A Dog with a Bad Name

by Talbot Baines Reed

After that he had given up what seemed the farce of holding up his head. What was the use, he said, when, as sure as night follows day, that bad name of his dogged him wherever he went?

So Jeffreys began to go down. In after years he spoke very little of those six months in London, and when he did it was about people he had met, and not about himself. What he did, where he lodged, how he lived, these were matters he never mentioned and never liked to be asked about.

I am quite sure myself that the reason of this silence was not shame. He was not one of those fellows who revenge themselves on fate by deliberately going to the bad. At his worst, he had no taste for vice or any affinity for it. He may have sunk low, not because he himself was low, but because in his miserable feud with all the world he scorned not to share the lot of others as miserable as himself.

His money—he had a few pounds when he left Clarges Street—soon failed him. He made no great effort to keep it, and was relieved to see the end of it. His companions in misery soon helped him away with it, and he let them.

But when it was gone the old necessity for work came back. By day he hardly ever ventured out of his court, for fear of being seen by some one who would attempt to rescue him from his present condition. At night he wandered restlessly about in the narrow streets picking up an early morning job at Covent Garden or in the omnibus stables.

He moved his lodgings incessantly, one week inhabiting a garret in Westminster, another sharing a common room in Whitechapel, another doing without lodgings altogether. He spoke little or not at all to his fellow-miserables, not because he despised them, but because they fought shy of him. They disliked his superior ways and his ill-concealed disgust of their habits and vices. They could have forgiven him for being a criminal in hiding; that they were used to. But a man who spoke like a gentleman, who took no pleasure in their low sports, and sat dumb while they talked loud and broad, seemed to them an interloper and an intruder.

Once—it was about the beginning of August—in a lodging-house across the river, he met a man to whom for a day or two he felt drawn. His story was a sad one. His father had been a gentleman, and the boy had been brought up in luxury and virtue. While at school his father had died, and before he had left school his mother had been married again to a brute who not only broke her heart, but, after setting himself to corrupt his stepson, had at last turned him adrift without a penny in the world. The lad, with no strong principle to uphold him, had sunk deep in vice. Yet there lurked about him occasional flashes of something better.

“After all,” he would say to Jeffreys, as the two lay at night almost on bare boards, “what’s the odds? I may be miserable one day, but I’m jolly the next. Now you seem to prefer to be uniformly miserable.”

“Hardly a case of preference,” said Jeffreys; “but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be more miserable to be jolly.”

“Try it. You’d give a lot to forget all about everything for an hour, wouldn’t you?”