CHAPTER 8
HUE AND CRY
“Wishin good luk, yours respeckfull, J. Butterfield.”
Those were the words that made full the warm heart and speaking eyes of Thomas Erichsen. He pictured the furtive waggoner slipping the halfcrowns into the waistcoat pocket where he had found them, while he himself lay serenely prone, with the long arm of the law already feeling for him, and nimble pressmen even then indicting paragraphs that should hound him to the gibbet. His new extremity made him the more appreciate this touching tribute. He could not understand why so many persons were so strangely kind to him. He was not aware that there was a something generous in himself which excited the generosity of others possessing that quality. He only knew that of all his like experiences he ranked this first. And then he began wondering what the waggoner would give to recall his crown and his kindness when he came to know the apparent truth.
It was so apparent that from the first he despaired of ever disproving it, and felt his only chance to lie in flight. To fly and hide was not only his first instinct, but his comparatively mature judgment in the matter. His stick had been used. He had told people that he intended so to use it himself. He would never be believed about the watch; the paper that alone could prove his word had been stolen with everything else from the dead man’s pocket. Even supposing he had started with a case, he must have spoilt it by his incriminating conduct at the hackney-coachman’s. Yet flight had been and was still his only chance. Innocent as the dead in the grave, as the child in the womb, he was still compelled to choose between a guilty hiding and a surrender tantamount to certain death.
These thoughts did not all come together, nor in this order. They were interspersed with white-hot memories of poor Blaydes as last seen in the moonlight; of that touch of dignity and of regret that read now as a premonition of his immediate end; and these in their turn were interrupted by visions of a repulsive face, and by the unseen flight of headlong, shambling feet. Perhaps there was no connection between any of these things; it was more than likely there was not. But the fugitive’s heated brain, susceptible enough to sharp and deep impressions, was as yet quite incapable of consecutive thought; besides, he was always wondering whether the footstep behind him conveyed a hand that would close next instant upon his collar; and every minute there were many such in the crowded City streets.
Towards dusk his eye was taken by a common barber’s pole. Hitherto the desired sign had been that of the three gilt globes, and he had paused at one or two, peering through the windows without daring to enter. The barber was a new idea. Tom felt his chin, looked at it in the window, and found it thinly yellowed over to the depth of half an inch; his fair hair was also very long. He entered, and asked to have it cut and his face shaved. It was quite a small shop, near Finsbury Circus, whither Tom had drifted from the Bank.
“Another nice murder!” remarked the barber, reluctantly throwing aside the Courier for his scissors.
“Whereabouts?” said Tom, who had guessed from his face what the man was reading.
“London again!—’Am’sted ’Eath way this time.”
“Ah, that! Yes, I’ve heard of it. I’ll have my hair quite short, please.”
But the man would talk.
“Worse than Greenacre, I say.”
“How so?”
“Done for robbery; that there watch and diamond pin!”
“Ah!”
“On the other ’and, Greenacre, ’e cut ’er up. You don’t ’appen to be goin’ to the ’anging on Tuesday? That ought to be prime. I mean to be there if I stand all night for my place! Not fond of an execootion, sir?”
“I never saw one.”
“Never saw one! Well, that’s funny; and I ’aven’t missed one these fifteen years!”
Tom looked from his own ghastly visage in the mirror to the low, gloating face puckered with sly smiles at ghoulish memories. He went elsewhere for his shave. And slowly but at last the grateful night closed in; the busy City streets became empty, echoing chasms; and Tom, feeling more than ever the guilty cynosure, drifted westward with the ebbing tide of innocent, free men.
His great dread was of the hackney-coachman. His friend Jim was perhaps the one man in the streets of London who could at present identify him at sight. He squandered fivepence on the latest Globe. It contained no fresh particulars. His name had not yet transpired, so Jim was still his chiefest terror. He tarried in narrow alleys where four wheels could not follow him. In one of these a second-hand bookseller, smoking a churchwarden on his doorstep, stared at Tom critically. Thereupon he slunk into the nearest street. It was Newgate Street. He stood before the sombre walls of the prison itself, and continued so to stand, impersonally fascinated, with a sudden end to all sense of danger, as though a nerve were killed.
There was no moon, but the wide clear space above the prison walls was pricked with the brightest stars Tom had ever seen. He wondered whether it was in mercy or in mockery that the stars shone their best over that monument of gloom and horror; then his speculations took a more practical direction. How thick were those grimy walls? Where was Greenacre? What was he doing? Where would he be hanged? But this he thought he knew, and turning into the Old Bailey, he stood opposite the place.
The Old Bailey was all but deserted. Tom stood unseen, and peopled it with the vile crowd he had often read of in those newspaper descriptions which it was easy to condemn but more difficult to skip. He found himself mentally in the midst of that ruthless ritual, just as he was bodily upon its scene. He heard the lewd cheering of throats athirst for blood, the screaming of bruised and trampled women, the clink of wineglasses in the twenty-guinea windows behind and above him. On every face he found the bestial relish that the mirror had shown him at the barber’s shop. And as then he saw his own sickly mask as well, but a long way off now—above the felon’s gate—with the rope round his neck and dangling from the beam. And with that final vision returned the sense of deadly danger, in tenfold force and with sickening poignancy, as the vividness leapt from the inner to the outward eye, and he saw and realised what was then and there taking place.
A police-officer had emerged from a narrow door in the great grimy walls; his white trousers shone across the street; so did the fluttering paper in his hand. He carried a paste-pot and a brush, and stopping at a point where a black board clung to the black stones, he pasted his paper upon it. Before he began there was a little crowd about him; when he finished it stretched half across the street. And there was Tom still cowering under the windows opposite.
The first word he heard was his own name bandied from mouth to mouth.
“Herichsen,” said one. “It’s as good a name as Greenacre. They allus do have good names. Look at Fauntleroy and—”
“A hundred pounds reward!”
“Long, fair hair—slight growth on chin—”
“Medium height—dark brown eyes—”
Tom heard no more; sidling warily to the left, he squeezed round the corner into Fleet Lane, while every eye was turned the other way. Out of Fleet Lane there ran another to the right; as Tom dived into it, his shaking hand went to his smooth-shaven chin and short-cut hair; and his quivering lips muttered a new blessing on Jonathan Butterfield and his seed for ever.
He had spent sixteen pence, which left exactly three-and-eight. Further disguise he must have, and though he tried more than once to pawn the watch, his nerve always failed him on the threshold of the shop. The aimlessness of his proceedings now came home to him, and yet what was he to do? He had heard that London was the best hiding-place in the world, and indeed it had never struck him to break for the country. Nor did it now. But he would try some other end of the town; not the docks, however; he had told everybody he was going there, and could not, therefore, go too far in the opposite direction.
The Paddington omnibus was passing as he emerged from Skinner Street. Tom got in, and paid his sixpence, leaving three-and-two.
So his name had come out already. He had time to think of things in the omnibus, which was half empty, and he soon saw that Jim the coachman could not have supplied the police with the name; he did not know it himself. Other witnesses must have stepped forward already. Who were they? But it mattered very little after all. Not Claire, at any rate; and yet the thought of her brought with it the keenest torture he had suffered yet.
She would think him guilty; after what had passed between them she could not do otherwise; then guilty let him be, in every earthly eye, and the sooner it was all over the better for him and for her. He had no wish to live if the one sweet judge whose judgment he respected held him worthy of death. And she would—she could not help herself; then what must she think of his love for her? And the thought of her thoughts was worse than that of shameful death before a howling mob.
He tore up her letter that he had meant to treasure till his death, so that when he was taken no slur should rest upon his beloved; and he distributed the minute fragments at long intervals that night before looking for a place to lay his head. In the end he hit upon an empty house overlooking the then green enclosure of Westbourne Park; an unfastened window caught his eye; he waited till the road was clear, and then entered like an expert, fastening the window behind him.
Here he destroyed and hid away his hat, a battered beaver bought in the days of poor Blaydes. In its stead he had obtained from a pawn-shop, and for eighteen pence, an old-fashioned peak-and-tassel cap. But he had not dared to offer the watch in pledge, although he had entered that shop for the purpose.
It ticked so loud in the empty house that in the dead of night he leapt up in a frenzy and smashed in the works with his heel.
Before he could lie down again there came a deafening double-knock at the street-door.