middle-aged clerks from a city counting-house, musty, cowed, and solemn
men, were discussing the trial wherein the morning journals with their
unerring instinct had discovered the element of sensation.
“----so she got off?”
“Yes, they brought in a verdict of not guilty. My father-in-law was on
the jury. He says it was her lawyer’s speech that saved her. He says
there wasn’t a dry eye in the court, and the poor old judge cried just
like a child.”
“No!”
“Yes! He says he never heard a speech like that before in his life, and
he says if he lives to be a hundred years old he will never forget it.”
“Who was her lawyer? Sir Somebody, K. C., M. P.?”
“My father-in-law says not. He says he was quite a young chap without
any reputation. But such a voice--he says it just went through you and
made you shiver.”
“Something like Irving?”
“My father-in-law says he must have been acting, yet there didn’t seem
to be a bit of the actor about him. That’s where he was so wonderful;
struck no attitudes; never even raised his voice. Every word seemed to
come straight out of him, as though he just couldn’t help it, and yet
at first all the jury thought she was a thorough bad one.”
“So she was, I expect.”
“I dare say; but after what her lawyer had said they never thought
of bringing in a verdict of guilty. My father-in-law says he was a
wonderfully read young fellow, and he must have known the Bible almost
by heart from the way in which he used it in his speech. And such an
eye as he had too! My father-in-law says it looked like that of an
eagle; and when the jury retired to consider the verdict the foreman,
who had got a weak heart, had to have brandy or he would have fainted
dead away.”
“It was very strange that the judge should have died suddenly.”
“Excitement killed him, they do say.”
“You would think that a judge would be so used to that sort of thing
that it wouldn’t affect him.”
“Well, my father-in-law has been many times on the common jury, but he
says this young lawyer beat all he had ever heard. He says it doesn’t
matter how clever the ordinary lawyer may be, you can always tell when
he’s putting it on. But this young chap was so quiet and solemn that he
simply made you shiver.”
“Just a trick.”
“They all knew that, yet he made them so that they couldn’t help
their feelings. My father-in-law says as soon as they retired to the
jury-room to find their verdict, old Bill Oaks--you know the old
prize-fighter what keeps the Blue Swan at Hackney--who was on the jury,
he just spat in the corner and wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and he
says, ‘Well, mateys, I’d reckon we’d ’ang no more women.’”
“Bill Oaks said that?”
“Those were his words. And it just shows the power that young chap must
have had to make a common fellow like old Bill Oaks say a thing like
that.”
“Some men are born lucky. With a mind of that sort he will have made
a fortune in no time. In a year or so he will be keeping his yacht
and driving his motor-car. It is a funny world when you come to think
about it. Here is a chap like me, been a clerk in the Providential for
thirty-five years. My hours are nine-thirty till five; I have never
once been late, nor had a day off for illness; and my salary per week
is thirty-eight and a tizzey, with a pound a week pension at sixty
provided I keep up my payments to the fund. I have never done a wrong
action as far as I know; I go to church once on Sunday; I teach in
the Sunday school; I give five shillings to the poor every Christmas;
I have brought up five children well and decently; I always acted the
part of the gentleman to my wife while she was alive, and now she is
dead I always keep fresh flowers on her grave summer and winter; I’ve
paid my rates and taxes regular; the landlord has never had to ask me
twice for the rent; and what’s it all amount to? Why, I leave off just
where I began. Yet I consider myself a cut above this young man, with
all his gifts, who will make a fortune by saving murderers from the
gallows.”
The speaker, a sallow, stunted little fellow, uttered his words in a
quiet, yet dogged staccato, as though he were issuing a challenge which
he knew could not be taken up. His sharp, quaint cockney speech was
almost musical in its incisive energy.
“Happiness don’t depend on money,” said his friend.
“You have got to have money, though, before you can believe it.”
Northcote overheard this conversation while he munched a sandwich. It
afforded him the keenest interest. He moved out into the eager crowd
which thronged the Strand. Yet again his old passion for perambulating
the streets came upon him. There was a sense of adventure in dodging
the traffic at a breakneck pace, and in elbowing his way through the
press. Until the evening he wandered about in the mud and the December
mists. He was sick and weary; the conflict within him gave him no rest;
yet there was a fierce joy to be gained in mingling with the virile,
many-sided life that was about him everywhere.
Thoroughly tired out at last, he took a frugal dinner at a restaurant,
and accompanied it with a bottle of inexpensive wine. He lingered
over his meal and made an attempt to read an evening paper, but found
he could not do so. The vortex in which his nature had been plunged
absorbed the whole of his thoughts.
XXXIV
MAGDALENE OR DELILAH
About nine he returned to his lodging. He lit the lamp, drew the
curtains across the window, and built up a good fire. He set himself to
do three hours’ reading before he turned into bed. However, that power
of will it was his wont to exert to its fullest capacity was for once
insubordinate. There were not two consecutive sentences upon any of the
pages which he tried that displayed a meaning. He had never known this
impotence before.
In the midst of these futile attempts to fix his mind on the task
before it, he thought he heard the creaking of the stairs. He listened
acutely. Late as was the hour, the clerk of some attorney might be
bringing him more briefs. A moment later his door was softly tried and
opened as softly as some one entered the room.
To the profound astonishment of the young man he saw that it was the
figure of a woman. She was tall and pale and clad sombrely in close
black draperies. Her entrance was somewhat stealthy, yet it had neither
reluctance nor timidity. Unhesitatingly she approached the chair in
which the advocate sat with a book on his knee. He rose to greet her
with an air of bewilderment.
“I knew you were a great student,” said his visitor in a low voice,
letting two large and dark eyes fall upon the page of the book.
“I beg your pardon,” said Northcote, “I am afraid I don’t know you.”
“You do not know me?” said his visitor in a tone that entered his
blood. “I will give you a moment to think.”
Northcote seemed to recoil with a half-born pang of recollection which
refused to take shape.
“I have not the faintest knowledge of having met you before,” he said,
feeling how vain was the effort to fix his thought.
“Think,” said his visitor.
“It is in vain.”
“I should not have expected you to have so short a memory,” said the
woman. “You saw me yesterday and you saw me the day before that.”
“I do not recognize you at all,” said Northcote faintly.
“Should I have remembered that you were a busy man who was unable to
spare a thought outside of his profession?”
There was something curiously stealthy in the fall of the voice which
startled the advocate.
“That is a voice I seem to recall,” he said, with an air almost of
distress.
“A voice you seem to recall,” said his visitor, with a sombre laughter
which made his heart beat violently. “How strange it is that you
should recall it! You only heard it once, and that was in the stifling
darkness of a prison!”
Northcote gave a cry of stupefaction.
“Impossible, impossible!” he said weakly. “You--you cannot be the woman
Emma Harrison!”
“Emma Murray, alias Warden, alias Harrison,” said his visitor, whose
tone of gentleness was now charged with deliberation.
“Then how and why do you dare to come here?” cried Northcote.
“I bring you my thanks,” she said, with a sudden consummate transition
to humility. “I bring the gratitude of an outcast to him who has
delivered her from a deeper shame than any she has suffered.”
At first the bewilderment of the advocate would not yield; the
revelation of the last creature in the world he looked to see in his
attic had seemed to arrest his nature. But hardly had she rendered him
her homage with somewhat of the sombre dignity of one who seeks by
suffering to efface her stains, than the old devouring curiosity of two
evenings previously returned to him. In the prison he had not seen her
face; in the dock he had not permitted his eyes once to stray towards
her. She was engraved in the tablets of his imagination as a foul
and sordid creature, dead to feeling, yet susceptible of the loss of
freedom, horrified by the too-definite thought of a barbarous doom; yet
over and above everything a denizen of the gutter, wretched, stupid,
and unclean. It was amazing to see her stand before him in this frank
guise.
Peering at her through the subdued flames of the fire and the lamp, he
saw that she had contrived to inhabit her stains in a kind of chastity.
It was a trick of her calling, perhaps; yet if trick it was, it was
subtle, consummate, and complete. As far as his eyes could pierce the
texture of her secrecy, her face was that of a woman of forty. It
was pale and unembellished; the cheeks were wan; the features, but
slightly defaced, were possessed of a certain original fineness of
line, like the handiwork of some little known craftsman who had been
touched by genius. There were the remains of a not inconsiderable
splendor strewn about her, particularly in her dark, enfolding, and
luminous eyes. Suffering was everywhere visible, even in the hair,
whose natural sallow hue was peeping through its dye. In form she was
large, but not massive; ample, flowing in contour, with the powerful,
yet graceful, moulding of a panther.
“Had you not expected something different?” she said, standing up
before a scrutiny he did not disguise, and speaking with a mournfulness
that seemed to challenge him.
“You have guessed my thoughts,” said Northcote, without lowering his
gaze.
“I was not always as I was,” she said, letting each syllable fall
passionless. “I sank deeply, but I am risen again. I am praying that
with the aid of one I may scale the heights. I even hope to reach that
which in the beginning was above my stature.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Northcote muttered.
“That is cruel,” said his visitor with a shiver. “Such a phrase from
your mouth wounds me like a sword.”
“I am afraid I don’t understand,” said Northcote, almost with
indifference.
“This is not him whom I came to see,” said the woman. “This is not
him who saved my base body; him who, if he will, may redeem my whole
nature.”
“I?” cried the incredulous young advocate.
“You, my deliverer!”
“I--I don’t think I like you; I think you had better go away,” said the
young man, with a brutality of which he was unconscious.
The woman replied to this speech by sinking slowly to her knees. She
lifted the noble line of her chin, which intense suffering had seemed
to refine, up towards him with an ineffable gesture of appeal. It
almost vouchsafed to him a sense of his own degradation.
“I see you as the one whose noble strength will heal me,” she said,
prostrating herself more completely, and clasping her arms about his
ankles.
“Better rise, better leave me,” said Northcote, bewildered by a sense
of pity for his own impotence.
“You are striking me again,” said the woman with a shudder that even to
Northcote seemed terrible, “but every blow you give may help to make me
whole.”
“What can heal a murderess, a prostitute?” he asked, with a candor of
selection that was intended to lacerate.
“You. You who brought me out of prison--you who delivered me from a
shame to which even I dared not yield.”
“Get up,” said Northcote, filled with an unaccountable pang. “Sit
there, and try to compose yourself a little.”
With an indescribable impulse, which he had no means of fathoming, he
raised the trembling, shuddering form by the shoulders, and let it into
the chair nearest the fire. The act was wholly without premeditation,
but there was nothing in it that partook of the uncouth harshness of
his voice. A few scalding drops crept out of her eyes on to his hands,
and when he lifted her the heat of her body communicated itself to the
tips of his fingers.
“Oh, why do you not speak to me with the voice with which you terrified
my judges?” she moaned.
“I cannot make up my mind about you,” said Northcote calmly. “I do not
know whether you are the Magdalene, or whether you are Delilah.”
“When you pleaded for my life before my judges yesterday in the court,
I looked upon you as Jesus,” said the woman, pressing the tips of her
fingers against the balls of her eyes.
“At that hour I felt myself to be no less. And I believe there were
those among my hearers who had that hallucination too.”
“Would _he_ have cut me into pieces when I crept to him for sanctuary?”
The young man pressed his hands to his sides. An ineffable anguish had
pierced him.
“No man ever felt less like that Nazarene than do I this day,” he
cried, with a face that was transfigured with terror. “A holocaust has
taken place in my nature. I know that I shall never take my stand with
the gods any more. Henceforward I am filled with roughness, brutality,
and rage; I hate myself, I hate my species.”
“Wherefore, O my prince!”
“Am I not fallen deeper than her I redeemed from her last ignominy?
Have I not prostituted a supreme talent; have I not poisoned the wells
of truth?”
“Can this be he who preached the Sermon upon the Mount? Can this be he
who said to the woman taken in adultery, ‘Daughter, go thy ways, and
sin no more’?”
Already the roughness of the advocate was melted into blood and tears.
His callous rage had yielded before the figure of the Magdalene. This
nondescript animal he had picked out of a sewer had proved to be a
woman who had bled for abasement, and who strove for reinstatement by
bleeding for it again.
“I have a curiosity about your history,” said Northcote, with a gaze
that devoured her. “You see you are pictured in my imagination as the
denizen of a slum.”
“I entered upon life,” said the woman, yielding to the domination of
his eyes, “as the eldest daughter of an artist whose existence was a
misery. He was a painter of masterpieces that no one would buy. He
had not been in his grave a year when they began to realize sums that
during his life would have appeared to him as fabulous. His two girls,
who comprised his family, never got the benefit of the recognition that
had been denied to their maker; but the dealers in pictures, who had
begrudged him so much as oils and canvas, grew rich by trading upon a
great name.
“My childhood was bitter, cruel, and demoralizing. Art for the sake
of art was the doctrine of my poor father, and in pursuing it he took
to drink. That honest and virtuous world which I have never been
allowed to enter, viewed him afar off as an outcast, as an idle and
dissolute vagabond, as a worthless citizen, whose nature was reflected
in his calling. Perhaps he was all this; perhaps he was more. Yet he
would shut himself up in a little back parlor in the squalid little
house in which we lived, and there he would work in a frenzy for days
together. He would emerge with his nerves in rags, his skin pale, his
eyes bloodshot, his linen foul, his clothes and person in disorder, yet
under his arm was a new masterpiece, twelve inches by sixteen, which
he would carry round to a dealer, who would bully and browbeat him,
and screw him down to the last shilling, which he already owed for the
rent. He would return home worn out in mind and body by his labors;
and for weeks he was unable to bear the sight of a brush or a skin of
paint. It was then he would seek to assuage his morbid irritation with
the aid of drink. ‘They will place a tablet over this hovel when I am
dead,’ he would say, ‘but while I am alive the rope which is needed to
hang me outbuys the worth of this tattered carcass.’
“My poor father, rare artist as he was, was right in this estimate of
himself. As a man, as a father, as a citizen, I cannot find a word
to say for him. He never brought a moment of happiness to either of
his girls. He dwelt in a world of his own; a beautiful and enchanted
world, the Promised Land of his art. He was a man of strange ambition;
of an ambition that had something ferocious in it; of an ambition
that was unfitted to cope with the sordid and material aims, by whose
aid persons of not one-tenth part of his quality achieved wealth,
respectability, power, and the fame of the passing hour. There was a
thread of noble austerity in my poor father’s genius, which remained
in it, like a vein of gold embedded in the mud of a polluted river,
throughout the whole time of his degradation and his ruin. His pride
seemed to grow more scornful with each year that witnessed more
completely the consummation of the darkening and overthrow of his
nature. I can remember his saying of a picture by the president of the
Academy, ‘I would rather have my flesh pecked by daws than prostitute
myself with such blasphemies as that;’ and at that time he stood upon
the verge of the grave of a drunken madman.
“I have said he was not a good citizen. Nor was he a good father to his
girls. He did not offer them physical violence; but it never occurred
to him to shield them from the indignities thrust upon them by want and
debt, and the despair which was sown in their hearts by the foulness
of every breath they drew. It would need my father’s own gift to limn
the picture of this beautiful talent living its appointed life in its
own way, yet indifferent to the most elementary duties of a righteous
parent and an honest citizen. As a young man he had been handsome,
with a fine, delicate, even an entrancing beauty; it was one of his
favorite sayings that the face of every true artist borrowed something
from heaven. I can only recall that face in its latter days, when it
was that of a petulant, arrogantly imperious, yet hideous and bloated
old creature, whose body and soul had been undermined; but from the
numerous pictures he painted of himself in his youth he had the divine
look of a poet.
“I have always considered it as both cruel and ironical of nature
that she should have bestowed upon the daughters of this drunkard and
madman, a little of his own originality--divinity, that taint of
genius, which brought him to the gutter. Look at me well, my deliverer,
and you will see what I mean. If you choose you may read my dreadful
secret in my eyes; in the shape of my lips; in the expanse of my
nostril. It is there still, although drink and the gutter have defaced
its bloom. Look at me, I say, and you will read my poor father’s
history. You will see in my face that ambition for which he sought
an anodyne in the drinking of drams. Sometimes when he grew tired of
painting himself he would have me to sit to him, and he would tell me
I was amazingly like him in his youth. He would also take my younger
sister as his model, but she did not interest him as much as I. ‘Polly
is destined for middle courses,’ he would say. ‘She is neither good
fowl, fish, nor flesh. One of these days she will effect a compromise,
and will be admitted to membership of the Great Trades Union.’
“‘As for thee, thou little slattern of a wench,’ he would say, running
his fingers through my hair, as he cuffed me affectionately, ‘I am
afraid to cast thy horoscope. I cannot predict what will become of
thee. Such a face as thine, thou dirty one, is born to a dreadful and
cynical hatred of things as they are. I can see a bitter scorn in thee
for those hare-hearted rogues who run the show. Like thy illustrious
father thou wilt live to be a thorn in the bowels of the canaille.’ I
was too young at that time to understand what was the meaning of my
illustrious parent, but often since, as I have sunk from one stratum
of my calling to another--there are degrees in this profession of
mine--have I recalled his words, and I have marvelled at his power of
seeing into the future.
“It was this father of ours, who before he deferred to the hand of
death, launched my sister and myself upon our respective careers in the
world. There was nothing hypocritical or pharisaical about this painter
and lyric poet. In his heart he never aspired to those principles which
he denounced with his lips. He sent our beauty to market as soon as it
had reached the age of puberty. He caused us to cease the scrubbing of
floors, lest it should roughen our hands. We were turned out upon the
streets with rouge on our cheeks; for it seemed to dawn upon him all at
once, in one of his Titanic flashes of inspiration, that there was a
rational way of obtaining money to buy the brandy for which he craved
during every hour of the day.
“After my father’s death, my younger sister grew into a charming,
accomplished, and beautiful woman. In the course of time she aspired to
the prizes of her trade. For several years she lived in refinement and
luxury with a judge of the High Court; and upon his demise was able to
claim the interest of a prosperous and clever criminal lawyer of the
name of Whitcomb.
“For many years now I have been dead to my sister’s knowledge, for
brutalized and sordid as I have grown, she was the one thing in the
world besides myself I have ever been able to pity. Even when I
descended below my poor father’s level, I could never find it in my
heart to ‘queer her pitch’ as we say in the gutter. She grew happy and
prosperous, and forgot her childhood and all the sores that festered
upon her name. Long ago she achieved the beatitude of that condition
of mental and moral nullity as predicted by her distinguished parent;
while I, as also predicted by that seer, was destined for sterner
things.
“In those lucid intervals when drugs and drams had left me the use of
my faculties, I sought to appease my cynicism by preying upon society.
I cannot reveal to you the cold rage I nourished against the cosmogony
that had been evolved by I know not how many generations of Pharisees.
The lode-star of my father’s ambition was art for the sake of art; that
of her he had nurtured upon it became crime for the sake of crime. Not
that I was wanton or petty in the workings of my creed; like my father,
I had usually some large aim in view. Yet again like my father, it was
not to myself that material prosperity accrued from the exercise of my
gift, but to the crimps and bullies by whom I was surrounded. It was
one of these, a base, cold-blooded, brutal, calculating ruffian, whom
so treacherously I did to death.
“I think I should enact that crime again; although when my guilt was
fastened upon me, and I was brought into prison, my fear of the gallows
was terrible. It was even stronger than my poor father’s dread of
criticism of his works. And yet as I lay under the shadow of a fate
that I did not know how to obtain the fortitude to accept, I amused
myself with a stroke of that wantonness which has sometimes delighted
my associates, and on occasions has even rendered them respectful. I
chose Mr. Whitcomb to undertake my defence. My poverty and evil repute
made him reluctant to accept the office, but like my father, I retain a
little of the artist’s power of seeing into the future. In my dreams
a voice whispered to me that he alone could ensure my safety. And to
my importunity he yielded. He yielded to that importunity which when I
have felt called upon to exert it, no man has ever been able to resist.
“What a sanctuary did this prison with its indescribable gloom offer
to me! All the days of my life had been cast with drunkards, madmen,
thieves, panders, and prostitutes. They had rendered the very breath
of heaven unclean. From one slum to another slum, from one gutter to
another gutter had my steps been traced. Will it astonish you that what
after all was a powerful nature had founded its grand passion upon an
irreconcilable hatred of its kind? Yet I was brought into prison, and
for the first time I tasted the breath of the living God.