Chapter 1

An ancient English Cathedral Tower? How can the ancient English
Cathedral tower be here! The well-known massive gray square tower of
its old Cathedral? How can that be here! There is no spike of rusty
iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real
prospect. What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up?
Maybe it is set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde
of Turkish robbers, one by one. It is so, for cymbals clash, and the
Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars
flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew
flowers. Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous
colours, and infinite in number and attendants. Still the Cathedral
Tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no
writhing figure is on the grim spike. Stay! Is the spike so low a thing
as the rusty spike on the top of a post of an old bedstead that has
tumbled all awry? Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted
to the consideration of this possibility.

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has
thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports
his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. He is in the
meanest and closest of small rooms. Through the ragged window-curtain,
the light of early day steals in from a miserable court. He lies,
dressed, across a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed
given way under the weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across
the bed, not longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman.
The two first are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind
of pipe, to kindle it. And as she blows, and shading it with her lean
hand, concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning
as a lamp to show him what he sees of her.

“Another?” says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper. “Have
another?”

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

“Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,” the woman
goes on, as she chronically complains. “Poor me, poor me, my head is so
bad. Them two come in after ye. Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is
slack! Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships
coming in, these say! Here’s another ready for ye, deary. Ye’ll
remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle
high just now? More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful!
And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side
the court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of
mixing it? Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?”

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it,
inhales much of its contents.

“O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad! It’s nearly ready for
ye, deary. Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off!
I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, ‘I’ll have another ready
for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay
according.’ O my poor head! I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles,
ye see, deary—this is one—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I
takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so
I fills, deary. Ah, my poor nerves! I got Heavens-hard drunk for
sixteen year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak
of. And it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.”

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on
her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone,
draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three
companions. He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a
strange likeness of the Chinaman. His form of cheek, eye, and temple,
and his colour, are repeated in her. Said Chinaman convulsively
wrestles with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls
horribly. The Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth. The hostess is
still.

“What visions can _she_ have?” the waking man muses, as he turns her
face towards him, and stands looking down at it. “Visions of many
butchers’ shops, and public-houses, and much credit? Of an increase of
hideous customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and
this horrible court swept clean? What can she rise to, under any
quantity of opium, higher than that!—Eh?”

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

“Unintelligible!”

As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face
and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in
them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a
lean arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such
emergencies—and to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the
better of this unclean spirit of imitation.

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with both
hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed. The Chinaman
clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

“What do you say?”

A watchful pause.

“Unintelligible!”

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with
an attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth
upon the floor. As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen
attitude, glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his
arms, and draws a phantom knife. It then becomes apparent that the
woman has taken possession of this knife, for safety’s sake; for, she
too starting up, and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife
is visible in her dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side
by side.

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no
purpose. When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had
no sense or sequence. Wherefore “unintelligible!” is again the comment
of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a
gloomy smile. He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his
hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to
some rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs,
and passes out.

That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old Cathedral
rises before the sight of a jaded traveller. The bells are going for
daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from
his haste to reach the open Cathedral door. The choir are getting on
their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets
on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service.
Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the
sanctuary from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled
into their places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, “WHEN
THE WICKED MAN—” rise among groins of arches and beams of roof,
awakening muttered thunder.