Moira came out into the busy streets; she saw here the last chance of touching that old life gone from her. Alice unapproachable, and Jimmy wandering London friendless; the prospect was not a cheerful one.
She went home to Patience, and took up again the life she had striven to change—took it up with a new humility and a new gratitude.
CHAPTER II
JIMMY—AND A MATTER OF FOOD
London, as we already know, had held out hands of welcome to the innocent Jimmy, and had promised great things to him; moreover, changing her name to Fortune, she had seemed to tell him that in a little time she would be his for the mere wooing. He soon discovered, however, what manner of jade she was, and how shamefully she had deceived him.
It must be said at once that Mr. Baffall had behaved rather well. Remembering complacently his own first struggles in the great city—struggles intimately connected even now in his mind with a shortage of food and of clothing—he decided that the boy was starting with good prospects—far better, indeed, than those his patron had enjoyed. The boy was put into a good business, and a sufficient sum was to be paid for his lodging in a modest way; Jimmy had but to work within those carefully-arranged lines that had been drawn for him, and all would be well. He would rise step by step, and presently take his place, with his advancing years, in the great army of men in that particular line of life. Mr. Baffall shook his head at the thought of the possibilities of Jimmy rising to be a second Baffall on such beginnings; such things did not happen every day. But for the rest he was well provided for, and there was an end of the matter.
Jimmy's lodging was in a sort of rough-and-tumble haphazard boarding-house in the neighbourhood of Camden Town—a boarding-house crowded with young men and half-grown youths, and presided over by a lady of untidy appearance and rasping voice, and with an air of being always in a hurry. She was assisted in the management of the place by two haphazard, scrambling, hurrying servant-maids—never quite clean (save on special occasions, when they managed to get out for an hour or so) and always haggard and tired-looking. Everyone appeared to be in a great hurry in the morning, from the time when the first young man clattered downstairs, and plunged at his breakfast, until the time when the more aristocratic, who did not begin work until ten o'clock, hurried away from the house; and everyone appeared very tired at night, what time that strangely composite meal known as a "meat tea" was set before the returning workers. Jimmy discovered, something to his dismay, that this, outside the actual life of the warehouse in that turning off Cheapside, was to be his life.
The thing was hideous from the beginning; hideous in the sense that, in being swallowed up in such an existence, he became at once a mere unit in the scheme of things—one of a hurrying, driving crowd, with no individuality, and no time to think of anything but his work, and his journeys to and fro, and his eating and his sleeping. And even sleep was hideous; because, to his dismay, he found that, as a junior in the boarding-house he had to share a room with two other youths, given a little to sky-larking, and to the smoking of cheap cigarettes.
At the warehouse, as a beginner, he did whatever odd work was set before him; wondered a little at first, in a petulant fashion, why the men and the boys seemed so much happier than he was, and so generally contented with their lot. But, grimly silent regarding the past, and suspicious as to the future, he took his place in this new life like a bruised, stunned creature driven along by an unkind fate. Only afterwards was he to learn that there is another life of the senses, quite independent of the mere work of the hands, or the mere sights and sounds around about us.