The Betrayal of John Fordham

by B. L. Farjeon

"Well, do your best," he said. "We shall create a sensation."

We did. My articles were quoted far and near. Writing under a burning sense of wrong I was not sparing of epithet and denunciation. I worked at fever heat, and was often appalled at what I wrote, but it went into print with scarcely the alteration of a word. Had I written under my own name I might have become a celebrity.

In one of my articles I touched upon the marriage tie in relation to the evil. I described a home—a type of many—in which the wife was a confirmed dipsomaniac; another, in which the husband was drunk every day of his life. They were cases which came under my own eye in the localities where I pursued my investigations. From the lips of the sufferers themselves I received the terrible details of the gradual sinking into the slough of despair. Here was the wretched husband, once a bright mechanic earning a fair wage, whose wife's filthy habits had brought ruin upon him—hopeless, irremediable ruin. Vainly had he striven to reform her, vainly had he pointed out to her the sure consequences of her dissipation. Coming home at night from his work he found his rooms in darkness, his hungry children lying almost naked on the bare boards, and his wife drunk in the nearest gin palace. It had become a common occurrence. She pawned the beds, the furniture, the children's clothes and his own, again and yet again, and when he dragged her from the public-house she lay through the night, gibbering at the awful sights her diseased imagination conjured up. He replaced the furniture, he bought new beds and clothing, he gave his children food, and when his wife was able to crawl out again, off she crept to the pawnbroker to repeat her evil work. The children had grown stunted and deformed, their rags hung loosely on their shrunken limbs, like starving dogs they nosed the gutters for offal. "My God, my God!" he cried, the tears streaming down his face. "What shall I do? How shall I save my children? How shall I save myself?" His voice sank to a whisper. "One night I shall kill her, and there will be murder on my soul!"

In the other case it was the husband who drank, who would not work, who starved his wife and children, and beat them till their flesh was covered with livid bruises. It was the wife who told me the story. "If it were not for my children," she moaned, "I would make a hole in the water." It was not my habit to make more than a passing comment upon my descriptions of real and suffering life as it is to be seen to-day in the fester-spots of London. I had wished to do so, but was requested by my editor to put some restriction upon myself in this respect. "Leave that," he said, "to the editorial pen." At the end of the article in which I narrated these two cases, I wrote: "And these poor creatures are, by the Church and the so-called laws of God, chained to a living curse which blights, destroys, and damns the innocent." The words were allowed to stand.

On the following day a powerful leading article was written by the editor, in which a change in the law of divorce was imperatively demanded.

"Confirmed drunkenness," he said, "is a crime against the true laws of God and man; it is far worse than adultery, and more than a sufficient cause for separation. It is not alone that humanity demands it, but could God make Himself heard in this sinful world there would be a Divine mandate to enforce it." Other papers took up the subject. One popular journal (the season being over, and the House not sitting) made it a theme for the usual yearly correspondence, and columns of letters were printed every day—from despairing husbands and wives approving, from the clergy protesting, from politicians shilly-shallying. Meanwhile my articles had come to an end.

There was no change in my home, except for the worse, and I grew to hate it, to hate all who visited it, to hate myself. I had as little authority in it as any chance guest. I breakfasted, dined, and slept there—and, for variation, there were the scenes I had with Barbara. The lies that were circulated as to my brutality towards her bore fruit, and I was shunned by every soul in the neighborhood. Not a person I met there had a smile or a cordial word for me, and not for one sober hour did Barbara relax her cunning. In her mad fits she was visible only to me and Annette; when she went about the house or was seen in the streets her sad, listless ways (she was always sad when sober) were apparent to all, and her conspicuous ill-health was attributed to my conduct. It was the popular belief that I was "killing her by inches." I heard the words uttered by one of our servants to a servant in the adjoining house, and the indignant comment upon them—"Brute!"

Maxwell tried to borrow money from me, but I was sufficiently incensed to refuse him. "Not another shilling while I live," I said, and he replied that I would live to repent it. Scoundrel as he was, he spoke the truth.

The cases of the two poor homes ruined by a drunken husband and a drunken wife, which I have just narrated, drove my thoughts upon my own—and indeed it may have been because of the position in which I stood that I sifted them to the bottom. They had a peculiar fascination for me.

But even if the law of divorce were so altered as to rescue those who are driven to despair, sometimes to crime, by this frightful vice—which I pray may soon be so—a man situated as I was would find no relief in it. The shame would have to be proved, and the web which had been spun around me was of so cunning a nature that proof was impossible in my case. On the contrary, indeed; all the evidence, except my bare statements, would be turned against myself.