took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.
The Albert Hall Hag
While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast thrust itself before me—she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt, cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes, dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat, beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a knot—this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!) stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the strings—they merely held the handle.
A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, “Not ’arf,” but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt, holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her skirt as she squeaked, “Break, break, break, on thy cold gray stones, O sea,” etc. The words were scarcely audible though she stood but two yards off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us—one would say she was frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.
After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the distracted, uncomfortable air of someone scurrying over a painful task—like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into bed—she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this harrowing incident—for each time she held out the bag, she smiled, which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar prominence and said something—an inarticulate noise in a very high pitch. “A woman,” I whispered to R⸺, “She claims to be a woman.” If anyone hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing absently—two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.
As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she thought, “Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man’s aid?” The clink of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her terrible grimacing smile.
Why didn’t I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, if you please. … And she may have been a well-to-do vagrant—well got up for the occasion—a clever simulator? …
Rigor Bordis
Rigor bordis!—I write like this as if it were a light matter. But tonight I was in extremis. … First I read the paper; then I finished the book I was reading—“Thus Spake Zarathustra.” Not knowing quite what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of coffee. But these manoeuvres were only the feeble attempts of a cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was:—
How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half before bedtime.
Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work—I don’t sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.
Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I sat down and played a game of Patience—no one knows how I loathe playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely, took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass. … I was at bay at last. There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have someone to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release. I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life. I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn’t feel more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it
