a good stroke of work to do that day, in the way of cooking a public
dinner for a tavern-keeper who knew me. I found my husband gone, and
the bedroom stripped of the furniture which I had put into it. For the
second time he had robbed me of my own property, and had turned it into
money to be spent in drink.
“I didn’t say a word. I stood and looked round the empty room. What was
going on in me I hardly knew myself at the time, and can’t describe now.
All I remember is, that, after a little, I turned about to leave the
house. I knew the places where thy husband was likely to be found; and
the devil possessed me to go and find him. The landlady came out into
the passage and tried to stop me. She was a bigger and a stronger woman
than I was. But I shook her off like a child. Thinking over it now, I
believe she was in no condition to put out her strength. The sight of me
frightened her.
“I found him. I said--well, I said what a woman beside herself with fury
would be likely to say. It’s needless to tell how it ended. He knocked
me down.
“After that, there is a spot of darkness like in my memory. The next
thing I can call to mind, is coming back to my senses after some days.
Three of my teeth were knocked out--but that was not the worst of it.
My head had struck against something in falling, and some part of me
(a nerve, I think they said) was injured in such a way as to affect my
speech. I don’t mean that I was downright dumb--I only mean that, all
of a sudden, it had become a labor to me to speak. A long word was
as serious an obstacle as if I was a child again. They took me to the
hospital. When the medical gentlemen heard what it was, the medical
gentlemen came crowding round me. I appeared to lay hold of their
interest, just as a story-book lays hold of the interest of other
people. The upshot of it was, that I might end in being dumb, or I might
get my speech again--the chances were about equal. Only two things were
needful. One of them was that I should live on good nourishing diet. The
other was, that I should keep my mind easy.
“About the diet it was not possible to decide. My getting good
nourishing food and drink depended on my getting money to buy the same.
As to my mind, there was no difficulty about _that._ If my husband came
back to me, my mind was made up to kill him.
“Horrid--I am well aware this is horrid. Nobody else, in my place, would
have ended as wickedly as that. All the other women in the world, tried
as I was, would have risen superior to the trial.”
9.
“I have said that people (excepting my husband and my relations) were
almost always good to me.
“The landlord of the house which we had taken when we were married heard
of my sad case. He gave me one of his empty houses to look after, and a
little weekly allowance for doing it. Some of the furniture in the upper
rooms, not being wanted by the last tenant, was left to be taken at a
valuation if the next tenant needed it. Two of the servants’ bedrooms
(in the attics), one next to the other, had all that was wanted in them.
So I had a roof to cover me, and a choice of beds to lie on, and money
to get me food. All well again--but all too late. If that house could
speak, what tales that house would have to tell of me!
“I had been told by the doctors to exercise my speech. Being all alone,
with nobody to speak to, except when the landlord dropped in, or when
the servant next door said, ‘Nice day, ain’t it?’ or, ‘Don’t you feel
lonely?’ or such like, I bought the newspaper, and read it out loud
to myself to exercise my speech in that way. One day I came upon a bit
about the wives of drunken husbands. It was a report of something said
on that subject by a London coroner, who had held inquests on dead
husbands (in the lower ranks of life), and who had his reasons for
suspecting the wives. Examination of the body (he said) didn’t prove it;
and witnesses didn’t prove it; but he thought it, nevertheless, quite
possible, in some cases, that, when the woman could bear it no longer,
she sometimes took a damp towel, and waited till the husband (drugged
with his own liquor) was sunk in his sleep, and then put the towel over
his nose and mouth, and ended it that way without any body being the
wiser. I laid down the newspaper; and fell into thinking. My mind was,
by this time, in a prophetic way. I said to myself ‘I haven’t happened
on this for nothing: this means that I shall see my husband again.’
“It was then just after my dinner-time--two o’clock. That same night,
at the moment when I had put out my candle, and laid me down in bed, I
heard a knock at the street door. Before I had lit my candle I says to
myself, ‘Here he is.’
“I huddled on a few things, and struck a light, and went down stairs. I
called out through the door, ‘Who’s there?’ And his voice answered, ‘Let
me in.’
“I sat down on a chair in the passage, and shook all over like a person
struck with palsy. Not from the fear of him--but from my mind being in
the prophetic way. I knew I was going to be driven to it at last. Try as
I might to keep from doing it, my mind told me I was to do it now. I sat
shaking on the chair in the passage; I on one side of the door, and he
on the other.
“He knocked again, and again, and again. I knew it was useless to
try--and yet I resolved to try. I determined not to let him in till I
was forced to it. I determined to let him alarm the neighborhood, and
to see if the neighborhood would step between us. I went up stairs and
waited at the open staircase window over the door.
“The policeman came up, and the neighbors came out. They were all for
giving him into custody. The policeman laid hands on him. He had but one
word to say; he had only to point up to me at the window, and to tell
them I was his wife. The neighbors went indoors again. The policeman
dropped hold of his arm. It was I who was in the wrong, and not he. I
was bound to let my husband in. I went down stairs again, and let him
in.
“Nothing passed between us that night. I threw open the door of the
bedroom next to mine, and went and locked myself into my own room. He
was dead beat with roaming the streets, without a penny in his pocket,
all day long. The bed to lie on was all he wanted for that night.
“The next morning I tried again--tried to turn back on the way that
I was doomed to go; knowing beforehand that it would be of no use. I
offered him three parts of my poor weekly earnings, to be paid to him
regularly at the landlord’s office, if he would only keep away from me,
and from the house. He laughed in my face. As my husband, he could take
all my earnings if he chose. And as for leaving the house, the house
offered him free quarters to live in as long as I was employed to look
after it. The landlord couldn’t part man and wife.
“I said no more. Later in the day the landlord came. He said if we could
make it out to live together peaceably he had neither the right nor
the wish to interfere. If we made any disturbances, then he should
be obliged to provide himself with some other woman to look after the
house. I had nowhere else to go, and no other employment to undertake.
If, in spite of that, I had put on my bonnet and walked out, my husband
would have walked out after me. And all decent people would have patted
him on the back, and said, ‘Quite right, good man--quite right.’
“So there he was by his own act, and with the approval of others, in the
same house with me.
“I made no remark to him or to the landlord. Nothing roused me now.
I knew what was coming; I waited for the end. There was some change
visible in me to others, as I suppose, though not noticeable by myself,
which first surprised my husband and then daunted him. When the next
night came I heard him lock the door softly in his own room. It didn’t
matter to me. When the time was ripe ten thousand locks wouldn’t lock
out what was to come.
“The next day, bringing my weekly payment, brought me a step nearer on
the way to the end. Getting the money, he could get the drink. This
time he began cunningly--in other words, he began his drinking by slow
degrees. The landlord (bent, honest man, on trying to keep the peace
between us) had given him some odd jobs to do, in the way of small
repairs, here and there about the house. ‘You owe this,’ he says, ‘to
my desire to do a good turn to your poor wife. I am helping you for her
sake. Show yourself worthy to be helped, if you can.’
“He said, as usual, that he was going to turn over a new leaf. Too late!
The time had gone by. He was doomed, and I was doomed. It didn’t matter
what he said now. It didn’t matter when he locked his door again the
last thing at night.
“The next day was Sunday. Nothing happened. I went to chapel. Mere
habit. It did me no good. He got on a little with the drinking--but
still cunningly, by slow degrees. I knew by experience that this meant a
long fit, and a bad one, to come.
“Monday, there were the odd jobs about the house to be begun. He was
by this time just sober enough to do his work, and just tipsy enough to
take a spiteful pleasure in persecuting his wife. He went out and got
the things he wanted, and came back and called for me. A skilled workman
like he was (he said) wanted a journeyman under him. There were things
which it was beneath a skilled workman to do for himself. He was not
going to call in a man or a boy, and then have to pay them. He was going
to get it done for nothing, and he meant to make a journeyman of _me._
Half tipsy and half sober, he went on talking like that, and laying out
his things, all quite right, as he wanted them. When they were ready he
straightened himself up, and he gave me his orders what I was to do.
“I obeyed him to the best of my ability. Whatever he said, and whatever
he did, I knew he was going as straight as man could go to his own death
by my hands.
“The rats and mice were all over the house, and the place generally was
out of repair. He ought to have begun on the kitchen-floor; but (having
sentence pronounced against him) he began in the empty parlors on the
ground-floor.
“These parlors were separated by what is called a ‘lath-and-plaster
wall.’ The rats had damaged it. At one part they had gnawed through
and spoiled the paper, at another part they had not got so far. The
landlord’s orders were to spare the paper, because he had some by him to
match it. My husband began at a place where the paper was whole. Under
his directions I mixed up--I won’t say what. With the help of it he got
the paper loose from the wall, without injuring it in any way, in a long
hanging strip. Under it was the plaster and the laths, gnawed away in
places by the rats. Though strictly a paperhanger by trade, he could be
plasterer too when he liked. I saw how he cut away the rotten laths and
ripped off the plaster; and (under his directions again) I mixed up the
new plaster he wanted, and handed him the new laths, and saw how he set
them. I won’t say a word about how this was done either.
“I have a reason for keeping silence here, which is, to my mind, a very
dreadful one. In every thing that my husband made me do that day he was
showing me (blindfold) the way to kill him, so that no living soul, in
the police or out of it, could suspect me of the deed.
“We finished the job on the wall just before dark. I went to my cup of
tea, and he went to his bottle of gin.
“I left him, drinking hard, to put our two bedrooms tidy for the night.
The place that his bed happened to be set in (which I had never remarked
particularly before) seemed, in a manner of speaking, to force itself on
my notice now.
“The head of the bedstead was set against the wall which divided his
room from mine. From looking at the bedstead I got to looking at the
wall next. Then to wondering what it was made of. Then to rapping
against it with my knuckles. The sound told me there was nothing but
lath and plaster under the paper. It was the same as the wall we had
been at work on down stairs. We had cleared our way so far through this
last--in certain places where the repairs were most needed--that we had
to be careful not to burst through the paper in the room on the other
side. I found myself calling to mind the caution my husband had given me
while we were at this part of the work, word for word as he had spoken
it. _‘Take care you don’t find your hands in the next room.’_ That
was what he had said down in the parlor. Up in his bedroom I kept on
repeating it in my own mind--with my eyes all the while on the key,
which he had moved to the inner side of the door to lock himself
in--till the knowledge of what it meant burst on me like a flash of
light. I looked at the wall, at the bedhead, at my own two hands--and I
shivered as if it was winter time.
“Hours must have passed like minutes while I was up stairs that night.
I lost all count of time. When my husband came up from his drinking, he
found me in his room.”
10.
“I leave the rest untold, and pass on purposely to the next morning.
“No mortal eyes but mine will ever see these lines. Still, there are
things a woman can’t write of even to herself. I shall only say this.
I suffered the last and worst of many indignities at my husband’s
hands--at the very time when I first saw, set plainly before me, the
way to take his life. He went out toward noon next day, to go his rounds
among the public houses; my mind being then strung up to deliver myself
from him, for good and all, when he came back at night.
“The things we had used on the previous day were left in the parlor. I
was all by myself in the house, free to put in practice the lesson he
had taught me. I proved myself an apt scholar. Before the lamps were lit
in the street I had my own way prepared (in my bedroom and in his)
for laying my own hands on him--after he had locked himself up for the
night.
“I don’t remember feeling either fear or doubt through all those hours.
I sat down to my bit of supper with no better and no worse an appetite
than usual. The only change in me that I can call to mind was that I
felt a singular longing to have somebody with me to keep me company.
Having no friend to ask in, I went to the street door and stood looking
at the people passing this way and that.
“A stray dog, sniffing about, came up to me. Generally I dislike dogs
and beasts of all kinds. I called this one in and gave him his supper.
He had been taught (I suppose) to sit up on his hind-legs and beg for
food; at any rate, that was his way of asking me for more. I laughed--it
seems impossible when I look back at it now, but for all that it’s
true--I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks, at the little beast
on his haunches, with his ears pricked up and his head on one side and
his mouth watering for the victuals. I wonder whether I was in my right
senses? I don’t know.
“When the dog had got all he could get he whined to be let out to roam
the streets again.
“As I opened the door to let the creature go his ways, I saw my husband
crossing the road to come in. ‘Keep out’ (I says to him); ‘to-night, of
all nights, keep out.’ He was too drunk to heed me; he passed by, and
blundered his way up stairs. I followed and listened. I heard him open
his door, and bang it to, and lock it. I waited a bit, and went up
another stair or two. I heard him drop down on to his bed. In a minute
more he was fast asleep and snoring.
“It had all happened as it was wanted to happen. In two minutes--without
doing one single thing to bring suspicion on myself--I could have
smothered him. I went into my own room. I took up the towel that I
had laid ready. I was within an inch of it--when there came a rush of
something up into my head. I can’t say what it was. I can only say the
horrors laid hold of me and hunted me then and there out of the house.
“I put on my bonnet, and slipped the key of the street door into my
pocket. It was only half past nine--or maybe a quarter to ten. If I had
any one clear notion in my head, it was the notion of running away, and
never allowing myself to set eyes on the house or the husband more.
“I went up the street--and came back. I went down the street--and came
back. I tried it a third time, and went round and round and round--and
came back. It was not to be done The house held me chained to it like a
dog to his kennel. I couldn’t keep away from it. For the life of me, I
couldn’t keep away from it.
“A company of gay young men and women passed me, just as I was going to
let myself in again. They were in a great hurry. ‘Step out,’ says one of
the men; ‘the theatre’s close by, and we shall be just in time for the
farce.’ I turned about and followed them. Having been piously brought
up, I had never been inside a theatre in my life. It struck me that I
might get taken, as it were, out of myself, if I saw something that was
quite strange to me, and heard something which would put new thoughts
into my mind.
“They went in to the pit; and I went in after them.
“The thing they called the farce had begun. Men and women came on to the
stage, turn and turn about, and talked, and went off again. Before long
all the people about me in the pit were laughing and clapping their
hands. The noise they made angered me. I don’t know how to describe the
state I was in. My eyes wouldn’t serve me, and my ears wouldn’t serve
me, to see and to hear what the rest of them were seeing and hearing.
There must have been something, I fancy, in my mind that got itself
between me and what was going on upon the stage. The play looked fair
enough on the surface; but there was danger and death at the bottom of
it. The players were talking and laughing to deceive the people--with
murder in their minds all the time. And nobody knew it but me--and my
tongue was tied when I tried to tell the others. I got up, and ran out.
The moment I was in the street my steps turned back of themselves on the
way to the house. I called a cab, and told the man to drive (as far as
a shilling would take me) the opposite way. He put me down--I don’t know
where. Across the street I saw an inscription in letters of flame over
an open door. The man said it was a dancing-place. Dancing was as new to
me as play-going. I had one more shilling left; and I paid to go in,
and see what a sight of the dancing would do for me. The light from the
ceiling poured down in this place as if it was all on fire. The crashing
of the music was dreadful. The whirling round and round of men and
women in each other’s arms was quite maddening to see. I don’t know what
happened to me here. The great blaze of light from the ceiling turned
blood-red on a sudden. The man standing in front of the musicians waving
a stick took the likeness of Satan, as seen in the picture in our family
Bible at home. The whirling men and women went round and round,
with white faces like the faces of the dead, and bodies robed in
winding-sheets. I screamed out with the terror of it; and some person
took me by the arm and put me outside the door. The darkness did me
good: it was comforting and delicious--like a cool hand laid on a hot
head. I went walking on through it, without knowing where; composing
my mind with the belief that I had lost my way, and that I should find
myself miles distant from home when morning dawned. After some time
I got too weary to go on; and I sat me down to rest on a door-step.
I dozed a bit, and woke up. When I got on my feet to go on again, I
happened to turn my head toward the door of the house. The number on it
was the same number an as ours. I looked again. And behold, it was our
steps I had been resting on. The door was our door.
“All my doubts and all my struggles dropped out of my mind when I made
that discovery. There was no mistaking what this perpetual coming back
to the house meant. Resist it as I might, it was to be.
“I opened the street door and went up stairs, and heard him sleeping his
heavy sleep, exactly as I had heard him when I went out. I sat down on
my bed and took off my bonnet, quite quiet in myself, because I knew it
was to be. I damped the towel, and put it ready, and took a turn in the
room.
“It was just the dawn of day. The sparrows were chirping among the trees
in the square hard by.
“I drew up my blind; the faint light spoke to me as if in words, ‘Do it
now, before I get brighter, and show too much.’
“I listened. The friendly silence had a word for me too: ‘Do it now, and
trust the secret to Me.’
“I waited till the church clock chimed before striking the hour. At the
first stroke--without touching the lock of his door, without setting
foot in his room--I had the towel over his face. Before the last stroke
he had ceased struggling. When the hum of the bell through the morning
silence was still and dead, _he_ was still and dead with it.”
11.
“The rest of this history is counted in my mind by four days--Wednesday,
Thursday, Friday, Saturday. After that it all fades off like, and the
new years come with a strange look, being the years of a new life.
“What about the old life first? What did I feel, in the horrid quiet of
the morning, when I had done it?
“I don’t know what I felt. I can’t remember it, or I can’t tell it, I
don’t know which. I can write the history of the four days, and that’s
all.
“Wednesday.--I gave the alarm toward noon. Hours before, I had put
things straight and fit to be seen. I had only to call for help, and to
leave the people to do as they pleased. The neighbors came in, and then
the police. They knocked, uselessly, at his door. Then they broke it
open, and found him dead in his bed.
“Not the ghost of a suspicion of me entered the mind of any one. There
was no fear of human justice finding me out: my one unutterable dread
was dread of an Avenging Providence.
“I had a short sleep that night, and a dream, in which I did the deed
over again. For a time my mind was busy with thoughts of confessing
to the police, and of giving myself up. If I had not belonged to a
respectable family, I should have done it. From generation to generation
there had been no stain on our good name. It would be death to my
father, and disgrace to all my family, if I owned what I had done, and
suffered for it on the public scaffold. I prayed to be guided; and I had
a revelation, toward morning, of what to do.
“I was commanded, in a vision, to open the Bible, and vow on it to set
my guilty self apart among my innocent fellow-creatures from that day
forth; to live among them a separate and silent life, to dedicate the
use of my speech to the language of prayer only, offered up in the
solitude of my own chamber when no human ear could hear me. Alone, in
the morning, I saw the vision, and vowed the vow. No human ear _has_
heard me from that time. No human ear _will_ hear me, to the day of my
death.
“Thursday.--The people came to speak to me, as usual. They found me
dumb.
“What had happened to me in the past, when my head had been hurt, and my
speech affected by it, gave a likelier look to my dumbness than it might
have borne in the case of another person. They took me back again to the
hospital. The doctors were divided in opinion. Some said the shock
of what had taken place in the house, coming on the back of the other
shock, might, for all they knew, have done the mischief. And others
said, ‘She got her speech again after the accident; there has been no
new injury since that time; the woman is shamming dumb, for some purpose
of her own.’ I let them dispute it as they liked. All human talk was
nothing now to me. I had set myself apart among my fellow-creatures; I
had begun my separate and silent life.
“Through all this time the sense of a coming punishment hanging over
me never left my mind. I had nothing to dread from human justice. The
judgment of an Avenging Providence--there was what I was waiting for.
“Friday--They held the inquest. He had been known for years past as an
inveterate drunkard, he had been seen overnight going home in liquor; he
had been found locked up in his room, with the key inside the door, and
the latch of the window bolted also. No fire-place was in this garret;
nothing was disturbed or altered: nobody by human possibility could have
got in. The doctor reported that he had died of congestion of the lungs;
and the jury gave their verdict accordingly.”
12.
“Saturday.--Marked forever in my calendar as the memorable day on which
the judgment descended on me. Toward three o’clock in the afternoon--in
the broad sunlight, under the cloudless sky, with hundreds of innocent
human creatures all around me--I, Hester Dethridge, saw, for the first
time, the Appearance which is appointed to haunt me for the rest of my
life.
“I had had a terrible night. My mind felt much as it had felt on the
evening when I had gone to the play. I went out to see what the air and
the sunshine and the cool green of trees and grass would do for me. The
nearest place in which I could find what I wanted was the Regent’s Park.
I went into one of the quiet walks in the middle of the park, where the
horses and carriages are not allowed to go, and where old people can sun
themselves, and children play, without danger.