But the most memorable visit of all was on the last Friday in August. The Rodets, secure from revolution and with a more prosperous year behind them, were staying at Maran Hill. That weekend they were all going up to Thorpe Old Manor for part of September, and then going on to the Beadors, in County Durham. Rodie had wanted to see Sarah again and so had suggested they make the Exhibition their meeting place. Then Arabella had the idea of taking her penitent women (now numbering eight) up as a treat during the sixpenny days in October, so she thought she ought to come there first and see which would be the most suitable portions to visit. In the end, the party included the Rodets, the Stevensons, the Thorntons, Sarah, and the two maids, Mademoiselle Nanette and Charity—out on her first official "trial" as a Lady's maid. All children, having been there twice that week already, were to be left behind.
Chapter 58
The moment they were through the turnstile, Rodie asked to see the French section, in the gallery on the south side of the nave. Swamped by her enthusiasm, they spent rather longer there than they had intended. The enamels and tapestries, porcelain and glass, the statues and vases and paintings were all scrutinized minutely and enthused over in her rich, piercing soprano. Only Rodet's insistence that they should go and see France's
machinery
prevented them from spending all day among her artistic products.
The French machinery was all to the north of the nave, so they had to come downstairs and go across to it. John knew it would take about five minutes to get Rodie out from among the Gobelins and Aubussons, so he went out to the stairhead to see that no one strayed too far in front, telling Nora to see that no one lingered too far behind.
While waiting there, he looked down at the American section, which filled the entire east end of the nave. Suddenly, he noticed a violent movement of the drapery around Hiram Powers's by now infamous
Greek Slave,
voted by widespread public disclaim to be the hottest sculpture there. The drapery, around three sides of her, was to prevent any unseemly fundamental display. Just at that moment, it was as if a pair of dogs were fighting silently to the death behind the crimson velvet. Then the entire drape fell from its hangings, leaving the canopy above dancing wildly in the morning sun, shedding the rich dust of four months.
The crowd pressed forward to help whoever was now trapped beneath those heavy folds. General laughter was growing, for few people were in any doubt as to what had been going on: Someone had been peeking.
"What's happening, John?" Sarah asked, joining him, with Charity at her side.
He pointed down at the heaving mound of drapes but had no time to explain before Walter Thornton, red, hot, and dusty, emerged from under them. He dived back, retrieved his hat, and then vanished below the balcony with an amazing turn of speed.
John and Sarah dared not look at one another, not with Charity there. They stood side by side, rocking with silent mirth, feeling set to burst at any minute. But few people noticed either them or Walter's swift departure. They were taking full advantage of the all-round view his act had temporarily offered them. Word spread up the nave like a Russian vine—you can see the
Slave's
tra-la-la, her fundamental features, her jutland, her blind cheeks, her saddle leather, her sitting room, her boo-boo, her derrière—hurry-hurry-hurry—for a limited season only.
"Anything amiss?" Walter asked, joining them on the balcony, washed and spruce from the lavatory at the foot of the stairs.
"The curtain seems to have fallen down," John said.
Walter laughed pityingly. "See how they run," he sneered. He did not notice John wink at Sarah.
Nor did Arabella, who joined them at that moment too. She took one look at the scene below and said it was a disgrace. "It exactly vindicates the sculptor's lofty aims in presenting this carving."
"In what way, Mrs. Thornton?" John asked, surprised at this judgement. He had expected Arabella to pretend not even to notice the statue.
"It clearly says in the catalogue," she told him, quoting from memory. "'The artist has delineated a young girl, deprived of her clothing [you see—she is not voluntarily in that state], standing before the licentious gaze of a wealthy Eastern Barbarian'."
The Lustful Turk!
Sarah thought.
How that image pursues us.
"'Her face expresses'," Arabella continued, "'shame and disgust at her ignominious position, while about her lips hovers that contemptuous scorn which a woman can so well show her manly oppressor'." She pointed at the rapidly swelling crowd below. "These…
men
, this rabble, are one and the same as that Eastern Barbarian. I hope the drapes fall again when I bring my girls. They would be highly instructed to see the expression on the faces of all these men, and contrast it with the purity of the slave's contemptuous scorn."
"Take Thornton with you," John suggested. "Get him to pull it down."
"I couldn't bring myself to go near it," Walter said firmly. "I have seen her piteous face in the engravings. It is as Mrs. Thornton says. And it is enough for me."
Arabella was proud of Walter's manly rebuff; she did not think John Stevenson had taken her sentiments quite seriously. Then she had to attend to Sarah, who had breathed a fly into her throat and was now having a fit trying to cough it up.
Nora had at last pried the Rodets from the French section, though they were still in bitter dispute as to whether a piece of Sèvres on display there was or was not identical to one they had at home. Nora was sure that Rodie had begun by saying it was, but by the time they reached the nave and were pressing through the thickening crowd she was saying it was not—and Rodet was opposing her with equal vehemence.
Arabella, rather startlingly for her, and certainly rather loudly, said that the crowd was "like flies near bad meat."
"She seems very much more robust than she used to be," John commented to Sarah.
"She is unrecognizable as the same woman. Nora used to chide you, John, for saying she would do something one day, but I think she really has the seeds of greatness." She turned to the girl. "Charity, you tell Mr. Stevenson what you told me the other day. What you say about Mrs. Thornton."
"It isn't me alone, Madame," Charity said—they had been at work on her language and accent—"'tis all the girls."
"Go on."
"Well…" Charity gulped, and smiled at John. "We believe Mrs. Thornton because she never makes you feel she's up there and you're down there. She says there isn't a man or woman born anywhere in all history, excepting Jesus, who had no sin. In God's eyes we're
all
sinners. Our souls be all in the same pan of His weighing scales. So she do make you feel like if there's hope for her, there's hope for you too."
"You see, John?" Sarah added. "I worked for years at the Hornsey Refuge never understanding that. But with Arabella, it was obvious from the start."
"Do you not remember?" he asked Charity. "It's exactly what she told you down in the kitchen basement that first night."
"I remember so little of that night, sir. It was a year ago now."
"But isn't that a mark of greatness?" Sarah pressed. "To understand such things without having to be told them. She has a loving command of those girls that is almost mystical."
"And you, Charity," John said, still looking at her. "Are you content?"
Charity smiled at Sarah, the way all in people smile at one another when outsiders ask naïve questions. "More than content, sir," she told him. "To walk day and night in Jesus's love is the greatest possible joy." He smiled back and drew a little apart from them then. Her radiant piety embarrassed him. Also, though he barely admitted it, religious females had always exercised an appeal for him that lewd women could never match. He found himself beginning to want Charity and had to remind himself of the remote possibility that she was his daughter, though inquiries at the two orphanages which she remembered produced no evidence to support it.
Nora had not seen Charity before, but she had heard the bare bones of the story as John had told it to her. She watched this exchange between John and Sarah and the girl carefully, as they strolled up the nave and into the foreign machinery section. She trusted John and was inclined to believe his story, but, even so, in any woman's heart, when she hears that her husband has picked up a pretty young dockside whore, for whatever laudable reasons, and brought her home, there must remain some element of doubting curiosity. She found Charity almost
too
good.
When they arrived at the French machinery, dominated by the "improved double turbine," Rodet, overcome by patriotic rapture, launched into a voluble explanation of it and its neighbours to Rodie. Even at his million-words-aminute, it looked set for a good half-hour.
Arabella smiled at Nora. "You are radiant, my dear."
"I was about to say the same to you."
"You realize it's eleven years and three days since my Nicholas was born. Alfresco! During that memorable picnic near Summit—at least, memorable to me."
"To all of us. What happy times they were!"
"Oh, I would not go back, Nora dear. I am so happy now. I have my life's true work ahead of me now."
They stood side by side, leaning on the guard rail surrounding the machines, looking at each other only occasionally.
"Stevenson always said it," Nora admitted with chagrin. "Do you remember how we used to laugh at the very idea!"
Arabella smiled. "Not now, Nora. I bless him every day I get up."
"You don't feel—sometimes—that he rather pushed you into it last year?"
"Not at all. Not remotely. Why do you ask?"
"Well—he found Charity and brought her home. It was sudden. It did force the issue."
That made Arabella laugh. "The only thing it forced was Thornton. I had been ready to begin for weeks. Long before Stevenson came to Bristol. It was Thornton's hand on the brake." She sighed. "But to have selected Charity—out of all the thousands he might have selected, and I mean
thousands—
that was a stroke of genius. I believe God must have directed him."
"Strong words." Nora smiled at Rodet, whose eye had accidentally caught hers; he smiled back but did not even hiccup in his narrative.
"I mean it. Without the help and guidance and advice of that girl I would have…made so many…blunders." She did not sound so happy now.
"Dangerous ones?"
"No. Futile ones. I would have wasted so much effort…pursued wrong courses…squandered our resources." She looked at Nora, as if sizing her up. "Did you realize, for instance," she asked, "that most girls who…take up
that
way of life leave it quite voluntarily within a few years?"
Nora cleared her throat, feeling nothing more was called for.
"And do you know," Arabella went on, "that if they did not go on the streets, they would quite literally starve, for there is no other work for them of any description?"
For the barest fleeting moment Nora thought
She knows! She knows I once let
Walter have me for money. And now she's trying to tell me she forgives it.
But in her heart she knew that Arabella was incapable of that sort of duplicity. She put her head on one side and shook it, hoping she looked puzzled and encouraging enough to draw Arabella on. She wanted to know more—about Charity, especially.
"Do you know," the rhetorical catechism unfurled, "that in their traffic with men they are for the most part—however well they may dissemble it—as coldly indifferent as the most chaste woman among us should school herself to become?"
It was a question that offered Nora the profoundest insight into her relations with Walter Thornton—and thus into his relations with the female world at large.
"Do you know that their traffic, far from being confined to people of inferior breeding and station, is largely with respectable people of middling wealth— indeed, the sort of people who live all around
us?
I could not at first believe it until I sat with Charity in a cab on the quay at night and in many very respectable thoroughfares in Bristol. You will not believe it, but I have seen three of our own neighbours, men from Montague Parade and Kingsdown Parade, take up with—such girls. And two of these men had donated most generously to the Rescue Society! I thank God my husband is all that a Christian gentleman should be."
"Indeed," Nora agreed. "You could hardly begin your work otherwise."
Again Arabella sighed; by now she almost radiated her gloom. "That is the present trouble—I have hardly begun."
"Everyone says you have made such a wonderful start."
"Everyone indeed." Her agreement was fervent. "Everyone. That is exactly what is wrong. I must tell you, Nora, if I have learned only one thing this past year, it is that when everyone, simply everyone, praises you, your work must be defective. Especially in this most delicate and ticklish field. It is impossible to work effectively and please everyone. I shall not begin to feel useful until I hear the voice of protest from some quarter."
Their talk was getting no nearer to the subject of Charity, which was all that Nora was really interested in. She tried to steer it back: "I would have thought that your work over this last twelve months is…"
"It's the wrong battle," Arabella cut in. "To put it bluntly. If I can do no more than to rescue eight women—perhaps two dozen in time—if that is all, in a town where over a thousand nightly ply for hire, then I have no business raising other people's money and spending it."