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The Woman Thou Gavest Me: Being the Story of Mary O'Neill, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Part 6. I Am Lost - Chapter 96 |
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_ SIXTH PART. I AM LOST NINETY-SIXTH CHAPTER I knew that my eyes were not fit to be seen in the streets, so I dropped my dark veil and hurried along, being conscious of nothing for some time except the clang of electric cars and the bustle of passers-by, to whom my poor little sorrow was nothing at all. But I had not gone far--I think I had not, though my senses were confused and vague--before I began to feel ashamed, to take myself to task, and to ask what I had to cry about. If I had parted from my baby it was for her own good, and if I had paid away my last sovereign I had provided for her for a month, I had nothing to think of now except myself and how to get work. I never doubted that I should get work, or that I should get it immediately, the only open question being what work and where. Hitherto I had thought that, being quick with my pen, I might perhaps become secretary to somebody; but now, remembering the typist's story ("firms don't like it"), and wishing to run no risks in respect of my child, I put that expectation away and began to soar to higher things. How vain they were! Remembering some kind words the Reverend Mother had said about me at the convent (where I had taken more prizes than Alma, though I had never mentioned it before) I told myself that I, too, was an educated woman. I knew Italian, French and German, and having heard that some women could make a living by translating books for publishers I thought I might do the same. Nay, I could even write books myself. I was sure I could--one book at all events, about friendless girls who have to face the world for themselves, and all good women would read it (some good men also), because they would see that it must be true. Oh, how vain were my thoughts! Yet in another sense they were not all vanity, for I was not thinking of fame, or what people would say about what I should write, but only what I should get for it. I should get money, not a great deal perhaps, yet enough for baby and me, that we might have that cottage in the country, covered with creepers and roses, where Isabel would run about the grass by and by, and pluck the flowers in the garden. "So what have _you_ got to cry about, you ridiculous thing," I thought while I hurried along, with a high step now, as if my soul had been in my feet. But a mother's visions of the future are like a mirage (always gleaming with the fairy palaces which her child is to inhabit some day), and I am not the first to find her shadows fade away. I must have been walking for some time, feeling no weariness at all, when I came to the bridge by Bow Church. There I had intended to take a tram, but not being tired I went on farther, thinking every stage I could walk would be so much money to the good. I was deep in the Mile End Road, when a chilling thought came to me. It was the thought of the distance that would divide me from my child, making my visits to her difficult, and putting it out of my power to reach her quickly (perhaps even to know in time) if, as happened to children, she became suddenly and dangerously ill. I remembered the long line of telescoping thoroughfares I had passed through earlier in the day (with their big hospitals, their big breweries, their big tabernacles, their workmen's lodging-houses, their Cinema picture palaces, their Jewish theatres, and their numberless public houses); and then the barrier of squalid space which would divide me from baby, if I obtained employment in the West End, seemed to be immeasurably greater and more frightening than the space that had divided me from Martin when he was at the other end of the world. Not all the allurements of my dream were sufficient to reconcile me to such a dangerous separation. "It's impossible," I thought. "Quite impossible." Insensibly my rapid footsteps slackened. When I reached that part of the Mile End Road in which the Jewish tailors live, and found myself listening to a foreign language which I afterwards knew to be Yiddish, and looking at men with curls at each side of their sallow faces, slithering along as if they were wearing eastern slippers without heels, I stopped, without knowing why, at the corner of a street where an Italian organ-man was playing while a number of bright-eyed Jewish children danced. I was still looking on, hardly thinking of what I saw, when my eyes fell on an advertisement, pasted on the window of a sausage-and-ham shop at the corner. In large written characters it ran:
A rather fat and elderly Jewess, covered with rings and gold chains, and wearing a manifest black wig, came from a room at one side of the lobby. I explained my errand, and after she had looked me over in a sort of surprise, as if I had not been the kind of person she expected, she said, in a nasal and guttural voice: "Vait! My daughter, she speaks very vell Ainglish." Then turning her head over her shoulder, she pitched her voice several octaves higher and cried, "Miriam," whereupon there came tripping downstairs a Jewish girl of about eighteen, with large black eyes, thick black hair, and such a dear good face. I repeated my application, and after the girl had interpreted my request to her mother, I was asked into the lobby, and put through a kind of catechism. Was I a seamstress? No, but I wished to become one. Had I aiver vorked on vaistcoats? I hadn't, but I could do anything with my needle. Perhaps the urgency of my appeal, and more probably the pressure of her own need, weighed with the Jewess, for after reflection, and an eager whisper from her daughter (who was looking at me with kindling eyes), she said, "Very vell, ve'll see what she can do." I was then taken into a close and stuffy room where a number of girls (all Jewish as I could see) were working on sections of waistcoats which, lying about on every side, looked like patterns for legs of mutton. One girl was basting, another was pressing, and a third was sewing button-holes with a fine silk twist round bars of gimp. This last was the work which was required of me, and I was told to look and see if I could do it. I watched the girl for a moment and then said: "Let me try." Needle and twist and one of the half vests were then given to me, and after ten minutes I had worked my first button-hole and handed it back. The daughter praised it warmly, but the mother said: "Very fair, but a leedle slow." "Let me try again," I said, and my trembling fingers were so eager to please that my next button-hole was not only better but more quickly made. "Beautiful!" said the daughter. "And mamma, only think, she's quicker than Leah, already. I timed them." "I muz call your vader, dough," said the Jewess, and she disappeared through the doorway. While I stood talking to the younger Jewess, who had, I could see, formed as quick an attachment for me as I for her, I heard another nasal and guttural voice (a man's) coming towards us from the hall. "Is she von of our people?" "Nein! She's a Skihoah"--meaning, as I afterwards learned, a non-Jewish girl. Then a tall, thin Jew entered the room behind the elderly Jewess. I had never before and have never since seen such a patriarchal figure. With his long grey beard and solemn face he might have stood for Moses in one of the pictures that used to hang on the walls of the convent--except for his velvet skull-cap and the black alpaca apron, which was speckled over with fluffy bits of thread and scraps of cloth and silk. He looked at me for a moment with his keen eyes, and after his wife had shown him my work, and he had taken a pinch of snuff and blown his nose on a coloured handkerchief with the sound of a trumpet, he put me through another catechism. I was trembling lest he should make intimate inquiries, but beyond asking my name, and whether I was a Christian, he did not concern himself with personal questions. "Vat vages do you vant?" he asked. I told him I should be pleased to take whatever was paid to other girls doing work of the same kind. "Ach no! Dese girls are full-timers. You are only a greener [meaning a beginner] so you vill not expect anything like so much." At that his daughter repeated her assurance that I was quicker than the girl she had called Leah; but the Jew, with an air of parental majesty, told her to be silent, and then said that as I was an "improver" he could only take me "on piece," naming the price (a very small one) per half-dozen buttons and buttonholes, with the condition that I found my own twist and did the work in my own home. Seeing that I should be no match for the Jew at a bargain, and being so eager to get to work at any price, I closed with his offer, and then he left the room, after telling me to come back the next day. "And vhere do you lif, my dear?" said the Jewess. I told her Bayswater, making some excuse for being in the East End, and getting as near to the truth as I dare venture, but feeling instinctively, after my sight of the master of the house, that I dared say nothing about my child. She told me I must live nearer to my work, and I said that was exactly what I wished to do--asking if she knew where I could find a room. Fortunately the Jewess herself had two rooms vacant at that moment, and we went upstairs to look at them. Both were at the top of the house, and one of them I could have for two shillings a week, but it was dark and cheerless, being at the back and looking into the space over the yards in which the tenants dried their washing on lines stretched from pulleys. The other, which would cost a shilling a week more, was a lean slit of a room, very sparsely furnished, but it was to the front, and looked down into the varied life of the street, so I took it instantly and asked when I could move in. "Ven you like," said the Jewess. "Everyding is ready." So, early next morning I bade farewell to my good Welsh landlady (who looked grave when I told her what I was going to do) and to Emmerjane (who cried when I kissed her smudgy face) and, taking possession of my new home, began work immediately in my first and only employment. Perhaps it was a deep decline after the splendours of my dreams, but I did not allow myself to think about that. I was near to Ilford and I could go to see Isabel every day. Isabel! Isabel! Isabel! Everything was Isabel, for now that Martin was gone my hopes and my fears, my love and my life, revolved on one axis only--my child. _ |
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