CHAPTER III
Life on a trooper is not eventful. Victoria was not so deeply absorbed in her mourning or in the pallid literature borrowed from Molly as not to notice it. Though she was not what is termed serious, the perpetual quoits on the upper deck in company with Alastair and his conversation limited by smiles, and with Mr Parker and his conversation limited by uneasiness palled about the second game. Bobby too was a cypher. It was his fate to be known as 'Bobby,' a quantity of no importance. He belonged to the modern school of squires of dames, ever ready to fetch a handkerchief, to fish when he inwardly wanted to sleep in a deck chair or to talk when he had a headache. Such men have their value as tame cats and Victoria did not avoid his cheery neighbourhood. But he was summed up in the small fact which she recalled with gentle amusement a long time after: she had never known his name. For her, as for the ship's company, he was 'Bobby,' merely Bobby.
The female section too could detain none but cats and hens, as Victoria put it. She had moved too long like a tiny satellite in the orbit of Mrs Colonel So-and-So to return to the little group which slumbered all day by the funnel dreaming aloud the petty happenings of Bombay. The heavy rains at Chandraga, the simply awful things that had been said about an A.D.C. and Mrs Bryan, and the scandalous way in which a Babu had been made a judge, all this filled her with an extraordinary weariness. She felt, in the presence of these remains of her daily life, as she would when confronted for the third time with the cold leg of mutton.
True there was Cairns, a man right enough and jovial in spite of his cynical assumption that nothing was worth anything. He could produce passing fair aphorisms, throw doubts on the value of success and happiness. There was nothing, however, to hold on to. Victoria had not found in him a teacher or a helper. He was merely destructive of thought and epicurean in taste. Convinced that wine, woman and song were quite valueless things, he nevertheless knew the best Rüdesheimer and had an eye for the droop of Victoria's shoulders.
Cairns obviously liked Victoria. He did not shun his fellow passengers, for he considered that the dullest people are the most interesting, yet she could not help noticing from time to time that his eyes followed her round. He was a good big man and she knew that his thick hand, a little swollen and sunburnt, would be a good thing to touch. But there was in him none of that subtle magnetism that grasps and holds. He was coarse, perhaps a little vulgar at heart.
Thus Victoria had roamed aimlessly over the ship, visiting even the bows where, everlastingly, a lascar seemed to brood in fixed attitudes as a Budh dreaming of Nirvana. She often wandered in the troop-deck filled with the womankind and children of the non-coms. Without disliking children she could find no attraction in these poor little faded things born to be scorched by the Indian sun. The women too, mostly yellow and faded, always recalled to her, so languid and tired were they, commonplace flowers, marigolds, drooping on their stems. Besides, the society of the upper deck found a replica on the troop deck, where it was occasionally a little shriller. There too, she could catch snatches which told of the heavy rains of Chandraga, the goings on of Lance Corporal Maccaskie's wife and the disgrace of giving Babu clerks more than fifty rupees a month.
Perpetually the Indian ocean shimmered by, calm as the opaque eye of a shark, breaking at times into immense rollers that swelled hardly more than a woman's breast. And the days passed on.
They were nearing Aden, though nothing on the mauve horizon told of the outpost where the filth of the East begins to overwhelm the ugliness of the West. Victoria and Cairns were leaning on the starboard bulwark. She was looking vacuously into the greying sky, conscious that Cairns was watching her. She felt with extraordinary clearness that he was gazing as if spell-bound at the soft and regular rise and fall of her skin towards the coarse black openwork of her bodice. Far away in the twilight was something long and black, hardly more than a line vanishing towards the north.
'Araby,' said Cairns.
Victoria looked more intently. Far away, half veiled by the mists of night, unlit by the evening star, lay the coast. Araby, the land of manna and milk – of black-eyed women – of horses that champ strange bits. Here and there a blackened rock sprang up from the waste of sand and scrub. Its utter desolation awakened a sympathetic chord. It was lonely, as she was lonely. As the night swiftly rushed into the heavens, she let her arm rest against that of Cairns. Then his hand closed over hers. It was warm and hard; something like a pale light of companionship struggled through the solitude of her soul.
They stood cold and silent while the night swallowed up the coast and all save here and there the foam tip of a wave. The man had put his arm round her and pressed her to him. She did not resist. The soft wind playing in her hair carried a straying lock into his eyes, half blinding him and making him catch his breath, so redolent was it, not with the scent of flowers, but of life, vigorous and rich in its thousand saps. He drew her closer to him and pressed his lips on her neck. Victoria did not resist.
From the forepeak swathed in darkness, came the faint unearthly echoes of the stokers' song. There were no fourths; the dominant and the subdominant were absent. Strangely attuned to the western ear, the sounds sometimes boomed, sometimes fell to a whisper. The chant rose like incense into the heavens, celebrating Durga, protector of the Motherland, Lakshmi, bowered in the flower that in the water grows. Cairns had drawn Victoria close against him. He was stirred and shaken as never before. All conspired against him, the night, the fancied scents of Araby, the unresisting woman in his arms who yielded him her lips with the passivity of weariness. They did not think as they kissed, whether laying the foundation of regret or snatching from the fleeting hour a moment of thoughtless joy. Again a brass drum boomed out beyond them, softly as if touched by velvet hands. It carried the buzzing of bees, the calls of corncrakes, in every tone the rich scents of the jungle, where undergrowth rots in black water – of perfumes that burn before the gods. Then the night wind arose and swept away the crooning voices.
CHAPTER IV
Victoria stepped out on to the platform with a heart that bounded and yet shrank. Not even the first faint coming of the coastline had given her the almost physical shock that she experienced on this bare platform. Waterloo station lay around her in a pall of faint yellow mist that gripped and wrenched at her throat. Through the fog a thousand ungainly shapes of stairs and signals thrust themselves, some crude in their near blackness, others fainter in the distance. It might have been a dream scene but for the uproar that rose around her from the rumble of London, the voices of a great crowd. Yet all this violence of life, the darkness, the surge of men and women, all this told her that she was once more in the midst of things.
She found her belongings mechanically, fumblingly. She did not realise until then the bitterness that drove its iron into her soul. Already, when the troopship had entered the Channel she had felt a cruel pang when she realised that she must expect nothing and that nobody would greet her. She had fled from the circle near the funnel when the talk began to turn round London and waiting sisters and fathers, round the Lord Mayor's show, the play, the old fashioned Christmas. Now, as she struggled through the crowd that cried out and laughed excitedly and kissed, she knew her isolation was complete. There was nobody to meet her. The fog made her eyes smart, so they filled readily with tears.
As she sat in the cab, however, and there flashed by her like beacons the lights of the stalls in the Waterloo Road, the black and greasy pavement sown with orange peel, she felt her heart beating furiously with the excitement of home coming. She passed the Thames flowing silently, swathed in its shroud of mist. Then the blackness of St James's Park through which her cab crawled timidly as if it feared things that might lurk unknown in the fogbound thickets.
It was still in a state of feverish dreaming that Victoria entered her room at Curran's Private Hotel, otherwise known by a humble number in Seymour Street. 'Curran's' is much in favour among Anglo-Indians, as it is both central and cheap. It has everything that distinguishes the English hotel which has grown from a boarding-house into a superior establishment where you may stay at so much a day. The successful owner had bought up one after the other three contiguous houses and had connected them by means of a conservatory where there lived, among much pampas grass, small ferns in pots shrouded in pea-green paper and sickly plants to which no name could be attached as they mostly suggested stewed lettuce. It was impossible to walk in a straight line from one end of the coalition of buildings to the other without climbing and descending steps every one of which proclaimed the fact that the leases of the houses would soon fall in. From the three kitchens ascended three smells of mutton. The three halls were strewn with bicycles, gun cases in their last phase, sticks decrepit or dandified. The three hat racks, all early Victorian in their lines, bore a motley cargo. Dusty bowlers hustled it with heather coloured caps and top hats; one even bore a pith helmet and a clerical atrocity.
Queer as Curran's is, it is comfortable enough. Victoria looked round her room, tiny in length and breadth, high however with all the dignity that befits an odd corner left over by the Victorian builder. It was distinguished by its simplicity, for the walls bore nothing whatever beyond a restrained papering of brownish roses. A small black and gold bed, a wardrobe with a white handle, a washing stand with a marble top took up all the space left by the large tin trunk which contained most of Victoria's worldly goods. So this, thought Victoria, is the beginning. She pulled aside the curtain. Before her lay Seymour Street, where alone an eye of light shone faintly from the nearest lamp post. Through the fog came the warning noise of a lorry picking its way. It was cold, cold, all this, and lonely like an island.
Her meditations were disturbed by the maid who brought her hot water.
'My name is Carlotta,' said the girl complacently depositing the can upon the marble topped washstand.
'Yes?' said Victoria. 'You are a foreigner?'
'Yes. I am Italian. It is foggy,' replied the girl.
Victoria sighed. It was kind of the girl to make her feel at home, to smile at her with those flashing teeth so well set in her ugly little brown face. She went to the washstand and cried out in horror at her dirt and fog begrimed face, rimmed at the eyes, furrowed on the left by the course of that tear shed at Waterloo.
'Tell them downstairs I shan't be ready for half an hour,' she said; 'it'll take me about a week to get quite clean, I should say.'
Carlotta bared her white teeth again and withdrew gently as a cat, while Victoria courageously drenched her face and neck. The scents of England, already conjured up by the fog and the mutton, rose at her still more vividly from the warm water which inevitably exhales the traditional perfume of hot painted can.
Her dinner was a small affair but delightful. It was good to eat and drink once more things to which she had been accustomed for the first twenty years of her life. Her depression had vanished; she was merely hungry, and, like the healthy young animal she was, longing for a rare cut of roast beef, accompanied by the good old English potatoes boiled down to the consistency of flour and the flavour of nothing. Her companions were so normal that she could not help wondering, when her first hunger was sated and she was confronted with the apple tart of her fathers, whether she was not in the unchanging old board residence in Fulham where her mother had stayed with her whenever she came up to town, excited and conscious of being on the spree.
Two spinsters of no age discussed the fog. Both were immaculate and sat rigidly in correct attitudes facing their plates. Both talked quickly and continuously in soft but high tones. They passed one another the salt with the courtesy of abbés taking pinches of snuff. A young man from the Midlands explained to the owner of the clerical hat that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more. Near by a heavy man solemnly and steadily ate, wiping at times from his beard drops of gravy and of sauce, whilst his faded wife nibbled disconsolately tiny scraps of crust. These she daintily buttered, while her four lanky girls nudged and whispered.
Victoria did not stay in the conservatory after the important meal. As she passed through it, a mist of weariness gathering before her eyes, she had a vision of half a dozen men sleeping in cane chairs, or studying pink or white evening papers. The young man from the Midlands had captured another victim and was once more explaining that under certain circumstances his food would cost him more.
Victoria seemed to have reached the limits of physical endurance. She fumbled as she divested herself of her clothes; she could not even collect enough energy to wash. All the room seemed filled with haze. Her tongue clove to her palate. Little tingles in her eyelids crushed them together over her pupils. She stumbled into her bed, mechanically switching off the light by her bedside. In the very act her arm lost its energy and she sank into a dreamless sleep.
Next morning she breakfasted with good appetite. The fog had almost entirely lifted and sunshine soft as silver was filtering through the windows into the little dining-room. Its mahoganous ugliness was almost warmed into charm. The sideboard shone dully through its covering of coarse net. Even the stacked cruets remembered the days when they cunningly blazed in a shop window. A pleasurable feeling of excitement ran through Victoria's body, for she was going to discover London, to have adventures. As she closed the door behind her with a definite little slam she felt like a buccaneer.
Buccaneering in the Edgware Road, even when it is bathed in the morning sun, soon falls flat in November. It came upon Victoria rather as a shock that her Indian clothing was rather thin. As her flying visits to town had only left in her mind a very hazy picture of Regent Street it was quite unconsciously that she entered the emporium opposite. A frigid young lady sacrificed for her benefit an abominable vicuna coat which, she said, fitted Victoria like a glove. Victoria paid the twenty seven and six with an admirable feeling of recklessness and left the shop reflecting that she looked the complete charwoman.
She turned into Hyde Park, where the gentle wind was sorrowfully driving the brown and broken leaves along the rough gravel. The thin tracery of the trees imaged itself on the road like a giant cobweb. Victoria looked for a moment towards the south where the massive buildings rise, towards the east where a cathedral thrusts into the sky a tower that suspiciously recalls waterworks. She drank in the cold air with a gusto that can be understood by none save those who have learned to live in the floating moisture of the plains. She felt young and, in the sunshine, with her cheeks gaining colour as the wind whipped them, she looked in her long black coat and broad brimmed straw hat, like a quakeress in love.
As she walked down towards the Achilles statue the early morning panorama of London unfolded itself before her un-understanding eyes. Girls hurried by with their satchels towards the typewriting rooms of the west; they stole a look at Victoria's face but quickly turned away from her clothes. Now and then spruce young clerks walking to the Tube slackened their pace to look twice into her grey eyes; one or two looked back, not so much in the hope of an adventure, for time could not be snatched for Venus herself on the way to the office, as to see whether they could carry away with them the flattery of having been noticed.
In a sense that first day in London was for Victoria a day of revelations. Having despatched a telegram to her brother to announce her arrival she felt that the day was hers. Ted had not troubled to meet her either at Southampton or Waterloo: it was not likely that he had followed the sightings of her ship. The next day being a Saturday, however, he would probably come up from the Bedfordshire school where he proffered Latin to an ungrateful generation.
Victoria's excursions to London had been so few that she had but the faintest idea of where she was to go. Knowing, however, that one cannot lose oneself in London, she walked aimlessly towards the east. It was a voyage of discovery. Piccadilly, bathed in the pale sun, revealed itself as a land where luxury flows like rivers of milk. Victoria, being a true woman, could not pass a shop. Thus her progress was slow, so slow that when she found herself between the lions of Trafalgar Square she began to realise that she wanted her lunch.
The problem of food is cruel for all women who desire more than a bun. They risk either inattention or over attention, and if they follow other women, they almost invariably discover the cheap and bad. Victoria hesitated for a moment on the steps of an oyster shop, as nervous in the presence of her first plunge into freedom as a novice at the side door of a pawnbroker. A man passed by her into the oyster shop, smoking a pipe. She felt she would never dare to sit in a room where strange men smoked pipes. Thus she stood for a moment forlorn on the pavement, until a memory of the only decent grill in town, according to Bobby, passed through her mind.
A policeman sent her by bus to the New Gaiety, patronised by Bobby and his cronies. As Victoria went down the interminable underground staircase, and especially as she entered the enormous room where paper, carpets, and plate always seem new, her courage almost failed her. Indeed she looked round anxiously, half hoping that the anonymous Bobby might be revisiting his old haunts. But she was quite alone, and it was only by reminding herself that she must always be alone at meals now that she coerced herself into sitting down. She got through her meal with expedition. She felt frightfully small; the waiters were painfully courteous; a man laid aside his orange coloured newspaper, and embarrassed her with frequent side glances. She braced herself up however. 'I am training,' was her uppermost thought. She then wondered whether she ought to have come to the New Gaiety at all. Fortunately it was only at the very end of her lunch that Victoria realised she was the only woman sitting alone. After this discovery her nerve failed her. She got up hurriedly, and, in her confusion, omitted to tip the waiter. At the desk the last stone was heaped on the cairn of her discomfiture when the cashier politely returned to her a quarter rupee which she had given her thinking it was a sixpence.
With a sigh of satisfaction Victoria resumed her walk through London. She was a little tired already but she could think of nothing to do, nowhere to go to. She did not want to return to Curran's to sit in her box-like room, or to look at the two spinsters availing themselves of their holiday in town to play patience in the conservatory.
All the afternoon, therefore, Victoria saw the sights. Covent Garden repelled her by the massiveness of its food suggestion, and especially by the choking dirt of its lanes. After Covent Garden, Savoy court yard and its announcements of intellectual plays by unknown women. Then once more, drawn by its spaciousness guessed at through Spring Gardens, Victoria walked into Saint James's Park. She rested awhile upon a seat, watching the waterfowl strut and plume themselves, the pelicans flounder heavily in the mud. She was tired. The sun was setting early. The magic slowly faded from London; Buckingham Palace lost the fictitious grace that it has when set in a blue sky. Victoria shivered a little. She felt tired. She did not know where to go. She was alone. On the seat nearest to hers two lovers sat together, hand in hand. The man's face was almost hidden by his cap and by the blue puffs of his pipe; the girl's was averted towards the ground where, with the ferule of her umbrella, she lazily drew signs. There was no bitterness in this sight for Victoria. Her romance had come and gone so long ago that she looked quite casually at these wanderers in Arcadia. She only knew that she was alone and cold.
Victoria got up and walked out of the park. It was darkening, and little by little the lights of London were springing into life. By dint of many questionings she managed to regain Oxford Street, that spinal column of London without which the stranger would be lost. Then her course was easy, and it was with a peculiar feeling of luxuriousness that she resigned herself to the motor bus that jolted and shook her tired body until she reached the Arch. More slowly, and with diminished optimism, she found her way up Edgware Road, where night was now falling. The emporium was dazzling with lights. Alone the public house rivalled it and thrust its glare through the settling mist. Victoria closed the door of Curran's. At once she re-entered its atmosphere; into the warm air rose the three smells of three legs of mutton.