Where Love Is

by William John Locke

“The fresh air and Jimmie,” laughed her friend. “You are the most beautifully in love young woman I have ever met.”

Norma started on her visit, walking fast. At Baker Street station it began to rain. She took the penitential omnibus; but her thoughts were too anxious to concern themselves with its discomforts. Besides, it was almost empty. The night had brought counsel. She would go to Jimmie and be her true self, frank and unsparing. With a touch of her old scorn she had resolved to confess unreservedly all the meanness and cowardice of which she had of late been guilty. She would bare to him the soon spotted soul and crave his cleansing. He would understand, pardon, and purify. Perhaps, when he knew all, he would be able to devise some new scheme of existence. At any rate, she would no longer receive his kisses with a lie in her heart. She loved him too ardently. He should know what she was, what were her needs, her limitations. The meeting would be a crisis in their lives. Out of it would come reconstruction on some unshakable basis. Up to a certain point she reasoned; beyond it, the pathetic unreason of a woman drifted rudderless.

It had stopped raining when she left the omnibus and started on the short walk from the corner to Friary Grove. At the familiar gate her heart already seemed lighter; she opened it, mounted the front steps, and rang. The middle-aged servant, minus cap and with thin untidy hair, in a soiled print dress, her sleeves rolled up to the elbow exposing red coarse arms, was the first shock to Norma when the door opened.

“Both the Master and Miss Aline are out, Miss,” said Hannah, with a good-natured smile. “He has gone into town on business, and Miss Aline, went out a little while ago with her young man. But they'll be back for lunch. Won't you come in and wait, Miss?”

Norma, vaguely resenting the familiar address of the servant and her slatternly appearance, hesitated for a moment before deciding to enter. Hannah showed her into the drawing-room and retired. It was a small dark room looking on to the back. Part of it had been cut off when the house had been altered, so as to construct the studio staircase, which contained one of the original windows. Norma felt strangely ill at ease in the room. The prim, cheap furniture, the threadbare carpet, the flimsy girlish contrivances at decoration, gave the place an air of shabby gentility. The gilt mirror was starred with spots and had a crack across the corner. Some of Jimmie's socks and underwear lay on the table for mending. They were much darned, and fresh holes could not fail to meet the eye that rested but momentarily on the pile. To mend these would in the future be her duty. She took up an undervest shrinkingly and shook it out; then folded it again and closed her eyes.... She could not wait there: the gloom depressed her. The studio would be brighter and more familiar. She went downstairs. Nothing in the room she knew so well was changed, yet it seemed to wear a different aspect. The homely charm had vanished. Here, too, shabbiness and poverty stared at her. The morning light streaming through the great high window showed pitilessly the cracks and stains and missing buttons of the old leathern suite, and the ragged holes in the squares of old carpet laid upon the boards. It was a mere bleak workshop, not a room for human habitation. The pictures on the walls and easels ceased to possess decorative or even intimate value. The large picture of the faun that had exercised so great an influence upon her had been despatched to its purchaser, and in its place was a hopeless gap.

She sat down in her accustomed chair, and once more strove to realise the future. There would be children who would need her care. On herself would all the sordid burdens fall. She saw herself a soured woman, worn with the struggle to make ends meet, working with her hands at menial tasks. The joy of Life! She laughed mirthlessly.

She rose, walked restlessly about the studio, longing for Jimmie to come and exorcise the devils that possessed her. A little sharp cry of distress escaped her lips. The place echoed like a vault, and she felt awfully alone. In her nervous tension she could bear it no longer. She went up the stairs again into the bare hall. On the pegs hung two or three discoloured hats and an old coat. Scarce knowing whither she went, she entered the dining-room. Luncheon had been laid. A freak of destiny had reproduced the meal of which Morland had spoken at Wiltshire House and of which last night had revived the memory: a scrag end of cold boiled mutton, blackened and shapeless, with the hard suet round about it; a dried-up heel of yellow American cheese; the half of a cottage loaf. The table-cloth—it was Friday—was stained with a week's meals. It was coarse in texture, old and thin and darned. The enamel on the plates was cracked, the hundred tiny fissures showing up dark brown. The plate on the forks had worn off in places, disclosing the yellowish metal beneath. The tumblers were thick and common, of glass scarcely transparent. She stared helplessly at the table. Never in her life had she seen such preparations for a meal. To the woman always daintily fed, daintily environed, it seemed squalor unspeakable.

She shrank back into the hall, pressed her hands to her eyes, looked round, as if to search for some refuge. The stairs met her eye. She had never seen what lay above the ground floor—except once, on the memorable evening when Aline had fainted. Suddenly madness seized her—an insane craving to spy out the whole nakedness of the house. The worn stair-carpet ended at the first landing. Then bare boards. The door of the bathroom was wide open. She peeked in. The ceiling was blackened with gas; the bath cracked and stained; the appointments as bare as those in a workhouse. Her glance fell upon a battered tin dish holding an uncompromising cube of yellow soap with hard sharp edges. She withdrew her head and shut the door hurriedly. Another door stood ajar. She pushed it open and entered. It was the front bedroom—inhabited by Jimmie. The thought that it would be her own, which a fortnight before might have clothed her in delicious confusion, chilled her to the bone. Bare boards again; a strip of oil-cloth by the narrow cheap iron bedstead; a painted deal table with a little mirror and the humblest of toilette equipments laid upon it; a painted deal chest of drawers with white handles; a painted deal wash-stand; a great triangular bit broken out of the mouth of the ewer.

It was poverty—grinding, sordid, squalid poverty. From the one dishevelled, slatternly, middle-aged servant to the cheap paper peeling off the wall in the bedrooms, all she had seen was poverty. The gathering terror of it burst like a thunderstorm above her head. Her courage failed her utterly. Like a creature distracted, she rushed downstairs and fled from the house. She walked homewards with an instinctive sense of direction. Afterwards she had little memory of the portion of the road she traversed on foot. She moved in a shuddering nightmare. All the love in the world could not shed a glamour over the nakedness of the existence that had now been revealed to her in its entire crudity. She could not face it. Other women of gentle birth had forsaken all and followed the men they loved; they had loved peasants and had led great-heartedly the peasant's life. They had qualities of soul that she lacked. Hideously base, despicably cowardly she knew herself to be. It was her nature. She could not alter. The world of graceful living was her world. In the other she would die. He had warned her. The gipsy faith in Providence had made him regard as a jest what would be to her a sordid shift, an intolerable ugliness, stripping life of its beauty. The passion-flower could not thrive in the hedge with the dog-rose. It was true—mercilessly true. The craving of last night awoke afresh, imperiously insistent. She walked blindly, tripped, and nearly fell. A subconscious self hailed a passing hansom and gave the address.

What would become of her she knew not. She thought wildly of suicide as the only possible escape. From her own world she was outcast. Its gates were barred with gold and opened but to golden keys. She was penniless. In this other world she would die. Love could not prevent her starving on its diet of herbs. She clung to life, to the stalled ox, and recked little of the hatred; but at the banquet she no longer had a seat. She had said she would follow him in rags and barefoot over the earth. She had not fingered the rags when she had made the senseless vow; she had not tried her tender feet on the stones. She could have shrieked with terror at the prospect. There was no way out but death.