THE russet of October had turned into the bleak darkness of December.
The threat of winter was in the air; it hissed and sizzled in the bare
branches as they bent in the cold wind, shaking quivering drops of water
broadcast as if sowing the seeds of pain. Victoria stopped for a moment
on the threshold of the house in Star Street, looked up and down the
road. It was black and sodden with wet; the pavement was greasy and
glistening, flecked with cabbage stalks and orange peel. Then she looked
across at the small shop where, though it was Sunday, a tailor sat
cross-legged almost on a level with the street, painfully collecting
with weary eyes the avaricious light. His back was bowed with habit;
that and his bandy legs told of his life and revealed his being. In the
street, when he had time to walk there, boys mocked his shuffling gate,
thus paying popular tribute to the marks of honest toil.
Victoria stepped down to the pavement. A dragging sensation made her
look at her right boot. The sole was parting from the upper, stitch by
stitch. With something that was hardly a sigh Victoria put her foot down
again and slowly walked away. She turned into Edgware Road, followed it
northwards for a while, then doubled sharply back into Praed Street
where she lingered awhile before an old curiosity shop. She looked
between two prints into the shop where, in the darkness, she could see
nothing. Yet she looked at nothingness for quite a long while. Then,
listlessly, she followed the street, turned back through a square and
stopped before a tiny chapel almost at the end of Star Street. The deity
that follows with passionless eyes the wanderer in mean streets knew
from her course that this woman had no errand; without emotion the Being
snipped a few minutes from her earthly span.
By the side of the chapel sat an aged woman smothered in rags so many
and so thick that she was passing well clad. She was hunched up on a
camp stool, all string and bits of firewood. A small stove carrying an
iron tray told that her trade was selling roasted chestnuts; nothing
moved in the group; the old woman's face was brown and cracked as her
own chestnuts and there was less life in her than in the warm scent of
the roasting fruits which gratefully filled Victoria's nostrils.
The eight weeks which now separated Victoria from the old days at the
'Rosebud' had driven deeper yet into her soul her unimportance. She was
powerless before the world; indeed, when she thought of it at all, she
no longer likened herself to a cork tossed in the storm, but to a pebble
sunken and motionless in the bed of a flowing river.
Upon the day which followed her sudden uprooting Victoria had bent her
back to the task of finding work. She had known once more the despairing
search through the advertisement columns of the _Daily Telegraph_, the
skilful winnowing of chaff from wheat, sudden and then baffled hopes.
Her new professional sense had taken her to the shops where young women
are wanted to enhance the attraction of coffee and cigarettes. But the
bankruptcy of the 'Rosebud' was not an isolated case. The dishonesty of
Burton was not its cause but its consequence; the ship was sinking under
his feet when he deserted it after loading himself with such booty as he
could carry. Victoria had discovered grimly that the first result of a
commercial crisis is the submerging of those whose labours create a
commercial boom. Within a week of the 'Rosebud' disaster the eleven City
cafes of the 'Lethe, Ltd.' had closed their doors. Two small failures in
the West End were followed by a greater crash. The 'People's
Restaurants, Ltd.', eaten out by the thousand depots of the 'Refreshment
Rendezvous, Ltd.,' had filed a voluntary petition for liquidation; the
official liquidator had at once inaugurated a policy of 'retrenchment
and sound business management,' and, as a beginning, closed two hundred
shops in the City and West End. He proposed to exploit the suburbs, and,
after a triumphant amalgamation with the victorious 'Refreshment
Rendezvous,' to retire from law into peaceful directorships and there
collect innumerable guineas.
Victoria had followed the convulsion with passionate interest. For a
week the restaurant slump had been the fashion. The manager of every
surviving cafe in London had given it as his deliberate opinion that
trade would be all the better for it. The financial papers published
grave warnings as to the dangers of the restaurant business, to which
the Stock Exchange promptly responded by marking up the prices of the
survivors' shares. The Socialist papers had eloquently pleaded for
government assistance for the two thousand odd displaced girls; a
Cabinet Minister had marred his parliamentary reputation by endeavouring
to satisfy one wing of his party that the tearoom at South Kensington
Museum was not a Socialistic venture and the other wing that it was an
institution leading up to State ownership of the trade. A girl
discharged from the 'Lethe' had earned five guineas by writing a
thousand words in a hated but largely read daily paper. The interest had
been kept up by the rescue of a P.R. girl who had jumped off Waterloo
Bridge. Another P.R. girl, fired by example, had been more successful
in the Lea. This valuable advertisement enabled the Relief Fund to
distribute five shillings a head to many young persons who had been
waitresses at some time or another; there were rumours of a knighthood
for its energetic promoter.
It was in the midst of this welter that Victoria had found herself cast,
with her newly acquired experience a drug in the market, and all the
world inclined to look upon her as a kind of adventuress. Her employer's
failure was in a sense her failure, and she was handy to blame. For
three weeks she had doggedly continued her search for work, applying
first of all in the smart tea-rooms of the West, and every day she
became more accustomed to being turned away. Her soul hardened to
rebuffs as that of a beggar who learns to bear stoically the denial of
alms. After vainly trying the best Victoria had tried the worst, but
everywhere the story was the same. Every small restaurant keeper was
drawing his horns in, feverishly casting up trial balances; some of them
in their panic had damaged their credit by trying to arrange with their
banks for overdrafts they would never need. The slump was such that they
did not believe that the public would continue to eat and drink; they
retrenched employees instead of trying to carve success out of other
men's disasters.
Victoria, her teeth set, had faced the storm. She now explored districts
and streets systematically, almost house by house. And when her spirit
broke at the end of the week, as her perpetual walks, the buffeting of
rain and wind soiled her clothing, broke breaches into her boots,
chapped her hands as glove seams gave way, the only thing that could
brace her up was the shrinkage of her hoard by a sovereign. She placed
the coin on the mantlepiece after counting the remainder. Monday morning
saw it reduced to eleven shillings and sixpence. When the crisis came
she had taken in sail by exchanging into the second floor back, then
fortunately vacant, thus saving three shillings in rent.
The sight of her melting capital was a horror which she faced only once
a week, for at other times she thrust the thought away, but it intruded
every time with greater insistence. Untrained still in economy she found
it impossible to reduce her expenditure below a pound. After paying off
the mortgage of eight and sixpence for her room and breakfast, she had
to set aside three shillings for fares, for she dared not wade overmuch
in the December mud. The manageress of a cafe lost in Marylebone had
heard her kindly, but had looked at her boots plastered with mud, then
at the dirty fringes of her petticoats and said, regretfully almost,
that she would not do. That day had cost Victoria a pound almost
wrenched out of the money drawer. But this wardrobe though an asset, was
an incubus, and Victoria at times often hated it, for it cost so much in
omnibus fares that she paid for it every day in food stolen from her
body.
By the end of the seventh week Victoria had reduced her hoard to four
pounds. She now applied for work like an automaton, often going twice to
the same shop without realising it, at other times sitting for hours on
a park seat until the drizzle oozed from her hair into her neck. At the
end of the seventh week she had so lost consciousness of the world that
she walked all through the Sunday gloom without food. Then, at eight
o'clock, awakening suddenly to her need, she gorged herself with suet
pudding at an eating house in the Edgware Road, came back to Star Street
and fell into a heavy sleep.
About four she was aroused by horrible sickness which left her weak,
every muscle relaxed and every nerve strained to breaking point. Shapes
blacker than the night floated before her eyes; every passing milk
cart rattled savagely through her beating temples; twitchings at her
ankles and wrists, and the hurried beat of her heart shook the whole of
her body. She almost writhed on her bed, up and down, as if forcibly
thrown or goaded.
As the December dawn struggled through her window, diffusing over the
white wall the light of the condemned cell, she could bear it no more.
She got up, washed horrible bitterness from her mouth, clots from her
eyes. Then, swaying with weariness and all her pulses beating, she
strayed into the street, unseeing, her boots unbuttoned, into the daily
struggle.
As the blind man unguided, or the poor on the march, she went into the
East, now palely glowing over the chimney pots. She did not feel her
weariness. Her feet did not belong to her; she felt as if her whole body
were one gigantic wound vaguely aching under the chloroform. She walked
without intention, and as towards no goal. At Oxford Circus she stopped.
Her eye had unconsciously been arrested by the posters which the
newsvendor was deftly glueing down on the pavement. The crude colours of
the posters, red, green, yellow, shocked her sluggish mind into action.
One spoke of a great reverse in Nubia; another repeated the information
and added a football cup draw. A third poster, blazing red, struck such
a blow at Victoria that, for a wild moment, her heart seemed to stop. It
merely bore the words:
P. R.
REOPENS
Victoria read the two lines five or six times, first dully, then in a
whirl of emotion. Her blood seemed to go hot and tingle; the twitchings
of her wrists and ankles grew insistent. With her heart pounding with
excitement she asked for the paper in a choked voice, refusing the
halfpenny change. Backing a step or two she opened the paper. A sheet
dropped into the mud.
The newsvendor, grizzled and sunburnt right into the wrinkles, picked up
the sheet and looked at her wonderingly. From the other side a corpulent
policeman watched her with faint interest, reading her like a book. He
did not need to be told that Victoria was out of work; her face showed
that hope had come into her life.
Victoria read every detail greedily. The enterprising liquidator had
carried through the amalgamation of the People's Restaurants and the
Refreshment Rendezvous, and created the People's Refreshment Rendezvous.
He had done this so quietly and suddenly that the effect was a
thunderbolt. He had forestalled the decision of the Court, so that
agreements had been ready and signed on the Saturday evening, while
leave had obscurely been granted on the Friday. Being master of the
situation the liquidator was re-opening fifty-five of the two hundred
closed shops. The paper announced his boast that 'by ten o'clock on
Monday morning fifty-five P. R. R.'s would be flying the flag of the
scone and cross buns.' The paper also hailed this pronouncement as
Napoleonic.
Victoria feverishly read the list of the rescued depots. They were
mainly in Oxford Street and Bloomsbury. Indeed, one of them was in
Princes Street. A flood of clarity seemed to come over Victoria's brain.
It was impossible for the P. R. or P. R. R. or whatever it had become,
to have secured a staff on the Sunday. No doubt they proposed to engage
it on the spot and to rush the organisation into working order so as to
capture at the outset the _succes de curiosite_ which every London daily
was beating up in the breast of a million idle men and women. Clutching
the paper in her hand she ran across Oxford Street almost under the
wheels of a motor lorry. She turned into Princes Street, and hurled
herself against the familiar door, clutching at the handle.
There was another girl leaning against the door. She was tall and slim.
Her fair hair went to sandiness. Her black coat was dusty and stained.
Her large blue eyes started from her colourless face, pale lipped,
hollow under the cheekbones. Victoria recovered her breath and put her
hair straight feverishly. A short dark girl joined the group, pressing
her body close against them. Then two more. Then, one by one, half a
dozen. Victoria discovered that her boots were undone, and bent down to
do them up with a hairpin. As she struggled with numb fingers her rivals
pressed upon her with silent hostility. As she straightened herself, the
throng suddenly thrust her away from the door. Victoria recovered
herself and drove against them gritting her teeth. The fair girl was
ground against her; but Victoria, full of her pain and bread lust,
thrust her elbow twice into the girl's breast. She felt something like
the rage of battle upon her and its joy as the bone entered the soft
flesh like a weapon.
'Now then, steady girls,' said the voice of the policeman, faint like a
dream voice.
'Blime, ain't they a 'ot lot!' said another dream voice, a loafer's.
The crowd once more became orderly. Though quite a hundred girls had now
collected hardly any spoke. In every face there was tenseness, though
the front ranks showed most ferocity in their eyes and the late-comers
most weariness.
'Where you shovin'?' asked a sulky voice.
There was a mutter that might have been a curse. Then silence once more;
and the girls fiercely watched for their bread, looking right and left
like suspicious dogs. A spruce young warehouseman slowly reviewed the
girls and allowed his eyes to linger approvingly on one or two. He
winked approvingly at the fair girl but she did not respond. She stood
flat against the door, every inch of her body spread so as to occupy as
much space as she could.
Then, half-past seven, a young man and a middle-aged woman shouldering
through the wedged mass, the fierce rush into the shop and there the
gasp behind closed doors among the other winners, hatless, their clothes
torn, their bodices ripped open to the stays, one with her hair down and
her neck marked here and there by bleeding scratches. Then, after the
turmoil of the day among the strangeness, without rest or food, to make
holiday for the Londoners, a night heavy as lead and a week every day
more mechanical, Victoria had returned to the treadmill and, within a
week, knew it.
. . . . The clock struck five. Victoria awoke from her dream epic. She
had won her battle and sailed into harbour. Its waters were already as
horribly still as those of a stagnant pool. The old chestnut vendor sat
motionless on her seat of firewood and string. Not a thought chased over
her gnarled brown face. From the stove came the faint pungent smell of
the charring peel.