The extortions of the Olivers had brought me to so narrow a margin
between my earnings and expenses that I lay awake nearly all that night
thinking what I could do to increase the one or reduce the other. The
only thing I found possible was to change to cheaper quarters. So next
morning, with a rather heavy heart, I asked Mrs. Abramovitch if the room
at the back of the house was still empty, and hearing that it was I
moved into it the same day.
That was a small and not a very wise economy.
My new room was cheerless as well as dark, with no sights but the
clothes that were drying from the pulley-lines and no sounds but the
whoops of the boys of the neighbourhood playing at "Red Indians" on the
top of the yard walls.
But it was about the same as the other in size and furniture, and after
I had decorated it with my few treasures--the Reverend Mother's rosary,
which I hung on the head of the bed, and my darling mother's miniature,
which I pinned up over the fire--I thought it looked bright and
homelike.
All this time, too, I was between the nether and the upper mill-stone.
My employer, the Jew (though he must have seen that I was sweating
myself much more than the law would have allowed him to sweat me), could
not forgive himself when he found that I was earning more by "piece"
than he would have had to pay me by the day, or resist the temptation to
square accounts with me at the earliest possible opportunity.
Unfortunately, his opportunity came only too quickly, and it led
(however indirectly) to the most startling fact that has ever, perhaps,
entered into a woman's life.
I had not been more than three months at the Jew's house when the Jewish
festivals came round--New Year's Day, the Day of Atonement, and the
Feast of Tabernacles--which, falling near together and occupying many
days, disturbed his own habits of work entirely.
One of the tasks he reserved for himself was that of taking the best
paid of his "best-bespoke" back to the large shops in the West End, and
waiting for the return orders. But finding that the festivals interfered
with these journeys, he decided that they should be made by me, who was
supposed to know the West End (having lived in it) and to present a
respectable appearance.
I was reluctant to undertake the new duty, for though the Jew was to pay
me a few shillings a week for it, I saw I could earn more in the time
with my needle. But when he laid his long, hairy forefinger on the side
of his nose and said with a significant smile:
"You vill be gradeful, and convenience your employer, mine child," I
agreed.
Thus it came to pass that not only during the Jewish festivals, but for
months after they were over, I carried a rather large black bag by tram
or rail to the district that lies at the back of Piccadilly and along
Oxford Street as far west as the Marble Arch.
I had to go whenever called upon and to wait as long as wanted, so that
in the height of the tailoring season I was out in the West End at all
irregular hours of night, and even returned to my lodgings on one or two
occasions in the raw sunshine of the early mornings.
The one terror of my West End journeys was that I might meet Sister
Mildred. I never did. In the multitude of faces which passed through the
streets, flashing and disappearing like waves under the moon at sea, I
never once caught a glimpse of a face I knew.
But what sights I saw for all that! What piercing, piteous proofs that
between the rich and the poor there is a great gulf fixed!
The splendid carriages driving in and out of the Park; the sumptuously
dressed ladies strolling through Bond Street; the fashionable church
paraders; the white plumes and diamond stars which sometimes gleamed
behind the glow of the electric broughams gliding down the Mall.
"I used to be a-toffed up like that onct," I heard an old woman who was
selling matches say as a lady in an ermine coat stepped out of a theatre
into an automobile and was wrapped round in a tiger-skin rug.
Sometimes it happened that, returning to the East End after the motor
'buses had ceased to ply, I had to slip through the silent Leicester
Square and the empty Strand to the Underground Railway on the
Embankment.
Then I would see the wretched men and women who were huddled together in
the darkness on the steps to the river (whose ever-flowing waters must
have witnessed so many generations of human wreckage), and, glancing up
at the big hotels and palatial mansions full of ladies newly returned
from theatres and restaurants in their satin slippers and silk
stockings, I would wonder how they could lie in their white beds at
night in rooms whose windows looked down on such scenes.
But the sight that stirred me most (though it did not awaken my charity,
which shows what a lean-souled thing I was myself) was that of the
"public women," the street-walkers, as I used to call them, whom I saw
in Piccadilly with their fine clothes and painted faces, sauntering in
front of the clubs or tripping along with a light step and trying to
attract the attention of the men.
I found no pathos in the position of such women. On the contrary, I had
an unspeakable horror and hatred and loathing of them, feeling that no
temptation, no poverty, no pressure that could ever be brought to bear
upon a woman in life or in death excused her for committing so great a
wrong on the sanctity of her sex as to give up her womanhood at any call
but that of love.
"Nothing could make me do it," I used to think, "nothing in this world."
But O God! how little I knew then what is in a woman's heart to do when
she has a child to live for, and is helpless and alone!
I cannot expect anybody to forgive me for what I did (or attempted to
do), and now that the time has come to tell of it my hand trembles, and
body and soul seem to be quivering like a flame.
May God (who has brought everything to such a glorious end) have mercy
on me and forgive me, and help me to be true!