There is no end to this story. I took her to the Middlesex, and they saved her by means of the stomach pump: to this day I cannot help wishing that her salvation might have had a more romantic name. But much more impressive is the man’s remark. I should not wonder if most people go through life with a single end in view: not to be mixed up. And one might as well be dead as not be mixed up. I have been much more mixed up than I dare tell in this respectable volume. I stole a baby once.
That is the story of ‘The Stolen Baby of Pimlico.’ I was waiting for an omnibus one night at the Chippenham. A young, dark girl was also waiting for the omnibus, but as she was showing more signs of impatience than are usual, namely, stamping, I could not help being interested. At last, as she passed me and flung me a look of intense malevolence, which I felt was rather unfair, I could not help smiling and saying: ‘I wonder whether there are any more buses.’ (Now I come to think of it, I might have said something more soothing.) This had the unexpected result of arousing confidence. ‘There’s got to be another bus,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to fetch my sister’s baby.’
‘Oh!’ I remarked.
We said no more for some time, and still no omnibus came. Then a taxi crawled up to us, and I said: ‘Well, if there are no more buses we had better take this taxi.’ The dark girl, who was young and very pretty, put on an expression of increased malevolence, but as I stopped the taxi, she said: ‘Oh, all right then, but I give the cabman the address, and not you.’ As we sat down, I gathered from this that my wanderer was no fledgling. But, after a few minutes, as she discovered that I made no attempt to kiss her, she became confidential. She had run away from an evil stepmother. She had £2 10s. She had just taken a furnished flat at £3 10s. a week. She was nineteen. She was going on the stage. Also, she wouldn’t have gone away if it hadn’t been for her father. (Rather mixed, this.) As we drew nearer to Pimlico I became more and more confused, for the baby was turning into her sister-in-law’s baby, and I swear that he became a she. We stopped in a little black street in Pimlico, in front of an enormous Victorian house which was still blacker than the street. ‘I must ring,’ said the girl, and promptly took from her little bag a key. Therefore she did not ring, but disappeared into the house, the inside of which was blacker than the outside, leaving the door wide open. After I had waited for a moment she came out again: ‘I say,’ she said, ‘I can’t carry him down; he’s too heavy.’
‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘now I’m in for it. But they can’t have laid much of a trap for a young man picked up outside the Chippenham.’ So, true to my principles, I went in. The house stank of solitude. It was the sort of house that does not even creak. I felt my way up to the first floor, and in a back room where there was very little besides a bed and a couple of chairs, I found asleep a pretty boy aged about five. ‘Pick him up,’ murmured the girl, ‘and don’t make a noise, I don’t want to wake the woman so late.’ Obediently I picked him up, and carried him down into the taxi. Just as the girl was about to follow me in, she said: ‘Now I’d better pay the woman. Lend me two shillings.’ In a few moments she came back, and some time later made me pull up the taxi at the corner of a side street, off Elgin Avenue.
Only later did all these confusions, this mixture of sexes and relationships, the silence in the silent house, lead me to theories. Little by little they crystallised into this: I seem to have stolen a baby I don’t know, belonging to somebody I don’t know, and taken it I don’t know where, in the charge of I don’t know whom. It preyed on me rather. I even worked up an alibi. Now I suppose it does not matter, as the child may be a householder.
There are many other stories I should like to tell, that of ‘The Watchmaker and the Four Pounds of Black-Lead,’ though, really, the adventure of ‘The Two Girls from County Cork and the Lost Camisole,’ is much more remarkable, but these and others must appear in another volume. There are many of these people, and one never discovers them before ten o’clock or so. They live in the streets, where they have their loves and their tragedies, and mainly in those places where there is not too much light. They like the darkness because the light of human understanding is not good for their peculiar affairs. We do not think enough of the influence of light. When we stand on Primrose Hill and, as Karl Baedeker would put it, behold before us the rich expanse of a great and sleeping city, we do not individualise the lights enough. When we look down upon Piccadilly Circus flaring from every veranda, and, like the laburnum, dropping wells of fire, when in these days we stand at the corner of Tottenham Court Road and watch the electric signs: ‘Player’s Navy Mixture,’ ‘Meux’s London Original Stout,’ ‘Y.M.C.A.,’ and ‘Tube,’ when we walk in all that brightness, we do not realise that this is the spirit of our city, the rather crude, commercial, and friendly spirit of London. Nor, in other cities at night, say in Birmingham, where through the dirty glass falls dirty yellow light, do we perceive in man unambitiousness. For mankind must have light. Light alone opens the windows on life, and makes night Arabian.
Only one creature likes the dark, and that is a wanderer, the cat. Have you watched cats at night? If you try in the street to stroke cats when the mood of night is on them, when they crouch under a bush, rolled up into tight balls, their sharp heads sunk into the woolly folds of their shoulders, when some are shadows in the shadow, spotted with two points of fire, they will not shrink from you, nor approach you, but so remain in static life. Or they will swiftly pass you, at that queer, soft trot, making towards a secret direction with entire intentness. Or, one upon the steps of a house, the other on a balustrade, they will face each other with swishing tails, and so remain in immense motion within the same spot, an infinity of provocation in every shiver of their sleek flanks; you, human, shall not know whether they are minded to love or war. If you interfere, you break the spell of their communication, but there is no room for you in their compact. You are the spectre of the commander, and they flee. But you shall feel the hostility they have left behind them; it flows from the immense cruelty of their cold eyes, that are lovely as emerald and topaz, that can harbour no love, but only voluptuousness, calm, deep eyes that calculate and fix only upon that which can serve them, eyes that glimpse only things they fear and things they desire, not things for which they may suffer. You shall stay awhile in that hostile ambiance, while they have fled into the night, to adventures more secret and profound than any that may be yours, even though you, too, be one of Diana’s foresters, a gentleman of the shade, a minion of the moon.