BOOK TWOANN PIDDUCK. . . and makeStrange combinations out of common thingsLike human babes in their brief innocence,And we will search with looks and words of loveFor hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last.IADVENTURE IN LONDONEt quelle est la femme qui ne chercherait pas à vous rendre heureux!HEawoke 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 eachother. 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, thebustling 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 dreadfullyclose 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 aboutJudexon 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, beyondanything 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 anotherbridge. 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 morecongested; 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 manyroads 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.
. . . and makeStrange combinations out of common thingsLike human babes in their brief innocence,And we will search with looks and words of loveFor hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last.
. . . and make
Strange combinations out of common things
Like human babes in their brief innocence,
And we will search with looks and words of love
For hidden thoughts, each lovelier than the last.
Et quelle est la femme qui ne chercherait pas à vous rendre heureux!
HEawoke 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 eachother. 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, thebustling 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 dreadfullyclose 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 aboutJudexon 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, beyondanything 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 anotherbridge. 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 morecongested; 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 manyroads 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.