Читать книгу Moss Rose - Bowen Marjorie - Страница 7

Table of Contents

The gin palaces of Holborn were nearly as sumptuous as those of the Tottenham Court Road or Drury Lane. Belle had the choice of several brilliant establishments as she proceeded slowly over the greasy pavement through the murk. The performance at the Cambridge would not yet be over; it was about eleven o'clock and the shopkeepers were putting up shutters and lowering their blinds; there was a glimpse through the fog of scarlet cheese and pallid butter as the cheesemonger shrouded his windows; there was the tinkle of the chemist's shop-door bell as it closed for the night, a glow of light from the baked-potato man's fire, where a few ragged children clustered to enjoy the warmth, and in the gutter a woman trailed with her arms folded in a ragged shawl, muttering a song in a broken falsetto. Belle passed these, into the darkness of the fog again that caused her eyes to smart and started her coughing; she then paused before the gas lamps in gilt burners flaring behind the plate-glass window of "The Bunch of Grapes." Belle pushed open the ground-glass door marked "Wine promenade" and joined the close-pressed crowd about the gleaming mahogany bar beyond which rows of painted casks showed behind the carefully polished brass rail. Belle edged through the crowd with a detached air and leant against the counter, eyeing the baskets of soft biscuits and raisin cake with disgust. She ordered half a quarters of gin and peppermint hot from the young woman with the large blue glass beads who was dispensing the spirits. As her lips sipped the mixture her cold eyes, under the dirty veil turned up to just above her mouth, glanced at some of her companions; the man in the moth-eaten fur cap with the diseased face, three bonnetless washerwomen drinking rum-shrub, the Irish labourer, the tattered women munching stale seed-cake and sipping port—all ill, wretched, hideous.

"If I continue to drink I shall soon be like these—how long would it take? It has not really got hold of me yet. I could stop it if I wanted. Sometimes I take nothing for days together—yes, if it were worth while and something else offered, I could stop. But it is not worth while and nothing else offers."

No one took any notice of her; when she had first entered public-houses she had been the object of much ribald attention, now she could stay as long as she pleased and no one troubled her, save for a formal commonplace or a maudlin confidence.

"I must be beginning to look just like these others—a draggled hussy—no one sees that my hands, my figure are different, perhaps they are not different any longer. When did I begin to be so familiar with this? When I left him—but haven't I decided that I won't remember anything?"

Behind the blur given to her senses by fatigue and alcohol her mind was cool and acute, she did not for a moment lose her reserved dignity; when she had finished her drink she pulled down her veil. After the sordid filth of the under-stage dressing-room from which she had come, and before the sordid misery of her cold bedroom in Great Hogarth Street, there was a certain solace in the opulent vulgarity of the gin palace, in the gilt, the bright new paint, the stucco flowers, the polished mirrors, the gleaming casks, the fan-shaped flares of gas which ate up the dirty yellow fog. But she spent no more on drink than the shilling she had allowed herself. When she had reached that limit she lifted her faded flounces from the sanded floor and with a lady's smile of detached courtesy, passed through the drinkers and out into the fog which had become so dense that the street lamps were but dim haloes in the dingy murk. Belle knew her way perfectly; for some time she had been going between Great Hogarth Street and the Cambridge; she knew all the shops, the chemists with the poppy-heads, the chandlers, the sweetstuff woman where the lollipops were boiled in the basement and filled the air with a smell of hot sugar, the baker, the bird fancier, and, at the corner where she had to turn, the pawnbroker who called himself a silversmith. Even through the fog the transparency at the door with three red balls on a blue ground and some rubbed letters showed brightly against the gaslight behind. There were some of Belle's one-time possessions among the stringless fiddles, cracked flutes, riveted china and cheap silver articles in the pawnshop windows, among them a plain ring which was inscribed inside with a man's name and the motto "Thine, for ever and ever." Belle turned this corner guided by the smear of red and blue on the door and saw a woman seated huddled in the entrance—it was the singer whom she had passed in the gutter before she entered the gin palace. Belle paused; the creature reminded her of Daisy Arrow—the reddish hair, the tattered silk bonnet, the thin burst shoes, the dirty pink stockings full of holes—Daisy, perhaps next year or the year after, Daisy, gripped by consumption and refused admittance to the Alhambra or the Argyll Rooms. "Myself, next year or the year after."

She took a shilling from her pocket and stooped over the woman who seemed unconscious or asleep or drunk.

"If I were to give you this, would you know where to get a lodging for the night?"

"Eh?" The woman looked up from the damp step, coughed and pulled together her gawdy thin attire round her. "What did you say?"

"A shilling is all I can spare."

The woman clutched it, muttering stupidly.

"Can you find a bed?" asked Belle.

"A bed? What use is a bed to me?" She tottered to her feet. "Are the public-houses still open?"

"Yes, I have just come from 'The Bunch of Grapes.'"

"That's across the road, isn't it?"

"Yes; good-night."

Belle watched the slovenly figure stagger from her huddled position and disappear into the fog; there was someone more wretched than herself, someone who would not be employed even at the Cambridge, to whom even Mrs. Bulke would not give a room, someone who had no hope of anything save a bed at a pauper ward, a grave in the pauper's ditch. "I don't know why I don't end it now, I really don't."

Without haste or agitation Belle went down the long street with the broken flagstone pavement, passed better shops shuttered against thieves, passed genteel houses darkened for the night, with here and there the light of a Christmas party showing through a chink in the curtains and shutters, passed the open spaces, crowded with bare trees, of handsome squares, and so to Great Hogarth Street and to No. 12 of a row of neatly built houses with closely veiled, dirty windows with broken panes, with worn doors that stood ajar, and broken rusty railings guarding areas. There was a light in the basement of No. 12 and the sound of cheerful, hoarse voices; across the tattered muslin at the barred windows had been hung a festoon of artificial flowers.

Belle entered; the door slipped from her cold hand and slammed. A voice shouted up from the basement:

"Who's that?"

"Belle—shall I leave the door shut?"

"Not yet, Daisy ain't back—give her a bit longer."

"But it's nearly midnight, dark and foggy—someone might slip in."

"Not here, dearie!" bellowed the voice from below good-humouredly. "They know us—come along down and have a drain. We are having a bit o' supper, Tommy and all, ain't we—Tommy, my love?"

Belle left the door ajar and leant against the dirty wall of the narrow passage; darkness was round her in rising waves; she had wished for death, attempted death that very evening, but now, suddenly, she was in a panic at the thought of the darkness of annihilation, of the damp clay of a London grave, afraid of the end, even of the end of misery. She clasped her bosom and her eyes fluttered for a second as if a mortal chill was on her flesh. The hoarse invitation was repeated from the basement. Belle fled from the dark and stumbled down the stairs to the light.