IIMITCHAM MEWSDo not her dark eyes tell thee thou art not despised? The Heaven’s messenger! All Heaven’s blessings be hers.“I’Msorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to help me upstairs. Wasn’t I a fool to go and get tripped up like that?—O-o-h! Hercules!”René took her in his arms and carried her up the narrow little stairs. She opened the door and asked him to come in and have a cup of tea. After she had put the kettle on and lit the gas she sat and took a long look at him.“I like you,” she said. “And I suppose I shan’t see you again. That’s always the way. The people you like best you see only once, or in the train, or going by in a bus. Is it far where you live?”“I don’t know where I live.”“Go on. I’m not that sort.”“It’s true. I’ve only just come to London. This morning.”“Leave your things at the station?”“Things? No, I didn’t bring any.”“Well! I never!”She shrugged her amazement away, his adventures being no business of hers.After she had made the tea she removed her shoes and stockings and examined her ankle. It was inflamed and slightly swollen. She made him rub it, giving little gasps as he touched or wrenched the soreness.“’Tisn’t a sprain? You don’t think it’s a sprain? I don’t care as long as it isn’t a sprain.”“No, I shouldn’t think it’s a sprain; but you’d better ask someone else.”“Are you Scotch?”“No. Why do you ask?”“You talk funny. I say arsk.”“My home’s up north.”“Home. Father and mother?”“Well—no. A wife and all that.”“O-o-h! Married?”She looked unhappy and uncomfortable for a moment. Then she said:“I shouldn’t have thought it. You look so young. What did you do?”“Lectured and took pupils at the university.”“College? I know. There’s a big school just round here. I suppose it’s something like that. I seen the teachers. Half-baked they look, some of them. Was that it?”“I don’t know what it was. Things came to a head suddenly. I was taken by surprise. I think it will take me some time to realize quite what has happened.”She asked his name. He gave it and she hers, Ann Pidduck, and she worked in a factory, pickles andcondiments, at the packing, putting wooden boxes together with a machine that drove in four nails at a time. Once she had been ill and sent away and taught the artificial flowers, and she did that too, in her spare time, for some hat-shops in the High Street, and for one or two ladies she knew. She used to live at home with her mother, who had turned religious and couldn’t put up with a bit of fun. And she had a friend who lived in these rooms when there were still horses in the mews, but the friend had gone out to Canada on a farm, “where you get married at once if you’re anything like.” She broke off her story:“What are you going to do?”“I don’t know.”“Well, you can’t just sit and look at London till it begins to look at you.”“No.”“You look as if you’d like to sit there forever and ever. Oh, you do look tired, poor thing! But keep awake a little, there’s a dear. I must know what I’m going to do with you.”He could hardly keep his attention fixed on what she was saying, but he fastened his eyes on her to make her understand that he was listening.“You don’t want to go home? No?”He shook his head.“Popped the lid on it, have you?”He nodded.“Got any money?”“In a bank.”“All right. You’ll want clothes and things. Youcan write. Only I want to know; it’s nothing I shouldn’t like? Is it?”“No.”“I don’t want you to tell me, but I wouldn’t like to think you’d done something you’d be sorry for. . . . You haven’t drunk your tea. I say, you haven’t drunk your tea. Asleep. I’m off. Good night.”And she limped away into the inner room.When he awoke the next day he remembered that she had come to him in the morning, shaken him out of his deep sleep, and made him understand that he could have her bed, sent him staggering toward it, and then, as he sank back into unconsciousness, he remembered hearing the door slam.She had laid breakfast for him, tea, bread and butter, and an egg lying ready to be boiled in a saucepan. He was at first petulant at her absence, but shook himself up enough to see that he was not in a position to feel any such thing, and to be amazed at his own acquiescence in the unexpected. It was somehow disreputable, this discovery of himself in a strange room after two nights spent in his clothes. He had not even removed his boots. His gratitude to Ann Pidduck was appreciably lessened as he remembered that she had not thought to take them off for him. To put a man in her bed with his boots on! That was, to say the least of it, distasteful. It was sufficiently against the grain of his physical and mental habits to send his thoughts flying back to the life he had left, but they were caught in the mists of the excitementand pain through which he had passed, and he relapsed into an insensate pondering, forgot his breakfast, his surroundings, and sat unheeding through the day, until Ann returned in the evening. She brought flowers.“Well, of all the——” she cried. “I did think you’d have cleared away. Why, you haven’t touched your breakfast. Haven’t you been out?”He had not exactly forgotten her. Indeed, he had been awaiting her coming, but now he was puzzled because her return was so expected, and it ought to have been unexpected. He felt injured, that he had been cheated, that things on this side of his crisis were too much like things on the other side: a woman, habit, meals, interest in his appetite.“Wake up, stoopid,” said Ann. “You’ll be wasting off like the niggers in Africa if you don’t wake up. You can’t go sleeping on forever.”“Can’t I?”“Well, you can, of course, but if you do, I’ll be thinking you’re a case. You’re not a case, are you? You weren’t last night.”She spoke as though to be called a case was the horridest of insults, and he took it as such and roused himself not to deserve it.“That’s better,” she said. “Nothing to eat all day.”“No. Nothing.”She pondered that.“I expect your stomach knows best. Now, then, stir yourself. You got to write home.”She gave him writing materials and he drew up to the table and sat staring at the blank sheet of paper.He took pen in hand, but could not write, could not concentrate his will even that much.“What am I to say?” he asked.“Don’t you know?”“No.”“Well, I’m blowed! If you aren’t the funniest. . . . It’s to your wife! Don’t you know what to say to your wife?”He wrote:“Dear Linda——”Then he thought of Linda in a friendly, distant fashion, as someone charming and taking whom he had known, of whom it was pleasant to think.“Dear Linda, Linda Brock, Lin——”Ann saw his hesitation, and suggested:“You want your clothes.”He wrote down:“I want my clothes. I don’t think I want my books. You can sell the car. You gave me a nice picture once by some German. I think I should like you to send that. I have been walking about London. It is very wonderful. A railway porter was nice to me, and there are other friendly people.”He stopped. Ann said:“The address is 6 Mitcham Mews, West Kensington.”He wrote that down. There was something else he wanted to say, but he could not fix in his mind a sufficient image of Linda to be able to write to her. So he gave it up presently and only added: “That’s all,” and his signature.The letter was addressed and stamped, and Ann, still limping, took it to the post.When she returned, she said:“I’ve fixed you up. You’re to sleep with Jimmy at No. 10 until your things come, and then we’ll begin to think. You’re not much use to anybody now, are you?”“No,” said he. Then he began to stammer out an apology.“Silly,” said Ann. “Just a lost boy, that’s what you are. Lucky for you it was me and not the police found you. They’d have sent you back where you came from.” She saw that it was useless to joke with René and soon dropped her bantering tone. She took him for a walk round the houses, and was delighted when he remembered that he must have a clean collar and a toothbrush; a return to grace, or sense.“Oh! I’d be sorry now if it wasn’t true, and you went back.”“I shan’t go back.”Her question, the necessity of responding to her spontaneity, brought back in a sudden flood his will, and he had a quick pleasure in feeling the air upon his face and seeing the evening color of the streets.“No. I shan’t go back. People can’t go back. But my father went back.”“Why did you say that?”“What did I say?”“‘But my father went back.’”“Did I? I didn’t know I said that. I didn’t know I even thought of him.”“I know,” said Ann. “It’s like suddenly finding yourself talking aloud. And don’t you feel a fool if there’s anybody listening?”They bought collar, toothbrush, pajamas, and a red sausage for supper. With these they returned to Mitcham Mews and had to wait up until Jimmy at No. 10 turned up. He did so about one o’clock, a strange figure strutting up the mews, beaming all over his face, and humming:Can you see me, gray eyes,Hiding in the tree,Waiting for the moonrise?Gray eyes, look at me,In the apple-tree.Apple-tree, apple-tree.He had on a mortar-board cap, a white collar reaching up to his ears, an enormous black bow tie, a red satin waistcoat hung with chains, and his face was blacked except for one eye and a quarter of an inch all round his mouth. He carried a banjo. As he saw Ann he drew his hand across the strings and croaked out in a hoarse voice:“Give us a kiss, old dear, I’m that hellish dry.”“Oh, go on. You got to behave yourself now, Jimmy, now you got a lodger.”“Like old times,” said Jimmy. “Ma had lodgers. What Ma didn’t know about lodgers——”“Give it a rest,” said Ann. “Do keep off the comic for a bit. Mr. Fourmy wants to get to bed. So do I, and you’ll have the neighbors up, the way voices go ringing up the mews. Good night.”She turned away.“Good night, old gal,” said Jimmy, and he led René up the stairs of No. 10. “Good sort, that gal. Likes her bit o’ fun same as any gal, but she’s a tiddler, she is. Independent! I don’t fink. Gals look arter theirselves nowadays. Cos why? Cos they’re three to one. We don’t go round, us men. What a awful thought! There’s your bed, Mr. —— What’s your name? ’Ardly a gent’s bed, but you can lie on it, and what more can be said of any bed?”He went into the inner room and began undressing, talking all the while, explaining that minstrelsy was only one of his professions, that he had had a rotten day, not a smile in the world; that he wouldn’t try again for a week, not if he starved; that Mr. Fourmy must be prepared for a shock when he saw him without his black, as it made such a difference, and that there was a silver lining to every cloud. He got into bed without removing his black, for René heard no sound of water, and talked himself to sleep. . . . René lay sleepless, this third night of his adventure, and rejoiced as one who had awakened from a long and painful dream. Jimmy amused him, Ann amused him, and all amusement was new to him.Jimmy woke up talking, ran out in nightshirt and trousers, and returned with a jug of beer and a loaf of bread. That was breakfast. He sat on René’s bed and they consumed their fare together.“Gardening to-day,” said Jimmy. “Ladies all want their gardens dug up these days. I got two or threegardens. They call me Gardener, though I ain’t no blooming gardener. ‘D’you think sweet peas will do in the smoke, gardener?’ they say. I dunno, but I sticks ’em all in. They gets it all out of a book, and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me. Gardener! Well, here’s luck!”And René said: “Here’s luck!”When he was washed, Jimmy appeared as a sandy-haired man with a fuchsia-colored face, fattish, shapeless, with little twinkling, blinking eyes. Round and ball-like his head was, round and ball-like his body, and he bounced in all his movements. He was grotesque, but not so grotesque as the idea René had of him, the idea which haunted him as he sat alone in the scantily-furnished room, with no desire to go out or to claim with the world any relationship but those which chance had thrown his way, with Ann and the minstrel-gardener. He spent many hours gazing out of the window at the children playing in the litter and adding to it. There were swarms of children; little girls in charge of babies, not so very much smaller than themselves; boys tirelessly passing from one game to another, stopping only when a car came up the mews or was brought out to be sluiced down or oiled. There were one or two men who sat all day as listless as himself. They smoked, chewed straws, occasionally talked, disappeared at intervals round the corner, but returned to smoke, chew straws, and talk occasionally. They were unconcerned, inattentive, and unmoved. René saw one of them earn a coin of some sort by holding a tool for a chauffeur while he groped in hisengine. There were women who sat in the windows for hours together, gazing out with unseeing eyes; other women who stood in the doors and talked. One young woman in the evening came and stood in a doorway with a baby in her arms. The light had grown very soft. It fell upon her, and surrounded her with an atmosphere that gave her beauty. René’s eyes rested on her gladly, but without conscious appreciation. Then, very slowly, he began to see something that appealed to him and accounted for her fascination: the line of her body drooping under the weight of the child in her arms, her whole body one unconscious, comforting caress of protection. While she stood there René saw nothing else, and he watched her until the light faded and she disappeared, slipped away like a vision, into the darkness. Somehow he felt that his day had not been in vain.Ann came to inspect his quarters and to take him out. He was very happy to see her, and she seemed to feel it, for she said:“I knew you’d be better to-day. A good night’s rest. That’s what you wanted. But I was afraid Jimmy would keep you up with his nonsense.”“He made me laugh,” said René.She gave a little crow of pleasure:“Good old Jimmy!” she cried.Then she asked him had he seen anyone that day, and he described some of the people he had seen. As he described she told histories, so that presently for René Mitcham Mews seemed a place bursting with human energy, passions, disasters, jokes, follies, andfrailties—just the sort of place he had been seeking. There was Old Lunt, who sold ballads and wrote letters for the people who had never learned to write; there was Maggie, who went out as a midwife to keep the families of her two daughters; Bellfield the furniture-remover, who had a strange young man come to see him sometimes, who was like no one else in the world; Mr. Martin, who used to keep the livery at the end of the mews and had now gone in for taxicabs; Fat Bessie, who went out charring and had an idiot son to whom her whole life was devoted; Billy and Click, who were wrong ’uns, dirty wrong ’uns, but too clever to be caught, though they would be one day.“A bright lot,” said Ann. “And then, of course, there’s me—and you. They’ll laugh at you at first. They laugh at everything and everybody new. But you mustn’t mind that. They’ll borrow money from you, but don’t you never lend them more than sixpence, if it’s Maggie or Bessie; twopence if it’s any of the men.”“And who,” asked René, “is the girl with the baby?”“Oh, that’s Rita. Baby? She’s got four, and another coming. She’s all right. Bit washed out with it. Makes her stupid and sly. But she’s all right, and Joe’s a good sort. One o’ them as is always in and out of work. I dunno why. I think he’s the sort as can’t work with a beast above him. ’Lectrician. If you want a feller to talk, he’s the one.”“I think your talk’s about as good as I could have, Ann.”Her face lighted up.“Is it? Iamglad. Ooh! It is nice to have you call me that. D’you know, I couldn’t stop thinking of you all day long. And it didn’t stop me working neither. I did best day I’ve done for a long time.”“And all day long I looked out of the window.”
Do not her dark eyes tell thee thou art not despised? The Heaven’s messenger! All Heaven’s blessings be hers.
“I’Msorry,” she said, “but you’ll have to help me upstairs. Wasn’t I a fool to go and get tripped up like that?—O-o-h! Hercules!”
René took her in his arms and carried her up the narrow little stairs. She opened the door and asked him to come in and have a cup of tea. After she had put the kettle on and lit the gas she sat and took a long look at him.
“I like you,” she said. “And I suppose I shan’t see you again. That’s always the way. The people you like best you see only once, or in the train, or going by in a bus. Is it far where you live?”
“I don’t know where I live.”
“Go on. I’m not that sort.”
“It’s true. I’ve only just come to London. This morning.”
“Leave your things at the station?”
“Things? No, I didn’t bring any.”
“Well! I never!”
She shrugged her amazement away, his adventures being no business of hers.
After she had made the tea she removed her shoes and stockings and examined her ankle. It was inflamed and slightly swollen. She made him rub it, giving little gasps as he touched or wrenched the soreness.
“’Tisn’t a sprain? You don’t think it’s a sprain? I don’t care as long as it isn’t a sprain.”
“No, I shouldn’t think it’s a sprain; but you’d better ask someone else.”
“Are you Scotch?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“You talk funny. I say arsk.”
“My home’s up north.”
“Home. Father and mother?”
“Well—no. A wife and all that.”
“O-o-h! Married?”
She looked unhappy and uncomfortable for a moment. Then she said:
“I shouldn’t have thought it. You look so young. What did you do?”
“Lectured and took pupils at the university.”
“College? I know. There’s a big school just round here. I suppose it’s something like that. I seen the teachers. Half-baked they look, some of them. Was that it?”
“I don’t know what it was. Things came to a head suddenly. I was taken by surprise. I think it will take me some time to realize quite what has happened.”
She asked his name. He gave it and she hers, Ann Pidduck, and she worked in a factory, pickles andcondiments, at the packing, putting wooden boxes together with a machine that drove in four nails at a time. Once she had been ill and sent away and taught the artificial flowers, and she did that too, in her spare time, for some hat-shops in the High Street, and for one or two ladies she knew. She used to live at home with her mother, who had turned religious and couldn’t put up with a bit of fun. And she had a friend who lived in these rooms when there were still horses in the mews, but the friend had gone out to Canada on a farm, “where you get married at once if you’re anything like.” She broke off her story:
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, you can’t just sit and look at London till it begins to look at you.”
“No.”
“You look as if you’d like to sit there forever and ever. Oh, you do look tired, poor thing! But keep awake a little, there’s a dear. I must know what I’m going to do with you.”
He could hardly keep his attention fixed on what she was saying, but he fastened his eyes on her to make her understand that he was listening.
“You don’t want to go home? No?”
He shook his head.
“Popped the lid on it, have you?”
He nodded.
“Got any money?”
“In a bank.”
“All right. You’ll want clothes and things. Youcan write. Only I want to know; it’s nothing I shouldn’t like? Is it?”
“No.”
“I don’t want you to tell me, but I wouldn’t like to think you’d done something you’d be sorry for. . . . You haven’t drunk your tea. I say, you haven’t drunk your tea. Asleep. I’m off. Good night.”
And she limped away into the inner room.
When he awoke the next day he remembered that she had come to him in the morning, shaken him out of his deep sleep, and made him understand that he could have her bed, sent him staggering toward it, and then, as he sank back into unconsciousness, he remembered hearing the door slam.
She had laid breakfast for him, tea, bread and butter, and an egg lying ready to be boiled in a saucepan. He was at first petulant at her absence, but shook himself up enough to see that he was not in a position to feel any such thing, and to be amazed at his own acquiescence in the unexpected. It was somehow disreputable, this discovery of himself in a strange room after two nights spent in his clothes. He had not even removed his boots. His gratitude to Ann Pidduck was appreciably lessened as he remembered that she had not thought to take them off for him. To put a man in her bed with his boots on! That was, to say the least of it, distasteful. It was sufficiently against the grain of his physical and mental habits to send his thoughts flying back to the life he had left, but they were caught in the mists of the excitementand pain through which he had passed, and he relapsed into an insensate pondering, forgot his breakfast, his surroundings, and sat unheeding through the day, until Ann returned in the evening. She brought flowers.
“Well, of all the——” she cried. “I did think you’d have cleared away. Why, you haven’t touched your breakfast. Haven’t you been out?”
He had not exactly forgotten her. Indeed, he had been awaiting her coming, but now he was puzzled because her return was so expected, and it ought to have been unexpected. He felt injured, that he had been cheated, that things on this side of his crisis were too much like things on the other side: a woman, habit, meals, interest in his appetite.
“Wake up, stoopid,” said Ann. “You’ll be wasting off like the niggers in Africa if you don’t wake up. You can’t go sleeping on forever.”
“Can’t I?”
“Well, you can, of course, but if you do, I’ll be thinking you’re a case. You’re not a case, are you? You weren’t last night.”
She spoke as though to be called a case was the horridest of insults, and he took it as such and roused himself not to deserve it.
“That’s better,” she said. “Nothing to eat all day.”
“No. Nothing.”
She pondered that.
“I expect your stomach knows best. Now, then, stir yourself. You got to write home.”
She gave him writing materials and he drew up to the table and sat staring at the blank sheet of paper.He took pen in hand, but could not write, could not concentrate his will even that much.
“What am I to say?” he asked.
“Don’t you know?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m blowed! If you aren’t the funniest. . . . It’s to your wife! Don’t you know what to say to your wife?”
He wrote:
“Dear Linda——”
Then he thought of Linda in a friendly, distant fashion, as someone charming and taking whom he had known, of whom it was pleasant to think.
“Dear Linda, Linda Brock, Lin——”
Ann saw his hesitation, and suggested:
“You want your clothes.”
He wrote down:
“I want my clothes. I don’t think I want my books. You can sell the car. You gave me a nice picture once by some German. I think I should like you to send that. I have been walking about London. It is very wonderful. A railway porter was nice to me, and there are other friendly people.”
He stopped. Ann said:
“The address is 6 Mitcham Mews, West Kensington.”
He wrote that down. There was something else he wanted to say, but he could not fix in his mind a sufficient image of Linda to be able to write to her. So he gave it up presently and only added: “That’s all,” and his signature.
The letter was addressed and stamped, and Ann, still limping, took it to the post.
When she returned, she said:
“I’ve fixed you up. You’re to sleep with Jimmy at No. 10 until your things come, and then we’ll begin to think. You’re not much use to anybody now, are you?”
“No,” said he. Then he began to stammer out an apology.
“Silly,” said Ann. “Just a lost boy, that’s what you are. Lucky for you it was me and not the police found you. They’d have sent you back where you came from.” She saw that it was useless to joke with René and soon dropped her bantering tone. She took him for a walk round the houses, and was delighted when he remembered that he must have a clean collar and a toothbrush; a return to grace, or sense.
“Oh! I’d be sorry now if it wasn’t true, and you went back.”
“I shan’t go back.”
Her question, the necessity of responding to her spontaneity, brought back in a sudden flood his will, and he had a quick pleasure in feeling the air upon his face and seeing the evening color of the streets.
“No. I shan’t go back. People can’t go back. But my father went back.”
“Why did you say that?”
“What did I say?”
“‘But my father went back.’”
“Did I? I didn’t know I said that. I didn’t know I even thought of him.”
“I know,” said Ann. “It’s like suddenly finding yourself talking aloud. And don’t you feel a fool if there’s anybody listening?”
They bought collar, toothbrush, pajamas, and a red sausage for supper. With these they returned to Mitcham Mews and had to wait up until Jimmy at No. 10 turned up. He did so about one o’clock, a strange figure strutting up the mews, beaming all over his face, and humming:
Can you see me, gray eyes,Hiding in the tree,Waiting for the moonrise?Gray eyes, look at me,In the apple-tree.Apple-tree, apple-tree.
Can you see me, gray eyes,
Hiding in the tree,
Waiting for the moonrise?
Gray eyes, look at me,
In the apple-tree.
Apple-tree, apple-tree.
He had on a mortar-board cap, a white collar reaching up to his ears, an enormous black bow tie, a red satin waistcoat hung with chains, and his face was blacked except for one eye and a quarter of an inch all round his mouth. He carried a banjo. As he saw Ann he drew his hand across the strings and croaked out in a hoarse voice:
“Give us a kiss, old dear, I’m that hellish dry.”
“Oh, go on. You got to behave yourself now, Jimmy, now you got a lodger.”
“Like old times,” said Jimmy. “Ma had lodgers. What Ma didn’t know about lodgers——”
“Give it a rest,” said Ann. “Do keep off the comic for a bit. Mr. Fourmy wants to get to bed. So do I, and you’ll have the neighbors up, the way voices go ringing up the mews. Good night.”
She turned away.
“Good night, old gal,” said Jimmy, and he led René up the stairs of No. 10. “Good sort, that gal. Likes her bit o’ fun same as any gal, but she’s a tiddler, she is. Independent! I don’t fink. Gals look arter theirselves nowadays. Cos why? Cos they’re three to one. We don’t go round, us men. What a awful thought! There’s your bed, Mr. —— What’s your name? ’Ardly a gent’s bed, but you can lie on it, and what more can be said of any bed?”
He went into the inner room and began undressing, talking all the while, explaining that minstrelsy was only one of his professions, that he had had a rotten day, not a smile in the world; that he wouldn’t try again for a week, not if he starved; that Mr. Fourmy must be prepared for a shock when he saw him without his black, as it made such a difference, and that there was a silver lining to every cloud. He got into bed without removing his black, for René heard no sound of water, and talked himself to sleep. . . . René lay sleepless, this third night of his adventure, and rejoiced as one who had awakened from a long and painful dream. Jimmy amused him, Ann amused him, and all amusement was new to him.
Jimmy woke up talking, ran out in nightshirt and trousers, and returned with a jug of beer and a loaf of bread. That was breakfast. He sat on René’s bed and they consumed their fare together.
“Gardening to-day,” said Jimmy. “Ladies all want their gardens dug up these days. I got two or threegardens. They call me Gardener, though I ain’t no blooming gardener. ‘D’you think sweet peas will do in the smoke, gardener?’ they say. I dunno, but I sticks ’em all in. They gets it all out of a book, and what’s good enough for them is good enough for me. Gardener! Well, here’s luck!”
And René said: “Here’s luck!”
When he was washed, Jimmy appeared as a sandy-haired man with a fuchsia-colored face, fattish, shapeless, with little twinkling, blinking eyes. Round and ball-like his head was, round and ball-like his body, and he bounced in all his movements. He was grotesque, but not so grotesque as the idea René had of him, the idea which haunted him as he sat alone in the scantily-furnished room, with no desire to go out or to claim with the world any relationship but those which chance had thrown his way, with Ann and the minstrel-gardener. He spent many hours gazing out of the window at the children playing in the litter and adding to it. There were swarms of children; little girls in charge of babies, not so very much smaller than themselves; boys tirelessly passing from one game to another, stopping only when a car came up the mews or was brought out to be sluiced down or oiled. There were one or two men who sat all day as listless as himself. They smoked, chewed straws, occasionally talked, disappeared at intervals round the corner, but returned to smoke, chew straws, and talk occasionally. They were unconcerned, inattentive, and unmoved. René saw one of them earn a coin of some sort by holding a tool for a chauffeur while he groped in hisengine. There were women who sat in the windows for hours together, gazing out with unseeing eyes; other women who stood in the doors and talked. One young woman in the evening came and stood in a doorway with a baby in her arms. The light had grown very soft. It fell upon her, and surrounded her with an atmosphere that gave her beauty. René’s eyes rested on her gladly, but without conscious appreciation. Then, very slowly, he began to see something that appealed to him and accounted for her fascination: the line of her body drooping under the weight of the child in her arms, her whole body one unconscious, comforting caress of protection. While she stood there René saw nothing else, and he watched her until the light faded and she disappeared, slipped away like a vision, into the darkness. Somehow he felt that his day had not been in vain.
Ann came to inspect his quarters and to take him out. He was very happy to see her, and she seemed to feel it, for she said:
“I knew you’d be better to-day. A good night’s rest. That’s what you wanted. But I was afraid Jimmy would keep you up with his nonsense.”
“He made me laugh,” said René.
She gave a little crow of pleasure:
“Good old Jimmy!” she cried.
Then she asked him had he seen anyone that day, and he described some of the people he had seen. As he described she told histories, so that presently for René Mitcham Mews seemed a place bursting with human energy, passions, disasters, jokes, follies, andfrailties—just the sort of place he had been seeking. There was Old Lunt, who sold ballads and wrote letters for the people who had never learned to write; there was Maggie, who went out as a midwife to keep the families of her two daughters; Bellfield the furniture-remover, who had a strange young man come to see him sometimes, who was like no one else in the world; Mr. Martin, who used to keep the livery at the end of the mews and had now gone in for taxicabs; Fat Bessie, who went out charring and had an idiot son to whom her whole life was devoted; Billy and Click, who were wrong ’uns, dirty wrong ’uns, but too clever to be caught, though they would be one day.
“A bright lot,” said Ann. “And then, of course, there’s me—and you. They’ll laugh at you at first. They laugh at everything and everybody new. But you mustn’t mind that. They’ll borrow money from you, but don’t you never lend them more than sixpence, if it’s Maggie or Bessie; twopence if it’s any of the men.”
“And who,” asked René, “is the girl with the baby?”
“Oh, that’s Rita. Baby? She’s got four, and another coming. She’s all right. Bit washed out with it. Makes her stupid and sly. But she’s all right, and Joe’s a good sort. One o’ them as is always in and out of work. I dunno why. I think he’s the sort as can’t work with a beast above him. ’Lectrician. If you want a feller to talk, he’s the one.”
“I think your talk’s about as good as I could have, Ann.”
Her face lighted up.
“Is it? Iamglad. Ooh! It is nice to have you call me that. D’you know, I couldn’t stop thinking of you all day long. And it didn’t stop me working neither. I did best day I’ve done for a long time.”
“And all day long I looked out of the window.”