Manalive Part 21

"The first effect of the tall turbaned vapours was that discoloured look of pea-soup or coffee brown of which Londoners commonly speak.

But the scene grew subtler with familiarity. We stood above the average of the housetops and saw something of that thing called smoke, which in great cities creates the strange thing called fog. Beneath us rose a forest of chimney-pots. And there stood in every chimney-pot, as if it were a flower-pot, a brief shrub or a tall tree of coloured vapour.

The colours of the smoke were various; for some chimneys were from firesides and some from factories, and some again from mere rubbish heaps.

And yet, though the tints were all varied, they all seemed unnatural, like fumes from a witch's pot. It was as if the shameful and ugly shapes growing shapeless in the cauldron sent up each its separate spurt of steam, coloured according to the fish or flesh consumed.

Here, aglow from underneath, were dark red clouds, such as might drift from dark jars of sacrificial blood; there the vapour was dark indigo gray, like the long hair of witches steeped in the h.e.l.l-broth. In another place the smoke was of an awful opaque ivory yellow, such as might be the disembodiment of one of their old, leprous waxen images.

But right across it ran a line of bright, sinister, sulphurous green, as clear and crooked as Arabic--"

Mr. Moses Gould once more attempted the arrest of the 'bus.

He was understood to suggest that the reader should shorten the proceedings by leaving out all the adjectives. Mrs. Duke, who had woken up, observed that she was sure it was all very nice, and the decision was duly noted down by Moses with a blue, and by Michael with a red pencil. Inglewood then resumed the reading of the doc.u.ment.

"Then I read the writing of the smoke. Smoke was like the modern city that makes it; it is not always dull or ugly, but it is always wicked and vain.

"Modern England was like a cloud of smoke; it could carry all colours, but it could leave nothing but a stain. It was our weakness and not our strength that put a rich refuse in the sky.

These were the rivers of our vanity pouring into the void.

We had taken the sacred circle of the whirlwind, and looked down on it, and seen it as a whirlpool. And then we had used it as a sink.

It was a good symbol of the mutiny in my own mind.

Only our worst things were going to heaven. Only our criminals could still ascend like angels.

"As my brain was blinded with such emotions, my guide stopped by one of the big chimney-pots that stood at the regular intervals like lamp-posts along that uplifted and aerial highway.

He put his heavy hand upon it, and for the moment I thought he was merely leaning on it, tired with his steep scramble along the terrace.

So far as I could guess from the abysses, full of fog on either side, and the veiled lights of red brown and old gold glowing through them now and again, we were on the top of one of those long, consecutive, and genteel rows of houses which are still to be found lifting their heads above poorer districts, the remains of some rage of optimism in earlier speculative builders.

Probably enough, they were entirely untenanted, or tenanted only by such small clans of the poor as gather also in the old emptied palaces of Italy. Indeed, some little time later, when the fog had lifted a little, I discovered that we were walking round a semi-circle of crescent which fell away below us into one flat square or wide street below another, like a giant stairway, in a manner not unknown in the eccentric building of London, and looking like the last ledges of the land.

But a cloud sealed the giant stairway as yet.

"My speculations about the sullen skyscape, however, were interrupted by something as unexpected as the moon falling from the sky.

Instead of my burglar lifting his hand from the chimney he leaned on, he leaned on it a little more heavily, and the whole chimney-pot turned over like the opening top of an inkstand.

I remembered the short ladder leaning against the low wall and felt sure he had arranged his criminal approach long before.

"The collapse of the big chimney-pot ought to have been the culmination of my chaotic feelings; but, to tell the truth, it produced a sudden sense of comedy and even of comfort. I could not recall what connected this abrupt bit of housebreaking with some quaint but still kindly fancies.

Then I remembered the delightful and uproarious scenes of roofs and chimneys in the harlequinades of my childhood, and was darkly and quite irrationally comforted by a sense of unsubstantiality in the scene, as if the houses were of lath and paint and pasteboard, and were only meant to be tumbled in and out of by policemen and pantaloons. The law-breaking of my companion seemed not only seriously excusable, but even comically excusable.

Who were all these pompous preposterous people with their footmen and their foot-sc.r.a.pers, their chimney-pots and their chimney-pot hats, that they should prevent a poor clown from getting sausages if he wanted them?

One would suppose that property was a serious thing. I had reached, as it were, a higher level of that mountainous and vapourous visions, the heaven of a higher levity.

"My guide had jumped down into the dark cavity revealed by the displaced chimney-pot. He must have landed at a level considerably lower, for, tall as he was, nothing but his weirdly tousled head remained visible.

Something again far off, and yet familiar, pleased me about this way of invading the houses of men. I thought of little chimney-sweeps, and 'The Water Babies;' but I decided that it was not that.

Then I remembered what it was that made me connect such topsy-turvy trespa.s.s with ideas quite opposite to the idea of crime.

Christmas Eve, of course, and Santa Claus coming down the chimney.

"Almost at the same instant the hairy head disappeared into the black hole; but I heard a voice calling to me from below. A second or two afterwards, the hairy head reappeared; it was dark against the more fiery part of the fog, and nothing could be spelt of its expression, but its voice called on me to follow with that enthusiastic impatience proper only among old friends.

I jumped into the gulf, and as blindly as Curtius, for I was still thinking of Santa Claus and the traditional virtue of such vertical entrance.

"In every well-appointed gentleman's house, I reflected, there was the front door for the gentlemen, and the side door for the tradesmen; but there was also the top door for the G.o.ds. The chimney is, so to speak, the underground pa.s.sage between earth and heaven.

By this starry tunnel Santa Claus manages--like the skylark-- to be true to the kindred points of heaven and home.

Nay, owing to certain conventions, and a widely distributed lack of courage for climbing, this door was, perhaps, little used.

But Santa Claus's door was really the front door: it was the door fronting the universe.

"I thought this as I groped my way across the black garret, or loft below the roof, and scrambled down the squat ladder that let us down into a yet larger loft below. Yet it was not till I was half-way down the ladder that I suddenly stood still, and thought for an instant of retracing all my steps, as my companion had retraced them from the beginning of the garden wall.

The name of Santa Claus had suddenly brought me back to my senses.

I remembered why Santa Clause came, and why he was welcome.

"I was brought up in the propertied cla.s.ses, and with all their horror of offences against property. I had heard all the regular denunciations of robbery, both right and wrong; I had read the Ten Commandments in church a thousand times.

And then and there, at the age of thirty-four, half-way down a ladder in a dark room in the bodily act of burglar, I saw suddenly for the first time that theft, after all, is really wrong.

"It was too late to turn back, however, and I followed the strangely soft footsteps of my huge companion across the lower and larger loft, till he knelt down on a part of the bare flooring and, after a few fumbling efforts, lifted a sort of trapdoor. This released a light from below, and we found ourselves looking down into a lamp-lit sitting room, of the sort that in large houses often leads out of a bedroom, and is an adjunct to it. Light thus breaking from beneath our feet like a soundless explosion, showed that the trapdoor just lifted was clogged with dust and rust, and had doubtless been long disused until the advent of my enterprising friend.

But I did not look at this long, for the sight of the s.h.i.+ning room underneath us had an almost unnatural attractiveness.

To enter a modern interior at so strange an angle, by so forgotten a door, was an epoch in one's psychology.

It was like having found a fourth dimension.

"My companion dropped from the aperture into the room so suddenly and soundlessly, that I could do nothing but follow him; though, for lack of practice in crime, I was by no means soundless.

Before the echo of my boots had died away, the big burglar had gone quickly to the door, half opened it, and stood looking down the staircase and listening. Then, leaving the door still half open, he came back into the middle of the room, and ran his roving blue eye round its furniture and ornament.

The room was comfortably lined with books in that rich and human way that makes the walls seem alive; it was a deep and full, but slovenly, bookcase, of the sort that is constantly ransacked for the purposes of reading in bed. One of those stunted German stoves that look like red goblins stood in a corner, and a sideboard of walnut wood with closed doors in its lower part.

There were three windows, high but narrow. After another glance round, my housebreaker plucked the walnut doors open and rummaged inside.

He found nothing there, apparently, except an extremely handsome cut-gla.s.s decanter, containing what looked like port.

Somehow the sight of the thief returning with this ridiculous little luxury in his hand woke within me once more all the revelation and revulsion I had felt above.

"'Don't do it!' I cried quite incoherently, 'Santa Claus--'

"'Ah,' said the burglar, as he put the decanter on the table and stood looking at me, 'you've thought about that, too.'

"'I can't express a millionth part of what I've thought of,' I cried, 'but it's something like this... oh, can't you see it? Why are children not afraid of Santa Claus, though he comes like a thief in the night?

He is permitted secrecy, trespa.s.s, almost treachery--because there are more toys where he has been. What should we feel if there were less?

Down what chimney from h.e.l.l would come the goblin that should take away the children's b.a.l.l.s and dolls while they slept? Could a Greek tragedy be more gray and cruel than that daybreak and awakening?

Dog-stealer, horse-stealer, man-stealer--can you think of anything so base as a toy-stealer?'

"The burglar, as if absently, took a large revolver from his pocket and laid it on the table beside the decanter, but still kept his blue reflective eyes fixed on my face.

"'Man!' I said, 'all stealing is toy-stealing. That's why it's really wrong. The goods of the unhappy children of men should be really respected because of their worthlessness.

I know Naboth's vineyard is as painted as Noah's Ark. I know Nathan's ewe-lamb is really a woolly baa-lamb on a wooden stand.

That is why I could not take them away. I did not mind so much, as long as I thought of men's things as their valuables; but I dare not put a hand upon their vanities.'

"After a moment I added abruptly, 'Only saints and sages ought to be robbed.

They may be stripped and pillaged; but not the poor little worldly people of the things that are their poor little pride.'

"He set out two winegla.s.ses from the cupboard, filled them both, and lifted one of them with a salutation towards his lips.

"'Don't do it!' I cried. 'It might be the last bottle of some rotten vintage or other. The master of this house may be quite proud of it.

Don't you see there's something sacred in the silliness of such things?'

"'It's not the last bottle,' answered my criminal calmly; 'there's plenty more in the cellar.'

"'You know the house, then?' I said.

"'Too well,' he answered, with a sadness so strange as to have something eerie about it. 'I am always trying to forget what I know-- and to find what I don't know.' He drained his gla.s.s.

'Besides,' he added, 'it will do him good.'

"'What will do him good?'

"'The wine I'm drinking,' said the strange person.