This pleased me extremely, especially (God forgive me!), the fact that Mrs. Oliver was a bereaved mother and lived on the edge of the country.

Already in my mind's eye I saw her sitting on sunny days under a tree (perhaps in an orchard) with Isabel in her arms, rocking her gently and singing to her softly, and almost forgetting that she was not her own baby whom she had lost . . . though that was a two-edged sword which cut me both ways, being a sort of wild joy with tears lurking behind it.

So I took a note of Mrs. Oliver's address (10 Lennard's Row, Lennard's Green, Ilford) and wrote to her the same night, asking her terms and stating my own conditions.

A reply came the following day. It was a badly-written and misspelt letter, which showed me that Mrs. Oliver must be a working woman (perhaps the wife of a gardener or farm-labourer, I thought), though that did not trouble me in the least, knowing by this time how poor people loved their children.

"The terms is fore shillins a weke," she wrote, "but i am that lonelie sins my own littel one lef me i wood tike your swete darling for nothin if I cud afford it and you can cum to see her as offen as you pleas."

In my ignorance and simplicity this captured me completely, so I replied at once saying I would take baby to Ilford the next day.

I did all this in a rush, but when it came to the last moment I could scarcely part with my letter, and I remember that I passed three pillar-boxes in the front street before I could bring myself to post it.

I suppose my eyes must have been red when I returned home, for my Welsh landlady (whom I had taken into my confidence about my means) took me to task for crying, telling me that I ought to thank God for what had happened, which was like a message from heaven, look you, and a dispensation of Providence.

I tried to see things in that light, though it was difficult to do so, for the darker my prospects grew the more radiant shone the light of the little angel by whose life I lived, and the harder it seemed to live without her.

"But it isn't like losing my child altogether, is it?" I said.

"'Deed no, and 'twill he better for both of you," said my landlady.

"Although Ilford is a long way off I can go there every day, can't I'!"

"'Deed thee can, if thee'st not minding a journey of nine miles or more."

"And if I can get a good situation and earn a little money I may be able to have baby back and hire somebody to nurse her, and so keep her all to myself."

"And why shouldn't thee?" said my Welsh landlady. "Thee reading print like the young minister and writing letters like a copybook!"

So in the fierce bravery of motherly love I dried my eyes and forced back my sobs, and began to pack up my baby's clothes, and to persuade myself that I was still quite happy.

My purse was very low by this time. After paying my rent and some other expenses I had only one pound and a few shillings left.



NINETY-SECOND CHAPTER

At half past seven next morning I was ready to start on my journey.

I took a hasty glance at myself in the glass before going out, and I thought my eyes were too much like the sky at daybreak—all joyful beams with a veil of mist in front of them.

But I made myself believe that never since baby was born had I been so happy. I was sure I was doing the best for her. I was also sure I was doing the best for myself, for what could be so sweet to a mother as providing for her child?

My Welsh landlady had told me it was nine miles to Ilford, and I had gathered that I could ride all the way in successive omnibuses for less than a shilling. But shillings were scarce with me then, so I determined to walk all the way.

Emmerjane, by her own urgent entreaty, carried baby as far as the corner of the Bayswater Road, and there the premature little woman left me, after nearly smothering baby with kisses.

"Keep straight as a' arrow and you can't lose your wye," she said.

It was one of those beautiful mornings in late July when the air is fresh and the sun is soft, and the summer, even in London, has not yet had time to grow tired and dusty.

I felt as light as the air itself. I had put baby's feeding-bottle in my pocket and hung her surplus linen in a parcel about my wrist, so I had nothing to carry in my arms except baby herself, and at first I did not feel her weight.

There were not many people in the West-End streets at that early hour, yet a few were riding in the Park, and when I came to the large houses in Lancaster Gate I saw that though the sun was shining on the windows most of the blinds were down.

I must have been walking slowly, for it was half past eight when I reached the Marble Arch. There I encountered the first cross-tide of traffic, but somebody, seeing baby, took me by the arm and led me safely over.

The great "Mediterranean of Oxford Street" was by this time running at full tide. People were pouring out of the Tube and Underground stations and clambering on to the motor-buses. But in the rush nobody hustled or jostled me. A woman with a child in her arms was like a queen—everybody made way for her.

Once or twice I stopped to look at the shops. Some of the dressmakers' windows were full of beautiful costumes. I did not covet any of them. I remembered the costly ones I had bought in Cairo and how little happiness they had brought me. And then I felt as if the wealth of the world were in my arms.

Nevertheless the whole feminine soul in me awoke when I came upon a shop for the sale of babies' clothes. Already I foresaw a time when baby, dressed in pretty things like these, would be running about Lennard's Green and plucking up the flowers in Mrs. Oliver's garden.

The great street was very long and I thought it would never end. But I think I must have been still fresh and happy while we passed through the foreign quarter of Soho, for I remember that, when two young Italian waiters, standing at the door of their cafe, asked each other in their own language which of us (baby or I) was "the bambino," I turned to them and smiled.

Before I came to Chancery Lane, however, baby began to cry for her food, and I was glad to slip down a narrow alley into Lincoln's Inn Fields and sit on a seat in the garden while I gave her the bottle. It was then ten o'clock, the sun was high and the day was becoming hot.

The languid stillness of the garden after the noise and stir of the streets tempted me to stay longer than I had intended, and when I resumed my journey I thought the rest must have done me good, but before I reached the Holborn Viaduct fatigue was beginning to gain on me.

I saw that I must be approaching some great hospital, for hospital nurses were now passing me constantly, and one of them, who was going my way, stepped up and asked me to allow her to carry baby. She looked so sweet and motherly that I let her do so, and as we walked along we talked.

She asked me if I was going far, and I said no, only to the other end of London, the edge of the country, to Ilford.

"Ilford!" she cried. "Why, that's miles and miles away. You'll have to 'bus it to Aldgate, then change for Bow, and then tram it through Stratford Market."

I told her I preferred to walk, being such a good walker, and she gave me a searching look, but said no more on that subject.

Then she asked me how old baby was and whether I was nursing her myself, and I answered that baby was six weeks and I had been forced to wean her, being supposed to be delicate, and besides . . .

"Ah, perhaps you are putting her out to nurse," she said, and I answered yes, and that was the reason I was going to Ilford.

"I see," she said, with another searching look, and then it flashed upon me that she had formed her own conclusions about what had befallen me.

When we came to a great building in a side street on the left, with ambulance vans passing in and out of a wide gateway, she said she was sorry she could not carry baby any further, because she was due in the hospital, where the house-doctor would be waiting for her.

"But I hope baby's nurse will be a good one. They're not always that, you know."

I was not quite so happy when the hospital nurse left me. The parcel on my wrist was feeling heavier than before, and my feet were beginning to drag. But I tried to keep a good heart as I faced the crowded thoroughfares—Newgate with its cruel old prison, the edge of St. Paul's, and the corner of St. Martin's-le-Grand, and so on into Cheapside.

Cheapside itself was almost impassable. Merchants, brokers, clerks, and city men generally in tall silk hats were hurrying and sometimes running along the pavement, making me think of the river by my father's house, whose myriad little waves seemed to my fancy as a child to be always struggling to find out which could get to Murphy's Mouth the first and so drown itself in the sea.

People were still very kind to me, though, and if anybody brushed me in passing he raised his hat; and if any one pushed me accidentally he stopped to say he was sorry.

Of course baby was the talisman that protected me from harm; and what I should have done without her when I got to the Mansion house I do not know, for that seemed to be the central heart of all the London traffic, with its motor-buses and taxi-cabs going in different directions and its tremendous tides of human life flowing every way.

But just as I was standing, dazed and deafened on the edge of a triangle of streets, looking up at a great building that was like a rock on the edge of a noisy sea, and bore on its face the startling inscription, "The Earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof," a big policeman, seeing me with baby in my arms, held up his hand to the drivers and shouted to the pedestrians ("Stand a-one side, please"), and then led me safely across, as if the Red Sea had parted to let us pass.

It was then twelve o'clock and baby was once more crying for her food, so I looked for a place in which I might rest while I gave her the bottle again.

Suddenly I came upon what I wanted. It seemed to be a garden, but it was a graveyard—one of the graveyards of the old London churches, enclosed by high buildings now, and overlooked by office windows.

Such a restful place, so green, so calm, so beautiful! Lying there in the midst of the tumultuous London traffic, it reminded me of one of the little islands in the middle of our Ellan glens, on which the fuchsia and wild rose grow while the river rolls and boils about it.

I had just sat down on a seat that had been built about a gnarled and blackened old tree, and was giving baby her food, when I saw that a young girl was sitting beside me.

She was about nineteen years of age, and was eating scones out of a confectioner's bag, while she read a paper-covered novel. Presently she looked at baby with her little eyes, which were like a pair of shiny boot buttons, and said:

"That your child?"

I answered her, and then she asked:

"Do you like children?"

I answered her again, and asked her if she did not like them also.

"Can't say I'm particularly gone on them," she said, whereupon I replied that that was probably because she had not yet had much experience.

"Oh, haven't I? Perhaps I haven't," she said, and then with a hard little laugh, she added "Mother's had nine though."

I asked if she was a shop assistant, and with a toss of her head she told me she was a typist.

"Better screw and your evenings off," she said, and then she returned to the subject of children.

One of her chums in the office who used to go out with her every night to the music-halls got into trouble a year or two ago. As a consequence she had to marry. And what was the result? Never had her nose out of the wash-tub now!

The story was crude enough, yet it touched me closely.

"But couldn't she have put her baby out to nurse and get another situation somewhere?" I asked.

"Matter o' luck," said the girl. "Some can. Some can't. That's their look out. Firms don't like it. If they find you've got a child they gen'r'lly chuck you."

In spite of myself I was a little down when I started on my journey again. I thought the parcel was cutting my wrist and I felt my feet growing heavier at every step.

Was Maggie Jones's story the universal one?

If a child were born beyond the legal limits, was it a thing to hide away and be ashamed of?

And could it be possible that man's law was stronger than God's law after all?



NINETY-THIRD CHAPTER

I had walked so slowly and stopped so often that it was two o'clock in the afternoon when I passed through Aldgate.

I was then faint for want of food, so I looked out for a tea-shop or restaurant.

I passed several such places before I found the modest house I wanted. Then I stepped into it rather nervously and took the seat nearest the door.

It was an oblong room with red plush seats along the walls behind a line of marble-topped tables. The customers were all men, chiefly clerks and warehousemen, I thought, and the attendants were girls in black frocks and white aprons.

There seemed to be a constant fire of free-and-easy flirtation going on between them. At one table a man in a cloth cap was saying to the girl who had served him:

"What's the damage, dearie?"

"One roast, one veg, two breads—'levenpence, and no liberties, mister."

"Sunday off, Em'ly?" said a youth in a red tie at another table, and being told it was, he said:

"Then what do you say to 'oppin' up to 'Endon and 'aving a day in a boat?"

I had to wait some time before anybody came to attend to me, but at length a girl from the other end of the room, who had taken no part in these amatory exchanges, stepped up and asked what I wanted.

I ordered a glass of cold milk and a scone for myself and a pint of hot milk to replenish baby's bottle.

The girl served me immediately, and after rinsing and refilling the feeding-bottle she stood near while the baby used it.

She had quiet eyes and that indefinable expression of yearning tenderness which we sometimes see in the eyes of a dear old maid who has missed her motherhood.

The shop had been clearing rapidly; and as soon as the men were gone, and while the other girls were sitting in corners to read penny novelettes, my waitress leaned over and asked me if I did not wish to go into the private room to attend to baby.

A moment afterwards I followed her into a small apartment at the end of the shop, and there a curious thing occurred.

She closed the door behind us and asked me in an eager whisper to allow her to see to baby.

I tried to excuse myself, but she whispered:

"Hush! I have a baby of my own, though they know nothing about it here, so you can safely trust me."

I did so, and it was beautiful to see the joy she had in doing what was wanted, saying all sorts of sweet and gentle things to my baby (though I knew they were meant for her own), as if the starved mother-heart in her were stealing a moment of maternal tenderness.

"There!" she said, "She'll be comfortable now, bless her!"

I asked about her own child, and, coming close and speaking in a whisper, she told me all about it.

It was a girl and it would be a year old at Christmas. At first she had put it out to nurse in town, where she could see it every evening, but the foster-mother had neglected it, and the inspector had complained, so she had been compelled to take it away. Now it was in a Home in the country, ten miles from Liverpool Street, and it was as bonny as a peach and as happy as the day is long.

"See," she whispered, taking a card from her breast, after a furtive glance towards the door. "I sent two shillings to have her photograph taken and the Matron has just sent it."

It was the picture of a beautiful baby girl, and I found it easy to praise her.

"I suppose you see her constantly, don't you?" I said.

The girl's face dropped.

"Only on visiting days, once a month, and not always that," she answered.

"But how can you live without seeing her oftener?" I asked.

"Matter o' means," she said sadly. "I pay five shillings a week for her board, and the train is one-and-eight return, so I have to be careful, you see, and if I lost my place what would happen to baby?"

I was very low and tired and down when I resumed my walk. But when I thought for a moment of taking omnibuses for the rest of my journey I remembered the waitress's story and told myself that the little I had belonged to my child, and so I struggled on.

But what a weary march it was during the next two hours! I was in the East End now, and remembering the splendour of the West, I could scarcely believe I was still in London.

Long, mean, monotonous streets, running off to right and left, miles on miles of them without form or feature, or any trace of nature except the blue strips of sky overhead.

Such multitudes of people, often badly dressed and generally with set and anxious faces, hasting to and fro, hustling, elbowing, jostling each other along, as if driven by some invisible power that was swinging an unseen scourge.

No gracious courtesy here! A woman with a child in her arms was no longer a queen. Children were cheap, and sometimes it was as much as I could do to save myself from being pushed off the pavement.

The air seemed to smell of nothing but ale and coarse tobacco. And then the noise! The ceaseless clatter of carts, the clang of electric cars, the piercing shrieks of the Underground Railway coming at intervals out of the bowels of the earth like explosions out of a volcano, and, above all, the raucous, rasping, high-pitched voices of the people, often foul-mouthed, sometimes profane, too frequently obscene.

A cold, grey, joyless, outcast city, cut off from the rest of London by an invisible barrier more formidable than a wall; a city in which the inhabitants seemed to live cold, grey, joyless lives, all the same that they joked and laughed; a city under perpetual siege, the siege of Poverty, in the constant throes of civil war, the War of Want, the daily and hourly fight for food.

If there were other parts of the East End (and I am sure there must be) where people live simple, natural, human lives, I did not see them that day, for my course was down the principal thoroughfares only.

Those thoroughfares, telescoping each other, one after another, seemed as if they would never come to an end.

How tired I was! Even baby was no longer light, and the parcel on my wrist had become as heavy as lead.

Towards four o'clock I came to a broad parapet which had strips of garden enclosed by railings and iron seats in front of them. Utterly exhausted, my arms aching and my legs limp, I sank into one of these seats, feeling that I could walk no farther.

But after a while I felt better, and then I became aware that another woman was sitting beside me.

When I looked at her first I thought I had never in my life seen anything so repulsive. She was asleep, and having that expressionless look which sleep gives, I found it impossible to know whether she was young or old. She was not merely coarse, she was gross. The womanhood in her seemed to be effaced, and I thought she was utterly brutalised and degraded.

Presently baby, who had also been asleep, awoke and cried, and then the woman opened her eyes and looked at the child, while I hushed her to sleep again.

There must be something in a baby's face that has a miraculous effect on every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.

Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman's face when she looked into the face of my baby. The expression of brutality and degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.

After a while the woman spoke to me. She spoke in a husky voice which seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.

"That your'n," she said.

I answered her.

"Boy or gel?"

I told her.

"'Ow old?"

I told her that too.

The woman was silent for a moment, and then, with a thickening of the husky voice, she said:

"S'pose you'll say I'm a bleedin' liar, but I 'ad a kid as putty as that onct—puttier. It was a boy. The nobbiest little b—— as you ever come acrost. Your'n is putty, but it ain't in it with my Billie, not by a long chalk."

I asked her what had become of her child.

"Lawst 'im," she said. "Used to give sixpence a week to the woman what 'ad 'alf the 'ouse with me to look after 'im while I was workin' at the fact'ry. But what did the bleedin' b—— do? Blimey, if she didn't let 'im get run over by the dray from the brewery."

"Killed?" I said, clutching at baby.

The woman nodded without speaking.

I asked her how old her child had been.

"More'n four," she said. "Just old enough to run a arrand. It was crool. Hit me out, I can tell you. That kid was all I had. Apple o' my eye, in a manner of speakin'. When it was gone there wasn't much encouragement, was there? The Favver from the Mission came jawin' as 'ow Jesus 'ad taken 'im to 'Imself. Rot! When they put 'im down in old Bow I didn't care no more for nothin'. Monse and monse I walked about night and day, and the bleedin' coppers was allus on to me. They got their own way at last. I took the pneumonier and was laid up at the London. And when I got out I didn't go back to the fact'ry neither."

"What did you do?" I asked.

The woman laughed—bitterly, terribly.

"Do? Don't you know?"

I shook my head. The woman looked hard at me, and then at the child.

"Look here—are you a good gel?" she said.

Hardly knowing what she meant I answered that I hoped so

"'Ope? Don't you know that neither?"

Then I caught her meaning, and answered faintly:

"Yes."

She looked searchingly into my eyes and said:

"I b'lieve you. Some gels is. S'elp me Gawd I don't know how they done it, though."

I was shuddering and trembling, for I was catching glimpses, as if by broken lights from hell, of the life behind—the wrecked hope, the shattered faith, the human being hunted like a beast and at last turned into one.

Just at that moment baby awoke and cried again. The woman looked at her with the same look as before—not so much a smile as a sort of haggard radiance.

Then leaning over me she blew puffs of alcoholic breath into baby's face, and stretching out a coarse fat finger she tickled her under the chin.

Baby ceased to cry and began to smile. Seeing this the woman's eyes sparkled like sunshine.

"See that," she cried. "S'elp me Jesus, I b'lieve I could 'ave been good meself if I'd on'y 'ad somethink like this to keer for."

I am not ashamed to say that more than once there had been tears in my eyes while the woman spoke, though her blasphemies had corrupted the air like the gases that rise from a dust-heap. But when she touched my child I shuddered as if something out of the 'lowest depths had tainted her.

Then a strange thing happened.

I had risen to go, although my limbs could scarcely support me, and was folding my little angel closely in my arms, when the woman rose too and said:

"You wouldn't let me carry your kiddie a bit, would you?"

I tried to excuse myself, saying something, I know not what The woman looked at me again, and after a moment she said:

"S'pose not. On'y I thought it might make me think as 'ow I was carryin' Billie."

That swept down everything.

The one remaining window of the woman's soul was open and I dared not close it.

I looked down at my child—so pure, so sweet, so stainless; I looked up at the woman—so foul, so gross, so degraded.

There was a moment of awful struggle and then . . . the woman and I were walking side by side.

And the harlot was carrying my baby down the street.



NINETY-FOURTH CHAPTER

At five o'clock I was once more alone.

I was then standing (with baby in my own arms now) under the statue which is at the back of Bow Church.

I thought I could walk no farther, and although every penny I had in my pocket belonged to Isabel (being all that yet stood between her and want) I must borrow a little of it if she was to reach Mrs. Oliver's that night.

I waited for the first tram that was going in my direction, and when it came up I signalled to it, but it did not stop—it was full.

I waited for a second tram, but that was still more crowded.

I reproached myself for having come so far. I told myself how ill-advised I had been in seeking for a nurse for my child at the farthest end of the city. I reminded myself that I could not hope to visit her every day if my employment was to be in the West, as I had always thought it would be. I asked myself if in all this vast London, with its myriads of homes, there had been no house nearer that could have sheltered my child.

Against all this I had to set something, or I think my very heart would have died there and then. I set the thought of Ilford, on the edge of the country, with its green fields and its flowers. I set the thought of Mrs. Oliver, who would love my child as tenderly as if she were her own little lost one.

I dare say it was all very weak and childish, but it is just when we are done and down, and do not know what we are doing, that Providence seems to be directing us, and it was so with me at that moment.

The trams being full I had concluded that Fate had set itself against my spending any of Isabel's money, and had made up my mind to make a fierce fight over the last stage of my journey, when I saw that a little ahead of where I was standing the road divided into two branches at an acute angle, one branch going to the right and the other to the left.

Not all Emmerjane's instructions about keeping "as straight as a' arrow" sufficed to show me which of the two roads to take and I looked about for somebody to tell me.

It was then that I became aware of a shabby old four-wheeled cab which stood in the triangular space in front of the statue, and of the driver (an old man, in a long coachman's coat, much worn and discoloured, and a dilapidated tall hat, very shiny in patches) looking at me while he took the nose-bag off his horse—a bony old thing with its head hanging down.

I stepped up to him and asked my way, and he pointed it out to me—to the right, over the bridge and through Stratford Market.

I asked how far it was to Ilford.

"Better nor two mile I call it," he answered.

After that, being so tired in brain as well as body, I asked a foolish question—how long it would take me to get there.

The old driver looked at me again, and said:

"'Bout a 'our and a 'alf I should say by the looks of you—and you carryin' the biby."

I dare say my face dropped sadly as I turned away, feeling very tired, yet determined to struggle through. But hardly had I walked twenty paces when I heard the cab coming up behind and the old driver crying:

"'Old on, missie."

I stopped, and to my surprise he drew up by my side, got down from his box, opened the door of his cab and said:

"Ger in."

I told him I could not afford to ride.

"Ger in," he said again more loudly, and as if angry with himself for having to say it.

Again I made some demur, and then the old man said, speaking fiercely through his grizzly beard:

"Look 'ere, missie. I 'ave a gel o' my own lost somewheres, and I wouldn't be ans'rable to my ole woman if I let you walk with a face like that."

I don't know what I said to him. I only know that my tears gushed out and that at the next moment I was sitting in the cab.

What happened then I do not remember, except that the dull rumble of the wheels told me we were passing over a bridge, and that I saw through the mist before my eyes a sluggish river, a muddy canal, and patches of marshy fields.

I think my weariness and perhaps my emotion, added to the heavy monotonous trotting of the old horse, must have put me to sleep, for after a while I was conscious of a great deal of noise, and of the old driver twisting about and shouting in a cheerful voice through the open window at the back of his seat:

"Stratford Market."

After a while we came to a broad road, full of good houses, and then the old driver cried "Ilford," and asked what part of it I wished to go to.

I reached forward and told him, "10 Lennard's Row, Lennard's Green," and then sat back with a lighter heart.

But after another little while I saw a great many funeral cars passing us, with the hearses empty, as if returning from a cemetery. This made me think of the woman and her story, and I found myself unconsciously clasping my baby closer.

The corteges became so numerous at last that to shut out painful sights I closed my eyes and tried to think of pleasanter things.

I thought, above all, of Mrs. Oliver's house, as I had always seen it in my mind's eye—not a pretentious place at all, only a little humble cottage but very sweet and clean, covered with creepers and perhaps with roses.

I was still occupied with these visions when I felt the cab turn sharply to the left. Then opening my eyes I saw that we were running down a kind of alley-way, with a row of very mean little two-storey houses on the one side, and on the other, a kind of waste ground strewn with broken bottles, broken iron pans, broken earthenware and other refuse, interspersed with tufts of long scraggy grass, which looked the more wretched because the sinking sun was glistening over it.

Suddenly the cab slowed down and stopped. Then the old man jumped from his box and opening his cab door, said:

"Here you are, missie. This is your destingnation."

There must have been a moment of semi-consciousness in which I got out of the cab, for when I came to full possession of myself I was standing on a narrow pavement in front of a closed door which bore the number 10.

At first I was stunned. Then my heart was in my mouth and it was as much as I could do not to burst out crying. Finally I wanted to fly, and I turned back to the cab, but it had gone and was already passing round the corner.

It was six o'clock. I was very tired. I was nine miles from Bayswater. I could not possibly carry baby back. What could I do?

Then, my brain being unable to think, a mystic feeling (born perhaps of my life in the convent) came over me—a feeling that all that had happened on my long journey, all I had seen and everything that had been said to me, had been intended to prepare me for (and perhaps to save me from) the dangers that were to come.

I think that gave me a certain courage, for with what strength of body and spirit I had left (though my heart was in my mouth still) I stepped across the pavement and knocked at the door.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My great-hearted, heroic little woman!

All this time I, in my vain belief that our expedition was of some consequence to the world, was trying to comfort myself with the thought that my darling must have heard of my safety.

But how could I imagine that she had hidden herself away in a mass of humanity—which appears to be the most impenetrable depths into which a human being can disappear?

How could I dream that, to the exclusion of all such interests as mine, she was occupied day and night, night and day, with the joys and sorrows, the raptures and fears of the mighty passion of Motherhood, which seems to be the only thing in life that is really great and eternal?

Above all, how could I believe that in London itself, in the heart of the civilised and religious world, she was going through trials which make mine, in the grim darkness of the Polar night, seem trivial and easy?

It is all over now, and though, thank God, I did not know at the time what was happening to my dear one at home, it is some comfort to me to remember that I was acting exactly as if I did.

From the day we turned hack I heard my darling's voice no more. But I had a still more perplexing and tormenting experience, and that was a dream about her, in which she was walking on a crevassed glacier towards a precipice which she could not see because the brilliant rays of the aurora were in her eyes.

Anybody may make what he likes of that on grounds of natural law, and certainly it was not surprising that my dreams should speak to me in pictures drawn from the perils of my daily life, but only one thing matters now—that these experiences of my sleeping hours increased my eagerness to get back to my dear one.

My comrades were no impediment to that, I can tell you. With their faces turned homewards, and the wind at their backs, they were showing tremendous staying power, although we had thirty and forty below zero pretty constantly, with rough going all the time, for the snow had been ruckled up by the blizzard to almost impassable heaps and hummocks.

On reaching our second installation at Mount Darwin I sent a message to the men at the foot of Mount Erebus, telling them to get into communication (through Macquarie Island) with the captain of our ship in New Zealand, asking him to return for us as soon as the ice conditions would permit; and this was the last of our jobs (except packing our instruments tight and warm) before we started down the "long white gateway" for our quarters at the Cape.

With all the heart in the world, though, our going had to be slow. It was the middle of the Antarctic winter, when absolute night reigned for weeks and we had nothing to alleviate the darkness but the light of the scudding moon, and sometimes the glory of the aurora as it encircled the region of the unrisen sun.

Nevertheless my comrades sang their way home through the sullen gloom. Sometimes I wakened the echoes of those desolate old hills myself with a stave of "Sally's the gel," although I was suffering a good deal from my darker thoughts of what the damnable hypocrisies of life might be doing with my darling, and my desire to take my share of her trouble whatever it might be.

The sun returned the second week in August. Nobody can know what relief that brought us except those who have lived for months without it. To see the divine and wonderful thing rise up like a god over those lone white regions is to know what a puny thing man is in the scheme of the world.

I think all of us felt like that at sight of the sun, though some (myself among the rest) were thinking more of it as a kind of message from friends at home. But old Treacle, I remember, who had stood looking at it in awed solemnity, said:

"Well, I'm d——!"

After that we got on famously until we reached Winter Quarters, where we found everybody well and everything in order, but received one piece of alarming intelligence—that the attempt to get into wireless communication with our ship had failed, with the result that we should have to wait for her until the time originally appointed for her return.

That did not seem to matter much to my shipmates, who, being snugly housed from blinding blizzards, settled down to amuse themselves with sing-songs and story-tellings and readings.

But, do what I would, to me the delay was dreadful, and every day, in the fever of my anxiety to get away as soon as the ice permitted, I climbed the slopes of old Erebus with O'Sullivan, to look through powerful glasses for what the good chap called the "open wather."

Thank God, our wooden house was large enough to admit of my having a cabin to myself, for I should have been ashamed of my comrades hearing the cries that sometimes burst from me in the night.

It is hard for civilised men at home, accustomed to hold themselves under control, to realise how a man's mind can run away from him when he is thousands of miles separated from his dear ones, and has a kind of spiritual certainty that evil is befalling them.

I don't think I am a bigger fool than most men in that way, but I shiver even yet at the memory of all the torment I went through during those days of waiting, for my whole life seemed to revolve before me and I accused myself of a thousand offences which I had thought dead and buried and forgotten.

Some of these were trivial in themselves, such as hot and intemperate words spoken in childhood to my good old people at home, disobedience or ingratitude shown to them, with all the usual actions of a naughty boy, who ought to have been spanked and never was.

But the worst of them concerned my darling, and came with the thought of my responsibility for the situation in which I felt sure she found herself.

A thousand times I took myself to task for that, thinking what I ought and ought not to have done, and then giving myself every bad name and my conduct every damning epithet.

Up and down my cabin I would walk with hands buried in my pockets, revolving these thoughts and working myself up, against my will, to a fever of regret and self-accusation.

Talk about Purgatory—the Purgatory of dear old Father Dan! That was to come after death—mine came before, and by the holy saints, I had enough of it.

Two months passed like this; and when the water of the Sound was open and our ship did not appear, mine was not the only heart that was eating itself out, for the spirits of my shipmates had also begun to sink.

In the early part of the Antarctic spring there had been a fearful hurricane lasting three days on the sea, with a shrieking, roaring chorus of fiends outside, and the conviction now forced itself on my men that our ship must have gone down in the storm.

Of course I fought this notion hard, for my last hopes were based on not believing it. But when after the lapse of weeks I could hold out no longer, and we were confronted by the possibility of being held there another year (for how were our friends to know before the ice formed again that it was necessary to send relief?), I faced the situation firmly—measuring out our food and putting the men on shortened rations, twenty-eight ounces each and a thimbleful of brandy.

By the Lord God it is a fearful thing to stand face to face with slow death. Some of my shipmates could scarcely bear it. The utter solitude, the sight of the same faces and the sound of the same voices, with the prospect of nothing else, seemed to drive most of them nearly mad.

There was no sing-songing among them now, and what speaking I overheard was generally about the great dinners they had eaten, or about their dreams, which were usually of green fields and flower-beds and primroses and daisies—daisies, by heaven, in a world that was like a waste!

As for me I did my best to play the game of never giving up. It was a middling hard game, God knows, and after weeks of waiting a sense of helplessness settled down on me such as I had never known before.

I am not what is called a religious man, but when I thought of my darling's danger (for such I was sure it was) and how I was cut off from her by thousands of miles of impassable sea, there came an overwhelming longing to go with my troubles to somebody stronger than myself.

I found it hard to do that at first, for a feeling of shame came over me, and I thought:

"You coward, you forgot all about God when things were going well with you, but now that they are tumbling down, and death seems certain, you whine and want to go where you never dreamt of going in your days of ease and strength."

I got over that, though—there's nothing except death a man doesn't get over down there—and a dark night came when (the ice breaking from the cliffs of the Cape with a sound that made me think of my last evening at Castle Raa) I found myself folding my hands and praying to the God of my childhood, not for myself but for my dear one, that He before whom the strongest of humanity were nothing at all, would take her into His Fatherly keeping.

"Help her! Help her! I can do no more."

It was just when I was down to that extremity that it pleased Providence to come to my relief. The very next morning I was awakened out of my broken sleep by the sound of a gun, followed by such a yell from Treacle as was enough to make you think the sea-serpent had got hold of his old buttocks.

"The ship! The ship! Commander! Commander! The ship! The ship!"

And, looking out of my little window I saw him, with six or seven other members of our company, half naked, just as they had leapt out of their bunks, running like savages to the edge of the sea, where the "Scotia," with all flags flying (God bless and preserve her!), was steaming slowly up through a grinding pack of broken ice.

What a day that was! What shouting! What hand-shaking! For O'Sullivan it was Donnybrook Fair with the tail of his coat left out, and for Treacle it was Whitechapel Road with "What cheer, old cock?" and an unquenchable desire to stand treat all round.

But what I chiefly remember is that the moment I awoke, and before the idea that we were saved and about to go home had been fully grasped by my hazy brain, the thought flashed to my mind:

"Now you'll hear of her!"

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]



NINETY-FIFTH CHAPTER

The door of No. 10 was opened by a rather uncomely woman of perhaps thirty years of age, with a weak face and watery eyes.

This was Mrs. Oliver, and it occurred to me even at that first sight that she had the frightened and evasive look of a wife who lives under the intimidation of a tyrannical husband.

She welcomed me, however, with a warmth that partly dispelled my depression and I followed her into the kitchen.

It was the only room on the ground floor of her house (except a scullery) and it seemed sweet and clean and comfortable, having a table in the middle of the floor, a sofa under the window, a rocking-chair on one side of the fireplace, a swinging baby's cot on the other side, and nothing about it that was not homelike and reassuring, except two large photographs over the mantelpiece of men stripped to the waist and sparring.

"We've been looking for you all day, ma'am, and had nearly give you up," she said.

Then she took baby out of my arms, removed her bonnet and pelisse, lifted her barrow-coat to examine her limbs, asked her age, kissed her on the arms, the neck and the legs, and praised her without measure.

"And what's her name, ma'am?"

"Mary Isabel, but I wish her to be called Isabel."

"Isabel! A beautiful name too! Fit for a angel, ma'am. And she is a little angel, bless her! Such rosy cheeks! Such a ducky little mouth! Such blue eyes—blue as the bluebells in the cemet'ry. She's as pretty as a waxwork, she really is, and any woman in the world might be proud to nurse her."

A young mother is such a weakling that praise of her child (however crude) acts like a charm on her, and in spite of myself I was beginning to feel more at ease, when Mrs. Oliver's husband came downstairs.

He was a short, thick-set man of about thirty-five, with a square chin, a very thick neck and a close-cropped red bullet head, and he was in his stocking feet and shirt-sleeves as if he had been dressing to go out for the evening.

I remember that it flashed upon me—I don't know why—that he had seen me from the window of the room upstairs, driving up in the old man's four-wheeler, and had drawn from that innocent circumstance certain deductions about my character and my capacity to pay.

I must have been right, for as soon as our introduction was over and I had interrupted Mrs. Oliver's praises of my baby's beauty by speaking about material matters, saying the terms were to be four shillings, the man, who had seated himself on the sofa to put on his boots said, in a voice that was like a shot out of a blunderbus:

"Five."

"How'd you mean, Ted?" said Mrs. Oliver, timidly. "Didn't we say four?"

"Five," said the man again, with a still louder volume of voice.

I could see that the poor woman was trembling, but assuming the sweet air of persons who live in a constant state of fear, she said:

"Oh yes. It was five, now I remember."

I reminded her that her letter had said four, but she insisted that I must be mistaken, and when I told her I had the letter with me and she could see it if she wished, she said:

"Then it must have been a slip of the pen in a manner of speaking, ma'am. We allus talked of five. Didn't we, Ted?"

"Certainly," said her husband, who was still busy with his boots.

I saw what was going on, and I felt hot and angry, but there seemed to be nothing to do except submit.

"Very well, we'll say five then," I said.

"Paid in advance," said the man, and when I answered that that would suit me very well, he added:

"A month in advance, you know."

By this time I felt myself trembling with indignation, as well as quivering with fear, for while I looked upon all the money I possessed as belonging to baby, to part with almost the whole of it in one moment would reduce me to utter helplessness, so I said, turning to Mrs. Oliver:

"Is that usual?"

It did not escape me that the unhappy woman was constantly studying her husband's face, and when he glanced up at her with a meaning look she answered, hurriedly:

"Oh yes, ma'am, quite usual. All the women in the Row has it. Number five, she has twins and gets a month in hand with both of them. But we'll take four weeks and I can't say no fairer than that, can I?"

"But why?" I asked.

"Well, you see, ma'am, you're . . . you're a stranger to us, and if baby was left on our hands . . . Not as we think you'd leave her chargeable as the saying is, but if you were ever ill, and got a bit back with your payments . . . we being only pore people. . . ."

While the poor woman was floundering on in this way my blood was boiling and I was beginning to ask her if she supposed for one moment that I meant to desert my child, when the man, who had finished the lacing of his boots, rose to his feet, and said:

"You don't want yer baiby to be give over to the Guardians for the sake of a week or two, do you?"

That settled everything. I took out my purse and with a trembling hand laid my last precious sovereign on the table.

A moment or two after this Mr. Oliver, who had put on his coat and a cloth cap, made for the door.

"Evenin', ma'am," he said, and with what grace I could muster I bade him good-bye.

"You aren't a-going to the 'Sun' to-night, are you, Ted?" asked Mrs. Oliver.

"Club," said the man, and the door clashed behind him.

I breathed more freely when he was gone, and his wife (from whose face the look of fear vanished instantly) was like another woman.

"Goodness gracious," she cried, with a kind of haggard hilarity, "where's my head? Me never offering you a cup of tea, and you looking so white after your journey."

I took baby back into my arms while she put on the kettle, set a black tea-pot on the hob to warm, laid a piece of tablecloth and a thick cup and saucer on the end of the table, and then knelt on the fender to toast a little bread, talking meantime (half apologetically and half proudly) about her husband.

He was a bricklayer by trade, and sometimes worked at the cemetery which I could see at the other side of the road (behind the long railings and the tall trees), but was more generally engaged as a sort of fighting lieutenant to a Labour leader whose business it was to get up strikes. Before they were married he had been the "Light Weight Champion of Whitechapel," and those were photos of his fights which I could see over the mantelpiece, but "he never did no knocking of people about now," being "quiet and matrimonual."

In spite of myself my heart warmed to the woman. I wonder it did not occur to me there and then that, living in constant dread of her tyrannical husband, she would always be guilty of the dissimulation I had seen an example of already and that the effect of it would be reflected upon my child.

It did not. I only told myself that she was clearly fond of children and would be a kind nurse to my baby. It even pleased me, in my foolish motherly selfishness, that she was a plain-featured person, whom baby could never come to love as she would, I was sure, love me.

I felt better after I had taken tea, and as it was then seven o'clock, and the sun was setting horizontally through the cypresses of the cemetery, I knew it was time to go.

I could not do that, though, without undressing baby and singing her to sleep. And even then I sat for a while with an aching heart, and Isabel on my knee, thinking of how I should have to go to bed that night, for the first time, without her.

Mrs. Oliver, in the meantime, examining the surplus linen which I had brought in my parcel, was bursting into whispered cries of delight over it, and, being told I had made the clothes myself, was saying:

"What a wonderful seamstress you might be if you liked, ma'am."

At length the time came to leave baby, and no woman knows the pain of that experience who has not gone through it.

Though I really believed my darling would be loved and cared for, and knew she would never miss me, or yet know that I was gone (there was a pang even in that thought, and in every other kind of comforting), I could not help it, that, as I was putting my cherub into her cot, my tears rained down on her little face and awakened her, so that I had to kneel by her side and rock her to sleep again.

"You'll be good to my child, won't you, Mrs. Oliver?" I said.

"'Deed I will, ma'am," the woman replied.

"You'll bath her every day, will you not?"

"Night and morning. I allus does, ma'am."

"And rinse out her bottle and see that she has nice new milk fresh from the cow?"

"Sure as sure, ma'am. But don't you fret no more about the child, ma'am. I've been a mother myself, ma'am, and I'll be as good to your little angel as if she was my own come back to me."

"God bless you," I said in a burst of anguish, and after remaining a moment longer on my knees by the cot (speaking with all my heart and soul, though neither to nurse nor to baby) I rose to my feet, dashed the tears from my eyes, and ran out of the house.



NINETY-SIXTH CHAPTER

I knew that my eyes were not fit to be seen in the streets, so I dropped my dark veil and hurried along, being conscious of nothing for some time except the clang of electric cars and the bustle of passers-by, to whom my poor little sorrow was nothing at all.

But I had not gone far—I think I had not, though my senses were confused and vague—before I began to feel ashamed, to take myself to task, and to ask what I had to cry about.

If I had parted from my baby it was for her own good, and if I had paid away my last sovereign I had provided for her for a month, I had nothing to think of now except myself and how to get work.

I never doubted that I should get work, or that I should get it immediately, the only open question being what work and where.

Hitherto I had thought that, being quick with my pen, I might perhaps become secretary to somebody; but now, remembering the typist's story ("firms don't like it"), and wishing to run no risks in respect of my child, I put that expectation away and began to soar to higher things.

How vain they were! Remembering some kind words the Reverend Mother had said about me at the convent (where I had taken more prizes than Alma, though I had never mentioned it before) I told myself that I, too, was an educated woman. I knew Italian, French and German, and having heard that some women could make a living by translating books for publishers I thought I might do the same.

Nay, I could even write books myself. I was sure I could—one book at all events, about friendless girls who have to face the world for themselves, and all good women would read it (some good men also), because they would see that it must be true.

Oh, how vain were my thoughts! Yet in another sense they were not all vanity, for I was not thinking of fame, or what people would say about what I should write, but only what I should get for it.

I should get money, not a great deal perhaps, yet enough for baby and me, that we might have that cottage in the country, covered with creepers and roses, where Isabel would run about the grass by and by, and pluck the flowers in the garden.

"So what have you got to cry about, you ridiculous thing," I thought while I hurried along, with a high step now, as if my soul had been in my feet.

But a mother's visions of the future are like a mirage (always gleaming with the fairy palaces which her child is to inhabit some day), and I am not the first to find her shadows fade away.

I must have been walking for some time, feeling no weariness at all, when I came to the bridge by Bow Church. There I had intended to take a tram, but not being tired I went on farther, thinking every stage I could walk would be so much money to the good.

I was deep in the Mile End Road, when a chilling thought came to me. It was the thought of the distance that would divide me from my child, making my visits to her difficult, and putting it out of my power to reach her quickly (perhaps even to know in time) if, as happened to children, she became suddenly and dangerously ill.

I remembered the long line of telescoping thoroughfares I had passed through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world.

Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to such a dangerous separation.

"It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible."

Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish, and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces, slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels, I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish children danced.

I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at the corner. In large written characters it ran:

Seamstress Wanted. Good Wages. Apply No. —— Washington Street.

How little are the things on which our destiny seems to hang! In a moment I was remembering what Mrs. Oliver had said about my being a good seamstress; and, almost before I knew what I was about, I was hurrying up the side street and knocking with my knuckles at an open door.

A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby. I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she said, in a nasal and guttural voice:

"Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish."

Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick black hair, and such a dear good face.

I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of catechism.

Was I a seamstress? No, but I wished to become one. Had I aiver vorked on vaistcoats? I hadn't, but I could do anything with my needle.

Perhaps the urgency of my appeal, and more probably the pressure of her own need, weighed with the Jewess, for after reflection, and an eager whisper from her daughter (who was looking at me with kindling eyes), she said,

"Very vell, ve'll see what she can do."

I was then taken into a close and stuffy room where a number of girls (all Jewish as I could see) were working on sections of waistcoats which, lying about on every side, looked like patterns for legs of mutton. One girl was basting, another was pressing, and a third was sewing button-holes with a fine silk twist round bars of gimp.

This last was the work which was required of me, and I was told to look and see if I could do it. I watched the girl for a moment and then said:

"Let me try."

Needle and twist and one of the half vests were then given to me, and after ten minutes I had worked my first button-hole and handed it back.

The daughter praised it warmly, but the mother said:

"Very fair, but a leedle slow."

"Let me try again," I said, and my trembling fingers were so eager to please that my next button-hole was not only better but more quickly made.

"Beautiful!" said the daughter. "And mamma, only think, she's quicker than Leah, already. I timed them."

"I muz call your vader, dough," said the Jewess, and she disappeared through the doorway.

While I stood talking to the younger Jewess, who had, I could see, formed as quick an attachment for me as I for her, I heard another nasal and guttural voice (a man's) coming towards us from the hall.

"Is she von of our people?"

"Nein! She's a Skihoah"—meaning, as I afterwards learned, a non-Jewish girl.

Then a tall, thin Jew entered the room behind the elderly Jewess. I had never before and have never since seen such a patriarchal figure. With his long grey beard and solemn face he might have stood for Moses in one of the pictures that used to hang on the walls of the convent—except for his velvet skull-cap and the black alpaca apron, which was speckled over with fluffy bits of thread and scraps of cloth and silk.

He looked at me for a moment with his keen eyes, and after his wife had shown him my work, and he had taken a pinch of snuff and blown his nose on a coloured handkerchief with the sound of a trumpet, he put me through another catechism.

I was trembling lest he should make intimate inquiries, but beyond asking my name, and whether I was a Christian, he did not concern himself with personal questions.

"Vat vages do you vant?" he asked.

I told him I should be pleased to take whatever was paid to other girls doing work of the same kind.

"Ach no! Dese girls are full-timers. You are only a greener [meaning a beginner] so you vill not expect anything like so much."

At that his daughter repeated her assurance that I was quicker than the girl she had called Leah; but the Jew, with an air of parental majesty, told her to be silent, and then said that as I was an "improver" he could only take me "on piece," naming the price (a very small one) per half-dozen buttons and buttonholes, with the condition that I found my own twist and did the work in my own home.

Seeing that I should be no match for the Jew at a bargain, and being so eager to get to work at any price, I closed with his offer, and then he left the room, after telling me to come back the next day.

"And vhere do you lif, my dear?" said the Jewess.

I told her Bayswater, making some excuse for being in the East End, and getting as near to the truth as I dare venture, but feeling instinctively, after my sight of the master of the house, that I dared say nothing about my child.

She told me I must live nearer to my work, and I said that was exactly what I wished to do—asking if she knew where I could find a room.

Fortunately the Jewess herself had two rooms vacant at that moment, and we went upstairs to look at them.

Both were at the top of the house, and one of them I could have for two shillings a week, but it was dark and cheerless, being at the back and looking into the space over the yards in which the tenants dried their washing on lines stretched from pulleys.

The other, which would cost a shilling a week more, was a lean slit of a room, very sparsely furnished, but it was to the front, and looked down into the varied life of the street, so I took it instantly and asked when I could move in.

"Ven you like," said the Jewess. "Everyding is ready."

So, early next morning I bade farewell to my good Welsh landlady (who looked grave when I told her what I was going to do) and to Emmerjane (who cried when I kissed her smudgy face) and, taking possession of my new home, began work immediately in my first and only employment.

Perhaps it was a deep decline after the splendours of my dreams, but I did not allow myself to think about that. I was near to Ilford and I could go to see Isabel every day.

Isabel! Isabel! Isabel! Everything was Isabel, for now that Martin was gone my hopes and my fears, my love and my life, revolved on one axis only—my child.



NINETY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

My employer was a Polish Jew, named Israel Abramovitch.

He had come to England at the time of the religious persecution in the Holy Cities of Russia, set himself up in his trade as a tailor in a garret in Whitechapel, hired a "Singer," worked with "green" labour for "slop" warehouses, and become in less than twenty years the richest foreign Jew in the East End of London, doing some of the "best bespoke" work for the large shops in the West and having the reputation (as I afterwards found) of being the greatest of Jewish "sweaters."

In spite of this, however, he was in his own way a deeply religious man. Strict, severe, almost superstitious in obeying the Levitical laws and in practising the sad and rather gloomy symbolism of his faith. A famous Talmudist, a pillar of the synagogue, one of the two wardens of the Chevra in Brick Lane, and consequently a great upholder of moral rectitude.

His house seemed to be a solid mass of human beings, chiefly Jewish girls, who worked all day, and sometimes (when regulations could be evaded or double gangs engaged) all night, for the Jew drove everybody at high speed, not excepting his wife, who cooked the food and pressed the clothes at the same time.

In this hive of industry I needed no spur to make me work.

Every morning Mrs. Abramovitch brought up a thick pile of vests to my room, and every evening she took them down again, after counting my earnings with almost preternatural rapidity and paying me, day by day, with unfailing promptitude.

At the end of my first week I found I had made ten shillings. I was delighted, but after I had paid for my room and my food there was not enough for baby's board, so the second week I worked later in the evenings, and earned fourteen shillings. This was still insufficient, therefore I determined to take something from the other end of the day.

"Morning will be better," I thought, remembering the painful noises at night, especially about midnight, when people were being thrown out of a public-house higher up the street, where there was a placard in the window saying the ale sold there could be guaranteed to "make anybody drunk for fourpence."

Unfortunately (being a little weak) I was always heavy in the mornings, but by great luck my room faced the east, so I conceived the idea of moving my bed up to the window and drawing my blinds to the top so that the earliest light might fall on my face and waken me.

This device succeeded splendidly, and for many weeks of the late summer and early autumn I was up before the sun, as soon as the dawn had broadened and while the leaden London daylight was filtering through the smoke of yesterday.

By this means I increased my earnings to sixteen shillings, and, as my fingers learned to fly over their work, to seventeen and even eighteen.

That was my maximum, and though it left a narrow margin for other needs it enabled me at the end of a month to pay another pound for baby's board and to put away a little towards her "shortening," which Mrs. Oliver was always saying must be soon.

I had to stick close to maintain this average, and I grudged even the time occupied in buying and eating my food, though that was not a long process in the Mile End Road, which is full of shops where things can be bought ready cooked. After the first week I did not even need to go out for them, for they were brought round to my room every morning, thus enabling me to live without leaving my work.

It was a stiff life, perhaps, but let nobody think I looked upon myself as a slave. Though I worked so hard I felt no self-pity. The thought that I was working for my child sweetened all my labours. It was such a joy to think that baby depended upon me for everything she wanted.

Being so happy in those days I sang a great deal, though naturally not in the middle of the day, when our house was going like a mill-wheel, but in the early mornings before the electric trams began to clang, or the hawkers with their barrows to shout, and when there was no sound even in the East End except that ceaseless tramp, tramp, tramp in the front street which always made me think of the children of Israel in Egypt drawing burdens for Pharaoh.

Throwing open my window I sang all sorts of things, but, being such a child myself and so fond of make-believe, I loved best to sing my lullaby, and so pretend that baby was with me in my room, lying asleep behind me in my bed.

"Sleep, little baby, I love thee, I love thee, Sleep, little Queen, I am bending above thee."

I never knew that I had any other audience than a lark in a cage on the other side of the street (perhaps I was in a cage myself, though I did not think of that then) which always started singing when I sang, except the washerwomen from a Women's Shelter going off at four to their work at the West End, and two old widows opposite who sewed Bibles and stitched cassocks, which being (so Miriam told me) the worst-paid of all sweated labour compelled them to be up as early as myself.

It was not a very hopeful environment, yet for some time, in my little top room, I was really happy.

I saw baby every day. Between six and nine every night, I broke off work to go to Ilford, saying nothing about my errand to anybody, and leaving the family of the Jew to think it was my time for recreation.

Generally I "trammed" it from Bow Church, because I was so eager to get to my journey's end, but usually I returned on foot, for though the distance was great I thought I slept better for the walk.

What joyful evenings those were!

Perhaps I was not altogether satisfied about the Olivers, but that did not matter very much. On closer acquaintance I found my baby's nurse to be a "heedless" and "feckless" woman; and though I told myself that all allowances must be made for her in having a bad husband, I knew in my secret heart that I was deceiving myself, and that I ought to listen to the voices that were saying "Your child is being neglected."

Sometimes it seemed to me that baby had not been bathed—but that only gave me an excuse for bathing her myself.

Sometimes I thought her clothes were not as clean as they might be—but that only gave me the joy of washing them.

Sometimes I was sure that her feeding-bottle had not been rinsed and her milk was not quite fresh—but that only gave me the pleasure of scalding the one and boiling the other.

More than once it flashed upon me that I was paying Mrs. Oliver to do all this—but then what a deep delight it was to be mothering my own baby!

Thus weeks and months passed—it is only now I know how many, for in those days Time itself had nothing in it for me except my child—and every new day brought the new joy of watching my baby's development.

Oh, how wonderful it all was! To see her little mind and soul coming out of the Unknown! Out of the silence and darkness of the womb into the world of light and sound!

First her sense of sight, with her never-ending interest in her dear little toes! Then her senses of touch and hearing, and the gift of speech, beginning with a sort of crow, and ending in the "ma-ma-ma" which the first time I heard it went prancing through and through me and was more heavenly to my ears than the music of the spheres!

What evenings of joy I had with her!

The best of them (God forgive me!) were the nights when the bricklayer had got into some trouble by "knocking people about" at the "Rising Sun" and his wife had to go off to rescue him from the police.

Then, baby being "shortened," I would prop her up in her cot while I sang "Sally" to her; or if that did not serve, and her little lip continued to drop, I both sang and danced, spreading my skirts and waltzing to the tune of "Clementina" while the kettle hummed over the fire and the bricklayer's kitchen buzzed softly like a hive of bees.

Oh dear! Oh dear! I may have been down in the depths, yet there is no place so dark that it may not be brightened by a sunbeam, and my sunbeam was my child.

And then Martin—baby was constantly making me think of him. Devouring her with my eyes, I caught resemblances every day—in her eyes, her voice, her smile, and, above all, in that gurgling laugh that was like water bubbling out of a bottle.

I used to talk to her about him, pouring all my sentimental secrets into her ears, just as if she understood, telling her what a great man her father had been and how he loved both of us—would have done if he had lived longer.

I dare say it was very foolish. Yet I cannot think it was all foolishness. Many and many a time since I have wondered if the holy saints, who knew what had really happened to Martin, were whispering all this in my ear as a means of keeping my love for him as much alive as if he had been constantly by my side.

The climax came when Isabel was about five months old, for then the feeling about baby and Martin reached another and higher phase.

I hardly dare to speak of it, lest it should seem silly when it was really so sacred and so exalted.

The idea I had had before baby was born, that she was being sent to console me (to be a link between my lost one and me), developed into the startling and rapturous thought that the very soul of Martin had passed into my child.

"So Martin is not dead at all," I thought, "not really dead, because he lives in baby."

It is impossible to say how this thought stirred me; how it filled my heart with thankfulness; how I prayed that the little body in which the soul of my Martin had come to dwell might grow beautiful and strong and worthy of him; how I felt charged with another and still greater responsibility to guard and protect her with my life itself if need be.

"Yes, yes, my very life itself," I thought.

Perhaps this was a sort of delirium, born of my great love, my hard work, and my failing strength. I did not know, I did not care.

All that mattered to me then was one thing only—that whereas hitherto I had thought Martin was so far gone from me that not Time but only Eternity would bring us together, now I felt that he was coming back and back to me—nearer and nearer and nearer every day.

MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD

My dear, noble little woman was right in more ways than she knew.

At that very time I was in literal truth hurrying home to her as fast as the fastest available vessel could carry me.

As soon as we had boarded the Scotia at the Cape and greeted our old shipmates, we shouted for our letters.

There were some for all of us and heaps for me, so I scuttled down to my cabin, where I sorted the envelopes like a pack of cards, looking for the small delicate hand that used to write my letters and speeches.

To my dismay it was not there, and realizing that fact I bundled the letters into a locker and never looked at them again until we were two days out—when I found they were chiefly congratulations from my committee, the proprietor of my newspaper, and the Royal Geographical Society, all welcome enough in their way, but Dead Sea fruit to a man with an empty, heaving heart.

Going up on deck I found every face about me shining like the aurora, for the men had had good news all round, one having come into a fortune and another into the fatherhood of twins, and both being in a state of joy and excitement.

But all the good fellows were like boys. Some of them (with laughter seasoned by a few tears) read me funny bits out of their wives' letters—bits too that were not funny, about having "a pretty fit of hysterics" at reading bad news of us and "wanting to kiss the newsboy" when he brought the paper contradicting it.

I did my best to play the game of rejoicing, pretending I had had good news also, and everything was going splendid. But I found it hard enough to keep it going, especially while we were sailing back to the world, as we called it, and hearing from the crew the news of what had happened while we had been away.

First, there was the reason for the delay in the arrival of the ship, which had been due not to failure of the wireless at our end, but to a breakdown on Macquarie Island.

And then there was the account of the report of the loss of the Scotia in the gale going out, which had been believed on insufficient evidence (as I thought), but recorded in generous words of regret that sent the blood boiling to a man's face and made him wish to heaven they could be true.

We were only five or six days sailing to New Zealand, but the strain to me was terrible, for the thought was always uppermost:

"Why didn't she write a word of welcome to reach me on my return to civilisation?"

When I was not talking to somebody that question was constantly haunting me. To escape from it I joined the sports of my shipmates, who with joyful news in their hearts and fresh food in their stomachs were feeling as good as new in spite of all they had suffered.

But the morning we smelt land, the morning the cloud banks above the eastern horizon came out hard and fast and sure (no dreamland this time), I stood at the ship's bow, saying nothing to anybody, only straining my eyes for the yet distant world we were coming back to out of that desolate white waste, and thinking:

"Surely I'll have news from her before nightfall."

There was a big warm-hearted crowd on the pier at Port Lyttelton. Treacle said, "Gawd. I didn't know there was so many people in the world, Guv'nor;" and O'Sullivan, catching sight of a pretty figure under a sunshade, tugged at my arm and cried (in the voice of an astronomer who has discovered a planet), "Commanther! Commanther! A girl!"

Almost before we had been brought to, a company of scientific visitors came aboard; but I was more concerned about the telegrams that had come at the same moment, so hurrying down to my cabin I tore them open like a vulture riving its prey—always looking at the signatures first and never touching an envelope without thinking:

"Oh God, what will be inside of it?"

There was nothing from my dear one! Invitations to dine, to lecture, to write books, to do this and that and Heaven knows what, but never a word from her who was more to me than all the world besides.

This made me more than ever sure of the "voices" that had called me back from the 88th latitude, so I decided instantly to leave our ship in New Zealand, in readiness for our next effort, and getting across to Sydney to take the first fast steamer home.

The good people at Port Lyttelton were loath to let us go. But after I had made my excuses, ("crazy to get back to wives and sweethearts, you know") they sent a school of boys (stunning little chaps in Eton suits) to sing us off with "Forty Years On"—which brought more of my mother into my eyes than I knew to be left there.

At Sydney we had the same experience—the same hearty crowds, the same welcome, the same invitations, to which we made the same replies, and then got away by a fast liner which happened to be ready to sail.

On the way "back to the world" I had slung together a sort of a despatch for the newspaper which had promoted our expedition (a lame, limping thing for want of my darling's help to make it go), saying something about the little we had been able to do but more about what we meant, please God, to do some day.

"She'll see that, anyway, and know we're coming back," I thought.

But to make doubly sure I sent two personal telegrams, one to my dear one at Castle Raa and the other to my old people at home, asking for answers to Port Said.

Out on the sea again I was tormented by the old dream of the crevassed glacier; and if anybody wonders why a hulking chap who had not been afraid of a ninety-mile blizzard in the region of the Pole allowed himself to be kept awake at night by a buzzing in the brain, all I can say is that it was so, and I know nothing more about it.

Perhaps my recent experience with the "wireless" persuaded me that if two sticks stuck in the earth could be made to communicate with each other over hundreds of miles, two hearts that loved each other knew no limitations of time or space.

In any case I was now so sure that my dear one had called me home from the Antarctic that by the time we reached Port Said, and telegrams were pouring in on me, I had worked myself up to such a fear that I dared not open them.

From sheer dread of the joy or sorrow that might be enclosed in the yellow covers, I got O'Sullivan down in my cabin to read my telegrams, while I scanned his face and nearly choked with my own tobacco smoke.

There was nothing from my dear one! Nothing from my people at home either!

O'Sullivan got it into his head that I was worrying about my parents, and tried to comfort me by saying that old folks never dreamt of telegraphing, but by the holy immaculate Mother he'd go bail there would be a letter for me before long.

There was.

We stayed two eternal days at Port Said while the vessel was taking coal for the rest of the voyage, and almost at the moment of sailing a letter arrived from Ellan, which, falling into O'Sullivan's hands first, sent him flying through the steamer and shouting at the top of his voice:

"Commanther! Commanther!"

The passengers gave room for him, and told me afterwards of his beaming face. And when he burst into my cabin I too felt sure he had brought me good news, which he had, though it was not all that I wanted.

"The way I was sure there would be a letter for you soon, and by the holy St. Patrick and St. Thomas, here it is," he cried.

The letter was from my father, and I had to brace myself before I could read it.

It was full of fatherly love, motherly love, too, and the extravagant pride my dear good old people had of me ("everybody's talking of you, my boy, and there's nothing else in the newspapers"); but not a word about my Mary—or only one, and that seemed worse than none at all.

"You must have heard of the trouble at Castle Raa. Very sad, but this happy hour is not the time to say anything about it."

Nothing more! Only reams and reams of sweet parental chatter which (God forgive me!) I would have gladly given over and over again for one plain sentence about my darling.

Being now more than ever sure that some kind of catastrophe had overtaken my poor little woman, I telegraphed to her again, this time (without knowing what mischief I was making) at the house of Daniel O'Neill—telling myself that, though the man was a brute who had sacrificed his daughter to his lust of rank and power and all the rest of his rotten aspirations, he was her father, and, if her reprobate of a husband had turned her out, he must surely have taken her in.

"Cable reply to Malta. Altogether too bad not hearing from you," I said.

A blind, hasty, cruel telegram, but thank God she never received it!

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]



NINETY-EIGHTH CHAPTER

Day by day it became more and more difficult for me to throw dust in my own eyes about the Olivers.

One evening on reaching their house a little after six, as usual, I found the front door open, the kitchen empty save for baby, who, sitting up in her cot, was holding quiet converse with her toes, and the two Olivers talking loudly (probably by pre-arrangement) in the room upstairs.

The talk was about baby, which was "a noosance," interfering with a man's sleep by night and driving him out of his home by day. And how much did they get for it? Nothing, in a manner of speaking. What did the woman (meaning me) think the "bleedin' place" was—"a philanthropic institooshun" or a "charity orginisation gime"?

After this I heard the bricklayer thunder downstairs in his heavy boots and go out of the house without coming into the kitchen, leaving his wife (moral coward that he was) to settle his account with me.

Then Mrs. Oliver came down, with many sighs, expressed surprise at seeing me and fear that I might have overheard what had been said in the room above.

"Sorry to say I've been having a few words with Ted, ma'am, and tell you the truth it was about you."

Ted had always been against her nursing, and she must admit it wasn't wise of a woman to let her man go to the public-house to get out of the way of a crying child; but though she was a-running herself off her feet to attend to the pore dear, and milk was up a penny, she had growd that fond of my baby since she lost her own that she couldn't abear to part with the jewel, and perhaps if I could pay a little more—Ted said seven, but she said six, and a shilling a week wouldn't hurt me—she could over-persuade him to let the dear precious stay.

I was trembling with indignation while I listened to the woman's whining (knowing well I was being imposed upon), but I was helpless and so I agreed.

My complacency had a bad effect on the Olivers, who continued to make fresh extortions, until their demands almost drove me to despair.

I thought a climax had been reached when one night a neighbour came to the door and, calling Mrs. Oliver into the lobby, communicated some news in a whisper which brought her back with a frightened face for her cloak and hat, saying "something was a matter with Ted" and she must "run away quick to him."

When she returned an hour or two later she was crying, and with sobs between her words she told me that Ted (having taken a drop too much) had "knocked somebody about" at the "Sun." As a consequence he had fallen into the hands of the police, and would be brought before the magistrate the following morning, when, being unable to pay the fine, he would have to "do time"—just as a strike was a-coming on, too, and he was expecting good pay from the Strike Committee.

"And what is to happen to me and the baby while my 'usband is in prison?" she said.

I knew it was an act of weakness, but, thinking of my child and the danger of its being homeless, I asked what the amount of the fine would probably be, and being told ten-and-six, I gave the money, though it was nearly all I had in the world.

I paid for my weakness, though, and have reason to remember it.

The extortions of the Olivers had brought me to so narrow a margin between my earnings and expenses that I lay awake nearly all that night thinking what I could do to increase the one or reduce the other. The only thing I found possible was to change to cheaper quarters. So next morning, with a rather heavy heart, I asked Mrs. Abramovitch if the room at the back of the house was still empty, and hearing that it was I moved into it the same day.

That was a small and not a very wise economy.

My new room was cheerless as well as dark, with no sights but the clothes that were drying from the pulley-lines and no sounds but the whoops of the boys of the neighbourhood playing at "Red Indians" on the top of the yard walls.

But it was about the same as the other in size and furniture, and after I had decorated it with my few treasures—the Reverend Mother's rosary, which I hung on the head of the bed, and my darling mother's miniature, which I pinned up over the fire—I thought it looked bright and homelike.

All this time, too, I was between the nether and the upper mill-stone.

My employer, the Jew (though he must have seen that I was sweating myself much more than the law would have allowed him to sweat me), could not forgive himself when he found that I was earning more by "piece" than he would have had to pay me by the day, or resist the temptation to square accounts with me at the earliest possible opportunity.

Unfortunately, his opportunity came only too quickly, and it led (however indirectly) to the most startling fact that has ever, perhaps, entered into a woman's life.

I had not been more than three months at the Jew's house when the Jewish festivals came round—New Year's Day, the Day of Atonement, and the Feast of Tabernacles—which, falling near together and occupying many days, disturbed his own habits of work entirely.

One of the tasks he reserved for himself was that of taking the best paid of his "best-bespoke" back to the large shops in the West End, and waiting for the return orders. But finding that the festivals interfered with these journeys, he decided that they should be made by me, who was supposed to know the West End (having lived in it) and to present a respectable appearance.

I was reluctant to undertake the new duty, for though the Jew was to pay me a few shillings a week for it, I saw I could earn more in the time with my needle. But when he laid his long, hairy forefinger on the side of his nose and said with a significant smile:

"You vill be gradeful, and convenience your employer, mine child," I agreed.

Thus it came to pass that not only during the Jewish festivals, but for months after they were over, I carried a rather large black bag by tram or rail to the district that lies at the back of Piccadilly and along Oxford Street as far west as the Marble Arch.

I had to go whenever called upon and to wait as long as wanted, so that in the height of the tailoring season I was out in the West End at all irregular hours of night, and even returned to my lodgings on one or two occasions in the raw sunshine of the early mornings.

The one terror of my West End journeys was that I might meet Sister Mildred. I never did. In the multitude of faces which passed through the streets, flashing and disappearing like waves under the moon at sea, I never once caught a glimpse of a face I knew.

But what sights I saw for all that! What piercing, piteous proofs that between the rich and the poor there is a great gulf fixed!

The splendid carriages driving in and out of the Park; the sumptuously dressed ladies strolling through Bond Street; the fashionable church paraders; the white plumes and diamond stars which sometimes gleamed behind the glow of the electric broughams gliding down the Mall.

"I used to be a-toffed up like that onct," I heard an old woman who was selling matches say as a lady in an ermine coat stepped out of a theatre into an automobile and was wrapped round in a tiger-skin rug.

Sometimes it happened that, returning to the East End after the motor 'buses had ceased to ply, I had to slip through the silent Leicester Square and the empty Strand to the Underground Railway on the Embankment.

Then I would see the wretched men and women who were huddled together in the darkness on the steps to the river (whose ever-flowing waters must have witnessed so many generations of human wreckage), and, glancing up at the big hotels and palatial mansions full of ladies newly returned from theatres and restaurants in their satin slippers and silk stockings, I would wonder how they could lie in their white beds at night in rooms whose windows looked down on such scenes.

But the sight that stirred me most (though it did not awaken my charity, which shows what a lean-souled thing I was myself) was that of the "public women," the street-walkers, as I used to call them, whom I saw in Piccadilly with their fine clothes and painted faces, sauntering in front of the clubs or tripping along with a light step and trying to attract the attention of the men.

I found no pathos in the position of such women. On the contrary, I had an unspeakable horror and hatred and loathing of them, feeling that no temptation, no poverty, no pressure that could ever be brought to bear upon a woman in life or in death excused her for committing so great a wrong on the sanctity of her sex as to give up her womanhood at any call but that of love.

"Nothing could make me do it," I used to think, "nothing in this world."

But O God! how little I knew then what is in a woman's heart to do when she has a child to live for, and is helpless and alone!

I cannot expect anybody to forgive me for what I did (or attempted to do), and now that the time has come to tell of it my hand trembles, and body and soul seem to be quivering like a flame.

May God (who has brought everything to such a glorious end) have mercy on me and forgive me, and help me to be true!



NINETY-NINTH CHAPTER

The worst consequence of my West End journeys was that my nightly visits to Ilford were fewer than before, and that the constant narrowing of the margin between my income and my expenses made it impossible for me to go there during the day.

As a result my baby received less and less attention, and I could not be blind to the fact that she was growing paler and thinner.

At length she developed a cough which troubled me a great deal. Mrs. Oliver made light of it, saying a few pennyworths of paregoric would drive it away, so I hurried off to a chemist, who recommended a soothing syrup of his own, saying it was safer and more effectual for a child.

The syrup seemed to stop the cough but to disturb the digestion, for I saw the stain of curdled milk on baby's bib and was conscious of her increasing weakness.

This alarmed me very much, and little as I knew of children's ailments, I became convinced that she stood in need of more fresh air, so I entreated Mrs. Oliver to take her for a walk every day.

I doubt if she ever did so, for as often as I would say:

"Has baby been out to-day, nurse?" Mrs. Oliver would make some lame excuse and pass quickly to another subject.

At last, being unable to bear the strain any longer, I burst out on the woman with bitter reproaches, and then she broke down into tears and explained everything. She was behind with her rent, the landlord was threatening, and she dared not leave the house for a moment lest he should lock her out altogether.

"I don't mind telling you, it's all along of Ted, ma'am. He's on strike wages but he spends it at the 'Sun.' He has never been the man to me—never once since I married him. I could work and keep the house comfortable without him, but he wouldn't let me a-be, because he knows I love, him dear. Yes, I do, I love him dear," she continued, breaking into hysterical sobs, "and if he came home and killed me I could kiss him with my last breath."

This touched me more than I can say. A sense of something tragic in the position of the poor woman, who knew the character of the man she loved as well as the weakness which compelled her to love him, made me sympathise with her for the first time, and think (with a shuddering memory of my own marriage) how many millions of women there must be in the world who were in a worse position than myself.

On returning to my room that night I began to look about to see if I had anything I could sell in order to help Mrs. Oliver, and so put an end to the condition that kept my baby a prisoner in her house.

I had nothing, or next to nothing. Except the Reverend Mother's rosary (worth no more than three or four shillings) I had only my mother's miniature, which was framed in gold and set in pearls, but that was the most precious of all my earthly possessions except my child.

Again and again when I looked at it in my darkest hours I had found new strength and courage. It had been like a shrine to me—what the image of the Virgin was in happier days—and thinking of all that my darling mother had done and suffered and sacrificed for my sake when I was myself a child, I felt that I could never part with her picture under the pressure of any necessity whatever.

"Never," I thought, "never under any circumstances."

It must have been about a week after this that I went to Ilford on one of those chill, clammy nights which seem peculiar to the East End of London, where the atmosphere, compounded of smoke and fog and thin drizzling rain; penetrates to the bone and hangs on one's shoulders like a shroud.

Thinking of this, as I thought of everything, in relation to baby, I bought, as I was passing a hosier's shop, a pair of nice warm stockings and a little woollen jacket.

When I reached the Olivers' I found, to my surprise, two strange men stretched out at large in the kitchen, one on the sofa and the other in the rocking-chair, both smoking strong tobacco and baby coughing constantly.

Before I realised what had happened Mrs. Oliver called me into the scullery, and, after closing the door on us, she explained the position, in whispers broken by sobs.

It was the rent. These were the bailiff's men put into possession by the landlord, and unless she could find two pounds ten by nine o'clock to-morrow morning, she and her husband would be sold up and turned into the street.

"The home as I've been scraping and pinching to keep together!" she cried. "For the sake of two pound ten! . . . You couldn't lend us that much, could you?"

I told her I could not, but she renewed her entreaties, asking me to think if I had not something I could pawn for them, and saying that Ted and she would consider it "a sacred dooty" to repay.

Again I told her I had nothing—I was trying not to think of the miniature—but just at that moment she caught sight of the child's jacket which I was still holding in my hand, and she fell on me with bitter reproaches.

"You've money enough to spend on baby, though. It's crool. Her living in lukshry and getting new milk night and day, and fine clothes being bought for her constant, and my pore Ted without a roof to cover him in weather same as this. It breaks my heart. It do indeed. Take your child away, ma'am. Take her to-night, afore we're turned out of house and home to-morrow morning."