The town lay around her desolate. Her footsteps smote the
wretchedly-laid street, and echoed on the loneliness. A cold wind blew
in fitful gusts, nipping her cheeks and hands. On the vagueness of
the market-place the gilded statue, with its sheen obscured, loomed
shapeless as she passed. She heard the lumber and creak of a wagon
straining out of sight; the quaver of a cock-crow, then one shriller
and more prolonged; two or three thin screams in quick succession from
a distant train. She knew, rather than decided, that she would go to
London, though there would not be a familiar face to greet her in all
its leagues of houses, not a door among its countless doors to reveal
a friend. She would go there because she was adrift in England and
"England" meant a blur of names equally unpitying, and London, somehow,
seemed the natural place to book to.
Few persons' ruin leaves them alone at once; the crash generally sees
some friends who prove loyal beneath the shock of the catastrophe and
drop away only afterwards under the wearisomeness of the worries. It is
the situation of few to emerge from the wreck of a home without any
personality dominating their consciousness as the counsellor to whom
they must turn for aid. But it was the situation of Mary Brettan to be
without a soul to turn to in the world; and briefly it had happened
thus.
Her father had been a country doctor with a large practice among
patients who could not afford to pay. From the standpoint of humanity
his conduct was admirable; regarded from the domestic hearthstone
perhaps it was a little less. The practitioner who neglected the wife
of the Mayor in order to attend a villager, because the villager's
condition was more critical, offered small promise of leaving his child
provided for, and before Mary was sixteen the problems of the rent
and butcher's book were as familiar to her as the surgery itself. The
exemplary doctor and unpractical parent struggled along more or less
placidly by means of the girl's surveillance. Had he survived her, it
is difficult to determine what would have become of him; but, dying
first, he had her protection to the end. She found herself after the
funeral with a crop of bills, some shabby furniture, and the necessity
for earning a living. The furniture and the bills were easy to dispose
of; they represented a sum in division with nothing over. The problem
was, what was she fitted to do? She knew none of those things which
used to be called "accomplishments," and which are to-day the elements
of education. Her French was the French of "Le Petit Précepteur"; in
German she was still bewildered by the article. And, a graver drawback,
since the selling-price of education is an outrage on its cost--she
had not been brought up to any trade. She belonged, in fact, and
circumstances had caused her to discover it, to the ranks of refined
incompetence: the incompetence that will not live by menial labour,
because it is refined; the refinement that cannot support itself by
any brain work, because it is incompetent. It was suggested that she
might possibly enter the hospital of a neighbouring town and try to
qualify for a nurse. She said, "Very well." By-and-by she was told that
she could be admitted to the hospital, and that if she proved herself
capable, that would be the end of her troubles. She said "Very well"
again--and this time, "thank you."
She had a good constitution, and she saw that if she failed here she
might starve at her leisure before any further efforts were put forth
on her behalf; so she gave satisfaction in her probation, and became at
last a nurse like the others, composed and reliable. When that stage
arrived, she owned to having fainted and suppressed the fact, after an
early experience of the operating-room; her reputation was established,
and it didn't matter now. The surgeon smiled.
Miss Brettan had been Nurse Brettan several years, when an actor who
had met with an accident was brought into the hospital. The mishap had
cost him his engagement, and he bewailed his fate to everyone who would
listen. The person who heard most was she, since it was she who had
the most to do for him, and she began by feeling sympathetic. He was a
paying patient, or he would have had to limp away much sooner; as it
was, it was many weeks before he was pronounced well enough to leave.
And during those weeks she remembered what in the years of routine she
had forgotten--that she was a woman capable of love.
One evening she learnt that the man really cared for her; he asked her
to marry him. She stooped, and across the supper-tray, they kissed.
Then she went upstairs, and cried with joy, and there was no happier
woman in or out of any hospital in Christendom.
He talked to her about himself more than ever after this, suppressing
only the one fact that he lacked the courage to avow. And when at last
he went away their engagement was made public, and it was settled that
she should join him in London as soon as he was able to write for her
to come.
There were many expressions of good-will heaped upon Nurse Brettan on
the summer morning that she bade the Yaughton Hospital good-bye; a
joint wedding-gift from the other nurses was presented, and everybody
shook her hand and wished her a life of happiness, for she was popular.
Carew met her at Euston. He had written that he had dropped into a good
part, anti that they would shortly be starting together on the tour,
but that in the meanwhile they were to be married in town. It was the
first time she had been to London. He took her to lodgings in Guilford
Street, and here occurred their great scene.
He confessed that when he was a boy he had made a wild marriage; he had
not set eyes on the woman since he discovered her past, but the law
would not annul his blunder. He was bound to a harlot, and he loved
Mary. Would she forgive his deception and be his wife in everything
except the ceremony that could not be performed?
It was a very terrible scene indeed. For a long while he believed her
lost to him; she could be brought to give ear to his entreaties only by
force, and he upbraided himself for not having disclosed his position
in the first instance. He had excused his cowardice by calling it
"expedience," but, to do him justice, he did not do justice to himself.
The delay had been due far less to his sense of its expedience than to
the tremors of his cowardice. Now he suffered scarcely less than she.
Had his plea been based on any but the insuperable obstacle that it
was, it would have failed to a certainty; but his helplessness gave
the sophistry of both full play. He harped on the "grandeur of the
sacrifice" she would be making for him, and the phrase pierced her
misery. He cried to her that it would be a heroism, and she wondered
dully if it really would. She queried if there was indeed a higher duty
than denial--if her virtue could be merely selfishness in disguise.
His insistence on the nobility of consent went very far with her; it
did seem a beautiful thing to let sunshine into her lover's life at
the cost of her own transgression. And then, in the background, burnt
a hot shame at the thought of being questioned and commiserated when
she returned to the hospital with a petition to be reinstalled. The
arguments of both were very stale, and equally they blinked the fact
that the practical use of matrimony is to protect woman against the
innate fickleness of man. He demanded why, from a rational point of
view, the comradeship of two persons should be any more sacred because
a third person in a surplice said it was; and she, with his arms round
her, began to persuade herself that he was a martyr, who had broken his
leg that she might cross his path and give him consolation. Ultimately
he triumphed; and a fortnight later she burst into a tempest of
sobs--in suddenly realising how happy she was.
He introduced her to everybody as his wife; their "honeymoon" was
spent in the, to her, unfamiliar atmosphere of a theatrical tour.
One of the first places that the company visited was West Hartlepool,
and he and she had lodgings outside the town in a little sea-swept
village--a stretch of sand, and a lane or two, with a sprinkling of
cottages--called Seaton Carew, from which, he told her, he had borrowed
his professional name. She said, "Dear Seaton Carew!" and felt in a
silly minute that she longed to strain the sunny prospect against her
heart.
In the rawness of dawn a clock struck five, and she stood forsaken in
the streets.
The myriad clocks of Leicester took up the burden, and the air was
beaten with their din. The way to the station appeared endless; yards
were preternaturally lengthened; and ever pressing on, yet ever with
a lonely vista to be covered, the walk began to be charged with the
oppression of a nightmare, in which she pursued some illimitable road,
seeking a destination that had vanished.
At last the building loomed before her, ponderously still, and she
passed in over the cob-stones. There were no indications of life
about the place; the booking-office was fast shut, and between the
dimly-burning lamps, the empty track of rails lay blue. For all she
knew to the contrary, she would have to wait some hours.
By-and-by, however, a sleepy-eyed porter lounged into sight, and she
learnt that there would be a train in a few minutes. Shortly after
his advent she was able to procure a ticket--a third-class ticket,
which diminished the little sum in her possession by eight shillings
and a halfpenny; and returning to the custody of her bag, she waited
miserably till the line of carriages thundered into view.
It was a wretched journey--a ghastly horror of a journey--but it did
not seem particularly long; with nothing to look forward to, she had no
cause to be impatient. Intermittently she dozed, waking with a start as
the train jerked to a standstill and the name of a station was bawled.
When St. Pancras was reached, her limbs were cramped as she descended
among the groups of dreary-faced passengers, and the load on her mind
lay like a physical weight. She had not washed since the previous
evening, and she made her way to the waiting-room, where a dejected
attendant charged her twopence. Then, having paid twopence more to
leave the bag behind her, she went out to search for a room.
A coffee-bar, with a quantity of stale pastry heaped in the window,
reminded her that she needed breakfast. A man with blue shirt-sleeves
rolled over red arms brought her tea and bread-and-butter at a sloppy
table. The repast, if not enjoyable, served to refresh her and was
worth the fourpence that she could very ill afford. Some of the
faintness passed; when she stood in the fresh air again her head was
clearer; the vagueness with which she had thought and spoken was gone.
It was not quite five minutes to eight; she wished she had rested
in the waiting-room. To be seeking a lodging at five minutes to
eight would look strange. Still, she could not reconcile herself to
going back; and she was eager, besides, to find a home as quickly as
possible, yearning to be alone with a door shut and a pillow.
She turned down Judd Street, forlornly scanning the intersecting
squalor. The tenements around her were not attractive. On the
parlour-floor, limp chintz curtains hid the interiors, but the steps
and the areas, and here and there a frouzy head and arm protruding
for a milkcan, were strong in suggestion of slatternly discomfort. In
Brunswick Square the aspect was more cheerful, but the rooms here were
obviously above her means. She walked along, and came unexpectedly
into Guilford Street, almost opposite the house where she had given
herself to Tony. The sudden sight of it was not the shock that she
would have imagined it would prove; indeed, she was sensible of a dull
sort of wonder at the absence of sensation. But for the veranda and
confirmatory number, the outside would have borne no significance to
her; yet it had been in that house----What a landmark in her life's
history was represented by that house!' What emotions had flooded her
soul behind the stolid frontage that she had nearly passed without
recognising it; how she had wept and suffered, and prayed and joyed
within the walls that would have borne no significance to her but for
a veranda and the number that proclaimed it was so! The thoughts were
deliberate; the past was not flashed back at her, she retraced it half
tenderly in the midst of her trouble. None the less, the idea of taking
up her quarters on the spot was eminently repugnant, and she turned
several corners before she permitted herself to ring a bell.
Her summons was answered by a flurried servant-girl, who on hearing
that she wanted a lodging, became helplessly incoherent--as is the
manner of servant-girls where lodgings are let--and fled to the
basement, calling "missis."
Mary contemplated the hat-stand until the "missis" advanced towards
her along the passage. There was a flavour of abandoned breakfast
about missis, an air of interruption; and when she perceived that the
stranger on the threshold was a young woman, and a charming woman,
and a woman by herself, the air of interruption that she had been
struggling to conceal all the way up the kitchen-stairs began to be
coupled with an expression of defensive virtue.
"I am looking for a room," said Mary.
"Yes," said the householder, eyeing her askance.
"You have one to let, I think, by the card?"
"Yes, there's a room."
She made no movement to show it, however; she stood on the mat nursing
her elbows.
"Can you let me see it--if it isn't inconvenient so early?"
"Oh, I suppose so," said the landlady. She preceded her to the
top-floor, but with no alacrity. "This is it," she said.
It was a back attic of the regulation pattern: brown drugget, yellow
chairs, and a bed of parti-coloured clothing. Nevertheless, it seemed
to be clean, and Mary was prepared to take anything.
"What is the rent?" she asked wearily.
"Did you say your husband would be joining you?"
"My husband? No, I'm a widow."
There was a glance shot at her hand. She wore gloves, but saw that it
would have been wiser to have told the truth and said "I am unmarried."
"As a single room, the rent is seven shillings. You'd be able to give
me references, of course?"
"I'm afraid I couldn't do that," she said, not a little surprised.
"I've only just arrived; my luggage is at the station."
"What do you work at?"
"Really!" she exclaimed; "I am looking for a room. You want references;
well, I will pay you in advance!"
"I don't take single ladies," answered the woman bluntly.
Mary looked at her bewildered; she thought that she had not made
herself understood.
"I should be quite willing to pay in advance," she repeated. "I'm a
stranger in London, so I can't refer you to anyone here; but I will pay
for the first week now, if you like?"
"I don't take ladies; I must ask you to look somewhere else, please."
They went down in silence. Virtue turned the handle with its backbone
stiff, and Mary passed out, giving a quiet "Good-day." Her blood
was tingling under the inexplicable insolence of the treatment she
had received, and she had yet to learn that it is possible for an
unaccompanied woman to seek a lodging until she falls exhausted on
the pavement; the unaccompanied woman being to the London landlady an
improper person--inadmissible not because she is improper, but because
her impropriety is presumably not monopolised.
During the next hour, repulse followed repulse. Sometimes, with the
curt assertion that they didn't take ladies, the door was shut in her
face; frequently she was conducted to a room, only to be cross-examined
and refused, as with her first venture, just when she was at the point
of engaging it. Sometimes a room was displayed indifferently, and there
were no questions put at all, but in these cases the terms asked were
so exorbitant that she came out astounded, not realising the nature of
the house.
It occurred to her to try the places where she would be known--not
the one in Guilford Street, the associations of that would be
unendurable--but some of the apartments that Carew and she had occupied
when they had come to town between the tours. None of these addresses
was in the neighbourhood, however, and the notion was too distasteful
to be adopted save on impulse.
She set her teeth, and pulled bell after bell. Along Southampton Row,
through Cosmo Place into Queen Square, she wandered, while the day
grew brighter and brighter; down Devonshire Street into Theobald's
Road, past the Holborn Town Hall. Amid these reiterated demands for
references a sudden terror seized her; she remembered the need for the
certificate that she had had when she quitted the hospital. She had
never thought about it since. It might be lying crushed in a corner
of the trunk that she had left behind in Leicester; it might long ago
have got destroyed--she did not know. It had never occurred to her
that the resumption of her former calling would one day present itself
as her natural resource. In ordinary circumstances the loss would have
been a trifle; but she felt it an impossibility to refer directly to
the Matron, because to do so would lead to the exposure of what had
happened in the interval. The absence of a certificate therefore meant
the absence of all testimony to her being a qualified nurse. As the
helplessness of her plight rushed in upon her she trembled. How long
must she not expect to wait for employment when she had nothing to
speak for her? To go back to nursing would be more difficult than to
earn a living in a capacity that she had never essayed. And she could
wait so short a time for anything, so horribly short a time! She would
starve if she did not find something soon!
Busses jogged by her laden with sober-faced men and women, bound for
the vocations that sustained the white elephant of life. Shops already
gave evidence of trade, and children with uncovered heads sped along
the curb with a "ha'porth o' milk," or mysterious breakfasts folded
in scraps of newspaper. Each atom of the awakening bustle passed her
engrossed by its own existence, operated by its separate interests,
revolving in its individual world. London looked to her a city without
mercy or impulse, populated to brimfulness, and flowing over. Every
chink and crevice seemed stocked with its appointed denizens, and the
hope of finding bread here which nobody's hand was clutching appeared
presumption.
Eleven o'clock had struck--that is to say, she had been walking for
more than three hours--when she saw a card with "Furnished Room to
Let" suspended from a blind, and her efforts to gain shelter succeeded
at last. It was an unpretentious little house, in an unpretentious
turning; and a sign on the door intimated that it was the residence of
"J. Shuttleworth, mason."
A hard-featured woman was evoked by the dispirited knock. Seeing a
would-be lodger who was dressed like a lady, she added eighteenpence to
the rent that she usually asked. She asked five shillings a week, and
the applicant agreed to it and was grateful.
"About your meals, miss?" said Mrs. Shuttleworth, when Mary had sunk on
the upright wooden chair at the head of the truckle-bed-stead. "Dinners
I can't do for yer, but as far as breakfas', and a cup o' tea in the
evening goes, you can 'ave a bit of something brought up when we 'as
our own. I suppose that'll suit you, won't it?"
"A cup of tea and some bread-and-butter," answered Mary, "in the
morning and afternoon, if you can manage it, will do very nicely, thank
you." She roused herself to the exigencies of the occasion. "How much
will that be?"
"Oh, well, we shan't break yer! You'll pay the first week now?"
The rent was forthcoming, and one more superfluity in the jostle of
existence profited by the misfortunes of another: going back to the
wash-tub cheerful.
Upstairs the lodger remained motionless; she was so tired that it was
a luxury to sit still, and for awhile she was more alive to the bodily
relief than the mental burden. It was afternoon by the time she faced
the necessity for returning to St. Pancras for her bag; and, pushing up
the rickety window to admit some air during her absence, she proceeded
to the basement, to ascertain the nearest route.
She learnt that she was much nearer to the station than she had
supposed, and in a little while she had her property in her possession
again. Her head felt oddly light, and she was puzzled by the dizziness
until she remembered she had had nothing to eat since eight o'clock.
The thought of food was sickening, though; and it was not till five
o'clock, when the tea was furnished, with a hunch of bread, and a slap
of butter in the middle of a plate, that she attempted to break her
fast.
And now ensued a length of dreary hours, an awful purposeless evening,
of which every minute was weighted with despair. Fortunately the
weather was not very cold, so the absence of a fire was less a hardship
than a lack of company; but the fatigue, which had been acting as a
partial opiate to her trouble, gradually passed, and her brain ached
with the torture of reflection. With nothing to do but think, she sat
in the upright chair, staring at the empty grate and picturing Tony
during the familiar waits at the theatre. An evil-smelling lamp burned
despondently on the table; outside, the street was discordant with the
cries of children. To realise that it was only this morning that the
blow had fallen upon her was impossible; an interval of several days
appeared to roll between the poky attic and her farewell; the calamity
seemed already old. "Oh, Tony!" she murmured. She got out his likeness.
"Yours ever"--the mockery of it! She did not hate him, she did not
even tell herself that she did; she contemplated the faded photograph
quite gently, and held it before her a long time. It had been taken
in Manchester, and she recalled the afternoon that it was done. All
sorts of trivialities in connection with it recurred to her. He was
wearing a lawn tie, and she remembered that it had been the last clean
one and had got mislaid. Their search for it, and comic desperation at
its loss, all came back to her quite clearly. "Oh, Tony!" Her fancies
projected themselves into his future, and she saw him in a score of
different scenes, but always famous, and in his greatness with the
memory of her flitting across his mind. Then she wondered what she
would have done if she had borne him a child--whether the child would
have been in the garret with her. But no, if he had been a father this
wouldn't have happened! he was always fond of children; to have given
him a child of his own would have kept, his love for her aglow.
Presently a diversion was effected by the home-coming of Mr. Shuttle
worthy evidently drunk, and abusing his wife with disjointed violence.
Next the woman's voice arose shrieking recrimination, the babel
subsiding amid staccato passages, alternately gruff and shrill.
The disturbance tended to obtrude the practical side of her dilemma,
and the importance of obtaining work of some sort speedily, no matter
what sort, appalled her. The day was Wednesday, and on the Wednesday
following, unless she was to go forth homeless, there would be the
lodging to pay for again, and the breakfasts and teas supplied in the
meanwhile. She would have to spend money outside as well; she had to
dine, however poorly, and there were postage-stamps, and perhaps train
fares, to be considered: some of the advertisers to whom she applied
might live beyond walking distance. Altogether, she certainly required
a pound. And she had towards it--with a sinking of her heart she
emptied her purse to be sure--exactly two and ninepence.