Et quelle est la femme qui ne chercherait pas à vous rendre
heureux!
HE awoke with a parched mouth and cramped limbs to find himself being
shaken and to hear a voice saying:
"Hi, mate, time to wake up. Can't leave you no longer."
"Eh? Is this London?"
"Aye, and London it's been these three hours past. You came in by the
five-twenty-five, and I couldn't get you to wake up, I couldn't.
You're in the sidings."
René shook himself and clambered down with the red-headed railway
porter, and walked with him across the rails through several coaches,
back to the station.
"Been ill, mate?"
"No. Why?"
"I never see such a face. Got more than your fair share of bones in
it. It was that made me leave you."
"I'm much obliged."
The big clock announced five minutes past eight.
"No luggage?" asked the porter.
"No. No luggage."
"Going to see friends?"
"No."
"You'll excuse me asking, but I don't like letting you go alone with a
face like that. D'you know London?"
"No."
"You'll want breakfast."
René realized that he was hungry. The porter took him to a pull-up in
a noisy street, filled with the clang of tramcars and the roar and
rattle of heavy drays coming from the goods yard. They had coffee and
ham and great hunks of bread.
"I never see such a sleeper," said the porter.
"I was tired, I think."
That struck the porter as a good joke. He kept on chuckling to himself
and saying:
"Tired? I should think you was. Tired! He says he was tired!"
Presently he became solemn and leaned across the deal-topped table.
"I can't make you out, mate. I don't know if you're a gent or what.
You're from the North. It's easy to see that. What is it? Trouble?"
"Not exactly trouble. Nothing unusual, I mean. It's been going on for
a long time."
"They're not after you, then?"
"Oh, no. No one's after me."
The porter's expression showed both disappointment and relief.
"Is it far to Putney?" asked René.
"It's where the boat-race is," said the porter. "I been there. An hour
in a bus or train."
"I mean--to walk. I'd like to walk. To see London. I've never seen it,
you know."
"It'd be Fulham Road, I fancy, though I don't know those parts well.
Friends at Putney?"
"Someone I know there."
"I see. You'll be going home soon. Return ticket?"
"No. I just wanted to see London. At least, there was a train going to
London."
"Ain't lost your memory, have you, mate?"
"No," said René. "No. I've lost interest in it, that's all."
"Money? Got any money?"
René thrust his hand into his pocket and produced three pounds and a
few shillings.
"And no friends," said the porter to himself. "Well, you are a corker,
and no mistake! Set on going to Putney, are you?" René nodded. "Well,
if you want a friend, come to me." And he wrote down an address in
Kentish Town which René pocketed without looking at it.
"But if I was you," said the little man, "I should go back home, I
should, really. See your friends and go back home. I had a brother
once who got crossed in love. Took it something crool, he did, and
walked out of the house one day after breakfast and went to Canada. We
sent him the money to come home, and now he's doing well in the
drysalting. Good-by, mate, and good luck."
He held out a grimy paw, and René clasped it warmly. It was, he felt,
a good beginning.
For some time he sat in the pull-up watching the busy trade in
victuals, the burly carters, weedy clerks and boys come in and gulp
down their food and drink as though the beginning of the day's work
hardly left them time for their natural necessities. It was all oddly
familiar and like enough to the life he had been accustomed to in the
school and university among factories and warehouses. Only, as he
looked out of the window, the light was different, softer and more
generous. It was exciting and invited him out.
He paid the bill, returned to the station, and washed and had himself
shaved. As he left the barber's shop he saw a train loading up for its
journey to Thrigsby, and he stayed and watched it go out for the
pleasure of feeling that he was not in it. Then he turned briskly away
for the adventure of the plunge into London.
A foreign city! He could hardly understand the language spoken by the
people in the streets. Within a quarter of a mile he came on a great
garden with trees and grass, and down a street he could see more
trees. A keen air was blowing. It was invigorating and whipped up his
blood. In Thrigsby, when the air was keen it was unpleasant and
devastating. The boarding-houses and private hotels in the region of
the station seemed to him very lordly houses. They had wide, handsome
doors that were in themselves a welcome--a welcoming and no
indifferent city. It seemed to him that the people in the streets were
aware of each other. At least he was aware of them, and pleased with
every kind of person. So many of them were amused, so many found it
good to be walking the streets, and they had some mind and energy to
spare from the business of the moment. Even the people in the sordid
streets through which he passed had the air of bearing their squalor
good-humoredly. No one was moody or grimly silent. And there was
color. He knew the color of many country-sides, but always on entering
the cities he had felt as though a dirty sponge had been passed over
his vision. Certain streets seemed to be filled with a dancing,
colored light. He was lured on from one to another, with no thought of
time or direction. Some of the great thoroughfares were so familiar
from pictures that he felt at home in them, and was queerly put out
when they led on to places and views of which he had no recollection.
Finding himself approaching a church as well known to him as the
Collegiate Church in Thrigsby, he said to himself with a sudden thrill
of almost awe: "This is the Strand!" And then down a street he caught
sight of water. The river! He almost ran down toward it.
The tide was up, the river at its broadest. On the other side were
great platforms surmounted with tall cranes that seemed higher than
the highest steeple. Beyond were towers, chimneys, domes, standing out
against the sky that so delighted and refreshed him. That sky and the
water in the wide sweep of the river! Friendliness and power! The
river seemed to bear on its broad back the bridges, the tall
buildings, the bustling energy about them, the twin masses of the city
built up on its flanks. And along the river with the tide came a
lovely air, sweetening and restoring. That was indeed a welcome, and
he felt that he had passed into another world and become its citizen.
He felt no more the strain of the crisis through which he had passed.
The years of unceasing labor that lay between his boyhood and this
moment were wiped out. The current of his being flowed again. He was
as eager as a boy, as ripe for adventure, weighed down only by the
memory of the dark little house that had been his home, and that other
house so full of gracious things, so empty of all that could justify
their graciousness. And, like a boy, he lacked purpose. He had nothing
but his fantastic desire to go to Putney, and he was reluctant to tear
himself away from the fascination of the river. But the porter had
said the boat-race was rowed at Putney and the river must be there
also.
So he walked along the river past the Houses of Parliament. He had
once made a cardboard replica of it as a child, and, remembering that,
his mind was filled with other childish memories--illnesses, books,
fights with George, games and exploits with other boys, next-door
neighbors, the small girl at his first school who had cast a blight
over his life by announcing that she was in love with him-- Past the
tall chimneys at Chelsea; and then, taking a wrong turning, he found
himself in a desolate region, almost as desolate as any in Thrigsby
but for the generous sky above it. And the two sides of little houses
did not so dreadfully close in upon the street as they did in the mean
quarters of the northern city. Nothing here was so cramping and
destroying as there.
At length he came to Putney Bridge and crossed it into what looked
like a holiday town, Southport, or Buxton, or Matlock. He asked a
policeman the way to Putney.
"This is Putney."
"I want Mr. Bentley's house. It is called Roseneath."
"Mr. Bentley. He's dead. Six months ago."
René asked to be directed to his house. The tidings he had received
had made his memory of Mr. Bentley very clear--gruff, kindly,
patronizing, a little pompous, conscious of being a success and
"somebody." He had his name printed very large on luggage labels, and
the note-paper on which Cathleen used to write was crested, with
something about _Judex_ on the scroll beneath the crest. And Mrs.
Bentley was always tired, and her husband used to keep everybody
flying round to fetch and carry for her. But they had very nice ways,
and their house in Scotland was always open, even if it was overfull
of athletic young men, highly polished and oppressively clean.
When he came to the house, René found it empty. He was disappointed
with its aspect. It was very like the Brocks' house in Galt's Park,
must have been built about the same time; stucco with absurd Gothic
windows; a square porch, rooms on either side of it. He was
disappointed, for he had thought of the Bentleys living in a region
remote and inaccessible, beyond anything he had ever known or could
know. He remembered the agent's description of his own house--"an
eminently desirable family residence." This house bore almost the same
recommendation. The fantastic London that he had shaped in his mind
began to fall away. It had something in common with Thrigsby, was
connected with it by something more than the deep sleep in which he
had been borne hither. He felt rather foolish standing there by the
empty house, and saw with dismay how much more foolish he would have
been if the house had been occupied and the Bentleys accessible. He
had a sick fear as he saw how irresponsibly he had acted, and how
separate his impulse had been from his will.
"All the same," he said, "it is done. It is done. I thought I should
always know what would happen to me, but this I did not know. It makes
it easy for Linda. The Smallmans will help her to see how badly I have
behaved. They will like saying it and explaining to all their friends.
They will talk about all they did for me. I never wanted them to do
anything. I never wanted-- If I had been like George and gone into
business? But I could not have stood that, either. It would have been
over sooner. Other people stand things, worse things, too. Oh, well--I
can't."
It gave him no pleasure to think that he was different from other
people. Rather the reverse; it brought an acute pang of something like
shame. He moved on. He lost himself in the polite streets of Putney
with their little gardens, but came at last to another bridge. The sun
was setting, and he stood and watched it weave a changing tapestry on
the sky.
"So the days go," he said. "I think I never noticed a day go before.
There must have been something very wrong with me."
That lightened his heart. To have confessed his failure was already in
some sort to justify it, and though the cloud upon his mind had grown
darker, he was sensible of a release of feeling. He could breathe
again. He was no longer the cramped, huddled creature that he had been
all day. He could rejoice as the sky grew dark and the stars came out
and the glow of the great city went up into the sky. There were
patches in the sky so lurid that they filled him with alarm that they
must mean fire. He moved toward one of those lurid patches and found
himself presently in a narrow thoroughfare crowded with men and women,
youths and maidens. The street was streaked with light and darkness.
Cheap bazaars were thronged; shops filled with automatic machines of
entertainment were garishly lit; there were butchers' and
greengrocers' shops open to the air, blazing with color under electric
and naphtha lamps; there were stalls in the road, barrows of
artificial flowers; white kinematograph houses; terra-cotta
music-halls and theaters; crimson-tiled and green-brick public-houses;
swarms of human beings, talking, laughing, singing, the laughter of
excited girls. He shrank within himself from the harsh vitality of it
all. He was filled with a dread of calling down some of the laughter
upon himself. The road grew narrower, the wheeled traffic more
congested; the yellow and red trams seemed to fill the street.
Motor-cars, trams, carts, all moved slowly and cautiously. A little
girl started to move across the road, her eyes fixed on someone or
something she had seen on the other side. Another step and she would
be under a motor-car. René moved to save her. At the same moment, from
the other side, he saw a young woman dart out, catch the child up,
fling her back, and rush on in her own impetus. She slipped in the
tramline, and almost fell just within his reach. He caught her arm,
pulled her up, and dragged both her and the child back to his own side
of the road. The traffic moved on and no one seemed to have seen what
had happened. The child saw her opportunity and dashed over in safety,
leaving René and the young woman together.
"A near thing that," said he.
"I think I've hurt my foot. I slipped on the tramline. They do stick
up just here."
"Can you walk?"
She tried, but twisted up her face with the pain of it.
"O-o-oh! Crimes! Let me hold on to you."
He supported her, and she found that she could just hobble.
"Rotten luck!" she said. "I was going to a dance. Don't you love
dancing? Just like me, though; if there's ever any trouble going, I
get it. I shall have to go home now."
"Is it far?"
"Not far. The busses go by. Any old bus from that corner." They had
come to a circus where many roads meet. "Mitcham Mews. Number six.
Don't you trouble. You just put me into the bus."
"But I must see you home."
"I 'spect you got someone waiting for you. 'Tain't fair to spoil your
fun."
"This is much better fun than anything I can imagine doing!"
"'Tain't my idea of fun, helping a lame duck over a stile. It's good
of you, anyway. Penny fare."
They boarded a bus and she leaned down and prodded at her ankle to
discover where and how much it hurt.
"It's only ricked, I think," she said. "It feels like your neck when
your head goes gammy. I don't think it's a sprain."
René was filled with admiration of her vivacious prettiness. She had
an oval face; a dark complexion beautifully colored, ivory most
delicately colored with crimson; wide-set eyes that were still merry
in spite of the pain smoldering in them; a pouting mouth that, as she
talked, showed perfect teeth, small and even brilliant, strong as an
animal's dark hair neatly arranged under a rather common hat. She had
a necklet of imitation pearls round her soft throat. Her dress was
neat, but just a little shabby. She laughed lightly, and her laughter
lit up her face with a radiant happiness.
"What you might call being thrown together," she said.
He could not but smile with her.
"I'm rather glad," he answered. "Do you know that I hadn't spoken to a
soul but a railway porter and a policeman since early morning?"
"Reely," said she. "I think I'd die if I couldn't talk. Here's where
we get off. O-o-oh!"
She hung more heavily on his arm as they descended. They stood for a
moment to watch the bus jolt back into its top gear and go roaring up
the wide and almost empty street.
"It's not far."
They moved slowly for some fifty yards, past empty shops, until they
came to an archway plastered on either side with the bills of local
music-halls, and lit with an old gas-jet. Through the archway they
turned and came to a dark place, very quiet, with long low buildings
on either side of it, and a great litter of paper and refuse on the
pavement, and handcarts and vans uptilted. The ground floors of the
buildings were all taken up with doors, the first floors with little
windows, in some of which were flower-boxes and bird-cages and hanging
ferns. One or two of the windows were lit up. From the other end, far
up, came the glaring lights of a motor-car. It stopped, and they could
hear the purr of its sweetly running engine.
"That's Mr. Ripley," said the young woman. "He's often out at night.
He's a oner, he is. Down to Brighton and back and all that, you know."
René did not know, but he was pleased and excited. London had ceased
to be a spectacle to him. He had been drawn into an adventure, taken
to a place where people lived--and a very strange place--the
friendliest of hands was on his arm, the cheeriest of voices ringing
in his ears.