Part 9

Alas! to us who live in these pushful days of Electrical Power Supply, the glories of the illuminated capital in the year of grace 1870 would appear murky enough. We should sneer at the stumpy iron lamp-posts and the chandeliers yet adorned with Early Victorian crystal glass lusters. The wood pavement, an invention _de luxe_ economically confined to the West End, and upon the greasy surface of which bus-horses broke legs as easily as the most aristocratic thoroughbreds--the loose iron gratings covering basement-lights, and incidentally presenting man-traps for unwary pedestrians, as receptacles for stray umbrellas, dead cats, wisps of packing straw, discarded newspapers and orange-peel--the untrapped gutter-drains and sewer-vents would awaken our ridicule and evoke our indignation, even as the displays in the shop windows, especially those of _modistes_, _couturières_, and tailors, would provoke us to mirth.

The extraordinary little hats, pot-shaped or plate-shaped, worn upon huge chignons, surmounting cascades of ringlets, _couleur Impératrice_. The preposterous frilled _paniers_, the bustles, the _jupes_ of velvet or plush, flounced to the waist or kilted--sometimes to mid-leg, displaying boots--such as are worn to this hour by Principal Boys in Christmas Pantomimes and serio-comic ladies of the Varsity Stage, who are, we know, Principal Boys in the pupa, or chrysalis-state. All these things compel us to hold our sides when we review them in the illustrated papers of the _Ladies' Mentor_,--which illuminating periodical, in the dearth of Fashionable Intelligence from Paris, the hub and center of the modish world, came to a sudden end in the October of that year, and has defied all efforts at resuscitation.

Though it is possible that the wearers of these long-vanished modes--surveying the belles of Belgravia, with their humbler followers of Brompton and Bayswater,--in the present year of progress, might be moved to laughter or provoked to wrath. To-day, when the ambition of every properly constituted woman is to be shaped like a golliwog and dressed like a pen-wiper, or to acquire the sinuosities of a Bayadere and drape the same in cobwebs calculated to conceal nothing and suggest everything--can we honestly enlarge upon the bygone improprieties of our aunts, and moan over our mothers' taste in toilettes?

It was just six when P. C. Breagh crossed Piccadilly Circus and turned down toward the Haymarket. Why hurry, he asked himself, when you have nowhere to go? The restaurants were filling with diners who were going to the theaters, the smell of cooked meats made savory the fogginess. He shrugged his shoulders, dug his hands deep into his empty pockets, and tried to whistle as he loafed along.

Misery stalked these West End streets, rampant and clamorous. A burly man devoid of legs, shuffling along with his hands in a pair of woman's clogs, entreated P. C. Breagh in stentorian tones to buy a tin nutmeg-grater. A miserable creature, whose sole garment appeared to be the upper portion of an adult pair of trousers, begged him, in the professional whine, to spare a penny for the pore orphan boy! A dank female, in rusty weeds, stationary by the curb, displaying a baby and a row of ballads, besought of him, for the love of Gawd! to pity the unfortunate widow and her starving orphans.

"Buy a ballad, kind genl'man! On'y a penny--goes to a lovelly choone!"

"Ho! Dermot, you look 'ealthy now, Your does is neat an' clean, Hi never sees you drunk about, W'erehever 'ave you been?"

The stave chanted as an appetizer for the music-lover, she wiped the baby's nose with her ostentatiously white apron, and protested it to be the image of its father--blowed up in a Mind.

"You mean a mine, don't you?" P. C. Breagh was beginning, when the widow once more burst into song.

"Your wife and Fam'ly--Har they well? You once did use them strynge! Ho! Har you kinder to them now? And wence this 'appy chynge?"

Reverting to prose, as P. C. Breagh lounged listlessly on, she demanded why, if he wasn't going to buy, he had stopped and given a respectable female Tongue.

"And not even fork out a copper, you blistered swindler! You blindin', blazin'----"

"Come now, Chanting Poll, what's all this here row about?"

The gruff, not unkindly voice of a policeman broke in upon the rusty widow's eloquence. P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, wheeled and swung back again.

"It's all right, constable, the lady was only having a bit of chaff with me!"

"I know her!" said P. C. 999, C. Division, removing a heavy but not brutal hand from the lady in question, "and the kind o' chaff she slings. Done Time for it, too, she 'as--before now!"

But he moved on, huge in his belted greatcoat, walking with the elephantine, clumping step begotten of boots with iron toe-caps, and iron-nailed soles at least two inches in thickness; and the dank widow cocked a knowing eye at his retreating back, and the other at her unexpected champion.

"Good for you, my dear! Stand us a drain for luck, since you're so civil!"

He returned:

"I would if I'd got the tin! I believe I'm poorer than you are!"

"S'welp me bob! wot 'ave we 'ere? A haristocrat in distress, har yer?" she demanded.

"Not quite," he told her, as she turned the ponderous batteries of her raillery upon him. "I've seen an aristocrat in distress to-day, and he was worse than me. I'd not change!"

"Fer ten thousand jimmies hannual hincome, an' a 'ouse at Number One 'Yde Park Corner!" she jeered. "'Ow did yer lose the I'm-so-funny?--for if you 'aven't it now, you 'ave 'ad it, I'll tyke me Davy!"

"It's--a long story! Good-bye!"

He nodded and was moving on, when she shot out a gaunt hand and clutched him by the sleeve, crying:

"'Old 'ard, Mister! 'Ang on till I give this 'ere squealer to its mammy. About due now, she ought to be!"

"Isn't it..." His surprised look tickled the relict of the blown-up husband into a chuckle.

"Mine? Not by 'arf! A tizzy per workin'-day is wot I pays for the loan of 'er. Nothin' like a babby--specially in narsty weather like this 'ere--to touch the people's 'arts! Lil's mine, though, ain't you, deary?"

A preternaturally bright-eyed, white-faced, wizened little creature peeped out from the shelter of the ostentatiously clean apron, making a sound as of assent.

"Is she ill?" asked P. C. Breagh commiseratingly.

"Not 'er, that's her color!"

"Hungry, perhaps?" he asked.

"Why should she be? ... Wot did yer 'ave fer dinner, Lil? Speak up like a good gal an' tell the gen'lman!"

The small, grimy finger came out of the wide mouth. She lisped confidingly:

"Ay'po'rth o' gin 'ot, an' a stit o' totlit!"

"My God!" gasped P. C. Breagh in horror, "does that baby drink hot gin?"

"When she can get it! an' so does Hi!" explained the lady of the ballads, whom a short female in a plaid shawl and a battered brown bonnet had now relieved of the baby. She added hospitably: "Come an' 'ave two-pennorth o' comfort along o' me now! It's meat and drink both! as you'll find afore long! I'll stand treat--no blarney!"

But he groaned and fled from the tragic pair, seeing the blazing eyes of the drunkard, set in the small white childish face, staring at him from the gas-lamps and the hoardings, from the paving-stones beneath his hurrying feet, and from under the hats of passing strangers; and peering between the slowly-moving shoals of sooty smoke and muddy vapor, streaking the livid grayness overhead.

XIII

Pall Mall was some relief. He looked for the Junior United Service Club, and found it; for the Rag,--and for a time walked up and down in the vicinity of both of these stately institutions, heartened by the memory that his father had been a member of the former--listening with eager ears to scraps of conversation between soldierly, well-groomed, clear-voiced men in evening dress, lingering on the wide doorsteps to finish some animated discussion, or waiting for cabs and hansoms, the common hack, or the smart private vehicle, low on the wheels at that date, and more heavily built than the later S. and T.

Certain bald, mustached, and red-faced veterans, scrupulously attired for the evening--delighted him extremely.

"By George, General!" he heard one of them say, as he went by, his slouch forgotten, his shoulders squared, his head held up, "look at that seedy-looking chap there! Twelve to one in sixpences he's one of the 'supererogatory useless infantrymen,' kicked out by Cardwell, after twelve years' Service. D'ye take the bet or no?"

The reference to the unpopular War Secretary under whose effacing hand infantry regiments had not only lost their numbers, but in many cases vanished from the rolls of the Army, swallowed up in the New System of Amalgamation--had, as was intended, the effect of the red rag on the bull. The General bellowed:

"Confound me if I don't! Pay the cabman, McIntosh, while I put the fellow through his paces! Hi! Hi! Come here, you, sir!"

Then, as P. C. Breagh, summoned by an imperious wave of the umbrella, stepped out of the fogginess into the mellow circle of light streaming through the glass doors of the brilliant vestibule:

"What's your regiment? ... Give me the old designation! ... I know nothing of new-fangled names; ... All my eye and Betty Martin! and I don't care a dee who hears me say it! ... What is your rank, name and battalion-number? When were you discharged? ... Where's your small-book and certificate? ... Got 'em about you? ... Every soldier has 'em about him! And why don't you answer, dee you!--why don't you answer, man?"

The volley of interrogations left no room for reply. A second might have followed had not the General's crony, in unconcealed ecstasies at the sulky embarrassment of the victim and the determined attitude of the inquisitor, intervened:

"Dashed sorry! My mistake! Believe you've landed a civilian, after all, General!"

"Be dee'd! and so I have!" the General, after a raking stare, admitted. Then he took his crony's arm, they wheeled, and marched into the Club together. From whence issued, a moment later, a small boy in buttons, who, after a look up and a look down the street, pursued the retreating figure of the stalwart young man in the gray felt wide-awake and shaggy greatcoat, and arrested it with the words:

"'Arf a jiff, my covey!" He added, as the retreating figure wheeled and surveyed him in hard-eyed silence: "Wasn't it you what Old Fireworks went for just now on the 'Rag and Famish' steps?"

"The General called to me--mistaking me for----"

"I know!" The boy in buttons winked. "He's always a-pitching into somebody in mistake for somebody else! Catch hold! This is for you!"

This was a warm half-crown, thrust upon P. C. Breagh, without further ceremony. He flushed a murky, savage red, and shouted:

"What is this for? ... Who had the infernal insolence----"

He choked. Buttons, plainly regarding the tramp who could be insulted by half-a-crown as a new species, stared at him with circular orbs of astonishment, retorting:

"What's it for? How do I know, stoopid? He told me to catch you and give it you.... Cool that! Well, blow me!..."

These expressions being evoked by the swift, supple movement of arm and wrist that had sent the half-crown flying into the midst of the Pall Mall traffic. A sharp ring on the wood-pavement, a yell, and a flourish of naked heels, and a street Arab had seized the treasure. As the fog swallowed the wealthy imp, said Buttons icily:

"That's your game, is it?--pavin' Pall Mall with 'arf bulls for gutter-pads to pick up. Better ha' tipped it to me!--or sent it back to Old Fireworks. He ain't got too many of 'em. Signs too many toast-and-water tickets to be flush!"

Perhaps P. C. Breagh, scalding with wrath as he was, would have dived in among the traffic to recover the coin had it been recoverable. But the snows of yester-year were not more irretrievably gone. He realized it, hung his head and hunched his shoulders, and moved away from the region of clubs, where officers of the twin Services talked shop in sublime indifference to other subjects, as white-chokered attendants supplied them with savory meats and cheering drinks.

Be sorry for the boy with the gaunt wolf Hunger at his heels, and the black demon of Despair sitting on his shoulders. That determination of his to face what might come, and take his luck in a cheerful spirit, was to be put to a yet fiercer test before the dawn of a new day.

He was hungry and thirsty, and sorely tempted to break into his solitary shilling. But that silver barrier between himself and pennilessness was not to be lightly changed. He wondered, as he recalled to mind the many occasions upon which he had wantonly squandered and wasted money, whether an experience such as this, previously undergone, would not have been a valuable lesson in thrift?

He presently came by a well-known theater. It was too early for the frequenters of the Stalls and Boxes and Grand Circle. But playgoers of the humbler kind were pouring in to fill the unnumbered seats in the upper tiers, and a crowd composed of the usual elements had gathered at the doors of the Pit and Gallery, and filled the narrow side-alley in which these were situated, and overflowed into the Strand.

Queues not being officially recognized and regulated, there was a good deal of obstruction and pushing and persiflage. Pausing a moment under the gas-jet bordered, glazed shelter ornamenting the box-office entrance, his unseasoned eyes winced as they took in a sad, sad sight.

You saw her as a woman not past early middle-age, nobly proportioned, and even in her dreadful degradation, imperially beautiful. An old velvet mantle covered her, from which the torn and moth-eaten fur-trimming hung in draggled festoons. A trained silk gown, stained and torn and flounced with mud of many thicknesses, trailed upon the slushy Strand pavement; a broken bonnet perched on a palpably false and inconceivably dirty chignon, the false curls that cascaded from beneath it, hid a workhouse-crop of rusty gray.... And she lifted her skirts aside, disclosing muddy bare feet shod with a trodden-down, elastic-sided boot and a ragged slipper; and stepped across the threshold of the gilt and mirrored vestibule with a graceful, royal air....

"Now then, missus! Out of this, will you!"

A uniformed theater-attendant had advanced toward the intruder. But she did not retreat in terror at his truculence. She drew herself up, and folded her arms upon her bosom, and confronted the menial with a haughty, quelling stare.

"Man! who are you to drive me from this threshold? Out of the way! Clear!--and let me look at her. Do you ask whom? She! that woman who stands behind you smiling, with the white dove perched upon her whiter hand. Times have changed, my girl, since you and I last saw each other! Well, well! You are the same, whatever I may be!"

She laughed, a deep, melodious ha, ha, ha! not at all like the laughter of everyday people. Even P. C. Breagh, inexperienced as he was in such matters, recognized it as the artificial laughter of the stage. And, profiting by the momentary confusion of the functionary, she swept in her silken rags toward the person indicated; who looked back at her with beautiful stagey eyes from a life-sized canvas, wearing a stage costume; standing in a pose of the theater; fondling the bird that was palpably a property of the scene.

A long gilt-framed mirror hung beside the portrait, and to this she pointed with the tattered remnants of her theatrical manner, exclaiming with another of the stage laughs:

"Look upon this picture and on that! Ye gods!..." Adding, as the guardian of the vestibule, now wroth, advanced upon her: "No! Don't you hustle me. I'm off, governor! Farewell. Ta-ta!--until we meet again!"

She was gone, but she must have noted the boy who stared, fascinated by her haggard beauty and her dreadful misery. In fact, P. C. Breagh, passing on, had barely traversed a dozen yards of slushy pavement, before, with a bound and rush, a supple movement, predatory and feline, the woman emerged from an alley, and was by his side.

"Who are you? A waif, like me? Where do you come from? I saw you looking at me with all your eyes and your heart in them!--I played that scene with the picture and the mirror for you! You know----" She took P. C. Breagh's reluctant arm and leaned to his ear, being taller than he was, "There's always one person in the house you play to--and when that person's not there--the inspiration doesn't come. When it won't, you--shall I tell you what you do if God hasn't made you able to say 'No' to them?--you send out the devils to fetch you brandy and champagne!"

She laughed wildly and looked round suspiciously.

"Walk fast! A policeman's behind us, shadowing us. I'll tell you my story as we go. Did you ever hear of Anabel Foltringham? You must have! Everybody has! I drew crowds to that theater you've seen me kicked out of!--I was beautiful--great--famous! Men gloated over my beauty--they hung upon my every word. That made the devils jealous--the smooth, servile, obsequious devils in white aprons, that you find behind the scenes at every theater. They call them dressers, but I know better, you can't deceive me! You boy, I like your face! You look at me as if I were a Christian, and a man I knew had eyes like yours! ... Don't leave me! I'll make it worth your while to stay, only listen! ... I'll teach you all I know, make you a greater artist than any of them. For the things that you shall learn from me--I learned myself--in Hell!"

She hung upon the boy's wincing arm, her terrible breath scorched him, her burned-out eyes appalled--her greedy, long-nailed clutch found his flesh through his sleeve like the talons of a beast of prey. And he wrenched himself free, and fled, sick at heart; fancying that the old boot and shoe were running after him, and that the mud-trimmed silk gown flapped at his hurrying heels like leathery wings.

He broke into his shilling to pass the turnstile of Waterloo Bridge, stowed himself in a corner of one of the seated niches, and found relief in the presence of a stray kitten, sore-footed, hungry-eyed, ginger-haired, that rubbed against his legs and responded with appreciative purrs to his tentative back-strokings and ear-rubbings, administered half-unconsciously, as he wondered why human beings--under certain given circumstances, should be so much more beastly than the brutes?

The kitten jumped on his knee. He saw that its fur had been torn--probably by a dog--and shuddered at the remembrance of having more than once set a rough-haired terrier--a companion of his early boyhood--to worry stray cats--and enjoyed the carnage resulting. Why did he shudder now? Because by a feat of imagination only possible to one who was beginning to learn what it is to be homeless and hunted and desperate, he had got inside the ginger kitten's ragged skin, and established between himself and what we are content to call inferior creatures a bond of brotherhood.

"Don't you go, Kitty! though I can't make it much worth your while to stop," he muttered. "If I'd got the things--a scrap of lint and a saucer of clean water, a needleful of silk and a dab of carbolic ointment--I could patch up that tear--you'd be as good as new inside of a week."

He yawned, and the tramp of booted feet and the shuffle of naked ones grew faint in his ears; and presently the rush and roar of the Bridge roadway-traffic dulled to a hum--and he was deadly sleepy. With blundering fingers he undid two buttons of the frieze greatcoat and tucked the kitten inside--and after turning round three times, and making a great parade of clawing the surface soft enough for comfort, it curled up and fell asleep, and its host not only slept, but snored.

Even in sleep he was dogged and haunted by those three tragic figures;--the broken-down _viveur_, the child dying on gin, the lost creature who had once been Anabel Foltringham--they cropped up in his troubled dreams, over and over again. And he woke up, and it was dark, and a sleety rain was stinging him, and even the kitten in his breast was cold and cried.

He got up, aching and stiff, hungry and thirsty, realizing that he must have slept for hours. Big Ben boomed twelve. A midnight express from Charing Cross dragged its chain of yellow lights across the railway bridge with a hollow roar and rattle. One or two shapes passed, vaguely human in the wintry darkness; a Post Office van or so, with an official inside sorting bags by the light of a swinging lantern, three or four crawling cabs, a trolley with a formless mass upon it, pushed by two indistinct, slow-moving figures, coming from the Surrey side.

Toward the Strandward end of the Bridge there was a light, with murky figures moving about it. Revealed by its two flaring naphtha-lamps, the characteristic hostelry of the London gutters, with its gaudy paint and patriotic decorations, its clean shelves piled up with homely food, and hung with common crockery, its steaming urns of hot and comforting drink,--proved a Godsend to one more hungry and homeless vagrant.

The shipwrecked mariner of his analogy might have known the same sense of relief, seeing his signal answered and some stout vessel, flying the red ensign of the British Mercantile Marine, bearing down upon his tiny, wave-washed raft.... P. C. Breagh was guilty of prodigality at that coffee-stall. A penny cup of coffee, weak, but hot, and a twopenny sandwich, consisting of two slices of bread smeared with mustard and inclosing something by courtesy called ham, but really pertaining to that less stylish part of the pig known as "gammon," took the edge off his savage appetite. A ha'porth of milk for the kitten, and another ha'porth of ham-trimmings, left him lord of seven-pence halfpenny cash.

Thus, warmed and cheered, he went back to his seat in the niche again, noting that every stone bench he passed had now its seated group, or prone extended figures. His recently vacated place had its occupant, a thin, barefooted young man, indescribably ragged; who slept with his famished face--sharp and yellow as a wedge of cheese--turned to the sky, and the Adam's apple of his lean throat jerking, as though something alive, swallowed inadvertently, was madly struggling to get out.

And as he leaned upon the eastward parapet of the Bridge with the ginger kitten, now replete and happy, purring on his shoulder, and watched the wild welter of black water, pale-patched with foam and spume, rushing away beneath him, to plunge growling through the arches of Blackfriars Bridge, and speed away under Southwark and London Bridges, past the Custom House, Traitor's Gate and the Docks, between Wapping and Rotherhithe on its way to Greenwich and Poplar and Blackwell; and thence, by the verdant heights of Charlton to Woolwich, widening to a mile here; and so on past Gravesend and the Nore Light to where it flows between Whitstable and Foulness Point--eighteen miles broad; a kingly river, carrying on its back the commerce of the world.