Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/220

Rh them came by. 'They're all stone deaf,' said the other girl, 'through firing big guns. That's why they all wear ropes down their backs; you pull it when you want to stop one instead of calling out to him, because that’s no good. You try one and see. Go on; he'll only grin and shake hands with you; they're all like that.' I didn’t know, of course, that it was a sort of game that was going then—to get you to do it—until all the Chinks about the Tidal Basin were nearly bar—I mean were frightfully wild, so I pulled the pigtail of the nearest one pretty hard. The other girl was gone like a flash and when the man jumped round at me with an awful yell I nearly tumbled backwards among the stalls there. I crawled through, but I saw him coming after me, so I flew. I went up one street and down another, and then hearing him getting nearer I dodged into a archway. He thought I was on in front and passed me—like that. I always remembered him.” The simple, vigorous studies which adorned her wall, framed in a maze of futile pencillings and inchoate attempts to realise some half-grasped idea, were generally "like that"—memories sharply stencilled by hunger, pain or fear. As Philip had said, everything she drew had passed along Cement Street. Her women, her grim, slatternly, unpleasant, lippy, wisp-haired, real-looking women, hung round its doorposts; her children rolled in its gutters or swung behind its dust-carts; her men—well, she was not imaginative and so her men were either in the act of working or the act of drinking. Phœbe picked out an exception—a long-stretching queue of dejection marshalled at the foot of a tall blank wall. "That?" replied Marianna. "Oh, that's only the men waiting for work at the docks. My father often stood there all day last winter. I used to take him his dinner—when there happened to be any—so that he should not lose his place. That's him, the third from this end."