The Gospel of Content
By Frederick Greenwood
I
How it was that I, being so young a man and not a very tactful one, was sent on such an errand is more than I should be able to explain. But many years ago some one came to me with a request that I should go that evening to a certain street at King's Cross, where would be found a poor lady in great distress; that I should take a small sum of money which was given to me for the purpose in a little packet which disguised all appearance of coin, present it to her as a “parcel” which I had been desired to deliver, and ask if there were any particular service that could be done for her. For my own information I was told that she was a beautiful Russian whose husband had barely contrived to get her out of the country, with her child, before his own arrest for some deep political offence of which she was more than cognisant, and that now she was living in desperate ignorance of his fate. Moreover, she was penniless and companionless, though not quite without friends; for some there were who knew of her husband and had a little help for her, though they were almost as poor as herself. But none of these dare approach her, so fearful was she of the danger of their doing so, either to themselves or her husband or her child, and so ignorant of the perfect freedom that political exiles could count upon in England. “Then,” said I, “what expectation is there that she will admit me, an absolute stranger to her, who may be employed by the police for anything she knows to the contrary?” The answer was: “Of course that has been thought of. But you have only to send up your name, which, in the certainty that you would have no objection, has been communicated to her already. Her own name, in England, is Madame Vernet.”
It was a Saturday evening in November, the air thick with darkness and a drizzling rain, the streets black and shining where lamplight fell upon the mud on the paths and the pools in the roadway, when I found my way to King's Cross on this small errand of kindness. King's Cross is a most unlovely purlieu at its best, which must be in the first dawn of a summer day, when the innocence of morning smiles along its squalid streets, and the people of the place, who cannot be so wretched as they look, are shut within their poor and furtive homes. On a foul November night nothing can be more miserable, more melancholy. One or two great thoroughfares were crowded with foot-passengers who bustled here and there about their Saturday marketings, under the light that flared from the shops and the stalls that lined the roadway. Spreading on every hand from these thoroughfares, with their noisy trafficking so dreadfully eager and small, was a maze of streets built to be “respectable” but now run down into the forlorn poverty which is all for concealment without any rational hope of success. It was to one of these that I was directed—a narrow silent little street of three-storey houses, with two families at least in every one of them.
Arrived at No. 17, I was admitted by a child after long delay, and by her conducted to a room at the top of the house. No voice responded to the knock at the room door, and none to the announcement of the visitor's name; but before I entered I was aware of a sound which, though it was only what may be heard in the grill-room of any coffee-house at luncheon time, made me feel very guilty and ashamed. For the last ten minutes I had been gradually sinking under the fear of intrusion—of intrusion upon grief, and not less upon the wretched little secrets of poverty which pride is so fain to conceal; and now these splutterings of a frying-pan foundered me quite. What worse intrusion could there be than to come prying in upon the cooking of some poor little meal?
Too much embarrassed to make the right apology (which, to be right, would have been without any embarrassment at all) I entered the room, in which everything could be seen in one straightforward glance: the little square table in the centre, with its old green cover and the squat lamp on it, the two chairs, the dingy half carpet, the bed wherein a child lay asleep in a lovely flush of colour, and the pale woman with a still face, and with the eyes that are said to resemble agates, standing before the hearth. Under the dark cloud of her hair she looked the very picture of Suffering—Suffering too proud to complain and too tired to speak. Beautiful as the lines of her face were, it was white as ashes and spoke their meaning; but nothing had yet tamed the upspringing nobility of her tall, slight, and yet imperious form.
Receiving me with the very least appearance of curiosity or any other kind of interest, but yet with something of proud constraint (which I attributed too much, perhaps, to the untimely frying-pan), she waved her hand toward the farther chair of the two, and asked to be excused from giving me her attention for a moment. By that she evidently meant that otherwise her supper would be spoiled. It is not everything that can be left to cook unattended; and since this poor little supper was a piece of fish scarce bigger than her hand, it was all the more likely to spoil and the less could be spared in damage. So I quietly took my seat in a position which more naturally commanded the view out of window than of the cooking operations, and waited to be again addressed.