I refused to believe what she told me about the last bus passing at
half-past nine, and so at a quarter to ten I stood outside "The Green
Lamp" and waited.
Ten minutes passed and no bus.
With me were two women waiting too--one holding a baby; the other,
younger, smarter, dangling a purse.
At last I communicated my growing fears: "I believe the last has
gone...."
We fixed our six eyes on the far corner of the road, waiting for the
yellow lights to round it, but only the gas-lamps stood firm in their
perspective.
"Oh my, Elsie!" said the woman with the baby, "you can't never walk up
to the cross-roads in the dark alone!"
"I wouldn't make the attempt, not for anything!" replied the younger one
firmly.
Without waiting for more I stepped into the middle of the road and
started on my walk home; the very next sentence would have suggested
that Elsie and I should walk together.
She wouldn't "make the attempt...." Her words trailed through my mind,
conjuring up some adventure, some act of bravery and daring.
The road was the high road, the channel of tarmac and pavements that she
probably walked along every day; and now it was the selfsame high road,
the same flagstones, hedges, railings, but with the cloak of night upon
them.
It wasn't man she feared; even in the dark I knew she wasn't that kind.
She would be awfully capable--with man. No, it was the darkness, the
spooky jungle of darkness: she feared the trees would move....
"I wouldn't make the attempt, not for anything"; and the other woman had
quite agreed with her.
I knew where I was by the smells and the sounds on the road--the smell
of the lines of picketed horses behind the railings, the sharp and
sudden stamp of the sick ones in the wooden stables, and, later on, the
glitter of water in the horse-troughs.
I thought: "I am not afraid.... Is it because I am more educated, or
have less imagination?"
"Halt! Who goes there?"
"Friend," I said, thrilling tremendously.
He approached me and said something which I couldn't make anything of.
Presently I disentangled, "You should never dread the baynit, miss."
"But I'm not dreading," I said, annoyed, "I ... I love it."
He said he was cold, and added: "I bin wounded. If you come to that lamp
you can see me stripe."
We went to the lamp. "It's them buses," he complained, "they won't stop
when I halt 'em."
"But why do you want to stop them? They can't poison the horse-troughs."
"It's me duty," he said. "There's one comin'."
A bus, coming the opposite way, bore down upon us with an unwieldy rush
and roar--the last bus, in a hurry to get to bed.
"You'll see," he said pessimistically.
"'Alt! 'Alt, there!" The bus, with three soldiers hanging on the step,
rushed past us, and seemed to slow a little. The sentry ran a few paces
towards it, crying "'Alt!" But it gathered speed and boomed on again,
buzzing away between the gas-lamps. He returned to me sadly.
"I don't believe they can hear," I said, and gave him some chocolates
and went on.
As I passed the hospital gates it seemed there was a faint, a very
faint, sweet smell of chloroform....
I was down at the hospital to-night when the factory blew up over the
river.
The lights went out, and as they sank I reached the kitchen hatchway
with my tray. At the bottom of the stairs I could see through the garden
door the sky grown sulphur and the bushes glowing, while all the panes
of glass turned incandescent.
Then the explosion came; it sounded as though it was just behind the
hospital. Two hundred panes of glass fell out, and they made a noise
too.
Standing in the dark with a tray in my hand I heard a man's voice saying
gleefully, "I haven't been out of bed this two months!"
Some one lit a candle, and by its light I saw all the charwomen from the
kitchen bending about like broken weeds, and every officer was saying,
"There, there now!"
We watched the fires till midnight from the hill.
I went over this morning early. We were thirty-two in a
carriage--Lascars, Chinese, children, Jews, niggers from the docks.
Lascars and children and Jews and I, we fought to get off the station
platform; sometimes there wasn't room on the ground for both my feet at
once.
The fires were still burning and smouldering there at midday, but a
shower of rime fell on it, so that it looked like an old ruin, something
done long ago.
At Pompeii, some one told me, one looked into the rooms and they were as
they had been left--tables laid.... Here, too, I saw a table laid for
the evening meal with a bedstead fallen from the upper floor astraddle
across it. The insides of the houses were coughed into their windows,
basket-chairs hanging to the sills, and fire-irons.
Outside, the soil of the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and
roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock--a fossil, as
though it had been there for ever.
London is only skin-deep. Beneath lies the body of the world.
The hump under the blankets rolls over and a man's solemn face appears
upon the pillow.
"Can you get me a book, nurse?"
"Yes. What kind do you like?"
"Nothing fanciful; something that might be true."
"All right!"
"Oh--and nurse...?"
"Yes?"
"Not sentimental and not funny, I like a practical story."