Poppy Part 35

If I had been anything else I should not have been in the garden that night at a time when well-brought-up girls were in bed! And I should have flown at the first sound of danger--but I didn't. Not because I did not recognise danger; but because I _did_ recognise something I had been looking for all my life--Love. And I put out both arms and embraced it.

_Now_ it seems revealed to me that I should not have done this ... I should have fenced and fended ... guarded myself ... given nothing ...

until he had asked for me and taken me, before all the world ... and made a nest for me somewhere away from the squalor of the world where no begriming thoughts could touch me and smirch the mother of _his_ son.

_Then_ I suppose the Abbey would have been for me too!----"

She twisted her lips and flung out her fingers.

"And I wouldn't change a thing that is done. Not for all the world could give would I forget or have undone that radiant hour!... And yet ... and yet ... how I should love the nest for my child ... the peace and fine honour of a wife's bed to lay _his_ son upon! Oh! why does life tear the hearts of women in half like this?" She rested her head on her hands and shed pa.s.sionate tears for herself and for all women like her. At last she said:

"Good-night, old Abbey! You are _mine_ all the same--mine because, moral or immoral, I love the things you stand for. You cannot rob even bad people of the love of beauty. And no one can rob me of the peace you have put into my heart night after night."

At last illness descended upon her. She had often known torment of mind, now she knew torment of body, and her mind did not suffer at all; but was possessed of a kind of exultation that supported and refreshed her through terrible gaps of time.

Nurse Selton came in often, but the girl preferred to be alone. Most of the day was spent between _Hope_ over the mantelpiece and the cas.e.m.e.nt-window. Often she thought of the native women in her own land, who, when the time comes to bring forth, go quietly away and make a soft green bed in some sheltered place, and there suffer in silence and alone; then, after a few hours, return as quietly to every-day work and go serenely on with life, the new-born child slung behind the shoulders.

The thought appealed to Poppy. She said:

"That is the way I should have borne my son if I had stayed in Africa ... out in the air--with the sun shining. But oh! these terrible walls that shut one in!... and without--cold, fog, mud!"

When evening fell, sickly and grey-green, she opened her cas.e.m.e.nt-window and leaned upon its sill. The roar of London heard through the fog was like the dull boom of the breakers on the Durban back beach. Far away, the sky above Trafalgar Square was spasmodically lit by electric advertis.e.m.e.nts.

In the street below, a woman's raucous voice pathetically shrieked:

"It's 'ard to give the 'and Where the 'eart can _Nev_-ver be."

But Poppy did not hear. With hidden eyes and hands clasped tight upon the pains that racked her, she was unravelling the mystery of Life and Love.

Evelyn Carson's son was born in the dawn of a late October day: heralded in by Big Ben striking the hour of five. Poppy gave one long, ravished glance at the little dimpled morsel, with its sleek, black head and features like crumpled rose-leaves, then lay back content and at peace with all the world.

"How sweet it is to be a woman!" she thought, forgetting all past pain and despair, all anguish to come. "My heart can never be a stone again, nor my soul a shrivelled leaf."

She drowsed happily through the days that followed, letting her mind rest with her body; she thought of nothing but the sweetness of being a mother; she was intoxicated by the cling of the little lips to her breast.

"I am a _real_ woman," she said. "This is what I was born for and made beautiful for. Poor, _poor_ old Sara!"

When Nurse Selton came one day and asked if she would like to get her child "adopted," she would have struck the woman's face if it had been within reach. As it was not, she said in a voice that was a drawn sword:

"Go away! I hate you!" And Nurse Selton actually understood and went away. She considered Poppy--taking one thing with another--the craziest patient she had ever had.

Poppy talked to her baby afterwards. "I said I would be at peace with the world for evermore dear one; but here I am, my old self already. And I see that it will always be so. I must be at war for _your_ sake now. I must fight _your_ enemies--until you are old enough to fight them for yourself. To _dare_ suggest such a thing!" A little while after she whispered pa.s.sionately to the sleek, black head:

"She did not know she was speaking of a king's son!"

CHAPTER XVII

When the time came for departure from No. 10, Old Street, Poppy did not go from Westminster. The grip of the place was on her and she did not care to leave it. But she sought and found a part of more cheerful aspect--a quiet square with a triangle of green in its centre, and the spire of an old church showing above the branches of trees in one of its corners. The house where she engaged two rooms had an old-fashioned air, though upon the opening of the front door was disclosed the depressing interior common to most houses of its kind--the worn linoleum in the hall and stairway; the inevitable pretentious hall-chair and umbrella-stand; the eternal smell of fish and boiling linen. But the two rooms were an artistic find. They had been inhabited and furnished by an actress, who was married to an artist, and were original without being uncomfortable.

The walls were papered with ordinary brown paper to a ledge of painted wood, above which rose a smoke-grey paper with pale zigzags upon it, making a charming background for a number of water-colour sketches and black-and-white etchings of all the chief theatrical celebrities, from Sir Henry Irving downwards.

There was also a piano--old and wicked, but still a piano, and various odd and quaint bits of furniture. The owners of these things had gone to America for a two-years' tour, and being anxious to come back to their rooms when they returned, had given the landlady instructions to "let furnished," and make what she could out of them. Poppy seized them with joy, glad to have so pleasant a setting for the struggle and fight she knew must ensue.

From the first it was bound to be a handicapped fight, for the king's son behaved like one, and a tyrannical despot at that. It was plain that work would only be achieved by desperate and persistent effort at all sorts of odds and ends of time in the day and night.

Probably things would have been more difficult still, but for the offices of a kindly soul who lived in the lower regions of the house by day, and ascended to somewhere near the stars at night, accompanied by her husband and two children.

She had opened the door to Poppy on the first visit, and having been the medium through which the rooms and tenant were brought together, she thereafter looked upon the tenant as her special _protegee_. She was a real c.o.c.kney, born and bred in Horseferry Road--quite young still, but with the hopelessly middle-aged, slack-waisted, slip-shod look of the English working man's wife who, having achieved a husband and two children, is content to consider her fate fulfilled and herself no more a player, but merely a _pa.s.see_ looker-on at the great game of life.

However, Mrs. Print did her looking on very good-humouredly. Her teeth were decayed, her hair in strings, but she carried an air of perpetual cheer and a wide smile. Her husband, a spruce, fresh-cheeked young cabman, looked, on the contrary, as though all the cares of the universe lay across his shoulders.

"'E always puts on that look," smiled Mrs. Print to Poppy; "in case I might ask 'im for an hextra sixpence for the 'ousekeeping."

She "charred" for Poppy; did various things, such as lighting the sitting-room fire and keeping the hearth and fire-irons clean. During this last business, which she always managed to prolong to the best part of an hour, she would give Poppy a brief summary of the morning news; an account of what the rest of the people in the house had been doing; what her George had said to her before he went to work; little bits of information about her two children; and advice about the treatment of Poppy's baby--generally sound.

She nearly drove poor Poppy frantic, yet it was impossible to be really angry with her: she was so essentially well-meaning and so unconsciously humorous. Besides, she took the king's son into the garden of the Square for a couple of hours every fine afternoon, carrying him most carefully up and down whilst she conversed in loud, agreeable tones with a dozen and one people who pa.s.sed by, exchanging chaff and banter, roaring with laughter, scolding her own children--Jimmy and Jack--who were left to amuse themselves by staring at the immaculate plots of a.r.s.enically-green gra.s.s and the bare branches of the trees. If they did anything else, their mother's tongue would wag and her finger threaten.

"Come off there, Jimmy! Jack, if you do that again, I'll pay you--I'll pay you _somethink merciful_!" Jack, a stolid, emotionless boy, looked as though he had been badly carved out of a log of wood; but Jimmy was of a more vivid appearance, being afflicted with what his mother called _St. Viper's Dance_.

In her window Poppy would sit at her table, her eyes occasionally glancing at the figures in the Square, her pen flying over the paper before her. She was writing for money. Thoughts of Fame had slipped away from her. She put her child before Fame now: and wrote no better for that.

Day by day she grew paler, and the high cheek-bones had shadows beneath them that might easily turn into hollows. She had not regained flesh much, and a little of her buoyancy was gone. What she needed was to sit in the air and sunshine all day playing with her baby's dimples. Dank Westminster, built on a swamp, low-lying and foggy, when all the rest of London was clear, was no place for her or for her baby; but she did not know it, and had no time to find out, so wrapt was she in the business of making money that would a.s.sure home and life for her child and herself.

The days were all too short, and soon the midnight-oil began to burn.

Thereafter, shadows really _did_ change gradually into hollows--very soft hollows, however. Still, her eyes were always blue and brave. Mrs.

Print used to observe her disapprovingly and tell her that she should take a leaf out of the book of the _lydy_ upstairs, who lay on the sofa all day reading novels.

"Miss Never-Sweat--that's what I calls her!" she said, contemptuously dismissing thus an anaemic blonde damsel on the first floor, who mysteriously did nothing except take a fat poodle for half an hour's walk every day. Mrs. Print's att.i.tude towards this graceful _dilettante_ was one of resentful suspicion--resentful because she did nothing: suspicious for the same reason!

"With everybody helse in this 'ouse, including you, Mrs. Chard, it is

"'Come day, go day, Please, G.o.d, send Sunday.'

"But all days looks the same to _'er_," she remarked, as she diligently polished the fire-irons in Poppy's sitting-room. The latter, intensely bored, knew that it was no use trying to divert Mrs. Print from the subject until it was exhausted; _then_, mayhap, she would depart.

"When I went up to do 'er fire this morning, she says to me, she says"

(here Mrs. Print pitched her voice high and fell into a drawl), "'Oh, Mrs. Print, _dear_, I _do_ feel so hill this morning. I've got pains in my 'ead and chest, and I can't henjoy my food at all. And my nerves is quite _rore_.' I gives one look at her yeller skin, and I says: 'Why, you've got the _boil_, that's what _you've_ got, for want of getting about on your two pins. Wot you want to do is to go to the chimist's round the corner, and arst him for a pennorth of ikery-pikery. When you've took _that_, come back 'ome and turn out these two rooms of yours and cook your dinner--' She give me a look like a mad hyhena, and slabbed the door."

"Now, Mrs. Print," said her listener wearily, "do make haste and finish that fender. I want to work while baby is asleep."

"Yes ma'am, I shan't be another minit. I must just give the 'earth a brush up, 'a dirty 'earth makes dinner late,' and that's what mine'll be to-day, same as breakfast was, and Old George gone off in a dandy because he was late."

She always spoke of her husband as Old George, her children as _our_ Jack and _my_ Jimmy.