He watched the two figures mingle in all their rustic quaintness
with the heterogeneous streams of persons and traffic which defiled
before his gaze. It followed their every deviation among this
ruthless swarm of Londoners until they were swallowed by the mist of
the December morning. The last detail he was able to discern, which
served to emphasize their slightly ridiculous character as seen from
this altitude, was the large empty basket bobbing about in the hand
of the girl. Their rusticity in combination with the wild hurry of
their flight marked them out as almost grotesque among the spruce and
purposeful crowd through which they made their way. With a pang he
remembered that neither of them had ever seen the metropolis before.
Whither were they flying? How would they spend their day? What would be
the end of their ill-starred adventure?
He continued to strain his eyes after them until they grew dark with
the effort. He then left the window and turned round to find that his
visitor was standing in front of the fire. She was yawning.
“A facer for the old Methodist,” she said, with a short, nonchalant
laugh.
Northcote clenched his hands. An almost ungovernable fury caused his
ears to sing.
“I know what is in your mind,” said the woman calmly. “Get it done.”
“I hope you will go,” said Northcote in a low tone.
“Get it done,” said the woman. “Tear my head from my body and I shall
respect you.”
Northcote was barely able to point to the door. The woman looked at him
with supreme effrontery. She was utterly divested of fear. Her nostrils
seemed to be dilated in scorn, and her dark eyes were full of mockery.
“I never saw anything half so funny,” she said, “as the worthy old
widow of the clergyman running back shamefaced to kiss her saint and
hero. The three of you made a picture for an almanac, as my dear father
would have said. You reminded me of nothing so much as a stuck pig.
The dear old hymnologist and psalm-singer, who had spoken such brave
nonsense, looked just like a poor silly old cow with a red face; and
that stupid little baby-face sticking up the holly, well, she was just
like one of those silly dolls with wax cheeks, which has a button which
you press and it changes its color.”
Northcote was faint already with the dreadful struggle he was waging.
Suddenly, as if touched by inspiration, he turned in the direction of
the door. Yet the woman was too quick for him. She leaped before him
and barred his course.
“I am asking you to pluck my throat out with your great hands,” she
cried with fury. “Don’t you understand, you fool? Don’t you understand,
I say? I cannot, I will not go back to the gutter; yet I cannot go
anywhere else. Why don’t you do as you are told?”
“Do go!” he cried weakly, piteously. The veins were swelling in his
neck.
He strove to thrust her aside, but she resisted him; and when he tried
again she fixed her strong teeth in his hand ferociously.
“Do it now!” she cried, watching his eyes with the baleful hunger of a
she-wolf.
“You are not worth it,” said Northcote, recovering possession of
himself.
She spat in his face.
Northcote began to realize that he had to deal with a mad woman.
She plucked a knife from the table. By this time, however, the man had
all his wits about him, and the movement was anticipated. He had seized
her before she could make use of it.
He knew immediately that he had entered upon a terrible struggle. He
possessed immense physical power, but the creature upon whom he had to
exercise it was extremely supple and vigorous, and, above all, was now
a maniac. She fought with the fury of a lioness. Her unbridled rage
seemed to make her more than a match for him. Screaming foul oaths,
and resorting to devices that a wild beast would not have employed,
the issue hung in the balance. Inch by inch, however, he obtained a
stronger purchase on her body, and it writhed under his great hands
like that of a huge snake. He grunted under the Titanic exertion of
forcing her to the ground. He shifted his hands to her throat, and once
he felt it yield to their gripe, his own pent-up fury broke forth in an
uncontrollable manner. Hardly conscious of what he did, he shook her
with the passion of a wounded bear. She gave a low moan, and a spray of
blood came on to her lips.
It fell upon him with a shock of surprise that her struggles had
ceased. She had fallen stiff under his hands. When he relaxed his grip
she fell to the ground, measuring her length with dull heaviness like
a sack of flour. In an instant a revolting idea stifled the dreadful
frenzy of the demoniac. She was dead. Those enormous hands of his had
pressed out her life without knowing it.
Overcome with horror, Northcote sank to his knees beside the body.
It was stark, and already a little cold. He rolled the corpse over,
so that its face was exposed; he felt for the beating of the heart.
There was not a movement of any sort to enkindle his touch. The face
was convulsed, tinged with purple, mottled with gray. The eyes were
glazed, and even more hideous than when he looked into them last. In
his anguish, he gave a little cry, and rose from his knees, and pressed
his hands to his head.
His first thought was for himself. By this irrevocable act he was
destroyed. His dreams had come to a brutally abrupt termination. That
high destiny which was to shake the world had petered out in a shameful
public ignominy.
In a pitiable state of terror he fell on his knees again. There was a
sort of morbid reflex action within him that seemed to draw him back to
the body, to force him to pass his hands across the corpse. It was now
cold. A stinging fury made him writhe. Was it for this foul, uncanny
monster that he must forfeit one of the most precious jewels that had
ever been devised by nature? He was a young man; life was before him;
there was the magic talisman in his spirit that could bend the whole
world to his purposes. He gnashed his teeth with impotent fury, and
rose biting at his nails.
“This is a dreadful tragedy,” he muttered. “This is a dreadful tragedy.
Think of such a one as myself being lost to mankind.”
His own grotesque words caused him to laugh. That surprising genie,
that had been destined to conquer a stupidly material world, enabled
him to present himself to himself in his amazing predicament. He could
hardly preserve his gravity before a spectacle so astonishing.
“The genie is deriding me,” he said.
That mute and distorted face that was looking up at him with an insane
leer had no message of its own. It was only significant to the advocate
as the price of all that he was about to give up. Yet suddenly he
remembered this strange creature he had broken with his hands as he
had first encountered her in the prison. In no animate thing could the
desire for life have been more intensely strong. Overmastering as was
his own desire at this moment, hers, at that time, had been no less so.
She must have life; she must see the sun and the clouds and the trees.
The common earth had acquired fresh symbols for that debauched vision.
And how nearly she had come to possess this strange new thing that she
craved. One heaven-born man had all but given it to her. He had so
nearly done so, that for one brief instant she had been able to taste
it with those blood-stained lips. And when she had discovered that
strong and shining as this one man was, his was not the divine valiance
of those early mystics who roamed the hills in the childhood of the
world, that he had not the simplicity to provide her with that which
she craved, she insisted on receiving death at his hands in lieu of the
life he could not give her.
It was then, that he took a little compassion. It was a loathsome and
terrible destiny to which this human being had been called. By what
subtle twist or abrogation of her noble faculties had she come to
live her days on such lines as these. This avowed and ruthless enemy
of society had been of no common or spurious clay. It was not a small
nature that had taken a revenge so bitter. A little more and it had
been how much? Another grain of courage, another ounce of power, and
she, too, poor maimed and twisted thing of beauty, would have been
numbered among the valiant.
It added a sharp touch to her slayer’s compassion, that, in regarding
her mutilated image, she became the mirror of his own. He saw the
parallel between the living and the dead. Every point in this analogy
was so perfect that a mental fascination lurked in its rendering. Did
the texture of his own fate admit of any more lenient inquiry? He also
would have entered his kingdom had he but possessed the little more
that meant so much. Were they not both in the beginning the victims
of a fine and original talent, for she whom he had slain had been the
offspring of a man of the first genius. Her thoughts were his thoughts;
her desires were his desires; the tragedy of each had been that their
fineness had been immolated upon the altar of its base surroundings;
both had failed to scale those precipitous mountain-places from which
alone it was possible to stand in true perspective to their own
characters.
As he pressed home this analogy with that curious grim subtlety that
was always one of his chief pleasures to employ, he began to feel in
his own veins that intense desire of hers to live the life that nature
had appointed, to discover an ampler, a truer self-expression. How was
it possible to arrest those functions that had not had an opportunity
to fulfil themselves? There was a ravishing vigor in his blood; he must
not perish as a felon, he to whom all things were so full of meaning.
The overwhelming force of these thoughts translated them into action.
It had already come to him that to obey his overmastering desire he
must conceal his deed. He raised the heavy corpse in his arms; yet
powerful as he was it proved too much for him to bear. Therefore he
dragged it across the room, and with herculean labor contrived to hoist
it on to the bed. He then drew the curtain across to hide it from
the view of those who should chance to enter the room. Afterwards he
proceeded to ponder the evolution of a means to ensure his own personal
security.
He was still engrossed with this occupation when the old charwoman
entered his room. She had brought him some clean linen. It was
contained in a basket which it was her custom to deposit on a chair
behind the curtain at the foot of his bed.
“You can leave it here, Mrs. Brown,” said Northcote, indicating with
his finger a place on the floor.
“I had better take it out of the way, sir,” said the old woman.
“Besides, I have not made the bed.”
“Never mind the bed,” said Northcote; “that won’t matter at all.”
“Oh, no, sir, it would never do for you not to have your bed made,”
said the old woman, in a tone of quiet but determined expostulation.
“I tell you I don’t want it made,” said Northcote. “You can go.”
The tone of his voice seemed to strike the old woman. Formerly he had
always been kind and gentle to her; he had never used such a tone to
her before.
“Very well, sir,” she said meekly, looking at him with scared eyes.
Still, however, with a perversity which in the circumstances he could
only regard as diabolical, she did not go. For suddenly she recollected
that the day before she had lost her shawl, and it occurred to her now
that it was not at all unlikely that she had left it beneath the bed.
It was not in the least probable that she would find it there, but one
of those irrational side-currents to mental activity, which science
finds so baffling, had suggested to her that she might.
“What do you want now?” cried Northcote, as she moved towards the
curtain.
“I want my shawl, sir.”
Her meekness exasperated him beyond endurance.
“Where is your shawl?”
“I think, sir, it might be under the bed.”
Her hand was already stretched towards the curtain. Northcote was
standing against his writing-table, and near his elbow was the leaden
paper-weight which he used for the destruction of rats. He took it in
his hand and poised it in a fashion that would enable him to hurl it
with all his force at the back of the old woman’s head.
For some occult reason she withdrew her hand from the curtain, and
retired without pulling it back.
“Of course I remember now,” she said. “I lent my shawl to Mary Parker
while the snow was about. I have such a bad memory,” she added
plaintively.
“There is one little errand I should like you to do for me,” said
Northcote, looking at her calmly. “Do you mind fetching me a gallon of
paraffin? You can get it at an oilman’s or an ironmonger’s. I am going
to try a new kind of fire.”
He handed her half a crown.
“Very good, sir,” said the old woman.
As he listened to her descending the stairs with little toddling steps,
he balanced the paper-weight thoughtfully in the palm of his hand.
“Those five grandchildren will never come much nearer to the workhouse,
you perverse old woman,” he said with a whimsical laugh.
He had already formed his plan, and like all subtle minds which yearn
for a finality which they so seldom obtain, the definiteness of its
nature enhanced his capacity for action. He discarded his carpet
slippers in favor of boots, and set his hat, gloves, and overcoat in
a place where he could take them up immediately. He placed the briefs
confided to him by the solicitor carefully in his pocket. There were no
other portable objects of value belonging to him except a quantity of
large and loose manuscript sheets, numbering some two thousand pages,
the “Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” that fruit of six years’
labor. These he collected from divers drawers in the writing-table, and
piled them into one upstanding heap.
He stood surveying this proud edifice with a rueful smile when the old
woman returned at last, bearing a gallon of paraffin contained in a tin.
“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her. “You may keep the change. If
I spoke to you rather roughly just now, I hope you will not mind it.
The fact is, I have a great deal of work to get through, and it has
made me rather irritable.”
The old charwoman, immensely mollified by the tone in which she
was now addressed, thanked him humbly, and after standing a moment
irresolutely, in which she further considered the question of how
far it would be now expedient to attempt the making of the bed, a
daily duty which with all her soul she yearned to perform, decided
it would not be politic to reopen the subject. Therefore she retired
crestfallen, because she had failed to carry out a régime which was the
foremost function of her life; yet a little exalted also by the apology
which had been so feelingly rendered to her by one who wore a nimbus;
and above all, tremulous with excitement by reason of having ninepence
in her pocket which was pure gain, a solid lump of treasure-trove.
As soon as she had gone, Northcote “sported his oak” and locked the
door. It was indeed necessary that he should not be disturbed in his
labors; and he took elaborate precautions to render them effectual.
First he broke up all the chairs he possessed, and strewed the
fragments over the corpse. He pulled down the curtains, and flung them
upon the pyre. He gathered several armfuls of books of jurisprudence
and philosophy, dilapidated articles which had been purchased
second-hand, tore them in pieces, and strewed them about. He pulled a
wooden box from under the bed, flung out the contents, consisting of
old clothes, and having broken up the box into splinters, heaped those
up also. Finally, he gathered in his arms that formidable bundle, the
“Note towards an Essay on Optimism,” and sprinkled its two thousand
leaves upon the sacrifice.
By pressing into service every combustible article the room contained,
the pile that he built mounted up to the roof. Having arranged the
great mass to his satisfaction, he poured the paraffin over it. He then
kindled one of the splinters of the chair into a fagot, and applied the
lighted end to one of the saturated blankets of the bed. He then ran
to the door, catching up his hat and coat as he did so, and unlocked
it. Barely had he time to do this ere the whole of the pyre, under the
excitation of the oil, had burst into a sheet of flame. He changed the
key, and locked the door after him.
Putting on his hat and coat and gloves he walked down the four flights
of stairs, past various open doors with clerks behind them, yet in so
doing betrayed neither sign of haste nor discomposure. At the bottom
of the last flight he was accosted by an elderly lame man, who bore
unmistakable traces of being the clerk of an attorney.
“Can you tell me if Mr. Northcote’s chambers are on the top floor,
sir?” he asked courteously.
“My name is Northcote. Can I be of service to you?”
The clerk opened a small bag that he carried, and selecting an oblong
piece of paper from among half a dozen similar documents lying within
it, handed it to the advocate.
“Messrs. Peberdy, Ward, and Peberdy, No. 3 Shortt’s Yard, sir,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Northcote, placing it in the inner pocket of his
overcoat.
At that moment a clerk from one of the upper stories came running down
the stairs.
“The place is on fire,” he cried. “The top landing is so full of smoke
you can’t go up to it.”
“I thought there was a smell of burning,” said Northcote. “I say, it
must be my room!”
“If you are Mr. Northcote, it is certainly your room.”
The advocate turned round hastily, and proceeded to ascend the steep
and rickety old stairs. He was turned back, however, as he had
anticipated, by other clerks who were running down.
“The place is on fire,” they cried excitedly. “The smoke will choke
you.”
XXXIX
WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT STAIN
Northcote made no further show of resistance to the inevitable, but
accompanied the excited clerks into Fleet Street. The window of his
room abutting on to it had already attracted the notice of the crowd
that thronged its pavements. By the time he had crossed to the other
side of the road and had taken up his stand with the knot of spectators
that was rapidly assembling at the end of a bystreet, the smoke had
increased considerably in volume.
“Not much doubt about there being a fire,” was the verdict of those
around him.
The bunch of witnesses in the side street increased every instant.
Persons riding on the outsides of the omnibuses stood up to look.
Policemen on point-duty came out of the press of the traffic to gaze
with concern and inquiry at the smoke which now was belching forth in a
black mass.
“Must ha’ begun in the chimbley,” said one of Northcote’s neighbors, a
man without a collar. “That’s soot.”
“It’s Pearmain’s Hotel,” said another.
“No,” said a third, “it’s Shepherd’s Inn.”
“If it’s Shepherd’s Inn it will take it all,” said a fourth. “It has
been condemned by the County Council for the past two years. It is so
crazy it can hardly stand up in a gale.”
“It is rotten and rat-ridden from top to bottom. It must be five
hundred years old.”
“Five ’undred me leg,” said the man without a collar. “It ain’t more
than two.”
“Lord Bacon lived in it, anyway.”
“Wot if he did? I tell you it ain’t more than two.”
The controversialist spat on the pavement authoritatively, and those
who surrounded him, who knew he was wrong, deferred to his opinion
humbly.
“There’s the flame,” said a quiet man excitedly. “Why don’t they bring
the engines?”
“They want it to get a firm ’old,” said the man without a collar, “so
that they can put it out in style.”
“They will have something to go at when they do come,” said a nervous
man, who wore spectacles. “There it goes through the roof. Look, look,
see that!”
There could be no measure of uncertainty as to the power the fire had
acquired already. Smoke and flame were pouring and leaping out of the
windows and through the old red tiles into the dull December sky. A
stern joy held Northcote as he gazed. Every instant of delay increased
his chance. It needed a holocaust to ensure his safety. He derived
that thrill of impersonal satisfaction which visits a good craftsman
when a work is placed before him which has been adequately planned and
executed.
“The engines ought to have been round from Fenchurch Street afore now,”
said one, whose mustache bristled like that of a county councillor.
“Fenchurch Street, did yer sye?” said the man without a collar. “Lord
love me, they’ll send ’em round from ’Olborn.”
“They are taking a lifetime about it,” said the nervous man in a voice
of intense anxiety.
However, at that moment there sounded a curious rattle of warning;
policemen came running up, and immediately afterwards came the first
of the engines. The crowd was now dense and the traffic was impeded.
In the next few moments it had been stopped altogether and diverted
into side streets. By now a large posse of constables had appeared, and
they succeeded in clearing a space in which the firemen could carry out
their operations. Before the hose had been placed in position two other
engines had arrived.
Northcote had managed to place himself in an admirable situation among
the excited throng; and although those in front of him were somewhat
roughly thrust back by the police, he was able to maintain his coign of
vantage. By the time the first spray of water had been flung upon the
conflagration, it had not only burnt through his room into the story
beneath, but also it had spread some twenty yards along the tiles.
“If it takes to burning down, it will be awkward,” said a voice near
him.
“How it is spreading! They will find it difficult to keep it off the
hotel.”
Northcote, in the midst of the frenzy of destruction that possessed
him, now grew conscious that a hand had gripped his arm. He managed
to turn his head sideways and discovered that his old schoolfellow,
Hutton, was standing next to him.
“This crazy old hole has been waiting for this,” said Hutton. “It burns
like tinder. If there are any poor devils who keep there, I pity them.”
“I’m one,” said Northcote quietly.
“Well, I call that really bad luck,” said his old schoolfellow
fervently. “Upon my word, it will take the whole place.”
“Job’s comforter,” said Northcote.
“I say though, it is a blaze! By Jove, it has got into the hotel! It
will take half Fleet Street if they don’t look out.”
“More engines,” said Northcote with satisfaction, as their hideous
rattles pierced the air. “Well, they will all be wanted.”
“I say, though,” said his companion, with the growing excitement of his
surroundings communicating itself to him, “this is going to be really
awful. It has got down another story, and it is certainly in the hotel,
and if they don’t look out it will be in the bank.”
Although half a dozen engines had arrived by this time and the supply
of water was copious, the fire had spread on all sides with such
alarming rapidity that the liquid sheets that were flung upon it
seemed only to increase the virulence of the flames. The surrounding
buildings were all more or less decrepit, while the old inn itself had
not the slightest resistance to offer to the flames. The whole of its
quadrangular roof, most of which lay behind, appeared, as far as the
onlookers could discern, by now to be involved.
“There is something strange, fascinating, exhilarating,” said Northcote
with a thrill of exaltation in his voice, “in witnessing a really great
fire. The fire of London must have been the finest sight the world
ever saw.”
“You don’t appear to mind very much about your rooms, I must say,” said
his companion. “If I were looking on at the destruction of my goods and
chattels and the roof that protects my head, I don’t think I should be
able to raise much enthusiasm for the spectacle.”
“It will probably take half Fleet Street. What is my wretched little
attic in comparison with that?”
“Somehow in the circumstances I don’t think I could play the
philosopher myself.”
“It is all up with the hotel,” said Northcote. “It will be into a few
of these newspaper offices before long. Conceive a holocaust that
places the press of England in danger! Ha, ha, there goes the roof of
my room!”
“Why, that is where the fire began! You don’t mean to say the fire
began in your room?”
“Yes, that is where the fire began.”
“No! How did it begin? Were you in it when it started?”
“Yes, I was in it when it started.”
“No!”
“I started it myself.”
“Did you overturn a lamp? Or did it begin in the chimney?”