Ninety-nine men out of a hundred would have asked what was the matter with me. But Campion, who all his life had given, wanted to know what he could co.
"Tell me fairy tales of Lambeth and idylls of the Waterloo Bridge Road.
Or light your pipe and talk to me of Barbara."
He folded up the tablecloth and put it in the sideboard drawer.
"If it"s elegant distraction you want," said he, "I can do better than that." He planted himself in front of me. "Would you like to do a night"s real work?"
"Certainly," said I.
"A gentleman of my acquaintance named Judd is in the ramping stage of _delirium tremens_. He requires a couple of men to hold him down so as to prevent him from getting out of bed and smashing his furniture and his wife and things. I was going to relieve one of the fellows there now, so that he can get a few hours" sleep, and if you like to come and relieve the other, you"ll be doing a good action. But I warn you it won"t be funny."
"I"m in the mood for anything," I said.
"You"ll come?"
"Of course."
"That"s splendid!" he shouted. "I hardly thought you were in earnest.
Wait till I telephone for some medicine to be sent up from the dispensary. I promised to take it round with me."
He telephoned instructions, and presently a porter brought in the medicine. Campion explained that it had been prescribed by the doctor attached to the inst.i.tution who was attending the case.
"You must come and see the working of our surgery and dispensary!" he cried enthusiastically. "We charge those who can afford a sixpence for visit and medicine. Those who can"t are provided, after inquiry, with coupons. We don"t want to encourage the well-to-do to get their medical advice gratis, or we wouldn"t be able to cope with the really poor. We pay the doctor a fixed salary, and the fees go to the general fund of the Building, so it doesn"t matter a hang to him whether a patient pays or not."
"You must be proud of all this, Campion?" I said.
"In a way," he replied, lighting his pipe; "but it"s mainly a question of money--my poor old father"s money which he worked for, not I."
I reminded him that other sons had been known to put their poor old father"s money to baser uses.
"I suppose Barbara is more useful to the community that steam yachts or racing stables; but there, you see, I hate yachting because I"m always sea-sick, and I scarcely know which end of a horse you put the bridle on. Every man to his job. This is mine. I like it."
"I wonder whether holding down people suffering from _delirium tremens_ is my job," said I. "If so, I"m afraid I shan"t like it."
"If it"s really your job," replied Campion, "you will. You must. You can"t help it. G.o.d made man so."
It was only an hour or two later when, for the first time in my life, I came into practical touch with human misery, that I recognised the truth of Campion"s perfervid optimism. No one could like our task that night in its outer essence. For a time it revolted me. The atmosphere of the close, dirty room, bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, sitting-room, bathroom, laundry--all in one, the home of man, wife and two children, caught me by the throat. It was sour. The physical contact with the flesh of the unclean, gibbering, shivering, maniacal brute on the foul bed was unutterably repugnant to me. Now and again, during intervals of comparative calm, I was forced to put my head out of the window to breathe the air of the street. Even that was tainted, for a fried-fish shop across the way and a public-house next door billowed forth their nauseating odours. After a while access to the window was denied me.
A mattress and some rude coverings were stretched beneath it--the children"s bed--on which we persuaded the helpless, dreary wife to lie down and try to rest. A neighbour had taken in the children for the night. The wife was a skinny, grey-faced, lined woman of six-and-twenty.
In her att.i.tude of hopeless incompetence she shed around her an atmosphere of unspeakable depression. Although I could not get to the window, I was glad when she lay down and spared me the sight of her moving f.e.c.klessly about the room or weeping huddled up on a broken-backed wooden chair and looking more like a half-animated dish-clout than a woman.
The poor wretch on the bed was a journeyman tailor who, when sober, could earn fair wages. The cry of the wife, before Campion awed her into comparative silence, was a monotonous upbraiding of her husband for bringing them down to this poverty. It seemed impossible to touch her intelligence and make her understand that no words from her or any one could reach his consciousness. His violence, his screams, his threats, the horrors of his fear left her unmoved. We were there to guard her from physical danger, and that to her was all that mattered.
In the course of an hour or so the nausea left me. I felt braced by the grimness of the thing, and during the paroxysms I had no time to think of anything but the mechanical work in hand. It was all that Campion and I, both fairly able-bodied men, could do to keep the puny little tailor in his bed. Horrible shapes menaced him from which he fought madly to escape. He writhed and shrieked with terror. Once he caught my hand in his teeth and bit it, and Campion had some difficulty in relaxing the wretch"s jaw. Between the paroxysms Campion and I sat on the bed watching him, scarcely exchanging a word. The wife, poor creature, whimpered on her mattress. It was not a pleasant vigil. It lasted till the grey dawn crept in, pitilessly intensifying the squalor of the room, and until the dawn was broadening into daylight. Then two of Campion"s men from Barbara"s Building arrived to relieve us. Before we went, however, the neighbour who had taken charge of the children came in to help the slatternly wife light a fire and make some tea. I have enjoyed few things more than the warm, bitter stuff which I drank out of the broken mug in that strange and depressing company.
I went out into the street with racked head and nerves and muscles.
Campion kept his cloth cap in his hand, allowing the morning wind to ruffle his s.h.a.ggy black hair, and drew a long breath.
"I think the worst is over now. As soon as he can be moved, I"ll get him down to the annexe at Broadstairs. The sea air will pull him round."
"Isn"t it rather hopeless?" I asked.
He turned on me. "Nothing"s hopeless. If you once start the hopeless game down here you"d better distribute cyanide of pota.s.sium instead of coals and groceries. I"ve made up my mind to get that man decent again, and, by George, I"m going to do it! Fancy those two weaklings producing healthy offspring. But they have. Two of the most intelligent kids in the district. If you hold up your hands and say it"s awful to contemplate their upbringing you"re speaking the blatant truth. It"s the contemplation that"s awful. But why contemplate when you can do something?"
I admitted the justice of the remark. He went on.
"Look at yourself now. If you had gone in with me last night and just stared at the poor devil howling with D.T. in that filthy place, you"d have come out sick and said it was awful. Instead of that, you buckled to and worked and threw off everything save our common humanity, and have got interested in the Judds in spite of yourself. You"ll go and see them again and do what you can for them, won"t you?"
I was not in a merry mood, but I laughed. Campion had read the intention that had vaguely formulated itself in the back of my mind.
"Of course I will," I said.
We walked on a few steps down the still silent, disheartening street without speaking. Then he tugged his beard, half-halted, and glanced at me quickly.
"See here," said he, "the more sensible people I can get in to help us the better. Would you like me to hand you over the Judd family _en bloc_?"
This was startling to the amateur philanthropist. But it is the way of all professionals to regard their own business as of absorbing interest to the outside world. The stockbroking mind cannot conceive a sane man indifferent to the fluctuations of the money market, and to the professional cricketer the wide earth revolves around a wicket. How in the world could I be fairy G.o.dfather to the Judd family? Campion took my competence for granted.
"You may not understand exactly what I mean, my dear Campion," said I; "but I attribute the most unholy disasters of my life to a ghastly attempt of mine to play Deputy Providence."
"But who"s asking you to play Deputy Providence?" he shouted. "It"s the very last idiot thing I want done. I want you to do certain definite practical work for that family under the experienced direction of the authorities at Barbara"s Building. There, do you understand now?"
"Very well, I"ll do anything you like."
Thus it befell that I undertook to look after the moral, material, and spiritual welfare of the family of an alcoholic tailor by the name of Judd who dwelt in a vile slum in South Lambeth. My head was full of the prospect when I awoke at noon, for I had gone exhausted to sleep as soon as I reached home. If goodwill, backed by the experience of Barbara"s Building, could do aught towards the alleviation of human misery, I determined that it should be done. And there was much misery to be alleviated in the Judd family. I had no clear notion of the means whereby I was to accomplish this; but I knew that it would be a philanthropic pursuit far different from my previous eumoirous wanderings abut London when, with a mind conscious of well-doing, I distributed embarra.s.sing five-pound notes to the poor and needy.
I had known--what comfortable, well-fed gentleman does not?--that within easy walking distance of his London home thousands of human beings live like the beasts that perish; but never before had I spent an intimate night in one of the foul dens where the living and perishing take place.
The awful pity of it entered my soul.
So deeply was I impressed with the responsibility of what I had undertaken, so grimly was I haunted by the sight of the pallid, howling travesty of a man and the squeezed-out, whimpering woman, that the memory of the conflicting emotions that had driven me to Campion the night before returned to me with a shock.
"It strikes me," I murmured, as I shaved, "that I am living very intensely indeed. Here am I in love with two women at once, and almost hysterically enthusiastic over a delirious tailor." Then I cut my cheek and murmured no more, until the operation was concluded.
I had arranged to accompany Lola that afternoon to the Zoological Gardens. This was a favourite resort of hers. She was on intimate terms with keepers and animals, and her curious magnetism allowed her to play such tricks with lions and tigers and other ferocious beasts as made my blood run cold. As for the bears, they greeted her approach with shrieking demonstrations of affection. On such occasions I felt the same curious physical antipathy as I did when she had dominated Anastasius"s ill-conditioned cat. She seemed to enter another sphere of being in which neither I nor anything human had a place.
With some such dim thoughts in my head, I reached her door in Cadogan Gardens. The sight of her electric brougham that stood waiting switched my thoughts into another groove, but one running oddly parallel.
Electric broughams also carried her out of my sphere. I had humbly performed the journey thither in an omnibus.
She received me in her big, expansive way.
"Lord! How good it is to see you. I was getting the--I was going to say "the blind hump"--but you don"t like it. I was going to turn crazy and bite the furniture."
"Why?" I asked with masculine directness.
"I"ve been trying to educate myself--to read poetry. Look here"--she caught a small brown-covered octavo volume from the table. "I can"t make head or tail of it. It proved to me that it was no use. If I couldn"t understand poetry, I couldn"t understand anything. It was no good trying to educate myself. I gave it up. And then I got what you don"t like me to call the hump."
"You dear Lola!" I cried, laughing. "I don"t believe any one has ever made head or tail out of "Sordello." There once was a man who said there were only two intelligible lines in the poem--the first and the last--and that both were lies. "Who will, may hear Sordello"s story told," and "Who would, has heard Sordello"s story told." Don"t worry about not understanding it."
"Don"t you?"