Rosie’s voice broke.
“Was it that death Driffield described in The Cup of Life?”
“Yes, that’s it. I always thought it so funny of Ted. He couldn’t bear to speak of it, any more than I could, but he wrote it all down; he didn’t leave out a thing; even little things I hadn’t noticed at the time he put in and then I remembered them. You’d think he was just heartless, but he wasn’t, he was upset just as much as I was. When we used to go home at night he’d cry like a child. Funny chap, wasn’t he?”
It was The Cup of Life that had raised such a storm of protest; and it was the child’s death and the episode that followed it that had especially brought down on Driffield’s head such virulent abuse. I remembered the description very well. It was harrowing. There was nothing sentimental in it; it did not excite the reader’s tears, but his anger rather that such cruel suffering should be inflicted on a little child. You felt that God at the Judgment Day would have to account for such things as this. It was a very powerful piece of writing. But if this incident was taken from life was the one that followed it also? It was this that had shocked the public of the ’nineties and this that the critics had condemned as not only indecent but incredible. In The Cup of Life the husband and wife (I forget their names now) had come back from the hospital after the child’s death—they were poor people and they lived from hand to mouth in lodgings—and had their tea. It was latish: about seven o’clock. They were exhausted by the strain of a week’s ceaseless anxiety and shattered by their grief. They had nothing to say to one another. They sat in a miserable silence. The hours passed. Then on a sudden the wife got up and going into their bedroom put on her hat.
“I’m going out,” she said.
“All right.”
They lived near Victoria Station. She walked along the Buckingham Palace Road and through the park. She came into Piccadilly and went slowly toward the Circus. A man caught her eye, paused and turned round.
“Good evening,” he said.
“Good evening.”
She stopped and smiled.
“Will you come and have a drink?” he asked.
“I don’t mind if I do.”
They went into a tavern in one of the side streets of Piccadilly, where harlots congregated and men came to pick them up, and they drank a glass of beer. She chatted with the stranger and laughed with him. She told him a cock-and-bull story about herself. Presently he asked if he could go home with her; no, she said, he couldn’t do that, but they could go to a hotel. They got into a cab and drove to Bloomsbury and there they took a room for the night. And next morning she took a bus to Trafalgar Square and walked through the park; when she got home her husband was just sitting down to breakfast. After breakfast they went back to the hospital to see about the child’s funeral.
“Will you tell me something, Rosie?” I asked. “What happened in the book after the child’s death—did that happen too?”
She looked at me for a moment doubtfully; then her lips broke into her still beautiful smile.
“Well, it’s all so many years ago, what odds does it make? I don’t mind telling you. He didn’t get it quite right. You see, it was only guesswork on his part. I was surprised that he knew as much as he did; I never told him anything.”
Rosie took a cigarette and pensively tapped its end on the table, but she did not light it.
“We came back from the hospital just like he said. We walked back; I felt I couldn’t sit still in a cab, and I felt all dead inside me. I’d cried so much I couldn’t cry any more, and I was tired. Ted tried to comfort me, but I said: ‘For God’s sake shut up.’ After that he didn’t say any more. We had rooms in the Vauxhall Bridge Road then, on the second floor, just a sitting room and a bedroom, that’s why we’d had to take the poor little thing to the hospital; we couldn’t nurse her in lodgings; besides, the landlady said she wouldn’t have it, and Ted said she’d be looked after better at the hospital. She wasn’t a bad sort, the landlady; she’d been a tart and Ted used to talk to her by the hour together. She came up when she heard us come in.
“ ‘How’s the little girl tonight?’ she said.
“ ‘She’s dead,’ said Ted.
“I couldn’t say anything. Then she brought up the tea. I didn’t want anything, but Ted made me eat some ham. Then I sat at the window. I didn’t look round when the landlady came up to clear away, I didn’t want anyone to speak to me. Ted was reading a book; at least he was pretending to, but he didn’t turn the pages, and I saw the tears dropping on it. I kept on looking out of the window. It was the end of June, the twenty-eighth, and the days were long. It was just near the corner where we lived and I looked at the people going in and out of the public house and the trams going up and down. I thought the day would never come to an end; then all of a sudden I noticed that it was night. All the lamps were lit. There were an awful lot of people in the street. I felt so tired. My legs were like lead.
“ ‘Why don’t you light the gas?’ I said to Ted.
“ ‘Do you want it?’ he
