I PLAY THE CRAVEN.
Then I played the craven. It is useless to say any more. It is idle to
urge an excuse. I played the craven, and pleaded to the man at whom, a
few minutes before, when he was unprepared, and after he had spared my
life, I had struck a cowardly blow.
"Don't strike!" I gasped. "I'm not Grant--Grant is dead. I've seen his
body. I'll tell you about it, if you'll not strike."
"This," he said--almost drawled--in slow, deliberate accents, "is very
extraordinary and most interesting. I won't promise to spare your life.
But I'll hear your tale. I'll promise nothing else, young man, whoever
you are, till I've heard you out."
My momentary panic was over. Already I was beginning to feel ashamed of
myself. Already the manhood which had deserted me was returning.
"Stop a moment," I said. "I won't have my life on false pretences. I
lost my nerve just now and played the coward; but, please God, I'll
play the man again. I'm not Grant, it is true, and Grant is dead; but
I'm your enemy, and I meant and mean to hunt you down. So knife me now
if you want to, but before you do so, I'd like to ask your pardon for
striking you, after you'd spared my life, and when you were unprepared.
It was a cad's blow--a coward's blow--and I am ashamed of it."
I stopped short, red-faced and choking. He gave an uneasy, abrupt
laugh, and, rising, put back his knife.
"Get up!" he said; "I guess you mean playing the game fairly. As for
the bit of a blow, we'll say no more about it. Perhaps I deserved it.
It does not do to think an opponent's beaten and means throwing up the
sponge too early in the game. For what happens after I've heard your
story--whether I kill you, as kill you I assuredly can this moment and
in this place--I promise nothing till I've heard you out. This much,
however, I will say. You tell me you are my enemy, and that you meant
and still mean hunting me down. Well, that's straight talk, and I'll
say this much of straight talk to you in return. If you are my enemy
only, I wouldn't and couldn't kill you for any reason under the sun.
If you're the enemy of the cause I have at heart, I'd find you out and
kill you though all Scotland Yard itself acted as your bodyguard and
protector. That's the state of the market, young man. First of all,
let me ask you whether that yarn you spun in the opium den about your
having come there by chance as an author in search of copy was true?"
"Every word of it," I answered.
"Well, now, tell me what you have been doing since, and how you came
to be in this house, and in this garden. I have got to know, and it
will go better with you, if you tell me with your own lips, than if you
force me to find it out for myself, as I most assuredly shall. I don't
want to kill you. It is horrible to me to have to take a life--unless
the safety of the cause is concerned, and then I'd kill you or anyone
else as unconcernedly--much more unconcernedly than I'd kill a
superfluous litter of kittens brought into the world by the family cat."
Doubt his sanity I might and did, but of his seriousness and sincerity
I was in no sense sceptical. If I refused to speak, the chances were
that I should not be allowed to leave the place alive. In the matter
of personal strength, I was hopelessly outmatched, and as my revolver
had dropped out of my hand when I had received the blow which felled
me, and had been secured by him, I was, save for a pocket-knife,
entirely unarmed.
All things considered, to tell him my story seemed the best course
to pursue. He would learn very little that mattered or that he could
not find out without me; whereas it was quite possible that if, in
return, I could induce him to speak of the "cause" to which he was so
warmly attached, and in the interests of which he was ready to stop at
nothing, I might, on the contrary, learn something which would be very
well worth the knowing.
"I'll tell you my story," I bargained, "if you in return will tell me
what is this cause which you say you have at heart. Who knows that it
might not be a cause with which I myself sympathise, and might wish to
befriend?"
"I agree," he said quietly. "But first I think we'll shut the door and
have a light. I've been in this place before. If I can help it, I never
enter any place without finding out all I can about it beforehand.
There's a gas-jet, and if you'll wait a moment, I'll light it. It can't
be seen from the outside."
Commencing with the invitation to write an article on the opium den, I
very briefly narrated what had befallen me, keeping back nothing except
my love for Kate, and the fact of the dream-tableaux, neither of which
seemed to me to come within my bargain.
He listened without a comment, though he now and then interpolated a
pointed question. When I had done, he lit a cigarette, and began to
pace backward and forward.
"Mr. Rissler," he said abruptly, after a short silence, "were you ever
poor?"
"Ever poor?" I laughed. "If you had asked me if I were ever rich, I
might, by thinking hard, remember a time when I had a few pounds in
hand. But ever poor? My dear sir, I can't recall a time when I was ever
anything else."
He nodded gravely.
"I have heard your story. Now listen to mine. I'm not without hope of
enlisting your sympathy. Not for myself: I need, and will have, the
sympathy of no man; but for the cause for which I fight, for which I
hope and believe I shall be able to persuade you to fight. My mother
was a poor woman--a woman of the people; my father--my God! the irony
of it--a gentleman. He was, if the truth were known, something more
than a gentleman. We are all gentlemen to-day, or think we are, and
one has to make a distinction. He was more than a gentleman. He was
an aristocrat. He was more, even, than an aristocrat; but we will not
talk further of that now. She was my mother, but not his wife. She
was the mother of his child, and he left her and her child to starve.
We did not starve; but I pass over those years. When I was ten, she
broke down, worked out, worn out, wearied out. Then I took over her
burden. No matter what my work, no matter who my employer. There are
thousands of such employers as he; there are millions of such workers
as I--workers whom no law protects. You may not be cruel to a cat
or dog; you may not over-work a horse. These are offences which are
punishable by law. But your fellow-men and fellow-women, your clerk,
your shop-assistant, your warehouse-man--these you may starve, sweat,
over-work, underpay, these you may do to death if you like, and none
shall say you nay. The sweating, the over-work, and the underpay are
the least of the evils they endure.
"The one and only aim of most employers is making money. And 'making'
money means _taking_ money, the money which is the rightful property
of others--means, in point of fact, swindling. But a good business man
is shy of swindling his customers. The customer is a free agent. If
he discovers he is being swindled he will take his custom elsewhere,
and loss of custom means loss of money, which will not suit your
business man. So he must needs look for somebody else to sweat and
swindle--somebody who cannot take himself elsewhere at choice; and in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the somebodies are the unfortunate
employees. They must be made to do the greatest possible amount of
work at the least possible rate of pay. And that they be compelled to
endure this wholesale blood-sucking and robbery, they must of necessity
be kept in a state of subjection, of fear, of slavery, and bondage.
All feeling of independence, of having a soul or a conscience to call
their own, must be taken from them. They are the chattels of their
master, the creatures of his will, depending--they and their wife and
child, if wife or child there be--upon his whim and pleasure for the
roof which covers their head, for the clothes they wear, for the very
food which keeps body and soul together. Let them once feel any sense
of independence--let them once feel that they can obtain shelter and
clothes and food at the hands of another employer, and they will no
longer consent to be sweated and robbed, underfed, underpaid, and
overworked.
"There are several ways of bringing the unhappy employees to this state
of servile subjection. One is to browbeat, to bully, and to intimidate,
till their nerve be gone and their spirit be broken. But why stand it,
you ask? Why not throw off these chains, and seek work at the hands
of some employer who is considerate and just. The reason is that such
an employer is not easy to find, and, when found, the chances are a
hundred to one against his having a vacancy on his staff.
"Every man in a situation knows that there are thousands out, and
that, were he to resign his post, it would be filled, almost at a
moment's notice, and at any wage which an employer chose to offer. Such
knowledge as that gives pause to the man who is minded to assert his
independence, for out of his meagre salary it is almost impossible to
save; and to be out of work even for a week or two, with nothing to
fall back upon, means not only starvation for him and his, but means
that every week he is out, the longer is he likely to remain so. It
means shabby clothes; for how, without money, can he buy new clothes
to keep up the appearance which is of so much importance to him when
applying for a post? It means that in an incredibly short time he
begins to look shabby and broken-down--begins to look, in fact, like
one of life's derelicts, and, of life's derelicts, employers are apt to
fight shy.
"Another reason why a man hesitates to throw off his chains is that
some employers have been known to refuse a character to the clerk or
assistant who has asserted his independence, and the independence of
his class, by discharging himself; and at the man who comes seeking
work, without a 'character,' no other employer will look. For an
employee to dare to prove that he has been overworked and underpaid
by discharging himself, and finding new employment, where the work is
less and the rate of pay higher, would be an example (your employer
argues) which would demoralise the whole staff. Such a state of things
approaches to sacrilege, blasphemy, anarchy. It must not be permitted.
Of the man who dares so to act, so to set employers as a class at
defiance, an object-lesson must be made, lest so dangerous an example
infect the workers who remain. I have known cases where, to such a man,
not only has a character been refused, but where a trumped-up charge
of theft, or insubordination, or other misconduct, has been brought
against him, that he and his fellow-slaves may be taught the salutary
lesson that, against Capital, Labour has no chance; against the
employer, the employee has no appeal. It is slavery, a thousand times
worse than that of the Chinese coolies about which some good folk have
such tender consciences.
"In England we do not flog our white slaves. We only break their
nerves, crush their spirit, and bully the manhood out of them. Two of
my fellow-workers went out of their minds; one of us took his own
life. You look incredulous--you think that sort of thing uncommon. They
haven't enough mind left, most of them, to go out of it, so abject and
cringing and timid do they become; and they haven't enough pluck left
in them--broken-spirited as they are--to take their lives. So they only
die, the weakly ones, or drag out their wretched lives, the strong
ones, in daily terror of being discharged and of being thrown homeless,
moneyless, to starve upon the streets. Perhaps to starve, and so to
make an end of it, would be the best thing that could happen to them.
For many employers, in addition to the sweating, encourage a system
which leaves their employees with less spirit to call their own than a
dog, less soul in their wretched bodies than a worm.
"In many business houses a system of espionage is established by which
the wretched workers are encouraged to sneak and pry and play the
cut-throat upon each other. If your fellow-slave gets two shillings a
week more than you get, and you can detect him in a moment's slackness,
a single mistake, and report it to the employer, it is possible that
the poor wretch may be discharged and you may get his post and his
extra pay. But you, in your turn, know that the man immediately below
you is watching you greedily and in the same way, lest you, also,
be guilty of a slip or an omission that, by reporting the matter
to his principals, he may work you out, as you had worked out your
predecessor, and so he may slip into your vacant shoes and your pay.
"It is a system of infamy--a system which breeds men and women who are
lower in the scale of being than a louse. You think I exaggerate. But
do you know what it is to wake up each morning so weary that you had
scarce the strength to struggle up that you might go forth to work for
the day's bread?
"I do, and so do tens of thousands in this London to-day.
"Do you know what it is to be so broken of spirit, so weary of the
cringing and the fawning, as to feel, each morning, that if death
had come to you in the night, and so spared you this waking, you had
counted it a happy release?
"I do, and so do tens of thousands in this London to-day.
"And, more terrible still, do you know what it is to be so abject
a thing, so infamous a creature, that you are content to play the
cut-throat to your fellow-slave, to pry and spy and carry tales, in
the hope that you may be appointed to replace him, and so put another
shilling a week in your own pocket, and another sovereign in that of
the tyrant and blood-sucker, to curry favour with whom you are ready to
do this infamous thing?
"Again I say I do; again I say, and so do tens of thousands in this
city of London to-day.
"For me those days of slavery and infamy are gone. For millions of my
fellow-men and fellow-women those days of slavery and infamy remain;
but a man who has once been through what I have, who has lived and
starved and eaten his heart out among the poor in their squalid, sordid
surroundings, can never forget it so long as he lives. Their cry is
ever in my ears; the cry of men whom these monsters have made less
than men, breaking the man's heart in them, turning them into curs
and cravens, robbing them of the very birthright of their manhood,
that, like bullocks and steers, they may be broken to bow themselves
to the yoke and lash, and meekly to obey their tyrant's bidding. The
cry of wan-faced, hollow-eyed women, working a week of winter days
and nights in a fireless garret till their chilled fingers can scarce
hold the needle, and for a wage, that on the streets to which--small
wonder!--such women are, by starvation and despair, too often driven,
can be earned at so light a cost. But most of all, the cry of little
children--little hollow-eyed children, crying silently because they are
hungry and cold, stretching wan hands for the bread----My God! I cannot
bear to think of it; I shall go mad. I sometimes think I _am_ mad when
I brood over their sufferings and their wrongs. A great writer has put
it on record that when he looks upon his fellow-men and fellow-women,
and remembers that pain and sorrow and disease, for themselves and
their dear ones, are the inevitable lot of all, and death the only
certainty--when he sees them smiling, flirting, posturing, grimacing on
the very edge of Eternity, he is filled with amazement and contempt.
"Contempt! To me the sight of haggard, careworn men, of weary-faced
and unlovely women, leading starved and joyless lives, out of which
all hope and beauty and poetry are irretrievably crushed and gone,
yet forcing themselves, in face of such terrible odds, to smile and
laugh and take life lightly--is a sight for gods to wonder at, is
magnificent, is heroic, is sublime.
"And me, God has upraised to right the wrongs of the poor. The love
that I bear to these my people, of whom I am one, burns more steadily
than ever within me; but side by side with it there has sprung up
a fiercer flame--the fires of fierce and relentless hate of their
oppressors. Me, God has marked out to be the avenger of the poor.
"As God sent the rainbow as a sign to his servant Noah, so to me by a
sign has He signified His will. To me, as I walked the streets of this
great city, a message came, bidding me turn my steps to the nation's
museum, there to seek the sign. And in the Egyptian court of the museum
I found it. There, stretching half the length of that great hall,
where stand the sarcophagi of Israel's taskmasters, the Pharaohs, is a
clenched arm and fist, of solid granite, and of such giant proportions,
that one single blow from it would make to fall the side of a house,
and bring to death and destruction all who dwell therein.
"And as I looked the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 'Behold, I
make of thee My fist and arm of granite, that thou mayest strike and
slay without mercy My enemies and thy enemies, them that oppress and
grind down My people. Strike then, slay and spare not, else shall it
be to thee as to Saul, who, when bidden by Me utterly to destroy the
Amalekites, spared many, bringing thereby upon himself and upon his
house the just and heavy vengeance of God.'"
The man was mad--mad as it is possible for a man to be; but there was
method in his madness. In all that had been said, no single word had
been dropped which afforded any clue in regard to the crimes he had
committed or meant to commit. Passionate as had been his outpourings
in the cause of the poor and of the oppressed, and vehement as had
been his declaration of war against the oppressor, he had given me no
inkling of the means at his command for the carrying on of the war he
was waging, no clue in regard to his associates, their methods, or
their meeting-places. Not one word of all he had said could be adduced
against him in court, as evidence in connection with any crime with
which he might be charged.
Then from under his cape of Christ-like compassion, the cunning and
cruel eyes of the madman peeped.
"But I mustn't tell you too much--anything you could use against me,"
he said with a leer, "until I know whether you are for the oppressor
or the oppressed. Tell me you are on our side, Rissler, and none shall
raise finger to harm or to injure you.
"But"--and now his voice was terrible to hear, the blue blaze in his
eyes terrible to see--"let me have cause to suspect you of assisting
the enemy, the people's enemy, God's enemy, and I'd throttle the life
out of you, tear the heart out of you, this night, this moment, in this
place. Which is it to be?"