It seemed to her a curious necessity that she should be driven to try and prove that people were unhappy, and that most men acted basely in their sexual relationships towards women. This last conviction did not need much proving.
Being in a mood that demanded fanatical thoroughness, Eve played with the ultimate baseness of man, and made herself a candle to the night-flying moths. She repeated the experience twice—once in Regent Street, and once in Leicester Square. Nothing but fanaticism could have made such an experiment possible, and have enabled her to outface her scorn and her disgust. Several men spoke to her, and she dallied with each one for a few seconds before letting him feel her scorn.
She spent the last night of her stay in the Bloomsbury hotel sitting in the lounge and listening to three raucous American women who were talking over their travels. They had been to Algiers, Egypt, Italy, the South of France, and of course to Paris. The dominant talker, who had gorgeous yellow hair, not according to Nature, and whose hands were always moving restlessly and showing off their rings, seemed to remember and to identify the various places she had visited by some particular sort of food that she had eaten! “Siena, Siena. Wasn’t that the place, Mina, where we had ravioli?”
“Did you go to Ré’s at Monte Carlo? It’s an experience to have eaten at Ré’s.” “I shan’t forget the Nile. The Arab boy made some bad coffee, and I was sick in the stomach.” They went on to describe their various hagglings with hotel-keepers, cabmen, and shop-people, and the yellow-haired lady who wore “nippers” on a very thin-bridged, sharp-pointed nose, had an exhilarating tale to tell of how she had stood out against a Paris taxi-driver over a matter of ten cents. Eve had always heard such lavish tales of American extravagance, that she was surprised to discover in these women the worst sort of meanness, the meanness that contrives to be generous on a few ostentatious occasions by beating all the lesser people’s profits down to vanishing point. She wondered whether these American women with their hard eyes, selfish mouths, and short-fingered, ill-formed, grasping hands were typical of this new hybrid race.
It amused her to contrast her own situation with theirs. When to-morrow’s bill was paid, and her box taken to Charing Cross station, she calculated that she would have about twelve pence left in her purse. And she was going to test another aspect of life on those twelve pennies. It would not be ravioli, or luncheon at Ré’s.
Eve packed up her box next morning, paid her bill, and drove off to Charing Cross, where she left her box in the cloak-room. She had exactly elevenpence left in her purse, and it was her most serious intention to make these eleven pennies last her for the best part of two days. One thing that she had lost, without noticing it, was her sense of humour. Fanaticism cannot laugh. Had Simeon Stylites glimpsed but for a moment the comic side of his existence, he would have come down off that pillar like a cat off a burning roof.
The day turned out to be a very tiring one for her, and Eve found out how abominably uncomfortable London can be when one has no room of one’s own to go to, and no particular business to do. She just drifted about till she was tired, and then the problem was to find something upon which to sit. She spent the latter part of the morning in the gardens below Charing Cross Station, and then it began to rain. Lunch cost her threepence—half a scone and butter, and a glass of milk. She dawdled over it, but rain was still falling when she came out again into the street. A station waiting-room appeared to be her only refuge, for it was a sixpenny day at the National Gallery, and as she sat for two hours on a bench, wondering whether the weather was going to make the experiment she contemplated a highly realistic and unpleasant test of what a wet night was like when spent on one of the Embankment seats.
The weather cleared about four o’clock, and Eve went across to a tea-shop, and spent another threepence on a cup of tea and a slice of cake. She had made a point of making the most of her last breakfast at the hotel, but she began to feel abominably hungry, with a hunger that revolted against cake. After tea she walked to Hyde Park, sat there till within half an hour of dusk, and then wandered back down Oxford Street, growing hungrier and hungrier. It was a very provoking sign of health, but if one part of her clamoured for food, her body, as a whole, protested that it was tired. The sight of a restaurant made her loiter, and she paused once or twice in front of some confectionery shop, and looked at the cakes in the window. But sweet stuffs did not tempt her. They are the mere playthings of people who are well fed. She found that she had a most primitive desire for good roast meat, beef for preference, swimming in brown gravy, and she accepted her appetite quite solemnly as a phenomenon that threw an illuminating light upon the problems of existence.
Exploring a shabbier neighbourhood she discovered a cheap cook-shop with a steaming window and a good advertising smell. There was a bill of fare stuck up in the window, and she calculated that she could spend another three pennies. Sausages and mashed potatoes were to be had for that sum, and in five minutes she was sitting at a wooden table covered with a dirty cloth, and helping herself to mustard out of a cracked glass pot.
It was quite a carnal experience, and she came out refreshed and much more cheerful, telling herself with naive seriousness that she was splitting life up into its elements. Food appeared to be a very important problem, and hunger a lust whose strength is unknown save to the very few, yet she was so near to her real self that she was on the edge of laughter. Then it occurred to her that she was not doing the thing thoroughly, that she had lapsed, that she ought to have started the night hungry.