The dawn was just breaking when I left the Court.
The world was wet and cold.
I looked back at the house from the other side of the wrought-iron gate;
its shuttered windows seemed like hostile eyes.
I felt a little like Eve expelled from the Garden of Eden--I wondered if
her expulsion had taken place on a wet morning before the sun was up.
*XIV*
I had read "Alone in London" stories, rather wonderful, poignant things.
I remembered two, one by Horace Newte and one by Peggy Webling. They
had gripped me at the time. I had been so lonely in my real life that I
always found it easy to get inside the skin of the heroines I was
reading about, and for days my lonely walks with Pomp and Circumstance
across the wet moors and through leafless lanes were no longer lonely or
desolate--they had become the streets of the greatest capital in the
world.
If you have sufficient imagination and a cheap lending library near you
your world is never unpeopled. I often think that the library is the
one thing that prevents prisoners going mad--you couldn't go mad if you
were allowed O. Henry once a week and Jane Austen to read yourself to
sleep with.
Two things I hadn't expected about London happened: it was radiant with
sunshine when I arrived, and no one took the faintest notice of me.
I was a little nonplussed; then I found a boarding-house, not in
Bloomsbury, where the wallpaper was not flowered and the atmosphere was
not cabbagey; the landlady neither stared at me nor asked questions, and
the maid was fat and brisk and efficient; and there was a parrot in the
basement who said "change for 'Ighgate" all day long; nothing could have
been less sinister or more normal and cheery.
I cried myself to sleep the first night--it seemed the right thing to
do; but I left off in the middle because I couldn't think of anything
more to cry about.
I had a dear old lady in the room next to mine. She knocked at my door
just as I was falling to sleep.
"My dear," she piped, "if you should hear a raid warning, if you would
just tap the wall. We all go down into the cellar--and one likes to
prepare a little."
"Prepare?" I said.
"Hindes," she whispered apologetically, "curlers--you know--one doesn't
like----"
I fell asleep smiling on my first night in darkest, dreadfulest,
naughtiest London.
The next day I started to hunt for work. I was paying forty shillings a
week, and had only four pounds ten left of my money.
I found it at once. I took the money in a cinema booking-office. It
was dull, and I got thirty shillings a week; I took it because it gave
me the entire morning to hunt for more remunerative work.
I met with no adventures in my hutch. I was sworn at several times for
giving the wrong change, and the gorgeous gentleman in Prussian blue and
silver uniform, who waved the people to their seats inside, gave me a
packet of butterscotch. But the more remunerative work did not present
itself. I was untrained. I could not type or do shorthand, and I had
no previous experience. The men who interviewed me were most civil,
they suggested Clark's College or Pitman's. I was no good to them.
I had to change my boarding-house. I went to one near Kentish Town, it
was very clean, and the landlady had been a professional cook. I boarded
with the family, and a Polish Jewess also lived there, a skirt hand in a
big West End tailor's. She used to press my skirts.
I wondered if anybody was advertising for me, or if there was any
fussation going on. I did not think I was worth a whole detective for
one minute. I did not attempt to hide. I had read somewhere that to
live an ordinary life was the surest way to escape detection.
I wondered, as the months slipped by, if Cheneston had married Grace
Gilpin.
I did not lose Cheneston. I could always step right back in memory into
the days I had spent with him, days of infinite and dear delight.
I knew I loved Cheneston, that I wanted passionately to be his wife;
that if he were to ask me to marry him I would marry him rapturously and
thankfully, even though I knew he didn't care two straws about me and
would need a photograph to remember the way I did my hair.
I believe the "if she be not fair for me, what care I how fair she be"
sort of people are very, very jelly-fishy.
If you care for a man you care for him, and that's all there is to it;
the fact that he cares for someone else or doesn't care for you doesn't
alter your feelings, it only makes the pain and hurt of it an artistic
success.
I wish I was jelly-fishy in my feelings for people. If I were I could
say of Cheneston, "I can't stick here! I'll float on." But I'm a
barnacle creature where I love. I shall be Cheneston's girl even if I
never see him again. My heart went from me when I first met him, and the
doors closed after it and left a little hole. It will always ache, and
I shall always know there is a hole where a heart should be--especially
when I listen to wonderful music or see sunsets or little children at
play.
I shall never, never have another heart to give away; some women have
theirs on bits of elastic so that they can always pull them back and
give them away again; a man sort of holds it until somebody else wins
it, like a challenge shield or a football cup.
I gave mine entirely and unconditionally; I believe that time will
cocaine the hole.
I look to time to do a lot for me in the healing and dulling line--all
that the poets and the proverbs say it will. Time never fails you--when
all else fails, you can always kid yourself you haven't given it long
enough to perform the miracle.
I don't ever want to see anyone I knew in the old life. I feel that the
Pamela Burbridge of those days is dead, poor thing! but she has a more
exciting time than most defunct people, because every night I shake her
up and make her live over again her enchanted halcyon days by the sea
and at Cromer Court.
She lives in sunshine and happiness for an hour or two of memory every
night, even if she has to die off while I go and do my day's work.
Life is really awfully funny and un-understandable. Why are we given
feelings we've got to squash?
Are we big if we squash them and little if we let them grow?