that had been attracting greatly when the litter was first descried
coming dancing round the corner by the great cathedral, were so
completely deposed now, that nobody save two little girls (one
showing them to a doll) would look at them. Yet the chief of the
three, the article in the front row, had received jagged injury of
the left temple; and the other two in the back row, the drowned two
lying side by side with their heads very slightly turned towards
each other, seemed to be comparing notes about it. Indeed, those
two of the back row were so furtive of appearance, and so (in their
puffed way) assassinatingly knowing as to the one of the front,
that it was hard to think the three had never come together in
their lives, and were only chance companions after death. Whether
or no this was the general, as it was the uncommercial, fancy, it
is not to be disputed that the group had drawn exceedingly within
ten minutes. Yet now, the inconstant public turned its back upon
them, and even leaned its elbows carelessly against the bar outside
the window and shook off the mud from its shoes, and also lent and
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borrowed fire for pipes.
Custodian re-enters from his door. 'Again once, gentlemen, you are
invited - ' No further invitation necessary. Ready dash into the
street. Toilette finished. Old man coming out.
This time, the interest was grown too hot to admit of toleration of
the boys on the stone posts. The homicidal white-lead worker made
a pounce upon one boy who was hoisting himself up, and brought him
to earth amidst general commendation. Closely stowed as we were,
we yet formed into groups - groups of conversation, without
separation from the mass - to discuss the old man. Rivals of the
tall and sallow mason sprang into being, and here again was popular
inconstancy. These rivals attracted audiences, and were greedily
listened to; and whereas they had derived their information solely
from the tall and sallow one, officious members of the crowd now
sought to enlighten HIM on their authority. Changed by this social
experience into an iron-visaged and inveterate misanthrope, the
mason glared at mankind, and evidently cherished in his breast the
wish that the whole of the present company could change places with
the deceased old man. And now listeners became inattentive, and
people made a start forward at a slight sound, and an unholy fire
kindled in the public eye, and those next the gates beat at them
impatiently, as if they were of the cannibal species and hungry.
Again the hinges creaked, and we rushed. Disorderly pressure for
some time ensued before the uncommercial unit got figured into the
front row of the sum. It was strange to see so much heat and
uproar seething about one poor spare, white-haired old man, quiet
for evermore. He was calm of feature and undisfigured, as he lay
on his back - having been struck upon the hinder part of his head,
and thrown forward - and something like a tear or two had started
from the closed eyes, and lay wet upon the face. The uncommercial
interest, sated at a glance, directed itself upon the striving
crowd on either side and behind: wondering whether one might have
guessed, from the expression of those faces merely, what kind of
sight they were looking at. The differences of expression were not
many. There was a little pity, but not much, and that mostly with
a selfish touch in it - as who would say, 'Shall I, poor I, look
like that, when the time comes!' There was more of a secretly
brooding contemplation and curiosity, as 'That man I don't like,
and have the grudge against; would such be his appearance, if some
one - not to mention names - by any chance gave him an knock?'
There was a wolfish stare at the object, in which homicidal whitelead
worker shone conspicuous. And there was a much more general,
purposeless, vacant staring at it - like looking at waxwork,
without a catalogue, and not knowing what to make of it. But all
these expressions concurred in possessing the one underlying
expression of LOOKING AT SOMETHING THAT COULD NOT RETURN A LOOK.
when a new pressure all at once coming up from the street pinioned
him ignominiously, and hurried him into the arms (now sleeved
again) of the Custodian smoking at his door, and answering
questions, between puffs, with a certain placid meritorious air of
not being proud, though high in office. And mentioning pride, it
may be observed, by the way, that one could not well help investing
the original sole occupant of the front row with an air
depreciatory of the legitimate attraction of the poor old man:
while the two in the second row seemed to exult at this superseded
popularity.
Pacing presently round the garden of the Tower of St. Jacques de la
Boucherie, and presently again in front of the Hotel de Ville, I
called to mind a certain desolate open-air Morgue that I happened
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to light upon in London, one day in the hard winter of 1861, and
which seemed as strange to me, at the time of seeing it, as if I
had found it in China. Towards that hour of a winter's afternoon
when the lamp-lighters are beginning to light the lamps in the
streets a little before they are wanted, because the darkness
thickens fast and soon, I was walking in from the country on the
northern side of the Regent's Park - hard frozen and deserted -
when I saw an empty Hansom cab drive up to the lodge at Gloucestergate,
and the driver with great agitation call to the man there:
who quickly reached a long pole from a tree, and, deftly collared
by the driver, jumped to the step of his little seat, and so the
Hansom rattled out at the gate, galloping over the iron-bound road.
I followed running, though not so fast but that when I came to the
right-hand Canal Bridge, near the cross-path to Chalk Farm, the
Hansom was stationary, the horse was smoking hot, the long pole was
idle on the ground, and the driver and the park-keeper were looking
over the bridge parapet. Looking over too, I saw, lying on the
towing-path with her face turned up towards us, a woman, dead a day
or two, and under thirty, as I guessed, poorly dressed in black.
The feet were lightly crossed at the ankles, and the dark hair, all
pushed back from the face, as though that had been the last action
of her desperate hands, streamed over the ground. Dabbled all
about her, was the water and the broken ice that had dropped from
her dress, and had splashed as she was got out. The policeman who
had just got her out, and the passing costermonger who had helped
him, were standing near the body; the latter with that stare at it
which I have likened to being at a waxwork exhibition without a
catalogue; the former, looking over his stock, with professional
stiffness and coolness, in the direction in which the bea
rers he
had sent for were expected. So dreadfully forlorn, so dreadfully
sad, so dreadfully mysterious, this spectacle of our dear sister
here departed! A barge came up, breaking the floating ice and the
silence, and a woman steered it. The man with the horse that towed
it, cared so little for the body, that the stumbling hoofs had been
among the hair, and the tow-rope had caught and turned the head,
before our cry of horror took him to the bridle. At which sound
the steering woman looked up at us on the bridge, with contempt
unutterable, and then looking down at the body with a similar
expression - as if it were made in another likeness from herself,
had been informed with other passions, had been lost by other
chances, had had another nature dragged down to perdition - steered
a spurning streak of mud at it, and passed on.
A better experience, but also of the Morgue kind, in which chance
happily made me useful in a slight degree, arose to my remembrance
as I took my way by the Boulevard de Sebastopol to the brighter
scenes of Paris.
The thing happened, say five-and-twenty years ago. I was a modest
young uncommercial then, and timid and inexperienced. Many suns
and winds have browned me in the line, but those were my pale days.
Having newly taken the lease of a house in a certain distinguished
metropolitan parish - a house which then appeared to me to be a
frightfully first-class Family Mansion, involving awful
responsibilities - I became the prey of a Beadle. I think the
Beadle must have seen me going in or coming out, and must have
observed that I tottered under the weight of my grandeur. Or he
may have been in hiding under straw when I bought my first horse
(in the desirable stable-yard attached to the first-class Family
Mansion), and when the vendor remarked to me, in an original
manner, on bringing him for approval, taking his cloth off and
smacking him, 'There, Sir! THERE'S a Orse!' And when I said
gallantly, 'How much do you want for him?' and when the vendor
said, 'No more than sixty guineas, from you,' and when I said
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smartly, 'Why not more than sixty from ME?' And when he said
crushingly, 'Because upon my soul and body he'd be considered cheap
at seventy, by one who understood the subject - but you don't.' - I
say, the Beadle may have been in hiding under straw, when this
disgrace befell me, or he may have noted that I was too raw and
young an Atlas to carry the first-class Family Mansion in a knowing
manner. Be this as it may, the Beadle did what Melancholy did to
the youth in Gray's Elegy - he marked me for his own. And the way
in which the Beadle did it, was this: he summoned me as a Juryman
on his Coroner's Inquests.
In my first feverish alarm I repaired 'for safety and for succour'
- like those sagacious Northern shepherds who, having had no
previous reason whatever to believe in young Norval, very prudently
did not originate the hazardous idea of believing in him - to a
deep householder. This profound man informed me that the Beadle
counted on my buying him off; on my bribing him not to summon me;
and that if I would attend an Inquest with a cheerful countenance,
and profess alacrity in that branch of my country's service, the
Beadle would be disheartened, and would give up the game.
I roused my energies, and the next time the wily Beadle summoned
me, I went. The Beadle was the blankest Beadle I have ever looked
on when I answered to my name; and his discomfiture gave me courage
to go through with it.
We were impanelled to inquire concerning the death of a very little
mite of a child. It was the old miserable story. Whether the
mother had committed the minor offence of concealing the birth, or
whether she had committed the major offence of killing the child,
was the question on which we were wanted. We must commit her on
one of the two issues.
The Inquest came off in the parish workhouse, and I have yet a
lively impression that I was unanimously received by my brother
Jurymen as a brother of the utmost conceivable insignificance.
Also, that before we began, a broker who had lately cheated me
fearfully in the matter of a pair of card-tables, was for the
utmost rigour of the law. I remember that we sat in a sort of
board-room, on such very large square horse-hair chairs that I
wondered what race of Patagonians they were made for; and further,
that an undertaker gave me his card when we were in the full moral
freshness of having just been sworn, as 'an inhabitant that was
newly come into the parish, and was likely to have a young family.'
The case was then stated to us by the Coroner, and then we went
down-stairs - led by the plotting Beadle - to view the body. From
that day to this, the poor little figure, on which that sounding
legal appellation was bestowed, has lain in the same place and with
the same surroundings, to my thinking. In a kind of crypt devoted
to the warehousing of the parochial coffins, and in the midst of a
perfect Panorama of coffins of all sizes, it was stretched on a
box; the mother had put it in her box - this box - almost as soon
as it was born, and it had been presently found there. It had been
opened, and neatly sewn up, and regarded from that point of view,
it looked like a stuffed creature. It rested on a clean white
cloth, with a surgical instrument or so at hand, and regarded from
that point of view, it looked as if the cloth were 'laid,' and the
Giant were coming to dinner. There was nothing repellent about the
poor piece of innocence, and it demanded a mere form of looking at.
So, we looked at an old pauper who was going about among the
coffins with a foot rule, as if he were a case of Self-Measurement;
and we looked at one another; and we said the place was well
whitewashed anyhow; and then our conversational powers as a British
Jury flagged, and the foreman said, 'All right, gentlemen? Back
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again, Mr. Beadle!'
The miserable young creature who had given birth to this child
within a very few days, and who had cleaned the cold wet door-steps
immediately afterwards, was brought before us when we resumed our
horse-hair chairs, and was present during the proceedings. She had
a horse-hair chair herself, being very weak and ill; and I remember
how she turned to the unsympathetic nurse who attended her, and who
might have been the figure-head of a pauper-ship, and how she hid
her face and sobs and tears upon that wooden shoulder. I remember,
too, how hard her mistress was upon her (she was a servant-of-allwork),
and with what a cruel pertinacity that piece of Virtue spun
her thread of evidence double, by intertwisting it with the
sternest thread of construction. Smitten hard by the terrible low
wail from the utterly friendless orphan girl, which never ceased
during the whole inquiry, I took hear
t to ask this witness a
question or two, which hopefully admitted of an answer that might
give a favourable turn to the case. She made the turn as little
favourable as it could be, but it did some good, and the Coroner,
who was nobly patient and humane (he was the late Mr. Wakley), cast
a look of strong encouragement in my direction. Then, we had the
doctor who had made the examination, and the usual tests as to
whether the child was born alive; but he was a timid, muddle-headed
doctor, and got confused and contradictory, and wouldn't say this,
and couldn't answer for that, and the immaculate broker was too
much for him, and our side slid back again. However, I tried
again, and the Coroner backed me again, for which I ever afterwards
felt grateful to him as I do now to his memory; and we got another
favourable turn, out of some other witness, some member of the
family with a strong prepossession against the sinner; and I think
we had the doctor back again; and I know that the Coroner summed up
for our side, and that I and my British brothers turned round to
discuss our verdict, and get ourselves into great difficulties with
our large chairs and the broker. At that stage of the case I tried
hard again, being convinced that I had cause for it; and at last we
found for the minor offence of only concealing the birth; and the
poor desolate creature, who had been taken out during our
deliberation, being brought in again to be told of the verdict,
then dropped upon her knees before us, with protestations that we
were right - protestations among the most affecting that I have
ever heard in my life - and was carried away insensible.
(In private conversation after this was all over, the Coroner
showed me his reasons as a trained surgeon, for perceiving it to be
impossible that the child could, under the most favourable
circumstances, have drawn many breaths, in the very doubtful case
of its having ever breathed at all; this, owing to the discovery of
some foreign matter in the windpipe, quite irreconcilable with many
moments of life.)
When the agonised girl had made those final protestations, I had
seen her face, and it was in unison with her distracted heartbroken
voice, and it was very moving. It certainly did not impress me by
any beauty that it had, and if I ever see it again in another world