Part 50 (1/2)
”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 phosph.o.r.escent sc.r.a.ps 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 h.e.l.l-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 h.e.l.l, that room. And in the midst of all the rout, the relieving officer stood impa.s.sive, jotting down sc.r.a.ps 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 superst.i.tious 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, superst.i.tious, 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!
CHAPTER x.x.xVI.
DREAMLAND.
It must have been two o'clock in the morning before I reached my lodgings.
Too much exhausted to think, I hurried to my bed. I remember now that I reeled strangely as I went up-stairs. I lay down, and was asleep in an instant.
How long I had slept I know not, when I awoke with a strange confusion and whirling in my brain, and an intolerable weight and pain about my back and loins. By the light of the gas-lamp I saw a figure standing at the foot of my bed. I could not discern the face, but I knew instinctively that it was my mother. I called to her again and again, but she did not answer. She moved slowly away, and pa.s.sed out through the wall of the room.
I tried to follow her, but could not. An enormous, unutterable weight seemed to lie upon me. The bedclothes grew and grew before me, and upon me, into a vast mountain, millions of miles in height. Then it seemed all glowing red, like the cone of a volcano. I heard the roaring of the fires within, the rattling of the cinders down the heaving slope. A river ran from its summit; and up that river-bed it seemed I was doomed to climb and climb for ever, millions and millions of miles upwards, against the rus.h.i.+ng stream. The thought was intolerable, and I shrieked aloud. A raging thirst had seized me. I tried to drink the river-water: but it was boiling hot--sulphurous--reeking of putrefaction. Suddenly I fancied that I could pa.s.s round the foot of the mountain; and jumbling, as madmen will, the sublime and the ridiculous, I sprang up to go round the foot of my bed, which was the mountain.
I recollect lying on the floor. I recollect the people of the house, who had been awoke by my shriek and my fall, rus.h.i.+ng in and calling to me. I could not rise or answer. I recollect a doctor; and talk about brain fever and delirium. It was true. I was in a raging fever. And my fancy, long pent-up and crushed by circ.u.mstances, burst out in uncontrollable wildness, and swept my other faculties with it helpless away over all heaven and earth, presenting to me, as in a vast kaleidoscope, fantastic symbols of all I had ever thought, or read, or felt.
That fancy of the mountain returned; but I had climbed it now. I was wandering along the lower ridge of the Himalaya. On my right the line of snow peaks showed like a rosy saw against the clear blue morning sky.
Raspberries and cyclamens were peeping through the snow around me. As I looked down the abysses, I could see far below, through the thin veils of blue mist that wandered in the glens, the silver spires of giant deodars, and huge rhododendrons glowing like trees of flame. The longing of my life to behold that cradle of mankind was satisfied. My eyes revelled in vastness, as they swept over the broad flat jungle at the mountain foot, a desolate sheet of dark gigantic gra.s.ses, furrowed with the paths of the buffalo and rhinoceros, with barren sandy water-courses, desolate pools, and here and there a single tree, stunted with malaria, shattered by mountain floods; and far beyond, the vast plains of Hindostan, enlaced with myriad silver rivers and ca.n.a.ls, tanks and rice-fields, cities with their mosques and minarets, gleaming among the stately palm-groves along the boundless horizon. Above me was a Hindoo temple, cut out of the yellow sandstone. I climbed up to the higher tier of pillars among monstrous shapes of G.o.ds and fiends, that mouthed and writhed and mocked at me, struggling to free themselves from their bed of rock. The bull Nundi rose and tried to gore me; hundred-handed G.o.ds brandished quoits and sabres round my head; and Kali dropped the skull from her gore-dripping jaws, to clutch me for her prey. Then my mother came, and seizing the pillars of the portico, bent them like reeds: an earthquake shook the hills--great sheets of woodland slid roaring and cras.h.i.+ng into the valleys--a tornado swept through the temple halls, which rocked and tossed like a vessel in a storm: a crash--a cloud of yellow dust which filled the air--choked me--blinded me--buried me--
And Eleanor came by, and took my soul in the palm of her hand, as the angels did Faust's, and carried it to a cavern by the seaside, and dropped it in; and I fell and fell for ages. And all the velvet mosses, rock flowers, and sparkling spars and ores, fell with me, round me, in showers of diamonds, whirlwinds of emerald and ruby, and pattered into the sea that moaned below, and were quenched; and the light lessened above me to one small spark, and vanished; and I was in darkness, and turned again to my dust.
And I was at the lowest point of created life; a madrepore rooted to the rock, fathoms below the tide-mark; and worst of all, my individuality was gone. I was not one thing, but many things--a crowd of innumerable polypi; and I grew and grew, and the more I grew the more I divided, and multiplied thousand and ten thousandfold. If I could have thought, I should have gone mad at it; but I could only feel.
And I heard Eleanor and Lillian talking, as they floated past me through the deep, for they were two angels; and Lillian said, ”When will he be one again?”
And Eleanor said, ”He who falls from the golden ladder must climb through ages to its top. He who tears himself in pieces by his l.u.s.ts, ages only can make him one again. The madrepore shall become a sh.e.l.l, and the sh.e.l.l a fish, and the fish a bird, and the bird a beast; and then he shall become a man again, and see the glory of the latter days.”
And I was a soft crab, under a stone on the sea-sh.o.r.e. With infinite starvation, and struggling, and kicking, I had got rid of my armour, s.h.i.+eld by s.h.i.+eld, and joint by joint, and cowered, naked and pitiable, in the dark, among dead sh.e.l.ls and ooze. Suddenly the stone was turned up; and there was my cousin's hated face laughing at me, and pointing me out to Lillian. She laughed too, as I looked up, sneaking, ashamed, and defenceless, and squared up at him with my soft useless claws. Why should she not laugh? Are not crabs, and toads, and monkeys, and a hundred other strange forms of animal life, jests of nature--embodiments of a divine humour, at which men are meant to laugh and be merry? But, alas! my cousin, as he turned away, thrust the stone back with his foot, and squelched me flat.
And I was a remora, weak and helpless, till I could attach myself to some living thing; and then I had power to stop the largest s.h.i.+p. And Lillian was a flying fish, and skimmed over the crests of the waves on gauzy wings.
And my cousin was a huge shark, rus.h.i.+ng after her, greedy and open-mouthed; and I saw her danger, and clung to him, and held him back; and just as I had stopped him, she turned and swam back into his open jaws.