And the wheelchair began to roll backwards.
"The brake!" Ah Ling gasped. "The brake!"
Sally flung herself at the chair, trying to hold its weight back while she fumbled for the brake. It was so heavy - it rolled so smoothly - where was the handle, for God's sake? Here - under her hand -
She snapped it down and the chair stopped, inches from the edge.
Ah Ling was still slumped forward across his knees. Little by little she heaved him upright again. His face was dark with the effort to breathe, his eyes protruding, but as soon as he was upright, he took a breath and looked around commandingly. Sally, breathless, leaned on the chair and looked as well.
The entire centre of the room was gone. In its place was a pit with jagged edges, opening on to a dark surging waste of water - the surface of a torrent that swirled from right to left, whirling, gushing, and splashing the whole room with mud and filth. It stank, and it gave off cold as a fire gives off heat.
As she clung to the chair and watched, another great chunk of masonry fell from the floor on the other side of the pit, and then another, and then there was no way across. The door to the stairs hung over nothing.
The walls were juddering; the whole house must be shaking. The oil-lamp still burned in its bracket, where she'd placed it only a minute or so before, but it was shaking so much she feared it would go out altogether and leave them in the dark.
"Turn me around," said Ah Ling. "Release the brake a little at a time. Brace yourself first to take the weight."
The wooden floor was so slippery that it was hard for Sally to get a grip on it. But just in reach on the other side of the chair was the iron grille of the lift, and if she could reach it. . .
The lift! They could go up in that!
But even as she turned to measure the distance and work out how to get him there, a deep series of shocks, like subterranean bombs, shook the ground and the walls. Sally clung to the arm of the wheelchair for balance, and then found herself knocked off her feet and sent sprawling by a jet of water, which hit her between the shoulder blades. She landed half on Ah Ling's lap, and clutched his sleeve for safety. Something was drenching them both - the spray filled the room - and then as it cleared she saw that there was no safety at all: for the hydraulic pipes that powered the lift had sheared. Water was gushing out of them to add to the filthy torrent splashing from below. Already the level part of the floor was awash.
The lift shaft with its iron frame hung crazily above them, and the lift itself was immovably wedged under the twisted iron of the pipes; but it was hanging securely from the cable, and if she could haul him on to the floor. . . It was level with his chest, though. How in the world was she. . . Never mind. Get on and do it.
She scrambled up on to it herself and then, sitting on the edge, reached forward and gripped the lapels of his coat. She heaved as hard as she could, and lifted him perhaps an inch.
Her position was wrong; she had no leverage. She jumped out, dragged the chair closer, and lifted his arms over the edge of the chair (and they were each so heavy. . .) so that she could put her arms around his chest from behind.
Her hands didn't meet. She tried to lift anyway, but the chair was in the way. She could hardly shift him at all.
"I'm going to have to pull you up with the rug," she said.
She dragged the sopping rug off his lap and fastened the right-hand end first to the stanchion at the corner to give herself more room to work with the other. Then she passed the rest of it under his arms, climbed up on to the floor of the lift, knelt at the edge, and pulled with all her might.
It worked. At first his body slumped forward against the edge of the floor, and she thought he'd slip down and into the water, but by hauling and shoving and bracing him while she rested to take a breath, she managed to get most of his upper body on to the floor, and then the rest was easier. Dripping, sodden, immense, like a huge dead water-slug, he lay at last on the edge of the lift floor, and Sally clung exhausted to the stanchion, waist-deep in water.
She hardly had the strength to pull herself up after him, but she managed to scramble up, and lay panting, frozen, trembling, on the floor beside him.
After a few seconds' rest she pushed herself up and made sure he could breathe, rolling him over on to his back and loosening his tie and shirt-collar. He looked up at her. His expression was impossible to read; but so was hers.
"They must have heard upstairs," she whispered. She'd intended to speak normally, but there was no voice there.
"Look," he said.
His eyes indicated the staircase on the other side of the room. The door had vanished; the door-frame and a section of the wall had slid into the water, and the stairs themselves were visible. Lights were flickering down; shadows wavered - there were voices, shouts of alarm over the noise of the torrent.
But something deep had rotted, and the scouring of the Blackbourne had weakened the very roots of the foundations; and the rescuers - Sally couldn't see, but she thought her footman Alfred was one, and the butler was another - had no sooner reached the foot of the steps than the whole of that side of the cellar collapsed into the torrent with a rending, splitting roar. Lamps, doorway, stairs, arms and heads - a confused and terrible slide, and they all vanished in the slimy surging water -
And then the flickering lamp fell off its bracket as a great crack split the wall from side to side, and darkness fell over everything.
Bricks, beams, stones were falling all around; the frame of the lift shaft was groaning and buckling, and the lift itself shook as something huge and heavy crashed down on to its roof.
Sally clung to the stanchion, and knelt by Ah Ling in the darkness.
Goldberg saw them before he reached the corner of Fashion Street: a little furtive knot of men coming out of a court near St Botolph's Church. There was no mistaking their manner, that look of sickening furtive lust for blood which he'd seen in crowds in Russia and Germany, but never in London, never yet. They were carrying sticks. One of them was swinging a heavy belt.
They saw him and stopped. Even across the street and through the rain, he could feel the pulse of their excitement.
"There's one! There's a Yid!" one of them yelled.
There were half a dozen of them, and for a moment Goldberg thought he'd have to take them on, stiff with pain as he was; but the leader growled something at the man who'd shouted, and with a final jeer they slouched off.
They were going in the same direction as he was, and moving quickly. Goldberg took a deep breath. His whole arm was throbbing abominably. Nothing to be done. Move.
He forced himself onward. Running, even if he hadn't already walked halfway across London, was out of the question. He wished he'd taken more of that damned whisky.
Left into Commercial Street, right down North Street, left up Brough Street. . . Careful now. This led into Holywell Street. He went to the corner and looked round.
No, they weren't there yet. He ran to the nearest door and banged on it. Never mind who; they were all Jewish. Then to the next, and the next, and the next.
Windows flew up. Heads looked out - angry, frightened, men's and women's, sleepy-eyed, ringleted, bald, bearded, young, old.
"Wake up!" Goldberg shouted to them all. He stood in the middle of the road as the sky lightened and the rain teemed down endlessly. He looked around at the faces in the windows and shouted again, "Wake up! Come and defend yourselves! Every man who can fight, come out now and help me! Wake up! Wake up!"
And peering through the rain in the thin dawn light, one after another of them recognized him.
"It's Goldberg -"
"It's Dan Goldberg! It's him -"
And again he shouted, so the whole street heard: "Wake up! Come and follow me! To Solomons' Bakery - come on!"
And he ran on, down Wilson's Place and Lower Heath Street and Keats Court and then through the little alley behind the Jews' Soup Kitchen at the end of Flower and Dean Street, and then to the houses by the synagogue in N
ew Court; and very soon one man came out of his house, and then two more, armed with sticks, thrusting their arms into their coats, shivering as the chilly rain hit their sleep-warmed faces; and then there were a dozen, and then a dozen more, and then someone cried:
"Look! There they are - by the bakery -"
And sure enough, there was a mob of men surging up from Brick Lane, shouting, yelling -
And then the first stone crashed through the air, and the first window shattered.
The lift shook, the cable groaned. Only the roof of the lift saved them from the weight of masonry which had fallen down the shaft - and only the cable stopped the lift itself from plunging down into the water.
There was nothing she could do. He lay on his back beside her, and the water was already lapping at the edge of the floor.
Chapter Twenty-seven
THE TIGER IN THE WELL
The air was thick with moisture: silver-grey, fog-yellow, ash-white. Somewhere high above and inconceivably far away, over Venice, perhaps, or Mont Blanc, the sun was shining. Some of the sun's brightness filtered down through layer after layer of smoke and steam and dust and swagging heavy mist, looped and festooned like curtains, through the trailing clouds that dragged their swollen bellies over the rooftops and the chimneys, in among the sodden bricks, the glistening tiles, the dripping eaves, the cluttered gutters.
After the long night, you could see from one end of Holywell Street to the other.
Behind Goldberg stood eighteen men and boys. They were small traders, craftsmen; scholars, one or two of them; the oldest was sixty-six, the youngest thirteen. Some of them had seen violence before. One walked with a limp from where a Cossack's horse had crushed his leg; another had a scar from a sabre-cut under his skull-cap. The boys were used to scrapping in the street or the dingy schoolyard, but this was different, this was worse. There was poison in the air. The most nervous of them all was the one who had least need to be. He worked as a professional strongman, lifting dumb-bells in a music hall, clad in a leopard-skin, but he was the mildest of souls, and he'd never had a fight in his life. One of the scholars, a round-shouldered middle-aged man, could hardly see a thing, for he'd come out without his spectacles. He gripped his stick tight in his shaking hands and whispered to his neighbour, "Point me in the right direction, Mr Mandelbaum - tell me when to strike. . ."
Goldberg looked back at them. They were a feeble, timorous, uncertain bunch, but he was proud of them. Then he looked along the street at the enemy.
Forty? Fifty of them? Couldn't be sure. Big men with hard fists and muscles; tough lean boys like the Lambeth gang, with hard narrow faces, and here and there the glint of brass at their knuckles.
They were still, watching. The sound of the brick shattering a window a second or so before still hung in the air, like a false note, an embarrassment. The stillness was entirely due, Goldberg realized, to the sudden appearance of his ragged, sleepy army: it was so unexpected that the mob had been shocked out of itself, and just for a second or so, they weren't a crowd, they were individuals. He could see their faces.
So he had just a moment to act in, before that craziness flowed back and made them into a hundred-handed howling monster without a soul.
"Stay here," he said to his men, and then he walked along Holywell Street towards the mob, in the narrow brick-red canyon between the houses.
A crepitation of astonishment whispered through the gang by the bakery. One or two of them took a step forward, but they were human still, not yet monstrous, and to be human is to be curious: they only wanted to see better.
And Goldberg felt a moment of pure, clear-headed elation. It was a kind of religious glee: holy mischief. He was weak with loss of blood, he was exhausted, his arm throbbed with an abominable pain, and there was an armed crowd in front of him that the slightest miscalculation would send mad. He thought: is there anywhere else I'd rather be? Anything else I'd rather be doing now than this?
What a lucky bugger I am, he said to himself. Talk for your life, Danny boy. Tell 'em a story.
"I need a chair," he said loudly. "The man over there by the door - knock on it, will you? Ask the lady for a chair. She's just inside. That's it. Fetch it over here, don't be shy."
They didn't know what to make of it, but in the face of his brazen confidence they felt their anger tremble a little, uncertainly. The weight of their suspicion, the undischarged burden of their hatred, still hung in the air like electricity; but as he climbed up to stand on the chair, Goldberg saw a young boy on the fringe of the crowd look away from him, and then up uncertainly at the man beside him, whose features were similar; a father, or a brother. And then he knew how to begin.
"Brothers," he said - "yes, I'm not ashamed of you, I'm not ashamed to call you brothers, though I'm a Jew and you're Gentiles. Brothers - d'you know what brings you here? D'you know why this man, Harry Solomons the baker, d'you know why the good Lord picked on him this morning to have his business threatened and his wife and children terrified? Is it because he doesn't make good bread? No - it can't be that. Smell it, brothers. Put your noses up and sniff that good smell. Harry Solomons is a fine baker. If this place burnt down, there wouldn't be more good bread in the world - there'd be less.
"So there's a puzzle. There's a mystery. We all want more bread, but we're going to burn down Harry Solomons' bakery where he makes the stuff.
"But I can see a man down there, one of my brothers, one of you, who can explain. I won't tell you his name, but I know a lot about him. He's got a wife called Florrie. He's got three kids living and two that died before they were a year old, poor little scraps. He's a docker. Now the other day he goes down to the dock gate as usual. To the Cage. He hasn't had work for two days. He's hungry, he's not in his full strength, and there's six hundred men crammed in there down Nightingale Lane, all of 'em desperate.
"And the foreman there - you seen him? Big belly on him as if he's got a bun in the oven? You know what - he felt the pangs of birth coming on the other day. Lay down and bellowed like a pig. 'Help me!' he roars. 'I'm giving birth! I'm having a baby!' They all come running - sent for the doctor - carried him in the office - bent over him to see what came out - and you know what it was? Wind. A whole bellyful of wind. They heard it down in Gravesend - thought it was a steamship."
And they laughed. There was a murmuring, like the pull of the tide on a shingle beach - but over and above that there was a shushing, an impatient shaking of heads. They wanted to hear more. Tell 'em a rude joke, make 'em want more; now get on with the story, wind 'em in.
"Anyway, Fartbelly the foreman, the other day that I was telling you about, he was rolling up and down with the tickets in his hand. Twenty jobs - six hundred men. You know the scene - howling, yelling, shouting men, pressed up against the bars, hands held out - me! Me! Give it to me! Gimme a job!
"And then he flips a ticket up, old Fartbelly, and he watches 'em scramble for it - kicking, shrieking, desperate men. One of 'em gets it, and they let him through. There's one man with food in the house tonight.
"Then up comes the second ticket. Little brass thing flipping through the air, and another scramble, another fight, another torn ear, another broken finger. Twenty times it happens, twenty men are safe in the docks with a day's work to do and three or four bob at the end of it.
"But not our friend. Not the man in the crowd down there - he knows who he is. No job for him. Old Fartbelly's got his favourites; days when he doesn't want a scramble, or when the boss is looking, old Fartbelly calls out the names he knows won't be any trouble to him, doesn't he - hungry men, men with injuries, men who've lost the will to fight, men who won't complain if he gets a day's work out of them and sends 'em home with a shilling short. But our friend - he's not one of them, not one of Fartbelly's favourites."
They were still now. Goldberg knew that people are hungry to have their own experience voiced; he was saying all this for them. They wanted to hear more.
"So there's no job. Nothing in his poc
ket. Nothing in the cupboard at home; nothing in his belly; nothing for the kids. So he puts his hands in his pockets - yes, I can see him now, I know who he is - and he sets off home.
"And on the way he goes past the workhouse. On a sunny day, the shadow of the workhouse never leaves the street, does it? They never see the sun down Old Gravel Lane; the workhouse shuts out half the sky. And he wonders - didn't you, mate? He wonders how long it'll be before he's drawn into that great dark shadow, him and Florrie, and the three little kids; how long it'll be before they're split up and taken away and he has to look at 'em one last time with shame in his heart. . .
"It's enough to send a man mad. It's enough to make him cry out to God and beat his head against the walls; enough to make him fling himself in the river with despair. He knows that feeling. You know that feeling."
The street was silent. The Jews had crept closer to hear, and behind the shutters of the bakery, the baker and his wife and children were pressed to the window, listening. Every man in the crowd stood still, and he looked into their eyes, and he drank in all their attention and focused it back through the story.
"And then he sees a mate of his outside a pub, and his mate beckons him over. 'Come over here,' he says, 'there's a bloke in here buying drinks.' And he follows his mate into the pub, and sure enough there's a fellow sitting at a table, an agreeable-looking bloke, smartly dressed, soft hands; he's not a docker. You'd put him down for a clerk of some kind.
"And yes, he's buying drinks. Pint of bitter? By all means, mate, sit down, have a bit of baccy for your pipe.
"And then a strange thing happens: Softhands starts dripping poison. Not the sort you can see: this is invisible poison; it's lies. 'D'you know what's behind all this?' he says. 'D'you know why good men like you are thrown on the scrapheap while others prosper? It's the Jews. . .' Then he puts his soft lips round his little cigarette and he blows out a stream of smoke, and you can see his little eyes calculating, watching how the poison's going down."