Chapter 17: The Affair of the Freak.

(MR. FRANK PAINE TELLS THE STORY OF HIS ASSOCIATION WITH THE TESTAMENTARY DISPOSITIONS OF MR. BENJAMIN BATTERS.)

I have not yet been able to determine if my connection with the testamentary dispositions of Mr. Benjamin Batters was or was not, in the first place, owing to what I call the Affair of the Freak in the Commercial Road. On no other hypothesis can I understand why the business should have been placed in my hands. While, at the same time, I am willing to admit that the connection, if any, was of so shadowy a nature that I am myself at a loss to perceive where it quite comes in.

What exactly took place was this.

George Kingdon had got his first command. As we have been the friends of a lifetime, and are almost of an age, he being twenty-seven and I twenty-eight, the matter had almost as much interest for me as it had for him. The vessel’s name was The Flying Scud. It was to leave the West India south dock on Tuesday, April 3. He dined with me the night before. We drank success to the voyage. The following day I went to see him start. All went well; he had a capital send off; was in the highest spirits; and the last I saw of him the ship was going down the river on the tide.

It was, I suppose, about seven o’clock in the evening. It had been a glorious day; promised to be as fine a night. The shadows were only just beginning to lengthen. I had had a drink or two with Kingdon, and felt that a walk would do me good. I strolled along Preston’s Road and High Street, into the West India Road, and thence into the Commercial Road. Before I had gone very far I came upon a number of people who were thronging round one of the entrances into Limehouse Basin. They were crowding round some central object which was apparently affording them entertainment of a somewhat equivocal kind. I asked a bystander what was the matter; a man with between his lips a clay pipe turned bowl downwards.

“It’s one of Barnum’s Freaks. They’re giving him what for.”

“What’s he done?”

“Done?” The fellow shrugged his shoulders. “He ain’t done nothing so far as I knows on; what should he ‘ave done? They’re only ‘aving a bit o’ fun.”

It was fun of a peculiar sort; humorous from the Commercial Road point of view only. I doubted if the “Freak” found it amusing. He was being hustled this way and that; serving as a target for remarks which were, to say the least, unflattering. All at once there came a dent in the crowd. The “Freak” had either tumbled, or been pushed, over. Three or four of his more assiduous admirers had gone down on the top of him. The others roared. Four or five of those in the front rank were shoved upon the rest. The joke expanded. Presently the “Freak” was at the bottom of a writhing heap.

Perceiving that the jest was likely to become a serious one for the point of it, I forced my way into the centre of the crowd.

“Stand back!” I cried. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! You ought to pity the man instead of making sport of him. He is as God made him; it is not his fault that he is not like you.”

Nor, I felt as I looked at the faces which surrounded me, was it, after all, his serious misfortune either. Unless their looks belied them, in a moral, mental, and physical sense, the majority of them were “freaks,” if the word had any meaning. They gave way, however, to let me pass; it seemed that their temper was thoughtless rather than cruel. Soon I had extricated the wretched creature from his ignominious, and even perilous, position. Hailing a passing four-wheeler I put him into it. I slipped some money into the driver’s hand, and, bidding him take his fare to Olympia, the man drove off. The crowd booed a little, and then stared at me. Then, seeing that I paid them no sort of heed, they were so good as to suffer me to pursue my way unmolested and alone.

It was only after I had gone some little distance that I realised that I knew nothing whatever about the creature I had put into the cab. I had only the clay-piped gentleman’s word for the fact that he, she, or it was a freak at all. The creature—I call it creature for lack of more precise knowledge as to what he, she, or it, really was—was so enveloped in an odd-shaped cloak of some dark brown material, that, practically, so far as I had been able to see, nothing of it was visible. For all that I could tell the creature beneath the cloak might not have been human. There was certainly nothing to show—except the way in which it was shrouded, and that might have been owing to the action of the crowd—that it was what is commonly called a freak. Its connection with the Barnum Show at Olympia might be as remote as mine. If a mistake had been made I wondered what would happen when it was discovered. Playing the Good Samaritan in the London streets is not always a remunerative rôle for any one concerned. In my blundering haste I had probably done at least as much harm as good. I smiled, drily, at the reflection. Anyhow, I had given the cabman a liberal fare. To me, then, as now, a cab fare is a cab fare.