A WALK ABROAD
Thyme Dallison, in the midst of her busy life, found leisure to record
her recollections and ideas in the pages of old school notebooks. She
had no definite purpose in so doing, nor did she desire the solace of
luxuriating in her private feelings--this she would have scorned as out
of date and silly. It was done from the fulness of youthful energy, and
from the desire to express oneself that was "in the air." It was
everywhere, that desire: among her fellow-students, among her young men
friends, in her mother's drawing-room, and her aunt's studio. Like
sentiment and marriage to the Victorian miss, so was this duty to express
herself to Thyme; and, going hand-in-hand with it, the duty to have a
good and jolly youth. She never read again the thoughts which she
recorded, she took no care to lock them up, knowing that her liberty,
development, and pleasure were sacred things which no one would dream of
touching--she kept them stuffed down in a drawer among her handkerchiefs
and ties and blouses, together with the indelible fragment of a pencil.
This journal, naive and slipshod, recorded without order the current
impression of things on her mind.
In the early morning of the 4th of May she sat, night-gowned, on the foot
of her white bed, with chestnut hair all fluffy about her neck, eyes
bright and cheeks still rosy with sleep, scribbling away and rubbing one
bare foot against the other in the ecstasy of self-expression. Now and
then, in the middle of a sentence, she would stop and look out of the
window, or stretch herself deliciously, as though life were too full of
joy for her to finish anything.
"I went into grandfather's room yesterday, and stayed while he was
dictating to the little model. I do think grandfather's so splendid.
Martin says an enthusiast is worse than useless; people, he says, can't
afford to dabble in ideas or dreams. He calls grandfather's idea
paleolithic. I hate him to be laughed at. Martin's so cocksure. I
don't think he'd find many men of eighty who'd bathe in the Serpentine
all the year round, and do his own room, cook his own food, and live on
about ninety pounds a year out of his pension of three hundred, and give
all the rest away. Martin says that's unsound, and the 'Book of
Universal Brotherhood' rot. I don't care if it is; it's fine to go on
writing it as he does all day. Martin admits that. That's the worst of
him: he's so cool, you can't score him off; he seems to be always
criticising you; it makes me wild.... That little model is a hopeless
duffer. I could have taken it all down in half the time. She kept
stopping and looking up with that mouth of hers half open, as if she had
all day before her. Grandfather's so absorbed he doesn't notice; he likes
to read the thing over and over, to hear how the words sound. That girl
would be no good at any sort of work, except 'sitting,' I suppose. Aunt
B. used to say she sat well. There's something queer about her face; it
reminds me a little of that Botticelli Madonna in the National Gallery,
the full-face one; not so much in the shape as in the expression--almost
stupid, and yet as if things were going to happen to her. Her hands and
arms are pretty, and her feet are smaller than mine. She's two years
older than me. I asked her why she went in for being a model, which is
beastly work. She said she was glad to get anything! I asked her why
she didn't go into a shop or into service. She didn't answer at once,
and then said she hadn't had any recommendations--didn't know where to
try; then, all of a sudden, she grew quite sulky, and said she didn't
want to...."
Thyme paused to pencil in a sketch of the little model's profile....
"She had on a really pretty frock, quite simple and well made--it must
have cost three or four pounds. She can't be so very badly off, or
somebody gave it her...."
And again Thyme paused.
"She looked ever so much prettier in it than she used to in her old brown
skirt, I thought .... Uncle Hilary came to dinner last night. We talked
of social questions; we always discuss things when he comes. I can't
help liking Uncle Hilary; he has such kind eyes, and he's so gentle that
you never lose your temper with him. Martin calls him weak and
unsatisfactory because he's not in touch with life. I should say it was
more as if he couldn't bear to force anyone to do anything; he seems to
see both sides of every question, and he's not good at making up his
mind, of course. He's rather like Hamlet might have been, only nobody
seems to know now what Hamlet was really like. I told him what I thought
about the lower classes. One can talk to him. I hate father's way of
making feeble little jokes, as if nothing were serious. I said I didn't
think it was any use to dabble; we ought to go to the root of everything.
I said that money and class distinctions are two bogeys we have got to
lay. Martin says, when it comes to real dealing with social questions
and the poor, all the people we know are amateurs. He says that we have
got to shake ourselves free of all the old sentimental notions, and just
work at putting everything to the test of Health. Father calls Martin a
'Sanitist'; and Uncle Hilary says that if you wash people by law they'll
all be as dirty again tomorrow...."
Thyme paused again. A blackbird in the garden of the Square was uttering
a long, low, chuckling trill. She ran to the window and peeped out. The
bird was on a plane-tree, and, with throat uplifted, was letting through
his yellow beak that delicious piece of self-expression. All things he
seemed to praise--the sky, the sun, the trees, the dewy grass, himself:
'You darling!' thought Thyme. With a shudder of delight she dropped her
notebook back into the drawer, flung off her nightgown, and flew into her
bath.
That same morning she slipped out quietly at ten o'clock. Her Saturdays
were free of classes, but she had to run the gauntlet of her mother's
liking for her company and her father's wish for her to go with him to
Richmond and play golf.
For on Saturdays Stephen almost always left the precincts of the Courts
before three o'clock. Then, if he could induce his wife or daughter to
accompany him, he liked to get a round or two in preparation for Sunday,
when he always started off at half-past ten and played all day. If
Cecilia and Thyme failed him, he would go to his club, and keep himself
in touch with every kind of social movement by reading the reviews.
Thyme walked along with her head up and a wrinkle in her brow, as though
she were absorbed in serious reflection; if admiring glances were flung
at her, she did not seem aware of them. Passing not far from Hilary's,
she entered the Broad Walk, and crossed it to the farther end.
On a railing, stretching out his long legs and observing the passers-by,
sat her cousin, Martin Stone. He got down as she came up.
"Late again," he said. "Come on!"
"Where are we going first?" Thyme asked.
"The Notting Hill district's all we can do to-day if we're to go again to
Mrs. Hughs'. I must be down at the hospital this afternoon."
Thyme frowned. "I do envy you living by yourself, Martin. It's silly
having to live at home."
Martin did not answer, but one nostril of his long nose was seen to
curve, and Thyme acquiesced in this without remark. They walked for some
minutes between tall houses, looking about them calmly. Then Martin
said: "All Purceys round here."
Thyme nodded. Again there was silence; but in these pauses there was no
embarrassment, no consciousness apparently that it was silence, and their
eyes--those young, impatient, interested eyes--were for ever busy
observing.
"Boundary line. We shall be in a patch directly."
"Black?" asked Thyme.
"Dark blue--black farther on."
They were passing down a long, grey, curving road, whose narrow houses,
hopelessly unpainted, showed marks of grinding poverty. The Spring wind
was ruffling straw and little bits of paper in the gutters; under the
bright sunlight a bleak and bitter struggle seemed raging. Thyme said:
"This street gives me a hollow feeling."
Martin nodded. "Worse than the real article. There's half a mile of
this. Here it's all grim fighting. Farther on they've given it up."
And still they went on up the curving street, with its few pinched shops
and its unending narrow grimness.
At the corner of a by-street Martin said: "We'll go down here."
Thyme stood still, wrinkling her nose. Martin eyed her.
"Don't funk!"
"I'm not funking, Martin, only I can't stand the smells."
"You'll have to get used to them."
"Yes, I know; but--but I forgot my eucalyptus."
The young man took out a handkerchief which had not yet been unfolded.
"Here, take mine."
"They do make me feel so--it's a shame to take yours," and she took the
handkerchief.
"That's all right," said Martin. "Come on!"
The houses of this narrow street, inside and out, seemed full of women.
Many of them had babies in their arms; they were working or looking out
of windows or gossiping on doorsteps. And all stopped to stare as the
young couple passed. Thyme stole a look at her companion. His long
stride had not varied; there was the usual pale, observant, sarcastic
expression on his face. Clenching the handkerchief in readiness, and
trying to imitate his callous air, she looked at a group of five women on
the nearest doorstep.
Three were seated and two were standing. One of these, a young woman
with a round, open face, was clearly very soon to have a child; the
other, with a short, dark face and iron-grey, straggling hair, was
smoking a clay pipe. Of the three seated, one, quite young, had a face
as grey white as a dirty sheet, and a blackened eye; the second, with her
ragged dress disarranged, was nursing a baby; the third, in the centre,
on the top step, with red arms akimbo, her face scored with drink, was
shouting friendly obscenities to a neighbour in the window opposite. In
Thyme's heart rose the passionate feeling, 'How disgusting! how
disgusting!' and since she did not dare to give expression to it, she bit
her lips and turned her head from them, resenting, with all a young
girl's horror, that her sex had given her away. The women stared at her,
and in those faces, according to their different temperaments, could be
seen first the same vague, hard interest that had been Thyme's when she
first looked at them, then the same secret hostility and criticism, as
though they too felt that by this young girl's untouched modesty, by her
gushed cheeks and unsoiled clothes, their sex had given them away. With
contemptuous movements of their lips and bodies, on that doorstep they
proclaimed their emphatic belief in the virtue and reality of their own
existences and in the vice and unreality of her intruding presence.
"Give the doll to Bill; 'e'd make 'er work for once, the---" In a burst
of laughter the epithet was lost.
Martin's lips curled.
"Purple just here," he said.
Thyme's cheeks were crimson.
At the end of the little street he stopped before a shop.
"Come on," he said, "you'll see the sort of place where they buy their
grub."
In the doorway were standing a thin brown spaniel, a small fair woman
with a high, bald forehead, from which the hair was gleaned into
curlpapers, and a little girl with some affection of the skin.
Nodding coolly, Martin motioned them aside. The shop was ten feet
square; its counters, running parallel to two of the walls, were covered
with plates of cake, sausages, old ham-bones, peppermint sweets, and
household soap; there was also bread, margarine, suet in bowls, sugar,
bloaters--many bloaters--Captain's biscuits, and other things besides.
Two or three dead rabbits hung against the wall. All was uncovered, so
that what flies there were sat feeding socialistically. Behind the
counter a girl of seventeen was serving a thin-faced woman with portions
of a cheese which she was holding down with her strong, dirty hand, while
she sawed it with a knife. On the counter, next the cheese, sat a
quiet-looking cat.
They all glanced round at the two young people, who stood and waited.
"Finish what you're at," said Martin, "then give me three pennyworth of
bull's-eyes."
The girl, with a violent effort, finished severing the cheese. The
thin-faced woman took it, and, coughing above it, went away. The girl,
who could not take her eyes off Thyme, now served them with three
pennyworth of bull's-eyes, which she took out with her fingers, for they
had stuck. Putting them in a screw of newspaper, she handed them to
Martin. The young man, who had been observing negligently, touched
Thyme's elbow. She, who had stood with eyes cast down, now turned. They
went out, Martin handing the bull's-eyes to the little girl with an
affection of the skin.
The street now ended in a wide road formed of little low houses.
"Black," said Martin, "here; all down this road-casual labour, criminals,
loafers, drunkards, consumps. Look at the faces!"
Thyme raised her eyes obediently. In this main thoroughfare it was not
as in the by-street, and only dull or sullen glances, or none at all,
were bent on her. Some of the houses had ragged plants on the
window-sills; in one window a canary was singing. Then, at a bend, they
came into a blacker reach of human river. Here were outbuildings, houses
with broken windows, houses with windows boarded up, fried-fish shops,
low public-houses, houses without doors. There were more men here than
women, and those men were wheeling barrows full of rags and bottles, or
not even full of rags and bottles; or they were standing by the
public-houses gossiping or quarrelling in groups of three or four; or
very slowly walking in the gutters, or on the pavements, as though trying
to remember if they were alive. Then suddenly some young man with gaunt
violence in his face would pass, pushing his barrow desperately, striding
fiercely by. And every now and then, from a fried-fish or hardware shop,
would come out a man in a dirty apron to take the sun and contemplate the
scene, not finding in it, seemingly, anything that in any way depressed
his spirit. Amongst the constant, crawling, shifting stream of passengers
were seen women carrying food wrapped up in newspaper, or with bundles
beneath their shawls. The faces of these women were generally either
very red and coarse or of a sort of bluish-white; they wore the
expression of such as know themselves to be existing in the way that
Providence has arranged they should exist. No surprise, revolt, dismay,
or shame was ever to be seen on those faces; in place of these emotions a
drab and brutish acquiescence or mechanical coarse jocularity. To pass
like this about their business was their occupation each morning of the
year; it was needful to accept it. Not having any hope of ever, being
different, not being able to imagine any other life, they were not so
wasteful of their strength as to attempt either to hope or to imagine.
Here and there, too, very slowly passed old men and women, crawling
along, like winter bees who, in some strange and evil moment, had
forgotten to die in the sunlight of their toil, and, too old to be of
use, had been chivied forth from their hive to perish slowly in the cold
twilight of their days.
Down the centre of the street Thyme saw a brewer's dray creeping its way
due south under the sun. Three horses drew it, with braided tails and
beribboned manes, the brass glittering on their harness. High up, like a
god, sat the drayman, his little slits of eyes above huge red cheeks
fixed immovably on his horses' crests. Behind him, with slow, unceasing
crunch, the dray rolled, piled up with hogsheads, whereon the drayman's
mate lay sleeping. Like the slumbrous image of some mighty unrelenting
Power, it passed, proud that its monstrous bulk contained all the joy and
blessing those shadows on the pavement had ever known.
The two young people emerged on to the high road running east and west.
"Cross here," said Martin, "and cut down into Kensington. Nothing more
of interest now till we get to Hound Street. Purceys and Purceys all
round about this part."
Thyme shook herself.
"O Martin, let's go down a road where there's some air. I feel so
dirty." She put her hand up to her chest.
"There's one here," said Martin.
They turned to the left into a road that had many trees. Now that she
could breathe and look about her, Thyme once more held her head erect and
began to swing her arms.
"Martin, something must be done!"
The young doctor did not reply; his face still wore its pale, sarcastic,
observant look. He gave her arm a squeeze with a half-contemptuous
smile.