Now, here is the effect of taking advice upon the man who gives it! Mainwaring is a genial, uncalculating, kindly soul, who is always tendering counsel and exhortation to everybody, from his shoeblack upwards; yet, in a moment, I had him reduced to a mere bundle of vibrating nerves, simply because I had promptly undertaken to follow one of his suggestions. Of course I knew the thought in his mind: he believed that I was out of mine. So I said:
“Yes, old fellow, I see what you think; but, consider, if I’m a lunatic to take your advice, what must you be to give it?”
This conundrum, if possible, increased his uneasiness. He fussed anxiously around me and begged to be allowed to see me home; whereupon, being weary of his cowardice, I waved Mainwaring off, left the station to be free of him, and hastily ascended Arundel Street.
My object was now an omnibus which should convey me almost to my door; and my heart grew fairly light again, for if by the terms of the wager I could legitimately get back under my own roof, the worst might be well over. I pictured myself packing quietly all day for the Continent. Then, when morning should come, I had merely to change my mind again and the matter would terminate. Any natural disappointment of my wife and the girls, when they heard of my intention to stop in London after all, might be relieved with judicious gifts.
At a corner in the Strand I waited, and others with me, while the fog increased—noisome veil upon veil—and the lurid street seemed full of dim ghosts wandering in a sulphur hell. My omnibus was long in coming, and just as it did so I pressed forward with the rest, and had the misfortune to tread upon the foot of a threadbare and foul-mouthed person who had been waiting beside me. Standing there, the sorry creature had used the vilest language for fifteen minutes, had scattered his complicated imprecations on the ears of all, but especially, I think, for the benefit of his wretched wife. She—a lank and hungry creature—had flashed back looks at him once or twice, but no more. Occasionally, as his coarse words lashed her, she had shivered and glanced at this face and that to see whether any champion of women stood there waiting for the South Kensington omnibus. But apparently none did, though, for my part, at another time I had certainly taken it upon me to reprove the wretch, or even call a constable. But upon this day, and moving as it were for that occasion under a curse, I held silence the better course, and maintained the same while much pitying this down-trodden woman. Now, however, Fate chose me for a sort of Nemesis against my will, and leaping forward to the omnibus, I descended with all my fourteen stone upon the foot of the bully. He hopped in agony, lifted up his voice, and added a darkness to the fog. His profanity increased the ambient gloom, and out of it I saw the white face of his wife, and her teeth gleamed in a savage smile as he hopped in the gutter, like some evil fowl. People laughed at his discomfort, and a vocabulary naturally rich was lifted above itself into absolute opulence. He loosed upon me a chaos of sacred and profane expletives, uttered in the accent of south-west London. His words tumbled about my ears like a nest of angered hornets. The man refused to listen to any apology, and, from natural regret, my mood changed to active annoyance, because he insisted upon hopping between me and the omnibus, and a crowd began to collect.
Then his bitter-hearted wife spoke up and bid me take action, little dreaming of the position in which I stood with respect to all advice.
“Don’t let the swine cheek you like that,” she cried. “He’s all gas, that’s what he is—a carwardly ’ound as only bullies women and children. You’re bigger than him. Hit him over the jaw with your rumberella. Hit him hard, then you’ll see.”
It will not, I trust, be necessary for me to say that never before that moment had I struck a fellow-creature, either in the heat of anger or with calculated intention. Indeed, even a thousand pounds would seem a small price to expend if for that outlay one might escape such a crime; yet now, dazed by the noise, by the fog, by emotions beyond analysis, by the grinning teeth and eyes of the crowd shining wolfish out of the gloom around me, by the woman’s weird, tigerish face almost thrust into mine, and by the fact that the man had asked me why the blank blank I didn’t let my blank self out at so much a blank hour for a blank steam-roller—I let go. If Bellamy could have seen me then! My umbrella whistled through the fog, and appeared to strike the man almost exactly where his wife had suggested. He was gone like a dream, and everybody seemed pleased excepting the unfortunate creature himself. There were yells and cat-calls and wild London sounds in my ears. Somebody rose out of the pandemonium and patted me on the back, and told me to ‘hook it before the bloke got up again.’ Somebody else whispered earnestly in my ear that I had done the community a good turn. The omnibus proceeded without me, for I was now separated from it by a crowd. The fog thickened, lurid lights flashed in it, my head whirled, the man who had whispered congratulations in my ear endeavoured to take my watch, and I was just going to cry for the police, when my recumbent victim, assisted, to my amazement, by the tigerish woman, rose, clothed in mud as with a garment, and advanced upon me.
There are times and seasons when argument and even frank apology is useless. There are very rare occasions when coin of the realm itself is vain to heal a misunderstanding or soothe a wounded spirit. I felt that the man now drawn up in battle array before me was reduced for the moment to a mere pre-Adamite person or cave-dweller, first cousin to, and but slightly removed from, the unreasoning and ferocious dinosaur or vindictive megatherium. This poor, bruised, muddy Londoner, now dancing with clenched fists, and exuding a sort of language which rendered him almost incandescent, obviously thirsted to do me physical hurt. No mere wounding of my tenderest feeling, no shaming of me, no touching of my pride or my pocket would suffice for him. Indeed, he explained openly that he was going to break every bone in my body and stamp my remains into London mud, even if it spoilt his boots. Hearing which prophecy, one of those inspirations that repay a studious man for his study came in the nick of time, and I remembered a happy saying of the judicious Hooker, how that many perils can best be conquered by flying from them. I had not run for thirty years, but I ran then, and dashing past a church, a cheap book-shop, and the Globe Theatre, darted into the friendly shelter of a populous neighbourhood that extends beyond. So sudden was my action, and so dense the fog, that I escaped without loss, and within three minutes from that moment, all sorrow past, sat in a hansom, had the window lowered, and drove off with joy and thankfulness for my home.
So far I had done, or set about doing, everything my fellow-man or woman deemed well for me. As it was now past eleven o’clock, I felt that the day would soon slip away, and all might yet be well.