Mike Fletcher: A Novel

by George Moore

He saw Frank's home—the little parlour with its bits of furniture, scraggy and vulgar, but sweet with the presence of the wife and her homely occupations; then the children—the chicks—cooing and chattering, creating such hope and fond anxiety! Why then did he not have wife and children? Of all worldly possessions they are the easiest to obtain. Because he had created a soul that irreparably separated him from these, the real and durable prizes of life; they lay beneath his hands, but his soul said no; he desired, and was powerless to take what he desired.

For a moment he stood, in puzzled curiosity, listening to the fate that his thoughts were prophesying; then, as if in answer antiphonal, terrible as the announcing of the chorus, came a quick thought, quick and sharp as a sword, fatal as a sword set against the heart. He strove to turn its point aside, he attempted to pass it by, but on every side he met its point, though he reasoned in jocular and serious mood. Then his courage falling through him like a stone dropped into a well, he crossed the street, seeking the place Flossy had told him of, and soon after saw her walking a little in front of him with another girl. She beckoned him, leading the way through numerous by-streets. Something in the sound of certain footsteps told him he was being followed; his reason warned him away, yet he could not but follow. And in the shop below and on the stairs of the low eating-house where they had led him, loud voices were heard and tramping of feet. Instantly he guessed the truth, and drew the furniture across the doorway. The window was over twenty feet from the ground, but he might reach the water-butt. He jumped from the window-sill, falling into the water, out of which he succeeded in drawing himself; hence he crawled along the wall, dropped into the lane, hearing his pursuers shouting to him from the window. There were only a few children in the lane; he sped quickly past, gained a main street, hailed a cab, and was driven safely to the Temple.

He flung off his shoes, which were full of water; his trousers were soaking, and having rid himself of them, he wrapped himself in a dressing-gown, and went into the sitting-room in his slippers. It was the same as when it was Frank's room. There was the grand piano and the slender brass lamps; he had lit none, but stood uncertain, his bed-room candle in his hand. And listening, he could hear London along the Embankment—all occasional cry, the rattle of a cab, the hollow whistle of a train about to cross the bridge at Blackfriars, the shrill whistle of a train far away in the night. He had escaped from his pursuers, but not from himself.

"How horribly lonely it is here," he muttered. Then he thought of how narrowly he had escaped disgraceful exposure of his infamy. "If those fellows had got hold of my name it would have been in the papers the day after to-morrow. What a fool I am! why do I risk so much? and for what?" He turned from the memory as from sight of some disgustful deformity or disease. Going to the mirror he studied his face for some reflection of the soul; but unable to master his feelings, in which there was at once loathing and despair, he threw open the window and walked out of the suffocating room into the sultry balcony.

It was hardly night; the transparent obscurity of the summer midnight was dissolving; the slight film of darkness which had wrapped the world was evanescent. "Is it day or night?" he asked. "Oh, it is day! another day has begun; I escaped from my mortal enemies, but not from the immortal day. Like a gray beast it comes on soft velvet paws to devour. Stay! oh, bland and beautiful night, thou that dost so charitably hide our misfortunes, stay!

"I shudder when I think of the new evils and abominations that this day will bring. The world is still at rest, lying in the partial purity of sleep. But as a cruel gray beast the day comes on soundless velvet paws. Light and desire are one; light and desire are the claws that the gray beast unsheathes; a few hours' oblivion and the world's torment begins again!" Then looking down the great height, he thought how he might spring from consciousness into oblivion—the town and the river were now distinct in ghastly pallor—"I should feel nothing. But what a mess I should make; what a horrible little mess!"

After breakfast he sat looking into space, wondering what he might do. He hoped for a visitor, and yet he could not think of one that he desired to see. A woman! the very thought was distasteful. He rose and went to the window. London implacable lay before him, a morose mass of brick, fitting sign and symbol of life. And the few hours that lay between breakfast and dinner were narrow and brick-coloured; and longing for the vast green hours of the country, he went to Belthorpe Park. But in a few weeks the downs and lanes fevered and exasperated him, and perforce he must seek some new distraction. Henceforth he hurried from house to house, tiring of each last abode more rapidly than the one that had preceded it. He read no books, and he only bought newspapers to read the accounts of suicides; and his friends had begun to notice the strange interest with which he spoke of those who had done away with themselves, and the persistency with which he sought to deduce their motives from the evidence; and he seemed to be animated by a wish to depreciate all worldly reasons, and to rely upon weariness of life as sufficient motive for their action.

The account of two young people engaged to be married, who had taken tickets for some short journey and shot themselves in the railway carriage. "Here," he said, "was a case of absolute sanity, a quality almost undiscoverable in human nature. Two young people resolve to rid themselves of the burden; but they are more than utilitarians, they are poets, and of a high order; for, not only do they make most public and emphatic denial of life, but they add to it a measure of Aristophanesque satire—they engage themselves to marry. Now marriage is man's approval and confirmation of his belief in human existence—they engage themselves to marry, but instead of putting their threat into execution, they enter a railway carriage and blow out their brains, proving thereby that they had brains to blow out."

When, however, it transpired that letters were found in the pockets of the suicides to the effect that they had hoped to gain such notoriety as the daily press can give by their very flagrant leave-taking of this world, Mike professed much regret, and gravely assured his astonished listeners that, in the face of these letters which had unhappily come to light, he withdrew his praise of the quality of the brains blown out. In truth he secretly rejoiced that proof of the imperfect sanity of the suicides had come to light and assured himself that when he did away with Mike Fletcher, that he would revenge himself on society by leaving behind him a document which would forbid the usual idiotic verdict, "Suicide while in a state of temporary insanity," and leave no loophole through which it might be said that he was impelled to seek death for any extraneous reasons whatever. He would go to death in the midst of the most perfect worldly prosperity the mind could conceive, desiring nothing but rest, profoundly convinced of the futility of all else, and the perfect folly of human effort.

In such perverse and morbid mind Mike returned to London. It was in the beginning of August, and the Temple weltered in sultry days and calm nights. The river flowed sluggishly through its bridges; the lights along its banks gleamed fiercely in the lucent stillness of a sulphur-hued horizon. Like a nightmare the silence of the apartment lay upon his chest; and there was a frightened look in his eyes as he walked to and fro. The moon lay like a creole amid the blue curtains of the night; the murmur of London hushed in stray cries, and only the tread of the policeman was heard distinctly. About the river the night was deepest, and out of the shadows falling from the bridges the lamps gleamed with strange intensity, some flickering sadly in the water. Mike walked into the dining-room. He could see the sward in the darkness that the trees spread, and the lilies reeked in the great stillness. Then he thought of the old days when the Pilgrim was written in these rooms, and of the youthfulness of those days; and he maddened when he recalled the evenings of artistic converse in John Norton's room—how high were then their aspirations! The Temple, too, seemed to have lost youth and gaiety. No longer did he meet his old friends in the eating-houses and taverns. Everything had been dispersed or lost. Some were married, some had died.