PART ONE
EVENING
CHAPTER I: SIX O’CLOCK
i
Six o’clock was striking. The darkness by Westminster Bridge was intense; and as the tramcar turned the corner from the Embankment Jenny craned to look at the thickly running water below. The glistening of reflected lights which spotted the surface of the Thames gave its rapid current an air of such mysterious and especially sinister power that she was for an instant aware of almost uncontrollable terror. She could feel her heart beating, yet she could not withdraw her gaze. It was nothing: no danger threatened Jenny but the danger of uneventful life; and her sense of sudden yielding to unknown force was the merest fancy, to be quickly forgotten when the occasion had passed. None the less, for that instant her dread was breathless. It was the fear of one who walks in a wood, at an inexplicable rustle. The darkness and the sense of moving water continued to fascinate her, and she slightly shuddered, not at a thought, but at the sensation of the moment. At last she closed her eyes, still, however, to see mirrored as in some visual memory the picture she was trying to ignore. In a faint panic, hardly conscious to her fear, she stared at her neighbour’s newspaper, spelling out the headings to some of the paragraphs, until the need of such protection was past.
As the car proceeded over the bridge, grinding its way through the still rolling echoes of the striking hour, it seemed part of an endless succession of such cars, all alike crowded with homeward-bound passengers, and all, to the curious mind, resembling ships that pass very slowly at night from safe harbourage to the unfathomable elements of the open sea. It was such a cold still night that the sliding windows of the car were almost closed, and the atmosphere of the covered upper deck was heavy with tobacco smoke. It was so dark that one could not see beyond the fringes of the lamplight upon the bridge. The moon was in its last quarter, and would not rise for several hours; and while the glitter of the city lay behind, and the sky was greyed with light from below, the surrounding blackness spread creeping fingers of night in every shadow.
The man sitting beside Jenny continued to puff steadfastly at his pipe, lost in the news, holding mechanically in his further hand the return ticket which would presently be snatched by the hurrying tram-conductor. He was a shabby middle-aged clerk with a thin beard, and so he had not the least interest for Jenny, whose eye was caught by other beauties than those of assiduous labour. She had not even to look at him to be quite sure that he did not matter to her. Almost, Jenny did not care whether he had glanced sideways at herself or not. She presently gave a quiet sigh of relief as at length the river was left behind and the curious nervous tension—no more lasting than she might have felt at seeing a man balancing upon a high window-sill—was relaxed. She breathed more deeply, perhaps, for a few instants; and then, quite naturally, she looked at her reflection in the sliding glass. That hat, as she could see in the first sure speedless survey, had got the droops. “See about you!” she said silently and threateningly, jerking her head. The hat trembled at the motion, and was thereafter ignored. Stealthily Jenny went back to her own reflection in the window, catching the clearly-chiselled profile of her face, bereft in the dark mirror of all its colour. She could see her nose and chin quite white, and her lips as part of the general colourless gloom. A little white brooch at her neck stood boldly out; and that was all that could be seen with any clearness, as the light was not directly overhead. Her eyes were quite lost, apparently, in deep shadows. Yet she could not resist the delight of continuing narrowly to examine herself. The face she saw was hardly recognisable as her own; but it was bewitchingly pale, a study in black and white, the kind of face which, in a man, would at once have drawn her attention and stimulated her curiosity. She had longed to be pale, but the pallor she was achieving by millinery work in a stuffy room was not the marble whiteness which she had desired. Only in the sliding window could she see her face ideally transfigured. There it had the brooding dimness of strange poetic romance. You couldn’t know about that girl, she thought. You’d want to know about her. You’d wonder all the time about her, as though she had a secret.... The reflection became curiously distorted. Jenny was smiling to herself.
As soon as the tramcar had passed the bridge, lighted windows above the shops broke the magic mirror and gave Jenny a new interest, until, as they went onward, a shopping district, ablaze with colour, crowded with loitering people, and alive with din, turned all thoughts from herself into one absorbed contemplation of what was beneath her eyes. So absorbed was she, indeed, that the conductor had to prod her shoulder with his two fingers before he could recover her ticket and exchange it for another. “‘Arf asleep, some people!” he grumbled, shoving aside the projecting arms and elbows which prevented his free passage between the seats. “Feyuss please!” Jenny shrugged her shoulder, which seemed as though it had been irritated at the conductor’s touch. It felt quite bruised. “Silly old fool!” she thought, with a brusque glance. Then she went silently back to the contemplation of all the life that gathered upon the muddy and glistening pavements below.