Aylwin Part 36

'But you never walk out in the daytime.'

'Not often; indeed, I may say never, unless it is to go to the Zoo, or to Jamrach's, which I do about once in three months.'

'Jamrach's!' I said. 'Why, he's the importer of animals, isn't he? Of all places in London that is the one I should most like to see.' He then took me into a long panelled room with bay windows looking over the Thames, furnished with remarkable Chinese chairs and tables. And then we left the house.

In Maud Street a hansom pa.s.sed us; D'Arcy hailed it.

'We will take this to the Bank,' said he, 'and then walk through the East End to Jamrach's. Jump in.'

As we drove off, the sun was s.h.i.+ning brilliantly, and London seemed very animated--seemed to be enjoying itself. Until we reached the Bank our drive was through all the most cheerful-looking and prosperous streets of London. It acted like a tonic on me, and for the first time since my trouble I felt really exhilarated. As to D'Arcy, after we had left behind us what he called the 'stucco world'

of the West End, his spirits seemed to rise every minute, and by the time we reached the Strand he was as boisterous as a boy on a holiday.

On reaching the Bank we dismissed the hansom and proceeded to walk to Ratcliffe Highway. Before reaching it I was appalled at the forbidding aspect of the neighbourhood. It was not merely that the unsavoury character of the streets offended and disgusted me, but the locality wore a sinister aspect which acted upon my imagination in the strangest, wildest way. Why was it that this aspect fairly cowed me, scared me? I felt that I was not frightened on my own account, and yet when I asked myself why I was frightened I could not find a rational answer.

As I saw the sailors come noisily from their boarding-houses; as I saw the loafers standing at the street corners, smoking their dirty pipes and gazing at us; as I saw the tawdry girls, bare-headed or in flaunting hats covered with garish flowers, my thoughts, for no conceivable reason, ran upon Winnie more persistently than they had run upon her since I had abandoned all hope of seeing her in Wales.

The thought came to me that, grievous as was her fate and mine, the tragedy of our lives might have been still worse.

'Suppose,' I said, 'that instead of being lost in the Welsh hills she had been lost here!' I shuddered at the thought.

Again that picture in the Welsh pool came to me, the picture of Winnie standing at a street corner, offering matches for sale. D'Arcy then got talking about Sinfi Lovell and her strange superiority in every respect to the few Gypsy women he had seen.

'She has,' said he, 'mesmeric power; it is only semiconscious, but it is mesmeric. She exercises it partly through her gaze and partly through her voice.'

He was still talking about Sinfi when a river-boy, who was whistling with extraordinary brilliancy and gusto, met and pa.s.sed us. Not a word more of D'Arcy's talk did I hear, for the boy was whistling the very air to which Winnie used to sing the Snowdon song

I met in a glade a lone little maid At the foot of y Wyddfa the white.

I ran after the boy and asked him what tune he was whistling.

'What tune?' he said, 'blowed if I know.'

'Where did you hear it?' I asked.

'Well, there used to be a gal, a kind of a beggar gal, as lived not far from 'ere for a little while, but she's gone away now, and she used to sing that tune. I allas remember tunes, but I never could make out anything of the words.'

D'Arcy laughed at my eccentricity in running after the boy to learn where he had got a tune. But I did not tell him why.

After we had pa.s.sed some way down Ratcliffe Highway, D'Arcy said, 'Here we are then,' and pointed to a shop, or rather two shops, on the opposite side of the street. One window was filled with caged birds; the other with specimens of beautiful Oriental pottery and grotesque curiosities in the shape of Chinese and j.a.panese statues and carvings.

My brain still rang with the air I had heard the river-boy whistling, but I felt that I must talk about something.

'It is here that you buy your wonderful curiosities and porcelain!' I said.

'Partly; but there is not a curiosity shop in London that I have not ransacked in my time.'

The shop we now entered reminded me of that Raxton Fair which was so much a.s.sociated with Winnie. Its chief attraction was the advent of Wombwell's menagerie. From the first moment that the couriers of that august establishment came to paste their enormous placards on the walls, down to the sad morning when the caravans left the market-place, Winnie and I and Rhona Boswell had talked 'Wombwell.'

It was not merely that the large pictures of the wild animals in action, the more than bra.s.sy sound of the cracked bra.s.s band, delighted our eyes and ears. Our olfactories also were charmed. The mousy scent of the animals mixed with the scent of sawdust, which to adults was so objectionable, was characterised by us as delicious.

All these Wombwell delights came back to me as we entered Jamrach's, and for a time the picture of Winifred prevented my seeing the famous shop. When this pa.s.sed I saw that the walls of the large room were covered from top to bottom with cages, some of them full of wonderful or beautiful birds, and others full of evil-faced, screeching monkeys.

While D'Arcy was amusing himself with a blue-faced rib-nosed baboon, I asked Mr. Jamrach, an extremely intelligent man, about the singing girl and the Welsh air. But he could tell me nothing, and evidently thought I had been hoaxed.

In a small case by itself was a beautiful jewelled cross, which attracted D'Arcy's attention very much.

'This is not much in your line,' he said to Jamrach.'This is European.'

'It came to me from Morocco,' said Jamrach, 'and it was no doubt taken by a Morocco pirate from some Venetian captive.'

'It is a diamond and ruby cross,' said D'Arcy, 'but mixed with the rubies there are beryls. I am at this moment describing a beryl in some verses. The setting of the stones is surely quite peculiar.'

'Yes,' said Jamrach. 'It is the curiosity of the setting more than the value of the gems which caused it to be sent to me. I have offered it to the London jewellers, but they will only give me the market-price of the stones and the gold.'

While he was talking I pulled out of my breast pocket the cross, which had remained there since I received it from my mother the evening before.

'They are very much alike,' said Jamrach; 'but the setting of these stones is more extraordinary than in mine. And of course they are more than fifty times as valuable.'

D'Arcy turned round to see what we were talking about, when he saw the cross in my hand, and an expression of something like awe came over his face.

'The Moonlight Cross of the Gnostics!' he exclaimed. 'You carry this about in your breast pocket? Put it away, put it away! The thing seems to be alive.'

In a second, however, and before I could answer him, the expression pa.s.sed from his face, and he took the cross from my hands and examined it.

'This is the most beautiful piece of jewel work I ever saw in my life. I have heard of such things. The Gnostic art of arranging jewels so that they will catch the moon-rays and answer them as though the light were that of the sun, is quite lost.'

We then went and examined Jamrach's menagerie. I found that one source of the interest D'Arcy took in animals was that he was a believer in Baptista Porta's whimsical theory that every human creature resembles one of the lower animals, and he found a perennial amus.e.m.e.nt in seeing in the faces of animals caricatures of his friends.

With a fund of humour that was exhaustless, he went from cage to cage, giving to each animal the name of some member of the Royal Academy, or of one of his own intimate friends.

On leaving Jamrach's he said to me, 'Suppose we make a day of it and go to the Zoo?'

I agreed, and we took a hansom as soon as we could get one and drove across London towards Regent's Park.

Here the pleasure that he took in watching the movements of the animals was so great that it seemed impossible but that he was visiting the Zoo for the first time. I remembered, however, that he had told me in the morning how frequently he went to these gardens.

But his interest in the animals was unlike my own, and I should suppose unlike the interest of any other man. He had no knowledge whatever of zoology, and appeared to wish for none. His pleasure consisted in watching the curious expressions and movements of the animals and in dramatising them.

On leaving the Zoo, I said, 'The cross you were just now looking at is as remarkable for its history as for its beauty. It was stolen from the tomb of a near relative of mine. I was under a solemn promise to the person upon whose breast it lay to see that it should never be disturbed. But, now that it has been disturbed, to replace it in the tomb would, I fear, be to insure another sacrilege. I wonder what you would do in such a case?'

He looked at me and said, 'As it is evident that we are going to be intimate friends, I may as well confess to you at once that I am a mystic.'

'When did you become so?'

'When? Ask any man who has pa.s.sionately loved a woman and lost her; ask him at what moment mysticism was forced upon him--at what moment he felt that he must either accept a spiritualistic theory of the universe or go mad; ask him this, and he will tell you that it was at that moment when he first looked upon her as she lay dead, with Corruption's foul fingers waiting to soil and stain. What are you going to do with the cross?'

'Lock it up as safely as I can,' I said; 'what else is there to do with it?'

He looked into my face and said, 'You are a rationalist.'