1
For some time Mrs Gosling was quite unable to grasp the significance of her daughters’ report on the condition of London. During the past two months she had persuaded herself that the traffic of the town was being resumed and that only Putney was still desolate. She had always disapproved of Putney; it was damp and she had never known anyone who had lived there. It is true that the late lamented George Gosling had been born in Putney, but that was more than half a century ago, the place was no doubt quite different then; and he had left Putney and gone to live in the healthy North before he was sixteen. Mrs Gosling was half inclined to blame Putney for all their misfortunes—it was sure to breed infection, being so near the river and all—and she had become hopeful during the past month that all would be well with them if they could once get back to Kilburn.
“D’you mean to say you didn’t see no one at all?” she repeated in great perplexity.
“Those three we’ve told you about, that’s all,” said Blanche.
“Well, o’ course, they’re all shut up in the ’ouses, still; afraid o’ the plague and ’anging on to what provisions they’ve got put by, same as us,” was the hopeful explanation Mrs Gosling put forward.
“They ain’t,” said Millie, and Blanche agreed.
“Well, but ’ow d’you know?” persisted the mother. “Did you go in to the ’ouses?”
“One or two,” returned Blanche evasively, “but there wasn’t no need to go in. You could see.”
“Are you quite sure there was no shops open? Not in the Strand?” Mrs Gosling laid emphasis on the last sentence. She could not doubt the good faith of the Strand. If that failed her, all was lost.
“Oh! can’t you understand, mother,” broke out Blanche petulantly, “that the whole of London is absolutely deserted? There isn’t a soul in the streets. There’s no cabs or buses or trams or anything, and grass growing in the middle of the road. And all the shops have been broken into, all those that had food in ’em, and——” words failed her. “Isn’t it, Millie?” she concluded lamely.
“Awful,” agreed Millie.
“Well, I can’t understand it,” said Mrs Gosling, not yet fully convinced. She considered earnestly for a few moments and then asked: “Did you go into Charing Cross Post Office? They’d sure to be open.”
“Yes!” lied Blanche, “and we could have taken all the money in the place if we’d wanted, and no one any the wiser.”
Mrs Gosling looked shocked. “I ’ope my gels’ll never come to that,” she said. Her girls, with a wonderful understanding of their mother’s opinions, had omitted to mention their raid on the Knightsbridge emporium.
“No one’d ever know,” said Millie.
“There’s One who would,” replied Mrs Gosling gravely, and strangely enough, perhaps, the two girls looked uneasy, but they were thinking less of the commandments miraculously given to Moses than of the probable displeasure of the Vicar of St John the Evangelist’s Church in Kilburn.
“Well, we’ve got to do something, anyhow,” said Blanche, after a pause. “I mean we’ll have to get out of this and go into the country.”
“We might go to your uncle’s in Liverpool,” suggested Mrs Gosling, tentatively.
“It’s a long walk,” remarked Blanche.
Mrs Gosling did not grasp the meaning of this objection. “Well, I think we could afford third-class,” she said. “Besides, though we ’aven’t corresponded much of late years, I’ve always been under the impression that your uncle is doin’ well in Liverpool; and at such a time as this I’m sure ’e’ll do the right thing, though whether it would be better to let ’im know we’re comin’ or not I’m not quite sure.”
“Oh! dear!” sighed Blanche, “I do wish you’d try to understand, mother. There aren’t any trains. There aren’t any posts or telegraphs. Wherever we go we’ve just got to walk. Haven’t we, Millie?”
Millie began to snivel. “It’s ’orrible,” she said.
“Well I can’t understand it,” repeated Mrs Gosling.
By degrees, however, the controversy took a new shape. Granting for the moment the main contention that London was uninhabitated, Mrs Gosling urged that it would be a dangerous, even a foolhardy, thing to venture into the country. If there was no Government there would be no law and order, was the substance of her argument; government in her mind being represented by its concrete presentation in the form of the utterly reliable policeman. Furthermore, she pointed out, that they did not know anyone in the country, with the exception of a too-distant uncle in Liverpool, and that there would be nowhere for them to go.
“We shall have to work,” said Blanche, who was surely inspired by her glimpse of the silent city.
“Well, we’ve got nearly a ’undred pounds left of what your poor father drew out o’ the bank before we shut ourselves up,” said her mother.
“I suppose we could buy things in the country,” speculated Blanche.
“You seem set on the country for some reason,” said Mrs Gosling with a touch of temper.
“Well, we’ve got to get food,” returned Blanche, raising her voice. “We can’t live on air.”
“And if food’s to be got cheaper in the country than in London,” snapped Mrs Gosling, “my experience goes for nothing, but, of course, you know best, if I am your mother.”
“There isn’t any food in London, cheap or dear, I keep telling you,” said Blanche, and left the room angrily, slamming the door behind her.
Millie sat moodily biting her nails.
“Blanche lets ’er temper get the better of ’er,” remarked Mrs Gosling addressing the spaces of the kitchen in which they were sitting.
“It’s right, worse luck,” said Millie. “We shall have to go. I ’ate it nearly as much as you do.”
The argument thus begun was continued with few intermissions for a whole week. A thunderstorm, followed by two days of overcast weather, came to the support of the older woman. One thing was certain among all these terrible perplexities, namely, that you couldn’t start off for a trip to the country on a wet day.
Meanwhile their stores continued to diminish, and one afternoon Mrs Gosling consented to take a walk with Blanche as far as Hammersmith Broadway.
The sight of that blank desert impressed her. Blanche pointed out the house in which she had seen the two women five days before, but no one was looking out of the window on that afternoon. Perhaps they had fled to the country, or were occupied elsewhere in the house, or perhaps they had left London by the easier way which had become so general in the past few months.
When she returned to the Putney house, Mrs Gosling wept and wished she, too, was dead, but she consented at last to Blanche’s continually urged proposition, in so far as she expressed herself willing to make a move of some sort. She thought they might, at least, go back and have a look at Wisteria Grove. And if Kilburn had, indeed, fallen as low as Hammersmith, then there was apparently no help for it and they must try their luck in the waste and desolation of the country. Perhaps some farmer’s wife might take them in for a time, until they had a chance to look about them. They had nearly a hundred pounds in gold.
The girls found a builder’s trolley in a yard near by, a truck of sturdy build on two wheels with a long handle. It bore marks of having held cement, and there were weeds growing in one end of it, but after it had been brought home and thoroughly scrubbed, it looked quite a presentable means for the transport of the “necessaries” they proposed to take with them.
They made too generous an estimate of essentials at first, piling their truck too high for safety and overtaxing their strength; but that problem, like many others, was finally solved for them by the clear-sighted guidance of necessity.
They started one morning—a Monday if their calculations were not at fault—about two hours after breakfast. Mrs Gosling and Millie pushed behind, and Blanche, the inspired one, went before, pulled by the handle of the pole and gave the others their direction.
It is possible that they were the last women to leave London.
By chance they discovered the Queen of all the Earth on a doorstep near Addison Road. She was quite dead, but they did not despoil her of the jewels with which she was still covered.