Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe
abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels
on the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of
close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the
strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are
hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of
its inhabitants.
To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze
of close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and
poorest of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be
supposed to occasion. The cheapest and least delicate provisions are
heaped in the shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of
wearing apparel dangle at the salesman’s door, and stream from the
house-parapet and windows. Jostling with unemployed labourers of the
lowest class, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged
children, and the raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way
with difficulty along, assailed by offensive sights and smells
from the narrow alleys which branch off on the right and left, and
deafened by the clash of ponderous waggons that bear great piles
of merchandise from the stacks of warehouses that rise from every
corner. Arriving, at length, in streets remoter and less-frequented
than those through which he has passed, he walks beneath tottering
house-fronts projecting over the pavement, dismantled walls that
seem to totter as he passes, chimneys half crushed half hesitating
to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron bars that time and dirt have
almost eaten away, every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect.
In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark,
stands Jacob’s Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight
feet deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once
called Mill Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly
Ditch. It is a creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be
filled at high water by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from
which it took its old name. At such times, a stranger, looking from
one of the wooden bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see
the inhabitants of the houses on either side lowering from their
back doors and windows, buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all
kinds, in which to haul the water up; and when his eye is turned
from these operations to the houses themselves, his utmost
astonishment will be excited by the scene before him. Crazy wooden
galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes
from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and
patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is
never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air
would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they
shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and
threatening to fall into it--as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls
and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty,
every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these
ornament the banks of Folly Ditch.
In Jacob’s Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls
are crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are
falling into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield
no smoke. Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery
suits came upon it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a
desolate island indeed. The houses have no owners; they are broken
open, and entered upon by those who have the courage; and there
they live, and there they die. They must have powerful motives for a
secret residence, or be reduced to a destitute condition indeed, who
seek a refuge in Jacob’s Island.
In an upper room of one of these houses--a detached house of fair
size, ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door
and window: of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner
already described--there were assembled three men, who, regarding
each other every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity
and expectation, sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence.
One of these was Toby Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a
robber of fifty years, whose nose had been almost beaten in, in
some old scuffle, and whose face bore a frightful scar which might
probably be traced to the same occasion. This man was a returned
transport, and his name was Kags.
‘I wish,’ said Toby turning to Mr. Chitling, ‘that you had picked
out some other crib when the two old ones got too warm, and had not
come here, my fine feller.’
‘Why didn’t you, blunder-head!’ said Kags.
‘Well, I thought you’d have been a little more glad to see me than
this,’ replied Mr. Chitling, with a melancholy air.
‘Why, look’ee, young gentleman,’ said Toby, ‘when a man keeps
himself so very exclusive as I have done, and by that means has a
snug house over his head with nobody a prying and smelling about it,
it’s rather a startling thing to have the honour of a wisit from a
young gentleman (however respectable and pleasant a person he may be
to play cards with at conweniency) circumstanced as you are.’
‘Especially, when the exclusive young man has got a friend stopping
with him, that’s arrived sooner than was expected from foreign
parts, and is too modest to want to be presented to the Judges on
his return,’ added Mr. Kags.
There was a short silence, after which Toby Crackit, seeming
to abandon as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual
devil-may-care swagger, turned to Chitling and said,
‘When was Fagin took then?’
‘Just at dinner-time--two o’clock this afternoon. Charley and I
made our lucky up the wash-us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty
water-butt, head downwards; but his legs were so precious long that
they stuck out at the top, and so they took him too.’
‘And Bet?’
‘Poor Bet! She went to see the Body, to speak to who it was,’
replied Chitling, his countenance falling more and more, ‘and went
off mad, screaming and raving, and beating her head against the
boards; so they put a strait-weskut on her and took her to the
hospital--and there she is.’
‘Wot’s come of young Bates?’ demanded Kags.
‘He hung about, not to come over here afore dark, but he’ll be here
soon,’ replied Chitling. ‘There’s nowhere else to go to now, for the
people at the Cripples are all in custody, and the bar of the ken--I
went up there and see it with my own eyes--is filled with traps.’
‘This is a smash,’ observed Toby, biting his lips. ‘There’s more
than one will go with this.’
‘The sessions are on,’ said Kags: ‘if they get the inquest over, and
Bolter turns King’s evidence: as of course he will, from what he’s
said already: they can prove Fagin an accessory before the fact, and
get the trial on on Friday, and he’ll swing in six days from this,
by G--!’
‘You should have heard the people groan,’ said Chitling; ‘the
officers fought like devils, or they’d have torn him away. He was
down once, but they made a ring round him, and fought their way
along. You should have seen how he looked about him, all muddy and
bleeding, and clung to them as if they were his dearest friends. I
can see ‘em now, not able to stand upright with the pressing of the
mob, and draggin him along amongst ‘em; I can see the people jumping
up, one behind another, and snarling with their teeth and making at
him; I can see the blood upon his hair and beard, and hear the cries
with which the women worked themselves into the centre of the crowd
at the street corner, and swore they’d tear his heart out!’
The horror-stricken witness of this scene pressed his hands upon
his ears, and with his eyes closed got up and paced violently to and
fro, like one distracted.
While he was thus engaged, and the two men sat by in silence with
their eyes fixed upon the floor, a pattering noise was heard upon
the stairs, and Sikes’s dog bounded into the room. They ran to the
window, downstairs, and into the street. The dog had jumped in at an
open window; he made no attempt to follow them, nor was his master
to be seen.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’ said Toby when they had returned. ‘He
can’t be coming here. I--I--hope not.’
‘If he was coming here, he’d have come with the dog,’ said Kags,
stooping down to examine the animal, who lay panting on the floor.
‘Here! Give us some water for him; he has run himself faint.’
‘He’s drunk it all up, every drop,’ said Chitling after watching the
dog some time in silence. ‘Covered with mud--lame--half blind--he
must have come a long way.’
‘Where can he have come from!’ exclaimed Toby. ‘He’s been to the
other kens of course, and finding them filled with strangers come on
here, where he’s been many a time and often. But where can he have
come from first, and how comes he here alone without the other!’
‘He’--(none of them called the murderer by his old name)--‘He can’t
have made away with himself. What do you think?’ said Chitling.
Toby shook his head.
‘If he had,’ said Kags, ‘the dog ‘ud want to lead us away to where
he did it. No. I think he’s got out of the country, and left the dog
behind. He must have given him the slip somehow, or he wouldn’t be
so easy.’
This solution, appearing the most probable one, was adopted as the
right; the dog, creeping under a chair, coiled himself up to sleep,
without more notice from anybody.
It being now dark, the shutter was closed, and a candle lighted and
placed upon the table. The terrible events of the last two days had
made a deep impression on all three, increased by the danger and
uncertainty of their own position. They drew their chairs closer
together, starting at every sound. They spoke little, and that in
whispers, and were as silent and awe-stricken as if the remains of
the murdered woman lay in the next room.
They had sat thus, some time, when suddenly was heard a hurried
knocking at the door below.
‘Young Bates,’ said Kags, looking angrily round, to check the fear
he felt himself.
The knocking came again. No, it wasn’t he. He never knocked like
that.
Crackit went to the window, and shaking all over, drew in his head.
There was no need to tell them who it was; his pale face was enough.
The dog too was on the alert in an instant, and ran whining to the
door.
‘We must let him in,’ he said, taking up the candle.
‘Isn’t there any help for it?’ asked the other man in a hoarse
voice.
‘None. He _must_ come in.’
‘Don’t leave us in the dark,’ said Kags, taking down a candle from
the chimney-piece, and lighting it, with such a trembling hand that
the knocking was twice repeated before he had finished.
Crackit went down to the door, and returned followed by a man with
the lower part of his face buried in a handkerchief, and another
tied over his head under his hat. He drew them slowly off. Blanched
face, sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, beard of three days’ growth,
wasted flesh, short thick breath; it was the very ghost of Sikes.
He laid his hand upon a chair which stood in the middle of the
room, but shuddering as he was about to drop into it, and seeming
to glance over his shoulder, dragged it back close to the wall--as
close as it would go--and ground it against it--and sat down.
Not a word had been exchanged. He looked from one to another
in silence. If an eye were furtively raised and met his, it was
instantly averted. When his hollow voice broke silence, they all
three started. They seemed never to have heard its tones before.
‘How came that dog here?’ he asked.
‘Alone. Three hours ago.’
‘To-night’s paper says that Fagin’s took. Is it true, or a lie?’
‘True.’
They were silent again.
‘Damn you all!’ said Sikes, passing his hand across his forehead.
‘Have you nothing to say to me?’
There was an uneasy movement among them, but nobody spoke.
‘You that keep this house,’ said Sikes, turning his face to Crackit,
‘do you mean to sell me, or to let me lie here till this hunt is
over?’
‘You may stop here, if you think it safe,’ returned the person
addressed, after some hesitation.
Sikes carried his eyes slowly up the wall behind him: rather trying
to turn his head than actually doing it: and said, ‘Is--it--the
body--is it buried?’
They shook their heads.
‘Why isn’t it!’ he retorted with the same glance behind him. ‘Wot
do they keep such ugly things above the ground for?--Who’s that
knocking?’
Crackit intimated, by a motion of his hand as he left the room, that
there was nothing to fear; and directly came back with Charley Bates
behind him. Sikes sat opposite the door, so that the moment the boy
entered the room he encountered his figure.
‘Toby,’ said the boy falling back, as Sikes turned his eyes towards
him, ‘why didn’t you tell me this, downstairs?’
There had been something so tremendous in the shrinking off of the
three, that the wretched man was willing to propitiate even this
lad. Accordingly he nodded, and made as though he would shake hands
with him.
‘Let me go into some other room,’ said the boy, retreating still
farther.
‘Charley!’ said Sikes, stepping forward. ‘Don’t you--don’t you know
me?’
‘Don’t come nearer me,’ answered the boy, still retreating, and
looking, with horror in his eyes, upon the murderer’s face. ‘You
monster!’
The man stopped half-way, and they looked at each other; but Sikes’s
eyes sunk gradually to the ground.
‘Witness you three,’ cried the boy shaking his clenched fist, and
becoming more and more excited as he spoke. ‘Witness you three--I’m
not afraid of him--if they come here after him, I’ll give him up; I
will. I tell you out at once. He may kill me for it if he likes, or
if he dares, but if I am here I’ll give him up. I’d give him up if
he was to be boiled alive. Murder! Help! If there’s the pluck of a
man among you three, you’ll help me. Murder! Help! Down with him!’
Pouring out these cries, and accompanying them with violent
gesticulation, the boy actually threw himself, single-handed,
upon the strong man, and in the intensity of his energy and the
suddenness of his surprise, brought him heavily to the ground.
The three spectators seemed quite stupefied. They offered no
interference, and the boy and man rolled on the ground together; the
former, heedless of the blows that showered upon him, wrenching
his hands tighter and tighter in the garments about the murderer’s
breast, and never ceasing to call for help with all his might.
The contest, however, was too unequal to last long. Sikes had him
down, and his knee was on his throat, when Crackit pulled him back
with a look of alarm, and pointed to the window. There were lights
gleaming below, voices in loud and earnest conversation, the tramp
of hurried footsteps--endless they seemed in number--crossing the
nearest wooden bridge. One man on horseback seemed to be among
the crowd; for there was the noise of hoofs rattling on the uneven
pavement. The gleam of lights increased; the footsteps came more
thickly and noisily on. Then, came a loud knocking at the door, and
then a hoarse murmur from such a multitude of angry voices as would
have made the boldest quail.
‘Help!’ shrieked the boy in a voice that rent the air.
‘He’s here! Break down the door!’
‘In the King’s name,’ cried the voices without; and the hoarse cry
arose again, but louder.
‘Break down the door!’ screamed the boy. ‘I tell you they’ll never
open it. Run straight to the room where the light is. Break down the
door!’
Strokes, thick and heavy, rattled upon the door and lower
window-shutters as he ceased to speak, and a loud huzzah burst from
the crowd; giving the listener, for the first time, some adequate
idea of its immense extent.
‘Open the door of some place where I can lock this screeching
Hell-babe,’ cried Sikes fiercely; running to and fro, and dragging
the boy, now, as easily as if he were an empty sack. ‘That door.
Quick!’ He flung him in, bolted it, and turned the key. ‘Is the
downstairs door fast?’
‘Double-locked and chained,’ replied Crackit, who, with the other
two men, still remained quite helpless and bewildered.
‘The panels--are they strong?’
‘Lined with sheet-iron.’
‘And the windows too?’
‘Yes, and the windows.’
‘Damn you!’ cried the desperate ruffian, throwing up the sash and
menacing the crowd. ‘Do your worst! I’ll cheat you yet!’
Of all the terrific yells that ever fell on mortal ears, none could
exceed the cry of the infuriated throng. Some shouted to those who
were nearest to set the house on fire; others roared to the officers
to shoot him dead. Among them all, none showed such fury as the man
on horseback, who, throwing himself out of the saddle, and bursting
through the crowd as if he were parting water, cried, beneath the
window, in a voice that rose above all others, ‘Twenty guineas to
the man who brings a ladder!’
The nearest voices took up the cry, and hundreds echoed it. Some
called for ladders, some for sledge-hammers; some ran with torches
to and fro as if to seek them, and still came back and roared again;
some spent their breath in impotent curses and execrations; some
pressed forward with the ecstasy of madmen, and thus impeded the
progress of those below; some among the boldest attempted to climb
up by the water-spout and crevices in the wall; and all waved to and
fro, in the darkness beneath, like a field of corn moved by an angry
wind: and joined from time to time in one loud furious roar.
‘The tide,’ cried the murderer, as he staggered back into the room,
and shut the faces out, ‘the tide was in as I came up. Give me a
rope, a long rope. They’re all in front. I may drop into the Folly
Ditch, and clear off that way. Give me a rope, or I shall do three
more murders and kill myself.’
The panic-stricken men pointed to where such articles were kept; the
murderer, hastily selecting the longest and strongest cord, hurried
up to the house-top.
All the window in the rear of the house had been long ago bricked
up, except one small trap in the room where the boy was locked, and
that was too small even for the passage of his body. But, from this
aperture, he had never ceased to call on those without, to guard the
back; and thus, when the murderer emerged at last on the house-top
by the door in the roof, a loud shout proclaimed the fact to those
in front, who immediately began to pour round, pressing upon each
other in an unbroken stream.
He planted a board, which he had carried up with him for the
purpose, so firmly against the door that it must be matter of great
difficulty to open it from the inside; and creeping over the tiles,
looked over the low parapet.
The water was out, and the ditch a bed of mud.
The crowd had been hushed during these few moments, watching his
motions and doubtful of his purpose, but the instant they perceived
it and knew it was defeated, they raised a cry of triumphant
execration to which all their previous shouting had been whispers.
Again and again it rose. Those who were at too great a distance to
know its meaning, took up the sound; it echoed and re-echoed; it
seemed as though the whole city had poured its population out to
curse him.
On pressed the people from the front--on, on, on, in a strong
struggling current of angry faces, with here and there a glaring
torch to lighten them up, and show them out in all their wrath
and passion. The houses on the opposite side of the ditch had been
entered by the mob; sashes were thrown up, or torn bodily out; there
were tiers and tiers of faces in every window; cluster upon cluster
of people clinging to every house-top. Each little bridge (and there
were three in sight) bent beneath the weight of the crowd upon it.
Still the current poured on to find some nook or hole from which to
vent their shouts, and only for an instant see the wretch.
‘They have him now,’ cried a man on the nearest bridge. ‘Hurrah!’
The crowd grew light with uncovered heads; and again the shout
uprose.
‘I will give fifty pounds,’ cried an old gentleman from the same
quarter, ‘to the man who takes him alive. I will remain here, till
he come to ask me for it.’
There was another roar. At this moment the word was passed among the
crowd that the door was forced at last, and that he who had first
called for the ladder had mounted into the room. The stream abruptly
turned, as this intelligence ran from mouth to mouth; and the people
at the windows, seeing those upon the bridges pouring back, quitted
their stations, and running into the street, joined the concourse
that now thronged pell-mell to the spot they had left: each man
crushing and striving with his neighbor, and all panting with
impatience to get near the door, and look upon the criminal as the
officers brought him out. The cries and shrieks of those who were
pressed almost to suffocation, or trampled down and trodden
under foot in the confusion, were dreadful; the narrow ways were
completely blocked up; and at this time, between the rush of some to
regain the space in front of the house, and the unavailing struggles
of others to extricate themselves from the mass, the immediate
attention was distracted from the murderer, although the universal
eagerness for his capture was, if possible, increased.
The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of
the crowd, and the impossibility of escape; but seeing this sudden
change with no less rapidity than it had occurred, he sprang
upon his feet, determined to make one last effort for his life
by dropping into the ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled,
endeavouring to creep away in the darkness and confusion.
Roused into new strength and energy, and stimulated by the noise
within the house which announced that an entrance had really been
effected, he set his foot against the stack of chimneys, fastened
one end of the rope tightly and firmly round it, and with the other
made a strong running noose by the aid of his hands and teeth almost
in a second. He could let himself down by the cord to within a less
distance of the ground than his own height, and had his knife ready
in his hand to cut it then and drop.
At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head previous
to slipping it beneath his arm-pits, and when the old gentleman
before-mentioned (who had clung so tight to the railing of the
bridge as to resist the force of the crowd, and retain his position)
earnestly warned those about him that the man was about to lower
himself down--at that very instant the murderer, looking behind him
on the roof, threw his arms above his head, and uttered a yell of
terror.
‘The eyes again!’ he cried in an unearthly screech.
Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and
tumbled over the parapet. The noose was on his neck. It ran up with
his weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it
speeds. He fell for five-and-thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk,
a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open
knife clenched in his stiffening hand.
The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The
murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting
aside the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the
people to come and take him out, for God’s sake.
A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards
on the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a
spring, jumped for the dead man’s shoulders. Missing his aim,
he fell into the ditch, turning completely over as he went; and
striking his head against a stone, dashed out his brains.