“ ‘There, guv’nor,’ he said, with another diabolical laugh, as the fluid in the cistern of the great arched chamber hissed and bubbled. ‘They wos bones; they’re superphosphate by this time. There ain’t no more to show ye, guv’nor,’ said the old man with a leer, as he stretched out his hand.
“I placed a half-crown in it.
“ ‘I knowed ye was a gentleman,’ he said. ‘It’s a hot night, guv’nor, and I’m dreadful droughty; but I do know where a drink’s to be had at any hour, when you’ve got the ready, and I’ll be off to get one.’
“ ‘You’ve forgotten to shut the furnace door, my man,’ I said.
“ ‘Thank ye, guv’nor, but I did it a purpose; the boiler above it’s to be drored tomorrow.’
“ ‘Aren’t you afraid that if you leave the place something may be stolen?’
“ ‘Lor, guv’nor,’ said the old man with a laugh, ‘you’re the fust as has showed his nose inside of Melmoth Brothers’ premises after dark, except the chaps as works here. Haw-haw! they durstn’t, guv’nor, come into this place; they calls it the Devil’s Cookshop hereabouts,’ and taking the iron fork up, the whitened wooden door swung back into its place, and hid the mass of seething vitriol from my view.
“Then, without a word, the old man in his heavy wooden-soled boots clattered out of the place, leaving me alone upon the premises of Melmoth Brothers.
“For several minutes I stood and gazed around me upon the strange weird scene of horror, when suddenly I heard a sound in the lane without, a sound as of a half-stifled shriek of agony. I hurried out into the lane at once. I looked up and down it, and fancied that I saw a dark brown shadow suddenly disappear within an archway. I walked hurriedly towards the archway. There was nothing. And now I heard a low voice cry in choking accents, ‘Help!’ Then there was a groan. At that instant I stumbled over something which lay half in half out of the entrance of a court. It was the body of a man. I stooped over him—it was the young policeman. I recognized his face instantly.
“ ‘I’m glad you’ve come, sir,’ said the poor fellow, in failing accents. ‘He’s put the hat on me, sir. He stabbed me from behind, and I’m choking, sir. But I saw him plain this time; it was him, sir, the man with the brown tweed coat and the red comforter. Don’t you move, sir,’ said the dying man, in a still lower whisper; ‘I see him, sir, I see him now, stooping and peeping round the archway. If you move, sir, he’ll twig you and he’ll slope. Oh, God!’ sobbed the poor young constable, and he gave a shudder. He was dead.
“Still leaning over the body of the dead man, I tried to collect my thoughts, for, my friends, I don’t mind confessing to you, for the first time in my life, since I was a child, I was really afraid. An awful deadly fear—a fear of I knew not what—had come upon me. I trembled in every limb, my hair grew wet with sweat, and I could hear—yes, I could hear—the actual beating of my own heart, as though it were a sledge-hammer. I was alone—alone and unarmed, two hours after midnight, in this dreadful place, with—well, I had no doubt with whom. No, not unarmed. I placed my hand upon the truncheon-case of the dead man. I gripped that truncheon, which is now lying upon the table, and in an instant my courage came back to me. Then, still stooping over the body of the murdered man, I slowly—very slowly—turned my head. There was the man, the murderer, the wretch who had been so accurately described to me, the crouching figure in the brown tweed coat, with the red cotton comforter loosely wound round his neck. In his left hand there was something long and bright and keen that glittered in the soft moonlight of the silent summer night.
“And I saw his face, his dreadful face, the face that will haunt me to my dying day.
“It wasn’t a bit like the descriptions. Mr. Stewart Cumberland’s vision of ‘The Man’ differed in every possible particular from the being whom I watched from under the dark shadow of the entry of the court, as he stood glaring at me in the moonlight, like a hungry tiger prepared to spring. The man had long, crisp-looking locks of tangled hair, which hung on either side of his face. There was no difficulty in studying him: the features were clearly, even brilliantly illuminated, both by the bright moonlight and by the one street-lamp, which chanced to be above his head; even the humidity of his fierce black eyes and of his cruel teeth was plainly apparent; there wasn’t a single detail of the dreadful face that escaped me.
“I’m not going to describe it, it was too awful, and words would fail me. I’ll tell you why I’ll not describe it in a moment.
“Have you ever seen a horse with a very tight bearing-rein on? Of course you have. Well, just as the horse throws his head about in uneasy torture, and champing his bit flings forth great flecks of foam, so did the man I was watching—watching with the hunter’s eye, watching as a wild and noxious beast that I was hoping anon to slay—so did his jaws, I say, champ and gnash and mumble savagely and throw forth great flecks of white froth. The creature literally foamed at the mouth, for this dreadful thirst for blood was evidently, as yet, unsatiated. The eyes were those of a madman, or of a hunted beast driven to bay. I have no doubt, no shadow of doubt, in my own mind, that he—the man in the brown coat—was a savage maniac, a person wholly irresponsible for his actions.
“And now I’ll tell you why I’m not going to describe that dreadful face of his, because, as I have told you, words would fail me. Give free rein to your fancy, let your imagination loose, and they will fail to convey to your mind one tittle of the loathsome horror of those features. The face was scarred in every direction—the mouth——
“Bah! I need say no more, the man was a leper. I have been in the Southern Seas, and I know—I know what a leper is like.
“But I hadn’t much time for meditation. I was alone with the dead man and his murderer: as likely as not, if the man in the brown coat should escape me, I might be accused of the crime; the very fact of my being possessed of the dead man’s truncheon would be looked on as a damning proof. Gripping the truncheon I rushed out upon the living horror. I would have shouted for assistance, but, why I cannot tell, my voice died away as to a whisper within my breast. It wasn’t fear for I rushed upon him fully determined to either take or slay the dreadful thing that wore the ghastly semblance of a man. I rushed upon him, I say, and struck furiously at him with the heavy staff. But he eluded me.
“Noiselessly and swiftly, without even breaking the silence of the night, just as a snake slinks into its hole, the creature dived suddenly beneath my arm, and with an activity that astounded me, passed as though he were without substance (for I heard no sound of footfalls) through the great open gates which formed the entry to the premises of Melmoth Brothers. As he passed under my outstretched arm he must have stabbed through my thin overcoat, and as you see,” said Horace Jeaffreson, pointing to the cut in his frock-coat, “an inch or two more, and H. J. wouldn’t have been among you to eat his breakfast and spin his yarn. The slash in the overcoat I wore last night, my friends, has a trace of bloodstains on it—but it was not my blood.
“ ‘Now,’ thought I, ‘I’ve got him’; his very flight filled me with determination, and I resolved to take him alive if possible, for I felt that he was delivered into my hand, and I was determined that he should not escape me; rather than that, I would knock him on the head with as little compunction as I would kill a mad dog.
“As these thoughts passed through my mind, I sped after the murderer of the unfortunate policeman. I gained upon him rapidly, I was within three yards of him, when we reached the middle of the great knackers’ yard; and then he attempted to dodge me round a sort of huge chopping-block which stood there.
“ ‘If you don’t surrender, by God I’ll kill you,’ I shouted.
“He never answered me, he only mowed and gibbered as he fled, threatening me at the same time with the knife which he held in his hand.
“I vaulted the block, and flung myself upon him; and I struck at him savagely and caught him across the forehead with the truncheon; and suddenly uttering a sort of cry as of an
animal in pain, he stabbed me through the hand and turned and fled once more, I after him. At the moment I didn’t even know that I had been stabbed. I gained upon him, but he reached the bottom of the yard, and turned in front of the low whitened doors and stopped and stood at bay—crouching, knife in hand, in the strong light thrown out by the open furnace door, as though about to spring. Blood was streaming over his face from the wound I had given him upon his forehead, and it half blinded him; and ever and anon he tried to clear his eyes of it with the cuff of his right hand. His face and figure glowed red and unearthly in the firelight.
“I wasn’t afraid of him now; I advanced on him.
“Suddenly he sprang forward. I stepped back and hit him over the knuckles of his raised left hand, in which glittered the knife you see upon that table. I struck with all my might, and the knife fell from his nerveless grasp.
“He rushed back with wonderful agility. The white and rotting doors rolled open on their hinges. I saw him fall backwards with a splash into the mass of froth now coloured by the firelight with a pinky glow.
“He disappeared.
“And then, horror of horrors, I saw the dreadful form rise once more, and cling for an instant to the low edge of the great leaden tank, and make its one last struggle for existence; and then it sank beneath the fuming waves, never to rise again.
“That’s all I have to tell. I picked up the knife and secured it, with the truncheon, about my person, as best I could.
“I’m glad that I avenged the death of the poor fellow whom I only knew as 1839 H. I shall be happier still if, as I believe, through my humble instrumentality, the awful outrages at the East End of London have ended.
“I got to my chambers in the Albany by three in the morning, then I sent for the nearest doctor to dress my hand. It’s not a serious cut, but I had bled like a pig.
“I bought the morning paper on my way here; it gives the details of the murder of Constable 1839 of the H Division by an unknown hand; and it mentions that the murderer appears to have possessed himself of the truncheon of his victim. You see he was stabbed through the great vessels of the lungs.
“I have no further remarks to make, except that I don’t believe we shall hear any more of Jack the Ripper. Of one thing I am perfectly certain, that I shall not visit Whitechapel again in a hurry.”
The Lodger
MARIE BELLOC LOWNDES
A prolific author of historical, romantic, and crime fiction and plays, Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947) based most of her work on historical events. Her most notable story, “The Lodger,” draws heavily on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. In 1913, two years after it was published as a short story that became enormously popular and created extraordinary attention, it was expanded into a full-length novel that has remained in print for more than a century.
In this classic suspense tale, Mr. Sleuth, a gentle man and a gentleman, takes rooms in Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s lodging house. Inexplicably, Mrs. Bunting becomes more and more terrified of him as the series of brutal Ripper murders continues to horrify London.
Marie Belloc was a member of a distinguished family. She was the daughter of the French barrister Louis Belloc and the English activist Bessie Rayner Parkes. Her brother was the famous writer Hilaire Belloc; her great-great-grandfather was Joseph Priestley, the chemist who discovered oxygen; her grandmother Louise Swanton Belloc was the translator of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in France; and her husband, Frederic Sawrey Lowndes, was a distinguished journalist for the London Times.
Although Lowndes was highly successful across several genres, only her short story “The Lodger” and the novel that it inspired are widely read today.
“The Lodger” was first published in the January 1911 issue of McClure’s Magazine.
THE LODGER
Marie Belloc Lowndes
“There he is at last, and I’m glad of it, Ellen. ’Tain’t a night you would wish a dog to be out in.”
Mr. Bunting’s voice was full of unmistakable relief. He was close to the fire, sitting back in a deep leather armchair—a clean-shaven, dapper man, still in outward appearance what he had been so long, and now no longer was—a self-respecting butler.
“You needn’t feel so nervous about him; Mr. Sleuth can look out for himself, all right.” Mrs. Bunting spoke in a dry, rather tart tone. She was less emotional, better balanced, than was her husband. On her the marks of past servitude were less apparent, but they were there all the same—especially in her neat black stuff dress and scrupulously clean, plain collar and cuffs. Mrs. Bunting, as a single woman, had been for long years what is known as a useful maid.
“I can’t think why he wants to go out in such weather. He did it in last week’s fog, too,” Bunting went on complainingly.
“Well, it’s none of your business—now, is it?”
“No; that’s true enough. Still, ’twould be a very bad thing for us if anything happened to him. This lodger’s the first bit of luck we’ve had for a very long time.”
Mrs. Bunting made no answer to this remark. It was too obviously true to be worth answering. Also she was listening—following in imagination her lodger’s quick, singularly quiet—“stealthy,” she called it to herself—progress through the dark, fog-filled hall and up the staircase.
“It isn’t safe for decent folk to be out in such weather—not unless they have something to do that won’t wait till tomorrow.” Bunting had at last turned round. He was now looking straight into his wife’s narrow, colorless face; he was an obstinate man, and liked to prove himself right. “I read you out the accidents in Lloyd’s yesterday—shocking, they were, and all brought about by the fog! And then, that ’orrid monster at his work again—”
“Monster?” repeated Mrs. Bunting absently. She was trying to hear the lodger’s footsteps overhead; but her husband went on as if there had been no interruption:
“It wouldn’t be very pleasant to run up against such a party as that in the fog, eh?”
“What stuff you do talk!” she said sharply; and then she got up suddenly. Her husband’s remark had disturbed her. She hated to think of such things as the terrible series of murders that were just then horrifying and exciting the nether world of London. Though she enjoyed pathos and sentiment,—Mrs. Bunting would listen with mild amusement to the details of a breach-of-promise action—she shrank from stories of either immorality or physical violence.
Mrs. Bunting got up from the straight-backed chair on which she had been sitting. It would soon be time for supper.
She moved abut the sitting-room, flecking off an imperceptible touch of dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.
Bunting looked around once or twice. He would have liked to ask Ellen to leave off fidgeting, but he was mild and fond of peace, so he refrained. However, she soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord.
But even then Mrs. Bunting did not at once go down to the cold kitchen, where everything was in readiness for her simple cooking. Instead, she opened the door leading into the bedroom behind, and there, closing the door quietly, stepped back into the darkness and stood motionless, listening.
At first she heard nothing, but gradually there came the sound of someone moving about in the room just overhead; try as she might, however, it was impossible for her to guess what her lodger was doing. At last she heard him open the door leading out to the landing. That meant that he would spend the rest of the evening in the rather cheerless room above the drawing-room floor—oddly enough, he liked sitting there best, though the only warmth obtainable was from a gas-stove fed by a shilling-in-the-slot arrangement.
It was indeed true that Mr. Sleuth had brought the Buntings luck, for at the time he had taken their rooms it had been touch and go with them.
After having each separately led the sheltered, impersonal, and, above all, the financially easy existence that is the compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take upon themselves the yoke of d
omestic service, these two, butler and useful maid, had suddenly, in middle age, determined to join their fortunes and savings.
Bunting was a widower; he had one pretty daughter, a girl of seventeen, who now lived, as had been the case ever since the death of her mother, with a prosperous aunt. His second wife had been reared in the Foundling Hospital, but she had gradually worked her way up into the higher ranks of the servant class and as a useful maid she had saved quite a tidy sum of money.
Unluckily, misfortune had dogged Mr. and Mrs. Bunting from the very first. The seaside place where they had begun by taking a lodging-house became the scene of an epidemic. Then had followed a business experiment which had proved disastrous. But before going back into service, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to make one last effort, and, with the little money that remained to them, they had taken over the lease of a small house in the Marylebone Road.
Bunting, whose appearance was very good, had retained a connection with old employers and their friends, so he occasionally got a good job as waiter. During this last month his jobs had perceptibly increased in number and in profit; Mrs. Bunting was not superstitious, but it seemed that in this matter, as in everything else, Mr. Sleuth, their new lodger, had brought them luck.
As she stood there, still listening intently in the darkness of the bedroom, she told herself, not for the first time, what Mr. Sleuth’s departure would mean to her and Bunting. It would almost certainly mean ruin.
Luckily, the lodger seemed entirely pleased both with the rooms and with his landlady. There was really no reason why he should ever leave such nice lodgings. Mrs. Bunting shook off her vague sense of apprehension and unease. She turned round, took a step forward, and, feeling for the handle of the door giving into the passage, she opened it, and went down with light, firm steps into the kitchen.
She lit the gas and put a frying-pan on the stove, and then once more her mind reverted, as if in spite of herself, to her lodger, and there came back to Mrs. Bunting, very vividly, the memory of all that had happened the day Mr. Sleuth had taken her rooms.
The Big Book of Jack the Ripper Page 61
