Adam’s Breed

I

Teresa Boselli stood at the window staring down at Old Compton Street; at the greasy pavements, the greasy roadway, the carts, the intolerable slow-moving vans, those vans, that to Teresa’s agonized ears, seemed to rumble more loudly because of that window. There were men in the street, and women too, mothers⁠—yet they let those vans go on rumbling; they did not know, and even if they knew they would probably continue on their way uncaring.

Teresa’s whole being, soul, heart and brain, seemed to fuse itself together into something hard, resisting⁠—a shield, a wall, a barricade of steel wherewith to shut away those sounds. In the street below the traffic blocked itself; protesting horses shuffled and stamped, their drivers shouted to each other, laughing; a boy went by whistling a music-hall song; a dog, perched jauntily on a grocer’s cart, sprang up to bark at nothing in particular; and Teresa shook her clenched fists in the air, then let them drop stiffly to her sides. Her eyes, small, black and aggressively defiant, burnt with a kind of fury.

Turning from the window, she looked about the room with its horsehair armchair and couch. She herself had crocheted the antimacassars that, slightly out of shape and no longer very white, adorned the slippery horsehair. She herself had chosen the red serge curtains and the bottle-green window blind, the brown linoleum so very unlike parquet and the rug so alien to Persia. She herself had made the spotted muslin hangings over pink sateen that clothed the dressing-table, and she herself had pinned on the large pink bow wherewith they were looped together. She herself had fixed the little wooden bracket that held the patient plaster Virgin, and hers were the hands that had nailed the Sacred Heart directly over the bedstead. A battered wooden bedstead, a battered Sacred Heart; the one from long enduring the travail of men’s bodies, the other from long enduring the travail of their souls. In the oleograph the Heart was always bleeding⁠—no one ever staunched it, no one ever worried. To Teresa it had stood for a symbol of salvation; she had sometimes condoned with its sufferings in her prayers, but never⁠—no, not once⁠—in her life. She had seen this particular picture of the Heart in a window near the church in Hatton Garden. She had gone in and bought it, three and sixpence it had cost. That had been six months ago this November, while Olga, the beloved, the only child, the beautiful, had been away in Florence serving as maid to the children of rich Americans, teaching them Italian⁠—Maledetti!