On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Mr. David Mosscrop lounged
against the low stone parapet of Westminster Bridge, and surveyed at
length the unflagging procession of his fellow-creatures plodding past
him northward into the polite half of London town.
He had come upon the bridge in a melancholy frame of mind, and had
paused first of all gloomily to look down at the water. His thoughts
were a burden to him, and his head ached viciously. This was no new
experience of a morning, worse luck; he had grown accustomed to these
evil opening hours of depression and nausea. The fact that it was his
birthday, however, gave uncomfortable point to his reflections. He had
actually crossed the threshold of the thirties, and he came into the
presence of this new lustrum worse than empty-handed. He had done none
of the great things which his youth had promised. He had not even found
his way into helpful and cleanly company. The memory of the people with
whom he spent his time nowadays--in particular, the recollection of the
wastrels and fools with whom he had started out yesterday to celebrate
the eve of his anniversary--made him sick. He stared down at the
slowly-moving flood, and asked himself angrily why a man of thirty who
had learned nothing worth learning, achieved nothing worth the doing;
who didn’t even know enough to keep sober over-night, should not be
thrown like garbage into the river.
The impulse to jump over the parapet hung somewhere very close to the
grasp of his consciousness. His mind almost touched it as his eyes dwelt
upon the broad, opaque mass of shifting drab waters. He said to himself
that he had never before been so near the possibility of deliberate
suicide as he was at this moment.
He did not allow the notion to take any more definite shape, but mused
for a while upon the fact of its lying there, vaguely formless at the
back of his brain, ready to leap into being at his will. Of course, he
would not give the word: it was merely interesting to think that he was
in the same street, so to speak, with the spirit of self-murder.
After a little, the effect of this steadily drifting body of water
seemed to soothe his vision. He grew less conscious of mental
disturbance and physical disgust alike. Then he stood up, yawned, and
glanced at the big clock-tower, where the laggard hands still clung to
the unreasonable neighbourhood of seven o’clock. For some reason, he
felt much better. The sensation was very welcome. He drew a long breath
of satisfaction, and, leaning with his back to the stonework, fell
to watching the people go past. By a sudden revulsion of mood, he
discovered all at once that the excess of the night was now offering him
compensations. His brain was extremely clear, and, now that the lees
of drink were gone, served him with an eager and almost fluttering
acuteness which it was pleasant to follow.
He noted with minute attention the varying types of workmen, shopgirls,
clerks, and salesmen as they trooped by in the throng, and found himself
devoting to each some appropriate mental comment, some wondering guess
into their history, or some flash of speculation as to their future. The
instantaneous play of his fancy among these flitting items brought great
diversion. He rollicked in it--picking out as they trudged along side by
side the book-keeper who was probably short in his accounts, the waiter
who had been hacking the wrong horses, the barmaid with the seraph’s
face who at luncheon time would be listening unmoved to conversation
from City men fit to revolt a dock labourer. It was indeed as good as
a play, this marvellous aggregation of human dramatic possibilities
surging tirelessly before him. He wondered that he had never thought of
seeing it before.
From amusing details his mind lifted itself to larger conceptions. He
thought of the mystery of London’s vast economy; of all its millions
playing dumbly, uninstructedly, almost like automata, their appointed
parts in the strange machinery by which so many droves of butchers’
cattle, so many thousands of tons of food and trucks of clothing and
coals and oil were brought in daily, and Babylon’s produce was sent out
again in balancing repayment. The miracle of these giant scales being
always kept even, of London’s ever-craving belly and the country’s
never-failing response, loomed upon his imagination. Then, stifling
another yawn, it occurred to him that a brain capable of such flights
deserved a better fate than to be banged out by a dirty tide against
some slime-stained wharf-pile down the river. Yes, and it merited
a nobler lot in life, too, than that of being nightly drenched with
poisonous drink. Decidedly he would forswear sack, and live cleanly.
The hour struck in the clock-tower. The boom of the great bell swelled
hopefully upon his hearing. The chime of the preceding quarter had
saddened him, because he heard in it the knell of thirty wasted years.
The louder resonance now bore a different meaning. A birthday exposed
a new leaf as well as turned down an old one. The twenties were behind
him, and undoubtedly they were not nice. Very well; he turned his hack
upon them. The thirties were all before him; and, as Big Ben thundered
forth its deep-voiced clamour, he straightened himself, and turned to
look them confidently in the face.
His eyes fell upon the figure of a young woman, advancing in a little
eddy of isolation from the throng, a dozen feet away. Even on
the instant he was conscious of a feeling that his gaze had not
distinguished her from the others by mere chance; it was, indeed, as
if there were no others. In the concentrated scrutiny which he
found himself bending upon her, there was a sense of compulsion. His
perceptions raced to meet and envelop her.
She was almost tall, and in carriage made the most of her inches. She
had much yellow hair of a noticeable sort, pale flaxen in bulk but
picked with lemon in its lights, about her brows. He thought that it was
dyed, and in the same breath knew better. He mastered the effect of
her fine face--with its regular contour, its self-conscious eyes, its
dainty rose-leaf of a chin thrust reliantly forth above a broad, white
throat--all in some unnamed fraction of a second.
The impression of her filled every corner of his mind. He tried to think
about who and what she was, and only built up scaffoldings of conjecture
to knock them down again. She was a girl who tried on mantles and frocks
in some big Regent Street place: no, the lack of dignity in such an
avocation would be impossible to one who carried her chin so high.
A woman journalist? No, she was too pretty for that. What was
she--type-writer, restaurant-waitress, saleswoman? No, these all wore
black, with white collar and wristbands; and her apparel was of an
almost flaring order. Her large-sleeved bodice of flowered blue silk,
snug to the belted waist, suggested Henley rather than the high road out
of squalid Lambeth. Her straw sailor-hat, jauntily borne on the primrose
fluff and coils of hair, belonged, too, not a mile lower on the river
than Teddington. She should by rights have a racquet in her hand, and be
moving along over the close-shaved lawn of Kanelagh’s park, on a hazy,
languid summer afternoon. What on earth was she doing on Westminster
Bridge, at this ridiculous hour, in this dismal company?
Then speculation died abruptly. She was close to him now, and he
recognized her. She was a young woman whom he had seen in the British
Museum reading-room a score of times. Her face was entirely familiar
to him. Only the other day he had got down for her, from the
county-histories shelves, two ponderous volumes which she had seemed
unable to manage by herself. She had thanked him with a glance and a
pleasant nod. He seemed to recall in that glance a tacit admission that
they were old acquaintances by sight. He looked her square in the
eye, meanwhile, the inner muscles of his face preparing and holding in
readiness a smile in case she gave a sign of remembering him.
For a moment it appeared that she was passing without recognition. He
had the presence of mind to feel that this was a gross and inexcusable
mischance. His feet instinctively poised themselves to follow her, as
if it were for this, and this only, that they had tarried so long on the
bridge.
Before he could take a step, however, she had halted, and, in a wavering
fashion, moved sidelong out of the main current of pedestrian-ism. She
stood irresolutely by the parapet for a few seconds, with a pretence
of being interested in the view of the river and the prim stretch of
Parliamentary architecture on its right bank. Then, with a little shrug
of decision, she turned to him.
“It is a fine morning,” she said.
He had stepped to her side, and he bent upon her now the smile which had
so nearly gone a-begging. “I was afraid you hadn’t noticed me--and I had
quite resolved to go after you.”
She flashed inquiry into his face, then let her glance wander vaguely
off again. “Oh, I saw you well enough,” she confessed, with a curious
intermingling of hesitation and boldness; “but at first I wasn’t going
to pretend I did. In fact, I don’t in the least know why I did stop. Or,
rather, I _do_ know, but you don’t, and you never will. That is to say,
_I_ shan’t tell you!”
“Oh, but I do know,” he answered genially. “How should you imagine me so
deficient in discernment? Only--only, I think I won’t tell either.”
She looked at him again with a kind of startled intentness, and parted
her lips as if to speak. He fancied that he caught in this gaze the
suggestion of a painful and humbled diffidence. But then she tossed her
head with a saucy air and smiled archly. “What a tremendous secret we
shall carry to our graves!” she laughed. “Tell me, do you sleep on the
bridge? One hears such remarkable stories, you know, about the readers
at the Museum.”
He regarded her with pleasure beaming in his eyes. “No, I go entirely
without sleep,” he replied, with gravity, “and walk about the streets
turning a single idea for ever in my mind; and every morning at
daybreak--oh, this has gone on for years now--I come here to watch for
the beautiful girl with the yellow hair who some time is to come up to
me and remark, ‘It is a fine morning.’ A fortuneteller told me, ever so
long ago, that this was what I must do, and I’ve never had a moment’s
rest since.”
“You must be very tired,” she commented, “and a good deal mixed in your
mind, too, especially since yellow hair has come so much into fashion.
And did the fortune-teller mention what was to happen after the--the
beautiful lady had really appeared?”
“Ah, that is another of my secrets!” he cried, delightedly.
They had begun to stroll together toward the clock-tower. The throng
bustling heedlessly past with hurried steps gave them an added sense of
detachment and companionship. They kept close together by the parapet,
their shoulders touching now and again. When they reached the end of the
bridge, and paused to look again upon the river prospect, their manner
had taken on the ease of people who have known each other for a long
time.
The tide was running out now with an exaggerated show of perturbed
activity. The girl bent over, and stared at the hurrying current,
sweeping along in swirling eddies under the arch, and sucking at the
brown-grey masonry of the embankment wall as it passed. Her silence in
this posture stretched out over minutes, and he respected it.
At last she had looked her fill and turned, and they resumed their walk.
“I could never understand drowning,” she remarked, musingly; “it doesn’t
appeal to me at all, somehow. They talk about its being pleasant after
the first minute or so, but I don’t believe it. Do you?”
“There might possibly be some point about it--if one could choose the
fluid,” he replied, achieving flippancy with an effort. “Like the Duke
of Clarence, for example.”
“How do you mean? The papers all said it was influenza. Oh, I see--you
mean the Shakespeare one.” Her good faith was undoubted. “But no, we
were speaking of drowning--of suicide.”
“No, we weren’t,” he said, soberly. The memory of his own mood a brief
half-hour ago stirred uneasily within him. “And we’re not going to,
either. What the mischief have you--young and healthy and happy and
pretty as a peach--to do with any such things?”
“In fact,” she went on thoughtfully, as if he had not spoken, “all kinds
of death seem an outrage to me. They make me angry. It is too stupid to
have to die. What right have other people to say to me, ‘How you must
die’? I was born to live just as much as they were, and I have every
whit as much right on the earth as they have. And I have a right to
what I need to keep me alive, too. That must be so, according to
common-sense!” Mosscrop had listened to this declaration of principles
but indifferently. A sense of drowsiness had stolen over him, and,
yielding to it for the moment, he had hung his head, with an aimless
regard upon the pavement. All at once he caught sight of something that
roused him. His companion’s little boot, disclosed in movement beneath
her skirt, was broken at the side, and almost soleless. He lagged behind
for a step or two, and made sure of what he saw. The girl in the silken
blouse was shod like a beggar.
“Which way are you going?” he asked, with a pretence of suddenly
remembering something. He had halted, and they stood at the corner,
looking up Whitehall. He smothered a yawn with a little explanatory
laugh. “I made rather a night of it--it’s my birthday to-day--and I’m
half asleep. I hadn’t noticed where we’d walked to. I hope I haven’t
taken you out of your way.”
The girl hesitated, looked up the broad, stately street, and bit her lip
in strenuous thought of some sort.
“Good morning, then!” she blurted out, confusedly, and turned to move
away.
The impulse to be quit of her had been very sharply defined in his mind,
and had dictated not only his words, but his awkward, half-shamefaced,
half-familiar, manner in suggesting a parting. Now it vanished again
with miraculous swiftness.
“No, no! You mustn’t go off like that!” he urged, and sprang forward to
her side. “I only asked you which was your way.”
She was blinking her eyes in a struggle to regain facial composure. He
could see that she had been on the point of tears, and the sight moved
him to recklessness. It was not surprising to hear her confess: “Me? I
have no way.”
He took charge of her with a fine paternal tone. “Oh yes, you have! Your
way is my way. You are going with me. It’s my birthday, you know, and
you have come to help me celebrate it. What do you say to beginning with
a special breakfast?--or perhaps you’ve spoiled your appetite already.
But you can pretend to eat a little.”
The girl laughed aloud, with pathetic irony at some conceit which
curled her lip in scornful amusement. “Words rose to her tongue, but she
forbore to utter them, and stared up the street.
“You’ll come along, won’t you?” He had held up his hand, and a
four-wheeler, with a driver and horse of advanced years and dejected
aspect, was crawling diagonally across the roadway toward them.
She took courage to look him frankly in the face. “I shall be very much
obliged to you, indeed,” she said, keeping her voice up till the avowal
should be finished. “I’ve had no breakfast.”
The ancient cab, with a prodigious rattling of framework and windows
for its snail’s progress, bore them along past Trafalgar Square,
and westward through narrow streets, already teeming with a busy,
foreign-looking life, till it halted before a restaurant in one of the
broader thoroughfares of Soho.
When they had alighted, and the sad old driver, pocketing his shilling
in scowling silence, had started off, a thought occurred to Mosscrop.
“I tell you what we’ll do,” he broke forth. “Well decree that it’s your
birthday, too, so that we can celebrate them together. That will be
much more fun. And before we go into breakfast, I must get you a little
present of some sort, just to mark the occasion. Come, you haven’t
anything to say about it at all. It’s my affair, entirely.”
He led the way along past several shops, and halted in front of a narrow
window in which a small collection of women’s boots was displayed. A man
in shirt-sleeves and apron had just taken down the shutter, and stood
now in the doorway, regarding them with a mercantile yet kindly smile.
“It is the best Parisian of make,” the shoeman affirmed, to help forward
Mosscrop’s decision.
“You can see how different they are from ordinary English things,”
said David, argumentatively. “The leather is like a glove, and the
workmanship--observe that! I don’t believe any lady could have a more
unique present than a pair of real French boots.”
The girl had come up, and stood close beside him, almost nestling
against his shoulder. He saw in the glass the dim reflection of her
pleased face, and moved toward the door as if it were all settled. Then,
as he stepped on the threshold, she called to him.
“No--please!” she urged. “I think we won’t, if you don’t mind.”
“Of course we will!” he insisted, turning in the doorway. “Why on earth
shouldn’t we? It’s your birthday, you know. Come, child, you mustn’t be
obstinate; you must be nice, and do what you’re told.”
As she still hung back, shaking her head, he went out to her. “What’s
the matter? You liked the idea well enough a minute ago. I saw you
smiling in the window there. Come! don’t let a mere trifle like this
spoil the beginning of our great joint-birthday. It’s too bad of you!
Won’t you really have the boots--from me?”
“Well,” she made answer, falteringly, “it’s very kind--but if I do, I’d
rather you didn’t come into the shop--that is, that you went out while
I was trying them on--because--well, it is my birthday, you know, and I
must have my own way--a little. You will stop outside, won’t you?”
This struck him as perhaps an excess of maidenly reserve. He smiled
impatiently. “By all means, if it is your whim. But--but I’m bound to
say--I suppose different people draw the line at different places, but
feet always seemed to me to be relatively blameless things, as things
go. Still, of course, if it’s your idea.”
“No, if you take it that way,” she said, “we’ll go and get our
breakfast, and say no more about it.” She found the fortitude to turn
away from the window as she spoke.
“If _I_ take it that way!” The perverseness of this trivial tangle
annoyed him. “Why, I consented to stop outside, didn’t I? What more
is demanded? Do you want me to pass a vote of confidence, or shall I
whistle during the performance, so that you may know I am cheerful,
or what? Suppose I told you that I had been a salesman in a boot-shop
myself, and had measured literally thousands of pretty little
feet--would that reassure you? I might come in, then, mightn’t I?”
“No--you never were _that_--you are a gentleman.” She stole a perplexed
glance up at him, and sighed. “I should dearly love the boots--but you
won’t understand. I don’t know how to make you.” Looking into his face,
and catching there a reflection of her own dubiety, she burst suddenly
into laughter. “You are a gentleman, but you are a goose, too. My
stockings are too mournful a patchwork of holes and darning to invite
inspection--if you will have it.”
“Poor child!” He breathed relief, as if a profoundly menacing
misunderstanding had been cleared up. “Here, take this and run across to
that fat Jewess in the doorway there. She will fit you out.”
Presently she returned, with beaming eyes, and an air of shyness linked
with complacent self-approbation which he found delightful.
“Oh, I should simply insist on your coming in _now_,” she cried gaily,
at the door of the boot-shop, in answer to his mock look of deferential
inquiry.