Love in a Muddle

by Christine Jope-Slade

There is a street that leads round the back of the Savoy Theatre. I ran down that. I don't know what it was like. There were great inky splotches of shadow, they seemed almost glistening wet in their impenetrable blackness. As a rule I mind these pools of darkness. I cross roads to avoid them, and if I must needs pass through them I hurry very quickly and my heart seems to beat in my throat.

This night I did not care; mad kaffirs, Landrus, the denizens of Soho, might nestle in their dozens in the shadows of London—I didn't care.

You can get so absolutely don't-carish that the things that normally terrify and appal you fail even to rouse a flicker.

I reached the Embankment.

I love the Thames Embankment. To me it seems a thousand times more romantic and wonderful than the canals of Venice or the crocodile-y charms of the Nile. The water is so sad and so wicked—the wisest, wickedest thing in England, flowing greyly between the great palaces of commerce; floating little ships and dirty hulks; holding up to the sunset, in places, a tangled mass of sails, a veritable fretwork; the humbler and less ostentatious commerce of the world flows through its veins, dear furtive, dirty, splendid, muddy old river!

I looked over the parapet. Once in my dim, funny little far-away youth, when impressions sort of bedded themselves down on your mind, I had driven in a hansom with mother and father from Blackfriars to Waterloo; and all the electric signs over the warehouses on the bank had streaked the water with colour, and all the Embankment had been fringed with electric lights, and I had cried with the beauty of it, and mother and father had been curious as to the cause of my emotion, and then angry because I wouldn't tell them—but how could I tell them I was crying because somebody's whisky advertisement looked so lovely on the water.

I remembered as I looked in the water and thought how jolly it is to be able to feel sad and romantically melancholy about abstract things, and let yourself go, when the real sorrows come there is always something to prevent you from letting yourself go.

I wondered why I wasn't feeling more awful about Cheneston's marriage to Grace.

I wasn't feeling at all. I was numbed. The pain hadn't begun to work.

An old gentleman passed me and then came back. Instantly the remembrance of London novels I had read flashed into my mind. Was he going to offer to adopt me, or help me save my soul, or thrust five pounds into my hand.