II
But a man cannot forget the training of his youth, the practice of his adult years, and the support of his middle age in one demonian hour. As I passed wildly through dim, bilious abysses of filth-laden atmosphere, though my body was soon lost, and hopelessly lost, in the fog, my mind became a trifle clearer and the steadfast principles of a lifetime reasserted themselves. I determined to go on with my shattered existence; indeed I felt tolerably sure that my fellow-man, who had kept me thus busily employed, would presently prevent me from carrying my purpose to its bitter end. I grew a little calmer, recollected the terms of my wager, and so proceeded with the directions delivered by the police constable, doubting nothing but that my next meeting with a human being would divert the catastrophe, and once more set me forward upon a new road.
Presently a little shop loomed alongside me, and I perceived that here might be procured an essential in the matter of destruction by hanging. A mean and humble establishment it was, lighted by one paraffin lamp. The stock-in-trade apparently consisted of ropes and door-pegs—in fact, the complete equipment proper to my undertaking. Time and place agreed. It was indeed just such a gloomy, lonesome, and sequestered hole as a suicide might select to make his final purchases. From a door behind the counter there came to me a bald and mournful little man with weak eyes, a subdued manner, and the facial inanity of the rabbit. Hints of a fish dinner followed him from his dwelling-room, and through the door I could catch a glimpse of his family, four in number, partaking of that meal.
“What might you want?” he asked, but in a despondent tone, implying, to my ear, that it was rarely his good fortune to have anything in stock a would-be customer desired to purchase.
“I want a rope to hang a man,” I answered, and waited with some interest to see the result.
The small shopkeeper’s eyes grew round; a mixture of admiration and creeping fear lighted them.
“My gracious! You’re him, then! To think as ever I should——”
Here he broke off, and in a frenzy of excitement opened the door behind him and spoke to his wife. I overheard, for he could not subdue his voice. I think he felt confronted by the supreme business transaction of his career.
“Jane, Jane! Creep in the shop quiet and look at this here man! By ’Eaven! it’s the public executioner! To think as ever I should sell a rope to him! Hush!”
He turned, and while he addressed me with dreadful humility, the woman, Jane, crept into the shop, and stared morbidly upon my harrowed countenance.
Then she whispered to her husband—
“That’s not him, for I seed his picture in the Police News last week. It’s a new one, or else his assistant!”
Meantime I was being served, and it seemed that the little man suddenly awakened to the dignity of his calling before my sensational order. He began handling a wilderness of rope ends and discoursing upon them with the air of an expert as he rose to the great occasion.
“A nice twisted cordage you’ll be wanting, and if you’ll leave the choice to me, nobody shall be none the worse. I’ve been in rope since I was seventeen. Now, Manila hemp won’t do—too stiff and woody, too lacking in suppleness. That’s what you want: suppleness. The sisal hemps, from South America, are very pretty things, and the New Zealand hemp is hard to beat; but there’s another still more beautiful cordage. Only it’s very rarely used because it comes rather expensive. Still, when a fellow-creature’s life’s at stake, I suppose you won’t count the cost. Besides, the Government pays, don’t it? That’s a Jubbulpore hemp—best of all—or bowstring hemp, as I’m told they use in the harems of the East, though what for I couldn’t say. I’ve got a very nice piece—ten foot long and supple as silk—just try it—and any strain up to two hundred pound. Hand-spun, of course—a lovely thing, though I say so. But it’s a terrible thought. Jute’s cheaper, only I won’t guarantee it; I won’t indeed. You want a reliable article, if only for your own reputation. And one more thing; I suppose there’s no objection to my using this as an advertisement? People in these parts is all so fond of horrors; and as it’s Government I ought to be allowed the lion and unicorn perhaps?”
I bought the Jubbulpore hemp as the man advised. It cost thirty shillings, and the vendor wrestled between pleasure at the success of his extortion and horror at the future of his rope. But I told him he must neither advertise the circumstance, nor dare to assume the lion and unicorn on the strength of it. This discouraged him, and he lost heart and took a gloomy view of the matter.
“A hawful tride, if I may say so without offence,” he ventured. “Would it be the Peckham Rye murderer as you’re buying this rope for, or that poor soul who lost his temper with his wife’s mother down Forest Hill wye?”
“Neither,” I answered. “It is a man called Honeybun.”
“Honeybun! Ah! A ugly, crool nime! What’s he done?”
“Made a fool of himself.”
“Lord! if we was hung for that, there wouldn’t be much more talk of over-population—eh? Well, well, I s’pose he’ll be as ’appy with you and that bit of Jubbulpore as we can hope for him. A iron nerve it must want. Yet Mr. Ketch was quite the Christian at ’ome, I b’lieve. Not your first case, of course?”
I picked up the rope and prepared to depart.
“My very first experience,” I said.
“Pore soul!” exclaimed the feeling tradesman, but he referred to the criminal, not to me.
“For Gord’s sake don’t bungle it!” were the last husky words I heard from him; and then I set forth to hang Arthur Honeybun, who deserved hanging if ever a man did. I told myself this, and made a quotation which I forget.
And now arose one of the most sinister concatenations easily to be conceived in the life of a respectable citizen. Here was I on the brink of self-destruction; I only waited for some fellow-creature to restrain me. But nobody attempted to do so! My folly in disguising the truth from the little rope-merchant now appeared. Had he known, he had doubtless shown me my dreadful error in time; now it was too late; his only advice—sound undoubtedly—had been not to bungle it. The world pursued its own business quite regardless of me and my black secret and my hidden rope. Apparently there was really nothing for me to do but to lose my wager or hang myself—an alternative which I well knew would represent for my family a total pecuniary loss considerably greater than the sum involved.
I wandered down a lonely court and found an archway at the bottom. One sickly gas-lamp gleamed above this spot, and the silence of death reigned within it. Had I been in sober earnest, no nook hidden away under the huge pall of the fog could have suited me better. Some evil fiend had apparently taken charge of my volition and designed to see the matter through, for I pursued this business of hanging with a callous deliberation that amazed me. I even smiled as I climbed up the arch and made the rope fast upon the lamp above it. Not a soul came to interrupt. The lamp blinked lazily, the fog crowded closer to see the sight, the fiend busied himself with my Jubbulpore rope and arranged all preliminaries, while I sat and grinned over the sooty desolation. I felt my pulse calmly, critically; I indulged in mental analysis, endeavoured to estimate my frame of mind, and wondered if I could throw the experience into literary form for a scientific journal. I remember being particularly surprised that the attitude of my intellect towards this performance was untinctured by any religious feeling whatsoever.
Then came a psychological moment when the fiend had done everything that he could for me. My task was merely to tie the loose end of the Jubbulpore masterpiece round my neck and cast forth into the void. How strange a thing is memory! For some extraordinary reason a famous definition of fishing flashed into my mind. I could not recall it exactly at that terrible moment, but I remembered how it had to do with a fool at one end of a piece of string.
Still not a footstep, but only the rumble and roar of all selfish London some twenty yards off, and never a hand to save me from a coward’s doom. I grew much annoyed with London; I reminded London of the chief incidents in my own career; I asked myself if this was justice; I also asked myself why I had been weak enough to turn into a blind alley, evidently an unpopular, undesirable spot, habitually ignored. And then I grew melancholy, even maudlin. I saw my faults staring at me—my negligences and ignorances; and chiefly my crass idiotcy in not undertaking this matter at Piccadilly Circus, or some main junction of our metropolitan system, where such enterprises are not tolerated. It is, of course, a free country, and the rights of the subject are fairly sacred, speaking generally; but we draw the line here and there, and I knew that any attempt to annihilate myself upon some lamp-post amid the busy hum of men must have resulted as I desired. Interference would have prevented complete suspension there, but here the seclusion was absolute, and simply invited crime. The fog had now reached its crowning triumph, and promised to deprive my trusty Jubbulpore hemp of its prey, for I was suffocating, and asphyxia threatened to overwhelm me at any moment.
“Where the deuce are the police?” I asked myself at this eleventh hour. It was a policeman who had placed me in my present pitiable fix, and—blessed inspiration!—why should not another of the tribe extricate me from it? When in danger or imminent peril it is our custom to shout for the help of the law, and surely if ever a poor, overwrought soul stood in personal need of the State’s assistance, it was Arthur Honeybun at that moment. So, with nerves strung to concert pitch, I lifted up my voice and called for a policeman. In these cases, however, one does not specify or limit, so my summons was couched generally to the force at large.
There followed no immediate response, then three boys assembled under my arch, and they formed a nucleus or focus about which a small crowd of the roughest possible persons, male and female, collected. Last of all a policeman also came.
“Now, then,” he said, “what’s all this, then?”
“I LIFTED UP MY VOICE AND CALLED FOR A POLICEMAN”
The miserable boys took entire credit to themselves for discovering me perched aloft. They pointed me out and called attention to the Jubbulpore rope dangling from the lamp, and elaborated their own theories.
Very properly the constable paid no attention to them, but addressed all his remarks to me.
“You up there,” he asked—“what d’you think you’re plyin’ at?”
There was no sympathy in his voice. He appeared to be a tall, harsh officer—a mere machine, with none of the milk of human kindness in him; or perhaps a beat in Seven Dials had long since turned it sour. Moreover, he felt that the crowd was on his side—a circumstance that always renders a constable over-confident and aggressive.
I felt unstrung, as I say—distracted and more or less emotional—or I should have approached the situation differently; but I was not my own master. I sat there, a mere parcel of throbbing nerves escaped from a hideous death. So, instead of being lucid, which is a vital necessity in all communion with the police, I uttered obscure sayings, went out of my way to be cryptical, and even spoke in spasmodic parables. But of course there exists no member of the body politic upon whom parables are wasted more utterly than a constable.
“You are surprised, and naturally so, to see me here,” I said. “There are, however, more things in heaven and earth, policeman, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I am the creature of circumstances—in fact, of a series of circumstances probably unparalleled. A colleague of your own—it may be a personal friend—is responsible for my position on this arch. Yonder wretched boy has not erred; I had seriously thought to destroy myself. I was driven to the very threshold of that rash act. A fronte præcipitium, a tergo lupi, policeman. I am here perched between the devil and the deep sea, a precipice in front, a pack of wolves in the immediate rear. Now, be frank with me. I place myself entirely in your hands. I desire your honest and dispassionate advice.”
But this is not the way to talk to a policeman; perhaps it is not the way to talk to anybody.
The deplorable boy had another theory.
He said, “The blighter’s off his onion!”
Then somebody else, dimly conscious that I had used a foreign language, suspected that I might be an anarchist. The policeman merely told me to come down, and I obeyed without hesitation, and gave myself up to him. I felt that, situated thus, at least I was safe enough, if he would only do his duty; but he appeared to believe in the opinion that I was a foreigner.
“Where do you come from?” he asked. “If you’re not English, it’s a case for your bloomin’ Consul.”
“I come from South Kensington,” I answered, “and I am English to the backbone, and it’s your duty to convey me to the police-station, which I’ll thank you to do.”
Here again I made a mistake. No man likes being told his duty, whether owing to the natural human aversion from thinking of it or doing it, or for other reasons connected with pride I know not; but the constable, upon this speech of mine, displayed annoyance, and even some idea of leaving me to my own devices. Seeing that he showed an inclination to let me escape into the fog without even a word of advice, I spurred him to his office. I said:—
“If you don’t arrest me, I shall persuade some other member of the force to do so, and, as I have already made a note of your number, it will be the worse for you.”
Upon this he started as if a serpent had stung him; the crowd cheered me, and my object was attained. He felt his popularity was slipping away, and so set about regaining it.
“All right, all right, my bold ’ero!” he said. Then he blew a whistle, and summoned two colleagues.
“Dangerous lunatic—wants to be took up,” he explained. “Clean off his chump. Tryin’ to ’ang ’imself.”
Then he turned to me, and adopted a conciliatory tone.
“Now, then, uncle, come along quiet,” he said.
I suggested a cab, and offered to pay for it, but the constable held such a thing unnecessary extravagance.
“Won’t hurt you to walk,” he said. “And we’ll go quicker than a four-wheeler in this fog.”
So, with a large accompaniment of those who win entertainment from the misfortunes of their betters, I started to some sheltering haven, where it was my hope that the remainder of the day might be spent in security and seclusion behind bolts and bars. In this desire lurked no taste of shame or humiliation. I was far past anything of that kind. My sole unuttered prayer was to be saved from all further human counsel whatsoever. If an angel from heaven had fluttered down beside me, and uttered celestial opinions to brighten that dark hour, I should have rejected his advice, very likely with rudeness.
I thought of the cynical sagacity of Norton Bellamy. How wise he had been! And what a fool was I! I pictured his face when my story came to be told. I heard his horrid laughter, and my self-respect oozed away, and I almost wished I was back with the Jubbulpore hemp upon the arch.
Then, in the moment of my self-abasement, at the supreme climax of my downfall, I looked out through a yellow rift in the accursed fog, and saw Norton Bellamy himself.
At first, indeed, I did not credit this. The fog had lifted somewhat, livid patches and streaks of daylight relieved the gloom, and a dingy metropolis peeped and blinked through it, fungus-coloured and foul; but suddenly, painted upon the murky air, there took shape and substance a moving concourse of figures—of heads under helmets—and I, remembering the spectre of the Brocken, for a moment suspected that what I saw was but the shadows of myself, my policemen and my crowd projected over against us upon the dusky atmosphere.
Yet as that other company approached the splendid truth burst upon me. Vagrants, policemen, and rioting boys mainly composed it; but in the place of chief dishonour walked Norton Bellamy. He, too, it would seem, had violated the laws of his country. He too, by devious and probably painful ways, had drifted into Seven Dials, and there lost his freedom. An even-handed Nemesis, whose operations yet remained hidden from me, had clearly punished Bellamy for rejecting the advice of his fellow-man, even as she had chastened me for accepting it. And from cursory appearances it looked as though Bellamy had endured even more varied torments than my own. One might have thought that attempts had been made to clean the highway with him. He was dripping with mud, he lacked a hat, his white waistcoat awoke even a passing pity in my heart, and yet the large placidity, the awful calm of a fallen spirit, sat on Bellamy. He had doubtless exploded, detonated, boiled over, fumed, foamed, fretted, and thundered to his utmost limit. His bolt was shot, his venom was gone; he stood before me reduced to the potency of a mere empty cartridge-case.
We met each other’s glance simultaneously, and a sort of savage and foggy beam of joy flitted across his muddy face; while for my part I doubt not that some passing expression of pleasure, which tact and humanity instantly extinguished, also illuminated my features. Our retinues mingled, and for a moment we had speech together.
Needless to say, the discovery that we were acquainted proved a source of much gratification to the crowd.
“Great Scott! You!” gasped out Bellamy. “What have you done?”
“Practically nothing,” I answered; “but what I have suffered no tongue can tell and no human being will ever know. It is sufficient to say that I am here because I was deliberately advised by a fellow-creature to go and hang myself.”
“They told you to do that?” he asked, with keen but suppressed excitement.
“They did.”
He was silent for an instant, pondering this thing, while joy and sorrow mingled on his countenance. Then he answered me.
“I’ll write your cheque the first moment I get back to the office. You were right. There is more good advice given than bad. I’ve proved it too. If I’d done half what I was told to-day, I——”
Here our respective guardians separated us, and we marched to our destination in silence; but about five or six minutes later we sat side by side in a police-station, and were permitted to renew our conversation.
“You’ve had a stirring day, no doubt,” Bellamy began, while he scraped mud off himself. “Tell me your yarn, then I’ll tell you mine. But how is it, if somebody advised you to go and hang yourself, that you are here now? You’ll have to explain that first as a matter of honour.”
I explained, and it must be confessed that my words sounded weak. It is certain, at any rate, that they did not convince Bellamy.
“I withdraw the promise to write a cheque,” he said shortly. “On your own showing you dallied and dawdled and fooled about upon the top of that arch. You temporised. If you had followed that advice with promptitude and like a man, you wouldn’t be here. This is paltry and dishonest. I certainly shan’t pay you a farthing.”
I told him that I felt no desire to take his money, and he was going into the question of how far he might be said to have won mine when we were summoned before the magistrate. Here fate at last befriended me, for the justice proved to be master of my lodge of Freemasons and an old personal friend. Finding that no high crime was laid at the door of Bellamy, and, very properly, refusing to believe that I had been arrested in an attempt on my own life, he rebuked my policeman and restored to us our liberty. Whereupon we departed in a hansom-cab, after putting two guineas apiece into the poor-box. This, I need hardly say, was my idea.
Then, as we drove to a hatter’s at the wish of Norton Bellamy, he threw some light on the sort of morning he himself had spent. The man was reserved and laconic to a ridiculous degree under the circumstances, therefore I shall never know all that he endured; but I gathered enough to guess at the rest, and feel more resigned in the contemplation of my own experiences. He hated to utter his confession, yet the memory of that day rankled so deep within him that he had not the heart to make light of it.
“A foretaste of the hereafter,” began Bellamy—“that’s what I have had. And if such a fiendish morning isn’t enough to drive a man to good works and a better way of life, I’d like to see what is. You say your trouble began in the railway-carriage coming to town. So did mine. But whereas your part was passive, and, by the mere putty-like and plastic virtue of ready obedience to everybody you finally found yourself face to face with death, I reached the same position through a more active and terrible sort of way.”
“Nevertheless,” said I, “taking into consideration the difference between my character and yours—remembering that by nature you are aggressive, I retiring—nothing you can say will make me believe that you have suffered more than I. Physically perhaps, but not mentally.”
“Don’t interrupt. I’ve heard you; now listen to me,” he answered. “It began, as I say, in a train. An infernal inspector desired to see my season-ticket. Of course he was within his rights, and I had a whole carriage-load of fools down on me because I refused to show it. This day has taught me one thing: there’s not a man, woman, or child in the country who minds their own business for choice if a chance offers of poking their vile noses into any other body’s. The people who have interested themselves in me to-day! Well, this railway chap was nasty, of course, and took my name and address; but nothing more worth mentioning happened, except a row with a shoeblack, until I got to my office. There the real trouble began.
“You know Gideon? Who doesn’t, for that matter? I had the luck to do him a good turn a week ago, and he came in this morning with a tip—actually went out of his way to cross Lombard Street and get out of his cab and look in.
“He said ‘Good morning. Buy Diamond Jubilees—all you can get.’ And I didn’t look up from my letters, but thought it was Jones, who’s always dropping in to play the fool, and remembered our loathsome bet. So I merely said, ‘Shan’t! Clear out!’ Then I lifted my head just in time to see Gideon departing, about as angry as a big man can be with a little one, and my clerks all looking as though they’d suddenly heard the last trump.
“I tore after him, but too late; of course he’d gone. Then I dashed to his place of business, but he’d got an appointment somewhere else and didn’t turn up till after twelve, by which time the tip was useless. And he showed me pretty plainly that I may regard myself as nothing to him henceforth. After that I was too sick to work, so went West to see a man and get some new clothes. Like a fool, I never remembered that with this bet on me I couldn’t lie too low. It was all right at the hairdresser’s, as you may imagine; but I’m accustomed to let my tailor advise me a good deal, and you can see the holy fix I was in after he’d measured me. I got out of that by saying that I’d drop in again and see his stuffs and his pictures by daylight; then I had a glass of port at Long’s, and remembering my youngsters, went to find a shop where I could get masks and wigs and nonsense for them, because they are proposing to do some charades or something to wind up their holiday before they go back to school. Then, in the fog, I got muddled up and lost myself about a quarter of a mile from where we met. First I had a row with a brute from Covent Garden Market, who ran into me with a barrow of brussels-sprouts. We exchanged sentiments for a while, and then the coster said—
“‘I don’t arsk of you to pick ’em up, do I?’
“Well, of course, as he didn’t ask me to pick them up, I immediately began to do it. And the man was so astonished that he stopped swearing and called several of his friends to make an audience. So that was all right as far as it went; but just then a bobby appeared out of the din and clatter of the street, and ordered me to move on. Of course I wouldn’t, and while I was arguing with him, and asking for his reason, a fire-engine dashed out of the bowels of the fog and knocked me down in a heap before I knew who’d hit me.
“Everybody thought I was jolly well killed, and I could just see the air thick with blackguard faces, getting their first bit of real fun for the day, when I suppose I must have become unconscious from the shock for the time being. Anyway, on regaining my senses, I found myself in a bed of mud and rotten oranges, with three policemen and about fifty busybodies, all arguing cheerfully over me, as if I was a lost child. Most of them hoped I was dead, and showed their disappointment openly when I recovered again. Two doctors—so they said they were—had also turned up from somewhere, and taken a general survey of me while I was in no condition to prevent them. After that I need hardly tell you I’ve lost my watch.
“The question appeared to be my destination, and now the policeman who had told me to move on explained, at great length, that depended entirely on whether I was physically shattered or still intact. If I was all right save for the loss of my hat and the gain of an extra coat or two of mud, the man had arranged to take me to a police-station for interfering with a fire-engine in the execution of its duty, or some rot of that sort; but if, on the other hand, I was broken up and perhaps mortally injured, then it struck him as a case for a stretcher and a hospital.
“They were still arguing about this when I came to. Upon which the constable invited my opinion, and explained the two courses open to him. He seemed indifferent and practically left it to me; so, as I felt the police-station would probably represent the simplest and shortest ordeal, and as, moreover, so far as I could judge at the time, I was little the worse in body for the downfall, I decided in that direction. I told him I was all right and had mercifully escaped. Whereupon he congratulated me in a friendly spirit and took me in charge.”
Thus Bellamy: and when the man had finished, we spoke further for the space of about two minutes and a half, then parted, by mutual understanding, to meet no more.
“I’m sorry for you,” I said. “We were both wrong and both right. The truth is that there’s a golden mean in the matter of advice, as in most things. Probably the proportions of good and bad are about equal, though I am not prepared to allow that our experiments can be regarded as in any sense conclusive.”
“And as to the bet, I suppose we may say it’s off?” asked Norton Bellamy. “I imagine you’ve had enough of this unique tomfoolery, and I know I have. I’m a mass of bruises and may be smashed internally for all I know, not to mention my watch.”
“Yes,” I replied, “the wager must be regarded as no longer existing. We have both suffered sufficiently, and if we proceeded with it quod avertat Deus, some enduring tribulation would probably overtake one or both of us. And a final word, Bellamy. As you know, we have never been friends; our natures and idiosyncrasies always prevented any mutual regard; and this tragedy of to-day must be said to banish even mutual respect.”
“It has,” said Norton Bellamy. “I won’t disguise it. I feel an all-round contempt for you, Honeybun, that is barely equalled by the contempt I feel for myself. I can’t possibly put it more strongly than that.”
“Exactly my own case,” I answered; “and, therefore, in the future it will be better that we cease even to be acquaintances.”
“My own idea,” said Bellamy, “only I felt a delicacy about advancing it, which you evidently didn’t. But I am quite of your opinion all the same. And, of course, this day’s awful work is buried in our own breasts. Consider if it got upon the Stock Exchange! We should be ruined men. Absolute silence must be maintained.”
“So be it,” I replied. “Henceforth we only meet on the neutral ground of Brighton A’s. Indeed, even there it is not necessary, I think, that we should have any personal intercourse. And one final word; if you will take my advice——”
He had now alighted, but turned upon this utterance and gave me a look of such concentrated bitterness, malice, and detestation, that I felt the entire horror of the day was reflected in his eyes.
“Your advice! Holy angels and Hanwell!”
Those were the last words of Norton Bellamy. He felt this to be the final straw; he turned his back upon me; he tottered away into his hatter’s; and, with a characteristic financial pettiness, raised no question about paying for his share of our cab.