The Life of Thomas Wanless, Peasant

by A. J. Wilson

Paying the toll at the north side, he wandered backwards and forwards till the chill from the river began to enter his bones. The one he looked for came not to him—still he could not drag himself away. He sat down in a recess and cowered below the parapet for shelter, waiting for he knew not what. It might have been ten o'clock. He had sat quite an hour, and was nearly going to sleep with weariness, inaction, and cold, when a rustle of a woman's dress near him spurred his faculties into active watchfulness. Peering into the darkness, made visible by the feeble shimmer of the lamp on the parapet, he discovered a woman approach him, crouching down in the recess on the other side of the bridge, weeping bitterly, though almost in silence. Raising himself on his elbow, he was about to speak to her when she started up with a wild despairing gesture, and, jumping on the seat, flung away her shawl.

"Yes," he heard her say to herself, with a wailing resoluteness, "I'll do it; I'll die," and with one look of farewell to the world, where no hope was left for her, a look of despair and horror that gleamed through the darkness, she clutched the parapet and drew herself on to it.

It was all the work of a moment, a flash of time, but Wanless had sprung to his feet at the sound of her voice, and was half across the bridge by the time the woman got upon the parapet. Then he saw her last look, and the gleam of a neighbouring lamp revealed her features. She was Adelaide Codling, and the recognition so startled Wanless that he staggered and for a moment stopped short. In that moment she was lost. Even as the cry burst from his lips, "Adelaide Codling, Adelaide, Adelaide," she threw herself over, as if the sight of a man approaching her had given the last spur to her despair. He reached the parapet but in time to hear the dull splash of her body in the dark tide rolling beneath. As she felt the water close round her, a cry—weird, unearthly, terrible,—broke from the girl's lips, and then all was silent, till the waves threw her up again on the other side of the bridge, when a hollow, dying wail wandered over the river—the last farewell of this poor waif of humanity, sacrificed to the pleasures of the scoundrels who "bear rule" among us, and call themselves refined.

Wanless was already at the toll-house, panting and hardly able to speak. But his look was enough, and presently there arose a shouting to lightermen and bargemen. Boats were put off by those who had heard the splash and the cry. A crowd gathered to see. In little more than a quarter of an hour a shout rose from the water far down towards Blackfriars, for the tide was running out, and the girl had gone rapidly down stream. "Saved! saved!" was the cry, and they had, indeed, found the body of Adelaide Codling. She herself had gone. The cold had killed her rather than the length of time she had been in the water—the cold and the shock.

Thomas waited to hear the result of the doctor's efforts at the police office, and then saw the body deposited in a neighbouring deadhouse. No clue to her identification was found upon the body, the poor girl had taken care of that, more mindful of her friends in death than they of her living. But Thomas felt bound to tell the police sergeant what he knew. He gave his own address and that of the Rev. Josiah Codling, but could not tell where the girl lived, or what had been the immediate cause of her suicide. The police, seeing that the upper classes were in question, decided to keep names quiet for the present—but communicated with the girl's father, and arranged that the inquest should be delayed for two days to permit him to attend. Thomas himself was told that he would be summoned as a witness, and then went his way.

He hardly knew how he got home to his lodgings that night.

The inquest on the body of Adelaide Codling was held in the upper room of a low-class public house in Upper Thames Street. Thomas Wanless obtained liberty to absent himself from work that day, at his own charges, of course, and punctually at three in the afternoon—the appointed hour—he entered the parlour of the inn. He was carefully dressed in the now threadbare and shiny suit of black, which had been his Sunday costume for many years.

A small knot of men had gathered in the room, and a desultory kind of chat was going on when Thomas entered. Two or three were grumbling at the nuisance of these "coroner's 'quests," which took men away from their business, the majority were "having something to drink," and all were utterly indifferent to the business that had brought them there.

Presently the coroner bustled into the room with his clerk. The latter hurriedly called over some names, which were answered, and then produced a greasy-looking volume in leather which he called "the book." This talisman he put into the hands of the man nearest him, to whom he mumbled some cabalistic words, at the end of which the book was passed along and kissed in a foolish sort of way by the chosen twelve. Having in this manner "constituted the jury," proceedings commenced with a procession to "view the body," led by the coroner. It lay in a rough wooden shell coffin, in a dark hole attached to an old city church, and used as a mortuary. Wanless followed the little crowd in a stunned sort of way. To his simple, rustic mind it was a dreadful thing that men should be able to go so carelessly about such a solemn duty. At the mortuary he was surprised to see the Vicar. The old man stood by his child's head, gazing at it in a helpless, dazed way, as if hardly conscious of what it all meant. No emotion was visible on his face, no tears broke from his eyes when a policeman, softened by the sight, led him gently away to the inn parlour out of the way of coroner and jury.

The "viewing" over, the Court returned to the inn to take evidence. Of that there was very little, beyond the personal testimony of the police, until Thomas Wanless was called. When his name was mentioned, Thomas saw the old Vicar start, and for the first time look up with something like intelligence in his glance, then a scared, shrinking sort of expression stole across his features, as if he had suddenly thought of home and cruel village tongues. But he listened quietly to all the old labourer had to say. It was not much, for a proper-minded coroner would not have suffered "family secrets" to be too freely exposed, nor had Wanless himself any desire to tell more than was absolutely needful.