All life is an adventure, even the most monotonous moments of it.
It is impossible to walk the streets of London without being
conscious of that spirit of the possibility of happenings which makes
life tolerable. It was not to feast their eyes upon unknown worlds,
or drench their hands in a stream of gold, that the old marauders
of England set forth upon the high seas. Assuredly it must have been,
in the hearts of them, that love of adventure, that desire for the
happenings of strange things which spurred them on to face God in
the wind, to dare Him in the tempest, to brave Him even into the
unknown.
Some of that instinct, but in its various and lesser degrees, is left
in us now. For one moment it rose in the mind of Sally Bishop, as
she turned into Bedford Street and directed her course towards
Piccadilly Circus. It had crossed her mind in suspicion--the uprush
of an idea, as a bubble struggles to the surface--that the man whom
she had found waiting outside the premises of Bonsfield & Co. had
had the intention in his mind to speak to her as she passed. Now,
as she looked sideways when she turned the corner, and found that
he had altered his direction--was following her--the suspicion
became a conviction. She knew.
In the first realization, the thought of adventure thrilled her. A
life, quiet and uneventful such as hers, looks of necessity for its
happiness to the little thrills, the little emotions that combine
to make one day less monotonous than another. But when, having
reached Garrick Street and, looking hurriedly over her shoulder, she
found that not only was he still following, but that he had
perceptibly lessened the distance between them, the spirit of
interest sank--died out, like a candle snuffed in a gale. In that
moment she became afraid.
It is nameless, that terror in the mind of a woman pursued. Yet
without it one of the first of her abstract attractions would be gone.
Undoubtedly it is the joy of the pursuer that the quarry should take
to flight. Would there be any chase without? But long years of study
amongst the more advanced of us have made the fact of rather common
knowledge. The woman has learnt that to be caught there must be flight,
and, in assuming it, she has acquired for herself the instincts of
the pursuer. So an army, resorting to the strategy of retreat, is
still the pursuer in the more subtle sense of the word. It is this
strategy that is cunningly taught in the modern, genteel education
of the sex. The virtue of chastity it is called, but over the length
of time it has come to be a forced growth; it has altered
intrinsically in its composition. Education has learnt to make use
of chastity, rather than to acquire it for itself. And, after all,
what is it in itself, when the gilt of its glamour is stripped, like
tinsel, from the fairy's pantomimic wand?
There is, when everything has been said, only one value in chastity
in its ideal sense, so long as we are tied to these conditions of
human instinct, and that is in the value that it brings to women.
Without it, a woman may be the essence of fascination; she may be
the completeness of attraction, but for the need of the race she is
undesirable. Without chastity, a woman may be most things to a man,
but she cannot be a mother to his child.
Amongst those girls, then, whose desire in life it is to marry,
conforming in all ways to the authority of convention, chastity has
been taught from the cradle--taught as a means to an end. It is mostly,
if not altogether, in the lower middle classes that you will find
chastity to be an end in itself. The destructive philosophy of
education has not swept out the gentler virtues from them. As yet
they have not come under the keen edge of its influence. For their
chastity, then, they are interesting; whereas the manufactured
virtue of the upper middle class is like the hothouse
strawberry--forced in May--a tempting fruit to lay upon a dish, but
tasteless, as is wool, between the teeth.
It is this virtue--this real quality, breeding self-respect--that
you will find in the mind of Sally Bishop. Here is no strategy of
movement, no well-considered campaign. She quickens her steps, and
her heart thumps within her, because that virtue, which is her
priceless possession, is in danger of being assailed. In the very
soul of her is the desire to escape. There are thousands of women
whom education has nursed who set the pace as well, whenever a man
starts in pursuit; but the course of their flight leads straight to
the altar and they run neither too fast, nor too slow, lest by any
chance the hunter should weary of the chase. But here you have none
of this. The woman is obeying instincts that Nature gave her with
her soul. Sally Bishop is pure--the chaste woman. Where men most look
for her, she is hard to find.
This journey from King Street to Piccadilly Circus was performed
every evening. In Piccadilly she found the 'bus that took her to
Hammersmith. It was a pleasurable little journey; she looked forward
to it. It amused her to dally on the way, stopping to look in the
shop windows. The bright lights lifted her spirits. After a time she
had become acquainted with the prints that hung in the print-seller's
windows in Garrick Street; they always stayed there long enough to
grow familiar. There was also a jeweller's shop in Coventry Street;
it sold second-hand silver--old Sheffield-plated candle-sticks,
cream ewers and sugar bowls; George III. silver tea-services, and
quaint-shaped wine strainers--they stood there in the window in
profusion. In themselves, for the daintiness of their design, or the
value of their antiquity, they did not interest her. She liked the
look of them glittering there; they conveyed a sense of the
embarrassment of riches which touched her ideas of romance. It was
the tray of old-fashioned ornaments, brooches in the design of flimsy
baskets of flowers, each flower represented by a different coloured
stone--old signet rings, old seals, quaint little figures of men and
beasts in silver, sometimes in gold; these were the things that
caught her fancy; she pored over them, choosing, every time she
passed, some fresh trinket that she would like to possess.
But on this evening in November she did not stop. At the
print-seller's in Garrick Street, she hesitated, but one glance over
her shoulder sped her onwards. The apprehension most prominent in
her mind was that if she continually looked behind her, the man might
fancy she was encouraging him. Once having consciously decided that,
she turned no more until she had reached the protection of the
fountain in the middle of the Circus. There she stopped and glanced
back. He was gone. In all the hundreds of human beings who mingled
and churned like a swarm of ants upon an ant-hill, he was nowhere
to be seen. With a genuine sigh of relief, she crossed over to the
Piccadilly side and walked beside a Hammersmith 'bus, as if slowed
gradually down to the regulated place where the conditions of traffic
permit vehicles to collect their passengers.
A little crowd of people, like flies upon fallen fruit, clung about
the steps of the 'bus as it moved towards its resting-place. She
joined in with them, jostled along the pavement by their efforts to
secure an advantageous position by the steps. When finally it did
come to a standstill and she had reached the conductor's platform,
the announcement, "Outside only," met her attempt to force a passage
within.
It was still raining--persistent mist of rain that steals a way
through any clothing. Should she wait? She had no umbrella. But she
had known what it was to wait on such occasions before. The next 'bus
would probably be full up inside, and the next, and the next. Twenty
minutes might well be wasted before she could start on her way home,
and you have little energy left within you to care about a wetting,
when from nine o'clock in the morning until six, when it is dark,
you have been beating the keys of a typewriter. Your mind demands
but little then, so long as you can secure a peaceful oblivion.
So, in the face of others who turned back, she mounted the stairway
on to the roof of the 'bus. There she was alone, and, pulling the
tarpaulin covering around her, she seated herself on the little bench
farthest from the driver. The little bell tinkled twice,
viciously--all drivers and conductors are made vicious by a steady
rain--and they moved out into the swim of the traffic, as a steamer
puts out from its pier.
On bright evenings it was the most enjoyable part of the journey home,
this ride from Piccadilly Circus to Hammersmith. From there onwards
in the tram to Kew Bridge, it became uninteresting. The shops were
not so bright; the people not so well dressed. It always gave her
a certain amount of quaint amusement to envy the ladies in their
carriages and motor-cars. The envy was not malicious. You would have
found no socialistic tendencies in her. In her mind, utterly
untutored in the sense of logic, she found birth to be a full and
sufficient reason for possession. But there was always alive in her
consciousness the orderly desire to also be a possessor herself. It
never led her actually into a definite discontent with her own
conditions of life, irksome, wearying, exhausting though she found
them to be. But subconsciously within her was the feeling that she
was not really meant to be denied the joy of luxuries. That instinct
showed itself in many little ways. She was sometimes
extravagant--bought a silk petticoat when a cotton one would have
done just as well, but, oh heavens! it was cheap! You would scarcely
have thought it possible to buy silk petticoats at the price. And
no doubt the appearance of the silk was only superficial. But it gave
her a great deal of pleasure. When any lady stepped down from her
carriage to go into one of those West End shops, Sally always noticed
the petticoat that she wore. Women will--men too, perhaps.
But on this dismal evening, when whenever she lifted her head the
fine rain sprayed upon her face, there was no pleasure to be found
in watching the people in the streets below. Carriages were huddled
up in line upon the stands and the coachmen shivered miserably on
their seats, the rain dripping in steady drops from the brims of their
hats into the laps of their mackintoshes. So she kept her head down,
and when she heard footsteps mounting the stairway, approaching her,
she held out the three coppers for her fare without looking up. When
her mind, anticipating the answering ring of the conductor's
ticket-puncher, realized the mistake, she raised her head, then
twisted back, electrically, as though some current had been passed
through her body. Seated on the bench at the other side of the
passage-way, was the man whom she had found in King Street outside
the premises of Bonsfield & Co.
Her first thought was to get off the 'bus. She made a preparatory
movement, leaning forward with her hand upon the back of the seat
in front of her. Possibly the man saw it and had no desire to be foiled
a second time. Whatever may have been his purpose, he moved nearer
to her and held out the umbrella with which he was sheltering himself.
"You'd better let me lend you an umbrella--hadn't you?" he said.
There is a quality of voice that commands. It neither considers nor
admits of refusal. He had it. Women of strong personality it
irritates; women with no personality it affrights; but the women who
are women obey--with reluctance probably, struggling against it, but
in the end they obey. There is, again, a quality of voice that
hall-marks the man of birth. Long years of careful preservation of
the breed have refined it down. It may cloak a mind that is vicious
to a thought; but there is a ring in it--a ring of true metal, well
tried in the furnace. He had that also. From him, dressed none too
carefully, it sounded almost misplaced and therefore was the more
noticeable. The effect of it upon her was obvious. Instead of taking
his suggestion as an insult, which undoubtedly she would have done
had the offer been made in any other type of voice, Sally checked
the offended toss of the head, restrained the contemptuous flash of
eye, and merely said, "No, thank you." She said it coldly. There was
no warmth of encouragement, either in her tone of voice or the
unrecognizing eye which she turned upon him without trace of
sympathy.
"Isn't that rather foolish?" he suggested. "You'll get wet through.
How far are you going?"
"Hammersmith."
He had asked the question with such apparent inconsequence that the
thought of denying him the information had not occurred to her.
Undoubtedly it was foolish to refuse his offer. She would get wet
through before she reached Hammersmith. The tarpaulin only covered
her skirt, and in the lap that it made was already a pool of water
swilling backwards and forwards with the rocking of the 'bus. Through
her mind raced a swift calculation, estimating the benefits she would
gain by keeping dry. They were not many in number, but they entered
the balance, dragged down the scales of her decision. The hat she
was wearing--it was not a best hat--but some few evenings before,
she had retrimmed it; there was matter for consideration in that.
The frame was a good one. It could be trimmed again and again, so
long as it met with those requirements which in Sally's mind were
governed by a vogue of fashion that she followed reverently, though
always, perhaps, some few paces in the rear. A severe wetting might
so alter the shape of that frame as to make it for ever unwearable.
Her coat was serge--short, ending at the waist; the feather boa that
clung round her neck, they would inevitably suffer without
protection. For the moment she felt angry with herself. She hoped
almost, since he was there, that he would make his offer again. It
is these little things--the saving of a feather boa, the destruction
of a flimsy hat frame--that are the seed of big issues. Every book,
as is this, is in its way a study in the evolution of a crisis, the
germ of tiny incident which through a thousand stages grows in
strength and magnitude until it takes upon itself the stature of some
giant event.
The thought of her clothes that had entered Sally's mind brought her
one step further, prepared her for the silent permission she gave
him, when he took the vacant seat beside her and shared the umbrella
between them.
"By the time you reached Hammersmith," he said, "you know you'd be
soaked."
"It wouldn't be the first time," she replied.
"Probably not--but it might be the last."
"How?"
"Influenza--pneumonia--congestion of the lungs--of such are the
kingdom of heaven."
She looked at him quickly--that sudden look of one who for a moment
sees into another and a new mind, as passing some strange house, you
look with curious surprise through the unexpectedly opened door into
another's life. The glance was as quick, as little comprehensive.
Just as within that strange house you see schemes of colour that you
would never have thought of, furniture and pictures that are not of
your taste at all, so Sally saw for one brief moment the glimpse of
a mind that could casually make a jest of death and holy-written
things. A great deal of that servile obedience to the religion in
which she had been brought up had been driven out of her by hard work.
You might not get the priesthood to admit it, but religion is a luxury
which few of the hard-workers in this world can afford. But she still
maintained that sense of conventional awe which strict religious
training drives deep into a receptive mind.
"Do you think it amusing to speak like that?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"What you said--the sentence that you quoted?"
"Of such are the kingdom of heaven?"
"Yes."
"Well--I don't think it's the best joke I've ever made--but it was
meant to be amusing."
At this, she laughed--laughed in spite of herself. His absolute
inconsequence was in itself humorous. She snatched a swift glance
at him under cover of a pretence to look behind her. As her eyes
returned, she was conscious that she was interested.
He was clean shaven. The lines were hard about his mouth, cutting
character--the chin was strong, the jaw well-moulded. It was not a
type of face that belonged to the class in which she moved. These
men were of the unreliable type--some definite weakness somewhere
in every face. So far as she could see in that one sudden glance,
this man had none. His face dominated, his voice too. The hardness
of his features carried with it a sense of cruelty; but a woman is
seldom thwarted by that.
Then returned again the spirit of adventure. By the peculiar
inconsequence of his conversation, he had succeeded in driving
timidity from her. No man whom she knew would, in the first moments
of acquaintance, have spoken as he did. The fact of that alone was
an interest in itself. This was an adventure. Again she thrilled to
it. The unexpectedness of the whole affair, this riding homewards
on the top of a 'bus with a man who had come out of nowhere into her
life--even if it were only for a few moments. Would not many another
girl in her position be delighted with the experience? That thought
warmed her to a greater appreciation of the situation.
But why had he been waiting outside the door of the office? Why had
he followed her? How had he known that she was employed in the
exacting services of Bonsfield & Co.? All these questions gyrated
wildly in her mind, swept about, confused at finding no plausible
answers to their importunate demands.
Then, lastly, who was he? There are men who suggest to you that they
must be somebody; there is an air of distinction about them that
glosses the cheapest coat and creases the poorest pair of trousers.
If they are poorly dressed, then it must be that they are
masquerading; if their clothes are well-fitting, then it is only what
you would have expected. It makes for no definite confirmation of
your opinion.
Sally was made conscious of this impression, and, in its way, that
thrilled her too. You have little chance with a woman in this world
if you are a nonentity. Personality inevitably wins its way, and,
in that she was susceptible to the personality of the man beside her,
Sally forgot the circumstances of their acquaintance, forgot to
review them with that same impartial judgment which she would have
exercised had the man conveyed to her mind a more commonplace
impression.
Stung then with curiosity to know how he had heard of her, how he
had come to be waiting in King Street until she should leave off her
work, or whether, as she suspected, it were only that he had been
attracted to her as she passed by, she gave herself away with
unconscious ingenuousness.
"Why were you waiting in King Street?" she asked suddenly.
The words hurried, tumbling in a confusion of self-consciousness
from her lips.
"Oh--you saw me there?" said he.
"Yes."
"You saw me when you passed?"
"Yes."
"Did you know I was walking behind you all the way to Piccadilly
Circus?"
"N--no--how should I?"
"You looked back once or twice."
"Did I?"
"Why do you want to know why I was waiting in King Street?"
"I don't want to know particularly."
"Shall I tell you?"
"Yes."
"I had seen you through the window--working at that ghastly
typewriter--stood there for more than a quarter of an hour--down the
street--waiting till you got sick of it. Then I was going to ask you
to come and have tea with me--dinner if you'd liked. I wanted some
one to talk to; I was going back to my rooms. When they're empty,
a man's rooms can be the most godless--"
She stood up abruptly, striking her hat against the roof of the
umbrella.
"Will you let me out, please?"
"But you told me you were going to Hammersmith. This is only
Knightsbridge."
"I'm getting down here."
He stood up. "I've offended you," he said quietly.
"Did you imagine you would not?"
"No--I suppose I didn't--but I wasn't going to let that stop me from
making your acquaintance. There's nothing to be sorry about. You were
sick of things--I could see that through the window--so was I. Mayn't
two human beings, who are sick of things, find something in common?
You're really going?"
"Yes."
She curled her lip with contempt; but it had a smile behind it which
he could not see.
"Shan't we see each other again?"
"Certainly not!"
She stood at the top of the steps waiting for the 'bus to stop. He
looked up into her face and held her eyes.
"Then I apologize," he said willingly. "And don't be offended at what
I'm going to say now."
She put her foot down on to the first step. "What is it?"
"I'll bet you ten pounds we don't. That is to say you win ten pounds
if we do."
She laughed contemptuously in a breath and hurried down the steps.