I knew that my eyes were not fit to be seen in the streets, so I dropped
my dark veil and hurried along, being conscious of nothing for some time
except the clang of electric cars and the bustle of passers-by, to whom
my poor little sorrow was nothing at all.
But I had not gone far--I think I had not, though my senses were
confused and vague--before I began to feel ashamed, to take myself to
task, and to ask what I had to cry about.
If I had parted from my baby it was for her own good, and if I had paid
away my last sovereign I had provided for her for a month, I had nothing
to think of now except myself and how to get work.
I never doubted that I should get work, or that I should get it
immediately, the only open question being what work and where.
Hitherto I had thought that, being quick with my pen, I might perhaps
become secretary to somebody; but now, remembering the typist's story
("firms don't like it"), and wishing to run no risks in respect of my
child, I put that expectation away and began to soar to higher things.
How vain they were! Remembering some kind words the Reverend Mother had
said about me at the convent (where I had taken more prizes than Alma,
though I had never mentioned it before) I told myself that I, too, was
an educated woman. I knew Italian, French and German, and having heard
that some women could make a living by translating books for publishers
I thought I might do the same.
Nay, I could even write books myself. I was sure I could--one book at
all events, about friendless girls who have to face the world for
themselves, and all good women would read it (some good men also),
because they would see that it must be true.
Oh, how vain were my thoughts! Yet in another sense they were not all
vanity, for I was not thinking of fame, or what people would say about
what I should write, but only what I should get for it.
I should get money, not a great deal perhaps, yet enough for baby and
me, that we might have that cottage in the country, covered with
creepers and roses, where Isabel would run about the grass by and by,
and pluck the flowers in the garden.
"So what have _you_ got to cry about, you ridiculous thing," I thought
while I hurried along, with a high step now, as if my soul had been in
my feet.
But a mother's visions of the future are like a mirage (always gleaming
with the fairy palaces which her child is to inhabit some day), and I am
not the first to find her shadows fade away.
I must have been walking for some time, feeling no weariness at all,
when I came to the bridge by Bow Church. There I had intended to take a
tram, but not being tired I went on farther, thinking every stage I
could walk would be so much money to the good.
I was deep in the Mile End Road, when a chilling thought came to me. It
was the thought of the distance that would divide me from my child,
making my visits to her difficult, and putting it out of my power to
reach her quickly (perhaps even to know in time) if, as happened to
children, she became suddenly and dangerously ill.
I remembered the long line of telescoping thoroughfares I had passed
through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big
breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their
Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless
public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide
me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be
immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had
divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world.
Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to
such a dangerous separation.
"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."
Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the
Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself
listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish,
and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces,
slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels,
I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an
Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish
children danced.
I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell
on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at
the corner. In large written characters it ran:
_Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages.
Apply No. ---- Washington Street_.
How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a
moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good
seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying
up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.
A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and
wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby.
I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of
surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she
said, in a nasal and guttural voice:
"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."
Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several
octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping
downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick
black hair, and such a dear good face.
I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request
to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of
catechism.
Was I a seamstress? No, but I wished to become one. Had I aiver vorked
on vaistcoats? I hadn't, but I could do anything with my needle.
Perhaps the urgency of my appeal, and more probably the pressure of her
own need, weighed with the Jewess, for after reflection, and an eager
whisper from her daughter (who was looking at me with kindling eyes),
she said,
"Very vell, ve'll see what she can do."
I was then taken into a close and stuffy room where a number of girls
(all Jewish as I could see) were working on sections of waistcoats
which, lying about on every side, looked like patterns for legs of
mutton. One girl was basting, another was pressing, and a third was
sewing button-holes with a fine silk twist round bars of gimp.
This last was the work which was required of me, and I was told to look
and see if I could do it. I watched the girl for a moment and then said:
"Let me try."
Needle and twist and one of the half vests were then given to me, and
after ten minutes I had worked my first button-hole and handed it back.
The daughter praised it warmly, but the mother said:
"Very fair, but a leedle slow."
"Let me try again," I said, and my trembling fingers were so eager to
please that my next button-hole was not only better but more quickly
made.
"Beautiful!" said the daughter. "And mamma, only think, she's quicker
than Leah, already. I timed them."
"I muz call your vader, dough," said the Jewess, and she disappeared
through the doorway.
While I stood talking to the younger Jewess, who had, I could see,
formed as quick an attachment for me as I for her, I heard another nasal
and guttural voice (a man's) coming towards us from the hall.
"Is she von of our people?"
"Nein! She's a Skihoah"--meaning, as I afterwards learned, a non-Jewish
girl.
Then a tall, thin Jew entered the room behind the elderly Jewess. I had
never before and have never since seen such a patriarchal figure. With
his long grey beard and solemn face he might have stood for Moses in one
of the pictures that used to hang on the walls of the convent--except
for his velvet skull-cap and the black alpaca apron, which was speckled
over with fluffy bits of thread and scraps of cloth and silk.
He looked at me for a moment with his keen eyes, and after his wife had
shown him my work, and he had taken a pinch of snuff and blown his nose
on a coloured handkerchief with the sound of a trumpet, he put me
through another catechism.
I was trembling lest he should make intimate inquiries, but beyond
asking my name, and whether I was a Christian, he did not concern
himself with personal questions.
"Vat vages do you vant?" he asked.
I told him I should be pleased to take whatever was paid to other girls
doing work of the same kind.
"Ach no! Dese girls are full-timers. You are only a greener [meaning a
beginner] so you vill not expect anything like so much."
At that his daughter repeated her assurance that I was quicker than the
girl she had called Leah; but the Jew, with an air of parental majesty,
told her to be silent, and then said that as I was an "improver" he
could only take me "on piece," naming the price (a very small one) per
half-dozen buttons and buttonholes, with the condition that I found my
own twist and did the work in my own home.
Seeing that I should be no match for the Jew at a bargain, and being so
eager to get to work at any price, I closed with his offer, and then he
left the room, after telling me to come back the next day.
"And vhere do you lif, my dear?" said the Jewess.
I told her Bayswater, making some excuse for being in the East End, and
getting as near to the truth as I dare venture, but feeling
instinctively, after my sight of the master of the house, that I dared
say nothing about my child.
She told me I must live nearer to my work, and I said that was exactly
what I wished to do--asking if she knew where I could find a room.
Fortunately the Jewess herself had two rooms vacant at that moment, and
we went upstairs to look at them.
Both were at the top of the house, and one of them I could have for two
shillings a week, but it was dark and cheerless, being at the back and
looking into the space over the yards in which the tenants dried their
washing on lines stretched from pulleys.
The other, which would cost a shilling a week more, was a lean slit of a
room, very sparsely furnished, but it was to the front, and looked down
into the varied life of the street, so I took it instantly and asked
when I could move in.
"Ven you like," said the Jewess. "Everyding is ready."
So, early next morning I bade farewell to my good Welsh landlady (who
looked grave when I told her what I was going to do) and to Emmerjane
(who cried when I kissed her smudgy face) and, taking possession of my
new home, began work immediately in my first and only employment.
Perhaps it was a deep decline after the splendours of my dreams, but I
did not allow myself to think about that. I was near to Ilford and I
could go to see Isabel every day.
Isabel! Isabel! Isabel! Everything was Isabel, for now that Martin was
gone my hopes and my fears, my love and my life, revolved on one axis
only--my child.