THE LOWEST DEEP.
Sullen, disappointed, desperate, I strode along the streets that evening,
careless whither I went. The People's Cause was lost--the Charter a
laughing-stock. That the party which monopolizes wealth, rank, and, as it
is fancied, education and intelligence, should have been driven, degraded,
to appeal to brute force for self-defence--that thought gave me a savage
joy; but that it should have conquered by that last, lowest resource!--That
the few should be still stronger than the many, or the many still too
cold-hearted and coward to face the few--that sickened me. I hated the
well-born young special constables whom I passed, because they would have
fought. I hated the gent and shop-keeper special constables, because they
would have run away. I hated my own party, because they had gone too
far--because they had not gone far enough. I hated myself, because I had
not produced some marvellous effect--though what that was to have been I
could not tell--and hated myself all the more for that ignorance.
A group of effeminate shop-keepers passed me, shouting, "God save the
Queen!" "Hypocrites!" I cried in my heart--"they mean 'God save our shops!'
Liars! They keep up willingly the useful calumny, that their slaves and
victims are disloyal as well as miserable!"
I was utterly abased--no, not utterly; for my self-contempt still vented
itself--not in forgiveness, but in universal hatred and defiance. Suddenly
I perceived my cousin, laughing and jesting with a party of fashionable
young specials: I shrank from him; and yet, I know not why, drew as near
him as I could, unobserved--near enough to catch the words.
"Upon my honour, Locke, I believe you are a Chartist yourself at heart."
"At least I am no Communist," said he, in a significant tone. "There is one
little bit of real property which I have no intention of sharing with my
neighbours."
"What, the little beauty somewhere near Cavendish Square?"
"That's my business."
"Whereby you mean that you are on your way to her now? Well, I am invited
to the wedding, remember."
He pushed on laughingly, without answering. I followed him fast--"near
Cavendish Square!"--the very part of the town where Lillian lived! I had
had, as yet, a horror of going near it; but now an intolerable suspicion
scourged me forward, and I dogged his steps, hiding behind pillars, and at
the corners of streets, and then running on, till I got sight of him again.
He went through Cavendish Square, up Harley Street--was it possible? I
gnashed my teeth at the thought. But it must be so. He stopped at the
dean's house, knocked, and entered without parley.
In a minute I was breathless on the door-step, and knocked. I had no plan,
no object, except the wild wish to see my own despair. I never thought
of the chances of being recognized by the servants, or of anything else,
except of Lillian by my cousin's side.
The footman came out smiling, "What did I want?"
"I--I--Mr. Locke."
"Well you needn't be in such a hurry!" (with a significant grin). "Mr.
Locke's likely to be busy for a few minutes yet, I expect."
Evidently the man did not know me.
"Tell him that--that a person wishes to speak to him on particular
business." Though I had no more notion what that business was than the man
himself.
"Sit down in the hall."
And I heard the fellow, a moment afterwards, gossiping and laughing with
the maids below about the "young couple."
To sit down was impossible; my only thought was--where was Lillian?
Voices in an adjoining room caught my ear. His! yes--and hers too--soft
and low. What devil prompted me to turn eavesdropper? to run headlong
into temptation? I was close to the dining-room door, but they were not
there--evidently they were in the back room, which, as I knew, opened into
it with folding-doors. I--I must confess all.--Noiselessly, with craft like
a madman's, I turned the handle, slipped in as stealthily as a cat--the
folding-doors were slightly open. I had a view of all that passed within.
A horrible fascination seemed to keep my eyes fixed on them, in spite of
myself. Honour, shame, despair, bade me turn away, but in vain.
I saw them.--How can I write it? Yet I will.--I saw them sitting together
on the sofa. Their arms were round each other. Her head lay upon his
breast; he bent over her with an intense gaze, as of a basilisk, I thought;
how do I know that it was not the fierceness of his love? Who could have
helped loving her?
Suddenly she raised her head, and looked up in his face--her eyes brimming
with tenderness, her cheeks burning with mingled delight and modesty--their
lips met, and clung together.... It seemed a life--an eternity--before they
parted again. Then the spell was broken, and I rushed from the room.
Faint, giddy, and blind, I just recollect leaning against the wall of the
staircase. He came hastily out, and started as he saw me. My face told all.
"What? Eavesdropping?" he said, in a tone of unutterable scorn. I answered
nothing, but looked stupidly and fixedly in his face, while he glared at me
with that keen, burning, intolerable eye. I longed to spring at his throat,
but that eye held me as the snake's holds the deer. At last I found words.
"Traitor! everywhere--in everything--tricking me--supplanting me--in my
friends--in my love!"
"Your love? Yours?" And the fixed eye still glared upon me. "Listen, cousin
Alton! The strong and the weak have been matched for the same prize: and
what wonder, if the strong man conquers? Go and ask Lillian how she likes
the thought of being a Communist's love!"
As when, in a nightmare, we try by a desperate effort to break the spell, I
sprang forward, and struck at him, he put my hand by carelessly, and felled
me bleeding to the ground. I recollect hardly anything more, till I found
myself thrust into the street by sneering footmen, and heard them call
after me "Chartist" and "Communist" as I rushed along the pavement,
careless where I went.
I strode and staggered on through street after street, running blindly
against passengers, dashing under horses' heads, heedless of warnings and
execrations, till I found myself, I know not how, on Waterloo Bridge. I had
meant to go there when I left the door. I knew that at least--and now I was
there.
I buried myself in a recess of the bridge, and stared around and up and
down.
I was alone--deserted even by myself. Mother, sister, friends, love, the
idol of my life, were all gone. I could have borne that. But to be shamed,
and know that I deserved it; to be deserted by my own honour, self-respect,
strength of will--who can bear that?
I could have borne it, had one thing been left--faith in my own
destiny--the inner hope that God had called me to do a work for him.
"What drives the Frenchman to suicide?" I asked myself, arguing ever even
in the face of death and hell--"His faith in nothing but his own lusts and
pleasures; and when they are gone, then comes the pan of charcoal--and all
is over. What drives the German? His faith in nothing but his own brain. He
has fallen down and worshipped that miserable 'Ich' of his, and made that,
and not God's will, the centre and root of his philosophy, his poetry, and
his self-idolizing æsthetics; and when it fails him, then for prussic acid,
and nonentity. Those old Romans, too--why, they are the very experimentum
crucis of suicide! As long as they fancied that they had a calling to serve
the state, they could live on and suffer. But when they found no more work
left for them, then they could die--as Porcia died--as Cato--as I ought.
What is there left for me to do? outcast, disgraced, useless, decrepit--"
I looked out over the bridge into the desolate night. Below me the dark
moaning river-eddies hurried downward. The wild west-wind howled past me,
and leapt over the parapet downward. The huge reflexion of Saint Paul's,
the great tap-roots of light from lamp and window that shone upon the lurid
stream, pointed down--down--down. A black wherry shot through the arch
beneath me, still and smoothly downward. My brain began to whirl madly--I
sprang upon the step.--A man rushed past me, clambered on the parapet, and
threw up his arms wildly.--A moment more, and he would have leapt into the
stream. The sight recalled me to my senses--say, rather, it reawoke in me
the spirit of manhood. I seized him by the arm, tore him down upon the
pavement, and held him, in spite of his frantic struggles. It was Jemmy
Downes! Gaunt, ragged, sodden, blear-eyed, drivelling, the worn-out
gin-drinker stood, his momentary paroxysm of strength gone, trembling and
staggering.
"Why won't you let a cove die? Why won't you let a cove die? They're all
dead--drunk, and poisoned, and dead! What is there left?"--he burst out
suddenly in his old ranting style--"what is there left on earth to live
for? The prayers of liberty are answered by the laughter of tyrants; her
sun is sunk beneath the ocean wave, and her pipe put out by the raging
billows of aristocracy! Those starving millions of Kennington Common--where
are they? Where? I axes you," he cried fiercely, raising his voice to a
womanish scream--"where are they?"
"Gone home to bed, like sensible people; and you had better go too."
"Bed! I sold ours a month ago; but we'll go. Come along, and I'll show you
my wife and family; and we'll have a tea-party--Jacob's Island tea. Come
along!
"Flea, flea, unfortunate flea!
Bereft of his wife and his small family!"
He clutched my arm, and dragging me off towards the Surrey side, turned
down Stamford Street.
I followed half perforce; and the man seemed quite demented--whether with
gin or sorrow I could not tell. As he strode along the pavement, he kept
continually looking back, with a perplexed terrified air, as if expecting
some fearful object.
"The rats!--the rats! don't you see 'em coming out of the gullyholes,
atween the area railings--dozens and dozens?"
"No; I saw none."
"You lie; I hear their tails whisking; there's their shiny hats a
glistening, and every one on 'em with peelers' staves! Quick! quick! or
they'll have me to the station-house."
"Nonsense!" I said; "we are free men! What are the policemen to us?"
"You lie!" cried he, with a fearful oath, and a wrench at my arm which
almost threw me down. "Do you call a sweater's man a free man?"
"You a sweater's man?"
"Ay!" with another oath. "My men ran away--folks said I drank, too; but
here I am; and I, that sweated others, I'm sweated myself--and I'm a slave!
I'm a slave--a negro slave, I am, you aristocrat villain!"
"Mind me, Downes; if you will go quietly, I will go with you; but if you do
not let go of my arm, I give you in charge to the first policeman I meet."
"Oh, don't, don't!" whined the miserable wretch, as he almost fell on
his knees, gin-drinkers' tears running down his face, "or I shall be too
late.--And then, the rats'll get in at the roof, and up through the floor,
and eat 'em all up, and my work too--the grand new three-pound coat that
I've been stitching at this ten days, for the sum of one half-crown
sterling--and don't I wish I may see the money? Come on, quick; there
are the rats, close behind!" And he dashed across the broad roaring
thoroughfare of Bridge Street, and hurrying almost at a run down Tooley
Street, plunged into the wilderness of Bermondsey.
He stopped at the end of a miserable blind alley, where a dirty gas-lamp
just served to make darkness visible, and show the patched windows and
rickety doorways of the crazy houses, whose upper stories were lost in a
brooding cloud of fog; and the pools of stagnant water at our feet; and the
huge heap of cinders which filled up the waste end of the alley--a dreary,
black, formless mound, on which two or three spectral dogs prowled up and
down after the offal, appearing and vanishing like dark imps in and out of
the black misty chaos beyond.
The neighbourhood was undergoing, as it seemed, "improvements" of that
peculiar metropolitan species which consists in pulling down the dwellings
of the poor, and building up rich men's houses instead; and great
buildings, within high temporary palings, had already eaten up half the
little houses; as the great fish, and the great estates, and the great
shopkeepers, eat up the little ones of their species--by the law of
competition, lately discovered to be the true creator and preserver of the
universe. There they loomed up, the tall bullies, against the dreary sky,
looking down, with their grim, proud, stony visages, on the misery which
they were driving out of one corner, only to accumulate and intensify it in
another.
The house at which we stopped was the last in the row; all its companions
had been pulled down; and there it stood, leaning out with one naked ugly
side into the gap, and stretching out long props, like feeble arms and
crutches, to resist the work of demolition.
A group of slatternly people were in the entry, talking loudly, and as
Downes pushed by them, a woman seized him by the arm.
"Oh! you unnatural villain!--To go away after your drink, and leave all
them poor dear dead corpses locked up, without even letting a body go in to
stretch them out!"
"And breeding the fever, too, to poison the whole house!" growled one.
"The relieving officer's been here, my cove," said another, "and he's gone
for a peeler and a search warrant to break open the door, I can tell you!"
But Downes pushed past unheeding, unlocked a door at the end of the
passage, thrust me in, locked it again, and then rushed across the room in
chase of two or three rats, who vanished into cracks and holes.
And what a room! A low lean-to with wooden walls, without a single article
of furniture; and through the broad chinks of the floor shone up as it
were ugly glaring eyes, staring at us. They were the reflexions of the
rushlight in the sewer below. The stench was frightful--the air heavy with
pestilence. The first breath I drew made my heart sink, and my stomach
turn. But I forgot everything in the object which lay before me, as Downes
tore a half-finished coat off three corpses laid side by side on the bare
floor.
There was his little Irish wife:--dead--and naked; the wasted white limbs
gleamed in the lurid light; the unclosed eyes stared, as if reproachfully,
at the husband whose drunkenness had brought her there to kill her with
the pestilence; and on each side of her a little, shrivelled, impish,
child-corpse,--the wretched man had laid their arms round the dead mother's
neck--and there they slept, their hungering and wailing over at last for
ever; the rats had been busy already with them--but what matter to them
now?
"Look!" he cried; "I watched 'em dying! Day after day I saw the devils come
up through the cracks, like little maggots and beetles, and all manner of
ugly things, creeping down their throats; and I asked 'em, and they said
they were the fever devils."
It was too true; the poisonous exhalations had killed them. The wretched
man's delirium tremens had given that horrible substantiality to the
poisonous fever gases.
Suddenly Downes turned on me, almost menacingly. "Money! money! I want some
gin!"
I was thoroughly terrified--and there was no shame in feeling fear, locked
up with a madman far my superior in size and strength, in so ghastly a
place. But the shame and the folly too, would have been in giving way to my
fear; and with a boldness half assumed, half the real fruit of excitement
and indignation at the horrors I beheld, I answered--
"If I had money, I would give you none. What do you want with gin? Look
at the fruits of your accursed tippling. If you had taken my advice,
my poor fellow," I went on, gaining courage as I spoke, "and become a
water-drinker, like me--"
"Curse you and your water-drinking! If you had had no water to drink
or wash with for two years but that--that," pointing to the foul ditch
below--"if you had emptied the slops in there with one hand, and filled
your kettle with the other--"
"Do you actually mean that that sewer is your only drinking water?"
"Where else can we get any? Everybody drinks it; and you shall, too--you
shall!" he cried, with a fearful oath, "and then see if you don't run off
to the gin-shop, to take the taste of it out of your mouth. Drink? and who
can help drinking, with his stomach turned with such hell-broth as that--or
such a hell's blast as this air is here, ready to vomit from morning till
night with the smells? I'll show you. You shall drink a bucket full of it,
as sure as you live, you shall."
And he ran out of the back door, upon a little balcony, which hung over the
ditch.
I tried the door, but the key was gone, and the handle too. I beat
furiously on it, and called for help. Two gruff authoritative voices were
heard in the passage.
"Let us in; I'm the policeman!"
"Let me out, or mischief will happen!"
The policeman made a vigorous thrust at the crazy door; and just as it
burst open, and the light of his lantern streamed into the horrible den, a
heavy splash was heard outside.
"He has fallen into the ditch!"
"He'll be drowned, then, as sure as he's a born man," shouted one of the
crowd behind.
We rushed out on the balcony. The light of the policeman's lantern glared
over the ghastly scene--along the double row of miserable house-backs,
which lined the sides of the open tidal ditch--over strange rambling
jetties, and balconies, and sleeping-sheds, which hung on rotting piles
over the black waters, with phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming
and twinkling out of the dark hollows, like devilish grave-lights--over
bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of offal,
floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth--over the slow sullen rows
of oily ripple which were dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending
up, as they stirred, hot breaths of miasma--the only sign that a spark of
humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that
foul death. I almost fancied that I could see the haggard face staring up
at me through the slimy water; but no, it was as opaque as stone.
I shuddered and went in again, to see slatternly gin-smelling women
stripping off their clothes--true women even there--to cover the poor naked
corpses; and pointing to the bruises which told a tale of long tyranny
and cruelty; and mingling their lamentations with stories of shrieks and
beating, and children locked up for hours to starve; and the men looked on
sullenly, as if they too were guilty, or rushed out to relieve themselves
by helping to find the drowned body. Ugh! it was the very mouth of hell,
that room. And in the midst of all the rout, the relieving officer stood
impassive, jotting down scraps of information, and warning us to appear the
next day, to state what we knew before the magistrates. Needless hypocrisy
of law! Too careless to save the woman and children from brutal tyranny,
nakedness, starvation!--Too superstitious to offend its idol of vested
interests, by protecting the poor man against his tyrants, the house-owning
shopkeepers under whose greed the dwellings of the poor become nests of
filth and pestilence, drunkenness and degradation. Careless, superstitious,
imbecile law!--leaving the victims to die unhelped, and then, when the
fever and the tyranny has done its work, in thy sanctimonious prudishness,
drugging thy respectable conscience by a "searching inquiry" as to how it
all happened--lest, forsooth, there should have been "foul play!" Is the
knife or the bludgeon, then, the only foul play, and not the cesspool and
the curse of Rabshakeh? Go through Bermondsey or Spitalfields, St. Giles's
or Lambeth, and see if _there_ is not foul play enough already--to be tried
hereafter at a more awful coroner's inquest than thou thinkest of!