CHAPTER XI. THE GREAT FOG AND THE FIRE AT MIDNIGHT

It was London city, and the Bench was the kernel of it to me. I throbbed with excitement, though I sat looking out of the windows into the subterranean atmosphere quite still and firm. When you think long undividedly of a single object it gathers light, and when you draw near it in person the strange thing to your mind is the absence of that light; but I, approaching it in this dense fog, seemed to myself to be only thinking of it a little more warmly than usual, and instead of fading it reversed the process, and became, from light, luminous. Not being able, however, to imagine the Bench a happy place, I corrected the excess of brightness and gave its walls a pine-torch glow; I set them in the middle of a great square, and hung the standard of England drooping over them in a sort of mournful family pride. Then, because I next conceived it a foreign kind of place, different altogether from that home growth of ours, the Tower of London, I topped it with a multitude of domes of pumpkin or turban shape, resembling the Kremlin of Moscow, which had once leapt up in the eye of Winter, glowing like a million pine-torches, and flung shadows of stretching red horses on the black smoke-drift. But what was the Kremlin, that had seen a city perish, to this Bench where my father languished! There was no comparing them for tragic horror. And the Kremlin had snow-fields around it; this Bench was caught out of sight, hemmed in by an atmosphere thick as Charon breathed; it might as well be underground.

‘Oh! it’s London,’ Temple went on, correcting his incorrigible doubts about it. He jumped on the platform; we had to call out not to lose one another. ‘I say, Richie, this is London,’ he said, linking his arm in mine: ‘you know by the size of the station; and besides, there’s the fog. Oh! it’s London. We’ve overshot it, we’re positively in London.’

I could spare no sympathy for his feelings, and I did not respond to his inquiring looks. Now that we were here I certainly wished myself away, though I would not have retreated, and for awhile I was glad of the discomforts besetting me; my step was hearty as I led on, meditating upon asking some one the direction to the Bench presently. We had to walk, and it was nothing but traversing on a slippery pavement atmospheric circles of black brown and brown red, and sometimes a larger circle of pale yellow; the colours of old bruised fruits, medlars, melons, and the smell of them; nothing is more desolate. Neither of us knew where we were, nor where we were going. We struggled through an interminable succession of squalid streets, from the one lamp visible to its neighbour in the darkness: you might have fancied yourself peering at the head of an old saint on a smoky canvas; it was like the painting of light rather than light. Figures rushed by; we saw no faces.

Temple spoke solemnly: ‘Our dinner-hour at home is half-past six.’ A street-boy overheard him and chaffed him. Temple got the worst of it, and it did him good, for he had the sweetest nature in the world. We declined to be attended by link-boys; they would have hurt our sense of independence. Possessed of a sovereign faith that, by dint of resolution, I should ultimately penetrate to the great square enclosing the Bench, I walked with the air of one who had the map of London in his eye and could thread it blindfold. Temple was thereby deceived into thinking that I must somehow have learnt the direction I meant to take, and knew my way, though at the slightest indication of my halting and glancing round his suspicions began to boil, and he was for asking some one the name of the ground we stood on: he murmured, ‘Fellows get lost in London.’ By this time he clearly understood that I had come to London on purpose: he could not but be aware of the object of my coming, and I was too proud, and he still too delicate, to allude to it.

The fog choked us. Perhaps it took away the sense of hunger by filling us as if we had eaten a dinner of soot. We had no craving to eat until long past the dinner-hour in Temple’s house, and then I would rather have plunged into a bath and a bed than have been requested to sit at a feast; Temple too, I fancy. We knew we were astray without speaking of it. Temple said, ‘I wish we hadn’t drunk that champagne.’ It seemed to me years since I had tasted the delicious crushing of the sweet bubbles in my mouth. But I did not blame them; I was after my father: he, dear little fellow, had no light ahead except his devotion to me: he must have had a touch of conscious guilt regarding his recent behaviour, enough to hold him from complaining formally. He complained of a London without shops and lights, wondered how any one could like to come to it in a fog, and so forth; and again regretted our having drunk champagne in the morning; a sort of involuntary whimpering easily forgiven to him, for I knew he had a gallant heart. I determined, as an act of signal condescension, to accost the first person we met, male or female, for Temple’s sake. Having come to this resolve, which was to be an open confession that I had misled him, wounding to my pride, I hoped eagerly for the hearing of a footfall. We were in a labyrinth of dark streets where no one was astir. A wretched dog trotted up to us, followed at our heels a short distance, and left us as if he smelt no luck about us; our cajoleries were unavailing to keep that miserable companion.

‘Sinbad escaped from the pit by tracking a lynx,’ I happened to remark. Temple would not hear of Sinbad.

‘Oh, come, we’re not Mussulmen,’ said he; ‘I declare, Richie, if I saw a church open, I’d go in and sleep there. Were you thinking of tracking the dog, then? Beer may be had somewhere. We shall have to find an hotel. What can the time be?’

I owed it to him to tell him, so I climbed a lamppost and spelt out the hour by my watch. When I descended we were three. A man had his hands on Temple’s shoulders, examining his features.

‘Now speak,’ the man said, roughly.

I was interposing, but Temple cried, ‘All right, Richie, we are two to one.’

The man groaned. I asked him what he wanted.

‘My son! I’ve lost my son,’ the man replied, and walked away; and he would give no answer to our questions.

I caught hold of the lamp-post, overcome. I meant to tell Temple, in response to the consoling touch of his hand, that I hoped the poor, man would discover his son, but said instead, ‘I wish we could see the Bench to-night.’ Temple exclaimed, ‘Ah!’ pretending by his tone of voice that we had recently discussed our chance of it, and then he ventured to inform me that he imagined he had heard of the place being shut up after a certain hour of the night.

My heart felt released, and gushed with love for him. ‘Very well, Temple,’ I said: ‘then we’ll wait till tomorrow, and strike out for some hotel now.’

Off we went at a furious pace. Saddlebank’s goose was reverted to by both of us with an exchange of assurances that we should meet a dish the fellow to it before we slept.

‘As for life,’ said I, as soon as the sharp pace had fetched my breathing to a regular measure, ‘adventures are what I call life.’

Temple assented. ‘They’re capital, if you only see the end of them.’

We talked of Ulysses and Penelope. Temple blamed him for leaving Calypso. I thought Ulysses was right, otherwise we should have had no slaying of the Suitors but Temple shyly urged that to have a Goddess caring for you (and she was handsomer than Penelope, who must have been an oldish woman) was something to make you feel as you do on a hunting morning, when there are half-a-dozen riding-habits speckling the field—a whole glorious day your own among them! This view appeared to me very captivating, save for an obstruction in my mind, which was, that Goddesses were always conceived by me as statues. They talked and they moved, it was true, but the touch of them was marble; and they smiled and frowned, but they had no variety they were never warm.

‘If I thought that!’ muttered Temple, puffing at the raw fog. He admitted he had thought just the contrary, and that the cold had suggested to him the absurdity of leaving a Goddess.

‘Look here, Temple,’ said I, ‘has it never struck you? I won’t say I’m like him. It’s true I’ve always admired Ulysses; he could fight best, talk best, and plough, and box, and how clever he was! Take him all round, who wouldn’t rather have had him for a father than Achilles? And there were just as many women in love with him.’

‘More,’ said Temple.

‘Well, then,’ I continued, thanking him in my heart, for it must have cost him something to let Ulysses be set above Achilles, ‘Telemachus is the one I mean. He was in search of his father. He found him at last. Upon my honour, Temple, when I think of it, I ‘m ashamed to have waited so long. I call that luxury I’ve lived in senseless. Yes! while I was uncertain whether my father had enough to eat or not.’

‘I say! hush!’ Temple breathed, in pain at such allusions. ‘Richie, the squire has finished his bottle by about now; bottle number two. He won’t miss us till the morning, but Miss Beltham will. She’ll be at your bedroom door three or four times in the night, I know. It’s getting darker and darker, we must be in some dreadful part of London.’

The contrast he presented to my sensations between our pleasant home and this foggy solitude gave me a pang of dismay. I diverged from my favourite straight line, which seemed to pierce into the bowels of the earth, sharp to the right. Soon or late after, I cannot tell, we were in the midst of a thin stream of people, mostly composed of boys and young women, going at double time, hooting and screaming with the delight of loosened animals, not quite so agreeably; but animals never hunted on a better scent. A dozen turnings in their company brought us in front of a fire. There we saw two houses preyed on by the flames, just as if a lion had his paws on a couple of human creatures, devouring them; we heard his jaws, the cracking of bones, shrieks, and the voracious in-and-out of his breath edged with anger. A girl by my side exclaimed, ‘It’s not the Bench, after all! Would I have run to see a paltry two-story washerwoman’s mangling-shed flare up, when six penn’orth of squibs and shavings and a cracker make twice the fun!’

I turned to her, hardly able to speak. ‘Where ‘s the Bench, if you please?’ She pointed. I looked on an immense high wall. The blunt flames of the fire opposite threw a sombre glow on it.

The girl said, ‘And don’t you go hopping into debt, my young cock-sparrow, or you’ll know one side o’ the turnkey better than t’ other.’ She had a friend with her who chid her for speaking so freely.

‘Is it too late to go in to-night?’ I asked.

She answered that it was, and that she and her friend were the persons to show me the way in there. Her friend answered more sensibly: ‘Yes, you can’t go in there before some time—in the morning.’

I learnt from her that the Bench was a debtors’ prison.

The saucy girl of the pair asked me for money. I handed her a crown-piece.

‘Now won’t you give another big bit to my friend?’ said she.

I had no change, and the well-mannered girl bade me never mind, the saucy one pressed for it, and for a treat. She was amusing in her talk of the quantity of different fires she had seen; she had also seen accidental-death corpses, but never a suicide in the act; and here she regretted the failure of her experiences. This conversation of a good-looking girl amazed me. Presently Temple cried, ‘A third house caught, and no engines yet! Richie, there’s an old woman in her night-dress; we can’t stand by.’

The saucy girl joked at the poor half-naked old woman. Temple stood humping and agitating his shoulders like a cat before it springs. Both the girls tried to stop us. The one I liked best seized my watch, and said, ‘Leave this to me to take care of,’ and I had no time to wrestle for it. I had a glimpse of her face that let me think she was not fooling me, the watch-chain flew off my neck, Temple and I clove through the crowd of gapers. We got into the heat, which was in a minute scorching. Three men were under the window; they had sung out to the old woman above to drop a blanket—she tossed them a water-jug. She was saved by the blanket of a neighbour. Temple and I strained at one corner of it to catch her.

She came down, the men said, like a singed turkey. The flames illuminated her as she descended. There was a great deal of laughter in the crowd, but I was shocked. Temple shared the painful impression produced on me. I cannot express my relief when the old woman was wrapped in the blanket which had broken her descent, and stood like a blot instead of a figure. I handed a sovereign to the three men, complimenting them on the humanity of their dispositions. They cheered us, and the crowd echoed the cheer, and Temple and I made our way back to the two girls: both of us lost our pocket-handkerchiefs, and Temple a penknife as well. Then the engines arrived and soused the burning houses. We were all in a crimson mist, boys smoking, girls laughing and staring, men hallooing, hats and caps flying about, fights going on, people throwing their furniture out of the windows. The great wall of the Bench was awful in its reflection of the labouring flames—it rose out of sight like the flame-tops till the columns of water brought them down. I thought of my father, and of my watch. The two girls were not visible. ‘A glorious life a fireman’s!’ said Temple.

The firemen were on the roofs of the houses, handsome as Greek heroes, and it really did look as if they were engaged in slaying an enormous dragon, that hissed and tongued at them, and writhed its tail, paddling its broken big red wings in the pit of wreck and smoke, twisting and darkening-something fine to conquer, I felt with Temple.

A mutual disgust at the inconvenience created by the appropriation of our pocket-handkerchiefs by members of the crowd, induced us to disentangle ourselves from it without confiding to any one our perplexity for supper and a bed. We were now extremely thirsty. I had visions of my majority bottles of Burgundy, lying under John Thresher’s care at Dipwell, and would have abandoned them all for one on the spot. After ranging about the outskirts of the crowd, seeking the two girls, we walked away, not so melancholy but that a draught of porter would have cheered us. Temple punned on the loss of my watch, and excused himself for a joke neither of us had spirit to laugh at. Just as I was saying, with a last glance at the fire, ‘Anyhow, it would have gone in that crowd,’ the nice good girl ran up behind us, crying, ‘There!’ as she put the watch-chain over my head.

‘There, Temple,’ said I, ‘didn’t I tell you so?’ and Temple kindly supposed so.

The girl said, ‘I was afraid I’d missed you, little fellow, and you’d take me for a thief, and thank God, I’m no thief yet. I rushed into the crowd to meet you after you caught that old creature, and I could have kissed you both, you’re so brave.’

‘We always go in for it together,’ said Temple.

I made an offer to the girl of a piece of gold. ‘Oh, I’m poor,’ she cried, yet kept her hand off it like a bird alighting on ground, not on prey. When I compelled her to feel the money tight, she sighed, ‘If I wasn’t so poor! I don’t want your gold. Why are you out so late?’

We informed her of our arrival from the country, and wanderings in the fog.

‘And you’ll say you’re not tired, I know,’ the girl remarked, and laughed to hear how correctly she had judged of our temper. Our thirst and hunger, however, filled her with concern, because of our not being used to it as she was, and no place was open to supply our wants. Her friend, the saucy one, accompanied by a man evidently a sailor, joined us, and the three had a consultation away from Temple and me, at the end of which the sailor, whose name was Joe, raised his leg dancingly, and smacked it. We gave him our hands to shake, and understood, without astonishment, that we were invited on, board his ship to partake of refreshment. We should not have been astonished had he said on board his balloon. Down through thick fog of a lighter colour, we made our way to a narrow lane leading to the river-side, where two men stood thumping their arms across their breasts, smoking pipes, and swearing. We entered a boat and were rowed to a ship. I was not aware how frozen and befogged my mind and senses had become until I had taken a desperate and long gulp of smoking rum-and-water, and then the whole of our adventures from morning to midnight, with the fir-trees in the country fog, and the lamps in the London fog, and the man who had lost his son, the fire, the Bench, the old woman with her fowl-like cry and limbs in the air, and the row over the misty river, swam flashing before my eyes, and I cried out to the two girls, who were drinking out of one glass with the sailor Joe, my entertainer, ‘Well, I’m awake now!’ and slept straight off the next instant.