The woman thought her a fool.
"Everything paid in advance," said she in a business-like tone. Being satisfied on that point they descended. Presently, after answering a few more odiously piercing questions, Poppy escaped.
CHAPTER XVI
IN the room overlooking the Abbey were spent many dark and ominous hours. By direction of Nurse Selton, Poppy presented herself at No. 10 one dreary October day, and while she stood knocking at the door of the mean house, the grey, sad shadows of Westminster fell across her, and were not lifted by day or night.
Each part of London has its own peculiar atmosphere. Chelsea is cheerful; Kensington reserved; Bayswater extremely refined; Bloomsbury vulgar and pathetic—and a number of other things. Westminster is essentially sad—sad with a noble, stately sadness.
"It cannot grieve as them that have no hope," but its high towers and spires, its statues, cloisters, yards, hospitals, and ancient walls—all have an aloof air of haunting melancholy. Beautiful but unsmiling, Westminster dreams always and sadly of the great, noble past.
So, when Poppy came into it that October day, its brooding spirit enfolded her, and all her life after she was never quite able to lift from her heart the sad, lovely hand of Westminster.
At night, when she could open her little casement-window and gaze out at the profile of the Abbey, and hear sometimes the bells of "sweet St. Margaret's," life went kindly with her. Before leaving Hunter Street, at the last moment, a fair thing had happened. The editor of The Cornfield had sent her a cheque for eight pounds seventeen shillings, in payment for a story which she had written in Sophie Cornell's bungalow and discovered of late at the bottom of a trunk. It was a story full of sunshine and gay, gibing wit, and the editor asked her for more work in the same vein. She had none, indeed, to send, but the request put her in good heart for the future. She essayed to write a little from day to day in the upper chamber; but the atmosphere was wrong for the romantic sun-bitten tales of her own land that seethed within her, and yet evaded her pen when she sought to fasten them to paper. Also, though she had but to close her eyes to see Africa lying bathed in spring sunshine, and to remember every detail of scents and sounds, it broke her heart to write of these things in a room dim with fog and full of a piercing smell that found its way from the kitchen up four flights of stairs and through closed doors—the smell of bloaters.
She brightened her room as much as possible with flowers, and taking down Mrs. Selton's tawdry pictures, had the walls bare, except for a blue print of Watts's Hope—a statuesque-limbed woman, with blindfolded eyes, who sits at the top of the world sounding the last string of a broken viol. On a day when hope was bright in her, Poppy had bought the picture at a little shop in Victoria Street, and now she counted it one of her dearest possessions. Always it comforted and cheered her on.