THE ACCIDENT TO MR. THORPE.
When Mr. Thorpe, drysalter, of St. Mary Axe, E.C., fell into the water, it was the opinion of those who knew him best that he would be drowned. I say “those who knew him best” because, in the crowd that immediately gathered upon the embankment, there were present not a few of his friends. They had been walking home together on this fine evening along the river side, and now that Mr. Thorpe was in such peril, not one could be got to do more than lean upon the parapet shouting for the police, though they should have known how useless was that body of men in any other than its native element. Alas! how frail a thing is human friendship, and how terribly does misfortune bring it to the test.
How had Mr. Thorpe fallen into the water? I am not surprised at your asking that question. It argues a very observant, critical, and accurate mind; a love of truth; a habit of weighing evidence; and altogether a robust, sturdy, practical, Anglo-Saxon kind of an attitude, that does you credit. You will not take things on hearsay, and there is no monkish credulity about you. I congratulate you. You say (and rightly) that Honest Merchants do not fall into the Thames for nothing, the thing is unusual; you want (very properly) to know how it happened, or, as you call it, “occurred.” I cannot tell you. I was not there at the time. All I know is, that he did fall in, and that, as matter of plain fact (and you are there to judge fact, remember, not law), Mr. Thorpe was at 6.15 in the evening of June 7th, 1892, floundering about in the water a little above Cleopatra’s Needle; and there are a cloud of witnesses.
It now behoves me to detail with great accuracy the circumstances surrounding his immersion, the degree of danger that he ran, and how he was saved. In the first place, Mr. Thorpe fell in at the last of the ebb, so that there was no tide to sweep him out to sea; in the second place, the depth of water at that spot was exactly five feet two inches, so that he could—had he but known it—have walked ashore (for he was, of course, over six feet in height); in the third place, the river has here a good gravelly bed, as you ought to know, for the clay doesn’t begin till you get beyond Battersea Bridge—and, by the way, this gravel accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phenomenon of the little boys that will dive for pennies at low tide opposite the shot tower; in the fourth place, the water, as one might have imagined at that season of the year, was warm and comfortable; in the fifth place, there lay but a few yards from him a Police Pier, crowded with lines, lifebuoys, boats, cork-jackets, and whatnot, and decorated, as to its Main Room, with a large placard entitled “First help to the drowning,” the same being illustrated with cuts, showing a man of commonplace features fallen into the hands of his religious opponents and undergoing the torture. Therefore it is easy to see that he could have either saved himself or have been saved by others without difficulty. Indeed, for Mr. Thorpe to have drowned, it would have been necessary for him to have exercised the most determined self-control, and to have thought out the most elaborate of suicidal plans; and, as a fact, he was within forty-three seconds of his falling in pulled out again by a boat-hook, which was passed through the back of his frock coat: and that is a lesson in favour of keeping one’s coat buttoned up like a gentleman, and not letting it flap open like an artist or an anarchist, or a fellow that writes for the papers. But I digress. The point is, that Mr. Thorpe was immediately saved, and there (you might think) was an end of the matter. Indeed, the thing seems to come to a conclusion of its own, and to be a kind of epic, for it has a beginning where Mr. Thorpe falls into the water (and, note you, the beginning of all epics is, or should be, out of the text); it has a middle or “action,” where Mr. Thorpe is floundering about like a sea monster, and an end, where he is pulled out again. They are of larger scope than this little story, and written in a pompous manner, yet the Iliad, the Æneid, Abbo’s Siege of Paris, the Chanson de Roland, Orlando Furioso, Thalaba the Destroyer, and Mr. Davidson’s shorter lyrics have no better claim to be epics in their essentials than has this relation of The Accident to Mr. Thorpe. So, then (you say), that is the end; thank you for the story; we are much obliged. If ever you have another simple little story to tell, pray publish it at large, and do not keep it for the exquisite delight of your private circle. We thank you again a thousand times. Good morrow.
Softly, softly. I beg that there may be no undue haste or sharp conclusions; there is something more to come. Sit you down and listen patiently. Was there ever an epic that was not continued? Did not the Rhapsodists of Cos piece together the Odyssey after their successful Iliad? Did not Dionysius Paracelsus write a tail to the Æneid? Was not the Chanson de Roland followed by the Four Sons of Aymon? Could Southey have been content with Thalaba had he not proceeded to write the adventures in America of William ap Williams, or some other Welshman whose name I forget? Eh? Well, in precisely the same manner, I propose to add a second and completing narrative to this of Mr. Thorpe’s accident; so let us have no grumbling.
And to understand what kind of thing followed his fall into the water, I must explain to you that nothing had ever happened to Mr. Thorpe before; he had never sailed a boat, never ridden a horse, never had a fight, never written a book, never climbed a mountain—indeed, I might have set out in a long litany, covering several pages, the startling, adventurous, and dare-devil things that Mr. Thorpe had never done; and were I to space out my work so, I should be well in the fashion, for does not the immortal Kipling (who is paid by the line) repeat his own lines half-a-dozen times over, and use in profusion the lines of well-known ballads? He does; and so have I therefore the right to space and stretch my work in whatever fashion will spin out the space most fully; and if I do not do so, it is because I am as eager as you can possibly be to get to the end of this chronicle.
Well then, nothing had ever happened to Mr. Thorpe before, and what was the result? Why that this aqueous adventure of his began to grow and possess him as you and I are possessed by our more important feats, by our different distant journeys, our bold speculations, our meeting with grand acquaintances, our outwitting of the law; and I am sorry to say that Mr. Thorpe in a very short time began to lie prodigiously. The symptoms of this perversion first appeared a few days after the accident, at a lunch which he attended (with the other directors of the Marine Glue Company) in the City. The company was in process of negotiating a very difficult piece of business, that required all the attention of the directors, and, as is usual under such circumstances, they fell to telling amusing tales to one another. One of them had just finished his story of how a nephew of his narrowly escaped lynching at Leadville, Colorado, when Mr. Thorpe, who had been making ponderous jokes all the morning, was suddenly observed to grow thoughtful, and (after first ascertaining with some care that there was no one present who had seen him fall in) he astonished the company by saying: “I cannot hear of such escapes from death without awe. It was but the other day that I was saved as by a miracle from drowning.” Then he added, after a little pause, “My whole life seemed to pass before me in a moment.”
Now this was not true. Mr. Thorpe’s mind at the moment he referred to had been wholly engrossed by the peculiar sensation that follows the drinking of a gallon of water suddenly when one is not in the least thirsty; but he had already told the tale so often, that he was fully persuaded of it, and, by this time, believed that his excellent and uneventful life had been presented to him as it is to the drowning people in books.
His fall was rapid. He grew in some vague way to associate his adventure with the perils of the sea. Whenever he crossed the Channel he would draw some fellow passenger into a conversation, and, having cunningly led it on to the subject of shipwreck, would describe the awful agony of battling with the waves, and the outburst of relief on being saved. At first he did not actually say that he had himself struggled in the vast and shoreless seas of the world, but bit by bit the last shreds of accuracy left him, and he took to painting with minute detail in his conversations the various scenes of his danger and salvation. Sometimes it was in the “steep water off the Banks;” sometimes in “the glassy steaming seas and on the feverish coast of the Bight;” sometimes it was “a point or two norr’ard of the Owers light”—but it was always terrible, graphic, and a lie.