“Money and love. What else is there?”
“Cruelty.”
She laughed and said that was a very English idea, but people who loved cruelty had to pay for it, which proved love and money came first. I asked what she meant? She stared and asked what I meant. I said I was afraid to tell her. At this she stopped being motherly and jolly, and asked in a low voice if a man had hurt me?
“O no Millie — nobody ever hurt me. I’m talking about worse things than that.”
I was trembling and starting to weep but she held my hands. This strengthened me so much that I told her what happened in Alexandria. And now I have the strength to tell you about it too, God, but it is so important that I will divide it from the rest of my letter with another line.
Mr. Astley and Dr. Hooker took me to a hotel where we sat among well-dressed people like ourselves at tables on a veranda chatting eating drinking and a crowd of nearly naked folk mostly children watched us all across a space where two men with whips walked up and down and at first I thought a jolly game was happening for many in the crowd were amusing folk on the veranda by bowing and praying to them and wriggling their bodies and grinning comically until someone on the veranda flung a coin or handful of coins onto the dusty ground before the veranda then one or two or a horde raced out and flung themselves down on the coins scrabbling and screaming while the audience at the tables laughed or looked disgusted or turned away then the men with whips who had stood with folded arms pretending not to see suddenly saw and rushed into the crowd flogging it apart and back which caused laughter too and Mr. Astley said remnants of the race that carved the sphinx and Dr. Hooker said that looks like a deserving case and pointed to a thin little girl blind in one eye carrying a baby with a big head who was blind in both she held it tight in one arm held the other straight out swaying the empty clutching hand from side to side mechanically as if in a trance in a trance I stood and walked to her I think the men shouted and followed I crossed the space and entered the crowd of beggars taking the purse out of my handbag to put into her hand but before I could do that someone snatched it anyway the money could never be enough she was my daughter perhaps I knelt on the ground embraced her and the baby lifted them up waded stumbled back through crippled blind children old men with running sores scrambling screaming stamping each other’s fingers to get coins from split purse I climbed onto the veranda a hotel man said you cannot bring these here and I said they are coming home with me and Mr. Astley said Mrs. Wedderburn neither the port authorities nor the captain will let you bring them onto the ship and the baby was wailing and peeing but the little girl clutched me with her other arm I am sure she knew she had found her mother but they dragged us apart YOU CAN DO NO GOOD bellowed Dr. Hooker nobody had ever cursed me insulted me like that before how could he say that to me who like all of us is good right through to the backbone I CAN DO NO GOOD? I cried hardly believing I had heard such a vile suggestion but Mr. Astley said distinctly none at all so I tried to scream like you once screamed God since I wanted to make the whole world faint but Harry Astley clapped his hand over my mouth O the sheer joy of feeling my teeth sink in.
The taste of blood sobered me. I was also surprised, because Mr. Astley did not wince or groan. He only frowned slightly, but two seconds later his face lost colour and he would have collapsed if Dr. Hooker and I had not helped him indoors and placed him on a sofa in the alcove of a lounge. Dr. Hooker ordered hot water, iodine and clean bandages, but though he has a medical certificate it was I who bathed and dressed the wound and bound it with a tourniquet bandage. I also told him I was sorry. In a sleepy voice he told me that a clean, unexpected flesh wound, however painful, was a flea bite to one who had been educated at Eton.
On the way back to the ship in a cab I sat silent and rigid, staring straight ahead while they talked. Dr. Hooker said now I knew the great task which lay ahead of the Anglo-Saxon races, and also why Our Father in Heaven had created an afterlife to counteract the evils of life on earth. At the same time (he said) I should not exaggerate the evil of what we had seen. The open sores et cetera were a source of income to those who flaunted them, and most beggars were happier than folk who lived by honest toil. The girl and baby were accustomed to their state, it was not misery in our sense of the word — they were certainly happier and freer in Egypt than they would be in a civilized country. He admired how completely I had recovered from my first reaction to a terrible surprise, but was not sorry to have administered that surprise — from now on I would think like a woman, not like a child. Mr. Astley said my pity was natural and good if confined to the unfortunate of my own class, but if acted on promiscuously it would prolong the misery of many who would be better dead. I had just seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and rulers — their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who keep society as it is. And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do.
“I still do not know,” I told Millie, smiling through my tears. “I had better return to God for advice. But I cannot do that until I am rid of the poor fellow who waits outside.”
“Bring him in,” said Millie firmly. “Your apartment is ready so take him up to it, knock him off quick and we will have another talk. Your heart is too good for this wicked world, my dear. You need advice from a friendly, experienced woman you can trust.”
I thought “knock him off” a queer way to say “put him to bed”, but out I went and saw — no Duncan! Four empty little green fairy glasses stood on the table top, a waiter who wanted paid sprang forward, but my Wedder had vanished.
I went back inside. Millie made us more coffee then asked how I had met such a man and why I was wandering in Paris with so little luggage. I told her.
She said, “I greatly admire your sense, my dear, in taking a nice long honeymoon with your lover before marrying a respectable husband. Too many women enter marriage completely ignorant of what they ought to give and take. But this Wedderburn is obviously an over-sucked orange. You will be a far better wife to your husband if you now enjoy some variety.”
She explained that the hotel was the sort Londoners call a knocking-shop — her customers were men who paid to wed a total stranger for periods of an hour or less. Knocking was illegal in Britain, but any clean intelligent girl could get a licence to do it in France, or find work in a licensed establishment like her own.
“Is it possible for strangers to wed so quickly?” I asked, astonished, and she said many men preferred strangers because they could not wed those they knew best. Most of her customers were married men, and some of them had mistresses too. It seemed a mistress was what I had been to Wedder, though a Parisian kind are called midinettes.