PROLOGUE.
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR SEEKS TO CAST THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS STORY
UPON ANOTHER.
At the corner of a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East
End of London--one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls
upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills
and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end,
suggesting petrified diagrams proving dead problems--stands a house
that ever draws me to it; so that often, when least conscious of my
footsteps, I awake to find myself hurrying through noisy, crowded
thoroughfares, where flaring naphtha lamps illumine fierce, patient,
leaden-coloured faces; through dim-lit, empty streets, where monstrous
shadows come and go upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow,
noisome streets, where the gutters swarm with children, and each
ever-open doorway vomits riot; past reeking corners, and across waste
places, till at last I reach the dreary goal of my memory-driven
desire, and, coming to a halt beside the broken railings, find rest.
The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still a
country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of
individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is
encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a
barren patch of stones and dust where clothes--it is odd any one
should have thought of washing--hang in perpetuity; while about the
door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has
left exposed in all its naked insincerity.
Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women
gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the hoarse,
wailing cry of "Coals--any coals--three and sixpence a
sack--co-o-o-als!" chanted in a tone that absence of response has
stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and
my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the
unpitying sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I
pass.
Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws
her veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse,
sought out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the
teeming life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the
flickering flare from the "King of Prussia" opposite extinguished,
will it talk with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding
me of many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come
the well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not
seeing me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as
two cronies, turning the torn leaves of some old album where the faded
portraits in forgotten fashions, speak together in low tones of those
now dead or scattered, with now a smile and now a sigh, and many an
"Ah me!" or "Dear, dear!"
This bent, worn man, coming towards us with quick impatient steps,
which yet cease every fifty yards or so, while he pauses, leaning
heavily upon his high Malacca cane: "It is a handsome face, is it
not?" I ask, as I gaze upon it, shadow framed.
"Aye, handsome enough," answers the old House; "and handsomer still it
must have been before you and I knew it, before mean care had furrowed
it with fretful lines."
"I never could make out," continues the old House, musingly, "whom you
took after; for they were a handsome pair, your father and your
mother, though Lord! what a couple of children!"
"Children!" I say in surprise, for my father must have been past five
and thirty before the House could have known him, and my mother's face
is very close to mine, in the darkness, so that I see the many grey
hairs mingling with the bonny brown.
"Children," repeats the old House, irritably, so it seems to me, not
liking, perhaps, its opinions questioned, a failing common to old
folk; "the most helpless pair of children I ever set eyes upon. Who
but a child, I should like to know, would have conceived the notion of
repairing his fortune by becoming a solicitor at thirty-eight, or,
having conceived such a notion, would have selected the outskirts of
Poplar as a likely centre in which to put up his door-plate?"
"It was considered to be a rising neighbourhood," I reply, a little
resentful. No son cares to hear the family wisdom criticised, even
though at the bottom of his heart he may be in agreement with the
critic. "All sorts and conditions of men, whose affairs were in
connection with the sea would, it was thought, come to reside
hereabout, so as to be near to the new docks; and had they, it is not
unreasonable to suppose they would have quarrelled and disputed with
one another, much to the advantage of a cute solicitor, convenient to
their hand."
"Stuff and nonsense," retorts the old House, shortly; "why, the mere
smell of the place would have been sufficient to keep a sensible man
away. And"--the grim brick face before me twists itself into a goblin
smile--"he, of all men in the world, as 'the cute solicitor,' giving
advice to shady clients, eager to get out of trouble by the shortest
way, can you fancy it! he who for two years starved himself, living on
five shillings a week--that was before you came to London, when he was
here alone. Even your mother knew nothing of it till years
afterwards--so that no man should be a penny the poorer for having
trusted his good name. Do you think the crew of chandlers and
brokers, dock hustlers and freight wreckers would have found him a
useful man of business, even had they come to settle here?"
I have no answer; nor does the old House wait for any, but talks on.
"And your mother! would any but a child have taken that soft-tongued
wanton to her bosom, and not have seen through acting so transparent?
Would any but the veriest child that never ought to have been let out
into the world by itself have thought to dree her weird in such folly?
Children! poor babies they were, both of them."
"Tell me," I say--for at such times all my stock of common sense is
not sufficient to convince me that the old House is but clay. From
its walls so full of voices, from its floors so thick with footsteps,
surely it has learned to live; as a violin, long played on, comes to
learn at last a music of its own. "Tell me, I was but a child to whom
life speaks in a strange tongue, was there any truth in the story?"
"Truth!" snaps out the old House; "just truth enough to plant a lie
upon; and Lord knows not much ground is needed for that weed. I saw
what I saw, and I know what I know. Your mother had a good man, and
your father a true wife, but it was the old story: a man's way is not
a woman's way, and a woman's way is not a man's way, so there lives
ever doubt between them."
"But they came together in the end," I say, remembering.
"Aye, in the end," answers the House. "That is when you begin to
understand, you men and women, when you come to the end."
The grave face of a not too recently washed angel peeps shyly at me
through the railings, then, as I turn my head, darts back and
disappears.
"What has become of her?" I ask.
"She? Oh, she is well enough," replies the House. "She lives close
here. You must have passed the shop. You might have seen her had you
looked in. She weighs fourteen stone, about; and has nine children
living. She would be pleased to see you."
"Thank you," I say, with a laugh that is not wholly a laugh; "I do not
think I will call." But I still hear the pit-pat of her tiny feet,
dying down the long street.
The faces thicken round me. A large looming, rubicund visage smiles
kindly on me, bringing back into my heart the old, odd mingling of
instinctive liking held in check by conscientious disapproval. I turn
from it, and see a massive, clean-shaven face, with the ugliest mouth
and the loveliest eyes I ever have known in a man.
"Was he as bad, do you think, as they said?" I ask of my ancient
friend.
"Shouldn't wonder," the old House answers. "I never knew a worse--nor
a better."
The wind whisks it aside, leaving to view a little old woman, hobbling
nimbly by aid of a stick. Three corkscrew curls each side of her head
bob with each step she takes, and as she draws near to me, making the
most alarming grimaces, I hear her whisper, as though confiding to
herself some fascinating secret, "I'd like to skin 'em. I'd like to
skin 'em all. I'd like to skin 'em all alive!"
It sounds a fiendish sentiment, yet I only laugh, and the little old
lady, with a final facial contortion surpassing all dreams, limps
beyond my ken.
Then, as though choosing contrasts, follows a fair, laughing face. I
saw it in the life only a few hours ago--at least, not it, but the
poor daub that Evil has painted over it, hating the sweetness
underlying. And as I stand gazing at it, wishing it were of the dead
who change not, there drifts back from the shadows that other face,
the one of the wicked mouth and the tender eyes, so that I stand again
helpless between the two I loved so well, he from whom I learned my
first steps in manhood, she from whom I caught my first glimpse of the
beauty and the mystery of woman. And again the cry rises from my
heart, "Whose fault was it--yours or hers?" And again I hear his
mocking laugh as he answers, "Whose fault? God made us." And
thinking of her and of the love I bore her, which was as the love of a
young pilgrim to a saint, it comes into my blood to hate him. But
when I look into his eyes and see the pain that lives there, my pity
grows stronger than my misery, and I can only echo his words, "God
made us."
Merry faces and sad, fair faces and foul, they ride upon the wind; but
the centre round which they circle remains always the one: a little
lad with golden curls more suitable to a girl than to a boy, with shy,
awkward ways and a silent tongue, and a grave, old-fashioned face.
And, turning from him to my old brick friend, I ask: "Would he know
me, could he see me, do you think?"
"How should he," answers the old House, "you are so different to what
he would expect. Would you recognise your own ghost, think you?"
"It is sad to think he would not recognise me," I say.
"It might be sadder if he did," grumbles the old House.
We both remained silent for awhile; but I know of what the old House
is thinking. Soon it speaks as I expected.
"You--writer of stories, why don't you write a book about him? There
is something that you know."
It is the favourite theme of the old House. I never visit it but it
suggests to me this idea.
"But he has done nothing?" I say.
"He has lived," answers the old House. "Is not that enough?"
"Aye, but only in London in these prosaic modern times," I persist.
"How of such can one make a story that shall interest the people?"
The old House waxes impatient of me.
"'The people!'" it retorts, "what are you all but children in a
dim-lit room, waiting until one by one you are called out to sleep.
And one mounts upon a stool and tells a tale to the others who have
gathered round. Who shall say what will please them, what will not."
Returning home with musing footsteps through the softly breathing
streets, I ponder the words of the old House. Is it but as some
foolish mother thinking all the world interested in her child, or may
there lie wisdom in its counsel? Then to my guidance or misguidance
comes the thought of a certain small section of the Public who often
of an evening commands of me a story; and who, when I have told her of
the dreadful giants and of the gallant youths who slay them, of the
wood-cutter's sons who rescue maidens from Ogre-guarded castles; of
the Princesses the most beautiful in all the world, of the Princes
with magic swords, still unsatisfied, creeps closer yet, saying: "Now
tell me a real story," adding for my comprehending: "You know: about
a little girl who lived in a big house with her father and mother, and
who was sometimes naughty, you know."
So perhaps among the many there may be some who for a moment will turn
aside from tales of haughty Heroes, ruffling it in Court and Camp, to
listen to the story of a very ordinary lad who lived with very
ordinary folk in a modern London street, and who grew up to be a very
ordinary sort of man, loving a little and grieving a little, helping a
few and harming a few, struggling and failing and hoping; and if any
such there be, let them come round me.
But let not those who come to me grow indignant as they listen,
saying: "This rascal tells us but a humdrum story, where nothing is
as it should be;" for I warn all beforehand that I tell but of things
that I have seen. My villains, I fear, are but poor sinners, not
altogether bad; and my good men but sorry saints. My princes do not
always slay their dragons; alas, sometimes, the dragon eats the
prince. The wicked fairies often prove more powerful than the good.
The magic thread leads sometimes wrong, and even the hero is not
always brave and true.
So let those come round me only who will be content to hear but their
own story, told by another, saying as they listen, "So dreamt I. Ah,
yes, that is true, I remember."
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