2
They crossed Putney Bridge and made their way towards Hammersmith.
The air was miraculously clear. The detail of the streets was so sharp and bright that it was as if they saw with wonderfully renewed and sensitive eyes. The phenomenon produced a sense of exhilaration. They were conscious of quickened emotion, of a sensation of physical well-being.
“Isn’t it clean?” said Blanche.
“H’m! Funny!” returned Millie. “Like those photographs of foreign places.”
Under their feet was an accumulation of sharp, dry dust, detritus of stone, asphalt and steel. In corners where the fugitive rubbish had found refuge from the driving wind, the dust had accumulated in flat mounds, broken by scraps of paper or the torn flag of some rain-soaked poster that gave an untidy air of human refuse. Across the open way of certain roads the dust lay in a waved pattern of nearly parallel lines, like the ridged sand of the foreshore.
For some time they kept to the pavements from force of habit.
“I say, Mill, don’t you feel adventurous?” asked Blanche.
Millie looked dissatisfied. “It’s so lonely, B.,” was her expression of feeling.
“Never had London all to myself before,” said Blanche.
Near Hammersmith Broadway they saw a tram standing on the rails. Its thin tentacle still clung to the overhead wire that had once given it life, as if it waited there patiently hoping for a renewal of the exhilarating current.
Almost unconsciously Blanche and Millie quickened their pace. Perhaps this was the outermost dying ripple of life, the furthest outpost of the new activity that was springing up in central London.
But the tram was guarded by something that in the hot, still air seemed to surround it with an almost visible mist.
“Eugh!” ejaculated Millie and shrank back. “Don’t go, Blanche. It’s awful!”
Blanche’s hand also had leapt to her face, but she took a few steps forward and peered into the sunlit case of steel and glass. She saw a heap of clothes about the framework of a grotesquely jointed scarecrow, and the gleam of something round, smooth and white.
She screamed faintly, and a filthy dog crept, with a thin yelp, from under the seat and came to the door of the tram. For a moment it stood there with an air that was half placatory, wrinkling its nose and feebly raising a stump of propitiatory tail, then, with another protesting yelp, it crept back, furtive and ashamed, to its unlawful meat.
The two girls, handkerchief to nose, hurried by breathless, with bent heads. A little past Hammersmith Broadway they had their first sight of human life. Two gaunt faces looked out at them from an upper window. Blanche waved her hand, but the women in the house, half-wondering, half-fearful, at the strange sight of these two fancifully dressed girls, shook their heads and drew back. Doubtless there was some secret hoard of food in that house and the inmates feared the demands of charity.
“Well, we aren’t quite the last, anyway,” commented Blanche.
“What were they afraid of?” asked Millie.
“Thought we wanted to cadge, I expect,” suggested Blanche.
“Mean things,” was her sister’s comment.
“Well! we weren’t so over-anxious to have visitors,” Blanche reminded her.
“We didn’t want their beastly food,” complained the affronted Millie.
The shops in Hammersmith did not offer much inducement to exploration. Some were still closely shuttered, others presented goods that offered no temptation, such as hardware; but the majority had already been pillaged and devastated. Most of that work had been done in the early days of the plague when panic had reigned, and many men were left to lead the raids on the preserves of food.
Only one great line of shuttered fronts induced the two girls to pause.
“No need to go to Wisteria for clothes,” suggested Blanche.
“How could we get in?” asked Millie.
“Oh! get in some way easy enough.”
“It’s stealing,” said Millie, and thought of her raid on the Kilburn tobacconist’s.
“You can’t steal from dead people,” explained Blanche; “besides, who’ll have the things if we don’t?”
“I suppose it’d be all right,” hesitated Millie, obviously tempted.
“Well, of course,” returned Blanche and paused. “I say, Mill,” she burst out suddenly. “There’s all the West-end to choose from. Come on!”
For a time they walked more quickly.
In Kensington High Street they had an adventure. They saw a woman decked in gorgeous silks, strung and studded with jewels from head to foot. She walked with a slow and flaunting step, gesticulating, and talking. Every now and again she would pause and draw herself up with an affectation of immense dignity, finger the ropes of jewels at her breast, and make a slow gesture with her hands.
“She’s mad,” whispered Blanche, and the two girls, terrified and trembling, hastily took refuge in a great square cave full of litter and refuse that had once been a grocer’s shop.
The woman passed their hiding-place in her stately progress westward without giving any sign that she was conscious of their presence. When she was nearly opposite to them she made one of her stately pauses. “Queen of all the Earth,” they heard her say, “Queen and Empress. Queen of the Earth.” Her hand went up to her head and touched a strange collection of jewels pinned in her hair, of tiaras and brooches that flashed brighter than the high lights of the brilliant sun. One carelessly fastened brooch fell and she pushed it aside with her foot. “You understand,” she said in her high, wavering voice, “you understand, Queen and Empress, Queen of the Earth.”
They heard the refrain of her gratified ambition repeated as she moved slowly away.
A long submerged memory rose to the threshold of Millie’s mind. “Thieving slut,” she murmured.