“I took him by the arm an’ spoke to him, but he never turned his head; an’ his face was worse than any corpse’s I ever see. An’ s’elp me, I looked under the trough, an’ there was the rats all round the other way, tails out, shovin’ their noses down into the corner, an’ fightin’ to get deeper in the crowd! I knelt down aside of Skibby, an’ shook him, an’ he groaned, an’ fell of a heap—sort o’ fainted.
“I’d had enough for a bit, so I shoved the hammers an’ chisels in the sack an’ rolled it up, an’ I shook up Skibby again, an’ started to get him out of it. He rolled up pretty dull an’ stupid with a bit more shaking, an’ I got him down the stairs. An’ when we went out o’ the room I see the rats sneakin’ off both ways along the corner of the wall an’ round to the door.
“I dragged ’im through the winder somehow, an’ out on the marsh. ‘What’s come to you, Skibby?’ I says. ‘Are you balmy?’
“‘Didn’t you see ’im?’ says he, hangin’ onto me tremblin’; ‘didn’t you see ’im?’
“‘See who?’ says I.
“‘Flash Povey,’ says Skibby.
“‘Flash Povey!’ says L ‘Why, he’s been dead a month!’
“An’ so he had. He pegged out while Skibby was doin’ his six months, you remember.”
“Um,” said Snorkey Timms. “An’ that’s all?”
“That’s all what I didn’t tell the coroner,” answered Bob. “But I said ’e seemed very much off ’is rocker while ’e was with me. An’ when we got to the canal he would go down along the towpath, though it wasn’t ’is way ’ome.
“‘Go along, Bob,” ’e says; ‘you leave me alone. I’ll be better in a bit.’
“I didn’t quite know what to do, but I thought I’d come along an’ tell ’is missis ’e seemed a bit roundmy-’at. An’ so I did. An’ they found ’im in the canal the next morning.”
A BLOT ON ST. BASIL
First published in The Butterfly, March 1899
In the parish of St. Basil-in-the-East there is like to be a vacancy for a male Bible-reader, for committees are aflare at the scandalous misuse of some part of Mr. Albert Murch’s last week’s pay. It was not extravagant pay for a week, being, in fact, some way short of a sovereign. But it was explained to him at his appointment that the consciousness of doing good should support him: not to mention his old mother. And many people—on the committees, for instance—worked zealously for no other reward whatever: as was notorious everywhere; and if it were not notorious, truly it was by no neglect of the committees.
Nor is this the first complaint against Mr. Murch, though certainly it is the most shocking. He was a promising young man in the beginning, becomingly docile and obedient, and with some enthusiasm for his work, as was shown by his renunciation of his situation and prospects, in order to devote himself thereunto. But as time went, and his clothes grew seedier, it became vaguely suspected that he had begun to hold secret opinions of his own in the matters of visits and relief of the poor: an ineffable presumption. For the committees, and the associations, and the rest, did they not know all about it? They gave their whole energies (for some hours a week) to the business, and their names were known far and wide as Authorities on the Lives of the Poor; while he, of whom nobody out of the parish had ever heard, was little more than one of the poor himself, groping about underground among them. Now and again he had an irritating trick of being right; and if he had been less insignificant, and if the committees and associations had not needed most of their jealousy and spite for use among themselves, he would have run into trouble sooner.
It seemed plain that constant contact with the lower orders had blunted all his finer feelings. He would recommend the most sullen and unrepentant for relief—people so wholly conscious of their lack of claim that they never asked for themselves; people altogether unconverted; while others, fervidly converted a dozen times over, and ever ready to be converted again, he reported “undeserving.” Fortunately there were those who could check his discreditable partialities; as in a flagrant case, but a little before his final lapse, when a member of a committee, minded to make personal visits in Randall’s Rents, found two very respectful and plainly deserving families wholly destitute of bedding, coals, and provisions—a state of affairs that Mr. Murch had never even reported. The deficiencies were supplied on the spot. And the Bible-reader’s explanations, when he was called to account, were far-fetched and ludicrous. He tried to convince the committee that the two families, the Dodds and the Blandys, having word of the nearing visitor, passed their portable property through their windows, which stood frame to frame in a wall-angle; first all the Dodd bedclothes into the Blandys’ room, and then, as soon as the visitor was engaged on other floors, all the Blandy property, with the Dodds’ own, in the opposite direction, so that both rooms should seem equally necessitous. To offer such a story was a mere trifling with the committee, and Mr. Murch was told so, with asperity. It was also an insult to the intelligence of the exploring committee-member, and an evidence of an unworthy attitude of mind toward the suffering poor.
Mr. Murch, for his part, went his way hopelessly enough. He was not a strong man, either in body or in spirit; and such strength as he possessed grew from fervour of conviction and knowledge of his work. Still, he was ever at odds with himself, and the prey of doubts. Was he right, after all, in his treatment of the Hanks, and should he have said what he did to the Poysers or not? Such questions kept him awake at night. Again, should he have given the man Briggs those few coppers from his own pocket (for the committee would give nothing), when his mother was old and ailing, and really needed beef-tea? Which way lay his duty?
His offence, which surprised even the Randall’s Renters, and for that was noised abroad, was committed on a dank, wet day, when the world bore a more than commonly hopeless aspect in his eyes. His umbrella had grown so bad of late, had gone at so many joints, that he left it at home. He buttoned his coat about him—though he was loth to put strain on the worn button-holes—turned down his hat-brim, and dodged the puddles as best he might.
Randall’s Rents was to be the scene of his morning’s work, and thither he took his way, through streets growing narrower and fouler as he went. Mrs. Bannam’s was the case he had most in mind, and he doubted much if he should find her alive. A long course of drinking, and insufficient eating with it, had laid her low with a hopeless hobnailed liver, and now hyperstatic pneumonia had come in to cut the struggle shorter. As a hard drinker she was no rarity in Randall’s Rents, but she had been also a hard worker, which was in no way so common. She had sworn at a lady visitor, who had pushed into her room without knocking or asking leave, and so was cut off from the aid of committees; and she had loudly prodaimed that she could work for her own blankets, coals, and groceries, and would neither beg, nor go to church, nor be converted, in order to get them free. She had been the chief support of a very large son of about thirty, who cherished his constitution by leaning against the doorpost of the Three Bells, and felt unfitted for personal exertion except when supplies ran short, and it became imperatively necessary to punch his mother. So that her now destitute child had taken himself off, and neighbours tended her.
As Mr. Murch, already half wet through, turned the corner into Randall’s Rents, harsh yells met his ears, and an occasional shout, as of encouragement. The yells were the yells of Mrs. Blandy, who danced about the gutter, and screamed defiance at the Dodds, one and all. For the Dodds had turned out unsportsmanlike in regard to the spoil of the committee-member, and this was the third day of the consequent row. The fortune of sport had so laid it that the Dodds had received the larger dole, and while the Blandys very properly held that the whole bag, as product of their joint operations, should be put to fair division, the Dodds held fast to all they had got, and kept in the family all the liquor it produced.
“Call yerself a man!” shrieked Mrs. Blandy, who was menacing each member of the opposing family in tu
rn, and now came to its head. “Call yerself a man. Why, look there! There goes the bloomin’ Bible-reader. Blimy if ’e ain’t a better man than you! ’E don’t ’ide away from a woman, any’ow! An’ you’re a—”
Mr. Murch hurried on, and entered an open door. Mrs. Bannam’s room was on the second floor, but he stopped at a door just within the passage to ask for news. He knocked, but got no answer. Then again, and called, “Mrs. Tapner!” Whereat came a sound from within, between a grunt and a wail, and Murch pushed open the door.
Mrs. Tapner was very fat, very dirty, very much unhooked about the bodice, greatly bedraggled about the hair, and not at all sober. She sat on a stool, and her head lay back against the wall.
“Giddy young kipper!” she gurgled, with a leer. “Giddy young kipper, comin’ into a lady’s room when she’s drunk! ’Ave a lil drop yeself!” And she pointed to a small flat bottle on the floor beside her.
It was a safe offer, for everybody knew Mr. Murch for a teetotaler. “I came to ask about Mrs. Bannam,” he said, “before I go up. I suppose you’ve not been up there this morning?”
“Mish’ Bannam’s wuss off’n me,” the woman answered, with a hiccup and a giggle. “I’m in ’eaven; presen’ly she’ll be in ’ell, with no ’eaven fust, like what I’ve got. Doctor’s up there now.”
Murch thought he would wait, and see the doctor as he came out. He turned slowly toward the door, and the woman behind him chuckled again.
“What’s good o’ you?” she said. “You bring pore people ’ell out o’ the Bible; others brings us ’eaven—in a quartem bottle.”
“If you was sober you’d be ashamed to know you said such things,” said Mr. Murch. “There’s no ’eaven in the gin-bottle, but bitter repentance. Anyone that brings you that’s no friend.”
“Ain’t they? Not when they brings it in a ticket, or a pair o’ boots, or a petticut? Oh, there’s ways! You know.”
Truly he knew, and knew the regular tariff in gin for charity-given shirts and boots and groceries. But the doctor’s step was on the stairs.
“Ah!” said the doctor on the landing; “I won’t be back again unless I’m called, and I know I sha’n’t be. Two or three hours is about her time—more or less. I suppose you must say something, but I wouldn’t worry her.”
The air of the room was faint and fetid. A rag of old skirt half obscured the grimy window, against which a bare-armed slattern pressed her face, to catch what view she might of the row outside Dodd’s. She turned her head at Murch’s entrance, but, seeing it was he, she addressed her eyes again to the window.
The bed was a low one, indefinite as to shape and supports, and covered with the dying woman’s skirts and under-clothes, supplementary to the insufficient bed-linen. A chair had been planted at the upper end, supported in which she half sat, half lay. Her face was gross and puffy, slaty in hue, and blue about the mouth, and she breathed lightly and quickly, eyes fixed on the wall before her: for to take breath was now conscious and incessant work. Murch stepped quietly across the floor, and knelt beside her.
“Don’t—read,” she said presently, with a breath between the words.
He had not intended to read, for he remembered the doctor’s caution. Without, the row waxed amain, and it was plain that one Dodd, at least, had sallied from the stronghold. Feet pattered on the pavement, and boys yelled delight. At the window the woman jammed her eye closer, for the fray was drifting up the street.
Murch bent his head for a few seconds. When he looked up the dying woman was regarding him—a little curiously, he thought.
“I’m—goin’—’ard—crool ’ard,” she gasped.
He offered comforting words—though he had said them so often in such cases that they had become a formula, and he felt them a mockery. The row in the street quieted suddenly, and then revived in a new key. No doubt a policeman had come.
“Can I do anything to make you comfortable?” Murch asked, softly.
“Ever—know—me—beg?”
“Never once.”
Again her eyes were turned on him with an odd, questioning look. “Then—gimme—sixpence—now,” she said.
He wondered. “What is it you want?” he asked. She made as though to shake her head. “Nogimme—the—sixpence.”
Too well he knew what any bye-chance sixpence went to buy in Randall’s Rents. “But,” he murmured, “I—I’m afraid you’d buy gin with it.”
At the words the slaty mask lit up, and the eyes turned skyward. “Wouldn’t—I—just!” said Mrs. Bannam.
He stood, conscious of a strange shock. Well indeed his creed taught him—the hard creed he learned at his mother’s knees—the fate of that lost soul in two hours’ time. And the words were fresh in his ears—the words of the obscene creature leering and rolling below: “No ’eaven fust, like what I’ve got!”
He turned toward the door, his hand to his head. Then he looked, as for help, to the slattern at the window; but though she may have heard, she looked without, where two policemen were hauling off her neighbours. His gaze fell last on the bed, and there was a blue, appealing face that looked as it were already from another world.
Two pennies and a sixpence was all left of last week’s pay. He scarce knew his hand had gone to his pocket ere the sixpence was lying on the bed, and he was stumbling blindly on the stairs.
ONE MORE UNFORTUNATE
First published in the anthology In the May, 1901
Bill Harnell, lighterman, red and hairy, clumped home late up Old Gravel Lane. For such bad times as these on the river, Bill had had a lucky spell, and he bore its trophies with him. A new pair of water-boots is a thing of consideration, a matter of thirty-five shillings; a piece of trade gear renewed on momentous days, years apart, when the fates are propitious and savings adequate; days remembered with birthdays and wedding-days. This had been such a day; more, it was a day of general rig-out, and Bill Hamell’s blue serge coat, thick as a board, was new and stiff from the slop-shop, as also was his cap. Where light fell from a shop window a bulging pocket was observable in the new coat, with an exposed wrap of paper and a fishtail—signs of supper provided for. And so Bill Harrell, rolling at the shoulders, stiff and heavy below the knees, clumped home that evening up Old Gravel Lane, reflective.
Truly he was a fortunate man, and not as so many in the swamp of humanity about him. There were some whom the price of his water-boots would keep in better raiment than their own for two years and more, and to whom his serge coat, when rotten and threadbare with time, would be a prize to risk gaol or life for; many who at that moment might be debating whether or not more of life were worth the waiting—for want of an unconsidered morsel of that supper that bulged his coat-pocket.
Bill Harnell might have been clairvoyant. Two hundred yards ahead, where the great dock-wall turned its vast flank into the lane, a bridge spanned a dark channel. It was the “Mr. Baker’s trap” of old days—since that coroner’s time called, with more sentiment and less wit, the Bridge of Sighs. Here the life-weary, and those drunk enough to feel so, from all Wapping, Shadwell, and Ratcliff flung over into the foul dock-fluid, and were drowned and lost, or fished out, dead or alive as the case might be, with boat-hooks. Mostly they were women. And there were so many that a policeman on that beat would stop and watch any woman as she crossed the bridge, and would hasten to move on one who showed a sign of lingering.
Now no policeman was in sight; no man but one, a hulking shadow, half visible up a foul passage. Down on the rail of the bridge a woman cowered, thinly clothed and almost shoeless, clutching the iron with both hands, and turning her eager, haggard face this way and that as she listened.
From along the lane came the sound of a slow, heavy tramp. A policeman! The woman rose and hurried toward the deeper shadow by the dock-wall. No—not a policeman; a home-going lighterman with heavy new water-boots. The woman hesitated and stopped. There were other, fai
nter footsteps farther off. Now—or wait? Now. She ran back to the middle of the bridge, seized the rail, flung her knee upon it and rolled over.
There was a great splash and a shriek. Bill Harnell, slow and heavy ashore, was deft and active in sight of water. From his trudge he broke into a clangorous run, and swung down by the bridge-foot to the quay. There was no boat and no long hook. In an instant his thick coat was off, and sitting on it, he tore off his heavy boots, dropped them on the spot, and dived. Something floated in the shadow of the bridge, and for that he swam. It was the woman, floating still, and shrieking, though now but faintly. He took her by the hair and turned for the quay steps. She made no trouble by way of clinging and clutching, for which Bill was duly thankful; for he had rescued before, in the river. Up the steps he dragged her by the armpits and set her down. There he left her, and took to staring about the quay paving: for the black heap of coat and boots was no longer there.
His glance rose from his feet, and lo! up by the bridge-foot, her single skirt clutched about her knees, scuttled the woman, nimble though dripping, and vanished in the foul passage, where now no hulking shadow was. Two seconds more of staring, and Bill followed in his wet socks. But the passage was empty. It led into an alley; the alley was empty also. Bill Harrell returned, and found a stranger or two.
“Lor’!” said an immense woman who kept her hands under her apron. “Done ’im for ’is boots, pore bloke. What a shame!”
“Wet, mate?” asked another, kindly.
“It’s jist the same of game,” pursued the first. “They done it afore, many’s a time. It’s water-boots they tries for mostly. They ought t’ ’ave six munse, both on ’em—’er an ’er bloke. She won’t never be drownded; swims like anythink!”
“Wot’s ’er name?” demanded Bill, as the state of the case grew apparent. “Oo are they, an’ where do they live?”
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