"Hush! I have a baby of my own, though they know nothing about it here,
so you can safely trust me."
I did so, and it was beautiful to see the joy she had in doing what was
wanted, saying all sorts of sweet and gentle things to my baby (though I
knew they were meant for her own), as if the starved mother-heart in her
were stealing a moment of maternal tenderness.
"There!" she said, "She'll be comfortable now, bless her!"
I asked about her own child, and, coming close and speaking in a
whisper, she told me all about it.
It was a girl and it would be a year old at Christmas. At first she had
put it out to nurse in town, where she could see it every evening, but
the foster-mother had neglected it, and the inspector had complained, so
she had been compelled to take it away. Now it was in a Home in the
country, ten miles from Liverpool Street, and it was as bonny as a peach
and as happy as the day is long.
"See," she whispered, taking a card from her breast, after a furtive
glance towards the door. "I sent two shillings to have her photograph
taken and the Matron has just sent it."
It was the picture of a beautiful baby girl, and I found it easy to
praise her.
"I suppose you see her constantly, don't you?" I said.
The girl's face dropped.
"Only on visiting days, once a month, and not always that," she
answered.
"But how can you live without seeing her oftener?" I asked.
"Matter o' means," she said sadly. "I pay five shillings a week for her
board, and the train is one-and-eight return, so I have to be careful,
you see, and if I lost my place what would happen to baby?"
I was very low and tired and down when I resumed my walk. But when I
thought for a moment of taking omnibuses for the rest of my journey I
remembered the waitress's story and told myself that the little I had
belonged to my child, and so I struggled on.
But what a weary march it was during the next two hours! I was in the
East End now, and remembering the splendour of the West, I could
scarcely believe I was still in London.
Long, mean, monotonous streets, running off to right and left, miles on
miles of them without form or feature, or any trace of nature except the
blue strips of sky overhead.
Such multitudes of people, often badly dressed and generally with set
and anxious faces, hasting to and fro, hustling, elbowing, jostling each
other along, as if driven by some invisible power that was swinging an
unseen scourge.
No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no
longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I
could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.
The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then
the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars,
the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out
of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above
all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often
foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.
A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by
an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the
inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that
they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of
Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily
and hourly fight for food.
If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be)
where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that
day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.
Those thoroughfares, telescoping each other, one after another, seemed
as if they would never come to an end.
How tired I was! Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my
wrist had become as heavy as lead.
Towards four o'clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of
garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them. Utterly
exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these
seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.
But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another
woman was sitting beside me.
When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen
anything so repulsive. She was asleep, and having that expressionless
look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was
young or old. She was not merely coarse, she was gross. The womanhood in
her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and
degraded.
Presently baby, who had also been asleep, awoke and cried, and then the
woman opened her eyes and looked at the child, while I hushed her to
sleep again.
There must be something in a baby's face that has a miraculous effect on
every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young
and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.
Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman's face when she
looked into the face of my baby. The expression of brutality and
degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the
coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.
After a while the woman spoke to me. She spoke in a husky voice which
seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.
"That your'n," she said.