He rushed to her, she told me, with a yell, threw his arms round her and hugged her until she thought she would have fainted. On the way to the house he almost danced round her. He waved his hat to everybody he saw and, on entering the house, shook the astonished maid-servant so violently by the hand that she thought he was mad.
That afternoon he enjoyed himself as he had never done before. The cloud was removed, his world was a blaze of sunshine again, his wife was saved. She took him to the golf links and went round with him as he played, although she was so weak she could hardly crawl along. His game was a series of ridiculous antics. He used the handle of his club on the tee, did his putting with a driver and finished up by giving the caddie half a sovereign. In the evening his wife hurriedly invited a few of his choicest friends to supper. It was such a supper as never was known in “The Avenue” either before or since. He laughed and joked, was generally uproarious, and finished by proposing the health of his wife in a rapturous speech. It was the day of his life.
Next morning she told him the truth.
I asked her why she had not told him at once. She replied, “It was his half-holiday and I wished to give him just one more happy day.”
The second episode belongs to the days of my youth when I was a house-surgeon. The affair was known in the hospital as “The Lamp Murder Case.” It concerned a family of three—husband, wife and grown-up daughter. They lived in an ill-smelling slum in the most abject quarter of Whitechapel. The conditions under which this family existed were very evil, although not exceptional in the dark places of any town.
The husband was just a drunken loafer, vicious and brutal, and in his most fitting place when he was lying in the filth of the gutter. He had probably never done a day’s work in his life. He lived on the earnings of his wife and daughter. They were seamstresses and those were the doleful days of “The Song of the Shirt.” As the girl was delicate most of the work fell upon the mother. This wretched woman toiled day by day, from year’s end to year’s end, to keep this unholy family together. She had neither rest nor relaxation, never a gleam of joy nor a respite from unhappiness. The money gained by fifteen hours’ continuous work with her needle might vanish in one uproarious drinking bout. Her husband beat her and kicked her as the fancy pleased him. He did not disable her, since he must have money for drink and she alone could provide it. She could work just as well with a black eye and a bruised body as without those marks of her lord’s pleasure.
As she had to work late at night she kept a lamp for her table. One evening the sodden brute, as he staggered into the room, said that he also must have a lamp, must have a lamp of his own. What he wanted it for did not matter. He would have it. He was, as a rule, too muddled to read even if he had ever learnt to read. Possibly he wanted the lamp to curse by. Anyhow, if she did not get him a lamp to-morrow he would “give her hell,” and the poor woman had already seen enough of hell. Next day she bought a lamp, lit it and placed it on the table with some hope no doubt in her heart that it would please him and bring a ray of peace.
He came home at night not only drunk but quarrelsome. The two lamps were shining together on the table. The room was quite bright and, indeed, almost cheerful; but the spectacle drove him to fury. He cursed the shrinking, tired woman. He cursed the room. He cursed the lamp. It was not the kind of lamp he wanted. It was not so good as her lamp and it was like her meanness to get it. As she stood up to show him how nice a lamp it really was he hit her in the face with such violence that he knocked her into a corner of the room. She was wedged in and unable to rise. He then took up his lamp and, with a yell of profanity, threw it at her as she lay on the ground. At once her apron and cotton dress were ablaze and, as she lay there burning and screaming for mercy, he hurled the other lamp at her.
The place was now lit only by the horrible, dancing flames that rose from the burning woman. The daughter was hiding in terror in the adjoining room. The partition which separated it from her mother’s was so thin that she had heard everything that passed. She rushed in and endeavoured to quench the flames; but streams of burning oil were trickling all over the floor, while the saturated clothes on her mother’s body flared like a wick. Her father was rolling about, laughing. He might have been a demon out of the Pit. Neighbours poured in and, by means of snatched-up fragments of carpet, bits of sacking and odd clothes, the fire was smothered; but it was too late.
There followed a period of commotion. A crowd gathered in the dingy lane with faces upturned to the window from the broken panes of which smoke was escaping. People pressed up the stair, now thick with the smell of paraffin and of burning flesh. The room, utterly wrecked, was in darkness, but by the light of an unsteady candle stuck in a bottle the body of the woman, moaning with pain, was dragged out. An improvised stretcher was obtained and on it the poor seamstress, wrapped up in a dirty quilt, was marched off to the hospital, followed by a mob. The police had appeared early on the scene and, acting on the evidence of the daughter, had arrested the now terrified drunkard.