Chapter 9

Her strange petition, or rather discourse, concluded, she rose and walked away. The great doors of the church swung heavily behind her as she stepped out and stood once more in the muddy street. It was raining steadily--a fine, cold, penetrating rain. But the coin she held was a talisman against outer discomforts, and she continued to walk on till she came to a clean-looking dairy, where for a couple of pence she was able to replenish the infant’s long ago emptied feeding bottle; but she purchased nothing for herself. She had starved all day, and was now too faint to eat. Soon she entered an omnibus, and was driven to Charing Cross, and alighting at the great station, brilliant with its electric light, she paced up and down outside it, accosting several of the passers-by and imploring their pity. One man gave her a penny; another, young and handsome, with a flushed, intemperate face, and a look of his fast-fading boyhood still about him, put his hand in his pocket and drew out all the loose coppers it contained, amounting to three pennies and an odd farthing, and, dropping them into her outstretched palm, said, half gaily, half boldly: “You ought to do better than that with those big eyes of yours!” She drew back and shuddered; he broke into a coarse laugh, and went his way. Standing where he had left her, she seemed for a time lost in wretched reflections; the fretful, wailing cry of the child she carried roused her, and hushing it softly, she murmured, “Yes, yes, darling, it is too wet and cold for you; we had better go.” And acting suddenly on her resolve, she hailed another omnibus, this time bound for Tottenham Court Road, and was, after some dreary jolting, set down at her final destination--a dirty alley in the worst part of Seven Dials. Entering it, she was hailed with a shout of derisive laughter from some rough-looking men and women, who were standing grouped round a low gin-shop at the corner.

“Here’s Liz!” cried one. “Here’s Liz and the bloomin’ kid!”

“Now, old gel, fork out! How much ‘ave you got, Liz? Treat us to a drop all round!”

Liz waked past them steadily; the conspicuous curve of her upper lip came into full play, and her eyes flashed disdainfully, but she said nothing. Her silence exasperated a tangle-haired, cat-faced girl of seventeen years, who, more than half drunk, sat on the ground, clasping her knees with both arms and rocking herself lazily to and fro.

“Mother Mawks!” cried she, “Mother Mawks! You’re wanted! Here’s Liz come back with your babby!”

As if her words had been a powerful incantation to summon forth an evil spirit, a door in one of the miserable houses was thrown open, and a stout woman, nearly naked to the waist, with a swollen, blotched, and most hideous countenance, rushed out furiously, and darting at Liz, shook her violently by the arm.

“Where’s my shullin’?” she yelled, “where’s my gin? Out with it! Out with my shullin’ an’ fourpence! None of yer sneakin’ ways with me; a bargain’s a bargain all the world over! Yer’re making a fortin’ with my babby--yer know y’ are; pays yer a good deal better than yer old trade! Don’t say it don’t--yer know it do. Yer’ll not find such a sickly kid anywheres, an’ it’s the sickly kids wot pays an’ moves the ‘arts of the kyind ladies an’ good gentlemen”--this with an imitative whine that excited the laughter and applause of her hearers. “Yer’ve got it cheap, I kin tell yer, an’ if yer don’t pay up reg’lar, there’s others that’ll take the chance, an’ thankful too!”

She stopped for lack of breath, and Liz spoke quietly:

“It’s all right, Mother Mawks,” she said, with an attempt at a smile; “here’s your shilling, here’s the four pennies for the gin. I don’t owe you anything for the child now.” She stopped and hesitated, looking down tenderly at the frail creature in her arms; then added, almost pleadingly, “It’s asleep now. May I take it with me to-night?”

Mother Mawks, who had been testing the coins Liz had given her by biting them ferociously with her large yellow teeth, broke into a loud laugh.

“Take it with yer! I like that! Wot imperence! Take it with yer!” Then, with her huge red arms akimbo, she added, with a grin, “Tell yer wot, if yer likes to pay me ‘arf a crown, yer can ‘ave it to cuddle, an’ welcome!”

Another shout of approving merriment burst from the drink-sodden spectators of the little scene, and the girl crouched on the ground removed her encircling hands from her knees to clap them loudly, as she exclaimed:

“Well done, Mother Mawks! One doesn’t let out kids at night for nothing! ‘T ought to be more expensive than daytime!”

The face of Liz had grown white and rigid.

“You know I can’t give you that money,” she said, slowly. “I have not tasted bit or drop all day. I must live, though it doesn’t seem worth while. The child”--and her voice softened involuntarily--“is fast asleep; it’s a pity to wake it, that’s all. It will cry and fret all night, and--and I will make it warm and comfortable if you’d let me.” She raised her eyes hopefully and anxiously. “Will you?”

Mother Mawks was evidently a lady of an excitable disposition. The simple request seemed to drive her nearly frantic. She raised her voice to an absolute scream, thrusting her dirty hands through her still dirtier hair as the proper accompanying gesture to her vituperative oratory.

“Will I! Will I!” she screeched. “Will I let out my hown babby for the night for nuthin’? Will I? No, I won’t! I’ll see yer blowed into the middle of next week fust! Lor’ ‘a’ mussey! ‘ow ‘igh an’ mighty we are gittin’, to be sure! The babby’ll be quiet with you, Miss Liz, will it, hindeed! An’ it will cry an’ fret with its hown mother, will it, hindeed!” And at every sentence she approached Liz more nearly, increasing in fury as she advanced. “Yer low hussy! D’ye think I’d let ye ‘ave my babby for a hour unless yer paid for ‘it? As it is, yer pays far too little. I’m an honest woman as works for my livin’ an’ wot drinks reasonable, better than you by a long sight, with yer stuck-up airs! A pretty drab you are! Gi’ me the babby; ye ‘a’n’t no business to keep it a minit longer.” And she made a grab at Liz’s sheltering shawl.

“Oh, don’t hurt it!” pleaded Liz, tremblingly. “Such a little thing--don’t hurt it!”

Mother Mawks stared so wildly that her blood-shot eyes seemed protruding from her head.

“‘Urt it! Hain’t I a right to do wot I likes with my hown babby? ‘Urt it! Well, I never! Look ‘ere!”--and she turned round on the assembled neighbours--“hain’t she a reg’lar one? She don’t care for the law, not she! She’s keepin’ back a child from its hown mother!” And with that she made a fierce attack on the shawl, and succeeded in dragging the infant from Liz’s reluctant arms. Wakened thus roughly from its slumbers, the poor mite set up a feeble wailing; its mother, enraged at the sound, shook it violently till it gasped for breath.

“Drat the little beast!” she cried. “Why don’t it choke an’ ‘ave done with it!”

And, without heeding the terrified remonstrances of Liz, she flung the child roughly, as though it were a ball, through the open door of her lodgings, where it fell on a heap of dirty clothes, and lay motionless; its wailing had ceased.

“Oh, baby, baby!” exclaimed Liz, in accents of poignant distress. “Oh, you have killed it, I am sure! Oh, you are cruel, cruel! Oh, baby, baby!”

And she broke into a tempestuous passion of sobs and tears. The bystanders looked on in unmoved silence. Mother Mawks gathered her torn garments round her with a gesture of defiance, and sniffed the air as though she said, “Any one who wants to meddle with me will get the worst of it.” There was a brief pause; suddenly a man staggered out of the gin-shop, smearing the back of his hand across his mouth as he came--a massively built, ill-favoured brute, with a shock of uncombed red hair and small ferret-like eyes. He stared stupidly at the weeping Liz, then at Mother Mawks, finally from one to the other of the loafers who stood by. “Wot’s the row?” he demanded, quickly. “Wot’s up? ‘Ave it out fair! Joe Mawks ‘ll stand by and see fair game. Fire away, my hearties! fire, fire away!” And, with a chuckling idiot laugh, he dived into the pocket of his torn corduroy trousers and produced a pipe. Filling this leisurely from a greasy pouch, with such unsteady fingers that the tobacco dropped all over him, he lighted it, repeating, with increased thickness of utterance, “Wot’s the row! ‘Ave it out fair!”

“It’s about your babby, Joe!” cried the girl before mentioned, jumping up from her seat on the ground with such force that her hair came tumbling all about her in a dark, dank mist, through which her thin, eager face spitefully peered. “Liz has gone crazy! She wants your babby to cuddle!” And she screamed with sudden laughter. “Eh, eh, fancy! Wants a babby to cuddle!”

The stupefied Joe blinked drowsily and sucked the stem of his pipe with apparent relish. Then, as if he had been engaged in deep meditation on the subject, he removed his smoky consoler from his mouth, and said, “W’y not? Wants a babby to cuddle? All right! Let ‘er ‘ave it--w’y not?”

At these words Liz looked up hopefully through her tears, but Mother Mawks darted forward in raving indignation.

“Yer great drunken fool!” she yelled to her besotted spouse, “aren’t yer ashamed of yerself? Wot! let out babby for a whole night for nuthin’? It’s lucky I’ve my wits about me, an’ I say Liz sha’n’t ‘ave it! There, now!”

The man looked at her, and a dogged resolution darkened his repulsive countenance. He raised his big fist, clinched it, and hit straight out, giving his infuriated wife a black eye in much less than a minute. “An’ I say she shall ‘ave it. Where are ye now?”

In answer to the query Mother Mawks might have said that she was “all there,” for she returned her husband’s blow with interest and force, and in a couple of seconds the happy pair were engaged in a “stand-up” fight, to the intense admiration and excitement of all the inhabitants of the little alley. Every one in the place thronged to watch the combatants, and to hear the blasphemous oaths and curses with which the battle was accompanied.

In the midst of the affray a wizened, bent old man, who had been sitting at his door sorting rags in a basket, and apparently taking no heed of the clamour around him, made a sign to Liz.

“Take the kid now,” he whispered. “Nobody’ll notice. I’ll see they don’t cry arter ye.”

Liz thanked him mutely by a look, and rushing to the house where the child still lay, seemingly inanimate, on the floor among the soiled clothes, she caught it up eagerly, and hurried away to her own poor garret in a tumble-down tenement at the farthest end of the alley. The infant had been stunned by its fall, but under her tender care, and rocked in the warmth of her caressing arms, it soon recovered, though when its blue eyes opened they were full of a bewildered pain, such as may be seen in the eyes of a shot bird.

“My pet! my poor little darling!” she murmured over and over again, kissing its wee white face and soft hands; “I wish I was your mother--Lord knows I do! As it is, you’re all I’ve got to care for. And you do love me, baby, don’t you? just a little, little bit!” And as she renewed her fondling embraces, the tiny, sad-visaged creature uttered a low, crooning sound of baby satisfaction in response to her endearments--a sound more sweet to her ears than the most exquisite music, and which brought a smile to her mouth and a pathos to her dark eyes, rendering her face for the moment almost beautiful. Holding the child closely to her breast, she looked cautiously out of her narrow window, and perceived that the connubial fight was over. From the shouts of laughter and plaudits that reached her ears, Joe Mawks had evidently won the day; his wife had disappeared from the field. She saw the little crowd dispersing, most of those who composed it entered the gin-shop, and very soon the alley was comparatively quiet and deserted. By-and-bye she heard her name called in a low voice: “Liz! Liz!”

She looked down and saw the old man who had promised her his protection in case Mother Mawks should persecute her. “Is that you, Jim? Come upstairs; it’s better than talking out there.” He obeyed, and stood before her in the wretched room, looking curiously both at her and the baby. A wiry, wolfish-faced being was Jim Duds, as he was familiarly called, though his own name was the aristocratic and singularly inappropriate one of James Douglas. He was more like an animal than a human creature, with his straggling gray hair, bushy beard, and sharp teeth protruding like fangs from beneath his upper lip. His profession was that of an area thief, and he considered it a sufficiently respectable calling.

“Mother Mawks has got it this time,” he said, with a grin which was more like a snarl. “Joe’s blood was up, and he pounded her nigh into a jelly. She’ll leave ye quiet now; so long as ye pay the hire reg’lar ye’ll have Joe on yer side. If so be as there’s a bad day, ye’d better not come home at all.”

“I know,” said Liz; “but she’s always had the money for the child, and surely it wasn’t much to ask her to let me keep it warm on such a cold night as this.”

Jim Duds looked meditative. “Wot makes yer care for that babby so much?” he asked. “‘T ain’t yourn.”

Liz sighed.

“No,” she said, sadly. “That’s true. But it seems something to hold on to, like. See what my life has been!” She stopped, and a wave of colour flushed her pallid features. “From a little girl, nothing but the streets--the long, cruel streets! and I just a bit of dirt on the pavement--no more; flung here, flung there, and at last swept into the gutter. All dark--all useless!” She laughed a little. “Fancy, Jim! I’ve never seen the country!”

“Nor I,” said Jim, biting a piece of straw reflectively. “It must be powerful fine, with naught but green trees an’ posies a-blowin’ an’ a growin’ everywheres. There ain’t many kitching areas there, though, I’m told.”

Liz went on, scarcely heeding him: “The baby seems to me like what the country must be--all harmless and sweet and quiet; when I hold it so, my heart gets peaceful somehow--I don’t know why.”

Again Jim looked speculative. He waved his bitten straw expressively.

“Ye’ve had ‘sperience, Liz. Hain’t ye met no man like wot ye could care fur?”

Liz trembled, and her eyes grew wild..

“Men!” she cried, with bitterest scorn--“no men have come my way, only brutes!”

Jim stared, but was silent; he had no fit answer ready. Presently Liz spoke again, more softly:

“Jim, do you know I went into a great church to-day?”

“Worse luck!” said Jim, sententiously. “Church ain’t no use nohow as far as I can see.”

“There was a figure there, Jim,” went on Liz, earnestly, “of a Woman holding up a Baby, and people knelt down before it. What do you s’pose it was?”

“Can’t say!” replied the puzzled Jim. “Are ye sure ‘t was a church? Most like ‘t was a mooseum.”

“No, no!” said Liz. “‘T was a church for certain; there were folks praying in it.”

“Ah, well,” growled Jim, gruffly, “much good it may do ‘em! I’m not of the prayin’ sort. A woman an’ a babby, did ye say? Don’t ye get such cranky notions into yer head, Liz! Women an’ babbies are common enough--too common, by a long chalk; an’ as for prayin’ to ‘em--” Jim’s utter contempt and incredulity were too great for further expression, and he turned away, wishing her a curt “Good-night!”

“Good-night!” said Liz, softly; and long after he had left her she still sat silent, thinking, thinking, with the baby asleep in her arms, listening to the rain as it dripped, dripped heavily, like clods falling on a coffin lid. She was not a good woman--far from it. Her very motive in hiring the infant at so much a day was entirely inexcusable; it was simply to gain money upon false pretences--by exciting more pity than would otherwise have been bestowed on her had she begged for herself alone, without a child in her arms. At first she had carried the baby about to serve as a mere trick of her trade, but the warm feel of its little helpless body against her bosom day after day had softened her heart toward its innocence and pitiful weakness, and at last she had grown to love it with a strange, intense passion--so much that she would willingly have sacrificed her life for its sake. She knew that its own parents cared nothing for it, except for the money it brought them through her hands; and often wild plans would form in her poor tired brain--plans of running away with it altogether from the roaring, devouring city, to some sweet, humble country village, there to obtain work and devote herself to making this little child happy. Poor Liz! Poor, bewildered, heart-broken Liz! Ignorant London heathen as she was, there was one fragrant flower blossoming in the desert of her soiled and wasted existence--the flower of a pure and guileless love for one of those “little ones,” of whom it hath been said by an all-pitying Divinity unknown to her, “Suffer them to come unto Me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

The dreary winter days crept on apace, and, as they drew near Christmas, dwellers in the streets leading off the Strand grew accustomed of nights to hear the plaintive voice of a woman, singing in a peculiarly thrilling and pathetic manner some of the old songs and ballads familiar and dear to the heart of every Englishman--“The Banks of Allan Water,” “The Bailiff’s Daughter,” “Sally in our Alley,” “The Last Rose of Summer.” All these well-loved ditties she sang one after the other, and, though her notes were neither fresh nor powerful, they were true and often tender, more particularly in the hackneyed, but still captivating, melody of “Home, Sweet Home.” Windows were opened, and pennies freely showered on the street vocalist, who was accompanied in all her wanderings by a fragile infant, which she seemed to carry with especial care and tenderness. Sometimes, too, in the bleak afternoons, she would be seen wending her way through mud and mire, setting her weary face against the bitter east wind, and patiently singing on; and motherly women, coming from the gay shops and stores, where they had been purchasing Christmas toys for their own children, would often stop to look at the baby’s pinched, white features with pity, and would say, while giving their spare pennies, “Poor little thing! Is it not very ill?” And Liz, her heart freezing with sudden terror, would exclaim, hurriedly, “Oh, no, no! It is always pale; it is just a little bit weak, that’s all!” And the kindly questioners, touched by the large despair of her dark eyes, would pass on and say no more. And Christmas came--the birthday of the Child Christ--a feast the sacred meaning of which was unknown to Liz; she only recognized it as a sort of large and somewhat dull bank-holiday, when all London devoted itself to church-going and the eating of roast beef and plum-pudding. The whole thing was incomprehensible to her mind, but even her sad countenance was brighter than usual on Christmas eve, and she felt almost gay, for had she not, by means of a little extra starvation on her own part, been able to buy a wondrous gold-and-crimson worsted bird suspended from an elastic string, a bird which bobbed up and down to command in the most lively and artistic manner? And had not her hired baby actually laughed at the clumsy toy--laughed an elfish and weird laugh, the first it had ever indulged in? And Liz had laughed too, for pure gladness in the child’s mirth, and the worsted bird became a sort of uncouth charm to make them both merry.

But after Christmas had come and gone, and the melancholy days, the last beating of the failing pulse of the Old Year, throbbed slowly and heavily away, the baby took upon its wan visage a strange expression--the solemn expression of worn-out and suffering age. Its blue eyes grew more solemnly speculative and dreamy, and after a while it seemed to lose all taste for the petty things of this world and the low desires of mere humanity. It lay very quiet in Liz’s arms; it never cried, and was no longer fretful, and it seemed to listen with a sort of mild approval to the tones of her voice as they rang out in the dreary streets, through which, by day and night, she patiently wandered. By-and-by the worsted bird, too, fell out of favour; it jumped and glittered in vain; the baby surveyed it with an unmoved air of superior wisdom, just as if it had suddenly found out what real birds were like, and was not to be deceived into accepting so poor an imitation of nature. Liz grew uneasy, but she had no one in whom to confide her fears. She had been very regular in her payments to Mother Mawks, and that irate lady, kept in order by her bull-dog of a husband, had been of late very contented to let her have the child without further interference. Liz knew well enough that no one in the miserable alley where she dwelt would care whether the baby were ill or not. They would tell her, “The more sickly the better for your trade.” Besides, she was jealous; she could not endure the idea of any one tending it or touching it but herself. Children were often ailing, she thought, and if left to themselves without doctor’s stuff they recovered sometimes more quickly than they had sickened. Thus soothing her inward tremors as best she might, she took more care than ever of her frail charge, stinting herself than she might nourish it, though the baby seemed to care less and less for mundane necessities, and only submitted to be fed, as it were, under patient and silent protest.

And so the sands in Time’s hour-glass ran slowly but surely away, and it was New-Year’s eve. Liz had wandered about all day, singing her little repertoire of ballads in the teeth of a cruel, snow-laden wind--so cruel that people otherwise charitably disposed had shut close their doors and windows, and had not even heard her voice. Thus the last span of the Old Year had proved most unprofitable and dreary; she had gained no more than sixpence; how could she return with only that humble amount to face Mother Mawks and her vituperative fury? Her throat ached; she was very tired, and, as the night darkened from pale to deep and starless shadows, she strolled mechanically from the Strand to the Embankment, and after walking some little distance she sat down in a corner close to Cleopatra’s Needle--that mocking obelisk that has looked upon the decay of empires, itself impassive, and that still appears to say, “Pass on, ye puny generations! I, a mere carven block of stone, shall outlive you all!” For the first time in all her experience the child in her arms seemed a heavy burden. She put aside her shawl and surveyed it tenderly; it was fast asleep, a small, peaceful smile on its thin, quiet face. Thoroughly worn out herself, she leaned her head against the damp stone wall behind her, and clasping the infant tightly to her breast, she also slept--the heavy, dreamless sleep of utter fatigue and physical exhaustion. The solemn night moved on, a night of black vapours; the pageant of the Old Year’s deathbed was unbrightened by so much as a single star. None of the hurrying passers-by perceived the weary woman where she slept in that obscure corner, and for a long while she rested there undisturbed. Suddenly a vivid glare of light dazzled her eyes; she started to her feet half asleep, but still instinctively retaining the infant in her close embrace. A dark form, buttoned to the throat and holding a brilliant bull’s-eye lantern, stood before her.

“Come now,” said this personage, “this won’t do! Move on!”

Liz smiled faintly and apologetically.

“All right!” she answered, striving to speak cheerfully, and raising her eyes to the policeman’s good-natured countenance. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep here. I don’t know how I came to do it. I must go home, of course.”