PART III
I
THE BATHS OF APOLLO
On a foggy November morning of the year whose events have been chronicled a man came out of a house in Westminster and stood for a moment on the worn steps, supporting himself against one of the pillars of the porch, to blink sorely at the raw day. The house he was leaving was one of a few old buildings that still exist on the long, crooked street whose northern frontage follows the ancient precincts of royal abbey and palace. From its size, the graceful detail of its doorway, the white and black squares unevenly paving its hall and the depth of brickwork which the long recessed windows revealed, one judged at once that this had been, in days gone by, the town mansion of a great legal or political family, forced by its very functions to dwell at the gates of the legislature. But whatever it had been in olden times, to-day the great house was inexpressibly sordid and degraded. The cupids and garlands of its doorway, blunted by two centuries of whistling house-painters, had well-nigh disappeared once for all beneath a last coat of coarse red-brown paint. With the same dismal tint—the old penitential hue of the galleys—were daubed window-sashes and sills, the panelling of the wide hall, the carved brackets that supported the crumbling edges of its tiled roof. Within, one conjectured rightly bare lime-washed walls—disinfection, not decoration—sodden boards worn away round the knots. Even in the foggy half-light, so merciful to all that has beauty of outline still to show, its crude defacement did not escape. One felt that the pickaxe and sledge-hammer of the house-breaker, busy in a neighboring hoarded space, spared it too long.
A thick, dun mist had been creeping up-river since dawn from the Kent and Essex levels, gathering up on its way the filthy smoke of glue factories and chemical works, and holding it suspended over the spires and domes of the Imperial city. The close alleys and wynds that, like a fungus growth upon polluted soil, cover the area once sacred to the brothels and dog-kennels of the Plantagenet Court, seemed not so much to be endued with smoke and grime as actually to be built up out of compacted slabs of the sooty atmosphere. The sun was still in the east—a red wafer stuck on a sealed sky.
For a few minutes the man stood still, as if either too tired to make up his mind which way he should take, or as if, really paralyzed for the moment by the equilibrium of the forces that acted on his will, he was at the point where, vertigo having seized upon the mind and, as it were, disorientated it, direction loses its meaning. It is almost certain that had any passer-by—a policeman, a man bearing a burden, even a child—jostled the man, he would have gone on in the direction to which the collision turned him.
He wore a jacket and trousers of what had once been blue serge, faded by exposure, by dust, by rain that soaked in the dust, and sun that dried the rain in turn, to that color which is obtained by mixing all the primaries upon a palette. A streak of the coat's original color showed still under the upturned collar, and had the effect of a facing upon a soldier's tunic. Coat and trousers were miserably frayed at the edges, but neatly mended in more than one place. Probably from being worn night and day upon an almost naked body, the stiff straight lines natural to modern clothing had disappeared, and they had acquired, in their place, an actual mould of the limbs. His shoes, spattered with mud and grease, seemed once to have been brown. They were broken, and the heels had been trodden down so far that the soles curled up in front like an eastern slipper. The man was quite clean, his hair and beard even trimly kept. His face was refined. Whatever physical suffering he was undergoing or had undergone, it was evident he had not yet reached the depth at which the soul contracts and shrivels once for all, and, dropping into some inmost recess where only death shall find it again, leaves the animal epidermis to bear the outrage of life. Under one eye the discoloration of an old bruise showed faintly.
As he looked about him—first above his head, then mechanically to left and right—what was almost a look of relief and peace came over the tortured face. In this narrow drab margin twixt night and night—a day only by the calendar and by the duties it imposed—it is possible he felt something akin. Something of the mechanical precision of life that was such a reproach to his own confusion would have to be relaxed. It would be a day of late trains, of crawling, interlocked traffic, of sudden warnings from the darkness, with the ever-present possibility of some levelling disaster to lend a zest to the empty hours. Excluded from human communion on the side of its pleasures, the outcast yearns toward it all the more upon the side of its pain and mischance. What is the savagery of revolution but a very exaltation of perverted sympathy? "Weep with me, my brother," says the red of hand, "weep with me at least, since I might not rejoice with you."
He had been the last to leave the common lodging-house which had given him a night's shelter, and, as he lingered, the deputy, a big, fleshy man in shirt-sleeves, came down the passage behind him, whistling and sweeping before him the caked mud which forty pairs of broken shoes had brought in during the night. At the sound of his broom against the wainscot, the man turned sharply, with a sudden energy that was like the release of a coiled spring, and, thrusting his hands into his pockets, strode off to the left quickly and aimlessly as a caged wolf. Where Great Smith Street runs into Victoria Street he turned to his left again, and followed the main thoroughfare southward. Through the happy accident of its deflection midway, at the point where the colossal doorway of the Windsor Hotel confronts the Army and Navy Stores, Victoria Street possesses, as all visitors to London with the architectural sense must have noticed, a dignity and effectiveness unique in the city of costly ineptitude. Approached from the river at sunset or sunrise, or in any light low enough and dim enough to hide the sorry detail of its lofty houses, the effect approaches the monumental. The wanderer's eyes had been fixed on the ground; but, possibly arriving at some spot where in former days he had been used to watch for it, he raised his head and stood, unsteadily, for a few seconds, intent upon the beauty with which the world is as prodigal as it is niggardly of its substance. The sky was an orange dun, deepening and lightening almost momentarily, as though some pigment with which the day was to be dyed later were being prepared overhead. The long Italianesque façade of the stores was all one blue shadow, but over its roof, through some atmospheric freak, the campanile of the new cathedral emerged, pale pink and cream, and in the upper windows of the great hotel, whose pillars and helmed mask closed the prospect on the right, a few wavering squares as of strawberry tinsel foil reflected the foggy sun. As he watched, leaning against the railing, one might have noticed his lips move. He took his clenched fists from his pockets, and opened them slowly with a strange gesture of surrender. It was as though some inward resolution, evidenced by the hasty walk, the lowered eye, the clenched hands, yielded at its first contact with the influence he was attempting to forswear.
A man who had been walking hastily from the opposite direction, with a long roll of blue prints under his arm, stopped short, pulled off his glove, and, diving into his trouser pocket, pulled out a copper and pressed it against one of the open palms. The dreamer started, closed his hand upon the penny convulsively, and, without a word of thanks, gazed after the bustling figure. He opened his fingers slowly and looked at the coin, with the same fear and repugnance that a sick man might show who, having put his hand to his mouth, finds blood upon it. Then, still holding it in his hand, he quickened his walk, until it was almost a run.
In a baker's shop near the terminus he spent half the money on a stale roll, and ate it, standing in the doorway of the Underground Station, and using his free hand to cover his mouth, as though he felt his voracity was indecent. A wretched little waif—a girl child, bareheaded, in a long dress like a woman's, and with her hair done up in a wisp—seeing him eating, approached, held out a hand scaled with dirt like a fish's skin, and begged of those rags with the same blind confidence with which the child in heart asks relief of a beggared providence. He gave her the halfpenny, and as much of the bread as he had not eaten; then, crossing the road, he shouldered his way into the station yard.
The Continental Night Mail, more than half an hour late on account of the fog, was just in. A long line of motor-cabs, with an occasional four-wheeler, stood along the curb. Porters in charge of portmanteaux and trunks were shouting and gesticulating; the air was full of grunts, whistles, and the sudden clatter of horses' feet catching hold on the pavement. The man paid no attention to the motor-cabs, but, slipping behind a four-wheeler loaded with luggage and a bicycle, followed it from the yard and into the street.
The cab rolled along through Pimlico and in the direction of the river. Almost immediately the station was left the fog shut down and hid the houses on either side. The driver, an old street pilot of thirty years, kept on at a steady amble; the man behind, quite ignorant of his destination, settled down to a steady loping run, which apparently he was prepared to keep to between the wheels as long as the horse kept to it between the shafts.
At a cross-traffic break he looked up, and saw he was not alone. A short, thick-set stranger, with a bullet head and strangling, wheezy breath, had joined himen route. That competition which is said to be the soul of trade was not to be lacking.
"Ullo!" said the stertorous one, as soon as he felt himself observed. "W'ere didyoucome from?"
Finding he was not rebuked, he thought it safe to essay a little further.
"You be awf and find a —— keb for yourself. D'jeer? Follered this from the stishun, I did."
His bearded brother in misfortune gave him such a look that he judged it wise to defer settling the difference. The cab started again, turned, and twisted in the maze of stucco streets, always followed by the two men; stopped finally in a crescent that even in daylight was secluded, but in a fog might be said to be mislaid. Bullet head, being outside the wheel, used his tactical advantage to lay one authoritative hand on the leather trunk and the other on the bicycle.
"It's aw ri', guv'nor," he called, reassuringly through the window to their proprietor. Even as he spoke, he was himself deposited upon the pavement in an efficient manner of which the tall comrade's face had given no hint. Followed, not so much a volley of oaths, as a kind of set-piece, a transparency of language, which hung suspended in the shocked air of Pimlico long enough for a window or two to open, presumably in protest. Appealed to by his fare, a literary gentleman of peaceful habit, upon the score of age and experience, the driver refused to be drawn into the conflict.
"Settle it between yerselves," he said complacently, sucking on a voice lozenge and pocketing his legal fare. "Door to door, my trade is, and don't ferget it." A woman meantime had opened the hall door, and was scolding every one, impartially, in the dialect of Fifeshire.
Nothing goads to madness like foiled knavery. The tall man, having already shouldered the trunk, the short one laid a violent and ill-advised hand upon it from behind. Next moment it was set upon the ground and with a vigorous movement of the shoulders that gave his words authority, the dreamer spoke for the first time, in a voice whose accent and whose idiom alike were familiar.
"See here, now! You have one minute to hit the grit. If you're not gone then, I'll lay that mouth of yours against the sidewalk and give it the dry cleaning it needs. Now that goes—all the way!"
"My God!" I cried, "it's Ingram!"
He turned to run, but I clung to him. He was a powerful man, much stronger, even exhausted as he was, than I have been at any time, but I am proud to think my grip upon him never once gave way. At last he desisted, perhaps because he heard tears in my voice, and disengaged my fingers gently.
"Ingram! Oh! in God's name what does it mean? I thought you'd gone back—thought you were thousands of miles away."
He laughed. "Can't you see what it is, Prentice? It's the last note in journalism. A delegate to the depths. Talks with the underworld. I'm doing it pretty thoroughly, don't you think?"
Well, I stood there and pleaded with him. His competitor carried in the baggage meekly, under Mrs. Mac's petrifying eye, was paid, and went his way—the mystified Jehu cracked his whip and rumbled off into the fog before I had exhausted half the arguments and expedients with which my brain swarmed. I wanted him to take money, to come in and be fed and clothed, to go back to America (assisted passage). He shook his head at everything, and at the last suggestion set his bearded jaw hard. I thought his objection very fanciful.
"I won't go back," he said, "to see a democracy that has had its chance and missed it, done to death with a golden bandage over its eyes. It's less hard to stop here among the poor devils that have never known what economic independence meant."
He found reasons equally good or equally bad for resisting my offers toward rehabilitation in England.
"It's no use, Prentice," he said, again and again. "Believe me, between the very last rung of the social ladder and the depths in which I'm swimming round and round, and waiting for the final suffocation, there's a sheer fall that no power on earth can ever bridge again. From where I am I can speak still, hear still, even feel. I look up and see living men on the slope above me. Some are slipping down, some, who have stood once on the verge and looked over, are crawling up again, weak and half dead from terror. But I and those with me are past help. You don't know the gulf that separates having a little money, even your last pound, from having none at all. That's an experience as final and irremediable as death. None can imagine it unless they have known it, and none that have known it ever come back to tell."
Before such remorseless logic I weakened, little by little. I told him he was ungenerous—that friendship involved debts of honor he had never been willing to pay; finally I went into the house to make him up a parcel of warm underclothing. I remember blubbering like a whipped lower-form urchin as I ransacked drawers and trunks, and how the string kept snapping as I tried to tie up the great untidy brown-paper parcel. When I came downstairs the street was empty.