"My dear girl," Rose answered, "it is so charming of you to say that.
That is just the att.i.tude in which I want you to be--all excitement and anxiousness!"
They crowded round her, regarding her, as she could not but feel, as the centre of the picture, and her trepidation and excitement grew with the occasion. She was becoming, indeed, rather overstrained, when Mrs. Rose took her by the arm.
"My dear," she said, "don"t get excited until it is absolutely necessary. Remember that you are here to-day simply to receive certain impressions, which are to germinate in your brain; seeds to be sown in your temperament, which shall blossom out in your heart. Therefore do not waste nervous force before the occasion arises. I am not going, you will be the only woman upon this expedition."
Mary looked round in a rather helpless way.
"Oh!" she said, "am I to be all alone?"
There came a sudden, sharp cackle of laughter from the famous editor.
"My dear Miss Marriott," he said, "all alone?"
Looking round upon the group of people who were indicated by the sweep of the little man"s hand, Mary realised that she would be by no means alone.
Then she noticed, as she had not done before, that in the back recesses of the drawing-room were three or four other men, who, somehow or other, did not seem to belong to the world of her companions.
Rose caught the glance.
"Oh," he said, "I must introduce you to the bodyguard!"
He took her by the arm, and led her to the other end of the drawing-room.
There were four people standing there. One was clean-shaven, and wore a uniform of dark blue, braided with black braid, and held a peaked hat in his hand. Two of the others were bearded, very tall, strong and alert.
They were dressed in ordinary dark clothes, and Mary felt--your experienced actress has always an eye for costume, and the necessity of it--that these two also suggested uniform.
The fourth person, who stood a little in the background of the other three, was a man with a heavy black moustache, hair cut short, except for a curious, shining wave over the forehead, and was obviously a strong and l.u.s.ty constable in plain clothes.
"This is Miss Marriott, gentlemen," Rose said.
The three men in the foreground bowed. The man at the back automatically raised his right arm in military salute.
"These gentlemen, Miss Marriott," Rose said, "are going to take us into the places where we have to go. They are going to protect us. Inspector Brown and Inspector Smith, of Scotland Yard, and Inspector Green, of the County Council."
Mary bowed and smiled.
Then the tallest of the bearded men said: "Excuse me, miss, where we are going it would be quite inadvisable for you to wear the clothes you are wearing now."
He spoke quite politely, but with a certain decision and sharpness, at which Mary wondered.
"I don"t quite understand," she said.
"Well, Miss Marriott," the inspector answered, "you see we are going into some very queer places indeed, and as you will be the only lady with us, you had better wear----"
"Oh, I quite forgot," Fabian Rose said. "Of course, you told me that before, Mr. Brown. We have got a nurse"s costume for you, Miss Marriott.
You see, a nurse can go anywhere in these places where no other woman can go. By the way," he added, as a sort of after-thought, "this must seem rather terrible to you. I hope you are not frightened?"
Mary smiled. She looked round at the group of big men in the drawing-room, and made a pretty little gesture with her hands.
"Frightened!" she said, and smiled.
"Come along," Rose said, "my wife will fit you up."
In half an hour a curious party had left Westminster in two closed motor-cars, and were rolling up Park Lane. When Oxford Street was reached the car in which the party sat went two or three hundred yards eastward. The car in which the other half were bestowed moved as far to the west.
Every one alighted, and the cars disappeared.
In half an hour after that the whole party, by devious routes carefully planned beforehand, met in a centre of the strange network of slums which are in the vicinity of the Great Western Station of Paddington.
These slums the ordinary wayfarer knows nothing of.
A man may ride down some main thoroughfare to reach the great railway gate of the West and realise nothing of the fact that, between some gin palace and large lodging-house, a little alley-entry may conduct the curious or the unwary into an inferno as sordid, as terrible, and even more dangerous than any lost quarter of Stepney or Whitechapel.
London, indeed, West End London, is quite unaware that among its stateliest houses, in the very middle of its thoroughfares, there are modern caves in which the troglodytes still dwell which are sinister and dark as anything can be in modern life.
Inspector Brown took the lead.
"Gentlemen," he said, "I am going to take you now through some streets which none of you have probably ever seen before, to a certain district about a quarter of a mile beyond Paddington Station, and where I shall show you exactly what I am instructed to show you. I am sorry to have to make you walk so far, and especially as we have a lady with us, but there is no alternative. We cannot take a cab, or several cabs, to where we are going. A cab has never been seen in the quarter which you are entering with me. Even as we go we shall be known and marked. We shall not be interfered with in any dangerous way because you are with me and my colleagues, but, at the same time, the noise of our arrival will spread through the whole quarter, and I shall only be able to show you the place somewhat dulled of its activities, and, as it were, frightened by our arrival."
"I see," Aubrey Flood answered. "I see, inspector. What you mean is that the rabbits will all be terrorised by the arrival of the ferret!"
"Well, sir," the inspector answered, "I am sure that is not a bad way of putting it."
"Is that a policeman? Do you mean to say he is a detective?" Mary asked James Fabian Rose. "I thought those people were so illiterate and stupid."
The great Socialist laughed.
"My dear," he answered, "you have so much, so very much to learn.
Inspector Brown is one of the most intelligent men you could meet with anywhere. He speaks three languages perfectly. He reads Shakespeare. He understands social economics almost as well as I do myself. If he had had better chances he would have been a leader at the bar or an archdeacon. As it is he protects society without _reclame_, or without acknowledgment, and his emolument for exercising his extreme talents in this direction is, I believe, something under 250 a year."
Mary said nothing. It seemed, indeed, the only thing to do, but very many new thoughts were born within her as she listened to the pleasant, cultured voice of the bearded man, who looked as if he ought to be in uniform, and who led the party with so confident and so blithe a certainty.
They walked through streets of squalor. They progressed through by-ways, ill-smelling and garbage-laden. The very sp.a.w.n of London squealed and rolled in the gutters, while grey, evil-faced men and women peered at them from doorways and spat a curse as they went by.
They wound in and out of the horrid labyrinth of the West End slums until the great roar of London"s traffic died away and became an indistinct hum, until they were all conscious of the fact that they were in another and different sphere.
They had arrived at the underworld.
They were come at last to grip with facts that stank and bit and gripped.
Mary turned a white face to Fabian Rose.
"Mr. Rose," she said, "I had no idea that anything could be quite so sordid and horrible as this. Why! the very air is different!"
"My child," the great Socialist answered, his hand upon her shoulder, the pale face and mustard-coloured beard curiously merged into something very eager, and yet full of pity. "My child, you are as yet only upon the threshold of what we are bringing you to see. We have brought you to-day to these terrible places so that you may drink in all their horrors, all their hideousness, and all their misery, and transform them--through the alchemy of your art--into a great and splendid appeal, which shall convulse the indifferent, the cruel, and the rich."
"Let us go on!" Mary said in a very quiet voice.