Complete works of hall c.., p.536
Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 536
Mildred looked across at me, but I shook my head.
“In that case there seems to be nothing more to say,” said the Mother, and rising without ceremony she walked with us to the door.
Our next call was at the headquarters of a home which was neither Catholic nor Protestant, but belonged, Mildred said, to a kind of Universal Church, admitting inmates of all denominations.
It was in a busy thoroughfare and had the appearance of a business office. After Mildred had written her name and the object of our visit on a slip of paper we were taken up in a lift to another office with an open safe, where a man in a kind of uniform (called a Commissioner) was signing letters and cheques.
The Commissioner was at first very courteous, especially to me, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that he was mistaking me for something quite other than I was until Mildred explained our errand, and then his manner changed painfully.
“What you ask is against all our regulations,” he said. “Secrecy implies something to hide, and we neither hide anything nor permit anything to be hidden. In fact our system requires that we should not only help the woman, but punish the man by making him realise his legal, moral, and religious liability for his wrong-doing. Naturally we can only do this by help of the girl, and if she does not tell us at the outset who and what the partner of her sin has been and where he is to be found. . . .”
I was choking with shame and indignation, and rising to my feet I said to Mildred:
“Let us go, please.”
“Ah, yes, I know,” said the Commissioner, with a superior smile, “I have seen all this before. The girl nearly always tries to shield the guilty man. But why should she? It may seem generous, but it is really wicked. It is a direct means of increasing immorality. The girl who protects the author of her downfall is really promoting the ruin of another woman, and if. . . .”
Thinking of Martin I wanted to strike the smug Pharisee in the face, and in order to conquer that unwomanly impulse I hurried out of the office, and into the street, leaving poor Mildred to follow me.
Our last call was at the home of a private society in a little brick house that seemed to lean against the wall of a large lying-in hospital in the West End of London.
At the moment of our arrival the Matron was presiding in the drawing-room over a meeting of a Missionary League for the Conversion of the Jews, so we were taken through a narrow lobby into a little back-parlour which overlooked, through a glass screen, a large apartment, wherein a number of young women, who had the appearance of dressmakers, ladies’ maids, and governesses, were sewing tiny pieces of linen and flannel that were obviously baby-clothes.
There were no carpets on the floors and the house had a slight smell of carbolic. The tick-tick of sewing machines on the other side of the screen mingled with the deadened sound of the clapping of hands in the room overhead.
After a while there was rustle of dresses coming down the bare stairs, followed by the opening and closing of the front door, and then the Matron came into the parlour.
She was a very tall, flat-bosomed woman in a plain black dress, and she seemed to take in our situation instantly. Without waiting for Mildred’s explanation she began to ask my name, my age, and where I came from.
Mildred fenced these questions as well as she could, and then, with even more nervousness than ever, made the same request as before.
The Matron seemed aghast.
“Most certainly not,” she said. “My committee would never dream of such a thing. In the interests of the unfortunate girls who have fallen from the path of virtue, as well as their still more unfortunate offspring, we always make the most searching inquiries. In fact, we keep a record of every detail of every case. Listen to this,” she added, and opening a large leather-bound hook like a ledger, she began to read one of its entries:
“H.J., aged eighteen years, born of very respectable parents, was led astray [that was not the word] in a lonely road very late at night by a sailor who was never afterwards heard of. . . .”
But I could bear no more, and rising from my seat I fled from the room and the house into the noisy street outside.
All day long my whole soul had been in revolt. It seemed to me that, while God in His gracious mercy was giving me my child to comfort and console me, to uplift and purify me, and make me a better woman than I had been before, man, with his false and cruel morality, with his machine-made philanthropy, was trying to use it as a whip to punish not only me but Martin.
But that it should never do! Never as long as I lived! I would die in the streets first!
Perhaps I was wrong, and did not understand myself, and certainly Mildred did not understand me. When she rejoined me in the street we turned our faces homeward and were half way back to the boarding-house before we spoke again.
Then she said:
“I am afraid the other institutions will be the same. They’ll all want references.”
I answered that they should never get them.
“But your money will be done soon, my child, and then what is to become of you?”
“No matter!” I said, for I had already determined to face the world myself without help from anybody.
There was a silence again until we reached the door of our boarding-house, and then Mildred said:
“Mary, your father is a rich man, and however much you may have displeased him he cannot wish you to be left to the mercy of the world — especially when your time comes. Let me write to him. . . .”
That terrified me, for I saw only one result — an open quarrel between my father and my husband about the legitimacy of my child, who would probably be taken away from me as soon as it was born.
So taking Mildred by the arm, regardless of the observation of passers-by, I begged and prayed and implored of her not to write to my father.
She promised not to do so, and we parted on good terms; but I was not satisfied, and the only result of our day’s journeying was that I became possessed of the idea that the whole world was conspiring to rob me of my unborn child.
A few days later Mildred called again, and then she said:
“I had another letter from Father Donovan this morning, Mary. Your poor priest is broken-hearted about you. He is sure you are in London, and certain you are in distress, and says that with or without his Bishop’s consent he is coming up to London to look for you, and will never go back until you are found.”
I began to suspect Mildred. In the fever of my dread of losing my child I convinced myself that with the best intentions in the world, merely out of love for me and pity for my position, she would give me up — perhaps in the very hour of my peril.
To make this impossible I determined to cut myself off from her and everybody else, by leaving the boarding-house and taking another and cheaper lodging far enough away.
I was encouraged in this course by the thought of my diminishing resources, and though heaven knows I had not too many comforts where I was. I reproached myself for spending so much on my own needs when I ought to be economising for the coming of my child.
The end of it all was that one morning early I went down to the corner of Oxford Street where the motor-omnibuses seem to come and go from all parts of London.
North, south, east, and west were all one to me, leading to labyrinths of confused and interminable streets, and I knew as little as a child which of them was best for my purpose. But chance seems to play the greatest part in our lives, and at that moment it was so with me.
I was standing on the edge of the pavement when a motor-bus labelled “Bayswater Road” stopped immediately in front of me and I stepped into it, not knowing in the least why I did so.
Late that evening, having found what I wanted, I returned in the mingled mist and darkness to the boarding-house to pack up my belongings. That was not difficult to do, and after settling my account and sending young John for a cab I was making for the door when the landlady came up to me.
“Will you not leave your new address, my dear, lest anybody should call,” she said.
“Nobody will call,” I answered.
“But in case there should he letters?”
“There will be no letters,” I said, and whispering to the driver to drive up Oxford Street, I got into the cab.
It was then quite dark. The streets and shops were alight, and I remembered that as I crossed the top of the Charing Cross Road I looked down in the direction of the lofty building in which Mildred’s window would be shining like a lighthouse over Piccadilly.
Poor dear ill-requited Mildred! She has long ago forgiven me. She knows now that when I ran away from the only friend I had in London it was because I could not help it.
She knows, too, that I was not thinking of myself, and that in diving still deeper into the dungeon of the great city, in hiding and burying myself away in it, I was asking nothing of God but that He would let me live the rest of my life — no matter how poor and lonely — with the child that He was sending to be a living link between my lost one and me.
In the light of what happened afterwards, that was all so strange, and oh, so wonderful and miraculous!
EIGHTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
My new quarters were in the poorer district which stands at the back of Bayswater.
The street was a cul-de-sac (of some ten small houses on either side) which was blocked up at the further end by the high wall of a factory for the “humanization” of milk, and opened out of a busy thoroughfare of interior shops like a gully-way off a noisy coast.
My home in this street was in number one, and I had been attracted to it by a printed card in the semi-circular fan-light over the front door, saying: “A ROOM TO LET FURNISHED.”
My room, which was of fair size, was on the first floor and had two windows to the street, with yellow holland blinds and white muslin curtains.
The furniture consisted of a large bed, a horse-hair sofa, three cane-bottomed chairs, a chest of drawers (which stood between the windows), and a mirror over the mantelpiece, which had pink paper, cut into fanciful patterns, over the gilt frame, to keep off the flies.
The floor was covered with linoleum, but there were two strips of carpet, one before the fire and the other by the bed: the walls were papered with a bright red paper representing peonies in bloom; and there were three pictures — a portrait of a great Welsh preacher with a bardic name (“Dyfed”), an engraving entitled “Feed my Sheep” (showing Jesus carrying a lamb), and a memorial card of some member of the family of the house, in the form of a tomb with a weeping angel on either side.
I paid five shilling a week for my room, and, as this included the use of kettle, cooking utensils, and crockery, I found to my great delight at the end of the first week that providing for myself (tea, bread and butter, and eggs being my principal food) I had only spent ten shillings altogether, which, according to my present needs, left me enough for my time of waiting and several weeks beyond.
Every morning I went out with a little hand-bag to buy my provisions in the front street; and every afternoon I took a walk in the better part of Bayswater and even into the Park (Hyde Park), which was not far off, but never near Piccadilly, or so far east as Bloomsbury, lest I should meet Sister Mildred or be recognized by the old boarders.
I had no key to my lodgings, but when I returned home I knocked at the front door (which was at the top of a short flight of steps from the pavement) and then a string was pulled in the cellar-kitchen in which the family of my landlady lived, whereupon the bolt was shot back and the door opened of itself.
Finding it necessary to account for myself here as at the boarding-house, I had adhered to my former name, but said I was the widow of a commander lately lost, at sea, which was as near to the truth as I dared venture.
I had also made no disguise of the fact that I was expecting a child, a circumstance which secured me much sympathy from the kind-hearted souls who were now my neighbours.
They were all womanly women, generally the wives of men working in the milk factory, and therefore the life of our street was very regular.
At five in the morning you heard the halting step of the old “knocker up,” who went up and down the street tapping at the bedroom windows with a long pole like a fishing-rod. A little before six you heard the clashing of many front doors and the echoing footsteps of the men going to their work. At half-past seven you heard the whoop of the milkman and the rattling of his cans. At half-past eight you heard the little feet of the children, like the pattering of rain, going off to the Board School round the corner. And a little after four in the afternoon you heard the wild cries of the juvenile community let loose from lessons, the boys trundling iron hoops and the girls skipping to a measured tune over a rope stretched from parapet to parapet.
After that, our street hummed like a bee-hive, with the women, washed and combed, standing knitting at their open doors or exchanging confidences across the areas until darkness fell and each of the mothers called her children into bed, as an old hen in the farmyard clucks up her chickens.
These good creatures were very kind to me. Having satisfied themselves from observation of my habits that I was “respectable,” they called me “our lady”; and I could not help hearing that I was “a nice young thing,” though it was a little against me that I did not go to church or chapel, and had confessed to being a Catholic — for several of our families (including that of my landlady) were members of the Welsh Zion Chapel not far away.
Such was the life of the little human cage to which I had confined myself, but I had an inner life that was all my own and very sweet to me.
During the long hours of every day in which I was alone I occupied myself in the making of clothes for my baby — buying linen and flannel and worsted, and borrowing patterns from my Welsh landlady.
This stimulated my tenderness towards the child that was to come, for the heart of a young mother is almost infantile, and I hardly know whether to laugh or cry when I think of the childish things I did and thought and said to myself in those first days when I was alone in my room in that back street in Bayswater.
Thus long before baby was born I had christened her. At first I wished to call her Mary, not because I cared for that name myself, but because Martin had said it was the most beautiful in the world. In the end, however, I called her Isabel Mary (because Isabel was my mother’s name and she had been a far better woman than I was), and as I finished my baby’s garments one by one I used to put them away in their drawer, saying to myself, “That’s Isabel Mary’s binder,” or “Isabel Mary’s christening-robe” as the case might be.
I dare say it was all very foolish. There are tears in my eyes when I think of it now, but there were none then, for though there were moments when, remembering Martin, I felt as if life were for ever blank, I was almost happy in my poor surroundings, and if it was a cage I had fixed myself in there was always a bird singing inside of it — the bird that sang in my own bosom.
“When Isabel Mary comes everything will he all right,” I used to think.
This went on for many weeks and perhaps it might have gone on until my time was full but for something which, occurring under my eyes, made me tremble with the fear that the life I was living and the hope I was cherishing were really very wrong and selfish.
Of my landlady, Mrs. Williams, I saw little. She was a rather hard but no doubt heavily-laden woman, who had to “do” for a swarm of children, besides two young men lodgers who lived in the kitchen and slept in the room behind mine. Her husband was a quiet man (a carter at the dairy) whom I never saw at all except on the staircase at ten o’clock at night, when, after winding the tall clock on the landing, he went upstairs to bed in his stocking feet.
But the outstanding member of the family for me was a shock-headed girl of fourteen called Emmerjane, which was a running version of Emma Jane.
I understood that Emmerjane was the illegitimate daughter of Mrs. Williams’s dead sister, and that she had been born in Carnarvon, which still shimmered in her memory in purple and gold.
Emmerjane was the drudge of the family, and I first saw her in the street at dusk, mothering a brood of her little cousins, taking Hughie by one hand and Katie by the other and telling Gwennie to lay hold of Davie lest he should be run over by the milk vans.
Afterwards she became my drudge also — washing my floor, bringing up my coals, and cleaning my grate, for sixpence a week, and giving me a great deal of information about my neighbours for nothing.
Thus she told me, speaking broad cockney with a Welsh accent, that the people opposite were named Wagstaffe and that the creaking noise I heard was that of a mangle, which Mrs. Wagstaffe had to keep because her husband was a drunkard, who stole her money and came home “a-Saturday nights, when the public-houses turned out, and beat her somethink shockin’,” though she always forgave him the next day and then the creaking went on as before.
But the greatest interest of this weird little woman, who had a premature knowledge of things a child ought not to know, was in a house half-way down the street on the other side, where steam was always coming from the open door to the front kitchen.
The people who lived there were named Jones. Mrs. Jones “washed” and had a bed-ridden old mother (with two shillings from the Guardians) and a daughter named Maggie.
Maggie Jones, who was eighteen, and very pretty, used to work in the dairy, but the foreman had “tiken advantage of her” and she had just had a baby.
This foreman was named Owen Owens and he lived at the last number on our side, where two unmarried sisters “kept house” for him and sat in the “singing seat” at Zion.
Maggie thought it was the sisters’ fault that Owen Owens did not marry her, so she conceived a great scheme for “besting” them, and this was the tragedy which, through Emmerjane’s quick little eyes and her cockney-Welsh tongue, came to me in instalments day by day.
When her baby was a month old Maggie dressed it up “fine” and took it to the photographers for its “card di visit.” The photographs were a long time coming, but when they came they were “heavenly lovely” and Maggie “cried to look at them.”
