Chapter XVIII: Tired

It was the fag end of the week in the Dingy City. A heavy weight of dusty grey cloud lay oppressively inert, vaguely resting on the house and tree tops, and underneath the cloud the air seemed stagnantly confined; in its lowest strata people had been breathing it all day--all the week, in fact--in and out of their lungs, so that it was no wonder it felt tired and second-hand and used up.

The air-thirst of their lungs had impelled those who were energetic to go away to where fresh air was to be breathed; but the very tired, and those who lacked the energy for initial impetus, remained. The shops had been closed, and the sunlight beat upon the shuttered eyelids of their windows on the Phryne side of Piccadilly. By that hour on Saturday afternoon Regent Street and Piccadilly were wearing almost a Sunday appearance; Ranelagh and Hurlingham and the new club at Roehampton were crowded with smart people, and for hours past trains from Paddington and Waterloo had been carrying thousands of Panama-hatted, white-trousered men and summer-clad women riverwards. Though the shops were closed, some belated workers, in ones or twos or threes, continued to dribble out from their doors.

Going westward, along Piccadilly, a slight, dark-haired young girl stepped out from one. She was dressed in a thin white blouse that showed the outline of her arms and shoulders; she did not join the crowd of others who were scaling the 'buses on the opposite side of the street, but turned to walk along the pavement parkwards. One fell to speculating as to why she walked. There was no spring or elasticity in her step as if she were doing so for the enjoyment of the exercise. Her feet, in boots with heels slightly rounded on the outside, seemed to drag on that hot pavement. Possibly the 'bus fare was an item of consideration, even though she looked as if she had spent all the morning on her feet in the shop. With thick, dark hair and good eyes, it would have taken very little aid in the way of dress to make her appear quite good-looking. As it was, men turned to look at her as she passed, and one even came across the street, followed, and leered at her as he came abreast; she held on the even tenor of her way, taking no notice of them. On, past the clubs, through the street vocal with the clanking stamp of the horses' hoofs--horses with shining flanks, who cocked their ears, and tossed their foam-dripping mouths as they passed the water-trough.

Wooden stands here and there still disfigured some of the house fronts, and here and there a red pole, looking like a sugar-stick that a child had been sucking, stood as a memento of one of the most hideous schemes of tawdry decoration that a civilised city has ever shown.

At Hyde Park corner she turned in towards the trees, following the stream-crowd direction of other pedestrians. She stopped near the railings, watching the procession of carriages going by. A girl, so like herself that they might almost have been sisters, passed in a high C-springed carriage. Looking from one to the other, the great difference made by little things was apparent. An application of powder-puff to the moist face of the girl at the railings would have worked improvement; her cotton gloves hung down flaccidly from the bare hand which held up her skirt; perhaps some such thought as that of the unfair distribution of C-spring carriages in this world crossed her mind, as she turned away and languidly continued her journey westward under the trees.

The seats were full of a heterogeneous collection of people, all more or less under the drowsy influence of that stagnant air. Here and there men were to be seen asleep in the chairs. Heads in tall hats nodded, debarred the luxury enjoyed by those tramps who lay at full length under the trees on the grass behind. Between those luxuriating on the grass, men lying in their shirt-sleeves, with heads a-resting in the laps of tired-faced women, whose children played or cried noisily around, and those who passed in the procession of carriages, was the intervening line of people from which all sorts of specimens could be taken of the great mediocracy of England--those who could no more afford a carriage than they could afford to lie on the grass. The men's heads were branded with tall hats, remnants and summer sales were suggested in the costumes of many of the women; an occasional glimpse of shoes or hosiery explained why the graceful holding up of the skirts should be unstudied or unknown on this side of the Channel. And their gloves were of the same character as the hose.

Curious specimens were to be found amongst that crowd. A man passed whom I recollect seeing there as long as I can recollect going to the park. Go round the world and back, and here one was certain to find him. I know his income--it is just three hundred a year; except that his whiskers had got a little whiter, he looked just the same as usual. The frock-coat he wore I have a sort of suspicion was the same as I saw on him two years ago. I could swear to the umbrella--at least the handle, because possibly it had been recovered. The frock-coat would obviously not see another season--not that it was showing any tinge of green about the shoulders, far from it. But perhaps it was a feeling of doubtfulness about the coat, which prompted a startling departure in his costume. He had gone in for a pair of those yellow, chamois-coloured gloves which have made their appearance this season. He sauntered along leisurely, watching the people and the carriages with apparently the same degree of interest as he had done for the past ten years. I have heard that long ago he had a good tenor voice, and he used to speak authoritatively of great singers, when they really were great singers, not such as now.... I've never seen him talking to anybody in the park, and I've never seen him smoke; yet his lips are seldom at rest. They have now got a motion something between that of a nervous American with a cigar and a cow chewing the cud. This is the result of the movableness of his artificial teeth. Perhaps an extra visit to his dentist was an item of expenditure not to be lightly incurred.

What appeared to be corresponding feminine types were to be seen in profusion. Women with incomes of one hundred, two hundred, three hundred a year, women who had passed the age either of matrimony or naughtiness. What thousands of friendless and lonely people there must be in this great Dingy City! The class that lies on the grass is more sociable; they are free from a thousand tyrannies that oppress the mediocracy.

The face of a woman dressed in black, seated between two children, seemed familiar; not until she bowed did I recognise her as the wife of an old friend who had been killed in Ladysmith. She used to be the prettiest officer's wife of his smart regiment; and from her account it would have been better if she had not been so pretty, or the regiment so smart. She was now left with barely his pension for herself and the two children to live on.... Yet very bravely, apparently, she had faced the change!

"Oh, I have tried various things for the last couple of years," she said, "but I am afraid there is nothing I can do. I even tried the stage for a time." She used to have a good voice. "But the managers were horrid, and the pay was very small. Then I tried to give music lessons; but what I got was hardly worth the distances I had to go; so now I have to settle down to working out daily problems in domestic economy."

"And all your friends?"

"Oh, they all were very nice and kind; but one cannot go about without being properly dressed, and when one keeps refusing invitations, one gradually becomes forgotten in time. I felt rather lonely just now when I saw the people driving down to Hurlingham. Come along, chicks, we must be going now. You see," she said, "it is a long 'bus ride to our little flat."

At the end of the long free seat, beyond where they had been sitting, was a strange, haggard-looking woman; a pair of cheap cotton gloves showed her thin white wrists, and her black dress looked dusty and draggled. She had a strange haunted look on her face, as if she had left some tragedy behind her at home. Every time a carriage with scarlet-liveried coachmen passed, she got up and stood on the seat. Perhaps she had journeyed there to see the Queen. She looked cross and disappointed each time she stepped down again. On the other side a couple of girls were discussing those that passed in the carriages, and speculating as to who they might be. It was interesting to follow their surmises.

"I think that's Lady X.," one of them said, as a lady, driving a pair of high-steppers, passed.

But it wasn't. The little fellow sitting beside her glowed with the importance of proprietorship; but, smart little chap that he was in Throgmorton Street, he had no idea how many understudies there were to his part, and did not realise that there are syndicates outside those of the City.

"What an awfully common-looking woman!" the other said, as an old lady passed in her carriage behind a sleepy pair of horses, sleepily driven, the fat pug dog at her feet suffering eclipse by the jelly-shaking arc of her redundant figure. She happened not to be common by any means, but one of the brightest and most good-natured members of one of the oldest and most distinguished families in England.

"My goodness, isn't that Lord Roberts?" said the other, as a pair of chestnuts passed, with a rigid and angular lady in the carriage sitting beside a red-faced, white-moustached little man with his nose in the air.

It was not Lord Roberts. He really looked much too important for "Bobs," although he was a military man in a sense, being colonel of a Volunteer regiment.

And how nasally obviously numerous in the procession was the proportion of Jews, and the Jewesses whose plumpness seemed the retribution inflicted by prosperity.

As the smart carriages passed and the high-stepping horses, which were indeed the exception, for the majority ambled along half somnolent from careless coachmanship, one sought in vain for some idea of what they were doing it all for. They did not seem to enjoy it. If they did not enjoy it, why did they do it? The expression that was common and universal to almost all was their seriousness. The Volunteer colonel took himself seriously, as did the fair frailty behind the high-steppers, no less than the best ladies of the land who seemed to be doing it as a traditional duty; but each and every one looked so serious.

How was it that no one seemed to be laughing and enjoying himself out of all the crowd? The Avenue du Bois de Boulogne seemed to belong to another planet. The listless languor of these girls did not at least obviously claim Transatlantic cousinship; the gaiety of a Japanese street seemed so remote as to belong to a planet of another system; and the seriousness seemed reflected in the faces of the great mediocracy sauntering along inside the railings or solemnly seated in the chairs with their faces turned carriagewards.

Here it did not seem the Dingy City; there was colour enough--bright splashes of colour, both colour in movement and colour from the rhododendron bushes, backgrounded with the fresh grass, that an artist was making a picture of over the way; it was not the Dingy City here. At least this was an oasis in it. But here, in this oasis, playground or pleasure-ground, the People of the Serious City was what was writ on their faces.

Five hours later the park was almost deserted, and the gleam of white shirt-front or tulle-foam was caught as a closed carriage passed.

The old bachelor was asleep in his chair at an open window looking across the narrow street at the familiar sooty face of the house opposite.

"Good-night, Tom; I do hope it will be fine for to-morrow," the black-haired girl was saying at her door, holding in her hand the new hat she had been trimming.

The Volunteer colonel was discussing Buller and port across the glittering dinner-field.

The little fair-haired boy had climbed softly out of his cot, and, going over to his mother's bed, whispered coaxingly, "Will 'oo let me sleep with 'oo, mummy?" and when he had nestled his head on her arm, "Now tell me the story how daddy died," and was asleep before the familiar story was finished.