"It's no use, Prentice," he said, again and again. "Believe me, between the very last rung of the social ladder and the depths in which I'm swimming round and round, and waiting for the final suffocation, there's a sheer fall that no power on earth can ever bridge again. From where I am I can speak still, hear still, even feel. I look up and see living men on the slope above me. Some are slipping down, some, who have stood once on the verge and looked over, are crawling up again, weak and half dead from terror. But I and those with me are past help. You don't know the gulf that separates having a little money, even your last pound, from having none at all. That's an experience as final and irremediable as death. None can imagine it unless they have known it, and none that have known it ever come back to tell."
Before such remorseless logic I weakened, little by little. I told him he was ungenerous—that friendship involved debts of honor he had never been willing to pay; finally I went into the house to make him up a parcel of warm underclothing. I remember blubbering like a whipped lower-form urchin as I ransacked drawers and trunks, and how the string kept snapping as I tried to tie up the great untidy brown-paper parcel. When I came downstairs the street was empty.
II
LIGHTNING IN THE FOG
He ran, he has told me since, like a man with a hue-and-cry in his ears, turning left or right at random. At last his breath failed; he remembered his rags, and noticed people looking suspiciously after him. He came out onto the river somewhere near the Tate Gallery, by a yard full of spray-battered old ship figureheads, and crossed the big new bridge to the Albert Embankment. At a river sluice below an iron yard men were unloading bundles of Belgian tees and angles from a barge. The river was falling fast, and he got an hour's job helping them to unload the cargo. It was on such casual labor, I suppose, that for months he had supported life. He was paid sixpence for his hour's work, and, seeing his strength and famished willingness, the lighter-men overloaded him and raised a weal on his shoulder. He was still nearly starving, but did not dare spend the money till later. By two o'clock in the afternoon the fog was general and very thick. He was standing in the centre of the little foot-bridge that runs under the viaduct from Charing Cross Station. Above his head trains rumbled softly and circumspectly. There were Pullman cars filled with sun-worshippers on their way from the winter-smitten city to France and Italy—to ivory villa and amethyst bay, maybe to the white sun-steeped cities upon whose ramparts he had once stood sentry. The fog-signals went off in his ears like cannon. On the Middlesex shore of the river was a dim bustle, muffled tang of gongs, constant flitting of blurred lights; but under the Surrey shore, lonely as a quicksand on the Breton coast, a strip of mud left by the falling tide shone, a coppery red, beneath the bulk of the big Lambeth brewery. Below his feet a squadron of empty lorries lay moored together, four—four—and three, like a hand of cards dealt face downward by a fortune-teller. All around him was mewing, as from a dozen litters of kittens; the fog became thick with the fluttering winged forms of sea birds. No one had passed him for a long time. He stretched out his arms and spoke aloud—
"Soul! what things are these that hem us in—that compass us about this November noontide, as we roam, stifled and uncertain, through Babylon's foggy streets? These towers, soaring into the infinite; these palaces, whose limits we conjecture from the dimmed overflow of light within; these chariots, rolling one instant soundless from obscurity, next instant engulfed by it? What things are they? Even such as to-day thou beholdest them: shadows, phantoms, vapor, and cloud. To-morrow the wind shall smite them, and their places know them no more; daylight seek them, and find them gone. Oh! paradox immeasurable, that where the sun had lied to thy senses fog should truly bespeak them!"
Solitary as he seemed, he had been observed for some time. A bulky figure, in heavy overcoat and helmet, stepped from behind a girder and touched him on the shoulder.
"Don't you think you'd best get to one side or the other? It's bad loitering weather."
Ingram started at the touch, then looked over his shoulder and laughed.
"I see," he said. "But there's no fear of that," and he looked at the river again. "You'd have come in after me, I suppose—boots, overcoat, and all."