Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/85

73 hurried on, past two silver-ornamented women who stood laughing and talking at a corner shop-door, out into a city street again, not streets of this city of horrible shadowiness! But the impression of that place, its shadowed air, its shadowed women, and the mad wolfishness and glitter of their eyes, was upon me all that night, turning my sleep into a nightmare. It was several days before that impression left me.

It was about this time that a vague idea came to me that I had caught some fever. My hands were so hot at nights, and cheeks and ears. I grew so impatient too. One evening I tilted over the table; and the ink-bottle was in the middle of my scattered blacked sheets on the floor, and I was almost crying, and had scarcely heart to pick the things up again.

This was the evening I determined to go down to Norfolk Square and see the house in which Clayton lived. I rose from the table where I had been reading with the light of a coffin-wicked dip-candle (the gas was an extra shilling a week), took up my hat, and set out. It was a long walk. At last I entered Norfolk Square, a long dark oblong, with a long black thin-railed garden in the middle. And, when I found out No. 21, I was facing a lampless eyeless house, up from the area rails of which protruded a towering To Let board. In a few moments, standing, I realised this, and turned away sick at heart. I was quite alone in this city, this careless, cruel London, and, if I were to lie down there in the hollow under the garden rails, and sleep, and never wake again, there would be no one, not a man, not a woman, not a child who … I gave up the thought as I began walking. I had never realised that I was quite alone here before this. The realisation seemed to deaden the soul in me. My later weary wandering of that night saw nothing of what was around me. I reached home somehow, and bed, and sleep.

The next morning I went for a long walk out to Hendon, and when I got there, lying on the grass, felt too languid to move: till at last, I summoned enough resolution to set off home again. It was two when I got there, hungry and yet not hungry, thirsty and yet not thirsty, hot and yet shivering. I sat down: lounged