Poppy Part 32

Newnham, restless and miserable, quoted with some trace of emotion:

"O to be in England Now that Spring is there."

But his emotion was neither for Spring nor England. He led the talk to London with the hope of getting her to speak of her destination; but she went off at a tangent and began to tell him about the wonderful shades of blue to be found in the interior of a glacier. He ignored that, and made occasion to give her his card with a Kensington address written on it, saying in rather strained fas.h.i.+on:

"If ever you want a friend--doctors are sometimes useful people, you know."

She thanked him and took his card, holding it carefully in her hand. But she offered no information on the subject which so engrossed his thoughts. An uncomfortable pause followed. Suddenly in the darkness she felt a hand hot on hers.

"Miss Chard ... Rosalind ..." he had discovered her name--"I will do anything for you."

It was far from being a surprise to her that he should make some kind of avowal. But his words seemed to her rather odd--and somehow in keeping with his odd looks at her. She very gently drew away her hand from under his and put it behind her head. The other was quite out of his reach.

"Thank you, Dr. Newnham," she said kindly, but with no particular fervour.

"Do you understand what I mean?" he said huskily, after another pause.

"I can help you."

He could not see the expression on her face, but he saw that she turned her head to look at him as she answered:

"What can you mean?"

"Oh, you needn't beat about the bush with me," he spoke with coa.r.s.e irritation. "I know what you have to face."

"You must be wonderfully clever," she said, with a touch of sarcasm; "but I should like to know just what you mean."

Irritation now became anger.

"You know well enough," he said brutally. "What is the good of playing pure with me! It is my business to see what isn't plain to other people."

In the darkness she grew pale with anger at his tone, but she had fear too, of she knew not what. Her wish was to rise and leave him at once; but curiosity chained her--curiosity and creeping, creeping fear. Dimly she became conscious of the predestined feeling that once or twice before in her life had presaged strange happenings. What was she going to hear? She sat very still, waiting.

The man leaned close to her and spoke into her ear. His breathing was quick and excited, but he had some difficulty with his words; he muttered and his sentences were halting and disjointed.

But Poppy heard everything he said. It seemed to her that his lowest whisper pierced to the inmost places of her being, and reverberated through her like the echoing and resounding of bells. Afterwards there was a terrible quiet. He could not see her face. She appeared almost to be crouching in her chair, all bundled up, but he did not venture to touch her--some instinct kept him from that. Pity, mingled with his base pa.s.sion and scorn. He regretted that he had spoken so violently. He feared he had been brutal. At last she spoke, in a faint voice, that seemed to come from far away.

"I don't know what you mean ... I think you must be mad."

Newnham laughed--derisively, devilishly.

"I'll bet that's what you are going home for, all the same."

While he was furiously laughing, with his hand flung above his head, she flamed up out of her chair, and spoke for a moment down at him in a low, vibrating voice:

"You vile man! Never dare speak to me again. You are not fit to live!"

Then she was gone.

After a time he got up and stumbled towards the smoke-room, intending to get drunk; but he changed his mind before he reached it, and went to his cabin instead. Having closed his door, he sat in the berth and stared at his boots. He said at last:

"H----! What a beast I am! But what is worse, I am a fool. I am no good any longer. I made a mistake in my diagnosis. That girl is straight!

Pure as the untrodden snow! I had better cut my throat."

However, he did not.

Poppy, lying on her face in her cabin, was tasting shame. Bitter-sweet, mysterious, terrifying knowledge was hers at last--and with it was shame. Shame that the knowledge should come to her from profane and guilty lips! Shame that the child of the king of her heart should be unworthily born; that a king's child should be robbed of its kingdom; that the mother of her child should be one to whom men might throw vile words. Shame that she was a transgressor.

CHAPTER XIV

London was not new to Poppy. She had lived there for months at a time, but always at the best hotels and under luxurious conditions. Now, she hardly knew where to seek a home in accord with her limited means, but she had heard of Bloomsbury as being the resort of writers and artists and people whose riches are rather to be found in their heads and hearts than in their purses; so she took her way thither.

She walked the old-fas.h.i.+oned squares the day after her arrival and found them all green-tracery, and darts of spring suns.h.i.+ne that touched the gloomy houses with the gilt of past romance. After much roaming, and knocking, and climbing of stairs, and making of awkward adieus to angry, disappointed landladies, she eventually discovered a tall, white house, whose front windows overlooked the pigeons pecking in the straggly gra.s.s that grows in the courtyard of the British Museum. A room on the top floor but one seemed likely to suit her purse and her tastes, and she seized upon it eagerly. It was big and bare, with no noise overhead, except the footsteps of two tired maids, who crept to bed at eleven o'clock with very little to say to each other. It seemed to Poppy that she could not have found any better place to start hard work in, and yet, from the first day there, a dreariness crept over her spirit--a kind of mental numbness she had never known before, oppressed her. She supposed it must have something to do with her physical condition and the shock she had lately received, and that after a few days it would pa.s.s. Instead, it increased. Her nights became indescribably weird and unhappy. Always it seemed to her that she heard someone calling somewhere, and she used to wake up, thinking that she had been urgently roused to fetch something. Sometimes, still half asleep, she would get up and begin to dress to go out; then, gradually becoming conscious of what she was doing, she would light the gas and stare round the room, looking for the person who had been speaking to her. In the daytime it became impossible to work, though she perpetually goaded herself to her writing-table. The only time she could get any ease from the intolerable restlessness and depression that filled her, was when she was half out of her window, leaning above the street, watching the intermittent stream of uninteresting-looking people who pa.s.sed up and down the broad, dingy steps of the Museum, and listening to the roar of London afar.

Trying to interpret the street calls was an idle amus.e.m.e.nt, too, wondering why the coal-carters should shout _Ko-bel_, and the cry of the oyster-man be exceeding dolorous like the cry of a soul in the depths.

_Clam ... Clam ... clamavi._

In the afternoons, when still haunting sadness obsessed her, she would put on her hat and visit a picture-gallery, or walk in the park, or roam the streets looking at the shop-windows and into the strained, anxious faces of the hurrying pa.s.sers-by. She speculated as to whether she would ever get that look, and always she wondered what was worth it; then one day, as she walked, she felt what seemed tiny fluttering fingers clutching at her heart-strings, and she _knew_! Flying home on swift feet, she nailed herself once more to her work-table. She _must_ work, she told herself feverishly; and when she could not, frenzy seized her, then terror, then despair. Yes, those were the things she had seen in the strained, hurrying faces that pa.s.sed along--frenzy, terror, despair; not for themselves, but for _others_. _She must work!_

But Inspiration hid Her face; and shadows came out of the four corners of the room and closed in upon her.

Breakfast was always brought on a tray by a maid called Kate. For the rest of her meals she frequented A.B.C. shops, and the like, existing on cups of tea and boiled eggs and gla.s.ses of milk, after the manner of women who live alone and have to economise. But sometimes in a wild burst of extravagance she would wend her way to Soho and order a little Italian meal all _hors-d'oeuvres_ and thin Chianti. She loved to hear the French and Italian chatter about her, and felt more at home there than anywhere, not minding the men's bold, dark glances, for in her travels with Abinger she had learnt to know that there was really little of harm in them. Of course, she attracted much attention and often had uncomfortable adventures in her lonely goings and comings; but she did not let these ruffle her greatly, telling herself that all such things were part and parcel of the fight. She minded nothing, in fact, except the tragic atmosphere of her room, which engulfed her spirit as soon as she entered. The nights began to be even more eerie. She lay awake often until dawn, and presently longings and urgings came upon her to procure something that would produce sleep. She had never known anyone who took drugs or sleeping-draughts, and could not imagine what put such an idea into her head--indeed, having read De Quincey's _Confessions_, she had a horror of such things, and so, fought the suggestion with all her might.

But still it returned. Once when she was sitting at her table, with a throbbing head, biting her pencil before a blank sheet of paper, she distinctly heard someone softly say:

"Go and _buy_ some inspiration."

She stared about the empty room.

"What can be the matter with me?" she demanded of herself, after a time, and strove with all her strength to work and drive such insane thoughts from her. But the writer within her was mute, the poet dumb, and her woman's body was very weary.

One day, she had been striving with herself for many hours, writing down dry, ba.n.a.l words that she almost dug out of the paper a moment afterwards. At intervals she sat with her head on her arms, wondering what had ever caused her to dream that she was born to the pen; brooding over the possibilities of her chances as a shop-girl, a waitress in a tea-shop, a chorus-girl, a housemaid--as _anything_ but a writer of poems and romantic fiction, at which she was obviously a dismal failure.

At last she flung papers and pencils to the four corners of the room, and left the house. Out of doors it was raining fearsomely. After tramping for an hour or so, soaked through, she found herself back near home, in Theobald's Row--a hateful street that smells of fish and rank cheese, where men bawl out the price of pork-chops, and women come furtively stealing from side-doors, wiping their lips. She made haste to get into Southampton Row, which has a sweeter savour to the nostrils and a staid, respectable air. At a corner she pa.s.sed a paper shop, which had many news-boards exposed, with the "sheets" hanging dripping and torn from them. One yellow sheet stood out boldly with the words "_South Africa_" in black letters across it. A pang of joy shot through her. She could have fallen down before that tattered paper and kissed the magic words. The name of her own land! The land that had beaten her and bruised her and flung her out to seek a living and safety in another country--but her own land! Some words came to her lips:

"She said: G.o.d knows they owe me naught.

I tossed them to the foaming sea, I tossed them to the howling waste, _Yet still their love comes home to me._"

So far she had forbidden herself entirely the luxury of journals and magazines, saying that she could not afford them; but now she went into the shop and recklessly bought up everything that had any connection with South-African affairs.

Afterwards, going home, she saw a flower-girl crouching in a doorway with a bale of wet daffodils and narcissi in her arms. Flowers, too, were luxuries, concerning which she had laid down a law unto herself; but the girl made a piteous appeal, and without a thought of dwindling funds, Poppy bought up the whole wet fragrant bale. Before she reached home she was reproaching herself bitterly.

"How _can_ I be buying magazines and flowers with money I have not earned?... I am becoming degraded! ... a parasite!"