'No, no,' he said; 'I don't want you to go, yet I don't like keeping
you in this musty studio on such a morning. Suppose we take a stroll
together.'
'But you never walk out in the daytime.'
'Not often; indeed, I may say never, unless it is to go to the Zoo,
or to Jamrach's, which I do about once in three months.'
'Jamrach's!' I said. 'Why, he's the importer of animals, isn't he? Of
all places in London that is the one I should most like to see.' He
then took me into a long panelled room with bay windows looking over
the Thames, furnished with remarkable Chinese chairs and tables. And
then we left the house.
In Maud Street a hansom passed us; D'Arcy hailed it.
'We will take this to the Bank,' said he, 'and then walk through the
East End to Jamrach's. Jump in.'
As we drove off, the sun was shining brilliantly, and London seemed
very animated--seemed to be enjoying itself. Until we reached the
Bank our drive was through all the most cheerful-looking and
prosperous streets of London. It acted like a tonic on me, and for
the first time since my trouble I felt really exhilarated. As to
D'Arcy, after we had left behind us what he called the 'stucco world'
of the West End, his spirits seemed to rise every minute, and by the
time we reached the Strand he was as boisterous as a boy on a
holiday.
On reaching the Bank we dismissed the hansom and proceeded to walk to
Ratcliffe Highway. Before reaching it I was appalled at the
forbidding aspect of the neighbourhood. It was not merely that the
unsavoury character of the streets offended and disgusted me, but the
locality wore a sinister aspect which acted upon my imagination in
the strangest, wildest way. Why was it that this aspect fairly cowed
me, scared me? I felt that I was not frightened on my own account,
and yet when I asked myself why I was frightened I could not find a
rational answer.
As I saw the sailors come noisily from their boarding-houses; as I
saw the loafers standing at the street corners, smoking their dirty
pipes and gazing at us; as I saw the tawdry girls, bare-headed or in
flaunting hats covered with garish flowers, my thoughts, for no
conceivable reason, ran upon Winnie more persistently than they had
run upon her since I had abandoned all hope of seeing her in Wales.
The thought came to me that, grievous as was her fate and mine, the
tragedy of our lives might have been still worse.
'Suppose,' I said, 'that instead of being lost in the Welsh hills she
had been lost here!' I shuddered at the thought.
Again that picture in the Welsh pool came to me, the picture of
Winnie standing at a street corner, offering matches for sale. D'Arcy
then got talking about Sinfi Lovell and her strange superiority in
every respect to the few Gypsy women he had seen.
'She has,' said he, 'mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it
is mesmeric. She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly
through her voice.'
He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling
with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and passed us. Not a
word more of D'Arcy's talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the
very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song
I met in a glade a lone little maid
At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.