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.
This habit, as it became his unique preoccupation, cost him not a
little. He lost his old friends who had seen his slight adventure,
and he wasted much time in spinning these yarns, and much money in
buying books of derring-do and wild ’scapes at sea. He loved those
who believed his stories to be true, and shocked the rare minds
that seemed to catch in them a suspicion of exaggeration. He could
not long frequent the same society, and he strained his mind a
little out of shape by the perpetual necessity of creative effort.
None the less, I think that, on the whole, he gained. It made him
an artist: he saw great visions of heaving waters at night; he
really had, in fancy, faced death in a terrible form, and this gave
him a singular courage in his last moments. He said to the doctor,
with a slight calm smile, “Tell me the worst; I have been through
things far more terrifying than this;” and when he was offered
consolation by his weeping friends, he told them that “no petty
phrases of ritual devotion were needed to soothe a man who had
been face to face with Nature in her wildest moods.” So he died,
comforted by his illusion, and for some days after the funeral his
sister would hold him up to his only and favourite nephew as an
example of a high and strenuous life lived with courage, and ended
in heroic quiet. Then they all went to hear the will read.
But the will was the greatest surprise of all. For it opened with
these words:--
“Having some experience of the perils they suffer that go down to
the sea in ships, and of the blessedness of unexpected relief and
rescue, I, John Curtall Thorpe, humbly and gratefully reminiscent
of my own wonderful and miraculous snatching from the jaws of
death ...”
And it went on to leave the whole property (including the little
place in Surrey), in all (after Sir William Vernon Harcourt’s death
duties had been paid) some £69,337. 6_s._ 3_d._ to the Lifeboat
Fund, which badly needed it. Nor was there any modifying codicil
but one, whereby the sum of £1000, free of duty, was left to
Sylvester Sarassin, a poetic and long-haired young man, who had for
years attended to his tales with reverent attention, and who had,
indeed, drawn up, or “Englished” (as he called it), the remarkable
will of the testator.
Many other things that followed this, the law-suit, the quarrel
of the nephew with Sarassin, and so forth, I would relate had I
the space or you the patience. But it grows late; the oil in the
bulb is exhausted. The stars, which (in the beautiful words of
Theocritus) “tremble and always follow the quiet wheels of the
night,” warn me that it is morning. Farewell.