Our Mutual Friend
‘It’s summut run down in the fog, ma’am,’ answered Bob. ‘There’s ever so
many people in the river.’
‘Tell ’em to put on all the kettles!’ cried Miss Abbey. ‘See that the
boiler’s full. Get a bath out. Hang some blankets to the fire. Heat some
stone bottles. Have your senses about you, you girls down stairs, and
use ’em.’
While Miss Abbey partly delivered these directions to Bob—whom she
seized by the hair, and whose head she knocked against the wall, as a
general injunction to vigilance and presence of mind—and partly hailed
the kitchen with them—the company in the public room, jostling one
another, rushed out to the causeway, and the outer noise increased.
‘Come and look,’ said Miss Abbey to her visitors. They all three hurried
to the vacated public room, and passed by one of the windows into the
wooden verandah overhanging the river.
‘Does anybody down there know what has happened?’ demanded Miss Abbey,
in her voice of authority.
‘It’s a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried one blurred figure in the fog.
‘It always IS a steamer, Miss Abbey,’ cried another.
‘Them’s her lights, Miss Abbey, wot you see a-blinking yonder,’ cried
another.
‘She’s a-blowing off her steam, Miss Abbey, and that’s what makes the
fog and the noise worse, don’t you see?’ explained another.
Boats were putting off, torches were lighting up, people were rushing
tumultuously to the water’s edge. Some man fell in with a splash, and
was pulled out again with a roar of laughter. The drags were called for.
A cry for the life-buoy passed from mouth to mouth. It was impossible to
make out what was going on upon the river, for every boat that put off
sculled into the fog and was lost to view at a boat’s length. Nothing
was clear but that the unpopular steamer was assailed with reproaches
on all sides. She was the Murderer, bound for Gallows Bay; she was the
Manslaughterer, bound for Penal Settlement; her captain ought to be
tried for his life; her crew ran down men in row-boats with a relish;
she mashed up Thames lightermen with her paddles; she fired property
with her funnels; she always was, and she always would be, wreaking
destruction upon somebody or something, after the manner of all her
kind. The whole bulk of the fog teemed with such taunts, uttered in
tones of universal hoarseness. All the while, the steamer’s lights moved
spectrally a very little, as she lay-to, waiting the upshot of whatever
accident had happened. Now, she began burning blue-lights. These made a
luminous patch about her, as if she had set the fog on fire, and in the
patch—the cries changing their note, and becoming more fitful and more
excited—shadows of men and boats could be seen moving, while voices
shouted: ‘There!’ ‘There again!’ ‘A couple more strokes a-head!’
‘Hurrah!’ ‘Look out!’ ‘Hold on!’ ‘Haul in!’ and the like. Lastly, with
a few tumbling clots of blue fire, the night closed in dark again,
the wheels of the steamer were heard revolving, and her lights glided
smoothly away in the direction of the sea.
It appeared to Miss Abbey and her two companions that a considerable
time had been thus occupied. There was now as eager a set towards the
shore beneath the house as there had been from it; and it was only
on the first boat of the rush coming in that it was known what had
occurred.
‘If that’s Tom Tootle,’ Miss Abbey made proclamation, in her most
commanding tones, ‘let him instantly come underneath here.’
The submissive Tom complied, attended by a crowd.
‘What is it, Tootle?’ demanded Miss Abbey.
‘It’s a foreign steamer, miss, run down a wherry.’
‘How many in the wherry?’
‘One man, Miss Abbey.’
‘Found?’
‘Yes. He’s been under water a long time, Miss; but they’ve grappled up
the body.’
‘Let ’em bring it here. You, Bob Gliddery, shut the house-door and stand
by it on the inside, and don’t you open till I tell you. Any police down
there?’
‘Here, Miss Abbey,’ was official rejoinder.
‘After they have brought the body in, keep the crowd out, will you? And
help Bob Gliddery to shut ’em out.’
‘All right, Miss Abbey.’
The autocratic landlady withdrew into the house with Riah and Miss
Jenny, and disposed those forces, one on either side of her, within the
half-door of the bar, as behind a breastwork.
‘You two stand close here,’ said Miss Abbey, ‘and you’ll come to no
hurt, and see it brought in. Bob, you stand by the door.’
That sentinel, smartly giving his rolled shirt-sleeves an extra and a
final tuck on his shoulders, obeyed.
Sound of advancing voices, sound of advancing steps. Shuffle and talk
without. Momentary pause. Two peculiarly blunt knocks or pokes at the
door, as if the dead man arriving on his back were striking at it with
the soles of his motionless feet.
‘That’s the stretcher, or the shutter, whichever of the two they are
carrying,’ said Miss Abbey, with experienced ear. ‘Open, you Bob!’
Door opened. Heavy tread of laden men. A halt. A rush. Stoppage of rush.
Door shut. Baffled boots from the vexed souls of disappointed outsiders.
‘Come on, men!’ said Miss Abbey; for so potent was she with her subjects
that even then the bearers awaited her permission. ‘First floor.’
The entry being low, and the staircase being low, they so took up the
burden they had set down, as to carry that low. The recumbent figure, in
passing, lay hardly as high as the half door.
Miss Abbey started back at sight of it. ‘Why, good God!’ said she,
turning to her two companions, ‘that’s the very man who made the
declaration we have just had in our hands. That’s Riderhood!’
Chapter 3
THE SAME RESPECTED FRIEND IN MORE ASPECTS THAN ONE
In sooth, it is Riderhood and no other, or it is the outer husk and
shell of Riderhood and no other, that is borne into Miss Abbey’s
first-floor bedroom. Supple to twist and turn as the Rogue has ever
been, he is sufficiently rigid now; and not without much shuffling of
attendant feet, and tilting of his bier this way and that way, and
peril even of his sliding off it and being tumbled in a heap over the
balustrades, can he be got up stairs.
‘Fetch a doctor,’ quoth Miss Abbey. And then, ‘Fetch his daughter.’ On
both of which errands, quick messengers depart.
The doctor-seeking messenger meets the doctor halfway, coming under
convoy of police. Doctor examines the dank carcase, and pronounces, not
hopefully, that it is worth while trying to reanimate the same. All the
best means are at once in action, and everybody present lends a hand,
and a heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the man; with them
all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but
the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now,
and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and
they are living and must die.
In answer to the doctor’s inquiry how did it happen, and was anyone to
blame, Tom Tootle gives in his verdict, unavoidable accident and no one
to blame but the sufferer. ‘He was slinking about in his boat,’ says
Tom, ‘which slinking were, not to speak ill of the dead, the manner of
the man, when he come right athwart the steamer’s bows and she cut him
in two.’ Mr Tootle is so far figurative, touching the dismemberment, as
that he means the boat, and not the man. For, the man lies whole before
them.
Captain Joey, the bottle-nosed regular customer in the glazed hat, is a
pupil of the much-respected old school, and (having insinuated himself
into the chamber, in the execution of the important service of carrying
the drowned man’s neck-kerchief) favours the doctor with a sagacious
old-scholastic suggestion that the body should be hung up by the heels,
‘sim’lar’, says Captain Joey, ‘to mutton in a butcher’s shop,’ and
should then, as a particularly choice manoeuvre for promoting easy
respiration, be rolled upon casks. These scraps of the wisdom of the
captain’s ancestors are received with such speechless indignation by
Miss Abbey, that she instantly seizes the Captain by the collar, and
without a single word ejects him, not presuming to remonstrate, from the
scene.
There then remain, to assist the doctor and Tom, only those three other
regular customers, Bob Glamour, William Williams, and Jonathan (family
name of the latter, if any, unknown to man-kind), who are quite enough.
Miss Abbey having looked in to make sure that nothing is wanted,
descends to the bar, and there awaits the result, with the gentle Jew
and Miss Jenny Wren.
If you are not gone for good, Mr Riderhood, it would be something to
know where you are hiding at present. This flabby lump of mortality that
we work so hard at with such patient perseverance, yields no sign of
you. If you are gone for good, Rogue, it is very solemn, and if you are
coming back, it is hardly less so. Nay, in the suspense and mystery of
the latter question, involving that of where you may be now, there is a
solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in attendance
alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below
start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor.
Stay! Did that eyelid tremble? So the doctor, breathing low, and closely
watching, asks himself.
No.
Did that nostril twitch?
No.
This artificial respiration ceasing, do I feel any faint flutter under
my hand upon the chest?
No.
Over and over again No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless.
See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may
smoulder and go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! The four
rough fellows, seeing, shed tears. Neither Riderhood in this world, nor
Riderhood in the other, could draw tears from them; but a striving human
soul between the two can do it easily.
He is struggling to come back. Now, he is almost here, now he is far
away again. Now he is struggling harder to get back. And yet—like us
all, when we swoon—like us all, every day of our lives when we wake—he
is instinctively unwilling to be restored to the consciousness of this
existence, and would be left dormant, if he could.
Bob Gliddery returns with Pleasant Riderhood, who was out when sought
for, and hard to find. She has a shawl over her head, and her first
action, when she takes it off weeping, and curtseys to Miss Abbey, is to
wind her hair up.
‘Thank you, Miss Abbey, for having father here.’
‘I am bound to say, girl, I didn’t know who it was,’ returns Miss Abbey;
‘but I hope it would have been pretty much the same if I had known.’
Poor Pleasant, fortified with a sip of brandy, is ushered into the
first-floor chamber. She could not express much sentiment about her
father if she were called upon to pronounce his funeral oration, but she
has a greater tenderness for him than he ever had for her, and crying
bitterly when she sees him stretched unconscious, asks the doctor, with
clasped hands: ‘Is there no hope, sir? O poor father! Is poor father
dead?’
To which the doctor, on one knee beside the body, busy and watchful,
only rejoins without looking round: ‘Now, my girl, unless you have the
self-command to be perfectly quiet, I cannot allow you to remain in the
room.’
Pleasant, consequently, wipes her eyes with her back-hair, which is in
fresh need of being wound up, and having got it out of the way, watches
with terrified interest all that goes on. Her natural woman’s aptitude
soon renders her able to give a little help. Anticipating the doctor’s
want of this or that, she quietly has it ready for him, and so by
degrees is intrusted with the charge of supporting her father’s head
upon her arm.
It is something so new to Pleasant to see her father an object of
sympathy and interest, to find any one very willing to tolerate his
society in this world, not to say pressingly and soothingly entreating