On reaching the front street, I may have taken the penny tram, for
though I had a sense of growing blind and deaf I have vague memories of
lights flashing past me and of the clanging of electric cars.
At Bow Church I must have got out (probably to save a further fare)
because I recollect walking along the Bow Road between the lights in the
shops and the coarse flares from the stalls on the edge of the pavement,
where women with baskets on their arms were doing their Saturday night's
shopping.
My heart was still strong (sharpened indeed into, poignancy) and I know
I was not crying, for at one moment as I passed the mirror in a
chemist's window I caught sight of my face and it was fierce as flame.
At another moment, while I was hurrying along, I collided with a drunken
woman who was coming out of a public-house with her arm about the neck
of a drunken sailor.
"Gawd! Here's the Verging Mary agine!" she cried.
It was the woman who had carried baby, and when I tried to hurry past
her she said:
"You think I'm drunk, don't you, dear? So'am. Don't you never get drunk?
No? What a bleedin' fool you are! Want to get out o' this 'ere 'ole?
Tike my tip then--gettin' drunk's on'y way out of it."
Farther on I had to steer my way through jostling companies of young
people of both sexes who were going (I thought) the same way as the
woman--girls out of the factories with their free walk, and their
boisterous "fellers" from the breweries.
It was a cold and savage night. As I approached the side street in which
I lived I saw by the light of the arc lamps a small group of people, a
shivering straggle of audience, with the hunched-up shoulders of beings
thinly clad and badly fed, standing in stupid silence at the corner
while two persons wearing blue uniforms (a man in a peaked cap and a
young woman in a poke bonnet) sang a Salvation hymn of which the refrain
was "It is well, it is well with my soul."
The door of the Jew's house was shut (for the first time in my
experience), so I had to knock and wait, and while I waited I could not
help but hear the young woman in the poke bonnet pray.
Her prayer was about "raising the standard of Calvary," and making the
drunkards and harlots of the East End into "seekers" and "soul yielders"
and "prisoners of the King of Kings."
Before the last words of the prayer were finished the man in the peaked
cap tossed up his voice in another hymn, and the young woman joined him
with an accordion:
"_Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod_. . . ."
The door was opened by the Jew himself, who, assuming a severe manner,
said something to me in his guttural voice which I did not hear or heed,
for I pushed past him and walked firmly upstairs.
When I had reached my room and lit the gas, I closed and locked the
door, as if I were preparing to commit a crime--and perhaps I was.
I did not allow myself to think of what I intended to do that night, but
I knew quite well, and when at one moment my conscience pressed me hard
something cried out in my heart:
"Who can blame me since my child's life is in danger?"
I opened my trunk and took out my clothes--all that remained of the
dresses I had brought from Ellan. They were few, and more than a little
out of fashion, but one of them, though far from gay, was bright and
stylish--a light blue frock with a high collar and some white lace over
the bosom.
I remember wondering why I had not thought of pawning it during the
week, when I had had so much need of money, and then being glad that I
had not done so.
It was thin and light, being the dress I had worn on the day I first
came to the East End, carrying my baby to Ilford, when the weather was
warm which now was cold; but I paid no heed to that, thinking only that
it was my best and most attractive.
After I had put it on and glanced at myself in my little swinging
looking-glass I was pleased, but I saw at the same time that my face was
deadly pale, and that made me think of some bottles and cardboard boxes
which lay in the pockets of my trunk.
I knew what they contained--the remains of the cosmetics which I had
bought in Cairo in the foolish days when I was trying to make my husband
love me. Never since then had I looked at them, but now I took them out
(with a hare's foot and some pads and brushes) and began to paint my
pale face--reddening my cracked and colourless lips and powdering out
the dark rings under my eyes.
While I was doing this I heard (though I was trying not to) the deadened
sound of the singing in the front street, with the young woman's treble
voice above the man's bass and the wheezing of the accordion:
"_Yes, we'll gather, at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod,
With its, crystal tide for ever
Flowing by the throne of God_."
The Dark Spirit must have taken possession of me by this time, poor
vessel of conflicting passions as I was, for I remember that while I
listened I laughed--thinking what mockery was to sing of "angel feet"
and "crystal tides" to those shivering wretches at the corner of the
London street in the smoky night air.
"What a farce!" I thought. "What a heartless farce!"
Then I put on my hat, which was also not very gay, and taking out of my
trunk a pair of long light gloves which I had never worn since I left
Ellan, I began to pull them on.
I was standing before the looking-glass in the act of doing this, and
trying (God pity me!) to smile at myself, when I was suddenly smitten by
a new thought.
I was about to commit suicide--the worst kind of suicide, not the
suicide which is followed by oblivion, but by a life on earth after
death!
After that night Mary O'Neill would no longer exist! I should never he
able to think of her again! I should have killed her and buried her and
stamped the earth down on her and she would be gone from me for ever!
That made a grip at my heart--awakening memories of happy days in my
childhood, bringing back the wild bliss of the short period of my great
love, and even making me think of my life in Rome, with its confessions,
its masses, and the sweetness of its church bells.
I was saying farewell to Mary O'Neill! And parting with oneself seemed
so terrible that when I thought of it my heart seemed ready to burst.
"But who can blame me when my child's life is in danger?" I asked myself
again, still tugging at my long gloves.
By the time I had finished dressing the Salvationists were going off to
their barracks with their followers behind them. Under the singing I
could faintly hear the shuffling of bad shoes, which made a sound like
the wash of an ebbing tide over the teeth of a rocky beach--up our side
street, past the Women's Night Shelter (where the beds never had time to
become cool), and beyond the public-house with the placard in the window
saying the ale sold there could be guaranteed to make anybody drunk for
fourpence.
"_We'll stand the storm, it won't be long,
And we'll anchor in the sweet by-and-by_."
I listened and tried to laugh again, but I could not do so now. There
was one last spasm of my cruelly palpitating heart, in which I covered
my face with both hands, and cried:
"For baby's sake! For my baby's sake!"
And then I opened my bedroom door, walked boldly downstairs and went out
into the streets.