The Spotted Dog
Part I
The Attempt
Some few years since we received the following letter:—
Dear Sir,
I write to you for literary employment, and I implore you to provide me with it if it be within your power to do so. My capacity for such work is not small, and my acquirements are considerable. My need is very great, and my views in regard to remuneration are modest. I was educated at ⸻, and was afterwards a scholar of ⸻ College, Cambridge. I left the university without a degree, in consequence of a quarrel with the college tutor. I was rusticated, and not allowed to return. After that I became for awhile a student for the Chancery Bar. I then lived for some years in Paris, and I understand and speak French as though it were my own language. For all purposes of literature I am equally conversant with German. I read Italian. I am, of course, familiar with Latin. In regard to Greek I will only say that I am less ignorant of it than nineteen-twentieths of our national scholars. I am well read in modern and ancient history. I have especially studied political economy. I have not neglected other matters necessary to the education of an enlightened man—unless it be natural philosophy. I can write English, and can write it with rapidity. I am a poet;—at least, I so esteem myself. I am not a believer. My character will not bear investigation;—in saying which, I mean you to understand, not that I steal or cheat, but that I live in a dirty lodging, spend many of my hours in a public-house, and cannot pay tradesmen’s bills where tradesmen have been found to trust me. I have a wife and four children—which burden forbids me to free myself from all care by a bare bodkin. I am just past forty, and since I quarrelled with my family because I could not understand The Trinity, I have never been the owner of a ten-pound note. My wife was not a lady. I married her because I was determined to take refuge from the conventional thraldom of so-called “gentlemen” amidst the liberty of the lower orders. My life, of course, has been a mistake. Indeed, to live at all—is it not a folly?
I am at present employed on the staff of two or three of the “Penny Dreadfuls.” Your august highness in literature has perhaps never heard of a “Penny Dreadful.” I write for them matter, which we among ourselves call “blood and nastiness,”—and which is copied from one to another. For this I am paid forty-five shillings a week. For thirty shillings a week I will do any work that you may impose upon me for the term of six months. I write this letter as a last effort to rescue myself from the filth of my present position, but I entertain no hope of any success. If you ask it I will come and see you; but do not send for me unless you mean to employ me, as I am ashamed of myself. I live at No. 3, Cucumber Court, Gray’s Inn Lane;—but if you write, address to the care of Mr. Grimes, the Spotted Dog, Liquorpond Street. Now I have told you my whole life, and you may help me if you will. I do not expect an answer.
Indeed he had told us his whole life, and what a picture of a life he had drawn! There was something in the letter which compelled attention. It was impossible to throw it, half read, into the waste-paper basket, and to think of it not at all. We did read it, probably twice, and then put ourselves to work to consider how much of it might be true and how much false. Had the man been a boy at ⸻, and then a scholar of his college? We concluded that, so far, the narrative was true. Had he abandoned his dependence on wealthy friends from conscientious scruples, as he pretended; or had other and less creditable reasons caused the severance? On that point we did not quite believe him. And then, as to those assertions made by himself in regard to his own capabilities—how far did they gain credence with us? We think that we believed them all, making some small discount—with the exception of that one in which he proclaimed himself to be a poet. A man may know whether he understands French, and be quite ignorant whether the rhymed lines which he produces are or are not poetry. When he told us that he was an infidel, and that his character would not bear investigation, we went with him altogether. His allusion to suicide we regarded as a foolish boast. We gave him credit for the four children, but were not certain about the wife. We quite believed the general assertion of his impecuniosity. That stuff about “conventional thraldom” we hope we took at its worth. When he told us that his life had been a mistake he spoke to us Gospel truth.
Of the “Penny Dreadfuls,” and of “blood and nastiness,” so called, we had never before heard, but we did not think it remarkable that a man so gifted as our correspondent should earn forty-five shillings a week by writing for the cheaper periodicals. It did not, however, appear to us probable that anyone so remunerated would be willing to leave that engagement for another which should give him only thirty shillings. When he spoke of the “filth of his present position,” our heart began to bleed for him. We know what it is so well, and can fathom so accurately the degradation of the educated man who, having been ambitious in the career of literature, falls into that slough of despond by which the profession of literature is almost surrounded. There we were with him, as brothers together. When we came to Mr. Grimes and the Spotted Dog, in Liquorpond Street, we thought that we had better refrain from answering the letter—by which decision on our part he would not, according to his own statement, be much disappointed. Mr. Julius Mackenzie! Perhaps at this very time rich uncles and aunts were buttoning up their pockets against the sinner because of his devotion to the Spotted Dog. There are well-to-do people among the Mackenzies. It might be the case that that heterodox want of comprehension in regard to The Trinity was the cause of it: but we have observed that in most families, grievous as are doubts upon such sacred subjects, they are not held to be cause of hostility so invincible as is a thoroughgoing devotion to a Spotted Dog. If the Spotted Dog had brought about these troubles, any interposition from ourselves would be useless.
For twenty-four hours we had given up all idea of answering the letter; but it then occurred to us that men who have become disreputable as drunkards do not put forth their own abominations when making appeals for aid. If this man were really given to drink he would hardly have told us of his association with the public-house. Probably he was much at the Spotted Dog, and hated himself for being there. The more we thought of it the more we fancied that the gist of his letter might be true. It seemed that the man had desired to tell the truth as he himself believed it.
It so happened that at that time we had been asked to provide an index to a certain learned manuscript in three volumes. The intended publisher of the work had already procured an index from a professional compiler of such matters; but the thing had been so badly done that it could not be used. Some knowledge of the classics was required, though it was not much more than a familiarity with the names of Latin and Greek authors, to which perhaps should be added some acquaintance, with the names also, of the better-known editors and commentators. The gentleman who had had the task in hand had failed conspicuously, and I had been told by my enterprising friend Mr. X⸺, the publisher, that £25 would be freely paid on the proper accomplishment of the undertaking. The work, apparently so trifling in its nature, demanded a scholar’s acquirements, and could hardly be completed in less than two months. We had snubbed the offer, saying that we should be ashamed to ask an educated man to give his time and labour for so small a remuneration;—but to Mr. Julius Mackenzie £25 for two months’ work would manifestly be a godsend. If Mr. Julius Mackenzie did in truth possess the knowledge for which he gave himself credit; if he was, as he said, “familiar with Latin,” and was “less ignorant of Greek than nineteen-twentieths of our national scholars,” he might perhaps be able to earn this £25. We certainly knew no one else who could and who would do the work properly for that money. We therefore wrote to Mr. Julius Mackenzie, and requested his presence. Our note was short, cautious, and also courteous. We regretted that a man so gifted should be driven by stress of circumstances to such need. We could undertake nothing, but if it would not put him to too much trouble to call upon us, we might perhaps be able to suggest something to him. Precisely at the hour named Mr. Julius Mackenzie came to us.
We well remember his appearance, which was one unutterably painful to behold. He was a tall man, very thin—thin we might say as a whipping-post, were it not that one’s idea of a whipping-post conveys erectness and rigidity, whereas this man, as he stood before us, was full of bends, and curves, and crookedness. His big head seemed to lean forward over his miserably narrow chest. His back was bowed, and his legs were crooked and tottering. He had told us that he was over forty, but we doubted, and doubt now, whether he had not added something to his years, in order partially to excuse the wan, worn weariness of his countenance. He carried an infinity of thick, ragged, wild, dirty hair, dark in colour, though not black, which age had not yet begun to grizzle. He wore a miserable attempt at a beard, stubbly, uneven, and half shorn—as though it had been cut down within an inch of his chin with blunt scissors. He had two ugly projecting teeth, and his cheeks were hollow. His eyes were deep-set, but very bright, illuminating his whole face; so that it was impossible to look at him and to think him to be one wholly insignificant. His eyebrows were large and shaggy, but well formed, not meeting across the brow, with single, stiffly-projecting hairs—a pair of eyebrows which added much strength to his countenance. His nose was long and well shaped—but red as a huge carbuncle. The moment we saw him we connected that nose with the Spotted Dog. It was not a blotched nose, not a nose covered with many carbuncles, but a brightly red, smooth, well-formed nose, one glowing carbuncle in itself. He was dressed in a long brown greatcoat, which was buttoned up round his throat, and which came nearly to his feet. The binding of the coat was frayed, the buttons were half uncovered, the buttonholes were tattered, the velvet collar had become parti-coloured with dirt and usage. It was in the month of December, and a greatcoat was needed; but this greatcoat looked as though it were worn because other garments were not at his command. Not an inch of linen or even of flannel shirt was visible. Below his coat we could only see his broken boots and the soiled legs of his trousers, which had reached that age which in trousers defies description. When we looked at him we could not but ask ourselves whether this man had been born a gentleman and was still a scholar. And yet there was that in his face which prompted us to believe the account he had given of himself. As we looked at him we felt sure that he possessed keen intellect, and that he was too much of a man to boast of acquirements which he did not believe himself to possess. We shook hands with him, asked him to sit down, and murmured something of our sorrow that he should be in distress.
“I am pretty well used to it,” said he. There was nothing mean in his voice;—there was indeed a touch of humour in it, and in his manner there was nothing of the abjectness of supplication. We had his letter in our hands, and we read a portion of it again as he sat opposite to us. We then remarked that we did not understand how he, having a wife and family dependent on him, could offer to give up a third of his income with the mere object of changing the nature of his work. “You don’t know what it is,” said he, “to write for the ‘Penny Dreadfuls.’ I’m at it seven hours a day, and hate the very words that I write. I cursed myself afterwards for sending that letter. I know that to hope is to be an ass. But I did send it, and here I am.”
We looked at his nose and felt that we must be careful before we suggested to our learned friend Dr. ⸻ to put his manuscript into the hands of Mr. Julius Mackenzie. If it had been a printed book the attempt might have been made without much hazard, but our friend’s work, which was elaborate, and very learned, had not yet reached the honours of the printing-house. We had had our own doubts whether it might ever assume the form of a real book; but our friend, who was a wealthy as well as a learned man, was, as yet, very determined. He desired, at any rate, that the thing should be perfected, and his publisher had therefore come to us offering £25 for the codification and index. Were anything other than good to befall his manuscript, his lamentations would be loud, not on his own score—but on behalf of learning in general. It behoved us therefore to be cautious. We pretended to read the letter again, in order that we might gain time for a decision, for we were greatly frightened by that gleaming nose.
Let the reader understand that the nose was by no means Bardolphian. If we have read Shakespeare aright Bardolph’s nose was a thing of terror from its size as well as its hue. It was a mighty vat, into which had ascended all the divinest particles distilled from the cellars of the hostelrie in Eastcheap. Such at least is the idea which stage representations have left upon all our minds. But the nose now before us was a well-formed nose, would have been a commanding nose—for the power of command shows itself much in the nasal organ—had it not been for its colour. While we were thinking of this, and doubting much as to our friend’s manuscript, Mr. Mackenzie interrupted us. “You think I am a drunkard,” said he. The man’s mother-wit had enabled him to read our inmost thoughts.
As we looked up the man had risen from his chair, and was standing over us. He loomed upon us very tall, although his legs were crooked, and his back bent. Those piercing eyes, and that nose which almost assumed an air of authority as he carried it, were a great way above us. There seemed to be an infinity of that old brown greatcoat. He had divined our thoughts, and we did not dare to contradict him. We felt that a weak, vapid, unmanly smile was creeping over our face. We were smiling as a man smiles who intends to imply some contemptuous assent with the self-depreciating comment of his companion. Such a mode of expression is in our estimation most cowardly, and most odious. We had not intended it, but we knew that the smile had pervaded us. “Of course you do,” said he. “I was a drunkard, but I am not one now. It doesn’t matter;—only I wish you hadn’t sent for me. I’ll go away at once.”
So saying, he was about to depart, but we stopped him. We assured him with much energy that we did not mean to offend him. He protested that there was no offence. He was too well used to that kind of thing to be made “more than wretched by it.” Such was his heartbreaking phrase. “As for anger, I’ve lost all that long ago. Of course you take me for a drunkard, and I should still be a drunkard, only—”
“Only what?” I asked.
“It don’t matter,” said he. “I need not trouble you more than I have said already. You haven’t got anything for me to do, I suppose?” Then I explained to him that I had something he might do, if I could venture to entrust him with the work. With some trouble I got him to sit down again, and to listen while I explained to him the circumstances. I had been grievously afflicted when he alluded to his former habit of drinking—a former habit as he himself now stated—but I entertained no hesitation in raising questions as to his erudition. I felt almost assured that his answers would be satisfactory, and that no discomfiture would arise from such questioning. We were quickly able to perceive that we at any rate could not examine him in classical literature. As soon as we mentioned the name and nature of the work he went off at score, and satisfied us amply that he was familiar at least with the title pages of editions. We began, indeed, to fear whether he might not be too caustic a critic on our own friend’s performance. “Dr. ⸻ is only an amateur himself,” said we, deprecating in advance any such exercise of the red-nosed man’s too severe erudition. “We never get much beyond dilettanteism here,” said he, “as far as Greek and Latin are concerned.” What a terrible man he would have been could he have got upon the staff of the Saturday Review, instead of going to the Spotted Dog!
We endeavoured to bring the interview to an end by telling him that we would consult the learned doctor from whom the manuscript had emanated; and we hinted that a reference would be of course acceptable. His impudence—or perhaps we should rather call it his straightforward sincere audacity—was unbounded. “Mr. Grimes of the Spotted Dog knows me better than anyone else,” said he. We blew the breath out of our mouth with astonishment. “I’m not asking you to go to him to find out whether I know Latin and Greek,” said Mr. Mackenzie. “You must find that out for yourself.” We assured him that we thought we had found that out. “But he can tell you that I won’t pawn your manuscript.” The man was so grim and brave that he almost frightened us. We hinted, however, that literary reference should be given. The gentleman who paid him forty-five shillings a week—the manager, in short, of the “Penny Dreadful,”—might tell us something of him. Then he wrote for us a name on a scrap of paper, and added to it an address in the close vicinity of Fleet Street, at which we remembered to have seen the title of a periodical which we now knew to be a “Penny Dreadful.”
Before he took his leave he made us a speech, again standing up over us, though we also were on our legs. It was that bend in his neck, combined with his natural height, which gave him such an air of superiority in conversation. He seemed to overshadow us, and to have his own way with us, because he was enabled to look down upon us. There was a footstool on our hearthrug, and we remember to have attempted to stand upon that, in order that we might escape this supervision; but we stumbled and had to kick it from us, and something was added to our sense of inferiority by this little failure. “I don’t expect much from this,” he said. “I never do expect much. And I have misfortunes independent of my poverty which make it impossible that I should be other than a miserable wretch.”
“Bad health?” we asked.
“No;—nothing absolutely personal;—but never mind. I must not trouble you with more of my history. But if you can do this thing for me, it may be the means of redeeming me from utter degradation.” We then assured him that we would do our best, and he left us with a promise that he would call again on that day week.
The first step which we took on his behalf was one the very idea of which had at first almost moved us to ridicule. We made enquiry respecting Mr. Julius Mackenzie, of Mr. Grimes, the landlord of the Spotted Dog. Though Mr. Grimes did keep the Spotted Dog, he might be a man of sense and, possibly, of conscience. At any rate he would tell us something, or confirm our doubts by refusing to tell us anything. We found Mr. Grimes seated in a very neat little back parlour, and were peculiarly taken by the appearance of a lady in a little cap and black silk gown, whom we soon found to be Mrs. Grimes. Had we ventured to employ our intellect in personifying for ourselves an imaginary Mrs. Grimes as the landlady of a Spotted Dog public-house in Liquorpond Street, the figure we should have built up for ourselves would have been the very opposite of that which this lady presented to us. She was slim, and young, and pretty, and had pleasant little tricks of words, in spite of occasional slips in her grammar, which made us almost think that it might be our duty to come very often to the Spotted Dog to enquire about Mr. Julius Mackenzie. Mr. Grimes was a man about forty—fully ten years the senior of his wife—with a clear gray eye, and a mouth and chin from which we surmised that he would be competent to clear the Spotted Dog of unruly visitors after twelve o’clock, whenever it might be his wish to do so. We soon made known our request. Mr. Mackenzie had come to us for literary employment. Could they tell us anything about Mr. Mackenzie?
“He’s as clever an author, in the way of writing and that kind of thing, as there is in all London,” said Mrs. Grimes with energy. Perhaps her opinion ought not to have been taken for much, but it had its weight. We explained, however, that at the present moment we were specially anxious to know something of the gentleman’s character and mode of life. Mr. Grimes, whose manner to us was quite courteous, sat silent, thinking how to answer us. His more impulsive and friendly wife was again ready with her assurance. “There aint an honester gentleman breathing;—and I say he is a gentleman, though he’s that poor he hasn’t sometimes a shirt to his back.”
“I don’t think he’s ever very well off for shirts,” said Mr. Grimes.
“I wouldn’t be slow to give him one of yours, John, only I know he wouldn’t take it,” said Mrs. Grimes. “Well now, look here, Sir;—we’ve that feeling for him that our young woman there would draw anything for him he’d ask—money or no money. She’d never venture to name money to him if he wanted a glass of anything—hot or cold, beer or spirits. Isn’t that so, John?”
“She’s fool enough for anything as far as I know,” said Mr. Grimes.
“She aint no fool at all; and I’d do the same if I was there, and so’d you, John. There is nothing Mackenzie’d ask as he wouldn’t give him,” said Mrs. Grimes, pointing with her thumb over her shoulder to her husband, who was standing on the hearthrug;—“that is, in the way of drawing liquor, and refreshments, and suchlike. But he never raised a glass to his lips in this house as he didn’t pay for, nor yet took a biscuit out of that basket. He’s a gentleman all over, is Mackenzie.”
It was strong testimony; but still we had not quite got at the bottom of the matter. “Doesn’t he raise a great many glasses to his lips?” we asked.
“No he don’t,” said Mrs. Grimes—“only in reason.”
“He’s had misfortunes,” said Mr. Grimes.
“Indeed he has,” said the lady—“what I call the very troublesomest of troubles. If you was troubled like him, John, where’d you be?”
“I know where you’d be,” said John.
“He’s got a bad wife, Sir; the worst as ever was,” continued Mrs. Grimes. “Talk of drink;—there is nothing that woman wouldn’t do for it. She’d pawn the very clothes off her children’s back in midwinter to get it. She’d rob the food out of her husband’s mouth for a drop of gin. As for herself—she aint no woman’s notions left of keeping herself anyway. She’d as soon be picked out of the gutter as not;—and as for words out of her mouth or clothes on her back, she hasn’t got, Sir, not an item of a female’s feelings left about her.”
Mrs. Grimes had been very eloquent, and had painted the “troublesomest of all troubles” with glowing words. This was what the wretched man had come to by marrying a woman who was not a lady in order that he might escape the “conventional thraldom” of gentility! But still the drunken wife was not all. There was the evidence of his own nose against himself, and the additional fact that he had acknowledged himself to have been formerly a drunkard. “I suppose he has drunk, himself?” we said.
“He has drunk, in course,” said Mrs. Grimes.
“The world has been pretty rough with him, Sir,” said Mr. Grimes.
“But he don’t drink now,” continued the lady. “At least if he do, we don’t see it. As for her, she wouldn’t show herself inside our door.”
“It aint often that man and wife draws their milk from the same cow,” said Mr. Grimes.
“But Mackenzie is here every day of his life,” said Mrs. Grimes. “When he’s got a sixpence to pay for it, he’ll come in here and have a glass of beer and a bit of something to eat. We does make him a little extra welcome, and that’s the truth of it. We knows what he is, and we knows what he was. As for book learning, Sir;—it don’t matter what language it is, it’s all as one to him. He knows ’em all round just as I know my catechism.”
“Can’t you say fairer than that for him, Polly?” asked Mr. Grimes.
“Don’t you talk of catechisms, John, nor yet of nothing else as a man ought to set his mind to;—unless it is keeping the Spotted Dog. But as for Mackenzie;—he knows off by heart whole books full of learning. There was some furreners here as come from—I don’t know where it was they come from, only it wasn’t France, nor yet Germany, and he talked to them just as though he hadn’t been born in England at all. I don’t think there ever was such a man for knowing things. He’ll go on with poetry out of his own head till you think it comes from him like web from a spider.” We could not help thinking of the wonderful companionship which there must have been in that parlour while the reduced man was spinning his web and Mrs. Grimes, with her needlework lying idle in her lap, was sitting by, listening with rapt admiration. In passing by the Spotted Dog one would not imagine such a scene to have its existence within. But then so many things do have existence of which we imagine nothing!
Mr. Grimes ended the interview. “The fact is, Sir, if you can give him employment better than what he has now, you’ll be helping a man who has seen better days, and who only wants help to see ’em again. He’s got it all there,” and Mr. Grimes put his finger up to his head.
“He’s got it all here too,” said Mrs. Grimes, laying her hand upon her heart. Hereupon we took our leave, suggesting to these excellent friends that if it should come to pass that we had further dealings with Mr. Mackenzie we might perhaps trouble them again. They assured us that we should always be welcome, and Mr. Grimes himself saw us to the door, having made profuse offers of such good cheer as the house afforded. We were upon the whole much taken with the Spotted Dog.
From thence we went to the office of the “Penny Dreadful,” in the vicinity of Fleet Street. As we walked thither we could not but think of Mrs. Grimes’s words. The troublesomest of troubles! We acknowledged to ourselves that they were true words. Can there be any trouble more troublesome than that of suffering from the shame inflicted by a degraded wife? We had just parted from Mr. Grimes—not, indeed, having seen very much of him in the course of our interview;—but little as we had seen, we were sure that he was assisted in his position by a buoyant pride in that he called himself the master, and owner, and husband of Mrs. Grimes. In the very step with which he passed in and out of his own door you could see that there was nothing that he was ashamed of about his household. When abroad he could talk of his “missus” with a conviction that the picture which the word would convey to all who heard him would redound to his honour. But what must have been the reflections of Julius Mackenzie when his mind dwelt upon his wife? We remembered the words of his letter. “I have a wife and four children, which burden forbids me to free myself from all care with a bare bodkin.” As we thought of them, and of the story which had been told to us at the Spotted Dog, they lost that tone of rhodomontade with which they had invested themselves when we first read them. A wife who is indifferent to being picked out of the gutter, and who will pawn her children’s clothes for gin, must be a trouble than which none can be more troublesome.
We did not find that we ingratiated ourselves with the people at the office of the periodical for which Mr. Mackenzie worked; and yet we endeavoured to do so, assuming in our manner and tone something of the familiarity of a common pursuit. After much delay we came upon a gentleman sitting in a dark cupboard, who twisted round his stool to face us while he spoke to us. We believe that he was the editor of more than one “Penny Dreadful,” and that as many as a dozen serial novels were being issued to the world at the same time under his supervision. “Oh!” said he, “so you’re at that game, are you?” We assured him that we were at no game at all, but were simply influenced by a desire to assist a distressed scholar. “That be blowed,” said our brother. “Mackenzie’s doing as well here as he’ll do anywhere. He’s a drunken blackguard, when all’s said and done. So you’re going to buy him up, are you? You won’t keep him long—and then he’ll have to starve.” We assured the gentleman that we had no desire to buy up Mr. Mackenzie; we explained our ideas as to the freedom of the literary profession, in accordance with which Mr. Mackenzie could not be wrong in applying to us for work; and we especially deprecated any severity on our brother’s part towards the man, more especially begging that nothing might be decided, as we were far from thinking it certain that we could provide Mr. Mackenzie with any literary employment. “That’s all right,” said our brother, twisting back his stool. “He can’t work for both of us;—that’s all. He has his bread here regular, week after week; and I don’t suppose you’ll do as much as that for him.” Then we went away, shaking the dust off our feet, and wondering much at the great development of literature which latter years have produced. We had not even known of the existence of these papers;—and yet there they were, going forth into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers, all of whom were being, more or less, instructed in their modes of life and manner of thinking by the stories which were thus brought before them.
But there might be truth in what our brother had said to us. Should Mr. Mackenzie abandon his present engagement for the sake of the job which we proposed to put in his hands, might he not thereby injure rather than improve his prospects? We were acquainted with only one learned doctor desirous of having his manuscripts codified and indexed at his own expense. As for writing for the periodical with which we were connected, we knew enough of the business to be aware that Mr. Mackenzie’s gifts of erudition would very probably not so much assist him in attempting such work as would his late training act against him. A man might be able to read and even talk a dozen languages—“just as though he hadn’t been born in England at all,”—and yet not write the language with which we dealt after the fashion which suited our readers. It might be that he would fly much above our heads, and do work infinitely too big for us. We did not regard our own heads as being very high. But, for such altitude as they held, a certain class of writing was adapted. The gentleman whom we had just left would require, no doubt, altogether another style. It was probable that Mr. Mackenzie had already fitted himself to his present audience. And, even were it not so, we could not promise him forty-five shillings a week, or even that thirty shillings for which he asked. There is nothing more dangerous than the attempt to befriend a man in middle life by transplanting him from one soil to another.
When Mr. Mackenzie came to us again we endeavoured to explain all this to him. We had in the meantime seen our friend the Doctor, whose beneficence of spirit in regard to the unfortunate man of letters was extreme. He was charmed with our account of the man, and saw with his mind’s eye the work, for the performance of which he was pining, perfected in a manner that would be a blessing to the scholars of all future ages. He was at first anxious to ask Julius Mackenzie down to his rectory, and, even after we had explained to him that this would not at present be expedient, was full of a dream of future friendship with a man who would be able to discuss the digamma with him, who would have studied Greek metres, and have an opinion of his own as to Porson’s canon. We were in possession of the manuscript, and had our friend’s authority for handing it over to Mr. Mackenzie.
He came to us according to appointment, and his nose seemed to be redder than ever. We thought that we discovered a discouraging flavour of spirits in his breath. Mrs. Grimes had declared that he drank—only in reason; but the ideas of the wife of a publican—even though that wife were Mrs. Grimes—might be very different from our own as to what was reasonable in that matter. And as we looked at him he seemed to be more rough, more ragged, almost more wretched than before. It might be that, in taking his part with my brother of the “Penny Dreadful,” with the Doctor, and even with myself in thinking over his claims, I had endowed him with higher qualities than I had been justified in giving to him. As I considered him and his appearance I certainly could not assure myself that he looked like a man worthy to be trusted. A policeman, seeing him at a street corner, would have had an eye upon him in a moment. He rubbed himself together within his old coat, as men do when they come out of gin-shops. His eye was as bright as before, but we thought that his mouth was meaner, and his nose redder. We were almost disenchanted with him. We said nothing to him at first about the Spotted Dog, but suggested to him our fears that if he undertook work at our hands he would lose the much more permanent employment which he got from the gentleman whom we had seen in the cupboard. We then explained to him that we could promise to him no continuation of employment.
The violence with which he cursed the gentleman who had sat in the cupboard appalled us, and had, we think, some effect in bringing back to us that feeling of respect for him which we had almost lost. It may be difficult to explain why we respected him because he cursed and swore horribly. We do not like cursing and swearing, and were any of our younger contributors to indulge themselves after that fashion in our presence we should, at the very least—frown upon them. We did not frown upon Julius Mackenzie, but stood up, gazing into his face above us, again feeling that the man was powerful. Perhaps we respected him because he was not in the least afraid of us. He went on to assert that he cared not—not a straw, we will say—for the gentleman in the cupboard. He knew the gentleman in the cupboard very well; and the gentleman in the cupboard knew him. As long as he took his work to the gentleman in the cupboard, the gentleman in the cupboard would be only too happy to purchase that work at the rate of sixpence for a page of manuscript containing two hundred and fifty words. That was his rate of payment for prose fiction, and at that rate he could earn forty-five shillings a week. He wasn’t afraid of the gentleman in the cupboard. He had had some words with the gentleman in the cupboard before now, and they two understood each other very well. He hinted, moreover, that there were other gentlemen in other cupboards; but with none of them could he advance beyond forty-five shillings a week. For this he had to sit, with his pen in his hand, seven hours seven days a week, and the very paper, pens, and ink came to fifteenpence out of the money. He had struck for wages once, and for a halcyon month or two had carried his point of sevenpence halfpenny a page; but the gentlemen in the cupboards had told him that it could not be. They, too, must live. His matter was no doubt attractive; but any price above sixpence a page unfitted it for their market. All this Mr. Julius Mackenzie explained to us with much violence of expression. When I named Mrs. Grimes to him the tone of his voice was altered. “Yes,” said he, “I thought they’d say a word for me. They’re the best friends I’ve got now. I don’t know that you ought quite to believe her, for I think she’d perhaps tell a lie to do me a service.” We assured him that we did believe every word Mrs. Grimes had said to us.
After much pausing over the matter we told him that we were empowered to trust him with our friend’s work, and the manuscript was produced upon the table. If he would undertake the work and perform it, he should be paid £8: 6s.: 8d. for each of the three volumes as they were completed. And we undertook, moreover, on our own responsibility, to advance him money in small amounts through the hands of Mrs. Grimes, if he really settled himself to the task. At first he was in ecstasies, and as we explained to him the way in which the index should be brought out and the codification performed, he turned over the pages rapidly, and showed us that he understood at any rate the nature of the work to be done. But when we came to details he was less happy. In what workshop was this new work to be performed? There was a moment in which we almost thought of telling him to do the work in our own room; but we hesitated, luckily, remembering that his continual presence with us for two or three months would probably destroy us altogether. It appeared that his present work was done sometimes at the Spotted Dog, and sometimes at home in his lodgings. He said not a word to us about his wife, but we could understand that there would be periods in which to work at home would be impossible to him. He did not pretend to deny that there might be danger on that score, nor did he ask permission to take the entire manuscript at once away to his abode. We knew that if he took part he must take the whole, as the work could not be done in parts. Counter references would be needed. “My circumstances are bad;—very bad indeed,” he said. We expressed the great trouble to which we should be subjected if any evil should happen to the manuscript. “I will give it up,” he said, towering over us again, and shaking his head. “I cannot expect that I should be trusted.” But we were determined that it should not be given up. Sooner than give the matter up we would make some arrangement by hiring a place in which he might work. Even though we were to pay ten shillings a week for a room for him out of the money, the bargain would be a good one for him. At last we determined that we would pay a second visit to the Spotted Dog, and consult Mrs. Grimes. We felt that we should have a pleasure in arranging together with Mrs. Grimes any scheme of benevolence on behalf of this unfortunate and remarkable man. So we told him that we would think over the matter, and send a letter to his address at the Spotted Dog, which he should receive on the following morning. He then gathered himself up, rubbed himself together again inside his coat, and took his departure.
As soon as he was gone we sat looking at the learned Doctor’s manuscript, and thinking of what we had done. There lay the work of years, by which our dear and venerable old friend expected that he would take rank among the great commentators of modern times. We, in truth, did not anticipate for him all the glory to which he looked forward. We feared that there might be disappointment. Hot discussion on verbal accuracies or on rules of metre are perhaps not so much in vogue now as they were a hundred years ago. There might be disappointment and great sorrow; but we could not with equanimity anticipate the prevention of this sorrow by the possible loss or destruction of the manuscript which had been entrusted to us. The Doctor himself had seemed to anticipate no such danger. When we told him of Mackenzie’s learning and misfortunes, he was eager at once that the thing should be done, merely stipulating that he should have an interview with Mr. Mackenzie before he returned to his rectory.
That same day we went to the Spotted Dog, and found Mrs. Grimes alone. Mackenzie had been there immediately after leaving our room, and had told her what had taken place. She was full of the subject and anxious to give every possible assistance. She confessed at once that the papers would not be safe in the rooms inhabited by Mackenzie and his wife. “He pays five shillings a week,” she said, “for a wretched place round in Cucumber Court. They are all huddled together, anyway; and how he manages to do a thing at all there—in the way of author-work—is a wonder to everybody. Sometimes he can’t, and then he’ll sit for hours together at the little table in our taproom.” We went into the taproom and saw the little table. It was a wonder indeed that anyone should be able to compose and write tales of imagination in a place so dreary, dark, and ill-omened. The little table was hardly more than a long slab or plank, perhaps eighteen inches wide. When we visited the place there were two brewers’ draymen seated there, and three draggled, wretched-looking women. The carters were eating enormous hunches of bread and bacon, which they cut and put into their mouths slowly, solemnly, and in silence. The three women were seated on a bench, and when I saw them had no signs of festivity before them. It must be presumed that they had paid for something, or they would hardly have been allowed to sit there. “It’s empty now,” said Mrs. Grimes, taking no immediate notice of the men or of the women; “but sometimes he’ll sit writing in that corner, when there’s such a jabber of voices as you wouldn’t hear a cannon go off over at Reid’s, and that thick with smoke you’d a’most cut it with a knife. Don’t he, Peter?” The man whom she addressed endeavoured to prepare himself for answer by swallowing at the moment three square inches of bread and bacon, which he had just put into his mouth. He made an awful effort, but failed; and, failing, nodded his head three times. “They all know him here, Sir,” continued Mrs. Grimes. “He’ll go on writing, writing, writing, for hours together; and nobody’ll say nothing to him. Will they, Peter?” Peter, who was now halfway through the work he had laid out for himself, muttered some inarticulate grunt of assent.
We then went back to the snug little room inside the bar. It was quite clear to me that the man could not manipulate the Doctor’s manuscript, of which he would have to spread a dozen sheets before him at the same time, in the place I had just visited. Even could he have occupied the chamber alone, the accommodation would not have been sufficient for the purpose. It was equally clear that he could not be allowed to use Mrs. Grimes’s snuggery. “How are we to get a place for him?” said I, appealing to the lady. “He shall have a place,” she said, “I’ll go bail; he shan’t lose the job for want of a workshop.” Then she sat down and began to think it over. I was just about to propose the hiring of some decent room in the neighbourhood, when she made a suggestion, which I acknowledge startled me. “I’ll have a big table put into my own bedroom,” said she, “and he shall do it there. There aint another hole or corner about the place as’d suit; and he can lay the gentleman’s papers all about on the bed, square and clean and orderly. Can’t he now? And I can see after ’em, as he don’t lose ’em. Can’t I now?”
By this time there had sprung up an intimacy between ourselves and Mrs. Grimes which seemed to justify an expression of the doubt which I then threw on the propriety of such a disarrangement of her most private domestic affairs. “Mr. Grimes will hardly approve of that,” we said.
“Oh, John won’t mind. What’ll it matter to John as long as Mackenzie is out in time for him to go to bed? We aint early birds, morning or night—that’s true. In our line folks can’t be early. But from ten to six there’s the room, and he shall have it. Come up and see, Sir.” So we followed Mrs. Grimes up the narrow staircase to the marital bower. “It aint large, but there’ll be room for the table, and for him to sit at it;—won’t there now?”
It was a dark little room, with one small window looking out under the low roof, and facing the heavy high dead wall of the brewery opposite. But it was clean and sweet, and the furniture in it was all solid and good, old-fashioned, and made of mahogany. Two or three of Mrs. Grimes’s gowns were laid upon the bed, and other portions of her dress were hung on pegs behind the doors. The only untidy article in the room was a pair of “John’s” trousers, which he had failed to put out of sight. She was not a bit abashed, but took them up and folded them and patted them, and laid them in the capacious wardrobe. “We’ll have all these things away,” she said, “and then he can have all his papers out upon the bed just as he pleases.”
We own that there was something in the proposed arrangement which dismayed us. We also were married, and what would our wife have said had we proposed that a contributor—even a contributor not red-nosed and seething with gin—that any best-disciplined contributor should be invited to write an article within the precincts of our sanctum? We could not bring ourselves to believe that Mr. Grimes would authorise the proposition. There is something holy about the bedroom of a married couple; and there would be a special desecration in the continued presence of Mr. Julius Mackenzie. We thought it better that we should explain something of all this to her. “Do you know,” we said, “this seems to be hardly prudent?”
“Why not prudent?” she asked.
“Up in your bedroom, you know! Mr. Grimes will be sure to dislike it.”
“What—John! Not he. I know what you’re a-thinking of, Mr. ⸻,” she said. “But we’re different in our ways than what you are. Things to us are only just what they are. We haven’t time, nor yet money, nor perhaps edication, for seemings and thinkings as you have. If you was travelling out amongst the wild Injeans, you’d ask anyone to have a bit in your bedroom as soon as look at ’em, if you’d got a bit for ’em to eat. We’re travelling among wild Injeans all our lives, and a bedroom aint no more to us than any other room. Mackenzie shall come up here, and I’ll have the table fixed for him, just there by the window.” I hadn’t another word to say to her, and I could not keep myself from thinking for many an hour afterwards, whether it may not be a good thing for men, and for women also, to believe that they are always travelling among wild Indians.
When we went down Mr. Grimes himself was in the little parlour. He did not seem at all surprised at seeing his wife enter the room from above accompanied by a stranger. She at once began her story, and told the arrangement which she proposed—which she did, as I observed, without any actual request for his sanction. Looking at Mr. Grimes’s face, I thought that he did not quite like it; but he accepted it, almost without a word, scratching his head and raising his eyebrows. “You know, John, he could no more do it at home than he could fly,” said Mrs. Grimes.
“Who said he could do it at home?”
“And he couldn’t do it in the taproom;—could he? If so, there aint no other place, and so that’s settled.” John Grimes again scratched his head, and the matter was settled. Before we left the house Mackenzie himself came in, and was told in our presence of the accommodation which was to be prepared for him. “It’s just like you, Mrs. Grimes,” was all he said in the way of thanks. Then Mrs. Grimes made her bargain with him somewhat sternly. He should have the room for five hours a day—ten till three, or twelve till five; but he must settle which, and then stick to his hours. “And I won’t have nothing up there in the way of drink,” said John Grimes.
“Who’s asking to have drink there?” said Mackenzie.
“You’re not asking now, but maybe you will. I won’t have it, that’s all.”
“That shall be all right, John,” said Mrs. Grimes, nodding her head.
“Women are that soft—in the way of judgment—that they’ll go and do a’most anything, good or bad, when they’ve got their feelings up.” Such was the only rebuke which in our hearing Mr. Grimes administered to his pretty wife. Mackenzie whispered something to the publican, but Grimes only shook his head. We understood it all thoroughly. He did not like the scheme, but he would not contradict his wife in an act of real kindness. We then made an appointment with the scholar for meeting our friend and his future patron at our rooms, and took our leave of the Spotted Dog. Before we went, however, Mrs. Grimes insisted on producing some cherry-bounce, as she called it, which, after sundry refusals on our part, was brought in on a small round shining tray, in a little bottle covered all over with gold sprigs, with four tiny glasses similarly ornamented. Mrs. Grimes poured out the liquor, using a very sparing hand when she came to the glass which was intended for herself. We find it, as a rule, easier to talk with the Grimeses of the world than to eat with them or to drink with them. When the glass was handed to us we did not know whether or no we were expected to say something. We waited, however, till Mr. Grimes and Mackenzie had been provided with their glasses. “Proud to see you at the Spotted Dog, Mr. ⸻,” said Grimes. “That we are,” said Mrs. Grimes, smiling at us over her almost imperceptible drop of drink. Julius Mackenzie just bobbed his head, and swallowed the cordial at a gulp—as a dog does a lump of meat, leaving the impression on his friends around him that he has not got from it half the enjoyment which it might have given him had he been a little more patient in the process. I could not but think that had Mackenzie allowed the cherry-bounce to trickle a little in his palate, as I did myself, it would have gratified him more than it did in being chucked down his throat with all the impetus which his elbow could give to the glass. “That’s tidy tipple,” said Mr. Grimes, winking his eye. We acknowledged that it was tidy. “My mother made it, as used to keep the Pig and Magpie, at Colchester,” said Mrs. Grimes. In this way we learned a good deal of Mrs. Grimes’s history. Her very earliest years had been passed among wild Indians.
Then came the interview between the Doctor and Mr. Mackenzie. We must confess that we greatly feared the impression which our younger friend might make on the elder. We had of course told the Doctor of the red nose, and he had accepted the information with a smile. But he was a man who would feel the contamination of contact with a drunkard, and who would shrink from an unpleasant association. There are vices of which we habitually take altogether different views in accordance with the manner in which they are brought under our notice. This vice of drunkenness is often a joke in the mouths of those to whom the thing itself is a horror. Even before our boys we talk of it as being rather funny, though to see one of them funny himself would almost break our hearts. The learned commentator had accepted our account of the red nose as though it were simply a part of the undeserved misery of the wretched man; but should he find the wretched man to be actually redolent of gin his feelings might be changed. The Doctor was with us first, and the volumes of the MS. were displayed upon the table. The compiler of them, as he lifted here a page and there a page, handled them with the gentleness of a lover. They had been exquisitely arranged, and were very fair. The pagings, and the margins, and the chapterings, and all the complementary paraphernalia of authorship, were perfect. “A lifetime, my friend; just a lifetime!” the Doctor had said to us, speaking of his own work while we were waiting for the man to whose hands was to be entrusted the result of so much labour and scholarship. We wished at that moment that we had never been called on to interfere in the matter.
Mackenzie came, and the introduction was made. The Doctor was a gentleman of the old school, very neat in his attire—dressed in perfect black, with knee-breeches and black gaiters, with a closely-shorn chin, and an exquisitely white cravat. Though he was in truth simply the rector of his parish, his parish was one which entitled him to call himself a dean, and he wore a clerical rosette on his hat. He was a well-made, tall, portly gentleman, with whom to take the slightest liberty would have been impossible. His well-formed full face was singularly expressive of benevolence, but there was in it too an air of command which created an involuntary respect. He was a man whose means were ample, and who could afford to keep two curates, so that the appanages of a Church dignitary did in some sort belong to him. We doubt whether he really understood what work meant—even when he spoke with so much pathos of the labour of his life; but he was a man not at all exacting in regard to the work of others, and who was anxious to make the world as smooth and rosy to those around him as it had been to himself. He came forward, paused a moment, and then shook hands with Mackenzie. Our work had been done, and we remained in the background during the interview. It was now for the Doctor to satisfy himself with the scholarship—and, if he chose to take cognizance of the matter, with the morals of his proposed assistant.
Mackenzie himself was more subdued in his manner than he had been when talking with ourselves. The Doctor made a little speech, standing at the table with one hand on one volume and the other on another. He told of all his work, with a mixture of modesty as to the thing done, and self-assertion as to his interest in doing it, which was charming. He acknowledged that the sum proposed for the aid which he required was inconsiderable;—but it had been fixed by the proposed publisher. Should Mr. Mackenzie find that the labour was long he would willingly increase it. Then he commenced a conversation respecting the Greek dramatists, which had none of the air or tone of an examination, but which still served the purpose of enabling Mackenzie to show his scholarship. In that respect there was no doubt that the ragged, red-nosed, disreputable man, who stood there longing for his job, was the greater proficient of the two. We never discovered that he had had access to books in later years; but his memory of the old things seemed to be perfect. When it was suggested that references would be required, it seemed that he did know his way into the library of the British Museum. “When I wasn’t quite so shabby,” he said boldly, “I used to be there.” The Doctor instantly produced a ten-pound note, and insisted that it should be taken in advance. Mackenzie hesitated, and we suggested that it was premature; but the Doctor was firm. “If an old scholar mayn’t assist one younger than himself,” he said, “I don’t know when one man may aid another. And this is no alms. It is simply a pledge for work to be done.” Mackenzie took the money, muttering something of an assurance that as far as his ability went, the work should be done well. “It should certainly,” he said, “be done diligently.”
When money had passed, of course the thing was settled; but in truth the banknote had been given, not from judgment in settling the matter, but from the generous impulse of the moment. There was, however, no receding. The Doctor expressed by no hint a doubt as to the safety of his manuscript. He was by far too fine a gentleman to give the man whom he employed pain in that direction. If there were risk, he would now run the risk. And so the thing was settled.
We did not, however, give the manuscript on that occasion into Mackenzie’s hands, but took it down afterwards, locked in an old despatch box of our own, to the Spotted Dog, and left the box with the key of it in the hands of Mrs. Grimes. Again we went up into that lady’s bedroom, and saw that the big table had been placed by the window for Mackenzie’s accommodation. It so nearly filled the room, that as we observed, John Grimes could not get round at all to his side of the bed. It was arranged that Mackenzie was to begin on the morrow.
Part II
The Result
During the next month we saw a good deal of Mr. Julius Mackenzie, and made ourselves quite at home in Mrs. Grimes’s bedroom. We went in and out of the Spotted Dog as if we had known that establishment all our lives, and spent many a quarter of an hour with the hostess in her little parlour, discussing the prospects of Mr. Mackenzie and his family. He had procured to himself decent, if not exactly new, garments out of the money so liberally provided by my learned friend the Doctor, and spent much of his time in the library of the British Museum. He certainly worked very hard, for he did not altogether abandon his old engagement. Before the end of the first month the index of the first volume, nearly completed, had been sent down for the inspection of the Doctor, and had been returned with ample eulogium and some little criticism. The criticisms Mackenzie answered by letter, with true scholarly spirit, and the Doctor was delighted. Nothing could be more pleasant to him than a correspondence, prolonged almost indefinitely, as to the respective merits of a τὸ or a τοῦ, or on the demand for a spondee or an iamb. When he found that the work was really in industrious hands, he ceased to be clamorous for early publication, and gave us to understand privately that Mr. Mackenzie was not to be limited to the sum named. The matter of remuneration was, indeed, left very much to ourselves, and Mackenzie had certainly found a most efficient friend in the author whose works had been confided to his hands.
All this was very pleasant, and Mackenzie throughout that month worked very hard. According to the statements made to me by Mrs. Grimes he took no more gin than what was necessary for a hardworking man. As to the exact quantity of that cordial which she imagined to be beneficial and needful, we made no close enquiry. He certainly kept himself in a condition for work, and so far all went on happily. Nevertheless, there was a terrible skeleton in the cupboard—or rather out of the cupboard, for the skeleton could not be got to hide itself. A certain portion of his prosperity reached the hands of his wife, and she was behaving herself worse than ever. The four children had been covered with decent garments under Mrs. Grimes’s care, and then Mrs. Mackenzie had appeared at the Spotted Dog, loudly demanding a new outfit for herself. She came not only once, but often, and Mr. Grimes was beginning to protest that he saw too much of the family. We had become very intimate with Mrs. Grimes, and she did not hesitate to confide to us her fears lest “John should cut up rough,” before the thing was completed. “You see,” she said, “it is against the house, no doubt, that woman coming nigh it.” But still she was firm, and Mackenzie was not disturbed in the possession of the bedroom. At last Mrs. Mackenzie was provided with some articles of female attire;—and then, on the very next day, she and the four children were again stripped almost naked. The wretched creature must have steeped herself in gin to the shoulders, for in one day she made a sweep of everything. She then came in a state of furious intoxication to the Spotted Dog, and was removed by the police under the express order of the landlord.
We can hardly say which was the most surprising to us, the loyalty of Mrs. Grimes or the patience of John. During that night, as we were told two days afterwards by his wife, he stormed with passion. The papers she had locked up in order that he should not get at them and destroy them. He swore that everything should be cleared out on the following morning. But when the morning came he did not even say a word to Mackenzie, as the wretched, downcast, brokenhearted creature passed upstairs to his work. “You see I knows him, and how to deal with him,” said Mrs. Grimes, speaking of her husband. “There aint another like himself nowheres;—he’s that good. A softer-hearteder man there aint in the public line. He can speak dreadful when his dander is up, and can look—; oh, laws, he just can look at you! But he could no more put his hands upon a woman, in the way of hurting—no more than be an archbishop.” Where could be the man, thought we to ourselves as this was said to us, who could have put a hand—in the way of hurting—upon Mrs. Grimes?
On that occasion, to the best of our belief, the policeman contented himself with depositing Mrs. Mackenzie at her own lodgings. On the next day she was picked up drunk in the street, and carried away to the lockup house. At the very moment in which the story was being told to us by Mrs. Grimes, Mackenzie had gone to the police office to pay the fine, and to bring his wife home. We asked with dismay and surprise why he should interfere to rescue her—why he did not leave her in custody as long as the police would keep her? “Who’d there be to look after the children?” asked Mrs. Grimes, as though she were offended at our suggestion. Then she went on to explain that in such a household as that of poor Mackenzie the wife is absolutely a necessity, even though she be an habitual drunkard. Intolerable as she was, her services were necessary to him. “A husband as drinks is bad,” said Mrs. Grimes—with something, we thought, of an apologetic tone for the vice upon which her own prosperity was partly built—“but when a woman takes to it, it’s the ⸻ devil.” We thought that she was right, as we pictured to ourselves that man of letters satisfying the magistrate’s demand for his wife’s misconduct, and taking the degraded, half-naked creature once more home to his children.
We saw him about twelve o’clock on that day, and he had then, too evidently, been endeavouring to support his misery by the free use of alcohol. We did not speak of it down in the parlour; but even Mrs. Grimes, we think, would have admitted that he had taken more than was good for him. He was sitting up in the bedroom with his head hanging upon his hand, with a swarm of our learned friend’s papers spread on the table before him. Mrs. Grimes, when he entered the house, had gone upstairs to give them out to him; but he had made no attempt to settle himself to his work. “This kind of thing must come to an end,” he said to us with a thick, husky voice. We muttered something to him as to the need there was that he should exert a manly courage in his troubles. “Manly!” he said. “Well, yes; manly. A man should be a man, of course. There are some things which a man can’t bear. I’ve borne more than enough, and I’ll have an end of it.”
We shall never forget that scene. After awhile he got up, and became almost violent. Talk of bearing! Who had borne half as much as he? There were things a man should not bear. As for manliness, he believed that the truly manly thing would be to put an end to the lives of his wife, his children, and himself at one swoop. Of course the judgment of a mealymouthed world would be against him, but what would that matter to him when he and they had vanished out of this miserable place into the infinite realms of nothingness? Was he fit to live, or were they? Was there any chance for his children but that of becoming thieves and prostitutes? And for that poor wretch of a woman, from out of whose bosom even her human instincts had been washed by gin—would not death to her be, indeed, a charity? There was but one drawback to all this. When he should have destroyed them, how would it be with him if he should afterwards fail to make sure work with his own life? In such case it was not hanging that he would fear, but the self-reproach that would come upon him in that he had succeeded in sending others out of their misery, but had flinched when his own turn had come. Though he was drunk when he said these horrid things, or so nearly drunk that he could not perfect the articulation of his words, still there was a marvellous eloquence with him. When we attempted to answer, and told him of that canon which had been set against self-slaughter, he laughed us to scorn. There was something terrible to us in the audacity of the arguments which he used, when he asserted for himself the right to shuffle off from his shoulders a burden which they had not been made broad enough to bear. There was an intensity and a thorough hopelessness of suffering in his case, an openness of acknowledged degradation, which robbed us for the time of all that power which the respectable ones of the earth have over the disreputable. When we came upon him with our wise saws, our wisdom was shattered instantly, and flung back upon us in fragments. What promise could we dare to hold out to him that further patience would produce any result that could be beneficial? What further harm could any such doing on his part bring upon him? Did we think that were he brought out to stand at the gallows’ foot with the knowledge that ten minutes would usher him into what folks called eternity, his sense of suffering would be as great as it had been when he conducted that woman out of court and along the streets to his home, amidst the jeering congratulations of his neighbours? “When you have fallen so low,” said he, “that you can fall no lower, the ordinary trammels of the world cease to bind you.” Though his words were knocked against each other with the dulled utterances of intoxication, his intellect was terribly clear, and his scorn for himself, and for the world that had so treated him, was irrepressible.
We must have been over an hour with him up there in the bedroom, and even then we did not leave him. As it was manifest that he could do no work on that day, we collected the papers together, and proposed that he should take a walk with us. He was patient as we shovelled together the Doctor’s pages, and did not object to our suggestion. We found it necessary to call up Mrs. Grimes to assist us in putting away the “Opus magnum,” and were astonished to find how much she had come to know about the work. Added to the Doctor’s manuscript there were now the pages of Mackenzie’s indexes—and there were other pages of reference, for use in making future indexes—as to all of which Mrs. Grimes seemed to be quite at home. We have no doubt that she was familiar with the names of Greek tragedians, and could have pointed out to us in print the performances of the chorus. “A little fresh air’ll do you a deal of good, Mr. Mackenzie,” she said to the unfortunate man—“only take a biscuit in your pocket.” We got him out to the street, but he angrily refused to take the biscuit which she endeavoured to force into his hands.
That was a memorable walk. Turning from the end of Liquorpond Street up Gray’s Inn Lane towards Holborn, we at once came upon the entrance into a miserable court. “There,” said he; “it is down there that I live. She is sleeping it off now, and the children are hanging about her, wondering whether mother has got money to have another go at it when she rises. I’d take you down to see it all, only it’d sicken you.” We did not offer to go down the court, abstaining rather for his sake than for our own. The look of the place was as of a spot squalid, fever-stricken, and utterly degraded. And this man who was our companion had been born and bred a gentleman—had been nourished with that soft and gentle care which comes of wealth and love combined—had received the education which the country gives to her most favoured sons, and had taken such advantage of that education as is seldom taken by any of those favoured ones;—and Cucumber Court, with a drunken wife and four half-clothed, half-starved children, was the condition to which he had brought himself! The world knows nothing higher nor brighter than had been his outset in life—nothing lower nor more debased than the result. And yet he was one whose time and intellect had been employed upon the pursuit of knowledge—who even up to this day had high ideas of what should be a man’s career—who worked very hard and had always worked—who as far as we knew had struck upon no rocks in the pursuit of mere pleasure. It had all come to him from that idea of his youth that it would be good for him “to take refuge from the conventional thraldom of so-called gentlemen amidst the liberty of the lower orders.” His life, as he had himself owned, had indeed been a mistake.
We passed on from the court, and crossing the road went through the squares of Gray’s Inn, down Chancery Lane, through the little iron gate into Lincoln’s Inn, round through the old square—than which we know no place in London more conducive to suicide; and the new square—which has a gloom of its own, not so potent, and savouring only of madness, till at last we found ourselves in the Temple Gardens. I do not know why we had thus clung to the purlieus of the Law, except it was that he was telling us how in his early days, when he had been sent away from Cambridge—as on this occasion he acknowledged to us, for an attempt to pull the tutor’s nose, in revenge for a supposed insult—he had intended to push his fortunes as a barrister. He pointed up to a certain window in a dark corner of that suicidal old court, and told us that for one year he had there sat at the feet of a great Gamaliel in Chancery, and had worked with all his energies. Of course we asked him why he had left a prospect so alluring. Though his answers to us were not quite explicit, we think that he did not attempt to conceal the truth. He learned to drink, and that Gamaliel took upon himself to rebuke the failing, and by the end of that year he had quarrelled irreconcilably with his family. There had been great wrath at home when he was sent from Cambridge, greater wrath when he expressed his opinion upon certain questions of religious faith, and wrath to the final severance of all family relations when he told the chosen Gamaliel that he should get drunk as often as he pleased. After that he had “taken refuge among the lower orders,” and his life, such as it was, had come of it.
In Fleet Street, as we came out of the Temple, we turned into an eating-house and had some food. By this time the exercise and the air had carried off the fumes of the liquor which he had taken, and I knew that it would be well that he should eat. We had a mutton chop and a hot potato and a pint of beer each, and sat down to table for the first and last time as mutual friends. It was odd to see how in his converse with us on that day he seemed to possess a double identity. Though the hopeless misery of his condition was always present to him, was constantly on his tongue, yet he could talk about his own career and his own character as though they belonged to a third person. He could even laugh at the wretched mistake he had made in life, and speculate as to its consequences. For himself he was well aware that death was the only release that he could expect. We did not dare to tell him that if his wife should die, then things might be better with him. We could only suggest to him that work itself, if he would do honest work, would console him for many sufferings. “You don’t know the filth of it,” he said to us. Ah, dear! how well we remember the terrible word, and the gesture with which he pronounced it, and the gleam of his eyes as he said it! His manner to us on this occasion was completely changed, and we had a gratification in feeling that a sense had come back upon him of his old associations. “I remember this room so well,” he said—“when I used to have friends and money.” And, indeed, the room was one which has been made memorable by Genius. “I did not think ever to have found myself here again.” We observed, however, that he could not eat the food that was placed before him. A morsel or two of the meat he swallowed, and struggled to eat the crust of his bread, but he could not make a clean plate of it, as we did—regretting that the nature of chops did not allow of ampler dimensions. His beer was quickly finished, and we suggested to him a second tankard. With a queer, half-abashed twinkle of the eye, he accepted our offer, and then the second pint disappeared also. We had our doubts on the subject, but at last decided against any further offer. Had he chosen to call for it he must have had a third; but he did not call for it. We left him at the door of the tavern, and he then promised that in spite of all that he had suffered and all that he had said he would make another effort to complete the Doctor’s work. “Whether I go or stay,” he said, “I’d like to earn the money that I’ve spent.” There was something terrible in that idea of his going! Whither was he to go?
The Doctor heard nothing of the misfortune of these three or four inauspicious days; and the work was again going on prosperously when he came up again to London at the end of the second month. He told us something of his banker, and something of his lawyer, and murmured a word or two as to a new curate whom he needed; but we knew that he had come up to London because he could not bear a longer absence from the great object of his affections. He could not endure to be thus parted from his manuscript, and was again childishly anxious that a portion of it should be in the printer’s hands. “At sixty-five, Sir,” he said to us, “a man has no time to dally with his work.” He had been dallying with his work all his life, and we sincerely believed that it would be well with him if he could be contented to dally with it to the end. If all that Mackenzie said of it was true, the Doctor’s erudition was not equalled by his originality, or by his judgment. Of that question, however, we could take no cognizance. He was bent upon publishing, and as he was willing and able to pay for his whim and was his own master, nothing that we could do would keep him out of the printer’s hands.
He was desirous of seeing Mackenzie, and was anxious even to see him once at his work. Of course he could meet his assistant in our editorial room, and all the papers could easily be brought backwards and forwards in the old despatch-box. But in the interest of all parties we hesitated as to taking our revered and reverend friend to the Spotted Dog. Though we had told him that his work was being done at a public-house, we thought that his mind had conceived the idea of some modest inn, and that he would be shocked at being introduced to a place which he would regard simply as a gin-shop. Mrs. Grimes, or if not Mrs. Grimes, then Mr. Grimes, might object to another visitor to their bedroom; and Mackenzie himself would be thrown out of gear by the appearance of those clerical gaiters upon the humble scene of his labours. We, therefore, gave him such reasons as were available for submitting, at any rate for the present, to having the papers brought up to him at our room. And we ourselves went down to the Spotted Dog to make an appointment with Mackenzie for the following day. We had last seen him about a week before, and then the task was progressing well. He had told us that another fortnight would finish it. We had enquired also of Mrs. Grimes about the man’s wife. All she could tell us was that the woman had not again troubled them at the Spotted Dog. She expressed her belief, however, that the drunkard had been more than once in the hands of the police since the day on which Mackenzie had walked with us through the squares of the Inns of Court.
It was late when we reached the public-house on the occasion to which we now allude, and the evening was dark and rainy. It was then the end of January, and it might have been about six o’clock. We knew that we should not find Mackenzie at the public-house; but it was probable that Mrs. Grimes could send for him, or, at least, could make the appointment for us. We went into the little parlour, where she was seated with her husband, and we could immediately see, from the countenance of both of them, that something was amiss. We began by telling Mrs. Grimes that the Doctor had come to town. “Mackenzie aint here, Sir,” said Mrs. Grimes, and we almost thought that the very tone of her voice was altered. We explained that we had not expected to find him at that hour, and asked if she could send for him. She only shook her head. Grimes was standing with his back to the fire and his hands in his trousers pockets. Up to this moment he had not spoken a word. We asked if the man was drunk. She again shook her head. Could she bid him to come to us tomorrow, and bring the box and the papers with him? Again she shook her head.
“I’ve told her that I won’t have no more of it,” said Grimes; “nor yet I won’t. He was drunk this morning—as drunk as an owl.”
“He was sober, John, as you are, when he came for the papers this afternoon at two o’clock.” So the box and the papers had all been taken away!
“And she was here yesterday rampaging about the place, without as much clothes on as would cover her nakedness,” said Mr. Grimes. “I won’t have no more of it. I’ve done for that man what his own flesh and blood wouldn’t do. I know that; and I won’t have no more of it. Mary Anne, you’ll have that table cleared out after breakfast tomorrow.” When a man, to whom his wife is usually Polly, addresses her as Mary Anne, then it may be surmised that that man is in earnest. We knew that he was in earnest, and she knew it also.
“He wasn’t drunk, John—no, nor yet in liquor, when he come and took away that box this afternoon.” We understood this reiterated assertion. It was in some sort excusing to us her own breach of trust in having allowed the manuscript to be withdrawn from her own charge, or was assuring us that, at the worst, she had not been guilty of the impropriety of allowing the man to take it away when he was unfit to have it in his charge. As for blaming her, who could have thought of it? Had Mackenzie at any time chosen to pass downstairs with the box in his hands, it was not to be expected that she should stop him violently. And now that he had done so we could not blame her; but we felt that a great weight had fallen upon our own hearts. If evil should come to the manuscript would not the Doctor’s wrath fall upon us with a crushing weight? Something must be done at once. And we suggested that it would be well that somebody should go round to Cucumber Court. “I’d go as soon as look,” said Mrs. Grimes, “but he won’t let me.”
“You don’t stir a foot out of this tonight;—not that way,” said Mr. Grimes.
“Who wants to stir?” said Mrs. Grimes.
We felt that there was something more to be told than we had yet heard, and a great fear fell upon us. The woman’s manner to us was altered, and we were sure that this had come not from altered feelings on her part, but from circumstances which had frightened her. It was not her husband that she feared, but the truth of something that her husband had said to her. “If there is anything more to tell, for God’s sake tell it,” we said, addressing ourselves rather to the man than to the woman. Then Grimes did tell us his story. On the previous evening Mackenzie had received three or four sovereigns from Mrs. Grimes, being, of course, a portion of the Doctor’s payments; and early on that morning all Liquorpond Street had been in a state of excitement with the drunken fury of Mackenzie’s wife. She had found her way into the Spotted Dog, and was being actually extruded by the strength of Grimes himself—of Grimes, who had been brought down, half dressed, from his bedroom by the row—when Mackenzie himself, equally drunk, appeared upon the scene. “No, John;—not equally drunk,” said Mrs. Grimes. “Bother!” exclaimed her husband, going on with his story. The man had struggled to take the woman by the arm, and the two had fallen and rolled in the street together. “I was looking out of the window, and it was awful to see,” said Mrs. Grimes. We felt that it was “awful to hear.” A man—and such a man, rolling in the gutter with a drunken woman—himself drunk—and that woman his wife! “There aint to be no more of it at the Spotted Dog; that’s all,” said John Grimes, as he finished his part of the story.
Then, at last, Mrs. Grimes became voluble. All this had occurred before nine in the morning. “The woman must have been at it all night,” she said. “So must the man,” said John. “Anyways he came back about dinner, and he was sober then. I asked him not to go up, and offered to make him a cup of tea. It was just as you’d gone out after dinner, John.”
“He won’t have no more tea here,” said John.
“And he didn’t have any then. He wouldn’t, he said, have any tea, but went upstairs. What was I to do? I couldn’t tell him as he shouldn’t. Well;—during the row in the morning John had said something as to Mackenzie not coming about the premises any more.”
“Of course I did,” said Grimes.
“He was a little cut, then, no doubt,” continued the lady; “and I didn’t think as he would have noticed what John had said.”
“I mean it to be noticed now.”
“He had noticed it then, Sir, though he wasn’t just as he should be at that hour of the morning. Well;—what does he do? He goes upstairs and packs up all the papers at once. Leastways, that’s as I suppose. They aint there now. You can go and look if you please, Sir. Well; when he came down, whether I was in the kitchen—though it isn’t often as my eyes is off the bar, or in the taproom, or busy drawing, which I do do sometimes, Sir, when there are a many calling for liquor, I can’t say;—but if I aint never to stand upright again, I didn’t see him pass out with the box. But Miss Wilcox did. You can ask her.” Miss Wilcox was the young lady in the bar, whom we did not think ourselves called upon to examine, feeling no doubt whatever as to the fact of the box having been taken away by Mackenzie. In all this Mrs. Grimes seemed to defend herself, as though some serious charge was to be brought against her; whereas all that she had done had been done out of pure charity; and in exercising her charity towards Mackenzie she had shown an almost exaggerated kindness towards ourselves.
“If there’s anything wrong, it isn’t your fault,” we said.
“Nor yet mine,” said John Grimes.
“No, indeed,” we replied.
“It aint none of our faults,” continued he; “only this;—you can’t wash a blackamoor white, nor it aint no use trying. He don’t come here any more, that’s all. A man in drink we don’t mind. We has to put up with it. And they aint that tarnation desperate as is a woman. As long as a man can keep his legs he’ll try to steady hisself; but there is women who, when they’ve liquor, gets a fury for rampaging. There aint a many as can beat this one, Sir. She’s that strong, it took four of us to hold her; though she can’t hardly do a stroke of work, she’s that weak when she’s sober.”
We had now heard the whole story, and, while hearing it, had determined that it was our duty to go round into Cucumber Court and seek the manuscript and the box. We were unwilling to pry into the wretchedness of the man’s home; but something was due to the Doctor; and we had to make that appointment for the morrow, if it were still possible that such an appointment should be kept. We asked for the number of the house, remembering well the entrance into the court. Then there was a whisper between John and his wife, and the husband offered to accompany us. “It’s a roughish place,” he said, “but they know me.” “He’d better go along with you,” said Mrs. Grimes. We, of course, were glad of such companionship, and glad also to find that the landlord, upon whom we had inflicted so much trouble, was still sufficiently our friend to take this trouble on our behalf.
“It’s a dreary place enough,” said Grimes, as he led us up the narrow archway. Indeed it was a dreary place. The court spread itself a little in breadth, but very little, when the passage was passed, and there were houses on each side of it. There was neither gutter nor, as far as we saw, drain, but the broken flags were slippery with moist mud, and here and there, strewed about between the houses, there were the remains of cabbages and turnip-tops. The place swarmed with children, over whom one ghastly gas-lamp at the end of the court threw a flickering and uncertain light. There was a clamour of scolding voices, to which it seemed that no heed was paid; and there was a smell of damp rotting nastiness, amidst which it seemed to us to be almost impossible that life should be continued. Grimes led the way without further speech, to the middle house on the left hand of the court, and asked a man who was sitting on the low threshold of the door whether Mackenzie was within. “So that be you, Muster Grimes; be it?” said the man, without stirring. “Yes; he’s there I guess, but they’ve been and took her.” Then we passed on into the house. “No matter about that,” said the man, as we apologised for kicking him in our passage. He had not moved, and it had been impossible to enter without kicking him.
It seemed that Mackenzie held the two rooms on the ground floor, and we entered them at once. There was no light, but we could see the glimmer of a fire in the grate; and presently we became aware of the presence of children. Grimes asked after Mackenzie, and a girl’s voice told us that he was in the inner room. The publican then demanded a light, and the girl with some hesitation, lit the end of a farthing candle, which was fixed in a small bottle. We endeavoured to look round the room by the glimmer which this afforded, but could see nothing but the presence of four children, three of whom seemed to be seated in apathy on the floor. Grimes, taking the candle in his hand, passed at once into the other room, and we followed him. Holding the bottle something over his head, he contrived to throw a gleam of light upon one of the two beds with which the room was fitted, and there we saw the body of Julius Mackenzie stretched in the torpor of dead intoxication. His head lay against the wall, his body was across the bed, and his feet dangled on to the floor. He still wore his dirty boots, and his clothes as he had worn them in the morning. No sight so piteous, so wretched, and at the same time so eloquent had we ever seen before. His eyes were closed, and the light of his face was therefore quenched. His mouth was open, and the slaver had fallen upon his beard. His dark, clotted hair had been pulled over his face by the unconscious movement of his hands. There came from him a stertorous sound of breathing, as though he were being choked by the attitude in which he lay; and even in his drunkenness there was an uneasy twitching as of pain about his face. And there sat, and had been sitting for hours past, the four children in the other room, knowing the condition of the parent whom they most respected, but not even endeavouring to do anything for his comfort. What could they do? They knew, by long training and thorough experience, that a fit of drunkenness had to be got out of by sleep. To them there was nothing shocking in it. It was but a periodical misfortune. “She’ll have to own he’s been and done it now,” said Grimes, looking down upon the man, and alluding to his wife’s good-natured obstinacy. He handed the candle to us, and, with a mixture of tenderness and roughness, of which the roughness was only in the manner and the tenderness was real, he raised Mackenzie’s head and placed it on the bolster, and lifted the man’s legs on to the bed. Then he took off the man’s boots, and the old silk handkerchief from the neck, and pulled the trousers straight, and arranged the folds of the coat. It was almost as though he were laying out one that was dead. The eldest girl was now standing by us, and Grimes asked her how long her father had been in that condition. “Jack Hoggart brought him in just afore it was dark,” said the girl. Then it was explained to us that Jack Hoggart was the man whom we had seen sitting on the doorstep.
“And your mother?” asked Grimes.
“The perlice took her afore dinner.”
“And you children;—what have you had to eat?” In answer to this the girl only shook her head. Grimes took no immediate notice of this, but called the drunken man by his name, and shook his shoulder, and looked round to a broken ewer which stood on the little table, for water to dash upon him;—but there was no water in the jug. He called again and repeated the shaking, and at last Mackenzie opened his eyes, and in a dull, half-conscious manner looked up at us. “Come, my man,” said Grimes, “shake this off and have done with it.”
“Hadn’t you better try to get up?” we asked.
There was a faint attempt at rising, then a smile—a smile which was terrible to witness, so sad was all which it said; then a look of utter, abject misery, coming, as we thought, from a momentary remembrance of his degradation; and after that he sank back in the dull, brutal, painless, deathlike apathy of absolute unconsciousness.
“It’ll be morning afore he’ll move,” said the girl.
“She’s about right,” said Grimes. “He’s got it too heavy for us to do anything but just leave him. We’ll take a look for the box and the papers.”
And the man upon whom we were looking down had been born a gentleman, and was a finished scholar—one so well educated, so ripe in literary acquirement, that we knew few whom we could call his equal. Judging of the matter by the light of our reason, we cannot say that the horror of the scene should have been enhanced to us by these recollections. Had the man been a shoemaker or a coalheaver there would have been enough of tragedy in it to make an angel weep—that sight of the child standing by the bedside of her drunken father, while the other parent was away in custody—and in no degree shocked at what she saw, because the thing was so common to her! But the thought of what the man had been, of what he was, of what he might have been, and the steps by which he had brought himself to the foul degradation which we witnessed, filled us with a dismay which we should hardly have felt had the gifts which he had polluted and the intellect which he had wasted been less capable of noble uses.
Our purpose in coming to the court was to rescue the Doctor’s papers from danger, and we turned to accompany Grimes into the other room. As we did so the publican asked the girl if she knew anything of a black box which her father had taken away from the Spotted Dog. “The box is here,” said the girl.
“And the papers?” asked Grimes. Thereupon the girl shook her head, and we both hurried into the outer room. I hardly know who first discovered the sight which we encountered, or whether it was shown to us by the child. The whole fireplace was strewn with half-burnt sheets of manuscript. There were scraps of pages of which almost the whole had been destroyed, others which were hardly more than scorched, and heaps of paper-ashes all lying tumbled together about the fender. We went down on our knees to examine them, thinking at the moment that the poor creature might in his despair have burned his own work and have spared that of the Doctor. But it was not so. We found scores of charred pages of the Doctor’s elaborate handwriting. By this time Grimes had found the open box, and we perceived that the sheets remaining in it were tumbled and huddled together in absolute confusion. There were pages of the various volumes mixed with those which Mackenzie himself had written, and they were all crushed, and rolled, and twisted as though they had been thrust thither as waste-paper—out of the way. “ ’Twas mother as done it,” said the girl, “and we put ’em back again when the perlice took her.”
There was nothing more to learn—nothing more by the hearing which any useful clue could be obtained. What had been the exact course of the scenes which had been enacted there that morning it little booted us to enquire. It was enough and more than enough that we knew that the mischief had been done. We went down on our knees before the fire, and rescued from the ashes with our hands every fragment of manuscript that we could find. Then we put the mass altogether in the box, and gazed upon the wretched remnants almost in tears. “You had better go and get a bit of some’at to eat,” said Grimes, handing a coin to the elder girl. “It’s hard on them to starve ’cause their father’s drunk, Sir.” Then he took the closed box in his hand and we followed him out into the street. “I’ll send or step up to look after him tomorrow,” said Grimes, as he put us and the box into a cab. We little thought when we made to the drunkard that foolish request to arise, that we should never speak to him again.
As we returned to our office in the cab that we might deposit the box there ready for the following day, our mind was chiefly occupied in thinking over the undeserved grievances which had fallen upon ourselves. We had been moved by the charitable desire to do services to two different persons—to the learned Doctor and to the red-nosed drunkard, and this had come of it! There had been nothing for us to gain by assisting either the one or the other. We had taken infinite trouble, attempting to bring together two men who wanted each other’s services—working hard in sheer benevolence;—and what had been the result? We had spent half an hour on our knees in the undignified and almost disreputable work of raking among Mrs. Mackenzie’s cinders, and now we had to face the anger, the dismay, the reproach, and—worse than all—the agony of the Doctor. As to Mackenzie—we asserted to ourselves again and again that nothing further could be done for him. He had made his bed, and he must lie upon it; but, oh! why—why had we attempted to meddle with a being so degraded? We got out of the cab at our office door, thinking of the Doctor’s countenance as we should see it on the morrow. Our heart sank within us, and we asked ourselves, if it was so bad with us now, how it would be with us when we returned to the place on the following morning.
But on the following morning we did return. No doubt each individual reader to whom we address ourselves has at some period felt that indescribable load of personal, short-lived care, which causes the heart to sink down into the boots. It is not great grief that does it;—nor is it excessive fear; but the unpleasant operation comes from the mixture of the two. It is the anticipation of some imperfectly-understood evil that does it—some evil out of which there might perhaps be an escape if we could only see the way. In this case we saw no way out of it. The Doctor was to be with us at one o’clock, and he would come with smiles, expecting to meet his learned colleague. How should we break it to the Doctor? We might indeed send to him, putting off the meeting, but the advantage coming from that would be slight, if any. We must see the injured Grecian sooner or later; and we had resolved, much as we feared, that the evil hour should not be postponed. We spent an hour that morning in arranging the fragments. Of the first volume about a third had been destroyed. Of the second nearly every page had been either burned or mutilated. Of the third but little had been injured. Mackenzie’s own work had fared better than the Doctor’s; but there was no comfort in that. After what had passed I thought it quite improbable that the Doctor would make any use of Mackenzie’s work. So much of the manuscript as could still be placed in continuous pages we laid out upon the table, volume by volume—that in the middle sinking down from its original goodly bulk almost to the dimensions of a poor sermon;—and the half-burned bits we left in the box. Then we sat ourselves down at our accustomed table, and pretended to try to work. Our ears were very sharp, and we heard the Doctor’s step upon our stairs within a minute or two of the appointed time. Our heart went to the very toes of our boots. We shuffled in our chair, rose from it, and sat down again—and were conscious that we were not equal to the occasion. Hitherto we had, after some mild literary form, patronised the Doctor—as a man of letters in town will patronise his literary friend from the country;—but we now feared him as a truant schoolboy fears his master. And yet it was so necessary that we should wear some air of self-assurance!
In a moment he was with us, wearing that bland smile which we knew so well, and which at the present moment almost overpowered us. We had been sure that he would wear that smile, and had especially feared it. “Ah,” said he, grasping us by the hand, “I thought I should have been late. I see that our friend is not here yet.”
“Doctor,” we replied, “a great misfortune has happened.”
“A great misfortune! Mr. Mackenzie is not dead?”
“No;—he is not dead. Perhaps it would have been better that he had died long since. He has destroyed your manuscript.” The Doctor’s face fell, and his hands at the same time, and he stood looking at us. “I need not tell you, Doctor, what my feelings are, and how great my remorse.”
“Destroyed it!” Then we took him by the hand and led him to the table. He turned first upon the appetising and comparatively uninjured third volume, and seemed to think that we had hoaxed him. “This is not destroyed,” he said, with a smile. But before I could explain anything, his hands were among the fragments in the box. “As I am a living man, they have burned it!” he exclaimed. “I—I—I—” Then he turned from us, and walked twice the length of the room, backwards and forwards, while we stood still, patiently waiting the explosion of his wrath. “My friend,” he said, when his walk was over, “a great man underwent the same sorrow. Newton’s manuscript was burned. I will take it home with me, and we will say no more about it.” I never thought very much of the Doctor as a divine, but I hold him to have been as good a Christian as I ever met.
But that plan of his of saying no more about it could not quite be carried out. I was endeavouring to explain to him, as I thought it necessary to do, the circumstances of the case, and he was protesting his indifference to any such details, when there came a knock at the door, and the boy who waited on us below ushered Mrs. Grimes into the room. As the reader is aware, we had, during the last two months, become very intimate with the landlady of the Spotted Dog, but we had never hitherto had the pleasure of seeing her outside her own house. “Oh, Mr. ⸻” she began, and then she paused, seeing the Doctor.
We thought it expedient that there should be some introduction. “Mrs. Grimes,” we said, “this is the gentleman whose invaluable manuscript has been destroyed by that unfortunate drunkard.”
“Oh, then you’re the Doctor, Sir?” The Doctor bowed and smiled. His heart must have been very heavy, but he bowed politely and smiled sweetly. “Oh, dear,” she said, “I don’t know how to tell you!”
“To tell us what?” asked the Doctor.
“What has happened since?” we demanded. The woman stood shaking before us, and then sank into a chair. Then arose to us at the moment some idea that the drunken woman, in her mad rage, had done some great damage to the Spotted Dog—had set fire to the house, or injured Mr. Grimes personally, or perhaps run a muck amidst the jugs and pitchers, window glass, and gas lights. Something had been done which would give the Grimeses a pecuniary claim on me or on the Doctor, and the woman had been sent hither to make the first protest. Oh—when should I see the last of the results of my imprudence in having attempted to befriend such a one as Julius Mackenzie! “If you have anything to tell, you had better tell it,” we said, gravely.
“He’s been, and—”
“Not destroyed himself?” asked the Doctor.
“Oh yes, Sir. He have indeed—from ear to ear—and is now a lying at the Spotted Dog!”
And so, after all, that was the end of Julius Mackenzie! We need hardly say that our feelings, which up to that moment had been very hostile to the man, underwent a sudden revulsion. Poor, overburdened, struggling, ill-used, abandoned creature! The world had been hard upon him, with a severity which almost induced one to make complaint against Omnipotence. The poor wretch had been willing to work, had been industrious in his calling, had had capacity for work; and he had also struggled gallantly against his evil fate, had recognised and endeavoured to perform his duty to his children and to the miserable woman who had brought him to his ruin!
And that sin of drunkenness had seemed to us to be in him rather the reflex of her vice than the result of his own vicious tendencies. Still it might be doubtful whether she had not learned the vice from him. They had both in truth been drunkards as long as they had been known in the neighbourhood of the Spotted Dog; but it was stated by all who had known them there that he was never seen to be drunk unless when she had disgraced him by the public exposure of her own abomination. Such as he was he had now come to his end! This was the upshot of his loud claims for liberty from his youth upwards;—liberty as against his father and family; liberty as against his college tutor; liberty as against all pastors, masters, and instructors; liberty as against the conventional thraldom of the world. He was now lying a wretched corpse at the Spotted Dog, with his throat cut from ear to ear, till the coroner’s jury should have decided whether or not they would call him a suicide!
Mrs. Grimes had come to tell us that the coroner was to be at the Spotted Dog at four o’clock, and to say that her husband hoped that we would be present. We had seen Mackenzie so lately, and had so much to do with the employment of the last days of his life, that we could not refuse this request, though it came accompanied by no legal summons. Then Mrs. Grimes again became voluble and poured out to us her biography of Mackenzie as far as she knew it. He had been married to the woman ten years, and certainly had been a drunkard before he married her. “As for her, she’d been well-nigh suckled on gin,” said Mrs. Grimes, “though he didn’t know it, poor fellow.” Whether this was true or not, she had certainly taken to drink soon after her marriage, and then his life had been passed in alternate fits of despondency and of desperate efforts to improve his own condition and that of his children. Mrs. Grimes declared to us that when the fit came on them—when the woman had begun and the man had followed—they would expend upon drink in two days what would have kept the family for a fortnight. “They say as how it was nothing for them to swallow forty shillings’ worth of gin in forty-eight hours.” The Doctor held up his hands in horror. “And it didn’t, none of it, come our way,” said Mrs. Grimes. “Indeed, John wouldn’t let us serve it for ’em.”
She sat there for half an hour, and during the whole time she was telling us of the man’s life; but the reader will already have heard more than enough of it. By what immediate demon the woman had been instigated to burn the husband’s work almost immediately on its production within her own home, we never heard. Doubtless there had been some terrible scene in which the man’s sufferings must have been carried almost beyond endurance. “And he had feelings, Sir, he had,” said Mrs. Grimes; “he knew as a woman should be decent, and a man’s wife especial; I’m sure we pitied him so, John and I, that we could have cried over him. John would say a hard word to him at times, but he’d have walked round London to do him a good turn. John aint to say edicated hisself, but he do respect learning.”
When she had told us all, Mrs. Grimes went, and we were left alone with the Doctor. He at once consented to accompany us to the Spotted Dog, and we spent the hour that still remained to us in discussing the fate of the unfortunate man. We doubt whether an allusion was made during the time to the burned manuscript. If so, it was certainly not made by the Doctor himself. The tragedy which had occurred in connection with it had made him feel it to be unfitting even to mention his own loss. That such a one should have gone to his account in such a manner, without hope, without belief, and without fear—as Burley said to Bothwell, and Bothwell boasted to Burley—that was the theme of the Doctor’s discourse. “The mercy of God is infinite,” he said, bowing his head, with closed eyes and folded hands. To threaten while the life is in the man is human. To believe in the execution of those threats when the life has passed away is almost beyond the power of humanity.
At the hour fixed we were at the Spotted Dog, and found there a crowd assembled. The coroner was already seated in Mrs. Grimes’s little parlour, and the body as we were told had been laid out in the taproom. The inquest was soon over. The fact that he had destroyed himself in the low state of physical suffering and mental despondency which followed his intoxication was not doubted. At the very time that he was doing it, his wife was being taken from the lockup house to the police office in the police van. He was not penniless, for he had sent the children out with money for their breakfasts, giving special caution as to the youngest, a little toddling thing of three years old;—and then he had done it. The eldest girl, returning to the house, had found him lying dead upon the floor. We were called upon for our evidence, and went into the taproom accompanied by the Doctor. Alas! the very table which had been dragged upstairs into the landlady’s bedroom with the charitable object of assisting Mackenzie in his work—the table at which we had sat with him conning the Doctor’s pages—had now been dragged down again and was used for another purpose. We had little to say as to the matter, except that we had known the man to be industrious and capable, and that we had, alas! seen him utterly prostrated by drink on the evening before his death.
The saddest sight of all on this occasion was the appearance of Mackenzie’s wife—whom we had never before seen. She had been brought there by a policeman, but whether she was still in custody we did not know. She had been dressed, either by the decency of the police or by the care of her neighbours, in an old black gown, which was a world too large and too long for her. And on her head there was a black bonnet which nearly enveloped her. She was a small woman, and, as far as we could judge from the glance we got of her face, pale, and worn, and wan. She had not such outward marks of a drunkard’s career as those which poor Mackenzie always carried with him. She was taken up to the coroner, and what answers she gave to him were spoken in so low a voice that they did not reach us. The policeman, with whom we spoke, told us that she did not feel it much—that she was callous now and beyond the power of mental suffering. “She’s frightened just this minute, Sir; but it isn’t more than that,” said the policeman. We gave one glance along the table at the burden which it bore, but we saw nothing beyond the outward lines of that which had so lately been the figure of a man. We should have liked to see the countenance once more. The morbid curiosity to see such horrid sights is strong with most of us. But we did not wish to be thought to wish to see it—especially by our friend the Doctor—and we abstained from pushing our way to the head of the table. The Doctor himself remained quiescent in the corner of the room the farthest from the spectacle. When the matter was submitted to them, the jury lost not a moment in declaring their verdict. They said that the man had destroyed himself while suffering under temporary insanity produced by intoxication. And that was the end of Julius Mackenzie, the scholar.
On the following day the Doctor returned to the country, taking with him our black box, to the continued use of which, as a sarcophagus, he had been made very welcome. For our share in bringing upon him the great catastrophe of his life, he never uttered to us, either by spoken or written word, a single reproach. That idea of suffering as the great philosopher had suffered seemed to comfort him. “If Newton bore it, surely I can,” he said to us with his bland smile, when we renewed the expression of our regret. Something passed between us, coming more from us than from him, as to the expediency of finding out some youthful scholar who could go down to the rectory, and reconstruct from its ruins the edifice of our friend’s learning. The Doctor had given us some encouragement, and we had begun to make enquiry, when we received the following letter:—
⸻ Rectory, ⸻—, 18—.
Dear Mr. ⸻—You were so kind as to say that you would endeavour to find for me an assistant in arranging and reconstructing the fragments of my work on The Metres of the Greek Dramatists. Your promise has been an additional kindness.
Dear, courteous, kind old gentleman! For we knew well that no slightest sting of sarcasm was intended to be conveyed in these words.
Your promise has been an additional kindness; but looking upon the matter carefully, and giving to it the best consideration in my power, I have determined to relinquish the design. That which has been destroyed cannot be replaced; and it may well be that it was not worth replacing. I am old now, and never could do again that which perhaps I was never fitted to do with any fair prospect of success. I will never turn again to the ashes of my unborn child; but will console myself with the memory of my grievance, knowing well, as I do so, that consolation from the severity of harsh but just criticism might have been more difficult to find. When I think of the end of my efforts as a scholar, my mind reverts to the terrible and fatal catastrophe of one whose scholarship was infinitely more finished and more ripe than mine.
Whenever it may suit you to come into this part of the country, pray remember that it will give very great pleasure to myself and to my daughter to welcome you at our parsonage.
We never have found the time to accept the Doctor’s invitation, and our eyes have never again rested on the black box containing the ashes of the unborn child to which the Doctor will never turn again. We can picture him to ourselves standing, full of thought, with his hand upon the lid, but never venturing to turn the lock. Indeed, we do not doubt but that the key of the box is put away among other secret treasures, a lock of his wife’s hair, perhaps, and the little shoe of the boy who did not live long enough to stand at his father’s knee. For a tender, softhearted man was the Doctor, and one who fed much on the memories of the past.
We often called upon Mr. and Mrs. Grimes at the Spotted Dog, and would sit there talking of Mackenzie and his family. Mackenzie’s widow soon vanished out of the neighbourhood, and no one there knew what was the fate of her or of her children. And then also Mr. Grimes went and took his wife with him. But they could not be said to vanish. Scratching his head one day, he told me with a dolorous voice that he had—made his fortune. “We’ve got as snug a little place as ever you see, just two mile out of Colchester,” said Mrs. Grimes triumphantly—“with thirty acres of land just to amuse John. And as for the Spotted Dog, I’m that sick of it, another year’d wear me to a dry bone.” We looked at her, and saw no tendency that way. And we looked at John, and thought that he was not triumphant.
Who followed Mr. and Mrs. Grimes at the Spotted Dog we have never visited Liquorpond Street to see.