The Frightened Man

‘We have close to a hundred at any particular time.’ She bent her head to look at Mrs Striker; there was a sense of expecting contradiction. ‘But they don’t live here. They are permitted to await the birth of their babies here.’

‘And then-?’

‘And then they must make their peace with the world, as we hope they have made their peace with Him who sees all transgression.’

‘Do they understand transgression, do you think?’

‘We always say, show me a young woman who is weeping in her bed, and we will show you a soul yearning for its maker.’ Again, she seemed to be quoting somebody else.

‘And the infants?’ Denton said.

Mrs Opdyke glanced at him. She flinched, as if he had surprised her, perhaps the rarity of his maleness. ‘Forgive me, sir,’ she said. She had a big voice, big like the rest of her, but raspy, as if she had used it too much. ‘I caught your name but not your purpose.’

‘I’m looking for a young woman who gave birth here.’

‘Are you a relative? Her father?’ She seemed ready to disbelieve him. ‘An uncle?’

‘The young woman is dead. I’m trying to find what happened to her.’

‘It seems to me you already know what happened to her, if, as you say, she’s dead.’ She dropped her chin and looked at him over the top of silver-rimmed glasses. ‘Are you a policeman?’

‘Mr Denton is a famous author,’ Janet Striker said. ‘He is acting philanthropically.’

They were standing in a lobby that lay immediately behind the front doors, a long, bleak room almost without furniture but overseen by the life-size portraits of two elderly men in the fashions of the seventies. Denton had been wondering which of them was the founding Humphrey, had decided that the more severe and lifeless of the two probably was he, the other being altogether too ruddy and too plump. Now, he smiled at Mrs Opdyke, trying to look philanthropical.

‘We encourage good works,’ the woman said, but the idea of philanthropy seemed to worry her, and she frowned. ‘Many gentlemen are able to practise good works through us. Many.’ She turned to stare at the portrait that Denton had not chosen as that of the onlie begetter. ‘We were founded by a man. Men serve on our board and our inspection committee.’ She turned back to stare at Denton. ‘Good works are one route to bliss.’

Denton was confounded by this — not the idea, but bliss, which seemed to him dated and poetic and, anyway, unattainable — and he said weakly, trying to smile, ‘“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”’

Mrs Opdyke’s frown deepened. ‘I don’t see the aptness of that,’ she said. For the first time, she seemed stirred to something other than quotation, and her cheeks reddened. ‘Forgive me if I miss something, but the aptness of that escapes me, escapes me altogether. Is this intellectualism? ’ Before he could answer, she rushed on. ‘There is too much intellectualism. We don’t allow our girls to engage in it.’ She turned to Mrs Striker as if for support, common understanding. ‘Our charity is based on the founder’s ideas and is straightforward and simple — work and prayer. “Work to weariness, pray to tears.” We always say that to new intakes, and I say it to each as she leaves. Work and pray, work and pray, I tell them — your lives are over, you are ruined, pray for release, nothing more can be expected.’ She raised a hand towards the portrait. ‘Our founding philosophy.’

‘I was quoting scripture,’ Denton said.

‘Were you ironic? We detest irony. It is part of intellectualism. ’

‘The girl’s real name was Ruth,’ Mrs Striker said in the voice of somebody bringing a meeting to order. ‘But after she left here, she called herself Stella Minter.’

Some of the colour left the woman’s face and she seemed to slump back to her normal posture. Denton had the sense that she saw him as an enemy, even the enemy — because of the men who had got her women pregnant? Or, more likely, because of the founder and the all-male inspection committee? At any rate, she was far more at ease with Janet Striker, to whom she now said in a lower, almost confiding voice, ‘I don’t understand this gentleman’s interest. I have a duty to protect the, mm, the premises.’

Mrs Striker produced the two letters they had prepared, the one from Hench-Rose about Denton’s sterling character, one from her own organization. ‘He is above reproach,’ she said.

Mrs Opdyke removed her glasses to read the letters. Her eyes looked undefended, timid. ‘Well-’ she said. ‘Well.’ She read both letters twice, then folded them and handed them back. ‘Well — very well.’

‘What can you tell us?’ Janet Striker said.

‘I can’t say anything, standing here in public.’ Only the three of them were in the draughty hall; nobody else had passed through it; nothing suggested that anybody else even had access to it. ‘We must go to my office. I’m sure you will want to see the work rooms and other, other — facilities.’ She had replaced her glasses, now looked at the portrait of the founder as if hoping the subject might step down and order them to leave.

‘Who’s the other fellow?’ Denton said. He jerked his head towards the other, more severe figure that he had thought the founder.

Mrs Opdyke stared at it. She drew a breath. ‘My predecessor, ’ she said. She turned away and moved towards a door at the far end of the long room, seeming to move on rollers, her skirts giving no hint of legs moving beneath them. Denton, wanting to get away as fast as possible, still cold and miserable, looked at Janet Striker. He was astonished to see her wink.

The visit became a kind of tour of inspection. Denton thought that they missed nothing except the water closets and perhaps some secret room where the staff sipped gin and smoked cigars. They were shown the kitchens, the dormitories, the chapel (stark), the classroom (girls under twelve were given two hours of lessons a day), the refectory (scrubbed wood tables, grey-green walls, a lectern for ‘improving lectures’ while the women ate), the lying-in rooms, the nursery, the infirmary, the morgue. ‘Yes, we have our deaths,’ Mrs Opdyke sighed. ‘Little deaths, mostly.’ She waved a hand at a pile of fresh wooden boxes that might have held papers but were infant coffins.

Ten women, all young, had been nursing babies in the nursery. They had thirty minutes off from their work, four times a day, Mrs Opdyke said. None of the young women looked at them. Their faces were healthy but tired, perhaps sullen. The kitchens told him in part why: great piles of cabbages lay on central tables; more young women with the same healthy, unhappy look were splitting the cabbage heads with cleavers, then chopping them and flinging the pieces into huge pots.

‘Boiled salt beef once a week,’ Mrs Opdyke said. ‘Fish on Fridays. Milk, four glasses a day, the last before bed with patent malt extract. Porridge found to be excellent for their general health. We do not approve of sauces.’

The lying-in rooms were closed to Denton, but he was allowed into a huge space where babies, new-born to four months, lay in rows like bullets in a belt. Surprisingly few of them were crying. Two women in striped caps and dark aprons moved among them but never picked one up.

‘They get no coddling?’ Janet Striker asked.

‘They are fed, changed, kept warm. Mothers don’t feed their own babies; they don’t know which are theirs, in fact. No, we don’t believe in coddling. These children face a harsh world.’

‘Where?’ Denton said. ‘Adoption?’

Mrs Opdyke turned eyes as weary as those of any of the women on him. ‘One in twenty is adopted. The rest go to institutions.’

Coming out of the babies’ room, they met a spry, angular man who was introduced as Mr Orkwright of the Eugenical Sterilization Society. He shook hands and passed on, grinning at the staff women, who all seemed to know him. Janet Striker stared after him and murmured to Denton, ‘Trolling for victims.’ If Mrs Opdyke heard her, she said nothing.

The work rooms were last. These were, in fact, the two wooden buildings that stood behind the stone structure and were the source of the smell that hung over the place and spilled into the square.

‘Our clients are some of the finest firms in London,’ Mrs Opdyke said.

Women, mostly visibly pregnant and with their sleeves pushed up and their damp hair falling down, stood over vats full of clothes; others turned the handles of big wringers; still others, using sticks like oversized broom handles, lifted wet cloth from the vats and turned it, stirring the water and the thick mass within. The air was wet; condensation clouded every window and lay as big drops on every cool surface; the floor was slippery. The women,