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Their wide open eyes looked at him. No suffering, he said. A moment and all is over. Like dying in sleep. No-one spoke. Dead side of the street this. Dull business by day, land agents, temperance hotel, Falconer's railway guide, civil service college, Gill's, catholic club, the industrious blind. Why? Some reason. Sun or wind. At night too. Chummies and slaveys.
"Good old Raffy," said he, as the two staggered across the hall with one of Miss Jill's private boxes between them; "would you like a threepenny bit?" Raffles, whose ideas of a tip were elastic, admitted that he was open to receive even the smallest coin. "All right, mum's the word. Jill and I have a thing on, and we don't want it spoiled by the slaveys."
"Now about grub!" said Tom that evening. Once more Jill turned a little pale. She had been dreading this fateful question all along. "What do you think?" said she diplomatically. Tom, of course, had thought the problem out. "We must keep it dark from the slaveys," said he, "at least till everybody comes, then they're bound to give us a leg up.
'Horful indeed, miss, I believe yer, the burglar rejoined, with deep feeling. 'You don't know her temper when she's roused. An' I'm sure I 'ope you never may, neither. And I'd 'ad all my oranges off of 'em. So it came back to me what was wrote on the ongverlope, and I says to myself, "Why not, seein' as I've been done myself, and if they keeps two slaveys there must be some pickings?"
"The servants were, of course, playing cards in the house-keeper's room." "Not at all. They were singing hymns with Lady Grosville." Ashe looked incredulous. "Only the slaveys and scullery maids that couldn't help themselves. Never mind. Was Lady Kitty amenable?" "She seems to have made Lord Grosville very angry. Lady Grosville and I smoothed him down." "Did you?" said Ashe.
He had a flashing sense of the great pageant of the Mediæval popes, kings, crusaders, friars, beggars, peasants, flagellants, schoolmen; of the vast modern life in Paris, Vienna, Rome, London, Berlin, New York, Chicago; the brilliant life of the fashionable quarters, the babble of the Bohemias, the poor in their slums, the sick on their beds of pain, the soldiers, the prostitutes, the slaveys in lodging-houses, the criminals, the lunatics; the vast hordes of Russia, the life pullulating in the swarming boats on Chinese rivers, the merry butterfly life of Japan, the unknown savages of mid-Africa with their fetishes and war-dances, the tribes of the East sleeping in tents or turning uneasily on the hot terraces of their houses, the negro races growing into such a terrible problem in the United States, and each of all these peoples, nay, each unit of any people, thinking itself the centre of the universe, and of its love and care; the destiny of the races no clearer than the destiny of the individuals and no diviner than the life of insects, and all the vast sweep of history nothing but a spasm in the life of one of the meanest of an obscure group of worlds, in an infinity of vaster constellations.
He waited for pottering old ladies, for gaping slaveys, for the perpetual Buttonses from Thrupp's; and the thing in all this that she would have liked most unspeakably to put to the test was the possibility of her having for him a personal identity that might in a particular way appeal. There were moments when he actually struck her as on her side, as arranging to help, to support, to spare her.
And I knew equally well that before I tapped at her door a little later she had examined the contents of the blue bag to make sure that I had extracted nothing. How I pity the long procession of "slaveys" who must have followed each other drearily in that lodging-house under the landlady's jurisdiction.
She was of the callously named tribe of lodging-house "slaveys"; and what gave me some interest in her personality, apart from the type she represented, was the fact that she had come from the Vale of Blackmore, a part of Dorset which I knew very well.
That is why, in this dynasty not of man's making, weavers gone blind from the intricacies of their queen's coronation robe, can kneel at her hem to kiss the cloth of gold that cursed them. A peasant can look on at a poet with no thought to barter his black bread and lentils for a single gossamer fancy. Backstair slaveys vie with each other whose master is more mighty.
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