Part 10

The wind blew bitter cold from the heights of Hampstead. A livid moon blinked through rifts in ink-black cloud-wrack above the Shot Towers and a huge mass of brewery-buildings on the right. On the left, revealed in glimpses and suggestions by stray moonbeams and wind-blown lamp-flares, was a great confusion of trucks and trolleys; huge cranes rearing skeleton arms aloft, colossal cauldrons, heaps of clay beside yawning trenches, winking red eyes of warning for belated wanderers. All this beyond a banking-face of stone masonry with completed piers, showed where the Victoria Embankment would be by-and-by. Meanwhile chaos reigned; the area would have been an appropriate playground for the inhabitants of Bethlem Hospital, in hours of relaxation, or on national holidays.

P. C. Breagh laughed gallantly at his own conceit, and his chapped lips cracked and hurt him. He staunched the bleeding with his handkerchief, conscious that a day might come when he should cease to have any use for such an article. Habits die hard with us, but the cleanly ones go first, being acquired. We continue to desire food and drink long after we have left off caring about the color of our linen--nay! long after we have become indifferent to the fact that we wear no linen at all.

He was bone-weary; his thigh-bones seemed wearing through their sockets. His knees ached, his feet were heavy as solid lumps of lead. It occurred to him that the two things most desirable on earth were an arm-chair and a roasting fire to toast before. Failing that, a seat on a stone bench, with a north wind gnawing you was better than nothing.... He thought that by now one of the sleepers in the niches would have wakened up and moved on.

Vain hope. Where one had withdrawn, his place had been filled by three newcomers. Misery, Dirt, Drunkenness, Disease, and Wretchedness herded in those stony refuges, mercifully winked at by the patroling policeman with the unsavory-smelling bull's-eye. And strange beings perambulated or crept the pavement; 2 a.m. is the time when you may see them!--emerging from the foul hiding-places where they pass the daylight hours, to wander forth unseen....

Such goblin forms, such Gorgon faces, revealed by some fitful ray of watery moonlight, or the lamp of a languid, belated cab.... It was a waking nightmare, a Dantesque vision realized, inconceivably hideous to nerves already weakening. The Celtic strain derived from his father, in conjunction with the sensitive romantic nature bequeathed by Milly Fermeroy, might have urged their son to end things that bleak January night, with a leap from the parapet and a plunge into the wild black welter tumbling under the Bridge arches. But P. C. Breagh was not fated to join the procession of grim, unconscious voyagers, that wallow in the tides and circle in the eddies, flounder under the sides of barges, beat upon the piles and bridge-piers, and sink to slumber in the river-sludge a while, before they rise, more dreadful than before, to journey on again....

His mother's faith plucked him as before, from the desperate brink of the temptation; and--he had worked in the dissecting-rooms and walked the hospitals, toward that end of failure previously recorded,--and the hardening did yeoman's service now. But it went badly with him--at one period of that week-long night particularly.... He never liked to speak of that experience.... But long, long afterward he said to one who loved him:

"I held on to my reason, and prayed Our Lord for daylight. And--I don't know how I managed--but somehow, I got through!"

He found a seat at length, not knowing by whom or how it had been vacated, and dropped into it and slept like the dead. And he awoke in a windless lull,--to a strange bluish-yellow radiance in the sky beyond the great squat dome of St. Paul's and the crowding chimneys of the City: and felt the stir and thrill and quiver that is the sign of this sad world's waking to yet another day.

Three homeless women shared the seat with him. Two were awake, watching him not unkindly. A third slept, leaning forward in a huddled attitude, propped by the handle of a basket she held upon her knees. She breathed in whistling squeals,--a night on Waterloo Bridge in January encourages bronchitis.... He listened for a moment, then with a prodigal impulse, dropped twopence of his eightpence into the basket on her lap. And she woke, and said with an Irish accent:

"May the heavens be yer bed!" and slept again, heavily.

The second woman snuffled out in the accents of the East End:

"Gawd bless you, good gen'leman!"

The third lifted a tattered scarlet head-shawl, and flashed a pair of jet-black Oriental eyes upon him:

"Fortune and Life!"

To her he said, with a creditable effort at cheeriness:

"I've lost the fortune, mother! the life's about all I've got that's left to me!"

"And a good thing too, my gorgious! Don't yer complain of it! Come, tip us yer vast!" She added, as he stared uncomprehending--"Eight or left-hand dook--whichever the Line's brightest in. Have yer a--No! I'll give yer of my jinnepen for naught!"

He held out the broad, strong palm, grimy enough by dawn-light. She peered, spat on the chilly gray pavement and said:

"You keep up heart--there's a change a-coming soon!"

"Can't come too soon for me!" His smile was rueful.

"Keep up heart, I tell yer!" she bade him. "Yer'll travel a long road and a bloody road, and yer'll tramp it with the one yer love, and never know it. Until the end, that is, when tute is jasing. And there's a finer fortune than I meant yer to get o' me! Shake her up, Bet!" She explained, as the other woman turned to rouse the sleeper, "Taken a great cold, she has! We're fetching her to the Hospital. 'Tholomewses in Smithell, for the gorgio doctors to make her well. Though that's not where I would lie, my rye, and my pipes playing the death-tune. Shoon tu, dilya! Better shake her again!"

"Wake up, deer! There's a good soul!"

They stood up, supporting the bronchial Irishwoman between them, shaking and straightening their frowsy garments--tidying themselves as the poorest women will. Then with, a farewell word they moved on, northward. And P. C. Breagh, following them with reddened, night-weary eyes, saw his Fate coming, though he did not know it, in the person of a small and shabbily-attired elderly man.

XIV

He came striding from the Strand side, in a red-hot hurry, making as much noise with his boots as three ordinary pedestrians. He wore no overcoat, but was buttoned up in a decent black serge frock, having his throat protected by a large white cashmere wrapper. Also he wore gray mixture trousers, rather baggy at the knees, and shiny, and was crowned with a well-worn silk top-hat.

He walked at a great pace, swinging his arms, which were inordinately lengthy, and finished with hands of extra size, encased in white knitted woolen bags not distantly resembling boxing-gloves. When he reached the middle of the Bridge, he stopped and backed against the west parapet, folded his arms, and,--or so it seemed to P. C. Breagh, who was watching him for the sole reason that he happened to be the only cheerful-looking, decently-clad human being within his range of vision--snuffed the breeze, and considered the prospect with a consciously-possessive air. In moving his head sideways, so as to extend his view, his sharp black glance encountered that of his neighbor, and he nodded, and thus their acquaintance began.

"I'm glad to see, young gentleman," said the little man--and "_My eye! Do I still look like anything of that sort?_" was the young gentleman's unvoiced aside: "I'm glad to see that you don't number one among the many thousands--if I was to say Millions I shouldn't be guilty of exaggeration--who under-estimate the value of fresh morning air. For my part, without boasting, I may call myself a walking Monument to its healthiness, or as you can't put up a monument to a live man--I'll say, a Living Testimonial."

He had a yellow, tight-drawn, wearied skin, with a patch of rather hectic red on either cheekbone, and his bright black eyes twinkled at the bottom of hollow orbits, overshadowed by shaggy eyebrows of the deepest black. When he took off his hat to cool his head, from which quite a cloud of steam arose, you could perceive that he was baldish, and that his bristly hair and large mutton-chop side-whiskers owed, like his shaggy eyebrows, their intense and aggressive blackness to a conscientious but unskillful dyer, for by the cold and searching light of morning, delicate nuances of green and purple were seen to mingle with their youthful sable, and here and there the roots showed grayish-white.

"I was given up by the Doctors at the age of twenty," said the little man, "as I had been previously give up by 'em at eleven and fifteen. 'The boy's in Rapid Decline,' says one, 'keep him out o' drafts and give him boiled snails and asses' milk.' My poor mother did her best, stopping up window-cracks with paste and paper, and stuffing chimneys with old carpets. And living as we was at Hampstead Village, and the Heath being productive in snails and donkeys, the rest o' the prescription was easy to carry out. Still I got lankier and went on coughing o' nights. Says Doctor Number Two, 'It's a case of Galloping Consumption. Feed him up, clothe him warmly, encourage him to take gentle exercise, and avoid chills whatever you do!' So my mother swadged me up in flannel, made me eat a mutton chop every two hours, and trot up and down the front-garden for exercise between chops; and she'd pour half-a-pint o' porter down me whenever I stood still. And in spite of all her affectionate solicitude," said the little man with a twinkle, "I kep' on wasting, and coughing and spitting, and doing everything that a young fellow in a galloping consumption could do, short of galloping out o' this world into another. And Doctor Number Three says,--being called in when I was twenty: 'It's _phthisis pulmonalis_ in the advanced and incurable stage. You can do nothing at all for this young man but get him into an Institute for Incurables. Codliver Oil, Care, and Kindness,' so says he, 'may prolong his miserable existence a month or two. For the rest, there's nothing to be done!' If you'll believe me, that news was the death of my poor mother. She'd expected nothing else for years--and yet it killed her at the end! And I acted as Chief Mourner at her funeral," ended the little man with a queer twist of his lean, sharp jaws and a momentary dimming of his keen black eyes, "in the pouring rain, and walked home without an overcoat--and got wet to the skin, and stripped, and rubbed myself dry, and made a rough supper of scalding oatmeal porridge, and went to bed and slep' with the windows open top and bottom. And that was over thirty years ago, and I've never missed my morning sponge-over with cold water since; nor never shut a window night or day, nor never run up a doctor's bill, and don't mean to! I left off coddling--once the blessed old soul was gone! Got better--better still--always expected to die by those who'd knowed mother. I traveled and saw Foreign Parts,--not specially going about to pick the 'ealthiest climates, knocked about abroad--came home and took to Business, and have taken to it ever since, as you may see. My health is robust," he made a show of hitting his chest again, but thought better of it. "I live plain, and make a point of getting Fresh Air into my system whenever possible.--This is the place I come to, as a rule, for the morning's supply. I take it on Blackfriars Bridge after the dinner-hour, the eating-house I patronize being on Ludgate Hill," he added. "And--I don't know whether you happen to be a student of old Bill Shakespeare, but there are some lines of his which might be twisted into applying to me." He drew a deep breath and delivered himself as follows:

"Some are born Tough, some achieve Toughness--others have Toughness thrust upon them."

He smote his chest hard with a muffled hand, and coughed in that rather hollow fashion, adding: "Without vanity, I may consider myself as belonging to the latter class! Eh?"

P. C. Breagh agreed that the speaker might be considered as belonging to the latter class.

"For at this moment I am as fresh as paint," said the little man proudly, "and as lively as a kitten, yet I have been up and about and on my legs all night! I left our place of business at 3.20 a.m., reached Charing Cross by 3.30, was on the platform when the Dover Boat Train steamed in--bringing mails and passengers that have crossed in the Night Boat from Cally--took over a shorthand report from a Special Correspondent--who has been to Paris to gather details of a political murder," he tapped the breast of his black frock-coat, which showed the bulging outline of a thick notebook. "And in the absence of our News Editor--who's been sent to Brummagem to report Mr. Bright's speech on Popular Education, Irish Amelioration, and Free Trade,--Parliamentary affairs being at a standstill this holiday season,--I shall hand 'em to the Senior Sub., who'll distribute the stuff and have it set up by the time the Chief drops in from Putney at eleven. It's for to-morrow's issue, following the ten-line telegram we publish this morning. A column-and-a-half of Latest Intelligence!" the little man screwed up his eyes and licked his lips as though reveling in the flavor of some rare gastronomic delicacy. "And if I had the say as to the setting of it--which I haven't!--and was free to indulge my predilection for showy printing--which I never shall be!--it should be headed with caps an inch high--and spaced and leaded all the way down."

His black eyes snapped: his hectic cheeks grew fiery.

"Headed with inch-high caps, ah! and spaced and leaded from the top to the bottom. Fancy how it 'ud lay siege to the Public Eye, and draw the Public's coppers! When I shut my eyes I can fair see the editions running out."

He recited, marking out the lines and spaces with a finger encased in white woolen:

A PRINCE MURDERS ONE MAN AND FIRES AT ANOTHER IN HIS OWN GILDED DRAWING-ROOM. PARIS SENSATION. COUSIN OF THE FRENCH EMPEROR KILLS A JOURNALIST ON THE VERY DAY WHEN THE FRENCH LEGISLATIVE BODY MEET TO INAUGURATE THE NEW ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT UNDER NAPOLEON III.

His eyes snapped, his hectic cheeks flamed, he was evidently launched on a subject that was near the heart beating beneath the bulgy pocket-book. He talked fast; and as he talked he waved his arms, and gesticulated with the large hands encased in the woolly boxing-gloves.

"I cherish ambitions, perhaps you'll say, above my calling, which I don't mind owning is that of Newspaper Publishers' Warehouseman. Perhaps I do--perhaps I don't! My own opinion is I'm before my time, a kind of Anachronism the wrong way round," said the little man rather ruefully, "and rightly belong to--say forty years hence. As the poet Shakespeare says, and if it wasn't him it ought to have been! 'Sweet are the uses of Advertisement.' I'm a believer in Advertisement, always have been and always shall be!"

His garrulity was an individual and not unpleasant trait, implying confidence in others' sympathy. He went on:

"Being Nobody in particular, my views have never been took up and acted on. Though I enjoy a good deal of confidence and am--I hope I am!--respected in my place. For as Solomon said, somewhere in Proverbs--'Designs are strengthened by counsels,' and our Chief himself hasn't been too proud to say, on occasion: 'Knewbit, what would you do in this or that case?' Such as you see me, I am often at the 'Ouse of Commons, when sittings are late and speeches have to be jotted down in mouthfuls and carried away and set up in snacks.... For my constitution is of that degree of toughness--sleep or no sleep matters little to me, and that I am as fresh at this moment as you are," he bit off the end of a yawn, "I wouldn't mind betting a sixpence now!"

Said P. C. Breagh, at last getting in a word edgeways:

"If you lost--and you would lose!--and paid--and I expect you'd pay!--my capital would be doubled. I'm not a young swell who has got up early to look at London. I'm a vagrant on the streets--and it strikes me I must look like it. To-day I've got to find work of some kind. Can you give me a job in your warehouse? I'm strong and willing and honest--up to now! But by G--! if stealing a bunch of turnips off a costermonger's barrow will get me a full belly and a clean bed in prison, I expect I shall have to do it before long, if I can't find work anywhere!"

"Bless my soul!" said the garrulous little man excitedly. "And I thought you were a Medical Student or an artist (some of 'em aren't over-given to clothes-brushes and soap-and-water), and here I stood a-jawing and you starving all the time! ... Work--of course you shall have work, though I can't promise it'll be the kind o' work that's fit for an educated young gentleman----"

"Any work is fit for a gentleman," snarled P. C. Breagh, "that a decent man can do! What I want is----"

"What you want is--Breakfast and a wash and brush-up!" cried the little man excitedly. "And that you must go to Miss Ling and get. Say Mr. Knewbit sent you--I'm Knewbit,--Christian name Solomon. It's No. 288 Great Coram Street--second turn to your right above Russell Square. Cross the Strand and go up Wellington Street and Bow Street, cross Long Acre and ... but you're too dead-beat to walk it. Take a growler--it'll be eighteenpence from here unless the cabby's lost to every sense of decency. Borrow the money from me--here it is! I give you my word you shall be able to pay me back to-morrow. Here is a cab! Hi! Phew'w!" Mr. Knewbit whistled scientifically, and the preternaturally red-nosed driver of an old and jingling four-wheeler pulled up beside the curb as P. C. Breagh stammered out:

"I--I can't thank! ... You're too confoundedly kind! ... and I'd begun to think that all men were thieves or scoundrels--except a poor, sick beggar of a swell I met yesterday, whose wife and children shun him and whose valet bullies him! I can't refuse, you know! ... Things are too..."

"The fare will be two shillings if you talk one minute longer!" warned Mr. Knewbit, opening the door of the straw-carpeted, moldy-smelling vehicle. "I can see extortion in that man's eye. I'm a judge of character, that's what I am. Bless my soul! Is that kitten yours?"

For the ginger Tom, with arched back and erect tail, was walking round P. C. Breagh's legs, purring insinuatingly, and his companion of the night's vigil said hesitatingly, looking at the meager, homeless mite:

"He seems to think so! And--he helped me through last night. Would you mind if I took him? I'll pay for his keep as soon as ever I----"

Mr. Knewbit shouted in a violent hurry:

"In with you! Cat and all! Don't apologize! Miss Ling adores 'em! Three in the house already--waste bits left on the dustbin for needy strangers. Don't forget! 288 Great Coram Street, Russell Square. Drive on, cabby!"

He added, dancing up and down excitedly on the pavement, as the jingling four-wheeler rolled on, with the pair of castaways:

"Lord! if I only had the setting up of that young fellow's story, how I would give it 'em in leaded capitals!"

He closed his eyes in ecstasy and saw, in large black letters standing out across the clear horizon of the new day to which London was waking:

LONDON DRAMA. BEGGARED HEIR TO WEALTH ROBBED. CAST ON THE STREETS! SOLE COMPANION A KITTEN! PATHETIC STORY.

"Not that I know he is the heir to wealth, but it looks well, uncommon! Uncommon well, it looks!" said Mr. Knewbit.

XV

When the Editorial Staff of the _Early Wire_ had gone home, or to the Club, by cab or private brougham or on foot, in the blackest hours of the night or the smallest hours of the morning; when the Printing Staff had filed out, pale and respectably attired, or thundered down the iron-shod staircases in grimy, inky, oily _déshabillé_, then the Publishing Staff trooped in and took possession. And, as the lines of carts backed up to the curb, and were filled by brawny shirt-sleeved men, who tossed the huge bales of newspapers from hand to hand with the nonchalant skill of jugglers doing tricks with willow-pattern plates and oranges, the Business Department began to empty so much that you could see the eyebrows of clerks behind the iron-nailed unplaned deal counters; and Mr. Knewbit, slackening in his terrific energy, would cease keeping count, and tallying, and writing cabalistic signs on huge packages with the stump of blue pencil that never was used up. And he would mop his face and say--in the same invariable formula:

"Well! we've broke the back of the day's work, and lucky if no one can say no worse of us!"

Later on, when the last newspaper-cart had been gorged and rattled away, and the last newspaper-boy had darted out with his armful, and his mouth open for the yell that would issue from it the moment his bare feet hit the pavement of Fleet Street, and the office of the _Early Wire_ and all the other offices that had got off the Morning Issue had an air of dozing with blinking eyes and mouths half open--when the Evening Papers were at the height of strenuous effort,--Mr. Knewbit would arrange the limited supply of hair remaining on his cranium with a pocket-comb, titivate his whiskers by the aid of a tiny scrap of looking-glass nailed inside his desk-lid, dust the blacks off his collar, straighten his cravat--which boasted a breastpin that was an oval plaque of china, painted with a miniature of a young lady with flowing ringlets, rosy cheeks, white arms and shoulders, pink legs and a diaphanous tutu, dancing, crowned with roses in front of a sylvan waterfall,--and betake himself out to dine.

Sometimes he would patronize the "Old Cheshire Cheese" chop-house, where they gave you beefsteak puddings on Saturdays. Or "The Cock" would have his custom, or he would drop in at an eating-house in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Irish stew, boiled beef with dumplings and carrots, or tripe and onions were the staple dishes in winter months. In summer you got roast mutton and green peas and gooseberry tart with custard; but whatever the season or the dish, it was always washed down with whisky-and-water, or gin-and-lemonade, or the strongest of strong beer.

For this particular tavern was patronized by the penny-a-liners of Paternoster Row and the vicinity; out-at-elbows, and generally seedy-looking literary free-lances, who picked up a living by inditing touching tracts and poignant pamphlets for religious Societies bearing arresting titles, such as:

"STOP! YOU ARE OUT AT THE GATHERS! Or, The Tale of a Skirt," and "DEAD LOCKS FOR LIVE HEADS! By A Converted Hairdresser." Or biographical accounts of the brief lives and protracted deaths of Little E----, aged seven, or Miss Madeline P---- of X----.