Part 36 (1/2)

'But you never walk out in the daytime.'

'Not often; indeed, I may say never, unless it is to go to the Zoo, or to Jamrach's, which I do about once in three months.'

'Jamrach's!' I said. 'Why, he's the importer of animals, isn't he? Of all places in London that is the one I should most like to see.' He then took me into a long panelled room with bay windows looking over the Thames, furnished with remarkable Chinese chairs and tables. And then we left the house.

In Maud Street a hansom pa.s.sed us; D'Arcy hailed it.

'We will take this to the Bank,' said he, 'and then walk through the East End to Jamrach's. Jump in.'

As we drove off, the sun was s.h.i.+ning brilliantly, and London seemed very animated--seemed to be enjoying itself. Until we reached the Bank our drive was through all the most cheerful-looking and prosperous streets of London. It acted like a tonic on me, and for the first time since my trouble I felt really exhilarated. As to D'Arcy, after we had left behind us what he called the 'stucco world'

of the West End, his spirits seemed to rise every minute, and by the time we reached the Strand he was as boisterous as a boy on a holiday.

On reaching the Bank we dismissed the hansom and proceeded to walk to Ratcliffe Highway. Before reaching it I was appalled at the forbidding aspect of the neighbourhood. It was not merely that the unsavoury character of the streets offended and disgusted me, but the locality wore a sinister aspect which acted upon my imagination in the strangest, wildest way. Why was it that this aspect fairly cowed me, scared me? I felt that I was not frightened on my own account, and yet when I asked myself why I was frightened I could not find a rational answer.

As I saw the sailors come noisily from their boarding-houses; as I saw the loafers standing at the street corners, smoking their dirty pipes and gazing at us; as I saw the tawdry girls, bare-headed or in flaunting hats covered with garish flowers, my thoughts, for no conceivable reason, ran upon Winnie more persistently than they had run upon her since I had abandoned all hope of seeing her in Wales.

The thought came to me that, grievous as was her fate and mine, the tragedy of our lives might have been still worse.

'Suppose,' I said, 'that instead of being lost in the Welsh hills she had been lost here!' I shuddered at the thought.

Again that picture in the Welsh pool came to me, the picture of Winnie standing at a street corner, offering matches for sale. D'Arcy then got talking about Sinfi Lovell and her strange superiority in every respect to the few Gypsy women he had seen.

'She has,' said he, 'mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it is mesmeric. She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly through her voice.'

He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and pa.s.sed us. Not a word more of D'Arcy's talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song

I met in a glade a lone little maid At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.

I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.

'What tune?' he said, 'blowed if I know.'

'Where did you hear it?' I asked.

'Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not far from 'ere for a little while, but she's gone away now, and she used to sing that tune. I allas remember tunes, but I never could make out anything of the words.'

D'Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn where he had got a tune. But I did not tell him why.

After we had pa.s.sed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and j.a.panese statues and carvings.

My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling, but I felt that I must talk about something.

'It is here that you buy your wonderful curiosities and porcelain!' I said.

'Partly; but there is not a curiosity shop in London that I have not ransacked in my time.'

The shop we now entered reminded me of that Raxton Fair which was so much a.s.sociated with Winnie. Its chief attraction was the advent of Wombwell's menagerie. From the first moment that the couriers of that august establishment came to paste their enormous placards on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.'

It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than bra.s.sy sound of the cracked bra.s.s band, delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious.