II
LIGHTNING IN THE FOG
He ran, he has told me since, like a man with a hue-and-cry in his ears, turning left or right at random. At last his breath failed; he remembered his rags, and noticed people looking suspiciously after him. He came out onto the river somewhere near the Tate Gallery, by a yard full of spray-battered old ship figureheads, and crossed the big new bridge to the Albert Embankment. At a river sluice below an iron yard men were unloading bundles of Belgian tees and angles from a barge. The river was falling fast, and he got an hour's job helping them to unload the cargo. It was on such casual labor, I suppose, that for months he had supported life. He was paid sixpence for his hour's work, and, seeing his strength and famished willingness, the lighter-men overloaded him and raised a weal on his shoulder. He was still nearly starving, but did not dare spend the money till later. By two o'clock in the afternoon the fog was general and very thick. He was standing in the centre of the little foot-bridge that runs under the viaduct from Charing Cross Station. Above his head trains rumbled softly and circumspectly. There were Pullman cars filled with sun-worshippers on their way from the winter-smitten city to France and Italy—to ivory villa and amethyst bay, maybe to the white sun-steeped cities upon whose ramparts he had once stood sentry. The fog-signals went off in his ears like cannon. On the Middlesex shore of the river was a dim bustle, muffled tang of gongs, constant flitting of blurred lights; but under the Surrey shore, lonely as a quicksand on the Breton coast, a strip of mud left by the falling tide shone, a coppery red, beneath the bulk of the big Lambeth brewery. Below his feet a squadron of empty lorries lay moored together, four—four—and three, like a hand of cards dealt face downward by a fortune-teller. All around him was mewing, as from a dozen litters of kittens; the fog became thick with the fluttering winged forms of sea birds. No one had passed him for a long time. He stretched out his arms and spoke aloud—
"Soul! what things are these that hem us in—that compass us about this November noontide, as we roam, stifled and uncertain, through Babylon's foggy streets? These towers, soaring into the infinite; these palaces, whose limits we conjecture from the dimmed overflow of light within; these chariots, rolling one instant soundless from obscurity, next instant engulfed by it? What things are they? Even such as to-day thou beholdest them: shadows, phantoms, vapor, and cloud. To-morrow the wind shall smite them, and their places know them no more; daylight seek them, and find them gone. Oh! paradox immeasurable, that where the sun had lied to thy senses fog should truly bespeak them!"
Solitary as he seemed, he had been observed for some time. A bulky figure, in heavy overcoat and helmet, stepped from behind a girder and touched him on the shoulder.
"Don't you think you'd best get to one side or the other? It's bad loitering weather."
Ingram started at the touch, then looked over his shoulder and laughed.
"I see," he said. "But there's no fear of that," and he looked at the river again. "You'd have come in after me, I suppose—boots, overcoat, and all."
"I'm not saying what I'd have done," the constable answered stolidly. "My dooty, I hope. But it's not the day I should choose to win the Albert Medal on."
He looked at the suspect closer, and seeing a man probably as strong as himself, his voice and manner changed. There was a new freemasonry in it when he spoke again, and a strange curiosity, shame-faced but eager.
"Man to man, mate; is it very bad?"
Ingram turned on his heels like the soldier he had been.
"Man to man—no. I've earned sixpence this morning; that's supper and bed. My nakedness is only an offence to the providence I've ceased to believe in, and I've the æsthetic sense which makes a thing like that," and he pointed to the patch of rosy mud, "a living joy. What man who works for bread will have more to say in two hundred years? Do you know there are great artists who'd go a day without food to paint truly what we've got under our feet. Not many English ones, though. I'll do them that justice."
"I think I know wot you mean," said S. 11. "I'm fond of pitchers myself. I suppose you know there's one of our force gets 'is pitcher into the 'cademy reg'lar every year. But hunger's one thing and starvation's another."
"It's not starvation, man; it's the fear of it that's putting out the sun and stars for three quarters of the world. 'Domywork or starve! domywork or starve!' that's what every factory hooter and works bell and alarm clock is ding-donging from morning till night. We're all too frightened to do ourselves justice. We sit down to our desk, or stand to our bench or easel with a full belly and an icy cold heart. So the great book never gets written, and the great picture never gets painted, and the great wrong never gets righted, and the soul we have no use for is passing into piston-rods and flywheels that eat up human flesh and blood as the beasts of the field chew grass. No thank you, constable. Didn't I tell you I'd got sixpence. Keep it for the next woman you have to move on.That'sthe shame—that'sthe unpardonable sin."
There had been no present thought of self-destruction in his mind, but, in spite of himself, the policeman's suspicion stirred a dormant idea that was now a comfort to him, now a terror, just so far as it lay vague or assumed definite shape. He climbed the ascent into the Strand, glad to be in the crowd again, and to feel himself jostled and elbowed by its hurrying life. Amid all the human tide that, after having turned the wheels of commerce all day, was now setting homeward, there was probably no one who walked straighter or brisker than he.
His long steps soon carried him into a distant quarter of the city; but as night fell he turned them toward Westminster again—back to the house where he had slept last night and perhaps many a night before. It was no better than others that lay to his hand, but at least its horrors were familiar. He shrank from new initiations. Besides, it was not seven o'clock, and eight was the earliest hour at which such places opened. How to kill an hour?—absorbing occupation for a mind like this.
He decided to follow the Embankment again. There, if his feverish walk outpaced the clock, he might loiter—lean upon the parapet, sit down upon one of the seats. He would buy some liver in Lambeth and cook it before the lodging-house fire. He was faint when he reached Blackfriars, and not from hunger alone. Dimly he divined a crisis. The last of a little store of illusions with which he concealed from himself how personal and irremediable was his misery had been expended during that wild talk with the man in blue upon the bridge. Something, if life was to continue, must supply its place.
The work upon the widening of the bridge was still in progress. Opposite De Keyser's Hotel a big wooden hoarding covered the pavement, making a little niche with the low granite wall of the Embankment. It was too early in the evening for the recess to be occupied or to be explored by the bull's-eye lantern of law and order. He crept within it under cover of the fog, and, resting his arms upon the wet granite wall, relit a half-smoked cigarette. All day long, throughout his defiant speech, his indignant bearing, his wretched assumption of energy, he had felt himself under an observation as unfriendly as it was thorough. Some other self, cold, critical, sneering, was watching his struggles with amused contempt. He had felt its presence before, but never so utterly detached, so hostile or so impatient. Thatalter sewhich education creates and easy living nourishes, and which, deplore him as we may, is a personality to be reckoned with at every crisis and in every action of our lives, is never long content to outlive such an experience as his. It is only a question of time before the rational in man wearies of prison and poor entertainment.
"Let us go hence!"
Ingram smoked his cigarette until it burnt his lips, leaned over the parapet, and, as he dropped the glowing end into the river, measured the distance to the water that was "clop-clopping" soupily against the foot of the Embankment. His isolation in the heart of London was strangely complete, for such foot-passengers as passed, passed wide of him by a railed plank walk built outside of the great wooden hoarding that concealed him from view. The wide roadway, moreover, full of vague sound and motion—blast of motor-horns, rumble of trams, quick come and go of blurred lamps, accentuated his solitude. He waited until a heavy tread that was going westward had died away into the fog. Then he drew up his legs, first one, then the other, upon the parapet beside his hands.
"Oh Gawd! oh Gawd!" a voice groaned behind him. He checked his sinister movement and listened intently. Some one—some fellow-creature in torment—was cursing and sobbing on the pavement he had just left. He got down and groped for it. A man, huddled together, and with one leg jerking convulsively, was lying with his head against the boards.
Ingram put his arms round him and lifted him gently.