I took pity on him, he looked so harassed, and I asked him to come on to
a Lyons restaurant with me and have a bit of lunch. As we walked through
the streets, we fell in with a great crowd, and then I remembered that
some royal visitors were to proceed in great state to the Mansion House.
I proposed to Barber that we should go and look at the procession, and
he agreed more readily than I expected.
In fact, after a while, the crowd, and the rumor, and stirring of troops
as they fell into position, evidently wrought on him to a remarkable
degree. He began to talk loud and rather haughtily, to study his
gestures; there was infinite superiority and disdain in the looks he
cast on the people. He attracted the attention and, I thought, the
derision of those close to us, and I became rather ashamed and impatient
of those ridiculous airs. Yet I could not help feeling sorry for him.
The poor creature evidently suffered from megalomania--that was the only
way to account for his pretentious notions of his own importance, seeing
that he was just a needy little clerk out of work.--
The place from which we were watching the procession was a corner of
Piccadilly Circus. The street lay before our eyes bleached in the sun,
wide and empty, looking about three times as large as usual, bordered
with a line of soldiers and mounted police, and the black crowd massed
behind. In a few minutes the procession of princes would sweep by. There
was a hush over all the people.
What followed happened so quickly that I can hardly separate the
progressive steps. Barber continued to talk excitedly, but all my
attention being on the scene before me, I took no heed of what he said.
Neither could I hear him very plainly. But it must have been the ceasing
of his voice which made me look around, when I saw he was no longer by
my side.
How he managed, at that moment, to get out there I never knew, but
suddenly in the broad vacant space, fringed by police and soldiery, I
saw Barber walking alone in the sight of all the people.
I was thunderstruck. What a madman! I expected to hear the crowd roar at
him, to see the police ride up and drag him away.
But nobody moved; there was a great stillness; and before I knew it my
own feelings blended with the crowd's. It seemed to me that Barber was
in his right place there: this mean shabby man, walking solitary, was
what we had all come to see. For his passage the street had been
cleared, the guards deployed, the houses decked.
It all sounds wild, I know, but the whole scene made so deep an
impression on my mind that I am perfectly certain as to what I felt
while Barber was walking there. He walked slowly, with no trace of his
usual shuffling uncertain gait, but with a balanced cadenced step, and
as he turned his head calmly from side to side his face seemed
transfigured. It was the face of a genius, an evil genius, unjust and
ruthless--a brutal god. I felt, and no doubt everyone in the crowd felt,
that between us and that lonely man there was some immense difference
and distance of outlook and will and desire.
I could follow his progress for several yards. Then I lost sight of him.
Almost immediately afterward I heard a tumult--shouts and uproar--
Then the royal procession swept by.
I said to Mr. G.M., "Whether he was arrested that day, or knocked down
by the cavalry and taken to a hospital, I don't know. I have not seen or
heard of him till I got that letter on Wednesday."
Mr. G.M., who is now one of the managers of a well-known tobacconist
firm, had been in the same office as Barber, and notwithstanding the
disparity of age and position, had always shown a kindly interest in him
and befriended him when he could. Accordingly, when I received a letter
from Barber begging in very lamentable terms to visit him at an address
in Kent, I thought it prudent to consult this gentleman before sending
any reply. He proposed very amiably that we should meet at Charing Cross
Station on the following Saturday afternoon and travel in to Kent
together. In the train we discussed Barber's case. I related all I knew
of the young man and we compared our observations.
"Certainly," said Mr. G.M., "what you tell me is rather astonishing. But
the explanation is simple as far as poor Barber is concerned. You say he
has been often ill lately? Naturally, this has affected his brain and
spirits. What is a little more difficult to explain is the impression
left by his acts on you and other spectators. But the anger you always
experienced may have clouded your faculties for the time being. Have you
inquired of anybody else who was present on these occasions?"
I replied that I had not. I had shrunk from being identified in any way
with Barber. I had to think of my wife and children. I could not afford
to lose my post.
"No," rejoined Mr. G.M., "I can quite understand that. I should probably
have acted myself as you did. Still, the effect his performances have
had on you, and apparently on others, is the strangest element in
Barber's case. Otherwise, I don't see that it offers anything
inexplicable. You say that Barber acts against his will--against his
better judgment. We all do that. All men and women who look back over
their lives must perceive the number of things they have done which they
had no intention of doing. We obey some secret command; we sail under
sealed orders. We pass by without noticing it some tiny fact which,
years later, perhaps, influences the rest of our lives. And for all our
thinking, we seldom can trace this tiny fact. I myself cannot tell to
this day why I did not become a Baptist minister. It seems to me I
always intended to do this, but one fine afternoon I found I had ended
my first day's work in a house of business.
"Much of our life is unconscious; even the most wide-awake of us pass
much of our lives in dreams. Several hours out of every twenty-four we
pass in a dream state we cannot help carrying some of those happy or
sinister adventures into our waking hours. It is really as much our
habit to dream as to be awake. Perhaps we are always dreaming. Haven't
you ever for a moment, under some powerful exterior shock, become half
conscious that you should be doing something else from what you are
actually doing? But with us this does not last; and as life goes on such
intimations become dimmer and dimmer. With subjects like Barber, on the
other hand, the intimations become stronger and stronger, till at last
they attempt to carry their dreams into action. That is the way I
explain this case."
"Perhaps you are right."
The house where Barber was lodging stood high up on the side of a hill.
We reached it after a rather breathless climb in the rain. It was a
shepherd's cottage, standing quite lonely. Far down below the village
could be seen with the smoke above the red roofs.
The woman told us that Barber was in, but she thought he might be
asleep. He slept a lot.
"I don't know how he lives," she said. "He pays us scarce anything. We
can't keep him much longer."
He was fast asleep, lying back in a chair with his mouth half open,
wrapped in a shabby overcoat. He looked very mean; and when he awoke it
was only one long wail on his hard luck. He couldn't get any work.
People had a prejudice against him; they looked at him askance. He had a
great desire for sleep--couldn't somehow keep awake.
"If I could tell you the dreams I have!" he cried fretfully. "Silliest
rotten stuff. I try to tell 'em to the woman here or her husband
sometimes, but they won't listen. Shouldn't be surprised if they think
I'm a bit off. They say I'm always talking to myself. I'm sure I'm
not.--I wish I could get out of here. Can't you get me a job?" he asked,
turning to Mr. G.M.
"Well, Gus, I'll see. I'll do my best."
"Lummy!" exclaimed Barber excitedly, "you ought to see the things I
dream. I can't think where the bloomin' pictures come from. And yet I've
seen it all before. I know all those faces. They are not all white. Some
are brown like Egyptians, and some are quite black. I've seen them
somewhere. Those long terraces and statues and fountains and marble
courts, and the blue sky and the sun, and those dancing girls with the
nails of their hands and feet stained red, and the boy in whose hair I
wipe my fingers, and the slave I struck dead last night--"
His eyes were delirious, terrible to see.
"Ah," he cried hoarsely, "I am stifling here. Let us go into the air."
And indeed he was changing so much--not essentially in his person,
though his face had become broader, intolerant, domineering and
cruel--but there was pouring from him so great an emanation of power
that it seemed to crack and break down the poor little room. Mr. G.M.
and myself had no desire to thwart him, and it never occurred to us to
do so. We should as soon have thought of stopping a thunderstorm. We
followed him outside on to the space of level ground before the house
and listened humbly while he spoke.
As well as I can recollect, he was lamenting some hindrance to his
impulses, some flaw in his power. "To have the instincts of the ruler
and no slaves to carry out my will. To wish to reward and punish and to
be deprived of the means. To be the master of the world, but only in my
own breast--Oh, fury! The ploughboy there is happy, for he has no
longings outside of his simple round life. While I--if I had the earth
in my hand, I should want a star. Misery! Misery!"
He leaned upon a low stonewall and looked down on the town, over the
pastures blurred with rain.
"And those wretches down there," he pronounced slowly, "who jeer at me
when I pass and insult me with impunity, whose heads should be struck
off, and I cannot strike them off! I loathe that town. How ugly it is!
It offends my eyes."
He turned and looked us full in the face and our hearts became as water.
"Burn it," he said.
Then he turned away again and bowed his head in his arms on the wall.
I don't remember anything clearly till a long time afterward, when I
found myself walking with Mr. G.M. in the wet night on a deserted road
on the outskirts of the town. We were carrying some inflammable things,
flax, tar, matches, etc., which we must have purchased.
Mr. G.M. stopped and looked at me. It was exactly like coming out of a
fainting fit.
"What are we doing with this gear?" he said in a low voice.
"I don't know."
"Better chuck it over a hedge.--"
We made our way to the station in silence. I was thinking of that
desolate figure up there on the hill, leaning over the wall in the dark
and the rain.
We caught the last train to London. In the carriage Mr. G.M. began to
shiver as though he were cold.
"Brrr! that fellow got on my nerves," he said; and we made no further
allusion to the matter.
But as the train, moving slowly, passed a gap which brought us again in
sight of the town, we saw a tongue of flame stream into the sky.