Robert Falconer

‘I cannot speak as strongly as you do,’ I replied. ‘But I perfectly understand what you mean. Why is it, do you think?’

‘Partly, I fancy, because it is like the primordial chaos, a concentrated tumult of undetermined possibilities. The germs of infinite adventure and result are floating around you like a snow-storm. You do not know what may arise in a moment and colour all your future. Out of this mass may suddenly start something marvellous, or, it may be, something you have been looking for for years.’

The same moment, a fierce flash of lightning, like a blue sword-blade a thousand times shattered, quivered and palpitated about us, leaving a thick darkness on the sense. I heard my companion give a suppressed cry, and saw him run up against a heavy drayman who was on the edge of the path, guiding his horses with his long whip. He begged the man’s pardon, put his hand to his head, and murmured, ‘I shall know him now.’ I was afraid for a moment that the lightning had struck him, but he assured me there was nothing amiss. He looked a little excited and confused, however.

I should have forgotten the incident, had he not told me afterwards—when I had come to know him intimately—that in the moment of that lightning flash, he had had a strange experience: he had seen the form of his father, as he had seen him that Sunday afternoon, in the midst of the surrounding light. He was as certain of the truth of the presentation as if a gradual revival of memory had brought with it the clear conviction of its own accuracy. His explanation of the phenomenon was, that, in some cases, all that prevents a vivid conception from assuming objectivity, is the self-assertion of external objects. The gradual approach of darkness cannot surprise and isolate the phantasm; but the suddenness of the lightning could and did, obliterating everything without, and leaving that over which it had no power standing alone, and therefore visible.

‘But,’ I ventured to ask, ‘whence the minuteness of detail, surpassing, you say, all that your memory could supply?’

‘That I think was a quickening of the memory by the realism of the presentation. Excited by the vision, it caught at its own past, as it were, and suddenly recalled that which it had forgotten. In the rapidity of all pure mental action, this at once took its part in the apparent objectivity.’

To return to the narrative of my first evening in Falconer’s company.

It was strange how insensible the street population was to the grandeur of the storm. While the thunder was billowing and bellowing over and around us—

‘A hundred pins for one ha’penny,’ bawled a man from the gutter, with the importance of a Cagliostro.

‘Evening Star! Telegrauwff!’ roared an ear-splitting urchin in my very face. I gave him a shove off the pavement.

‘Ah! don’t do that,’ said Falconer. ‘It only widens the crack between him and his fellows—not much, but a little.’

‘You are right,’ I said. ‘I won’t do it again.’

The same moment we heard a tumult in a neighbouring street. A crowd was execrating a policeman, who had taken a woman into custody, and was treating her with unnecessary rudeness. Falconer looked on for a few moments.

‘Come, policeman!’ he said at length, in a tone of expostulation. ‘You’re rather rough, are you not? She’s a woman, you know.’

‘Hold your blasted humbug,’ answered the man, an exceptional specimen of the force at that time at all events, and shook the tattered wretch, as if he would shake her out of her rags.

Falconer gently parted the crowd, and stood beside the two.

‘I will help you,’ he said, ‘to take her to the station, if you like, but you must not treat her that way.’

‘I don’t want your help,’ said the policeman; ‘I know you, and all the damned lot of you.’

‘Then I shall be compelled to give you a lesson,’ said Falconer.

The man’s only answer was a shake that made the woman cry out.

‘I shall get into trouble if you get off,’ said Falconer to her. ‘Will you promise me, on your word, to go with me to the station, if I rid you of the fellow?’

‘I will, I will,’ said the woman.

‘Then, look out,’ said Falconer to the policeman; ‘for I’m going to give you that lesson.’

The officer let the woman go, took his baton, and made a blow at Falconer. In another moment—I could hardly see how—he lay in the street.

‘Now, my poor woman, come along,’ said Falconer.

She obeyed, crying gently. Two other policemen came up.

‘Do you want to give that woman in charge, Mr. Falconer?’ asked one of them.

‘I give that man in charge,’ cried his late antagonist, who had just scrambled to his feet. ‘Assaulting the police in discharge of their duty.’

‘Very well,’ said the other. ‘But you’re in the wrong box, and that you’ll find. You had better come along to the station, sir.’

‘Keep that fellow from getting hold of the woman—you two, and we’ll go together,’ said Falconer.

Bewildered with the rapid sequence of events, I was following in the crowd. Falconer looked about till he saw me, and gave me a nod which meant come along. Before we reached Bow Street, however, the offending policeman, who had been walking a little behind in conversation with one of the others, advanced to Falconer, touched his hat, and said something, to which Falconer replied.

‘Remember, I have my eye upon you,’ was all I heard, however, as he left the crowd and rejoined me. We turned and walked eastward again.

The storm kept on intermittently, but the streets were rather more crowded than usual notwithstanding.

‘Look at that man in the woollen jacket,’ said Falconer. ‘What a beautiful outline of face! There must be something noble in that man.’

‘I did not see him,’ I answered, ‘I was taken up with a woman’s face, like that of a beautiful corpse. It’s eyes were bright. There was gin in its brain.’

The streets swarmed with human faces gleaming past. It was a night of ghosts.

There stood a man who had lost one arm, earnestly pumping bilge-music out of an accordion with the other, holding it to his body with the stump. There was a woman, pale with hunger and gin, three match-boxes in one extended hand, and the other holding a baby to her breast. As we looked, the poor baby let go its hold, turned its little head, and smiled a wan, shrivelled, old-fashioned smile in our faces.

Another happy baby, you see, Mr. Gordon,’ said Falconer. ‘A child, fresh from God, finds its heaven where no one else would. The devil could drive woman out of Paradise; but the devil himself cannot drive the Paradise out of a woman.’

‘What can be done for them?’ I said, and at the moment, my eye fell upon a row of little children, from two to five years of age, seated upon the curb-stone.

They were chattering fast, and apparently carrying on some game, as happy as if they had been in the fields.

‘Wouldn’t you like to take all those little grubby things, and put them in a great tub and wash them clean?’ I said.

‘They’d fight like spiders,’ rejoined Falconer.

‘They’re not fighting now.’

‘Then don’t make them. It would be all useless. The probability is that you would only change the forms of the various evils, and possibly for worse. You would buy all that man’s glue-lizards, and that man’s three-foot rules, and that man’s dog-collars and chains, at three times their value, that they might get more drink than usual, and do nothing at all for their living to-morrow.—What a happy London you would make if you were Sultan Haroun!’ he added, laughing. ‘You would put an end to poverty altogether, would you not?’

I did not reply at once.

‘But I beg your pardon,’ he resumed; ‘I am very rude.’

‘Not at all,’ I returned. ‘I was only thinking how to answer you. They would be no worse after all than those who inherit property and lead idle lives.’

‘True; but they would be no better. Would you be content that your quondam poor should be no better off than the rich? What would be gained thereby? Is there no truth in the words “Blessed are the poor”? A deeper truth than most Christians dare to see.—Did you ever observe that there is not one word about the vices of the poor in the Bible—from beginning to end?’

‘But they have their vices.’

‘Indubitably. I am only stating a fact. The Bible is full enough of the vices of the rich. I make no comment.’