The Red Book Magazine/Volume 28/Number 5/The Mirror of Nature

NSTINCTIVELY the man drew back, and the taxicab, unconscious of his escape, cut experimentally through the thick, yellow fog that had settled over London.

The man gave a sort of laugh as he felt his way across the wide street to the embankment of the silent Thames. The instinct of self-preservation in one who was on his way to commit suicide seemed almost comic in its irony.

He put a cold hand on the slimy stone-work and turned away from the slow, thick water in which he had at last made up his mind to bring failure to an end. He faced the city over whose hard pavements he had trod hungrily and shabbily in search of bread for many humiliating weeks, and waved his hat. The fog blotted its all-too-familiar features from his sight, but there it lay behind the temporary yellow curtain like a great octopus in uneasy sleep.

Big Ben struck twelve, and its muffled reverberations seemed to the intending suicide like the voice of a chaplain to a man beneath the gallows. They were the last sounds he would hear this side of the grave.

He threw his hat away, faced the water that he could not see and put both his hands on the stone-work, to vault into—peace. He fetched his hands back with a jerk. One of them had pressed down something that was small and warm and soft. A frightened and petulant voice came quickly.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“N-nothing,” he answered, stammering a little. “I beg pardon.”

“Then go away and leave me alone.”

He was too accustomed to be ordered to move on, to refuse to obey. But he turned back quickly, a sudden curiosity all alert, and tiptoed to his old place. He could just see the blurred outline of a woman attempting to climb the embankment. “Good God,” he said, before he was aware that the words were in his brain, “don't do that!”

There was no anger in the voice this time—only weariness and a sort of appeal. “Oh, do go away. I'm not interfering with you.”

“Yes, you are!”

“How am I?” And then after a pause, a quick, interested query: “Were you going to—”

“Yes.”

It was not so much a laugh as a sneer. “I beg your pardon,” she said.

“Oh, well, it can't be helped. It's a bit difficult to work oneself up to the necessary pitch again—that's all.”

“I sha'n't find it difficult.”

“It's taken me a week. I've looked—over there—for hours, every night.”

“I made up my mind half an hour ago and came straight here.”

“Well, you've got more pluck than I have.”

“Pluck? To me it requires more pluck to live than to die.”

“Does it? I'd give five years of my life to be able to live.”

SILENCE followed these strange confidences—a little silence broken only by the throb of the city's sleeping heart.

And then this man and woman who had met for the first time by accident on the very edge of life stood facing, mutually curious to see what manner of person the other was, each filled with a kind of morbid desire to know the reason that had sent the other to this place. But the fog hung like a pall between and over them, and from below came the soft lap of the outgoing water as it fingered the shiny wall.

The woman moved very close to the man and peered into his face. “Are you—afraid?” she asked.

“Afraid of what?”

“Oh, you know what they say about taking one's life.”

“Yes. Well—I've been too long up against actual things to put much store by what people say.”

“But—don't you believe in God?”

“Implicitly; but I've been so much punished for living that God can't have any left for me.”

“And yet you'd give five years for life?”

“Yes—seven, ten!”

“And I've never been really punished and have enough to make most women happy, and death's the only thing I need... Come with me,” she added, seized by a new idea.

“Where?”

“To my rooms.”

“Why?”

She gave an ironical laugh. “We may be able to shed a little mutual philosophy upon the question of life and death.”

“Wait a second.”

The man groped his way to the gutter. Crouching in a monkeyish attitude, he searched there for something. It was his hat. If he was to return to life, convention demanded that his head should be covered, even when fog made it impossible to see whether he was hatted or not. He told the woman why he had kept her waiting.

“Anyone would think you had been a gentleman,” she said, scoffingly.

“I am still,” he answered.

O Adam Street,” she said.

He took her arm to cross the road. “Forgive me, but this is necessary.”

In this familiar manner these strangers adventured through the fog. It had made a thick pattern of beads on the fur round the woman's neck, and on the hair over her ears. It seemed to have drilled its insidious way into the very marrow of the waistcoatless man.

They found the railings of the Temple Gardens. At regular intervals the bleary glance of a lamp fell distantly upon them, and from time to time a taxi-cab insinuated itself along with frequent warnings. One of them seemed to the man, whose imagination was as keenly alive as that of a child in a new place, to make sounds like a lonely cow from which her calf had strayed.

The man and the woman hugged the wall until they came to one of the insalubrious turnings that lead to the somber streets that lie behind the Strand. The woman found herself peculiarly amused at her eagerness to see the face and eyes of the man whose unexpected pleading had arrested her. The man plodded stiffly on, hoping there might be something to eat at the end of the journey.

With heavy tread a policeman passed them by, with a husky “Good night.” Not for months had the man heard such words from such a mouth. He had grown used to “Now then, you there, pass along, pass along,” and he had mechanically passed along to the only possible terminus.

Adam Street was well enough known to him, even though the fog had rubbed out its familiar lines. He had often stolen a little sleep crouched chin-to-knees in the porticoes of its houses, and snatched at crusts from the nightly offal-bins on its curbstones.

“Here,” said the woman, drawing away her arm.

He followed her up the worn stone steps of one of the bigger houses which he knew to be divided into offices. His hungry eyes had often rested sulkily on the brass plate on the door, “Society for the Supply of Clothing to the Natives of West Africa.” He heard the key turn in the lock, and he blinked as a stream of light from an electric lamp in the wide, dignified hall met his eyes.

“Follow me up. I'm on the third floor.”

He followed. The staircase was oak, and the wall was paneled. The fog had crept in and hung batlike in the corners. The offices on the first floor belonged to a Bible society and on the second to the monthly organ of the Christian Scientists. On the large door of the third floor the words Miss Sylvia MacDonald were painted in black letters. The room was large and lofty. Its furniture was sparse but good. An open typewriter with a sheet of paper upon its roller sat rather harshly on an oak table. It was surrounded by wicker baskets bulging with papers. Several straight-backed chairs stood coldly against the walls, which were undecorated by three calendars advertising life-insurance offices. A bunch of electric lights glared from the ceiling, and a coal fire was flickering to its death upon the hearth. Brown linoleum covered the floor, and the man noticed two large wastebaskets which stood in dignified aloofness.

“Now look at me,” said the woman, planting herself deliberately under the lights.

When the man looked, his curiosity was further stimulated by the sight of a tall, well-dressed woman about whom there was an unmistakable air of breeding, independence and intellect. Her face was still beautiful, although it was now lined by hard work, middle age and discontent. He thought that she looked like a thrush which had been trapped in its youth and hung in a too-small cage in a house in a city. How many years must have passed over her head since she had sung under the free sky!

“I would rather you didn't look at me,” said the man. He put up a thin hand and held his worn and shiny coat together to hide the fact that he was minus waistcoat, and he tried to place his feet so that his gaping boots would escape her examining eyes. His black hair, streaked with white, had not been cut for weeks. It was plain that he had slept and tramped. wet and fine, and sat about for months and months in that once respectable suit; and it was plainer still that he had mended and brushed and turned that suit until it was beyond all hope. But in the eyes that looked almost doglike from above a straggling Oberamergau beard, there was such a flame of optimism and love of life that something rose in the woman's throat and almost choked her.

“Come in here, brother,” she said.

With ready obedience he followed her into another room—and drew up short with a little cry.

T was years since he had stood in a place so warm and companionable and welcoming. It was, indeed, the very image of the room of which he had dreamed as he lay in dark archways and disused pits. There were the wide fireplace with its burning logs and the deep armchairs within a long arm's-reach of closely lined bookshelves. There were the etchings and engravings and the nice pieces of old oak, black with age, and the settee, long and wide and cushion-stacked, on which to stretch and read. A reading-lamp, closely shaded, lighted the room softly.

With wistful friendliness and admiration the piece of superfluous human flotsam gazed about him. His thin hands, with their long, unpractical fingers, went out to touch things; his sensitive, helpless nostrils quivered; and his weak, idealistic mouth took on a little smile as he looked and looked. Everything around him had belonged to him in his dreams. It was like coming home again.

“And yet you could go down to the river!” he said reproachfully.

Miss Sylvia MacDonald went to a cupboard. “I am thirty-six,” she said. “For sixteen years I have been working for this—alone.”

She held out a box of cigarettes. “Will you smoke?”

He did not take one—he pounced upon it, and lighted it eagerly. She had not seen anyone eating smoke before.

“Sit near the fire,” she said, and pointed to a chair; and when he took it and sat in a rather nervous attitude with his pathetic boots tucked under him, she opened another of her wonderful cupboards and produced a tin of biscuits. The man trembled at the sight of them, and moved uneasily.

A wave of pity ran over the woman. This poor starved optimist, to whom, even in his present condition of utter down-and-out-ness, life was good, twitched her away from her morbid and dangerous self-analysis and the selfish disillusion which had developed into hysteria. The sudden intimate contact with a state of mental starvation and physical need into which she had never been driven, made her human and reawaked her sense of perspective. Her own loneliness and isolation from love could not be compared with the hideous loneliness and lovelessness of this creature of the crowded streets.

“I'm sorry they're all I have in my rooms,” she said softly.

He did not wait to thank her. He ate like a starved animal, coughing and spluttering a little in his haste. She watched him, fascinated. She had been hungry, in such a way, for love and companionship. She would have fallen as pathetically upon an outstretched hand.

At last, with a shamefaced apology, he pushed the half-emptied tin away and with dreadful humility set about picking up the crumbs on the rug at his feet.

HEN the woman spoke again, there was less of the bitter antagonism against fate than there had been, in her clear voice.

“I'm thirty-six,” she repeated. “For sixteen years I have worked for this—alone.”

“How splendid to have had the work.”

“Splendid? At the age of twenty I came from the country, where all my blood had danced from exercise, and all my dreams were filled with romance and idealism and the sound of children's voices.”

“So did I.”

“My father died and left us penniless—my mother and me.”

“Mine died when I was at Oxford, and I walked to London. I had the vast fortune of a hundred pounds and the infinite capacity for doing nothing.”

“I,” went on the woman, apparently not heeding him, “got a place in the office of an old cousin who did research work in the British Museum, and every day since then, for sixteen years, I've kept hunger from my door by poring over old volumes in that detestable mausoleum of dead things.”

He was about to speak again in this queer contest of misfortune. She waved him down.

“For sixteen years I have been digging into dead heaps for the worms of information. For sixteen years I have bent over a metaphorical spade for the benefit of other people and have dug in, one by one, my youth, my good looks, my health, my ideals and my hopes of motherhood. All these have fallen into the little holes I have never been able to stop making in that vast pile of matter. From my rooms to the Museum, from the Museum to my rooms—that has been my daily journey alone, always alone. From one street into another street and back again, for sixteen years, with lonely, working nights in two small, shabby rooms—that is the story of a life that might have been blessed with love and laughter and clinging hands..... And when, a week ago, I woke from the state of coma in which monotony had put me, to find that my business had grown large enough to enable me to take these rooms and furnish them as you see, and that I had an income large enough to permit me to employ an assistant to relieve me of the drudgery, what do you think happened?”

Without an instant's pause, the man's answer came quietly.

“You went into the nearest church and thanked God on your knees.”

YLVIA MACDONALD got up. Her face was as white as the half-finished sheet of paper that remained on the roll of her machine in the other room. She gave an hysterical gesture as though flinging all her years of dingdong toil into the fire.

“I was like the man who had spent his youth and strength in climbing an apparently unassailable mountain to feast his eyes on the view, only to be struck blind at the top.”

“I don't understand,” said the optimist.

“Don't you? Then I'll tell you the truth in words that are dreadfully simple: For sixteen years I have plodded and plodded, day and night, to reach the goal of my ambition—these rooms, a good income and an assistant; and having arrived, I found this evening, half an hour before you touched my hand in the dark, that it was all Dead Sea fruit. It is tasteless. I am too old to enjoy it. My sense of joy has been eaten by those museum-worms.”

She sat down again, heavily, and covered her face with her delicate, capable hands.

The man bent forward and watched her intently for several moments. On his rough way through life he had been able to help several brother-wanderers, although he had never been able to help himself. For a brief period the woman opposite had led him into the room of his dreams and put food into his hand. He saw that there was something that he might do before he fumbled his way back to the riverside whose waters called him against his will: He could put sanity back into this brave woman's tired mind. He could leave her, perhaps, with the seed of renewed hope and content and gratitude in her overworked brain. At any rate, he would do his best.

So, very quietly and simply, he began to draw a relentless picture of his own life and to paint into its dark corners the amazing sunniness that the buffets of life had never been able to hit out of his childlike character. If his last act on earth were to enable this poor woman to adjust herself to fate without casting away her whole preceding life, how fortunate he would be! The momentary hole that he must make in the unconscious water might then be marked by the silver reflection of a star.

He said: “When my hundred pounds had been eaten up and I found to my astonishment that I was penniless and without a job, I left the hard streets of this cruel city for the country roads, with a song on my lips. I carried all my possessions in a bundle over my shoulder. My only check-book was my joy in living, and my only bank was my heart. I made hay for honest farmers, and picked hops and dug potatoes and chopped wood and broke stones. I walked the river towpath and pulled boats along and opened lock-gates. So long as summer lasted, I ate my bread and cheese to the orchestra of the birds and was sent to sleep under haystacks by the quiet song of the stars. The beauty of the trees and sky, the intimate friendship of birds and beasts, the rough charity of men and women, made the wet nights less wet, and hunger less intense.

“In the winter I tramped back to the city to sell papers, and carry and run for cabs. When luck was in, I dossed beneath a roof. Do you know the word doss? You buy it for threepence and lie on a mattress among the brothers of your kind. You may wonder why, as a gentleman, duly educated, these were the only things that I could find to do for bread? I had been educated not to work, you see, and dropped back to the land and streets.

“All my summers have found me in the lanes and all my winters in the gutters. In the country I have moved from place to place as freely as a stray dog. In the cities I have been moved on and swept up with the garbage. But now the time has come when exposure has made me delicate. One lung has gone, and one foot's in the grave. The end of my way of life is suicide. Somehow a gentleman does not care to die in a pauper's hospital and be flung into a nameless hole. If I could, I would gladly go on living, for the world is very beautiful and there are others who need a hand. There are always others.”

He stopped and got up slowly, coughing badly. He saw that the woman's eyes were on him wonderingly, admiringly, pityingly.

“I am going back alone,” he added, holding out his hand. “Wait until the summer comes, and go into the country. The birds will sing for you, and the stars send their messages; and all young growing things will hold up the. mirror of nature to you, and you will begin again. Good-by.”

“No,” said Miss MacDonald, “you're too valuable to die. I'll only say good night.”

The man began to tremble a little.

“I told you I can afford an assistant. Do you want me to see the country again? Then continue to assist. Take your place in my office. I engage you from to-night. It was God who placed your hand on mine out there just now in the dark. Try and help me to lift the fog. In return for your life, I will take five and even ten of your years. Is that a bargain?”

The man bowed, and his tears fell upon the floor among the other crumbs.

The woman pointed to the settee, which bulged with cushions. “Doss there,” she said. “Good night.

And when the man was alone, he stood up with his eyes alight in the room of his dreams. The unsatisfied river moved on to the sea.