The great Skene mystery

BY BERNARD CAPES
METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON
First Published in 1907
TO A. J. RICE-OXLEY IN TOKEN OF SOME DEVOTED KINDNESS THIS STORY IS DEDICATED BY HIS FRIEND AND CONNEXION The Author “ Good is a good doctor ”—Emerson
Forty-Five years ago, one February evening, the fog lay thick over Clapham suburb. Generated in the fat sink of Lambeth, it had come sweltering up by way of the Westminster Bridge and Kennington Roads; had poured, like smoke from a range, through the bars of the pike-gate by the church; had pressed on, rolling up the last levels of twilight in front of it, past the “Swan,” at Stockwell, and the “Bedford Arms” beyond—before each of which popular hostelries it had deployed, in order to post its pickets in a dozen of fuddled brains—and, thence shouldering its passage densely through the main channel of the High Street, had flowed out and camped itself sluggishly among the gorse bushes of the open common to the south.
Incidentally, amongst other obscene “flushings” by the way, it had entered and packed to the throat a certain White Square, which already, in that stronghold of Evangelicalism, was of sufficiently bad odour to need no reinforcement of supplementary brimstone to prove itself. Like the fisherman’s bottle, this White Square was entered by a narrow neck or gullet, through which the genie of viciousness could compress itself into an inadequate house room, or thence issue to expand into proportions which were a menace to its neighbourhood. Thieves, harlots, and low Irish rapparees formed the bulk of its population: costers, and a drunken washerwoman or two, were its élite . How Mother Carey, with at least her better traditions, had drifted into its fastnesses, let the recording angel note. It was sacred from the police.
Mother Carey was certainly White Square’s most respectable unit—a one-eyed queen among the blind. She rented an entire tenement, in place of the fraction with which the most of her compeers must be content; she enjoyed an “independence” (paid, quarterly, through a lawyer, for value received); she had descended, in a cloud, from the hallowed mysteries of the tu-tu and the dancing sandal. She was a superannuated coryphée, in fact, and, save for the redeeming grace of that allowance, had long since sunk into squalider depths than her present.