“Just for this night.”
There was a piece of flat stone projecting from the wall, and Gissing sat down upon it slowly. He had trained himself to think, and to analyze his sensations, in moments of solitude; but he could contemplate nothing now except the stone wall in front of him. It had been painted light green.
The hero of Workers in the Dawn was described by Gissing as “one of those men whose lives seem to have little result for the world save as a useful illustration of the force of circumstances.” Now, in the police cell, sat another prey of “circumstances” trapped in a narrative over which he had no control. There was a bucket in the corner, to be used by the prisoners, and for a moment he considered putting it over his head and beginning to moan. But then his thoughts took another turn. He had read in a recent copy of the Weekly Digest that part of the ancient city of London had been found during the building of certain warehouses by Shadwell Reach. Some stone walls had been uncovered, and it occurred to Gissing that this cell might have been constructed from the remnants of them. Perhaps the old buried city extended as far as Limehouse with the Analytical Engine as its god or genius loci. So now he might be its sacrifice, waiting in an antechamber for the doom prepared. And was that the secret of the golem which the police detective had mentioned? Perhaps Charles Babbage’s creation was the true Limehouse Golem, draining away the life and spirit of those who approached it. Perhaps the digits and the numbers were little chattering souls trapped in the mechanism, and its webs of iron no less than the web of mortality itself. What monstrous creation might it bring forth in years to come? What had begun in Limehouse might then spread over the entire world. But these were only Gissing’s disordered thoughts as he sat, exhausted, in his prison cell.
He was released the following morning, after the policeman had confirmed that he had indeed sat in the Berners Street chophouse until after midnight. Vincent, the young waiter, had been particularly forceful; he alluded to Gissing sitting there “all the bleeding night” while doing nothing but “doodling,” and accused him of being “stuck up” despite the fact that “he don’t have sixpence.” A customer also remembered seeing him that evening, and corroborated Vincent’s other testimony by describing Gissing as “shabby genteel.” This was a popular expression but one less than just to the novelist; he always tried to dress well, and his gentility was not of manner but of mind.
He came out of the courtyard of the police office, and stood uncertainly in the Limehouse air. He had resigned himself to a long process of investigation and humiliation, but his unexpected release did not afford him any real sense of freedom. Certainly he had experienced an exhilarating moment of relief when he finally left the building of dull yellow brick, but that was followed by a more persistent sense of threat. His whole existence in the world had been suddenly and quickly called into question. If he had not visited the chophouse he might well have been convicted and executed; it was as if his life were now revealed as a paltry and tenuous thing which the slightest misfortune might destroy. He blamed his wife for his situation, as we have seen, but up to this time she had never threatened his very survival. That was a new consideration. His night in the cell had revealed to him that he had no real protection against her, or against the world.
He walked home by way of Whitechapel and the City, although he knew well enough that he was returning to no “home” at all. He was like a condemned man going back to his cell. He could hear the argument as soon as he turned into Hanway Street: Nell was leaning down from the first-floor window and screaming at the landlady who stood in the street below. “Such things,” Mrs. Irving was shouting, “such as should not happen in this ’ere ’ouse.” Nell replied with a volley of foul words, at which the landlady accused her of being a “dirty ’ore.” His wife disappeared for a moment and then returned with a chamber pot, the contents of which she directed at Mrs. Irving’s head. Gissing could bear no more of this. Neither woman had seen him, so he retreated quickly down the Tottenham Court Road and made his way to the British Museum. If there was to be rest for him anywhere in this world, it was among his books.
TWENTY-FIVE
Within two years I had become a seasoned performer, and Little Victor’s Daughter had developed a life and a history which I quite believed when I went upon the stage. Of course I had my modèles, as Uncle used to say. I had watched Miss Emma Marriott in Gin and Limelight and had heard “Lady Agatha” (alias Joan Birtwhistle, a most unpleasant party) singing “Get Back to Your Pudding, Marianne,” and I took a little inflection from both of them. There was another seriocomic lady, Betty Williams, who had started as a big-boot dancer but had developed into a real artiste with her rendering of “It’s a Bit of Comfort to a Poor Old Maid.” She had a certain way of tilting herself, so that she always seemed to be on the deck of a ship or struggling in a high wind—I borrowed that effect, too, for a number of my own entitled “Don’t Stick It Out So Much.” How they roared, even when I was at my most genteel. Little Victor’s Daughter was the young virgin who said quite innocent things—how could she help it if she was open to misconstruction? Dan thought I was getting too blue and I became truly indignant with him—could I be blamed for all the chaff and the laughter in the gallery? I didn’t think her history deserved it. Here she was, having been brought up by Little Victor after her parents had perished in a fire in a sausage shop; of course she had to earn her keep as a maid in Pimlico, and what was she to do if all the men in the house kept on giving her presents? As she used to sing, “What’s a Girl Supposed to Say?” What a performance it was!
It was not until my third year on the stage, with all the usual hurry from hall to hall, that I grew sick of Little Victor’s Daughter. She was just too sweet, and I longed to kill her off by some violent action. When she was on the stage now I used to beat her about a bit—“I’ll give you the biggest scratch on the face,” the cook would say to me, and then I would land myself such a thump that I was almost knocked over. (Of course I played the cook as well, since it was part of what Dan called my “monypolylogue.”) But she was no longer the right girl for me. So I was sitting in the green room one weekday evening, feeling pretty sorry for myself “at my time of life,” when I noticed that Dan had dropped one of his costumes on a chair. It was not his way to be untidy, so out of old habit I picked up the duds and began dusting them down. He had left a battered beaver hat, an old green topcoat, check trousers, boots and a choker; I was about to fold them away, when suddenly it struck me as quite a funny thing to try them on. There was a tall mirror propped against the wall, by the makeup basket, and I dressed as quickly as I could. The hat was a little too big and came over my eyes, so I tilted it on the back of my head like a coster; the trousers and coat fitted me perfectly, and I realized that I would be able to swagger in them ever so well. But what a picture I made in the mirror—I had become a man, from tip to toe, and there might have been a slangster comedian standing there; it was a perfect piece of business and, even then, I think I began to consider ways of getting up a new act.
Dan came into the room while I was standing in front of the mirror and practicing some gestures. “Hello,” he said as if to a stranger. “Do I know you when you’re at home?”
“Of course you do.” I turned around and smiled at him, although I was perhaps a little embarrassed at what I had done. He was always quick, and he recognized me at once. “Good God,” he said. “This is a funny thing.” He carried on staring at me. “What a funny thing.”
“I could make it a scream, Dan. I could be Little Victor’s Daughter’s Older Brother.”
“A swell?”
“A shabby swell.”
I could see that he was contemplating the possibilities. There is always room in the halls for a good male impersonator and, somehow, I looked the part. “I suppose,” he said, “that it could be worked up. It could be quite a diversion.”
And so it proved. At first I went on as Little Victor’s Daughter’s Older Brother, but the name was too big for the b
ills and I settled for The Older Brother. The beaver hat was always a success when it came down over my eyes, and even fell off my head, but I decided to compromise with a nice little felt-top number without any brim; then I found myself a frock coat and some white trousers, before finishing off the mammoth ensemble with a high collar and big boots. I used to swagger on the stage like a leonine comique, and then somehow manage to have my hat knocked off by a gasman’s pole; that set them roaring because I started to quiver—literally quiver—with rage before very carefully taking the gasman’s cap and flinging it into the gutter. It was all mime, of course, and in the beginning Dan took me through the steps and gestures as if I were about to become a regular Grimaldi. But I was a good gagger, too, and after a while I developed my own masculine slanguage. “ ‘Arf a mo’, cocky” and “Will you just a wait a tic?”—uttered like they had never been uttered before—were two popular favorites: I sang them out just before I was about to run off the stage, and then I froze in the act of running with one leg stretched in the air behind me. The Older Brother was a terrible scamp, and was courting a fat old pastry cook who was supposed to have hidden a fortune somewhere. “She’s a fine figure of a woman is my Joan,” he would say. “It’s the dough that does it.” (Dough in those days was the latest morsel of lingo for baksheesh.) “Her hair’s another thing altogether, and there are some who would say it’s a home for old spiders. But not me.” I had another piece of foolery. When the new regulations came in, I used to gag them by marching across the stage with a banner saying “Temporary Fire Curtain.” That always got them going and, while I had them in the mood, I would hit them with the latest of my ditties. I made a success out of “I’m a Married Man Myself” and “Any Excuse for a Booze,” but I always ended my masculine turn with a song which Uncle originally found for me. It was entitled “She Was One of the Early Birds and I Was One of the—” and there were many times when I would have to “oblige again” before they would let me go on to the next hall. Of course everything was timed perfectly in advance, and my turn lasted thirty minutes before I got into the brougham and went on to the next set of doors. One evening’s program would take me to the Britannia in Hoxton at a quarter past eight, Wilton’s in Wellclose Square by nine, the Winchester along the Southwark Bridge Road at ten, and rounding off with the Raglan in Theobald’s Road at eleven. It was a hard life in some ways, but I was earning seven guineas a week plus supper. The Older Brother had become a great draw, and within a very short time I had taught him how to be cocky and yet naive, knowing yet innocent. Everyone knew that I was also Little Victor’s Daughter, but that was the joy of it. I could be girl and boy, man and woman, without any shame. I felt somehow that I was above them all, and could change myself at will. That was why I perfected the art of running off the stage, five minutes before the end, and coming back as Little Victor’s Daughter while they stared at me in surprise. Uncle was acting as my dresser now, and had my feminine rags in his hand as I came off; he would always pat me on the you-know-what while I changed, but I pretended to ignore him. I recognized all his tricks by now, and I knew that I was equal to them. In any case I was preparing myself for that old pathetic number, “I Wonder What It Feels Like to be Poor.” How the coppers rained down from the gods for that one! As I used to say, as I stood there as the lonely orphan, these were really “pennies from heaven.”
It must have been two or three months after the Older Brother was born that I had a sudden fancy of my own: it might be a piece of fun to take him out into the streets of London and see the other world. I had a room to myself in our diggings now, just next door to Doris, and after the show was over I would go back in my own clothes as if I were about to toast a slice of bread and retire. But then I would quietly dress myself as the Older Brother, wait until the lights were dimmed and the house was quiet, and then creep out of the back window by the staircase. Of course he never wore his stage clothes, which were a trifle too short and too shabby, and he had bought for himself a whole new set of duds. He was a scamp, as I said, and liked nothing better than to stroll through the night like a regular masher; he would cross the river down Southwark way and then wander by Whitechapel, Shadwell and Limehouse. He soon knew all the flash houses and the dens, but he never set foot in them: he had his fun by watching the filth of the town flowing along. The females of the street would whistle to him but he passed them by and, if the worst of them tried to touch him, he would grip their wrists with his big hands and thrust them away. He was not so rough with the game boys, because he knew that they lusted after him in a purer fashion: they were looking for their double, and who could reflect them better than the Older Brother? No one ever saw Lambeth Marsh Lizzie or Little Victor’s Daughter—she had gone away, and I liked to think of her sleeping peacefully somewhere. No. That is not precisely true. One man did see her. The Older Brother was walking through Old Jerusalem, just by the Limehouse church, when a Hebrew passed him by gaslight—they almost collided, since the Jew was walking with his eyes fixed upon the pavement. When he looked up, he saw Lizzie beneath the male and recoiled. He muttered something like “Cabman” or “Cadmon” and, in that instant, she struck out and knocked him to the ground. Then she went on her way as a swell of the night with her frock coat and fancy waistcoat; she even made a point of tipping her hat to the ladies.
Doris caught me one night when I returned to the New Cut. She must have been drinking porter with Austin for longer than usual, because she was a little bit “round the houses.” “Lizzie, love,” she said. “Whatever are you wearing?”
I had to think fast, even though I guessed that she would remember nothing in the morning. “I’m rehearsing, Doris. I’ve got a new bit of business, dear, and I need the practice.”
“You look the spitting image of a dear old pal.” She kissed the collar of my frock coat. “A dear old pal. Long departed. Sing us a song, darling, do.” She was quite dazed with the drink, so I took her back to her room and gave her the refrain of “My Sweet Mother Looks After Me Still, Though I Long to Be with Her in Heaven.” How she loved that song. She recalled nothing the next morning, as I expected, but it really did not matter: three weeks later, the poor dear died of drink. She started sweating and trembling while we were sitting in Austin’s nice little parlor; by the time we got her to the Free Hospital down the Westminster Bridge Road, she was all but gone. Drink is a slow poison, so they say, but it can always strike quickly when the body is weakened. We buried her on the Friday afternoon, just before our matinée at the Britannia, and Dan gave a little speech by the graveside. He called her the “female Blondin” who aspired higher and higher. She never fell, he said: she was someone we all looked up to. It was a very nice oration, and we shed a few tears. Then we put her wire in the coffin, and cried some more. I shall never forget it. I was at my best that night, after the funeral, and the mirth of the Older Brother had them roaring. But, as I said to Dan at the time, we have to remain professionals. That same night I dreamed that I was dragging a corpse behind me with a rope but, after all, what do dreams matter when we have the stage?
That is what I should have told Kennedy, the Great Mesmerist, who was on a bill with me two weeks later. “How is it done?” I had asked him, after I had seen him put several under the ’fluence. A fisherman had come down from the twopenny gallery and danced the fandango all over the place, while a coster and his donah were mesmerized into a clog dance which, being Londoners, they could not have known naturally. “Is it just a wheeze?”
“No. It’s a feat.” We were having a parcel of fish and chips on a licensed premises, not far from the hall in Bishopsgate, and he held up his glass so that he could look at me through it. We were in a snug little corner, where no one could see us, and I noticed a fire in his eyes—although I think now that it may just have been a reflection of the fire in the parlor.
“Go on, then,” I said. “Astonish me, Randolph.” He took from his pocket the flash gold watch which he used on the stage, and read the time before putting it b
ack again. At that moment I saw the fire gleaming inside the dial. “Do that again.”
“Do what, ducks?”
“Let me see it burning.” So slowly he takes out the watch again, and holds it up to the firelight. I could not take my eyes from it, and all at once I remembered how my mother used to hold up a candle to light me to bed in our Lambeth Marsh lodgings. That was all I knew before I fell asleep. It seemed like sleep, at least, but when I opened my eyes the Great Kennedy was looking at me in horror. “What on earth is the matter?” was all I could think of saying.
“It couldn’t have been you, Lizzie.”
“What couldn’t have been me?”
“I don’t want to say.”
I was afraid for a moment of what I might have revealed. “Go on. Do tell a girl.”
“All those terrible things.”
Then I laughed out loud, and raised my glass. “Here’s to you, Randolph. Don’t you know when you’ve been spoofed?”
“You mean …”
“You never had me under at all.” He still looked at me doubtfully. “Can you think so badly of your Lambeth Lizzie?”
“No. Of course not. But you were that genuine.”
“That’s the game, you see. Keep them guessing.” We left it there but, afterwards, he never treated me quite the same.
TWENTY-SIX
MR. LISTER: What is the evidence against Mrs. Cree, after all? She purchased some arsenic powder for rats. That is the sum of it. If that were grounds for the charge of murder, half the women of England would be standing in this place. The plain and certain truth is that the prosecution has failed to provide any convincing reason why Mrs. Cree should wish to kill her husband. He was a mild and studious man afflicted with some kind of brain disorder of an obsessive nature—reason enough for him to kill himself, as Mrs. Cree has suggested, but no reason at all for him to be murdered by his own wife. Had he been a good husband to her? Yes, he had. Had he provided for her? Yes indeed, and to suggest that she killed him for an inheritance is the plainest folly when we consider how comfortable her life had been. Was John Cree some kind of beast who tyrannized his wife? If he had been some fiend in human shape, why then there might have been a possible motive for such a crime. But in fact we have heard that he was, despite his mental infirmity, a kind and loving husband. There was no possible reason in the world why Mrs. Cree should wish to destroy him. Just look at her. Does she seem to you a monster incarnate, a veritable terror, as Mr. Greatorex has implied? On the contrary, I see all the womanly virtues in her face. I see loyalty, and chastity, and piety. Mr. Greatorex has made great play with the fact that she was once a performer in the halls, as if that were necessarily the mark of a bad character. But we have heard from several witnesses that she led an exemplary existence while employed upon the stage. And of her life in New Cross, we have heard much praise from her neighbors for her wifely deportment. The maid, Mortimer, has said that she was a hardened woman—I wish to quote her exactly—but is that not often the way servants talk about their employers and especially, if I may say so, maids about their mistresses? Mrs. Cree has told us that on several occasions she had threatened this Mortimer with a possible removal from her duties and expulsion from the house. We may have taken a different view of the maid’s opinion after that. Certainly it would be enough to embitter that young woman against her employer. Now imagine the real scene within the Cree household, with this morbidly religious man being comforted and supported by his wife …
The Trial of Elizabeth Cree Page 13
