"But who can blame me when my child's life is in danger?" I asked myself again, still tugging at my long gloves.
By the time I had finished dressing the Salvationists were going off to their barracks with their followers behind them. Under the singing I could faintly hear the shuffling of bad shoes, which made a sound like the wash of an ebbing tide over the teeth of a rocky beach—up our side street, past the Women's Night Shelter (where the beds never had time to become cool), and beyond the public-house with the placard in the window saying the ale sold there could be guaranteed to make anybody drunk for fourpence.
"We'll stand the storm, it won't be long,
And we'll anchor in the sweet by-and-by."
I listened and tried to laugh again, but I could not do so now. There was one last spasm of my cruelly palpitating heart, in which I covered my face with both hands, and cried:
"For baby's sake! For my baby's sake!"
And then I opened my bedroom door, walked boldly downstairs and went out into the streets.
MEMORANDUM BY MARTIN CONRAD
I don't call it Chance that this was the very day of my return to England.
If I had to believe that, I should have to disbelieve half of what is best in the human story, and the whole of what we are taught about a guiding Providence and the spiritual influences which we cannot reason about and prove.
We were two days late arriving, having made dirty weather of it in the Bay of Biscay, which injured our propeller and compelled us to lie to, so I will not say that the sense of certainty which came to me off Finisterre did not suffer a certain shock.