VICTORIA stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and
yet shrank. Not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given
her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare
platform. Waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist
that gripped and wrenched at her throat. Through the fog a thousand
ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in
their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. It might have been
a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of
London, the voices of a great crowd. Yet all this violence of life, the
darkness, the surge of men and women, all this told her that she was
once more in the midst of things.
She found her belongings mechanically, fumblingly. She did not realise
until then the bitterness that drove its iron into her soul. Already,
when the troopship had entered the Channel she had felt a cruel pang
when she realised that she must expect nothing and that nobody would
greet her. She had fled from the circle near the funnel when the talk
began to turn round London and waiting sisters and fathers, round the
Lord Mayor's show, the play, the old fashioned Christmas. Now, as she
struggled through the crowd that cried out and laughed excitedly and
kissed, she knew her isolation was complete. There was nobody to meet
her. The fog made her eyes smart, so they filled readily with tears.
As she sat in the cab, however, and there flashed by her like beacons
the lights of the stalls in the Waterloo Road, the black and greasy
pavement sown with orange peel, she felt her heart beating furiously
with the excitement of home coming. She passed the Thames flowing
silently, swathed in its shroud of mist. Then the blackness of St
James's Park through which her cab crawled timidly as if it feared
things that might lurk unknown in the fogbound thickets.
It was still in a state of feverish dreaming that Victoria entered her
room at Curran's Private Hotel, otherwise known by a humble number in
Seymour Street. 'Curran's' is much in favour among Anglo-Indians, as it
is both central and cheap. It has everything that distinguishes the
English hotel which has grown from a boarding-house into a superior
establishment where you may stay at so much a day. The successful owner
had bought up one after the other three contiguous houses and had
connected them by means of a conservatory where there lived, among much
pampas grass, small ferns in pots shrouded in pea-green paper and sickly
plants to which no name could be attached as they mostly suggested
stewed lettuce. It was impossible to walk in a straight line from one
end of the coalition of buildings to the other without climbing and
descending steps every one of which proclaimed the fact that the leases
of the houses would soon fall in. From the three kitchens ascended three
smells of mutton. The three halls were strewn with bicycles, gun cases
in their last phase, sticks decrepit or dandified. The three hat racks,
all early Victorian in their lines, bore a motley cargo. Dusty bowlers
hustled it with heather coloured caps and top hats; one even bore a pith
helmet and a clerical atrocity.
Queer as Curran's is, it is comfortable enough. Victoria looked round
her room, tiny in length and breadth, high however with all the dignity
that befits an odd corner left over by the Victorian builder. It was
distinguished by its simplicity, for the walls bore nothing whatever
beyond a restrained papering of brownish roses. A small black and gold
bed, a wardrobe with a white handle, a washing stand with a marble top
took up all the space left by the large tin trunk which contained most
of Victoria's worldly goods. So this, thought Victoria, is the
beginning. She pulled aside the curtain. Before her lay Seymour Street,
where alone an eye of light shone faintly from the nearest lamp post.
Through the fog came the warning noise of a lorry picking its way. It
was cold, cold, all this, and lonely like an island.
Her meditations were disturbed by the maid who brought her hot water.
'My name is Carlotta,' said the girl complacently depositing the can
upon the marble topped washstand.
'Yes?' said Victoria. 'You are a foreigner?'
'Yes. I am Italian. It is foggy,' replied the girl.
Victoria sighed. It was kind of the girl to make her feel at home, to
smile at her with those flashing teeth so well set in her ugly little
brown face. She went to the washstand and cried out in horror at her
dirt and fog begrimed face, rimmed at the eyes, furrowed on the left by
the course of that tear shed at Waterloo.
'Tell them downstairs I shan't be ready for half an hour,' she said;
'it'll take me about a week to get quite clean, I should say.'
Carlotta bared her white teeth again and withdrew gently as a cat, while
Victoria courageously drenched her face and neck. The scents of England,
already conjured up by the fog and the mutton, rose at her still more
vividly from the warm water which inevitably exhales the traditional
perfume of hot painted can.
Her dinner was a small affair but delightful. It was good to eat and
drink once more things to which she had been accustomed for the first
twenty years of her life. Her depression had vanished; she was merely
hungry, and, like the healthy young animal she was, longing for a rare
cut of roast beef, accompanied by the good old English potatoes boiled
down to the consistency of flour and the flavour of nothing. Her
companions were so normal that she could not help wondering, when her
first hunger was sated and she was confronted with the apple tart of her
fathers, whether she was not in the unchanging old board residence in
Fulham where her mother had stayed with her whenever she came up to
town, excited and conscious of being on the spree.
Two spinsters of no age discussed the fog. Both were immaculate and sat
rigidly in correct attitudes facing their plates. Both talked quickly
and continuously in soft but high tones. They passed one another the
salt with the courtesy of abbes taking pinches of snuff. A young man
from the Midlands explained to the owner of the clerical hat that under
certain circumstances his food would cost him more. Near by a heavy man
solemnly and steadily ate, wiping at times from his beard drops of gravy
and of sauce, whilst his faded wife nibbled disconsolately tiny scraps
of crust. These she daintily buttered, while her four lanky girls nudged
and whispered.
Victoria did not stay in the conservatory after the important meal. As
she passed through it, a mist of weariness gathering before her eyes,
she had a vision of half a dozen men sleeping in cane chairs, or
studying pink or white evening papers. The young man from the Midlands
had captured another victim and was once more explaining that under
certain circumstances his food would cost him more.
Victoria seemed to have reached the limits of physical endurance. She
fumbled as she divested herself of her clothes; she could not even
collect enough energy to wash. All the room seemed filled with haze.
Her tongue clove to her palate. Little tingles in her eyelids crushed
them together over her pupils. She stumbled into her bed, mechanically
switching off the light by her bedside. In the very act her arm lost its
energy and she sank into a dreamless sleep.
Next morning she breakfasted with good appetite. The fog had almost
entirely lifted and sunshine soft as silver was filtering through the
windows into the little dining-room. Its mahoganous ugliness was almost
warmed into charm. The sideboard shone dully through its covering of
coarse net. Even the stacked cruets remembered the days when they
cunningly blazed in a shop window. A pleasurable feeling of excitement
ran through Victoria's body, for she was going to discover London, to
have adventures. As she closed the door behind her with a definite
little slam she felt like a buccaneer.
Buccaneering in the Edgware Road, even when it is bathed in the morning
sun, soon falls flat in November. It came upon Victoria rather as a
shock that her Indian clothing was rather thin. As her flying visits to
town had only left in her mind a very hazy picture of Regent Street it
was quite unconsciously that she entered the emporium opposite. A frigid
young lady sacrificed for her benefit an abominable vicuna coat which,
she said, fitted Victoria like a glove. Victoria paid the twenty seven
and six with an admirable feeling of recklessness and left the shop
reflecting that she looked the complete charwoman.
She turned into Hyde Park, where the gentle wind was sorrowfully driving
the brown and broken leaves along the rough gravel. The thin tracery of
the trees imaged itself on the road like a giant cobweb. Victoria looked
for a moment towards the south where the massive buildings rise, towards
the east where a cathedral thrusts into the sky a tower that
suspiciously recalls waterworks. She drank in the cold air with a gusto
that can be understood by none save those who have learned to live in
the floating moisture of the plains. She felt young and, in the
sunshine, with her cheeks gaining colour as the wind whipped them, she
looked in her long black coat and broad brimmed straw hat, like a
quakeress in love.
As she walked down towards the Achilles statue the early morning
panorama of London unfolded itself before her un-understanding eyes.
Girls hurried by with their satchels towards the typewriting rooms of
the west; they stole a look at Victoria's face but quickly turned away
from her clothes. Now and then spruce young clerks walking to the Tube
slackened their pace to look twice into her grey eyes; one or two looked
back, not so much in the hope of an adventure, for time could not be
snatched for Venus herself on the way to the office, as to see whether
they could carry away with them the flattery of having been noticed.
In a sense that first day in London was for Victoria a day of
revelations. Having despatched a telegram to her brother to announce her
arrival she felt that the day was hers. Ted had not troubled to meet her
either at Southampton or Waterloo: it was not likely that he had
followed the sightings of her ship. The next day being a Saturday,
however, he would probably come up from the Bedfordshire school where he
proffered Latin to an ungrateful generation.
Victoria's excursions to London had been so few that she had but the
faintest idea of where she was to go. Knowing, however, that one cannot
lose oneself in London, she walked aimlessly towards the east. It was a
voyage of discovery. Piccadilly, bathed in the pale sun, revealed itself
as a land where luxury flows like rivers of milk. Victoria, being a true
woman, could not pass a shop. Thus her progress was slow, so slow that
when she found herself between the lions of Trafalgar Square she began
to realise that she wanted her lunch.
The problem of food is cruel for all women who desire more than a bun.
They risk either inattention or over attention, and if they follow other
women, they almost invariably discover the cheap and bad. Victoria
hesitated for a moment on the steps of an oyster shop, as nervous in the
presence of her first plunge into freedom as a novice at the side door
of a pawnbroker. A man passed by her into the oyster shop, smoking a
pipe. She felt she would never dare to sit in a room where strange men
smoked pipes. Thus she stood for a moment forlorn on the pavement, until
a memory of the only decent grill in town, according to Bobby, passed
through her mind.
A policeman sent her by bus to the New Gaiety, patronised by Bobby and
his cronies. As Victoria went down the interminable underground
staircase, and especially as she entered the enormous room where paper,
carpets, and plate always seem new, her courage almost failed her.
Indeed she looked round anxiously, half hoping that the anonymous Bobby
might be revisiting his old haunts. But she was quite alone, and it was
only by reminding herself that she must always be alone at meals now
that she coerced herself into sitting down. She got through her meal
with expedition. She felt frightfully small; the waiters were painfully
courteous; a man laid aside his orange coloured newspaper, and
embarrassed her with frequent side glances. She braced herself up
however. 'I am training,' was her uppermost thought. She then wondered
whether she ought to have come to the New Gaiety at all. Fortunately it
was only at the very end of her lunch that Victoria realised she was the
only woman sitting alone. After this discovery her nerve failed her. She
got up hurriedly, and, in her confusion, omitted to tip the waiter. At
the desk the last stone was heaped on the cairn of her discomfiture when
the cashier politely returned to her a quarter rupee which she had given
her thinking it was a sixpence.
With a sigh of satisfaction Victoria resumed her walk through London.
She was a little tired already but she could think of nothing to do,
nowhere to go to. She did not want to return to Curran's to sit in her
box-like room, or to look at the two spinsters availing themselves of
their holiday in town to play patience in the conservatory.
All the afternoon, therefore, Victoria saw the sights. Covent Garden
repelled her by the massiveness of its food suggestion, and especially
by the choking dirt of its lanes. After Covent Garden, Savoy court yard
and its announcements of intellectual plays by unknown women. Then once
more, drawn by its spaciousness guessed at through Spring Gardens,
Victoria walked into Saint James's Park. She rested awhile upon a seat,
watching the waterfowl strut and plume themselves, the pelicans flounder
heavily in the mud. She was tired. The sun was setting early. The magic
slowly faded from London; Buckingham Palace lost the fictitious grace
that it has when set in a blue sky. Victoria shivered a little. She felt
tired. She did not know where to go. She was alone. On the seat nearest
to hers two lovers sat together, hand in hand. The man's face was almost
hidden by his cap and by the blue puffs of his pipe; the girl's was
averted towards the ground where, with the ferule of her umbrella, she
lazily drew signs. There was no bitterness in this sight for Victoria.
Her romance had come and gone so long ago that she looked quite casually
at these wanderers in Arcadia. She only knew that she was alone and
cold.
Victoria got up and walked out of the park. It was darkening, and little
by little the lights of London were springing into life. By dint of many
questionings she managed to regain Oxford Street, that spinal column of
London without which the stranger would be lost. Then her course was
easy, and it was with a peculiar feeling of luxuriousness that she
resigned herself to the motor bus that jolted and shook her tired body
until she reached the Arch. More slowly, and with diminished optimism,
she found her way up Edgware Road, where night was now falling. The
emporium was dazzling with lights. Alone the public house rivalled it
and thrust its glare through the settling mist. Victoria closed the door
of Curran's. At once she re-entered its atmosphere; into the warm air
rose the three smells of three legs of mutton.