Part 85 (1/2)

We had to stoop and head it at the corners of streets. Not many people were out, and those who were, seemed to be hurrying home. A few little provision-shops, and a few inferior butchers' stalls were still open.

Their great jets of gas, which looked as if they must poison the meat, were flaming fierce and horizontal, roaring like fiery flags, and anon dying into a blue hiss. Discordant singing, more like the howling of wild beasts, came from the corner houses, which blazed like the gates of h.e.l.l. Their doors were ever on the swing, and the hot odours of death rushed out, and the cold blast of life rushed in. We paused a little before one of them--over the door, upon the sign, was in very deed the name Death. There were ragged women within who took their half-dead babies from their bare, cold, cheerless bosoms, and gave them of the poison of which they themselves drank renewed despair in the name of comfort. They say that most of the gin consumed in London is drunk by women. And the little clay-coloured baby-faces made a grimace or two, and sank to sleep on the thin tawny b.r.e.a.s.t.s of the mothers, who having gathered courage from the essence of despair, faced the scowling night once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went--whither? Where do they all go when the gin-h.e.l.ls close their yawning jaws? Where do they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations, under dry arches, within h.o.a.rdings; or they make vain attempts to rest the night out upon door-steps or curbstones. All their life long man denies them the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that once that life is over, he can no longer deny it--the right of room to lie down. s.p.a.ce itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move on, is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air into their graves.

In St. James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great house.

Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had for nothing by those who had nothing to pay. Oh! the children with clothes too ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that stared at the childless d.u.c.h.ess descending from her lordly carriage! Oh! the wan faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes--not yet too envious of unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed to them the angels, the G.o.ddesses of their kind. 'O G.o.d!' I thought, but dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou couldst give them all the gracious garments of rose and blue and white if thou wouldst! Why should these not be like those? They are hungry even, and wan and torn. These too are thy children. There is wealth enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy starry s.p.a.ces, O G.o.d!' But a voice--the echo of Falconer's teaching, awoke in my heart--'Because I would have these more blessed than those, and those more blessed with them, for they are all my children.'

By the Mall we came into Whitehall, and so to Westminster Bridge.

Falconer had changed his mind, and would cross at once. The present bridge was not then finished, and the old bridge alongside of it was still in use for pedestrians. We went upon it to reach the other side.

Its centre rose high above the other, for the line of the new bridge ran like a chord across the arc of the old. Through chance gaps in the boarding between, we looked down on the new portion which was as yet used by carriages alone. The moon had, throughout the evening, alternately shone in brilliance from amidst a lake of blue sky, and been overwhelmed in billowy heaps of wind-tormented clouds. As we stood on the apex of the bridge, looking at the night, the dark river, and the ma.s.s of human effort about us, the clouds gathered and closed and tumbled upon her in crowded layers. The wind howled through the arches beneath, swept along the boarded fences, and whistled in their holes.

The gas-lights blew hither and thither, and were perplexed to live at all.

We were standing at a spot where some shorter pieces had been used in the h.o.a.rding; and, although I could not see over them, Falconer, whose head rose more than half a foot above mine, was looking on the other bridge below. Suddenly he grasped the top with his great hands, and his huge frame was over it in an instant. I was on the top of the h.o.a.rding the same moment, and saw him prostrate some twelve feet below. He was up the next instant, and running with huge paces diagonally towards the Surrey side. He had seen the figure of a woman come flying along from the Westminster side, without bonnet or shawl. When she came under the spot where we stood, she had turned across at an obtuse angle towards the other side of the bridge, and Falconer, convinced that she meant to throw herself into the river, went over as I have related. She had all but scrambled over the fence--for there was no parapet yet--by the help of the great beam that ran along to support it, when he caught her by her garments. So poor and thin were those garments, that if she had not been poor and thin too, she would have dropped from them into the darkness below. He took her in his arms, lifted her down upon the bridge, and stood as if protecting her from a pursuing death. I had managed to find an easier mode of descent, and now stood a little way from them.

'Poor girl! poor girl!' he said, as if to himself: 'was this the only way left?'

Then he spoke tenderly to her. What he said I could not hear--I only heard the tone.

'O sir!' she cried, in piteous entreaty, 'do let me go. Why should a wretched creature like me be forced to live? It's no good to you, sir.

Do let me go.'

'Come here,' he said, drawing her close to the fence. 'Stand up again on the beam. Look down.'

She obeyed, in a mechanical kind of way. But as he talked, and she kept looking down on the dark mystery beneath, flowing past with every now and then a dull vengeful glitter--continuous, forceful, slow, he felt her shudder in his still clasping arm.

'Look,' he said, 'how it crawls along--black and slimy! how silent and yet how fierce! Is that a nice place to go to down there? Would there be any rest there, do you think, tumbled about among filth and creeping things, and slugs that feed on the dead; among drowned women like yourself drifting by, and murdered men, and strangled babies? Is that the door by which you would like to go out of the world?'

'It's no worse,' she faltered, '--not so bad as what I should leave behind.'

'If this were the only way out of it, I would not keep you from it. I would say, ”Poor thing! there is no help: she must go.” But there is another way.'

'There is no other way, sir--if you knew all,' she said.

'Tell me, then.'

'I cannot. I dare not. Please--I would rather go.'

She looked, from the mere glimpses I could get of her, somewhere about five-and-twenty, making due allowance for the wear of suffering so evident even in those glimpses. I think she might have been beautiful if the waste of her history could have been restored. That she had had at least some advantages of education, was evident from both her tone and her speech. But oh, the wild eyes, and the tortured lips, drawn back from the teeth with an agony of hopelessness, as she struggled anew, perhaps mistrusting them, to escape from the great arms that held her!

'But the river cannot drown you,' Falconer said. 'It can only stop your breath. It cannot stop your thinking. You will go on thinking, thinking, all the same. Drowning people remember in a moment all their past lives.

All their evil deeds come up before them, as if they were doing them all over again. So they plunge back into the past and all its misery. While their bodies are drowning, their souls are coming more and more awake.'

'That is dreadful,' she murmured, with her great eyes fixed on his, and growing steadier in their regard. She had ceased to struggle, so he had slackened his hold of her, and she was leaning back against the fence.

'And then,' he went on, 'what if, instead of closing your eyes, as you expected, and going to sleep, and forgetting everything, you should find them come open all at once, in the midst of a mult.i.tude of eyes all round about you, all looking at you, all thinking about you, all judging you? What if you should hear, not a tumult of voices and noises, from which you could hope to hide, but a solemn company talking about you--every word clear and plain, piercing your heart with what you could not deny,--and you standing naked and s.h.i.+vering in the midst of them?'

'It is too dreadful!' she cried, making a movement as if the very horror of the idea had a fascination to draw her towards the realization of it.

'But,' she added, yielding to Falconer's renewed grasp, 'they wouldn't be so hard upon me there. They would not be so cruel as men are here.'