A STRAIN ON THE CABLE
BOW STREET was completely at fault, and never discovered the secret of
that assassination. It was clear that neither the Major nor Coleman were
the murderers, as they had been noticed at some distance from the spot
where the Secretary fell by several persons who described them
accurately. Nor was Caillaud suspected, as the constable testified that
he passed him on the opposite side of the street, as he followed the
Secretary. The only conclusion, according to Bow Street, which was free
from all doubt was, that whoever did the deed was a committee consisting
of a single member. A reward of £500 did not bring forward anybody who
knew anything about the business. As for Caillaud, his daughter and the
Major, the next morning saw them far on the way to Dover, and eventually
they arrived at Paris in safety. Zachariah, when he reached home, found
his wife gone. A note lay for him there, probably from the same hand
which warned the Major, telling him not to lose an instant, but to join
in Islington one of the mails to Manchester. His wife would start that
night from St. Martin’s le Grand by a coach which went by another road.
He was always prompt, and in five minutes he was out of the house. The
fare was carefully folded by his unknown friend in the letter. He just
managed as directed, to secure a place, not by the regular Manchester
mail, but by one which went through Barnet and stopped to take up
passengers at the “Angel.” He climbed upon the roof, and presently was
travelling rapidly through Holloway and Highgate. He found, to his
relief, that nobody had heard of the murder, and he was left pretty much
to his own reflections. His first thoughts were an attempt to unravel
the mystery. Why was it so sudden? Why had no word not hint of what was
intended reached him? He could not guess. In those days the clubs were
so beset with spies that frequently the most important resolutions were
taken by one man, who confided in nobody. It was winter, but fortunately
Zachariah was well wrapped up. He journeyed on, hour after hour, in a
state of mazed bewilderment, one thought tumbling over another, and when
morning broke over the flats he had not advanced a single step in the
determination of his future path. Nothing is more painful to a man of
any energy than the inability to put things in order in himself—to place
before himself what he has to do, and arrange the means for doing it. To
be the passive victim of a rushing stream of disconnected impressions is
torture, especially if the emergency be urgent. So when the sun came up
Zachariah began to be ashamed of himself that the night had passed in
these idiotic moonings, which had left him just where he was, and he
tried to settle what he was to do when he reached Manchester. He did not
know a soul; but he could conjecture why he was advised to go thither.
It was a disaffected town, and Friends of the People were very strong
there. His first duty was to get a lodging, his second to get work, and
his third to find out a minister of God under whom he could worship. He
put this last, not because it was the least important, but because he had
the most time to decide upon it. At about ten o’clock at night he came
to his journey’s end, and to his joy saw his wife waiting for him. They
went at once to a small inn hard by, and Mrs. Coleman began to overwhelm
him with interrogation; but he quietly suggested that not a syllable
should be spoken till they had had some rest, and that they should
swallow their supper and go to bed. In the morning Zachariah rose and
looked out of the window. He saw nothing but a small backyard in which
some miserable, scraggy fowls were crouching under a cart to protect
themselves from the rain, which was falling heavily through the dim,
smoky air. His spirits sank. He had no fear of apprehension or
prosecution, but the prospect before him was depressing. Although he was
a poor man, he had not been accustomed to oscillations of fortune, and he
was in an utterly strange place, with five pounds in his pocket, and
nothing to do.
He was, however, resolved not to yield, and thought it best to begin with
his wife before she could begin with him.
“Now, my dear, tell me what has happened, who sent you here, and what
kind of a journey you have had?”
“Mr. Bradshaw came about seven o’clock, and told me the Government was
about to suppress the Friends of the People; that you did not know it;
that I must go to Manchester; that you would come after me; and that a
message would be left for you. He took me to the coach, and paid for
me.”
“Mr. Bradshaw! Did he tell you anything more?”
“No; except that he did not think we should be pursued, and that he would
send our things after us when he knew where we were.”
“You have not heard anything more, then?”
“No.”
“You haven’t heard that the Secretary was shot?”
“Shot! Oh dear! Zachariah, what will become of us?”
Her husband then told her what he knew, she listening with great
eagerness and in silence.
“Oh, Zachariah, what will become of us?” she broke out again.
“There is no reason to worry yourself, Jane; it is perfectly easy for me
to prove my innocence. It is better for us, however, to stay here for a
time. The Government won’t go any further with us; they will search for
the murderer—that’s all.”
“Why, then, are we sent here and the others are let alone? I suppose the
Major is not here?”
“I cannot say.”
“To think I should ever come to this! I haven’t got a rag with me beyond
what I have on. I haven’t got any clean things; a nice sort of creature
I am to go out of doors. And it all had nothing to do with us.”
“Nothing to do with us! My dear Jane, do you mean that we are not to
help other people, but sit at home and enjoy ourselves? Besides, if you
thought it wrong, why did you not say so before?”
“How was I to know what you were doing? You never told me anything; you
never do. One thing I do know is that we shall starve and I suppose I
shall have to go about and beg. I haven’t even another pair of shoes or
stockings to my feet.”
Zachariah pondered for a moment. His first impulse was something very
different; but at last he rose, went up to his wife, kissed her softly on
the forehead, and said:
“Never mind, my dear; courage, you will have your clothes next week.
Come with me and look out for a lodging.”
Mrs. Zachariah, however, shook herself free—not violently, but still
decidedly—from his caresses.
“Most likely seized by the Government. Look for a lodging! That’s just
like you! How can I go out in this pouring rain?”
Zachariah lately, at any rate, had ceased to expect much affection in his
wife for him; but he thought she was sensible, and equal to any
complexity of circumstances, or even to disaster. He thought this, not
on any positive evidence; but he concluded, somewhat absurdly, that her
coldness meant common sense and capacity for facing trouble courageously
and with deliberation. He had now to find out his mistake, and to learn
that the absence of emotion neither proves, nor is even a ground for
suspecting, any good whatever of a person; that, on the contrary, it is a
ground for suspecting weakness, and possibly imbecility.
Mrs. Coleman refused to go out, and after breakfast Zachariah went by
himself, having first inquired what was a likely quarter. As he wandered
along much that had been before him again and again once more recurred to
him. He had been overtaken by calamity, and he had not heard from his
wife one single expression of sympathy, nor had he received one single
idea which could help him. She had thought of nothing but herself, and
even of herself not reasonably. She was not the helpmeet which he felt
he had a right to expect. He could have endured any defect, so it
seemed, if only he could have had love; he could have endured the want of
love if only he could have had a counsellor. But he had neither, and he
rebelled, questioning the justice of his lot. Then he fell into the old
familiar controversy with himself, and it was curiously characteristic of
him, that, as he paced those dismal Manchester pavements, all their gloom
disappeared as he re-argued the universal problem of which his case was
an example. He admitted the unquestionable right of the Almighty to damn
three parts of creation to eternal hell if so He willed; why not, then,
one sinner like Zachariah Coleman to a weary pilgrimage for thirty or
forty years? He rebuked himself when he found that he had all his life
assented so easily to the doctrine of God’s absolute authority in the
election and disposal of the creatures He had made, and yet that he
revolted when God touched him, and awarded him a punishment which, in
comparison with the eternal loss of His presence, was as nothing. At
last—and here, through his religion, he came down to the only consolation
possible for him—he said to himself, “Thus hath He decreed; it is foolish
to struggle against His ordinances; we can but submit.” “A poor gospel,”
says his critic. Poor!—yes, it may be; but it is the gospel according to
Job, and any other is a mere mirage. “Doth the hawk fly by thy wisdom
and stretch her wings towards the south?” Confess ignorance and the
folly of insurrection, and there is a chance that even the irremediable
will be somewhat mitigated. Poor!—yes; but it is genuine; and this at
least must be said for Puritanism, that of all the theologies and
philosophies it is the most honest in its recognition of the facts; the
most real, if we penetrate to the heart of it, in the remedy which it
offers.
He found two small furnished rooms which would answer his purpose till
his own furniture should arrive, and he and his wife took possession that
same morning. He then wrote to his landlord in London—a man whom he knew
he could trust—and directed him to send his goods. For the present,
although he had no fear whatever of any prosecution, he thought fit to
adopt a feigned name, with which we need not trouble ourselves. In the
afternoon he sallied out to seek employment. The weather had cleared,
but Mrs. Coleman still refused to accompany him, and she occupied herself
moodily with setting the place to rights, as she called it, although, as
it happened, it was particularly neat and clean. There was not so much
printing done in Manchester then as now, and Zachariah had no success.
He came home about seven o’clock, weary and disheartened. His wife was
one of those women who under misfortune show all that is worst in them,
as many women in misfortune show all that is best.
“You might have been sure you would get nothing to do here. If, as you
say, there is no danger, why did you not stay in London?”
“You know all about it, my dear; we were warned to come.”
“Yes, but why in such a hurry? Why didn’t you stop to think?”
“It is all very well to say so now, but there were only a few minutes in
which to decide. Besides, when I got home I found you gone.”
Mrs. Zachariah conveniently took no notice of the last part of this
remark, which, of course, settled the whole question, but continued:
“Ah, well, I suppose it’s all right; but I’m sure we shall starve—I am
convinced we shall. Oh! I wish my poor dear mother were alive! I have
no home to go to. What _will_ become of us?”
He lost his patience a little.
“Jane,” he said, “what is our religion worth if it does not support us in
times like these? Does it not teach us to bow to God’s will? Surely we,
who have had such advantages, ought to behave under our trials better
than those who have been brought up like heathens. God will not leave
us. Don’t you remember Mr. Bradshaw’s sermon upon the passage through
the Red Sea. When the Israelites were brought down to the very shore
with nothing but destruction before them, a way was opened. What did Mr.
Bradshaw bid us observe? The Egyptians were close behind—so close that
the Israelites saw them; the sea was in front. The road was not made
till the enemy was upon them, and then the waters were divided and became
a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left; the very waters,
Mr. Bradshaw remarked, which before were their terror. God, too, might
have sent them a different way; no doubt He might, but He chose _that_
way.”
“Zachariah, I heard Mr. Bradshaw as well as yourself; I am a member of
the church just as much as you are, and I don’t think it becoming of you
to preach to me as if you were a minister.” Her voice rose and became
shriller as she went on. “I will not stand it. Who are you that you
should talk to me so?—bad enough to bring me down here to die, without
treating me as if I were an unconverted character. Oh! if I had but a
home to go to!” and she covered her face with her apron and became
hysterical.
What a revelation! By this time he had looked often into the soul of the
woman whom he had chosen—the woman with whom he was to be for ever in
this world—and had discovered that there was nothing, nothing, absolutely
nothing which answered anything in himself with a smile of recognition;
but he now looked again, and found something worse than emptiness. He
found lurking in the obscure darkness a reptile with cruel fangs which at
any moment might turn upon him when he was at his weakest and least able
to defend himself. He had that in him by nature which would have
prompted him to desperate deeds. He could have flung himself from her
with a curse, or even have killed himself in order to escape from his
difficulty. But whatever there was in him originally had been changed.
Upon the wild stem had been grafted a nobler slip, which drew all its sap
from the old root, but had civilised and sweetened its acrid juices. He
leaned over his wife, caressed her, gave her water, and restored her.
“God knows,” he said, “I did not mean to preach to you. God in heaven
knows I need that somebody should preach to me.” He knelt down before
her as she remained leaning back in the chair, and he repeated the Lord’s
Prayer: “_Give us this day our daily bread_. _Forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive them that trespass against us_.” But will it be believed
that as he rose from his knees, before he had actually straightened his
limbs, two lines from the “_Corsair_” flashed into his mind, not
particularly apposite, but there they were:
“She rose—she sprung—she clung to his embrace
Till his heart heaved beneath her hidden face?”
Whence had they descended? He was troubled at their sudden intrusion,
and he went silently to the window, moodily gazing into the street. His
wife, left to herself, recovered, and prepared supper. There was no
reconciliation, at least on her side. She was not capable of
reconciliation. Her temper exhausted itself gradually. With her the
storm never broke up nobly and with magnificent forgetfulness into clear
spaces of azure, with the singing of birds and with hot sunshine turning
into diamonds every remaining drop of the deluge which had threatened
ruin; the change was always rather to a uniformly obscured sky and a cold
drizzle which lasted all day.
The next morning he renewed his quest. He was away all day long, but he
had no success. He was now getting very anxious. He was expecting his
furniture, which he had directed to be sent to the inn where they had
first stayed, and he would have to pay for the carriage. His landlord
had insisted on a week’s rent beforehand, so that, putting aside the sum
for the carrier, he had now two pounds left. He thought of appealing to
his friends; but he had a great horror of asking for charity, and could
not bring himself to do it.
The third, fourth, and fifth day passed, with no result. On the seventh
day he found that his goods had come; but he decided not to move, as it
meant expense. He took away a chest of clothes, and remained where he
was. By way of recoil from the older doctrine that suffering does men
good, it has been said that it does no good. Both statements are true,
and both untrue. Many it merely brutalises. Half the crime of the world
is caused by suffering, and half its virtues are due to happiness.
Nevertheless suffering, actual personal suffering, is the mother of
innumerable beneficial experiences, and unless we are so weak that we
yield and break, it extracts from us genuine answers to many questions
which, without it, we either do not put to ourselves, or, if they are
asked, are turned aside with traditional replies. A man who is strong
and survives can hardly pace the pavements of a city for days searching
for employment, his pocket every day becoming lighter, without feeling in
after life that he is richer by something which all the universities in
the world could not have given him. The most dramatic of poets cannot
imagine, even afar off, what such a man feels and thinks, especially if
his temperament be nervous and foreboding. How foreign, hard, repellent,
are the streets in which he is a stranger, alone amidst a crowd of people
all intent upon their own occupation, whilst he has none! At noon, when
business is at its height, he, with nothing to do, sits down on a seat in
an open place, or, may be, on the doorstep of an empty house, unties the
little parcel he has brought with him, and eats his dry bread. He casts
up in his mind the shops he has visited; he reflects that he has taken
all the more promising first, and that not more than two or three are
left. He thinks of the vast waste of the city all round him; its miles
of houses; and he has a more vivid sense of abandonment than if he were
on a plank in the middle of the Atlantic. Towards the end of the
afternoon the pressure in the offices and banks increases; the clerks
hurry hither and thither; he has no share whatever in the excitement; he
is an intrusion. He lingers about aimlessly, and presently the great
tide turns outwards and flows towards the suburbs. Every vehicle which
passes him is crowded with happy folk who have earned their living and
are going home. He has earned nothing. Let anybody who wants to test
the strength of the stalk of carle hemp in him try it by the wringing
strain of a day thus spent! How humiliating are the repulses he
encounters! Most employers to whom a request is made for something to do
prefer to treat it as a petition for aims, and answer accordingly. They
understand what is wanted before a word is spoken, and bawl out “No!
Shut the door after you.” One man to whom Zachariah applied was opening
his letters. For a moment he did not pay the slightest attention, but as
Zachariah continued waiting, he shouted with an oath, “What do you stand
staring there for? Be off!” There was once a time when Zachariah would
have stood up against the wretch; but he could not do it now, and he
retreated in silence. Nevertheless, when he got out into the Street he
felt as if he could have rushed back and gripped the brute’s throat till
he had squeezed the soul out of his carcass. Those of us who have craved
unsuccessfully for permission to do what the Maker of us all has fitted
us to do alone understand how revolutions are generated. Talk about the
atrocities of the Revolution! All the atrocities of the democracy heaped
together ever since the world began would not equal, if we had any gauge
by which to measure them, the atrocities perpetrated in a week upon the
poor, simply because they are poor; and the marvel rather is, not that
there is every now and then a September massacre at which all the world
shrieks, but that such horrors are so infrequent. Again, I say, let no
man judge communist or anarchist _till he has asked for leave to work_,
and a “Damn your eyes!” has rung in his ears.
Zachariah had some self-respect; he was cared for by God, and in God’s
Book was a registered decree concerning him. These men treated him as if
he were not a person, an individual soul, but as an atom of a mass to be
swept out anywhere, into the gutter—into the river. He was staggered for
a time. Hundreds and thousands of human beings swarmed past him, and he
could not help saying to himself as he looked up to the grey sky, “Is it
true, then? Does God really know anything about me? Are we not born by
the million every week, like spawn, and crushed out of existence like
spawn? Is not humanity the commonest and cheapest thing in the world?”
But as yet his faith was unshaken, and he repelled the doubt as a
temptation of Satan. Blessed is the man who can assign promptly
everything which is not in harmony with himself to a devil, and so get
rid of it. The pitiful case is that of the distracted mortal who knows
not what is the degree of authority which his thoughts and impulses
possess; who is constantly bewildered by contrary messages, and has no
evidence as to their authenticity. Zachariah had his rule still; the
suggestion in the street was tried by it; found to be false; was labelled
accordingly, and he was relieved.
The dread of the real, obvious danger was not so horrible as a vague,
shapeless fear which haunted him. It was a coward enemy, for it seized
him when he was most tired and most depressed. What is that nameless
terror? Is it a momentary revelation of the infinite abyss which
surrounds us; from the sight of which we are mercifully protected by a
painted vapour, by an illusion that unspeakable darkness which we all of
us know to exist, but which we hypocritically deny, and determine never
to confess to one another? Here again, however, Zachariah had his
advantage over others. He had his precedent. He remembered that
quagmire in the immortal Progress into which, if even a good man falls,
he can find no bottom; he remembered that gloom so profound “that
ofttimes, when he lifted up his foot to set forward, he knew not where or
upon what he should set it next;” he remembered the flame and smoke, the
sparks and hideous noises, the things that cared not for Christian’s
sword, so that he was forced to betake himself to another weapon called
All-prayer; he remembered how that Christian “_was so confounded that he
did not know his own voice_;” he remembered the voice of a man as going
before, saying, “_Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I will fear none ill_, _for Thou art with me_.” Lastly, he remembered
that by-and-by the day broke, and Christian cried, “_He hath turned the
shadow of death into the morning_.” He remembered all this; he could
connect his trouble with the trouble of others; he could give it a place
in the dispensation of things, and could therefore lift himself above it.
He had now been in Manchester a fortnight, and his little store had
dwindled down to five shillings. It was Saturday night. On the Sunday,
as his last chance, he meant to write to Mr. Bradshaw. He went out on
the Sunday morning, and had persuaded his wife to accompany him. They
entered the first place of worship they saw. It was a Methodist chapel,
and the preacher was Arminian in the extreme. It was the first time
Zachariah had ever been present at a Methodist service. The congregation
sang with much fervour, and during the prayer, which was very long, they
broke in upon it with ejaculations of their own, such as “Hear him, O
Lord!”—“Lord have mercy on us!”
The preacher spoke a broad Lancashire dialect, and was very dramatic. He
pictured God’s efforts to save a soul. Under the pulpit ledge was the
imaginary bottomless pit of this world—not of the next. He leaned over
and pretended to be drawing the soul up with a cord. “He comes, he
comes!” he cried; “God be praised he is safe!” and he landed him on the
Bible. The congregation gave a great groan of relief. “There he is on
the Rock of Ages! No, no, he slips; the Devil has him!” The preacher
tried to rescue him: “He is gone—gone!” and he bent over the pulpit in
agony. The people almost shrieked. “Gone—gone!” he said again with most
moving pathos, and was still for a moment. Then gathering himself up, he
solemnly repeated the terrible verses: “_For it is impossible for those
who were once enlightened_, _and have tasted of the heavenly gift_, _and
were made partakers of the Holy Ghost_, _and have tasted the good word of
God_, _and the powers of the world to come_, _if they shall fall away_,
_to renew them again unto repentance_; _seeing they crucify to themselves
the Son of God afresh_, _and put Him to an open shame_.” Zachariah knew
that text well. Round it had raged the polemics of ages. Mr. Bradshaw
had never referred to it but once, and all the elder members of his
congregation were eager in the extreme to hear what he had to say about
it. He boldly declared that it had nothing to do with the elect. He was
compelled to do so. Following his master Calvin, he made it apply to
outsiders. The elect, says Calvin, are beyond the risk of fatal fall.
But “I deny,” he goes on to say, that “there is any reason why God may
not bestow even on the reprobate a taste of His favour; may irradiate
their minds with some scintillations of His light; may touch them with
some sense of His goodness; may somehow engrave His word on their minds.”
Horrible, most horrible, we scream, that the Almighty should thus play
with those whom He means to destroy; but let us once more remember that
these men did not idly believe in such cruelty. They were forced into
their belief by the demands of their understanding, and their assent was
more meritorious than the weak protests of so-called enlightenment.
Zachariah, pondering absently on what he had heard, was passing out of
the chapel when a hand was gently laid on his shoulder.
“Ah, friend, what are you doing here?”
He turned round and recognised William Ogden, who had been sent by the
Hampden Club in Manchester some six months before as a delegate to the
Friends of the People in London. The two walked some distance together,
and Zachariah gave him the history of the last three weeks. With the
murder he was, of course, acquainted. Ogden was a letterpress printer,
and when he heard that Zachariah was in such straits, he said that he
thought he might perhaps find him a job for the present, and told him to
come to his office on the following morning. Zachariah’s heart rejoiced
that his bread would not fail, but he characteristically rejoiced even
more at this signal proof that his trust in his God was justified. When
he reached home he proposed to his wife that they should at once kneel
down and thank God for His mercy.
“Of course, Zachariah; but you are not yet sure you will get anything. I
will take off my things directly.”
“Need you wait to take off your things, my dear?”
“Really, Zachariah, you do make such strange remarks sometimes. I need
not wait; but I am sure it will be more becoming, and it will give you an
opportunity to think over what you are going to say.”
Accordingly Mrs. Coleman retired for about five minutes. On her return
she observed that it was the time for regular family prayer, and she
produced the Bible. Zachariah had indeed had the opportunity to think,
and he had thought very rapidly. The mere opening of the sacred Book,
however, always acted as a spell, and when its heavy lids fell down on
either side the room cleared itself of all haunting, intrusive evil
spirits. He read the seventeenth chapter of Exodus, the story of the
water brought out of the rock; and he thanked the Almighty with great
earnestness for the favour shown him, never once expressing a doubt that
he would not be successful. He was not mistaken, for Ogden had a place
for him, just as good and just as permanent as the one he had left in
London.