a wrong un; an’ if they let ’er off, it won’t be fair to peace.”
“Well, ’e can talk. ’E kind of got ’old of me. I could ha’ stood there
all day.”
“’E kind o’ did me too, but I should shake him off in court. You’ll see
the beak will put a muzzle on ’im. He warn’t talkin’ law, and you’re no
good in court unless you talk law. The old bloke and them K. C.’s will
not stand that sort o’ lip, see if they does.”
“Well, ’ere’s the sergeant comin’. But just to show there’s no
ill-feelin’, I’ll ’ave ’arf a pint with you, mate, that ’e gets her
off.”
“Make it a pint, matey. A pint seems more legal.”
XV
TRUTH’S CHAMPION
Northcote had only a hazy notion of his whereabouts. He had never been
in these high latitudes before. He had a dim idea that London lay “over
there;” but upon ascending the steep hill that lay before him, he found
that “over there” was merged in the dark and enormous bulk of the
Crystal Palace.
“Whitcomb was right in his topography,” he laughed. “This is the route
he predicted I should take; therefore it is a perfectly fair inference
to regard it as the wrong one.”
He hailed yet another minion of the law, who no less than his brethren
was communicative.
“You are going away from London as fast as your legs will take you,”
said Z201, and proceeded to set a course which in itself was so
intricate that the young man by no means pledged himself to follow it.
The terrific central energy still driving him, the wayfarer strode
forth through the rain with an undiminished vigor. By now his clothes
were saturated and lay upon him heavily. But nothing could abate the
force of these concentrated fires which bore him so lightly mile after
mile. Not only did they burn with splendor, but also with a vital
clarity. His lips moved with the phrases that sprang upon them; the
sense of dull power, of unused native force, which had oppressed him
like a nightmare during many nights and days, had been fused all at
once into an immense fecundity of expression. Each minute blood-vessel
that formed a web round the ball of crystallized energy that was his
brain was big with its own peculiar, original, and special idea. The
strangest vistas had opened before his eyes. His faculties in the first
flush of their self-consciousness had grown insolent and overbearing.
How could a body of common citizens hope to stand against the battery
that would be directed upon them! All the subtleties of the sophists,
all the enthusiasms of the creeds would be as naught in the presence
of such an overweening personal force. How could such insignificant
fragments as these, the mere excrescences of the universal scheme, who
could not make a mind among them, hope to retain the all-too-precarious
standard of their probity when touched by the wand of the magician?
He laughed aloud to the rain when his thoughts reverted to the two
perplexed constables he had left at the bottom of Sydenham Hill; and
how, in spite of the tentativeness of the effort, as his talent had
mounted in him, so that presently its irresistible force had seemed
even to surprise himself, these two stolid, unemotional Englishmen had
nodded their heads in approval, and had hung breathless upon his words.
Only one of God’s great advocates could hope to perform that miracle
under a gas-lamp in the wind-swept streets on a wet and chill winter’s
morning. The old mystics, delivering with a divine _naïveté_ their
surprising message to mankind, could never have accomplished a feat
more wonderful.
His eyes veiled in darkness, his head high-poised yet thrust forward,
his mouth and nostrils filled with cold and deep draughts of air, his
whole being was surrendered to an orgy of freedom and power. For the
first time since he had come to maturity he had found an occupation
for his ferocious energies. It was no unworthy task by which they were
confronted. Thirty was usually the age at which genius elected to give
to the world its first masterpiece. And was it not as seemly that an
advocate should rejoice in a theme as the statesman, the musician,
or the poet? This first essay should be as complete, as audacious,
and as worthy of the sanction of the best minds of the time, as the
_chefs-d’œuvres_ of other representative spirits. It should stand as a
landmark in an art as little understood as that of truth itself.
Old men on the Woolsack, the most reverend seigniors of the law,
advocates who had received the homage the age is accustomed to
lavish on a scanty pretext, should stand aghast before an alarming
iconoclasm of which he would be the pioneer. His ideas should prove
so revolutionary that these practitioners, complacently drawing their
emoluments, should foregather to turn this magnificent ruffler out of
his inn. The scathing criticisms which the elect of all ages launch
against a Jesus, a Galileo, or a Wagner, before the world has grown
accustomed to their strangeness, he would be called upon to support;
for would not he alone be the true advocate, the heaven-born, immortal
one, while they would remain, as always, complacent performers of
tricks which they mistook for the operations of their specific talent,
subscribers to conventions that were shallow and nonsensical and
in open enmity to the idea of justice for which they stood as the
self-satisfied expression.
As he raced along in the company of these wonderful thoughts through
the south of London, he recognized in himself all the signs that
declare Truth’s authentic champion. It would be his to deliver more
than one rueful blow upon the close-locked portals of pedantry.
“The purblind old man who dares to occupy the seat of judgment, his
authority shall be traversed, it shall be rent in pieces. As for that
amazing creature who will dare to stand up for the Crown, who will
propose to do to death a human being with that bleak and irascible
voice, and the operations of that arrested growth he calls his
intellect, an awful example will have to be made of him.”
There was no end to the succession of deserted streets. Water swam
in shallow pools along the black pavements which seemed to reflect
the color of the sky. The numerous lamps, picked out as so many dull,
yellow balls in the surrounding blackness, suffused their oppressive
rays along the long, flat surfaces so that they appeared to shine
without giving forth a radiance.
How vague and vast seemed these early hours before the dawn! They did
not contain a living soul. The sky, the streets, the dark houses, the
bare trees in the gardens and at the sides of the roads were soundless,
empty, destitute of life. A quietness so profound appeared uncanny on
the outskirts of pandemonium. But astonishing, desolating as it was,
it seemed to aid the furious brain that was borne so fast in its midst.
There was only the echo of the advocate’s own feet, which came weirdly
from across the way, and the high and labored breathing of his own body.
By the time the hour of seven chimed out from the half-dozen
neighboring steeples of a population that was beginning to cluster much
closer together, he divined that he was pressing nearer to the heart of
the metropolis. He did not stay to inquire of the occasional wayfarer
who was abroad in these regions, but set his face into the ruck of the
streets, where the dark forms of the houses rose like an impenetrable
and endless forest. No fears assailed him as to whether he would reach
his home--the coldest, most inhospitable home that was ever called upon
to harbor a spirit with such widespread, space-cleaving pinions.
His feet seemed to devour the pavements. His stride was great, elastic,
and unflagging; it was propelled by the lungs, heart, and muscles
of the athlete. In the swing of the arms, the lunge of the limbs,
the lissom sway of the body, there was fine physical power, and the
seething engines that presided over this massive yet elastic framework
were like the boilers of a locomotive which eat up the miles without
fatigue. When excited into action on the football field the feeling was
always upon him that no puny human agent could stay his course. The
feeling was upon him now in an intensified degree. With will and muscle
coöperating to overstride the darkness, he longed for opposition to
declare itself that he might trample it down.
Near eight o’clock he recognized Waterloo Bridge and the cold Thames
below stealing like a felon through the vapors of the dawn. With
a stupefied surprise he awoke to the sensation of being launched
once more into the sharp and too-definite business of the time. The
pavements were now swarming with people, the roads with omnibuses,
cabs, and vans. Traffic was belching out of every street; clerks and
seamstresses were scurrying to their employments, masticating their
breakfasts as they went. Vendors of newspapers and hawkers of food
were tearing the gray air to pieces with their cries. He emerged from
the orgy of his passion to find that he was up to the throat and being
stifled in pandemonium, even before he was aware that his feet had
entered it.
The lines of palaces across the river, towering tier upon tier above
the embankment, with their majestic bulks half-thrust through the
curtain of December mist which the first streaks of day had seemed to
thicken, fell upon the imagination of the wayfarer, who had slackened
his pace all at once to a footsore limp as he crossed the bridge
and crept towards them. At a distance they stood insolent, aloof,
and cynical. He could hardly believe that in one of these wonderful
caravanserais he, the starving, the friendless, and the solitary, had
eaten and drunk only a few hours before. It was not feasible that such
palaces as these could touch a life so obscure at any point. Penniless,
friendless, lacking even life’s common necessaries, in the midst of six
millions of people, who contended rudely with the first weapons that
came to their hands to enforce their claims, how could he, whose coat
was in holes, whose pockets were empty, have penetrated to the Mecca of
their gods?
Limping into the Strand as the clock at the Law Courts chimed the hour
of eight, his imagination was assailed, not with their unmeaning mass
of architecture, but with that unseen and grisly bulk which only the
eye of his inner consciousness could apprehend. A shudder convulsed his
veins. Less than thirty short hours hence the gladiator would be called
into the arena. He would have to face the lions with no defence for
his nakedness except a small shield in the use of which he had had no
practice, and a sharp but untried spear.
Climbing up the steep stairs to his garret, his nostrils were affronted
as they had been on so many other occasions by the foulness of the
heavy and noisome air. What a labor it was to reach the locked door
at the top of the highest, the darkest, the most unpleasant story!
His fibres had grown strangely slack, his breathing was no longer
joyous and free. The mighty engines of his mind had ceased suddenly to
vibrate; those pulses which had been so overweening in their insolence
could only flutter now. He had fallen without a warning from his
eminence. His whole being was enveloped in a despicable flaccidity, a
despicable weakness, as he turned the key in the lock and entered his
garret.
He recoiled from the dismal scene that met his eyes with the shudder
that one gives in plunging into icy water. As he stood on the threshold
all the phantoms of his previous despair sprang upon him from the
walls of his chamber and seemed to throw him down. There was the cold
grate with the gray ashes in it still; there the lamp that had left
him in the darkness. The table was there with its pile of law-books
that he had conned with the sickening patience which tortured him so
keenly. Strewn over them were fragments of the writings which had eaten
away the flower of his intelligence without bringing him a shilling to
fill his belly or to pay his rent. Enveloped within them was the piece
of lead by whose aid and with a skill so ferocious he had destroyed
the rat. The confectioner’s paper was there that had contained his
dinner; also the crumbs which remained to testify to its nature. On the
mantelpiece was the burned and dirty old pipe which he had cherished so
much, the only friend of his adversity; on the floor was the pouch that
had not a grain of tobacco in it. The pool of water was still in the
corner, underneath the discoloration of the plaster in the low sloping
roof.
How cold it was! Everything in this horrible apartment seemed to be
rendered icier, more dismal, by the callous gray beams that stole
through the grimy windows with a sullenness that hardly merited the
name of light. Ah, that window with its outlook on oblivion! It all
came back to him with the indescribable pangs of the knife, that the
night before he had leaned out of it, bareheaded, open-mouthed, his
eyes and nostrils cut by blasts of sleet, and had cried his haughty
challenge to a world that grovelled so far below him in the mire.
It was all very hideous, yet this Titanic despair filled him with a
deep sense of poetry. He realized, even as he stood now confronting it
for the thousand and first time, that whatever the future might hold in
her womb, never again would he be pierced to these depths whose very
immensity urged the proud rage to his eyes. Yes, there in the cynical
eyes of the morning lay the stained and battered old table to which
the previous evening he had pressed his eyes to summon the genie. What
torments of impotence, of baffled and thwarted power, must those eyes
have undergone before they could prevail upon their royalty to stoop to
such an act.
He took from his pocket the bank-note, half his fee, which the
solicitor had given him at the restaurant, and held it up to a gaze
that was as scornful as that of a young god who has not yet learned to
accept as a matter of course the powers that render him immortal.
Not again would he suffer want. He had made his choice. In a tragic
moment his faintness had forced him to his knees. He had summoned
the mischievous imp who showers gold upon poor mortals in order that
it shall stultify, poison, and corrupt them. Already he could taste
success. There was a faint aroma of it in the dregs of the wine he
had drained the previous night. There was a slight nausea upon his
lips. There had been something beyond mere fatigue in the enervation
with which he had climbed those stairs. For once the great muscles had
seemed to flag. Yet not again would they know the chastening brutality
of want. Indeed his despair already was beginning to seem a holy and
pure condition. He foresaw, as he stood gazing upon its pinched face,
crinkling as he did so the bank-note between his hands, that the
future would be casting back to it perpetually as the tomb of his
godhead, in which he put off those spiritual splendors in which his
nature was once enveloped, those sanctified things which were native to
himself, in order that he might embrace those other things that were
the birthright and the measure of the meanest natures.
Through the open door came the sound of footsteps on the stairs. They
were shuffling and uncertain, and belonged to an old woman, who wore a
shawl and a faded black bonnet, and who crept into the room with little
toddling steps.
“Hullo, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, turning to confront her; “rather
late, aren’t you? It is a quarter-past eight.”
“Yes, sir, I am,” said the old woman, in a precise manner. “My youngest
grandchild is dying.”
“How old?”
“Five and a half, sir.”
“Of what is she dying?”
“Diphtheria, sir,” said the old woman humbly.
“And if the poor little kid dies that will reduce the number of small
orphans in your family to four, will it not?”
“It will, sir.”
Northcote stood looking at the old woman for a moment and then changed
the subject abruptly.
“Mrs. Brown,” he said, “I have had a windfall. For the time being I
am a rich man; and I may say that one of these days I expect to be
very much richer. And although your poor little grandchild is dying, I
think we owe it to Providence to celebrate this occasion in a fitting
manner. Never mind about the fire and the water for my bath. I want
you to get a basket and do some shopping, somewhat as follows: one
frying-pan, one pound of the choicest Wiltshire bacon, three moderately
fresh eggs if money will buy them, which I expect it will not, one pot
of marmalade, one pound of the most expensive butter and a loaf of
bread, a pound of tea, price half a crown, and a pint of milk. Now get
along, if you please, and I will light the fire.”
The blank stupefaction on the face of Mrs. Brown conveyed to Northcote
that he had forgotten to give her the money.
“I am so unaccustomed to have the handling of money,” he said, “that I
have forgotten to give it to you. This is a note for ten pounds. See
that no one robs you of the change.”
The stupefaction on the face of the old woman appeared to deepen as her
fingers closed over this unheard-of treasure.
“I--I don’t know that I dare trust myself with it, sir, along the
Strand,” she said weakly.
“Very well,” said Northcote. “Just make the fire--a real good one,
mind, and you can use all the coal that is laid by, because at one fell
swoop I am going to order a ton--and I will do the shopping myself.
Where is that big basket in which you bring home the washing?”
“Here, sir,” said the old woman, passing behind a curtain at the far
end of the room which concealed a bed.
“Good,” said Northcote. “Providence is working for us. It intends that
we shall do ourselves well. And my last words to you are, don’t spare
the coal.”
“I will not, sir,” said the old woman, discarding her air of
stupefaction in favor of her habitual preciseness.
XVI
A JURY OF ONE
When Northcote returned with the basket heavily laden in one hand, and
a frying-pan, aggressively new, in the other, his dismal chamber had
already been transformed, for a fire was burning bravely, a kettle
was singing upon it, the pool of water in the corner had been mopped
up, the floor had been visited with a brush, and books and papers,
two tables, and three chairs had received wholesome discipline from a
duster.
“I could have done it all as well myself,” said Northcote, surveying
this transformation with grim eyes, “although I do not deny it has the
efficient professional touch. But I would have you to know I am a man
of my hands. I am also a man of affairs. I have purchased extensively;
and I am proud to say the best goods in the cheapest markets. I have
ordered a ton of coal, although where we are going to put it I don’t
quite know. Now, these things I surrender to your care; and in half an
hour you will have the goodness to serve up a royal breakfast for two
persons. In the meantime I will have a shave and a tub.”
The young man’s operations behind the curtain were conducted on an
extensive scale, to judge by the noise and splashing that accompanied
them. Yet presently he emerged with a well-scraped chin, a skin glowing
with cleanliness, his ragged mass of hair reduced to a semblance of
order, and his person arrayed in an extremely shabby and unfashionable
but perfectly dry suit of clothes. The tea was at hand to be made, the
pot heated, the eggs, bacon, and toast were delightfully warm and laid
before the fire. And in accordance with instructions the table was
set for two persons, with the blunt knives and forks and the decrepit
crockery of his establishment.
“Will you wait till the other gentleman comes, sir?” asked the old
woman.
“What other gentleman, Mrs. Brown?”
“The gentleman who is coming to breakfast.”
“Well, I can’t very well, seeing that she turns out to be a lady.”
“I beg your pardon, sir.”
“You, Mrs. Brown, are that lady. You will please sit just there, as
near to the fire as you can get without burning yourself. I propose to
make the tea, for I am so expert in the art that I yield to none. And
I shall ask you to pour it out, while I proceed to serve the eggs and
bacon, which look perfectly delicious.”
The charwoman, however, betrayed no sign of assenting to this
arrangement.
“I am sure, sir, it is meant in great kindness,” she said humbly, “but
I could not think of such a thing. You see I have been in good service,
sir, and I beg your pardon, sir, but it is never done.”
“‘Never’ is a dangerous word to employ, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote,
towering over the old woman in a formidable manner. “In fact, I allow
none to employ it to me. Sit down, if you please, and pour out the tea,
and just have the goodness to imagine yourself the Lady Elizabeth
Who-was-it, famous alike for her breeding and her beauty, while I shall
endeavor to consider myself that distinguished nobleman, the Earl of
What’s-his-name.”
“The Lady Elizabeth Plumptre, sir, and the Earl of Widmerpool.”
“Very well. Now I say, ‘Betty, my gal, have an egg with your bacon?’
and you reply with a quiet ease and distinction of manner, ‘Yes, papa,
if you please,’ Now then, down you get into your chair, and spare me
the necessity of arguing the point. I am so apt to lose my temper if I
argue the point.”
The old woman, who was too much in fear of him to risk anything of the
kind, took her place at the table immediately.
“One of these days,” said Northcote, handing her an egg and some bacon
on the only plate that did not happen to be cracked, “I should like
you to meet my mother. She is a very notable and good woman, with a
remarkably resolute conception of her duty, which all her life she has
rendered bluntly and directly without ever speaking of it to a human
soul. She has ordered her life in the manner that she deems necessary
to the rôle of an eminent Christian. She has brought up her only son
in simple and pious resolves, educated him quite beyond her means, has
found him money when in order to do so she has been compelled to deny
herself life’s common necessaries, yet has asked alms of none, and at
Christmas time never omits to dispense charity to others.”
“I should like to see your mother, sir,” said the charwoman, folding
her hands meekly and sitting very upright on her chair. “I am sure she
is a very good lady.”
“One of those noble narrow women, Mrs. Brown, upon whom life bears
down so heavily. Yet she carries out her programme with a greatness of
spirit which is almost demoralizing to one who tries to look at things
as they are. I don’t know what there is in her life that carries her on
so victoriously; for one never hears her utter a complaint against the
buffets she has received from fate, or against the restrictions that
her dismal surroundings impose on her nature. I have never heard an
impatient word upon her lips, yet every morning, summer and winter, she
rises at the hour of five, performs those domestic functions that can
bring no satisfaction to her, and presently goes forth to labors still
more arduous and equally devoid of meaning. What there is to carry her
on I don’t know. Why that inflexible spirit has not been broken these
many years I cannot conjecture.”
“She has got into the habit of going on, sir, I suppose,” said the
charwoman.
“The habit must be a very strange one, Mrs. Brown, when to-morrow is
always the same as yesterday.”
“It is like being a clock, sir, which goes on because it has been wound
up.”
“Yes, but I never found a clock that could wind up itself. Every clock
must have some kind of a key.”
“It is God, sir, who is the key,” said the charwoman.
“That throws us back,” said Northcote, “to our original necessity to
have a religion. To my mind, Mrs. Brown, you have indicated that need
in a very lucid and practical manner. And how, Mrs. Brown, as you
appear to have given some thought to these things, do you suppose this
reticent mother of mine views this God who holds the key to the watch,
who winds it up and keeps it going? How would you say she regards Him
personally?”
“Perhaps she doesn’t think about Him much, sir. Perhaps as a girl she
troubled her head about Him a bit; but when she got older and had to
take heavy burdens on her shoulders, she was always too tired to think
of Him, except when she said her prayers.”
“Do you suppose there have been times when in her great fatigue she has
fallen asleep while she has been in the act of saying them?”
“Yes, sir, I suppose there may have been,” said the old woman.
“So, then, you would say there is nothing definite, forceful,
all-compelling about this God of hers? You would say He had no
particular personality to speak of?”