I think, I deserve to be crushed in the wreck of a train; and almost hope they do.
They do not. The engine speeds us onward, then slows, and again there are streets and the spires of churches—more streets and spires than I have yet seen; more houses, and between them a steady traffic of cattle and vehicles and people. London! I think, with a lurch of my heart. But Richard studies me as I gaze, and smiles unpleasantly. ‘Your natural home,’ he says. We stop at the station and I see the name of it: MAIDENHEAD.
Though we have come so swiftly we have travelled no more than twenty miles, and have another thirty to go. I sit, still gripping the strap, leaning close to the glass; but the station is filled with men and women—the women in groups, the men idly walking; and from them I shrink. Soon the train gives a hiss, and gathers its bulk, and shudders back into terrible life. We leave the streets of Maidenhead. We pass through trees. Beyond the trees there are open parklands, and houses—some as great as my uncle’s, some greater. Here and there are cottages with pens of pigs, with gardens set with broken sticks for climbing beans, and hung with lines of laundry. Where the lines are full there is laundry hung from windows, from trees, on bushes, on chairs, between the shafts of broken carts—laundry everywhere, drooping and yellow.
I keep my pose and watch it all. Look, Maud, I think. Here is your future. Here’s all your liberty, unfolding like a bolt of cloth . . .
I wonder if Sue is very much injured. I wonder what kind of place they have her in, now.
Richard tries to see beyond my veil. ‘You’re not weeping, are you?’ he says. ‘Come on, don’t trouble over it still.’
I say, ‘Don’t look at me.’
‘Should you rather be back at Briar, with the books? You know you should not. You know you have wanted this. You’ll forget, soon, the manner in which you got it. Believe me, I know these things. You must only be patient. We must both be patient now. We have many weeks to pass together, before the fortune becomes ours. I am sorry I spoke harshly, before. Come, Maud. We shall be at London, soon. Things will seem different to you there, I assure you . . .’
I do not answer. At last, with a curse, he gives it up. The day is darkening now—or rather, the sky is darkening, as we draw close to the city. There come streaks of soot upon the glass. The landscape is slowly growing meaner. The cottages have begun to be replaced by wooden dwellings, some with broken windows and boards. The gardens are giving way to patches of weed; soon the weed gives way to ditches, the ditches to dark canals, to dreary wastes of road, to mounds of stones or soil or ashes. Still, Even ashes, I think, are a part of your freedom—and I feel, despite myself, the kindling in me of a sort of excitement. But then, the excitement becomes unease. I have always supposed London a place, like a house in a park, with walls: I’ve imagined it rising, straight and clean and solid. I have not supposed it would sprawl so brokenly, through villages and suburbs. I’ve believed it complete: but now, as I watch, there come stretches of wet red land, and gaping trenches; now come half-built houses, and half-built churches, with glassless windows and slateless roofs and jutting spars of wood, naked as bones.
Now there are so many smuts upon the glass they show like faults in the fabric of my veil. The train begins to rise. I don’t like the sensation. We begin to cross streets—grey streets, black streets—so many monotonous streets, I think I shall never be able to tell them apart! Such a chaos of doors and windows, of roofs and chimneys, of horses and coaches and men and women! Such a muddle of hoardings and garish signs: SPANISH BLINDS.—LEAD COFFINS.—OIL TALLOW & COTTON WASTE. Words, everywhere. Words, six-feet high. Words, shrieking and bellowing: LEATHER AND GRINDERY.—SHOP TO LET.—BROUGHAMS & NEAT CARRIAGES.—PAPER-STAINERS.—SUPPORTED ENTIRELY.—TO LET!—TO LET!—BY VOLUNTARY SUBSCRIPTION.—
There are words, all over the face of London. I see them, and cover my eyes. When I look again we have sunk: brick walls, thick with soot, have risen about the train and cast the coach in gloom. Then comes a great, vast, vaulting roof of tarnished glass, hung about with threads of smoke and steam and fluttering birds. We shudder to a frightful halt. There is the shrieking of other engines, a thudding of doors, the pressing passage—it seems to me—of a thousand, thousand people.
‘Paddington terminus,’ says Richard. ‘Come on.’
He moves and speaks more quickly here. He is changed. He does not look at me—I wish he would, now. He finds a man to take our bags. We stand in a line of people—a queue, I know the word—and wait for a carriage—a hackney, I know that word also, from my uncle’s books. One may kiss in a hackney; one may take any kind of liberty with one’s lover; one tells one’s driver to go about the Regent’s Park. I know London. London is a city of opportunities fulfilled. This place, of jostling and clamour, I do not know. It is thick with purposes I do not understand. It is marked with words, but I cannot read it. The regularity, the numberless repetition, of brick, of house, of street, of person—of dress, and feature, and expression—stuns and exhausts me. I stand at Richard’s side and keep my arm in his. If he should leave me—! A whistle is blown and men, in dark suits—ordinary men, gentlemen—pass by us, running.
We take our place in the hackney at last, and are jerked out of the terminus into choked and filthy roads. Richard feels me tense. ‘Are you startled, by the streets?’ he says. ‘We must pass through worse, I’m afraid. What did you expect? This is the city, where respectable men live side by side with squalor. Don’t mind it. Don’t mind it at all. We are going to your new home.’
‘To our house,’ I say. I think: There, with the doors and windows shut, I will grow calm. I will bathe, I will rest, I will sleep.
‘To our house,’ he answers. And he studies me a moment longer, then reaches across me. ‘Here, if the sight troubles you—’ He pulls down the blind.
And so once again we sit, and sway to the motion of a coach, in a kind of twilight; but we are pressed about, this time, by all the roar of London. I do not see it when we go about the park. I do not see what route the driver takes, at all: perhaps I should not know it, if I did, though I have studied maps of the city, and know the placing of the Thames. I cannot say, when we stop, how long we have driven for—so preoccupied am I with the desperate stir of my senses and heart. Be bold, I am thinking. God damn you, Maud! You have longed for this. You have given up Sue, you have given up everything, for this. Be bold!
Richard pays the man, then returns for our bags. ‘From here we must walk,’ he says. I climb out, unassisted, and blink at the light—though the light here is dim enough: we have lost the sun, and the sky is anyway thick with cloud—brown cloud, like the dirty fleece of a sheep. I have expected to find myself at the door to his house, but there are no houses here: we have entered streets that appear to me unspeakably shabby and mean—are hedged on one side by a great, dead wall, on the other by the lime-stained arches of a bridge. Richard moves off. I catch at his arm.
‘Is this right?’ I say.
‘Quite right,’ he answers. ‘Come, don’t be alarmed. We cannot live grandly, yet. And we must make our entrance the quiet way, that’s all.’
‘You are still afraid that my uncle may have sent men, to watch us?’
He again moves off. ‘Come. We can talk soon, indoors. Not here. Come on, this way. Pick up your skirts.’
He walks quicker than ever now, and I am slow to follow. When he sees me hanging back he holds our bags in one hand and, with the other, takes my wrist. ‘Not far, now,’ he says, kindly enough; his grip is tight, however. We leave that road and turn into another: here I can see the stained and broken face of what I take to be a single great house, but which is in fact the rear of a terrace of narrow dwellings. The air smells riverish, rank. People watch us, curiously. That makes me walk faster. Soon we turn again, into a lane of crunching cinders. Here there are children, in a group: they are standing idly about a bird, which lurches and hops. They have tied its wings with twine. When they see us, they come and press close. They want money, or to tug at
my sleeve, my cloak, my veil. Richard kicks them away. They swear for a minute, then return to the bird. We take another, dirtier, path—Richard all the time gripping me harder, walking faster, faster, certain of his way. ‘We are very close now,’ he says. ‘Don’t mind this filth, this is nothing. All London is filthy like this. Just a little further, I promise. And then you may rest.’
And at last, he slows. We have reached a court, with a thick mud floor and nettles. The walls are high, and running with damp. There is no open route from here, only two or three narrow covered passages, filled with darkness. Into one of these he makes to draw me, now; but, so black and foul is it, I suddenly hesitate, and pull against his grip.
‘Come on,’ he says, turning round, not smiling.
‘Come to where?’ I ask him.
‘To your new life, that has waited for you to start it, too long. To our house. Our housekeeper expects us. Come, now.—Or shall I leave you here?’
His voice is tired, hard. I look behind me. I see the other passages, but the muddy path he has led me down is hidden—as if the glistening walls have parted to let us come, then closed to trap me.
What can I do? I cannot go back, alone, to the children, the labyrinth of lanes, the street, the city. I cannot go back to Sue. I am not meant to. Everything has been impelling me here, to this dark point. I must go forward, or cease to exist. I think again of the room that is waiting for me: of the door, with its key that will turn; of the bed, on which I shall lie and sleep, and sleep—
I hesitate, one second more; then let him draw me into the passage. It is short, and ends with a flight of shallow stairs, leading downwards; and these, in turn, end at a door, on which he knocks. From beyond the door there comes at once the barking of a dog, then soft, quick footsteps, a grinding bolt. The dog falls silent. The door is opened, by a fair-haired boy—I suppose, the housekeeper’s boy. He looks at Richard and nods.
‘All right?’ he says.
‘All right,’ answers Richard. ‘Is Aunty home? Here’s a lady, look, come to stay.’
The boy surveys me, I see him squinting to make out the features behind my veil. Then he smiles, nods again, draws back the door to let us pass him; closes it tightly at our backs.
The room beyond is a kind of kitchen—I suppose, a servants’ kitchen, for it is small, and windowless, dark and unwholesome, and chokingly hot: there is a good fire lit, and one or two smoking lamps upon a table and—perhaps, after all, these are the grooms’ quarters—a brazier in a cage, with tools about it. Beside the brazier is a pale man in an apron who, on seeing us come, sets down some fork or file and wipes his hands and looks me over, frankly. Before the fire sit a young woman and a boy: the girl fat-faced, red-haired, also watching me freely; the boy sallow and scowling, chewing with broken teeth on a strip of dry meat, and dressed—I notice this, even in my confusion—in an extraordinary coat, that seems pieced together from many varieties of fur. He holds, between his knees, a squirming dog, his hand about its jaws to keep it from barking. He looks at Richard and then at me. He surveys my coat and gloves and bonnet. He whistles.
‘What price them togs,’ he says.
Then he flinches as, from another chair—a rocking chair, that creaks as it tilts—a white-haired woman leans to strike him. I suppose her the housekeeper. She has watched me, more closely and more eagerly than any of the others. She holds a bundle: now she puts it down and struggles from her seat, and the bundle gives a shudder. This is more astonishing than the lighted brazier, the coat of fur—it is a sleeping, swollen-headed baby in a blanket.
I look at Richard. I think he will speak, or lead me on. But he has taken his hand from me and stands with folded arms, very leisurely. He is smiling, but smiling oddly. Everyone is silent. No-one moves save the white-haired woman. She has left her chair and comes about the table. She is dressed in taffeta, that rustles. Her face has a blush, and shines. She comes to me, she stands before me, her head weaves as she tries to catch the line of my features. She moves her mouth, wets her lips. Her gaze is still close and terribly eager. When she raises her blunt red hands to me, I flinch.—‘Richard,’ I say. But he still does nothing, and the woman’s look, that is so awful and so strange, compels me. I stand and let her fumble for my veil. She puts it back. And then her gaze changes, grows stranger still, when she sees my face. She touches my cheek, as if uncertain it will remain beneath her fingers.
She keeps her eyes on mine, but speaks to Richard. Her voice is thick with the tears of age, or of emotion.
‘Good boy,’ she says.
12.
Then there comes a kind of chaos.
The dog barks and leaps, the baby in its blanket gives a cry; another baby, that I have not noticed—it lies in a tin box, beneath the table—begins to cry also. Richard takes off his hat and his coat, sets down our bags, and stretches. The scowling boy drops open his mouth and shows the meat within.
‘It ain’t Sue,’ he says.
‘Miss Lilly,’ says the woman before me, quietly. ‘Ain’t you just the darling. Are you very tired, dear? You have come quite a journey.’
‘It ain’t Sue,’ says the boy again, a little louder.
‘Change of plan,’ says Richard, not catching my eye. ‘Sue stays on behind, to take care of a few last points.—Mr Ibbs, how are you, sir?’
‘Sweet, son,’ the pale man answers. He has taken off his apron and is quieting the dog. The boy who opened the door to us has gone. The little brazier is cooling and ticking and growing grey. The red-haired girl bends over the screaming babies with a bottle and a spoon, but is still stealing looks at me.
The scowling boy says, ‘Change of plan? I don’t get it.’
‘You will,’ answers Richard. ‘Unless—’ He puts his finger against his mouth, and winks.
The woman, meanwhile, is still before me, still describing my face with her hands, telling off my features as if they were beads upon a string. ‘Brown eyes,’ she says, beneath her breath; her breath is sweet as sugar. ‘Pink lips, two pouters. Nice and dainty at the chin. Teeth, white as china. Cheeks—rather soft, I dare say? Oh!’
I have stood, as if in a trance, and let her murmur; now, feeling her fingers flutter against my face, I start away from her.
‘How dare you?’ I say. ‘How dare you speak to me? How dare you look at me, any of you? And you—’ I go to Richard and seize his waistcoat. ‘What is this? Where have you brought me to? What do they know of Sue, here?’
‘Hey, hey,’ calls the pale man mildly. The boy laughs. The woman looks rueful.
‘Got a voice, don’t she?’ says the girl.
‘Like the blade on a knife,’ says the man. ‘That clean.’
Richard meets my gaze, then looks away. ‘What can I say?’ He shrugs. ‘I am a villain.’
‘Damn your attitudes now!’ I say. ‘Tell me what this means. Whose house is this? Is it yours?’
‘Is it his!’ The boy laughs harder, and chokes on his meat.
‘John, be quiet, or I’ll thrash you,’ says the woman. ‘Don’t mind him, Miss Lilly, I implore you now, don’t!’
I can feel her wringing her hands, but do not look at her. I keep my eyes upon Richard. ‘Tell me,’ I say.
‘Not mine,’ he answers at last.
‘Not ours?’ He shakes his head. ‘Whose, then? Where, then?’
He rubs at his eye. He is tired. ‘It is theirs,’ he says, nodding to the woman, the man. ‘Their house, in the Borough.’
The Borough . . . I have heard him say the name, once or twice before. I stand for a moment in silence, thinking back across his words; then my heart drops. ‘Sue’s house,’ I say. ‘Sue’s house, of thieves.’
‘Honest thieves,’ says the woman, creeping closer, ‘to those that know us!’
I think: Sue’s aunt! I was sorry for her, once. Now I turn and almost spit at her. ‘Will you keep from me, you witch?’ The kitchen grows silent. It seems darker, too, and close. I still have Richard gripped by the waistcoat. When he tries to
pull away, I hold him tighter. My thoughts are leaping, fast as hares. I think, He has married me, and has brought me here, as a place to be rid of me. He means to keep my money for himself. He means to give them some trifling share for the killing of me, and Sue—even in the midst of my shock and confusion, my heart drops again, as I think it—Sue they will free. Sue knows it all.
‘You shan’t do it!’ I say, my voice rising. ‘You think I don’t know what you mean to do? All of you? What trick?’
‘You don’t know anything, Maud,’ he answers. He tries to draw my hands from his coat. I will not let him. I think, if he does that, they will certainly kill me. For a second we struggle. Then: ‘The stitching, Maud!’ he says. He plucks my fingers free. I catch at his arm instead.
‘Take me back,’ I say. I say it, thinking: Don’t let them see you are afraid! But my voice has risen higher and I cannot make it firm. ‘Take me back, at once, to the streets and hackneys.’
He shakes his head, looks away. ‘I can’t do it.’
‘Take me now. Or I go, alone. I shall make my way—I saw the route! I studied it, hard!—and I shall find out a—a policeman!’
The boy, the pale man, the woman and girl, all flinch or wince. The dog barks.
‘Now now,’ says the man, stroking his moustache. ‘You must be careful how you talk, dear, in a house like this.’
‘It is you who must be careful!’ I say. I look from one face to another. ‘What is it you think you shall have from this? Money? Oh, no. It is you who must be careful. It is all of you! And you, Richard—you—who must be most careful of all, should I once find a policeman and begin to talk.’
But Richard looks and says nothing.