Home > Authors Index > Hall Caine > Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill > This page
The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
||
Part 6. I Am Lost - Chapter 94 |
||
| < Previous |
Table of content |
Next > |
|
________________________________________________
_ SIXTH PART. I AM LOST NINETY-FOURTH CHAPTER
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.
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] _ |
||