewalk tune, and Lizzie, carried away by
the music, leaped up, lifted high her skirts, and began to dance. It
was a long time, a very long time, since she had danced; but all the
steps she had executed formerly returned to her in an instant; and
when she had crossed the narrow room twice, from wall to wall, she had
become once more the little girl with tattered stockings, whom the
droning of a mechanical piano intoxicated like a powerful philtre.
Her uncle, who had first watched her with a smile, motioned to Bunny
to draw aside the chairs and, stressing the cadence with the beat
of his heavy boots on the floor, he played all the dance tunes he
knew--waltzes, polkas and jigs--humming and shaking his head. And
Lizzie danced.
She danced because each measure of the music spoke to her with a
different voice, whispered to her to turn, to leap from one foot to the
other, to tap the floor with her heels, or to advance holding out her
arms. She followed the rhythm because she felt she must do so; and the
rhythm entered into her and suggested to her the necessary gestures,
lifted her feet and forced them to follow an invisible pattern with
precise steps, made her knees rise, swayed her quivering body on tense
hips, bent her slender neck beneath a heavy vertigo. There were clear,
lively cadences which seemed to fill the chamber with joy and give
the legs a supernatural lightness, delirious cadences which demanded
abrupt gestures and the brutal hammering of the boards with fevered
feet. Lizzie followed them all blindly, unfolding from wall to wall her
dance, nameless and untrammelled, grave as a rite, primitive as the
drunken flight of a gnat in a sunbeam.
Then the world stopped with a shock, and the shadow seemed suddenly to
descend, inexorable, after a long suspense.
The music had ceased, and Lizzie was seated on a chair, panting a
little, with a slightly astonished smile.
Her uncle placed the accordion on the floor, rested his hands on his
knees, and gave a long whistle.
“But, little girl,” he said, “you certainly do know how to dance!”
* * * * *
Uncle Jim understood at once that he had, until then, been on the wrong
track in trying to teach his niece music. It was clear that she was not
born for the accordion, but for the dance, and that it was on this side
they should both direct their efforts.
Lizzie was a little astonished and almost offended to hear it
insinuated that she still had much to learn. She remembered the
triumphs of her childhood and protested that some weeks of practice
would give her back all her former suppleness; but her uncle had his
ideas on the dance--particular and very decided ideas--and when he
exposed them to Lizzie, the revelation was almost as complete for her
as when she had first heard him play the accordion.
She had accomplished several exercises under his guidance, and was
resting. It was the hour when the sandman passes for children, and
when tired little workers reflect that there is now only a short
night between the present hour and the morrow’s toil. Uncle Jim was
seated, bending forward, his elbows on his knees, dreamily handling
his accordion from which, at each of his gestures, issued stifled
complaints.
“You see, little girl, any young goose whose knees are not too stiff
and whose waist isn’t made of wood, can kick up her feet in the air,
break herself in two, and call that dancing. But we can do better than
that, little girl, much better! The folks in high society take each
other by the waist and turn round, putting on airs, and they call that
dancing, too; but if you take a duchess and if you put her on a good,
sounding platform two feet square, and if you play her a dance tune,
a real one, which carries you away like the lash on your legs, and you
tell her to sing that tune with her feet, well, your duchess won’t know
how to do it! She won’t know how, little girl! And all her airs won’t
keep her from looking like a fool, because she won’t know how.”
When she heard this parable, Lizzie clearly perceived that her mission
in this world was to do what the duchess would not have known how to
do: to get up on a good, sounding platform and to sing a tune with her
feet; and that, aside from this, life would never be for her anything
but a colorless, joyless thing.
* * * * *
For the first time in her existence, Lizzie knew what it is to have a
real desire, a desire which haunts you, which leads you, and which,
forgotten for a moment, comes back to awake you with a start, in
the midst of the daily routine. She had moments of wild terror--the
terror of having begun too late, when there was no longer time, or
the further terror of something unexpected and inevitable, which
would come suddenly to stop her. Then her fear was dissipated and, her
habitual calm returning, she felt herself invaded by a great hope. She
was going, that very day, to return from the factory as fast as she
could, to drink her tea, to eat a slice of bread, and her uncle would
arrive for the evening lesson. She would listen to all his counsels
and would work very hard, without losing a minute, in order to hasten
her progress. And she would begin again the next day, and the days
following, and many other days as well, until that day when she would
be able to mount on the platform, her dream--the compact, sonorous
square which would be her pedestal--and there, scanning the miraculous
music with the precise tap of her heels and of her toes, to pour out
over the world the intoxication of the rhythm which excited her.
When she stared long enough at a certain point on the wall, without
thinking of anything, she saw her dream take shape in an image.
Everything was there: the glorious platform, Lizzie, a Lizzie somewhat
transformed, who had auroral hair, a conquering smile which was yet
very sweet, and probably a pearl necklace; and all about, there would
be ... she did not know just what, but it, too, would be glorious.
Certainly not the damp, narrow walls nor the dirty windows of the
rope-walk. It was perhaps faces, innumerable rows of bright faces which
would form an amphitheatre; but, whatever it was, it would be good, for
there would no longer be anything tiresome or ugly. And the beautiful
Jewesses of Whitechapel Road would turn yellow with envy.
She was generally recalled to the reality by some noise, or the
charitable kick of a neighbour who wanted to save her a fine; and she
set to work again cheerfully, with a somewhat superior smile, because
she alone knew what was going to happen.
And summer came. It came suddenly, after a late cold spring, and
perhaps it filled the countryside with marvels, but it weighed heavily
in Mile End and in Stepney. The sun heated the zinc roof of the
rope-walk white-hot, and turned into a stove the long workshop where
hemp dust floated in the air; and the warm hours dragged one after the
other through interminable days.
Evening arrived, however, but it brought Lizzie only Faith Street,
like a long tepid, sunless passage, filled with a stagnant atmosphere
wherein blended all the fetid odors of the day. When Uncle Jim was late
in coming, she went up to await him in the room on the first floor,
and sat down in her favorite place by the window. At this hour, there
often came over the roofs of the houses opposite a slightly cooler
breeze which announced the approach of night; and, even when the breeze
failed, the soft tints of the sky, between the chimney-pots, were a
sort of comfort.
Bunny, who generally kept her company, sometimes allowed himself to be
touched by the evening peace and revealed to her his aspirations. He
indicated the sunset with a vague gesture, and said pensively: “You
see, there, where it’s green. Ah! how far away that must be!” And,
after a pause: “I’d like mighty well to go there and see!” He was
probably thinking only of that part of the world which lay directly
below the horizon, with its shades of aquamarine; but Lizzie, imagining
that he aspired after the firmament itself, regarded him with a
suspicious air, and merely shook her head.
She experienced no desire of that sort. The idea of travel was
associated, in her mind, with numerous difficulties, great fatigue,
intrusion into an unknown and probably hostile environment. No, she
preferred to await her happiness where she was.... She felt confusedly
that she had a quantity of wishes to formulate; but she could scarcely
separate them one from the other. They formed a whole, a complete
system, whose advent would come to modify a state of things entirely
too defective; but, separated, they would lose their magic.
Little by little gathered the darkness, peopled with vague forms,
sprinkled with lights, and Lizzie caught herself dreaming that, if
one of her desires could be realized, she would wish, most of all, to
have evening last longer. In the first place, the evening was often
cool and agreeable. Work was over, and there was still the whole night
before it was necessary to begin again. The harsh necessities of the
day, the odious abuses, the flagrant injustices ceased, after all, to
be so intolerable. Perhaps tomorrow, or a little later, everything
would arrange itself; and, in any event, so long as evening lasted,
there was no need to think of it. Evening was an hour of repose and
of compensation, which came to rectify, with a light touch, the
irremediably warped scales, and to give the poor world almost its
whole measure of peace. Lizzie would dearly have loved to have it last
longer. For the moment, she demanded nothing more of it.
The creaking of a door announced her uncle’s arrival, and she descended
to meet him. Several moments later, Faith Street was shaken in its
torpor by a refrain which rose alertly and lightly--a dance tune which
seemed to launch a defiance to all heavy, motionless things, and to
bear the rest away in an irresistible round. And very soon another
sound, still more alert, the tapping of two living feet on the floor,
mingled with the music.
At first they followed the cadence timidly, hesitating a trifle. Then
when this became lighter and stronger, their beating rose also, precise
and clear, scanning the refrain, cutting each phrase of the music up
into clean-cut taps; and they ended by dominating the voice of the
accordion, by filling the house with a great rhythmic clamour which
melted into a continuous roll or spaced itself into intervals, mumbled
a prayer with discreet little blows, went mad, changed into defiance,
passed through the window, insistent and brave, to tell the indifferent
universe that within, behind the stripped walls and the worm-eaten
door, there was Lizzie Blakeston, little Lizzie, who danced danced,
danced....
* * * * *
One Saturday evening, when she returned, Lizzie found her uncle in the
room on the ground-floor. His face and his bearing exuded mysterious
satisfaction. He greeted his niece with a friendly nod, then glanced
towards something which occupied the end of the room.
Lizzie followed his look and, clasping her hands, gave an “Oh!”
of exultant surprise. The summary furnishing of the room had been
enriched since the night before with a square platform built of boards
skilfully placed together--a little platform which was divined, at the
first glance, to be well constructed, strong and light, elastic as a
spring-board and sonorous as a drum.
Lizzie perched herself on it with a leap, tore off her hat and threw
it on the table, tapped her heel several times as a test, broke into a
sharp laugh, immediately resumed an air of preternatural gravity, and
said: “Good!” And Uncle Jim grasped the accordion with a broad grin.
The children who played in the middle of Faith Street stopped suddenly
in their games and, after a short search, came to crush multi-coloured
faces against the pane. They arrived just in time to see the dancer
stop; for her uncle had placed his instrument on the table and, leaning
back in his chair, regarded his work with an air of modest satisfaction.
“Well!” he said, “I did it myself, this afternoon. It’s good. It
doesn’t look like much, but you have to know how.” Then he arose and
assumed once more his mysterious air. “It’s only the beginning,” he
began again. “Put on your hat, little girl, we’re going out.” Lizzie
opened wide her eyes and obeyed.
They descended Cambridge Road, turned to the left in Mile End Road, and
followed the broad pavement as far as the “Paragon.” Her uncle said
negligently: “We’ll not go in this evening, but we’ve always a right
to look at the programme.” Lizzie read the names one after the other,
saluting those of the stars with admiring exclamations: “George Mozart!
Will Evans!... Chirgwin! Oh! Uncle! Chirgwin!...”
Her uncle answered evasively:
“Yes, it’s not bad; but let’s see what they’re giving next week. And
that! What’s that?”
“That” was a yellow poster which announced that the management, in
order to discover new talents capable of appearing on a music-hall
stage, was organizing, for two weeks later, a grand competition open
to amateurs only, of both sexes, who were invited to present a number
composed by themselves before a jury made up of persons well known in
the quarter.
Lizzie read the poster to herself, in a placid tone, indifferently,
and, turning round, encountered the gaze of her uncle, who rubbed
his chin as he looked at her with a mocking air. It was only then
that she understood, and the thing appeared to her, at the moment, so
prodigiously enormous, that she could only open her eyes in surprise,
shrug her shoulders and, her fingers stiff with emotion, heave a long
sigh, while all the gas-jets on the front of the theatre performed an
hysterical saraband before her eyes. Then she remained motionless on
the pavement, still without an idea in her head, her mouth open in the
form of an O, holding her breath; and the noise of the carriages and of
the trams in the street, a moment suspended, returned to fill her ears
with a confused thunder.
The first moment of stupor over, she understood more clearly; and,
taking in with a look the broad pavement flooded with light, the
imposing theatre front and the uniformed doorman, doubted herself.
“Oh! Uncle!” she cried. “You believe?”
Her uncle smiled a superior smile.
“I take the responsibility myself,” he said. “We still have fifteen
days, little girl, and you’re in good hands!”
After an instant’s silence he added:
“And the first prize is two pounds.”
They walked a little farther along Mile End Road, retraced their steps
and stopped again to read the poster attentively. Then they went home.
Lizzie walked with assurance along the middle of the pavement. She held
herself very straight and her cheeks burned a little, but her surprise
was entirely dissipated.
She said to herself, very deliberately, that she might perfectly well
have guessed it was something of this sort that was going to happen.
A little girl who dreams of fairy tales hardly takes the trouble to
calculate exactly how and when the miracle is going to manifest itself
for her; and she had not attempted to imagine these details in a
precise fashion. But the miracle was there. It had not yet arrived,
to be sure, but it was almost within reach of her hand, tangible,
infallible. Uncle Jim, who did not believe in fairies, answered for it.
It appeared to her nearer and still more certain when she had returned
to the little house in Faith Street, where the new platform, pushed
into a corner, seemed to await. The room was lighted only by the
uncertain gleam which came from the street, and there was no mirror;
but Lizzie dragged the board platform into the middle of the room and,
from it, facing the window, she sketched several gracious curtsies and
peopled the darkness with her smiles.
It was still merely Faith Street. At intervals were heard a noise of
distant quarrels, a child’s cry, the complaints of a drunkard who,
ejected, bewailed and threatened, turn by turn, before his closed door.
The silence itself was peopled with vague modulations, with thousands
of those uneasy cracklings peculiar to the fragile houses of the poor,
and the feeble light from the street illumined only the scaling walls,
one-eyed windows, the narrow roadway strewn with refuse; but Lizzie
could now contemplate all this with serenity. She was no longer angry
at anybody, she thought already of the present hour with a sort of
anticipated tenderness, and experienced only an immense pity for all
those who had nothing to expect.
She repeated to herself softly: “In two weeks!” and sketched a
sprightly step. The light clack of her soles on the boards troubled
the silence of the night, and she stopped short, thinking she had
heard someone stir above. The mere idea that Mr. Blakeston had perhaps
returned and might be disturbed in his sleep, chilled her enthusiasm.
She went out, closed the door with precaution, and took off her shoes
before ascending the staircase.
* * * * *
This fortnight did not appear very long to her. She had waited so long
that two weeks more or less did not really much matter, and these two
weeks were different from all those which had preceded them. It was
no longer a question of hollow dreams or of improbable hopes. The
marvellous event which was to inaugurate the new era had taken shape--a
shape convincingly, indisputably real. It was no longer anything but a
date on the calendar, a date underscored with ink, which nothing could
keep from arriving.
And then Lizzie was far too occupied to be impatient.
First there had to be chosen the dance, the irresistible tune which was
to ensure her triumph. Then the music must be copied out on carefully
ruled paper for the “Paragon’s” orchestra. It was long work, and she
had to take terrible pains to avoid blots, to keep to the line and,
when it was finished, to remove the finger-marks with a bit of rubber.
Then, in addition to all this, time must still be found to work harder
than ever, to learn all the shades of the selection by heart, to give,
in executing it, all its sure and brilliant “finish” which should
contrast with the mediocrity of rival exhibitions. The hours spent
in the workshop flowed by with an irksome slowness, but the evenings
passed in a state of fever.
It was only in the course of the second week that Lizzie woke up to
the fact that there was a capital question which had, until then,
been neglected: the costume. She thought of this for the first time
one morning, while dressing, went over in her mind the contents of
her wardrobe, and abandoned herself to the completest despair. Its
inadequacy was so evident that it seemed impossible to arrive at a
satisfactory solution. She considered the problem all day and decided
she would be obliged to resort to borrowing. One factory comrade had a
hat decorated with yellow feathers which she would perhaps consent to
lend. Another possessed a very beautiful black satin gown.
Lizzie recovered her serenity a little; but when she imparted her
project to Uncle Jim, he reflected several moments, and presented
surprising views.
“Little girl,” he said, “if you have the fine hat and the black satin
dress, perhaps they’ll please the gallery, but you may be sure the
folks in the expensive seats won’t find them great shucks! They’ve seen
better than that, they won’t be astonished, and perhaps, in fact, they
won’t be pleased at all. You mustn’t forget that they’ll have paid two
or three shillings for their seats, and that it’s their opinions which
will count in the management’s eyes.”
He deliberated several minutes, then said with decision:
“Do you know what you’re going to do, little girl? You’re going to
dance in your factory outfit. Just so, with a linen blouse, nice and
white, the sleeves rolled back to the elbows, and without a hat.”
Lizzie looked at him with horror, appeared to submit slowly, and said
in a trembling voice:
“And the skirt?”
Her uncle had a moment’s hesitation.
“Ah! the skirt!” he said. “We must see.”
He scratched his head meditatively, and reflected:
“The skirt,” he resumed, “hasn’t much importance. Any short skirt
that’s not too bad will do. All that’s necessary is for it to be short
enough not to bother you, and to show up your footwork.”
As Lizzie did not appear convinced, he continued persuasively: “You
see, little girl, what you want to put on is something distinguished.
Not a negro dance number, with spangled dresses, wriggles and screams.
No, nothing but the platform, the orchestra, and you. You’ve got
talent, and I’ve shown you the best I could.”
Her uncle seemed to struggle with his vocabulary. Filled with a great
desire to express his thought, he struck a lyric strain and became
solemn.
“It’s not every one who can understand dancing like that, little girl!
But it’s better, it’s decent, and it’s distinguished. In the first
place, if it was a matter of cutting monkey-tricks on the stage, you
couldn’t do it. It’s not in the family. Instead of that, you’re going
to show them what you can do: proper, pretty work, and so much the
worse for those who’ll see nothing in it. But you mustn’t forget one
thing, little girl! It’s this, that if you want to have the two pounds,
and perhaps something along with it, you must show them some real
dancing, and not monkey-tricks!”
Lizzie nodded her head, serious. She had understood. But these counsels
were superfluous. She had a mission, and it was certainly not to make
faces and cut capers. Her uncle himself considered Saturday’s test
only as a happy opportunity by which they must try to profit. Lizzie
knew better. After Saturday, everything was going to change, the clock
of time was going to stand still a second and to start again, gaily, to
mark the happy cadence of the new days. It was an authentic miracle,
revealed to her alone, which came secretly and which must be rejoiced
over in hiding: the realization of a promise made long, long ago to a
good little girl who had patiently waited.
* * * * *
This was the impression which still dominated her when she made her
appearance on the stage of the “Paragon”: the confused sentiment that
she had waited all her life, through interminable years, and that the
means had at length come. She had no doubt as to the result: during
a quarter of an hour spent in the wings she had seen pass on the
boards a dozen competitors whose plaintively snuffled love-songs or
flat monologues had aroused only a far from flattering hilarity or
impatient murmurs. There had been but one success, a carpenter who
juggled with his tools, but Lizzie was not afraid.
When her turn had arrived, she waited until an assistant in tinselled
uniform had dragged her platform to the middle of the stage. Then she
came on, dignified and business-like, with rapid steps, looked to see
that the board box was perfectly placed, and mounted upon it. She then
perceived that her entry had been greeted by a great clamour--a clamour
born somewhere at the back of the cavernous hall, which came to cross
the footlights in an avalanche of sound.
All her friends of the rope-walk were above, in the six-penny gallery.
The bar was deserted. Those who had been unable to find seats,
clustered about the balustrades, and they cried at the top of their
lungs: “Lizzie! Oh, Lizzie! Hurray!” The spectators in other seats
began to cry also: “Lizzie, Oh, Lizzie!” amid laughter. The astonished
orchestra did not yet begin to play. Lizzie remained motionless on the
platform, impatient, almost angry; but the occasion was so so solemn
that she could not refuse to contain herself and wait a little longer.
Perhaps it was the fragility of her silhouette, of the slender body,
alone in the middle of the stage; perhaps the naïve humility of the
costume, of the short flowered skirt, of the poor bodice with turned-up
sleeves; or still again the childish simplicity of her white face under
the light locks, her solemn air of waiting ... but there was something
about Lizzie, always motionless, rigid and dignified under the familiar
calls, that was strangely pathetic.
The orchestra started a dance, and the audience, amused and
sympathetic, became quite silent when it saw that the little doll had
begun to dance.
* * * * *
She danced with care, following exactly the cadence, a little annoyed
because the orchestra played too loudly to suit her, and she was afraid
of not being heard.
Before her, there was a vast hall, almost filled, innumerable rows of
seats occupied by spectators, men and women, who were silent. All this
was exactly as she had imagined it. After the first bars, her sight
became clouded, and she no longer saw before her anything but a great
yawning space peopled with attentive faces, towards which the light
tapping of her feet on the boards went as a poignant appeal.
There was a difficult, very lively, passage, and the desperate fear of
falling behind the music filled her with a feverish agony; but after
that, it was a full, easy rhythm, a song clear, light, joyous, which
carried her along utterly. She wanted to hold out her hands, to offer
her open palms, to let herself sway with the measure, to sing with her
whole body the hymn of desire and of glee. How could she make all these
people who listened, understand? But Uncle Jim’s words came back to
her: “Above all, little girl, no monkey-tricks!” And she let her arms
fall back to her sides.
She must, however, make herself heard, and she strove to introduce
into her dance all that she had been forbidden to express otherwise.
A quick, light cadence she turned into a naïve _hallelujah_, the
delirious psalm of a little creature young and intoxicated with the
sunshine; and when the rhythm slowed down again, languished, dragged a
trifle, she raised her childish eyes to the yawning hall and narrated,
with a hesitant, monotonous tapping, her short colorless life--long
with weariness--her discouraged hope, the dream still ill-defined,
obscure and frail.
And it was finished! She heard the last bar arrive with a wild
surprise, clacked her heels very loudly the last times, as an appeal,
a protest--it was too short; she could not be judged by it; it was so
important for her; she should have ... and the orchestra was silent,
the hall abandoned its immobility, was suddenly filled with various
movements and with a great confused noise. Lizzie, forgetting the
gracious curtsey she had planned, descended from the platform and
entered the wings, a little giddy, her heart in her mouth, calling upon
the gods to witness that it was too short and that she could do much
better.
A big gentlemen stopped her by the wrist and, without letting go,
advanced two steps and listened. She listened, too, and said to herself
that many people were applauding, but that they did not seem to be
clapping very loudly. A woman’s voice, shrill as a whistle, rose above
the uproar:
“Lizzie!... Lizzie!... Encore!”
The big gentleman turned round, nodded with a paternal air, and said:
“It’s a success, little girl, a real success!”
And the American woman-juggler showed her dazzling teeth in a
protecting smile.
Afterwards? Well, afterwards there was the deliberation of the jury,
the proclamation of the result, hailed by new cries of enthusiasm
from the gallery; and Lizzie was led to the middle of the stage to
be handed two new sovereigns in a little blue plush purse. Later,
there were all the friends who waited at the door, overflowing with a
hitherto unsuspected affection and with very shrill congratulations;
and there was Uncle Jim, smiling and superior, who asked to see the
sovereigns and, distrustful, rang them on the pavement.
But, in the midst of all this, Lizzie could not rid herself of an
inexplicable agony and she repeated softly, the length of Mile End
Road, that it was too short and that it could not count. What? It was
already finished? The familiar faces, the well-known voices, the daily
scene--nothing was changed in all that. Everything was as before, and
there Faith Street opened before her anew, narrow and sombre, gathering
between its soiled walls the stifling evening air, all its poor smells,
and the sadness of the night.
* * * * *
When Lizzie awoke, she was suddenly conscious of the great calm which
reigned at once in the house and out of doors. The silence of the
street was troubled only by vague domestic noises and the distant
echo of a lazy voice. She rubbed her eyes, murmured: “Sunday,” and
buried her head again in her pillow. A little later, she reopened
her eyes, without stirring, and all that had happened the evening
before came back to her in successive images. She remembered the
two sovereigns she had confided to Uncle Jim for greater safety,
and the size of the sum warmed her heart. Reflecting, she said to
herself that the trouble she had taken was surely worth that much;
and, several moments later, she found herself sitting up in her bed,
her chin on her knees, trembling with indignation. For two pounds,
forty shillings, two little pieces of gold, which would not be of the
slightest use to her, she had sold her future! That was what she had
done. She had perfected herself in an accomplishment through labour
and perseverance. She had acquired a talent--a rare talent, which had
cost her long efforts--and consequently much value. A great hope--the
hope of better days, of a different life, of the revenge which must
come sooner or later--had penetrated her, accompanied her everywhere
and always, had made her support the injustice of men and of fate,
the long hours in the factory, the shoes with their holes, the rancid
margarine, the featherless hats, and many other things; and then the
events had followed their course, the day of the apotheosis had come
and now everything was finished! Of all that her just hope had promised
her, there remained only a blue plush purse which held two sovereigns.
Nothing was changed. Life was going to go on as before, with this
difference, that she no longer had anything to expect.
She did not clearly understand what had happened. She did not know whom
to blame; but there was a dishonesty somewhere, a theft; and, inasmuch
as what had been filched from her was her due, her only belonging and
the essence of her life, the injustice was so crying, the theft so
cruel, that a just God should never have tolerated them.
Lizzie told herself all these things, seated on her bed, her arms
around her bended knees, and a crisis of impotent anger against the
iniquity of men brought the tears to her eyes. The past being full of
melancholy and the present uncertain, she tried to console herself by
imagining once again the future under dazzling colours; but, after a
brief effort, her poor courage crumbled, and the idea of the long years
to come shook her with a shudder of horror. They presented themselves
as a long gray warp, woven of toil and of weariness, where the
interminable succession of the days traced the same monotonous design.
She could imagine very exactly what the future would be, because it
would be absolutely like the past. Only, in the past, there was, at the
end of long dismal days, the consoling light of a promise--the promise
of all the things which had not arrived.... Lizzie remembered having
read in a book printed in big letters, for little children, the story
of a fairy who walked “in the midst of a golden cloud.” She felt a sort
of bitter vanity in thinking that she, too, had walked in a golden
cloud, dazzled and blinded; and, of the beautiful cloud, there remained
but two derisive fragments, enclosed in a blue plush purse.
In the midst of her despair, the idea came to her that there was, as
always on Sunday, the Middlesex Street market, several minutes away
from her home, and that the two sovereigns, so despised, might, after
all, judiciously employed, do a great many things. She arose, made her
toilette with the greatest care, and descended. Her mother remarked to
her that, when one got up at such an hour, it was absolutely useless
to hope to find anything to eat. Lizzie smiled haughtily, and went to
sit on the doorstep to await her uncle. He arrived soon and, at her
request, handed her the treasure with an indulgent smile.
Walking down Mile End Road, Lizzie thought that the pettiness of the
price in which her dream was condensed, was something astonishing,
almost tragic. She held there, in her closed palm, all that remained of
a world of mirage, slowly erected and dissipated in an evening. These
two pieces of gold were, in a certain sense, relics, all that remained
to prove to others, and to recall to herself, the existence of the fine
edifice destroyed.
When she reached Middlesex Street, she remembered suddenly that she had
as yet eaten nothing, and she breakfasted then and there on a portion
of jellied eel, two ice-creams, and a cake of chocolate. Then she let
herself be carried along by the crowd and followed the street to the
end, looking at the shop windows.
She was still perplexed, when a sudden push drove her towards a corner
of the pavement where pairs of shoes stood in rows. To tell the truth,
she would have preferred to keep her money for less useful objects; but
the voice of reason made itself heard, and she bought a pair of yellow
shoes slightly worn, but ravishingly pointed. Refusing the offer of a
newspaper to wrap them in, she went and sat down on the pavement in a
little side street, put on the yellow shoes and abandoned the old ones.
Having done so, she decided that, since she had just been practical
and provident, the next purchase would be an article of adornment.
After a long hesitation, she decided on a fur. It was August, but the
merchant dissipated her last doubts by assuring her that really fine
furs were worn all the year round. She also bought a pearl necklace, a
brooch, a pink velvet bow with which she adorned her hat, and a saffron
silk handkerchief with her initial embroidered in blue. After this,
she really could no longer feel sorry for herself, and her principal
concern was to dispose these various ornaments with sufficient art for
them all to be seen at the first glance.
This done, she went back up Whitechapel Road as far as the “Pavilion,”
then retraced her steps, walking slowly in the middle of the pavement,
but striving not to reveal a vulgar pride in her bearing. By the
time she had reached her starting-point, she understood that, in this
quarter, her toilette could not really be appreciated. Since, for once,
she happened to be well dressed, she would go and show herself in more
elegant spheres; and, without waiting longer, she lifted high her
skirt, took the corner of her fur between her teeth so as not to lose
it, and caught an omnibus in three strides. As it was not the moment to
consider the cost, she bought a three-penny ticket, reserving the right
to descend when she liked. She hesitated several times and half rose,
but restrained herself and left the omnibus only when the conductor
wearily announced: “Marble Arch.”
Lizzie, on the pavement, regarded the railing and said “Hyde Park!”
in a low voice charged with respect. Then she dusted her fur with
tender little taps, took the saffron silk handkerchief in her hand, and
entered high society with a natural air.
It is good to walk in the streets and look at the shop windows. It
is sweet to eat a raspberry ice slowly; sweet also to lie late abed
Sunday morning, or else to go in a carriage as far as Epping Forest
and rest one’s eyes on really green grass and on trees not planted in
rows; but to stroll slowly along the paths of a park when the sun is
shining, and when one has a new fur, yellow shoes, a pearl necklace
and an embroidered silk handkerchief, is more delicious than all the
rest. It is a joy so complete and so pure that every satisfaction of
petty vanity ends by disappearing. One seems to have emerged from the
hard shell of working days, to be installed in a superior circle where
dazzling toilettes, the well-groomed setting, and polished manners
render life sweet, easy and beautiful; and, through sympathy, the
most ordinary gestures and even the natural course of ideas assume a
mysterious distinction.
So Lizzie walked in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens as long as
daylight lasted, and was perfectly happy. At the end of the day she
went towards the band-stand and sat at some distance from it to enjoy
her last hours. The sun sank behind the distant trees, edged some
scattered clouds with softly dazzling tints, then disappeared entirely.
In the midst of the dusk which fell upon the park, the band continued
to be heard playing military airs, with a gay, martial rhythm, to which
the slow approach of twilight lent an unexpected melancholy.
Lizzie remained without stirring in her armchair, resolved not to leave
before the last possible moment, yet feeling that her happiness was
ebbing from her. It was too dark now for people to see her fur, the
pink bow on her hat, or the silk handkerchief which, however, she kept
half spread on her knees. The dusk thrust her pitilessly back into her
sphere. She was no longer anything but an insignificant little thing,
lost in the night.
When the music ceased, people rose from their seats and passed in front
of her on their way out; there were, above all, ladies--ladies with
soft, swaying gait, whose silhouette, divined in the dark, appeared
refined and elegant. They were fine ladies, surely, whether or not they
bore titles. The luxurious indolence of their slightest gestures said
to onlookers: “Now we are going home to our houses where there are soft
lights, four-post beds and silver services.”
Lizzie remembered the evening when Uncle Jim had awaked her high desire
by speaking of duchesses who never would have known how to dance.
Well, she knew how to dance as the fine ladies would never have been
able to, never; but little they cared! They had not even come to the
“Paragon” to see her win first prize; and, had they come, they would
have forgotten it in less than an hour, returning to their pleasures,
to their pretty things and to their pretty lives, while little Lizzie
went back to the dark regions, with her two sovereigns and, within
her, something broken which cried out its pain. The money was already
partly spent. It had given her several hours of satisfaction, and here
it was already finished, while the other voice within her began again
its mournful clamour, reminded her relentlessly of her despair, seemed
to drive her on towards some dread asylum.
She, too, arose and went towards the gate. She no longer sought to
look distinguished. In the first place, she felt she was not even well
dressed. The other women wore no furs, and probably, if they had seen
hers, before it was dark, they would have laughed. They would have
laughed softly, without bursts, through politeness, and they would have
passed on, with swaying bodies in their silken skirts, towards the
carriages which certainly awaited them a little farther along. A great
thing to know how to dance! It was less difficult than being rich, less
witty than wearing rich costumes and doing nothing!
In the sombre paths of the park and later, on the omnibus which took
her back to Mile End, Lizzie felt a strange pride arise in the midst
of her anxiety--the pride of those who have nourished great dreams and
have not been understood. There would be a sort of bitter nobility to
bear about in Faith Street, even in the rope-walk--the consciousness
of unrecognized aspirations. She now felt herself delivered from petty
obligations and vulgar duties, called to walk in ways strewn with
laurels and briars, where go the great souls whom life has treated
unjustly.
This pride fell somewhat when she reached the house, where the rest of
the family were assembled. On the table was a pot of beer with glasses.
Even Bunny had a little beer by him in the bottom of a goblet, and was
eating nuts diligently. Blakeston saw the new adornments at the first
glance, and frowned, but Uncle Jim admired sincerely:
“It’s astonishing,” he said, “the difference a little dressing makes
all of a sudden in a girl!”
Lizzie kept a tragic silence, and Bunny, divining her sadness, offered
her some nuts.
Her uncle pursued placidly:
“Oh, well! Folks have a good time when they can, and then to work on
Monday! So, little girl?”
The “little girl,” with pinched lips, took off her hat, put down her
fur; then, suddenly giving way, let herself go on the table and, her
head between her arms, sobbed wildly. The nuts, slipping from her hand,
bounded from the table and rolled along the floor, where Bunny picked
them up.
In the midst of the stupefied silence, Lizzie’s tearful voice
pronounced pitifully:
“I don’t want to! Oh, I don’t want to!”
Her uncle, who still did not understand, asked slowly:
“What doesn’t she want?”
Between two desperate sobs, she replied weakly:
“To work. Oh, I don’t want to!”
Hearing this shameless pretention, Blakeston wanted to protest
indignantly, but her uncle stopped him with his hand.
He sought laboriously for something to say, and found nothing. Mrs.
Blakeston, who did not take a girl’s nerves too seriously, examined the
fur with interest. After a little while, Uncle Jim, having definitely
recognized his powerlessness to find words of consolation, offered her
some beer. Then, seeing that this subterfuge did not suffice to stop
the tears, he advised her to go to bed.
She climbed the stairs, still sobbing, and wept a long time on her
pillow. Life was too hard. The way of great souls was all briars,
without any laurels; and even the forgetfulness of sleep was no comfort
for her, because of the morrow which was already coming.
* * * * *
At quarter past five, Lizzie rose, descended to light the oil range
and fill the kettle, then went up again to dress. Beside her bed there
was a bit of mirror, hung on a nail. When she did her hair before it,
she noticed that her eyes were red, and said aloud: “I don’t care!”
Studying herself more attentively, she discovered something else--that
she would never be able to look like a heroine--any sort of heroine.
The heroines of vice and crime, the rebels, had a haughty mien, deep
eyes with a dominating look, a dead-white complexion, carmine lips, an
arrogant carriage of the head, enchanting and cruel. She, Lizzie, had
none of these things. As a virtuous, innocent, persecuted heroine, she
would have been more acceptable; but such heroines always had an air of
chaste distinction, of dazzling virtue which marked them for inevitable
triumph at the end. What she saw in the broken mirror was, without
possible illusion, the face of a tired, troubled little girl, who was
getting ready to work all day, for eight shillings a week, and did not
like it. There was, then, no hope for her! When she had reached this
conclusion, she perceived that she had now just enough time to drink
her tea hastily and to snatch a bit of bread to eat on the way.
She was nibbling as she reached Mile End Road, and the glory of the sun
rising above the houses struck her as an insult. She said to herself:
“The fine ladies are still in bed!” and looked hostilely at the rosy
sky. The fact that she had risen in time to see the dawn was the bitter
proof of her servitude. But it was only when she found herself once
more at her accustomed place in the workshop, harnessed anew to the
long, irksome task, that she tasted to the full the horror of the life
which was beginning again.
It was quite possible that, in twenty-five years, she would still
be there. Twenty-five years! She tried to count how many days that
made, but soon abandoned the calculation, having arrived at figures
so great that they ceased to have any meaning. The continuous whir of
the machines seemed the very symbol of eternity. They worked smoothly,
tirelessly, rapidly, exempt from the imperfections and weaknesses of
a precarious humanity, and all these things which revolved without
stopping--the fly-wheels, the long steel shafts, the belts and the
gears--were lives, lives, lives which passed. They followed each other
in long, inexhaustible files, performed several rapid revolutions, wore
out and entered the void, replaced by others, all resigned and docile.
Innumerable generations succeeded each other without complaining, and
already the machine called, with its soft purring, the little girls who
had thought to escape it.
The luncheon hour brought all her friends, who demanded a detailed
account of everything that had happened, what the manager of the
“Paragon” had said, and how she was going to spend the two sovereigns;
but Lizzie was not in a humour to talk. The curiosity of these
pretended friends appeared to her stupid and vulgar, and their various
exclamations, all of which came to: “Hasn’t Lizzie the luck!” shocked
her like inappropriate remarks at a funeral. For she bore to the earth
that day a great secret full of pride, something like the remains
of a person of high birth who had lived in exile, and whose name,
even after her death, it was forbidden to reveal. These other girls
did not understand. They would never understand, and they annoyed
her. Naturally, when she showed her bad humour, she was accused of
ridiculous vanity, and her comrades cut short their congratulations to
say, in a mocking tone:
“Ah, it seems hard to go to work again when you’ve been on the stage!
You’ll have to get used to it, however, Liz!”
Lizzie replied:
“Perhaps!”
And she was the first to enter the factory.
The machines kept on whirring. It seemed as if they must continue thus
for centuries and centuries, and as if all the generations to come
would scarcely suffice to accomplish their task; but Lizzie was no
longer in a state of resignation. A fever of revolt panted in her,
making her hands tremble, and all her frail will was up in arms against
fate. What excited her most of all was the inequality of the struggle.
On one side there was a great, irresistible and perhaps just law which,
since the beginning of the world, bent those who were resigned, and
those who were refractory, under the same yoke; and, on the other
side, there was little Lizzie who opposed herself to the inevitable
and aspired to escape the common lot. Yet, she would have to yield
sooner or later, unless.... She stopped a moment in her work, looking
open-eyed at the wall; and something great and solemn entered the long
hall filled with dust, veiled the mean setting, covered all the noises
of common life, and whispered in her ear promises of escape.
She thought: “How simple it is!” and was astonished not to have thought
of it sooner. It was a revenge, the only one possible, but dazzling;
a defiance launched against all the great powers of oppression; a
tragic, beautiful end which would fittingly close a great grief ...
and she had read in the papers that there was almost no pain. The fine
ladies themselves, if they learned of it, would be forced to respect.
Her friends in the rope-walk would perceive confusedly that they had
hidden among them a higher, purer soul; and when the knell of her
departure sounded, somewhere in the infinite a just and compassionate
voice would announce:
“She who is leaving us is little Lizzie, who knew how to dance!”
Once the idea had come to her, she did not even dream that there could
be the least hesitation. It was the glorious, simple solution, which
met every requirement, and for which she needed no one’s permission.
And she would be a heroine, after all!
The hours which passed after that were sweet and easy, and the
slightest things assumed a mysterious meaning, as if ennobled by the
reflection of what was to come. When the day’s work was done, Lizzie
left the factory with a pleasant smile, and followed Commercial Road
towards the docks, a little excited, but full of pride. She felt she
was going to accomplish something great and heroic there, which must
raise her forever to the rank from which she believed for a moment
she had fallen, and put a seal of authentic nobility on her abortive
efforts. People would say: “She must really have had a nature above
the ordinary, since she died because she had not been recognized!” And
death would thus give her her aureole more easily and more surely than
success.
She had walked fairly quickly and perceived that it was still too soon.
Night was only beginning. The river would be covered with barges and
steamers. She might be disturbed, and she desired to finish without
haste, gently, in an august frame of peace and of silence. So she
walked along the streets, looking about her, with curiosity. Everything
she saw--people, houses and shops--was ugly--ugly without distinction.
There was nothing worth a regret in all that. Besides--she understood
it now--even the West End houses with their columned fronts, the quiet,
distinguished squares, the shops with thick rugs, and even jewels and
furs, could not have satisfied her entirely. She said this without
envy and without spite, and she was proving it, since she was about to
renounce for ever the hope of all these things, which no one could have
taken from her.
When the night was a little farther advanced, she again took the
direction of the river, skirted Limehouse church, and followed the dark
streets, seeking the spot she had in view. She soon found it. It was
a narrow passage between two walls which led to a section of quay. On
both sides, the water of the river lapped softly against the high walls
of the deserted wharves. From the quay, a foot-bridge led to a pontoon
anchored in the current, to which steamers moored.
At the corner of the quay there was a public-house whose windows were
still lighted. When she was sure there was no longer anyone without,
she passed quickly and noiselessly, and crossed the foot-bridge.
The water was perfectly calm, yet the pontoon swayed gently with a lazy
motion, as if rocked by the wake of something which had just passed. On
the other side, there was the double security of the black water and
of the sombre walls of the warehouses. Here and there the lights of
several motionless steamers cast their long, quivering reflections on
the river. The distant whistling of a tug muffled by the night. Various
noises from the city arriving at intervals in confused echoes. And that
was all. This pontoon which swayed gently on the dark water had the
air of a haven, and its profound solitude seemed, indeed, a promise of
final peace.
Lizzie reached it running, saw the lights glimmering in the water,
almost under her feet, and stopped. She knew that, at the left, very
far away, was the sea, and, on the other side, London, and she was glad
to see the tide was ebbing. She thought what a vast and mysterious
thing was a river which traversed the cities of men from one end to
the other, pursuing, in their midst, its own life, which nothing had
been able to change. How many of those things such as little Lizzie was
about to become, had it already borne on its troubled waters and rolled
on its mud-flats? Poor girls who had been driven to the last refuge
because they had believed that honour and love were important things.
Old people who had lived too long and too harshly, and did not feel
strong enough to wait any longer. Bankrupt, vanquished, forsaken, they
had come to it, and they had found what they sought, as she was going
to find it in her turn.
She took two steps towards the edge and stopped again. Lizzie was not
afraid of death. Only ... she was terribly afraid of the black water,
and she drew back slowly to the middle of the pontoon and strove to
recall her great sorrow so as to arouse herself a little.
It came suddenly, with its train of disillusionments, of iniquities
and of intolerable vexations. Of all those women who had sought an
asylum in the deep water, there was, surely, not one who could have
had as sound reasons as Lizzie! What was it to have been betrayed
or abandoned! Not to have had enough to eat! She! Her hope had been
stolen from her; occult, maleficent powers had suggested to her an
obscure dream, had nourished it, fanned it, made it grow from day to
day, only to filch it suddenly from her in a cruelly incomprehensible
fashion! There remained now nothing but a great distress, the vague,
interminable future, the irksome toil.... And the two sovereigns were
already spent!
When she had thought of all this, Lizzie covered her eyes with her
hands, walked straight before her, felt the ground fall beneath her
feet, and let herself go with a shiver....
* * * * *
On the first floor of the house in Faith Street, the family council was
assembled. Mr. Blakeston looked at his brother-in-law’s watch, and
said bitterly:
“That’s what happens when you leave these children their money! They
pass their evenings out of doors spending it like fools!”
His wife added:
“And what fine ideas! You saw the fuss she made last night, saying she
didn’t want to work any more!”
Uncle Jim interposed benevolently:
“Bah!” he said. “At her age, they say that, and then next day think no
more of it. You mustn’t complain, all told; everything has ended well.”
Everything had, indeed, ended well, especially for Lizzie, whom the
ebbing tide urged gently to the ocean.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Typographical errors and misprinted punctuation corrected.
Author’s spelling of “Gudelski” (page 111) retained.
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