A Bed of Roses. George Walter Lionel

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ