All Roads Lead to Calvary. Jerome Klapka Jerome

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СКАЧАТЬ little restaurant, this,” she said. “One of the few places where you can depend upon not being annoyed.”

      Joan did not understand. “In what way?” she asked.

      “Oh, you know, men,” answered the girl. “They come and sit down opposite to you, and won’t leave you alone. At most of the places, you’ve got to put up with it or go outside. Here, old Gustav never permits it.”

      Joan was troubled. She was rather looking forward to occasional restaurant dinners, where she would be able to study London’s Bohemia.

      “You mean,” she asked, “that they force themselves upon you, even if you make it plain – ”

      “Oh, the plainer you make it that you don’t want them, the more sport they think it,” interrupted the girl with a laugh.

      Joan hoped she was exaggerating. “I must try and select a table where there is some good-natured girl to keep me in countenance,” she said with a smile.

      “Yes, I was glad to see you,” answered the girl. “It’s hateful, dining by oneself. Are you living alone?”

      “Yes,” answered Joan. “I’m a journalist.”

      “I thought you were something,” answered the girl. “I’m an artist. Or, rather, was,” she added after a pause.

      “Why did you give it up?” asked Joan.

      “Oh, I haven’t given it up, not entirely,” the girl answered. “I can always get a couple of sovereigns for a sketch, if I want it, from one or another of the frame-makers. And they can generally sell them for a fiver. I’ve seen them marked up. Have you been long in London?”

      “No,” answered Joan. “I’m a Lancashire lass.”

      “Curious,” said the girl, “so am I. My father’s a mill manager near Bolton. You weren’t educated there?”

      “No,” Joan admitted. “I went to Rodean at Brighton when I was ten years old, and so escaped it. Nor were you,” she added with a smile, “judging from your accent.”

      “No,” answered the other, “I was at Hastings – Miss Gwyn’s. Funny how we seem to have always been near to one another. Dad wanted me to be a doctor. But I’d always been mad about art.”

      Joan had taken a liking to the girl. It was a spiritual, vivacious face with frank eyes and a firm mouth; and the voice was low and strong.

      “Tell me,” she said, “what interfered with it?” Unconsciously she was leaning forward, her chin supported by her hands. Their faces were very near to one another.

      The girl looked up. She did not answer for a moment. There came a hardening of the mouth before she spoke.

      “A baby,” she said. “Oh, it was my own fault,” she continued. “I wanted it. It was all the talk at the time. You don’t remember. Our right to children. No woman complete without one. Maternity, woman’s kingdom. All that sort of thing. As if the storks brought them. Don’t suppose it made any real difference; but it just helped me to pretend that it was something pretty and high-class. ‘Overmastering passion’ used to be the explanation, before that. I guess it’s all much of a muchness: just natural instinct.”

      The restaurant had been steadily emptying. Monsieur Gustav and his ample-bosomed wife were seated at a distant table, eating their own dinner.

      “Why couldn’t you have married?” asked Joan.

      The girl shrugged her shoulders. “Who was there for me to marry?” she answered. “The men who wanted me: clerks, young tradesmen, down at home – I wasn’t taking any of that lot. And the men I might have fancied were all of them too poor. There was one student. He’s got on since. Easy enough for him to talk about waiting. Meanwhile. Well, it’s like somebody suggesting dinner to you the day after to-morrow. All right enough, if you’re not troubled with an appetite.”

      The waiter came to clear the table. They were almost the last customers left. The man’s tone and manner jarred upon Joan. She had not noticed it before. Joan ordered coffee and the girl, exchanging a joke with the waiter, added a liqueur.

      “But why should you give up your art?” persisted Joan. It was that was sticking in her mind. “I should have thought that, if only for the sake of the child, you would have gone on with it.”

      “Oh, I told myself all that,” answered the girl. “Was going to devote my life to it. Did for nearly two years. Till I got sick of living like a nun: never getting a bit of excitement. You see, I’ve got the poison in me. Or, maybe, it had always been there.”

      “What’s become of it?” asked Joan. “The child?”

      “Mother’s got it,” answered the girl. “Seemed best for the poor little beggar. I’m supposed to be dead, and my husband gone abroad.” She gave a short, dry laugh. “Mother brings him up to see me once a year. They’ve got quite fond of him.”

      “What are you doing now?” asked Joan, in a low tone.

      “Oh, you needn’t look so scared,” laughed the girl, “I haven’t come down to that.” Her voice had changed. It had a note of shrillness. In some indescribable way she had grown coarse. “I’m a kept woman,” she explained. “What else is any woman?”

      She reached for her jacket; and the waiter sprang forward and helped her on with it, prolonging the business needlessly. She wished him “Good evening” in a tone of distant hauteur, and led the way to the door. Outside the street was dim and silent. Joan held out her hand.

      “No hope of happy endings,” she said with a forced laugh. “Couldn’t marry him I suppose?”

      “He has asked me,” answered the girl with a swagger. “Not sure that it would suit me now. They’re not so nice to you when they’ve got you fixed up. So long.”

      She turned abruptly and walked rapidly away. Joan moved instinctively in the opposite direction, and after a few minutes found herself in a broad well-lighted thoroughfare. A newsboy was shouting his wares.

      “’Orrible murder of a woman. Shockin’ details. Speshul,” repeating it over and over again in a hoarse, expressionless monotone.

      He was selling the papers like hot cakes; the purchasers too eager to even wait for their change. She wondered, with a little lump in her throat, how many would have stopped to buy had he been calling instead: “Discovery of new sonnet by Shakespeare. Extra special.”

      Through swinging doors, she caught glimpses of foul interiors, crowded with men and women released from their toil, taking their evening pleasure. From coloured posters outside the great theatres and music halls, vulgarity and lewdness leered at her, side by side with announcements that the house was full. From every roaring corner, scintillating lights flared forth the merits of this public benefactor’s whisky, of this other celebrity’s beer: it seemed the only message the people cared to hear. Even among the sirens of the pavement, she noticed that the quiet and merely pretty were hardly heeded. It was everywhere the painted and the overdressed that drew the roving eyes.

      She remembered a pet dog that someone had given her when she was a girl, and how one afternoon she had walked with the tears streaming down her face because, in spite of her scoldings and her pleadings, it would keep stopping to lick up filth СКАЧАТЬ