FROM THE DEPTHS.
Into a dull, gusty room, barren of everything but the necessities of
its office, we walked and stopped.
Distempered walls; a high desk, a railed dock, where creatures were
put to the first question like an experimental torture; black windows
high in the wall and barred with network of wire, as if to break into
fragments the sunshine of hope; a double gas bracket on an arm hanging
from the ceiling, grimly suggestive of a gallows; a fireplace whose
warmth was ruthlessly boxed in--such was the place we found ourselves
in. Its ministers figured in the persons of a half-dozen constables
sitting officially yawning on benches against the walls, and looking
perplexingly human shorn of their helmets; and in the presence of a
high priest, or inspector, and his clerk who sat respectively at the
desk and a table placed alongside of it.
The latter rose upon our entrance and asked our business.
“It’s plain enough,” said Duke. “I have received, by post, an hour
ago, a letter from a young woman threatening suicide. I don’t know her
address, but the postmark is this district.”
The officer motioned us to the higher authority at the desk.
“May I see it?” said the latter.
My companion produced the letter and handed it over. Throughout his
bearing and behavior were completely collected and formal--passionless
altogether in their studied unemotionalism.
The inspector went through the poor little scrawl attentively from
first word to last. No doubt he was a kindly family man in private.
Officially these pitiful warrants of heartbreaks were mere items in
his day’s business.
When he had finished he raised his eyes, but not his head.
“Sweetheart?” he said.
“No,” answered Duke, “but an old friend.”
“Renny?” asked the inspector, pointing a pen at me.
“Yes.”
“She ran away?”
“Yes.”
“Who with?”
“This man’s brother.”
“How long ago?”
“Three months, about.”
“And you have never seen her since?”
“No.”
“Nor him?”
“No.”
“And don’t know where they lived?”
“No--or I shouldn’t be here.”
The inspector caressed his short red beard, looked thoughtfully again
at the letter a moment or two, placed it gently on the desk and leaned
forward.
“You’d better take a man and hunt up the waterside. She hasn’t come
ashore here.”
“You think she means it?”
“I think--yes; you’d better go and look.”
“By water, I mean?”
“Yes--by water. That’s my opinion.”
He called to one of the seated men and gave him certain directions. A
minute later we were all three in the street outside.
What happened or whither we went during that long night remains only
in my memory the ghastly shadow of a dream. I can recall the white
plate of the moon, and still the icy wind and the spectral march
onward. This seemed the fitting outcome of our monotonous weeks of
wandering--this aimless corpse-search on the part of two passionate
fools who had failed in their pursuit of the living woman. To my sick
fancy it seemed the monstrous parody of chase--an objectless struggle
toward a goal that shifted with every step toward any determined
point.
Still we never stopped, but flitted hopelessly from station to
station, only to find ourselves baffled and urged forward afresh. I
became familiar with rooms such as that we had left--rooms varying
slightly in detail, but all furnished to the same pattern. Grewsomer
places knew us, too--hideous cellars for the dead, where clothes were
lifted from stiff yellow faces and from limbs stuck out in distorted
burlesque of the rest that is called everlasting.
Once, I remember, it came upon us with a quivering shock that our
mission was fulfilled; a body had been brought in--I forget where--the
body of a young woman. But when we came to view it it was not that
that we sought.
Pitiful heaven, was our tragedy, then, but a common fashion of the
dreadful waterway we groped our passage along? How was it possible in
all that harvest of death to find the one awn for our particular
gleaning?
But here--though I was little conscious of it at the time--an
impression took life in me that was to bear strange fruit by and by.
Dawn was in the air, menacing, most chill and gloomy, when we came out
once more upon the riverside at a point where an old rotting bridge of
timber sprawled across the stream like a wrecked dam. All its
neighborhood seemed waste ground or lonely deserted tenements standing
black and crookedly against a wan sweep of sky.
In the moment of our issuing, as if it were a smaller splinter
detached from the wreck, a little boat glided out from under the
bridge and made for a flight of dank and spongy steps that led up from
the water not ten yards from where we stood.
Something in the action of the dim figure that pulled, or the other
that hung over the stern sheets of the phantom craft, moved our
unwearying guide to motion us with his arm to watchfulness and an
immediate pause. In the same instant he hollowed his hand to his mouth
and hailed:
“Any luck, mate?”
The man who was rowing slowed down at once and paddled gingerly to
within a few yards of the steps.
“Who be you?” he growled, like a dog.
Our friend gave his authority.
“Oh,” said the fellow. “Yes; we’ve found one.”
“What sex, my man?”
“Gurl!”
I could have cried out. Something found my heart and seized it in a
suffocating grip.
“Where was it?”
“Caught yonder in the timbers.”
I reeled and clutched at Duke, but he shook me off sternly. I knew as
surely as that the night was done with that here our search ended.
That I stood quaking and shivering as nerveless as a haunted drunkard;
that I dared not follow them when they moved to the steps; that Duke’s
face was set like a dying man’s as he walked stiffly from me and stood
looking down upon the boat with a dreadful smile--all this comes to me
from the grim shadows of the past. Then I only knew a huddled group--a
weighted chamber of shapes with something heavy and sodden swung among
them--a pause of hours--of years--of a lifetime--and suddenly a
hideous scream that cleft like a madman’s into the waste silence of
the dawn.
He was down upon his knees by it--groveling, moaning--tearing tufts of
dead wintry grass with his hands in ecstasy of pain--tossing his wild
arms to the sky in impotent agony of search for some least grain of
hope or comfort.
I hurried to him; I called upon his name and hers. I saw the sweet
white face lying like a stone among the grass.
Wiser than I, the accustomed ministers of scenes such as this stood
watchful by and waited for the fit to pass. When its fury was spent,
they quietly took up their burden once more and moved away.
I had no need then to bid my comrade command himself. He rose on the
instant from the ground, where he had lain writhing, and fiercely
rejecting all offer of assistance on my part, followed in the wake of
the ghastly procession.
They bore it to the nearest station and there claimed their reward.
Think of it! We, who would have given our all to save the living
woman, were outbidden by these carrion crows who staked upon the dead!
Again at this point a lapse comes into my memory. Out of it grows a
figure, that of Duke, that stands before me and speaks with the
horrible smile again on its lips.
“You had better go home,” it says.
“Duke--why? What comes next? What are you going to do?”
“What does it matter? You had better go home.”
“I must know. Was there anything upon the--upon the body? Duke--was
there?”
“There was a letter.”
“Who from?”
“Go home, I tell you.”
“I can’t--I won’t--I must save you from yourself! I--Duke----”
He strikes at me--hits me, so that I stagger back--and, with an oath,
he speeds from me and is gone.
I recover myself and am on the point of giving mad chase, when a
thought strikes me and I rush into the building I have been all this
time standing outside the door of.