Mike Fletcher Part 34

When, however, it transpired that letters were found in the pockets of the suicides to the effect that they had hoped to gain such notoriety as the daily press can give by their very flagrant leave-taking of this world, Mike professed much regret, and gravely a.s.sured his astonished listeners that, in the face of these letters which had unhappily come to light, he withdrew his praise of the quality of the brains blown out. In truth he secretly rejoiced that proof of the imperfect sanity of the suicides had come to light and a.s.sured himself that when he did away with Mike Fletcher, that he would revenge himself on society by leaving behind him a doc.u.ment which would forbid the usual idiotic verdict, "Suicide while in a state of temporary insanity," and leave no loophole through which it might be said that he was impelled to seek death for any extraneous reasons whatever. He would go to death in the midst of the most perfect worldly prosperity the mind could conceive, desiring nothing but rest, profoundly convinced of the futility of all else, and the perfect folly of human effort.

In such perverse and morbid mind Mike returned to London. It was in the beginning of August, and the Temple weltered in sultry days and calm nights. The river flowed sluggishly through its bridges; the lights along its banks gleamed fiercely in the lucent stillness of a sulphur-hued horizon. Like a nightmare the silence of the apartment lay upon his chest; and there was a frightened look in his eyes as he walked to and fro. The moon lay like a creole amid the blue curtains of the night; the murmur of London hushed in stray cries, and only the tread of the policeman was heard distinctly. About the river the night was deepest, and out of the shadows falling from the bridges the lamps gleamed with strange intensity, some flickering sadly in the water. Mike walked into the dining-room. He could see the sward in the darkness that the trees spread, and the lilies reeked in the great stillness. Then he thought of the old days when the _Pilgrim_ was written in these rooms, and of the youthfulness of those days; and he maddened when he recalled the evenings of artistic converse in John Norton's room--how high were then their aspirations! The Temple, too, seemed to have lost youth and gaiety. No longer did he meet his old friends in the eating-houses and taverns. Everything had been dispersed or lost. Some were married, some had died.

Then the solitude grew more unbearable and he turned from it, hoping he might meet some one he knew. As he pa.s.sed up Temple Lane he saw a slender woman dressed in black, talking to the policemen. He had often seen her about the Courts and Buildings, and had accosted her, but she had pa.s.sed without heeding. Curious to hear who and what she was, Mike entered into conversation with one of the policemen.

"She! we calls her old Specks, sir."

"I have often seen her about, and I spoke to her once, but she didn't answer."

"She didn't hear you, sir; she's a little deaf. A real good sort, sir, is old Jenny. She's always about here. She was brought out in the Temple; she lived eight years with a Q.C., sir. He's dead. A strapping fine wench she was then, I can tell you."

"And what does she do now?"

"She has three or four friends here. She goes to see Mr.--I can't think of his name--you know him, the red-whiskered man in Dr.

Johnson's Buildings. You have seen him in the Probate Court many a time." And then in defence of her respectability, if not of her morals, the policeman said, "You'll never see her about the streets, sir, she only comes to the Temple."

Old Jenny stood talking to the younger member of the force. When she didn't hear him she cooed in the soft, sweet way of deaf women; and her genial laugh told Mike that the policeman was not wrong when he described her as a real good sort. She spoke of her last 'bus, and on being told the time gathered up her skirts and ran up the Lane.

Then the policemen related anecdotes concerning their own and the general amativeness of the Temple.

"But, lor, sir, it is nothing now to what it used to be! Some years ago, half the women of London used to be in here of a night; now there's very little going on--an occasional kick up, but nothing to speak of."

"What are you laughing at?" said Mike, looking from one to the other.

The policemen consulted each other, and then one said--

"You didn't hear about the little s.h.i.+ndy we had here last night, sir?

It was in Elm Court, just behind you, sir. We heard some one shouting for the police; we couldn't make out where the shouting came from first, we were looking about--the echo in these Courts makes it very difficult to say where a voice comes from. At last we saw the fellow at the window, and we went up. He met us at the door. He said, 'Policemen, the lady knocked at my door and asked for a drink; I didn't notice that she was drunk, and I gave her a brandy-and-soda, and before I could stop her she undressed herself!' There was the lady right enough, in her chemise, sitting in the arm-chair, as drunk as a lord, humming and singing as gay, sir, as any little bird. Then the party says, 'Policeman, do your duty!' I says, 'What is my duty?'

He says, 'Policeman, I'll report you!' I says, 'Report yourself. I knows my duty.' He says, 'Policeman, remove that woman!' I says, 'I can't remove her in that state. Tell her to dress herself and I'll remove her.' Well, the long and the short of it, sir, is, that we had to dress her between us, and I never had such a job."

The exceeding difficulties of this toilette, as narrated by the stolid policeman, made Mike laugh consummately. Then alternately, and in conjunction, the policemen told stories concerning pursuits through the areas and cellars with which King's Bench Walk abounds.

"It was from Paper Buildings that the little girl came from who tried to drown herself in the fountain."

"Oh, I haven't heard about her," said Mike. "She tried to drown herself in the fountain, did she? Crossed in love; tired of life; which was it?"

"Neither, sir; she was a bit drunk, that was about it. My mate could tell you about her, he pulled her out. She's up before the magistrate to-day again."

"Just fancy, bringing a person up before a magistrate because she wanted to commit suicide! Did any one ever hear such rot? If our own persons don't belong to us, I don't know what does. But tell me about her."

"She went up to see a party that lives in Pump Court. We was at home, so she picks up her skirts, runs across here, and throws herself in.

I see her run across, and follows her; but I had to get into the water to get her out; I was wet to the waist--there's about four feet of water in that 'ere fountain."

"And she?"

"She had fainted. We had to send for a cab to get her to the station, sir."

At that moment the presence of the sergeant hurried the policemen away, and Mike was left alone. The warm night air was full of the fragrance of the leaves, and he was alive to the sensation of the foliage spreading above him, and deepening amid the branches of the tall plane-trees that sequestered and shadowed the fountain. They grew along the walls, forming a quiet dell, in whose garden silence the dripping fountain sang its song of falling water. Light and shade fell picturesquely about the steps descending to the gardens, and the parapeted buildings fell in black shadows upon the sward, and stood sharp upon the moon illuminated blue. Mike sat beneath the plane-trees, and the suasive silence, sweetly tuned by the dripping water, murmured in his soul dismal sorrowings. Over the cup, whence issued the jet that played during the day, the water flowed. There were there the large leaves of some aquatic plant, and Mike wondered if, had the policeman not rescued the girl, she would now be in perfect peace, instead of dragged before a magistrate and forced to promise to bear her misery.

"A pretty little tale," he thought, and he saw her floating in shadowy water in pallor and beauty, and reconciliation with nature.

"Why see another day? I must die very soon, why not at once?

Thousands have grieved as I am grieving in this self-same place, have asked the same sad questions. Sitting under these ancient walls young men have dreamed as I am dreaming--no new thoughts are mine. For five thousand years man has asked himself why he lives. Five thousand years have changed the face of the world and the mind of man; no thought has resisted the universal transformation of thought, save that one thought--why live? Men change their G.o.ds, but one thought floats immortal, unchastened by the teaching of any mortal G.o.ds. Why see another day? why drink again the bitter cup of life when we may drink the waters of oblivion?"

He walked through Pump Court slowly, like a prisoner impeded by the heavy chain, and at every step the death idea clanked in his brain.

All the windows were full of light, and he could hear women's voices.

In imagination he saw the young men sitting round the sparely furnished rooms, law-books and broken chairs--smoking and drinking, playing the piano, singing, thinking they were enjoying themselves. A few years and all would be over for them as all was over now for him.

But never would they drink of life as he had drunk, he was the type of that of which they were but imperfect and inconclusive figments.

Was he not the Don Juan and the poet--a sort of Byron doubled with Byron's hero? But he was without genius; had he genius, genius would force him to live.

He considered how far in his pessimism he was a representative of the century. He thought how much better he would have done in another age, and how out of sympathy he was with the utilitarian dullness of the present time; how much more brilliant he would have been had he lived at any other period of the Temple's history. Then he stopped to study the style of the old staircase, the rough woodwork twisting up the wall so narrowly, the great banisters full of shadow lighted by the flickering lanterns. The yellowing colonnade--its beams and overhanging fronts were also full of suggestion, and the suggestion of old time was enforced by the sign-board of a wig-maker.

"The last of an ancient industry," thought Mike. "The wig is representative of the seventeenth as the silk hat is of the nineteenth century. I wonder why I am so strongly fascinated with the seventeenth century?--I, a peasant; atavism, I suppose; my family were not always peasants."

Turning from the old Latin inscription he viewed the church, so evocative in its fortress form of an earlier and more romantic century. The clocks were striking one, two hours would bring the dawn close again upon the verge of the world. Mike trembled and thought how he might escape. The beauty of the cone of the church was outlined upon the sky, and he dreamed, as he walked round the shadow-filled porch, full of figures in prayer and figures holding scrolls, of the white-robed knights, their red crosses, their long swords, and their banner called Beauseant. He dreamed himself Grand Master of the Order; saw himself in chain armour charging the Saracen. The story of the terrible idol with the golden eyes, the secret rites, the knight led from the penitential cell and buried at daybreak, the execution of the Grand Master at the stake, turned in his head fitfully; cloud-shapes that pa.s.sed, floating, changing incessantly, suddenly disappearing, leaving him again Mike Fletcher, a strained, agonized soul of our time, haunted and hunted by an idea, overpowered by an idea as a wolf by a hound.

His life had been from the first a series of attempts to escape from the idea. His loves, his poetry, his restlessness were all derivative from this one idea. Among those whose brain plays a part in their existence there is a life idea, and this idea governs them and leads them to a certain and predestined end; and all struggles with it are delusions. A life idea in the higher cla.s.ses of mind, a life instinct in the lower. It were almost idle to differentiate between them, both may be included under the generic t.i.tle of the soul, and the drama involved in such conflict is always of the highest interest, for if we do not read the story of our own soul, we read in each the story of a soul that might have been ours, and that pa.s.sed very near to us; and who reading of Mike's torment is fortunate enough to say, "I know nothing of what is written there."

His steps echoed hollow on the old pavement. Full of shadow the roofs of the square church swept across the sky; the triple lancet windows caught a little light from the gaslight on the buildings; and he wondered what was the meaning of the little gold lamb standing over one doorway, and then remembered that in various forms the same symbolic lamb is repeated through the Temple. He pa.s.sed under the dining-hall by the tunnel, and roamed through the s.p.a.ces beneath the plane-trees of King's Bench Walk. "My friends think my life was a perfect gift, but a burning cinder was placed in my breast, and time has blown it into flame."

In the soporific scent of the lilies and the stocks, the night drowsed in the darkness of the garden; Mike unlocked the gate and pa.s.sed into the shadows, and hypnotized by the heavenly s.p.a.ces, in which there were a few stars; by the earth and the many emanations of the earth; by the darkness which covered all things, hiding the little miseries of human existence, he threw himself upon the sward crying, "Oh, take me, mother, hide me in thy infinite bosom, give me forgetfulness of the day. Take and hide me away. We leave behind a corpse that men will touch. Sooner would I give myself to the filthy beaks of vultures, than to their more defiling sympathies. Why were we born? Why are we taught to love our parents? It is they whom we should hate, for it was they who, careless of our sufferings, inflicted upon us the evil of life. We are taught to love them because the world is mad; there is nothing but madness in the world.

Night, do not leave me; I cannot bear with the day. Ah, the day will come; nothing can r.e.t.a.r.d the coming of the day, and I can bear no longer with the day."

Hearing footsteps, he sprang to his feet, and walking in the direction whence the sound came, he found himself face to face with the policeman.

"Not able to get to sleep sir?"

"No, I couldn't sleep, the night is so hot; I shall sleep presently though."

They had not walked far before the officer, pointing to one of the gables of the Temple gardens, said--

"That's where Mr. Williamson threw himself over, sir; he got out on the roof, on to the highest point he could reach."

"He wanted," said Mike, "to do the job effectually."

"He did so; he made a hole two feet deep."

"They put him into a deeper one."

The officer laughed; and they walked round the gardens, pa.s.sing by the Embankment to King's Bench Walk. Opening the gate there, the policeman asked Mike if he were coming out, but he said he would return across the gardens, and let himself out by the opposite gate.

He walked, thinking of what he and the policeman had been saying--the proposed reduction in the rents of the chambers, the late innovation of throwing open the gardens to the poor children of the neighbourhood, and it was not until he stooped to unlock the gate that he remembered that he was alive.

Then the voice that had been counselling him so long, drew strangely near, and said "Die." The voice sounded strangely clear in the void of a great brain silence. Earth ties seemed severed, and then quite naturally, without any effort of mind, he went up-stairs to shoot himself. No effort of mind was needed, it seemed the natural and inevitable course for him to take, and he was only conscious of a certain faint surprise that he had so long delayed. There was no trace of fear or doubt in him; he walked up the long staircase without embarra.s.sment, and in a heavenly calm of mind hastened to put his project into execution, dreading the pa.s.sing of the happiness of his present mood, and the return of the fever of living. He stopped for a moment to see himself in the gla.s.s, and looking into the depths of his eyes, he strove to read there the story of his triumph over life. Then seeing the disorder of his dress, and the untidy appearance of his unshaven chin, he smiled, conceiving in that moment that it would be consistent to make as careful a toilette to meet death, as he had often done to meet a love.

He was anxious for the world to know that it was not after a drunken bout he had shot himself, but after philosophic deliberation and judicious reflection. And he could far better affirm his state of mind by his dress, than by any written words. Lying on the bed, cleanly shaved, wearing evening clothes, silk socks, patent leather shoes and white gloves? No, that would be vulgar, and all taint of vulgarity must be avoided. He must represent, even in a state of symbol, the young man, who having drunk of life to repletion, and finding that he can but repeat the same love draughts, says: "It is far too great a bore, I will go," and he goes out of life just as if he were leaving a fas.h.i.+onable _soiree_ in Piccadilly. That was exactly the impression he wished to convey. Yes, he would have out his opera hat and light overcoat. He was a little uncertain whether he should die in the night, or wait for the day, and considering the question, he lathered his face. "Curious it is," he thought, "I never was so happy, so joyous in life before.... These walls, all that I see, will in a few minutes disappear; it is this I, this Ego, which creates them; in destroying myself I destroy the world.... How hard this beard is! I never can shave properly without hot water!"

As he pulled on a pair of silk socks and tied his white necktie he thought of Lady Helen. Going to bed was not a bad notion--particularly for a woman, and a woman in love, but it would be ridiculous for a man. He looked at himself again in the long gla.s.s in the door of his carved mahogany wardrobe, and was pleased to see that, although a little jaded and worn, he was still handsome. Having brushed his hair carefully, he looked out the revolver; he did not remember exactly where he had put it, and in turning out his drawers he came upon a bundle of old letters. They were mostly from Frank and Lizzie, and in recalling old times they reminded him that if he died without making a will, his property would go to the Crown. It displeased him to think that his property should pa.s.s away in so impersonal a manner.

But his mind was now full of death; like a gourmet he longed to taste of the dark fruit of oblivion; and the delay involved in making out a will exasperated him, and it was with difficulty that he conquered his selfishness and sat down to write. Fretful he threw aside the pen; this little delay had destroyed all his happiness. To dispose of his property in money and land would take some time; the day would surprise him still in the world. After a few moments' reflection he decided that he would leave Belthorpe Park to Frank Escott.