The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells (rooftoppers TXT) 📗

Until at last there stood complete, across the sky, this cheerful message to all who felt the burthen of life’s earnestness: TUPPER’S TONIC WINE FOR VIGOUR.

Snap! and it had vanished into night, to be followed in the same slow development by a second universal solicitude:

BEAUTY SOAP.

Not, you remark, mere cleansing chemicals, but something, as they say, “ideal;” and then, completing the tripod of the little life:

TANKER’S YELLOW PILLS.

After that there was nothing for it but Tupper again, in naming crimson letters, snap, snap, across the void.

T U P P....

Early in the small hours it would seem that young Caddles came to the shadowy quiet of Regent’s Park, stepped over the railings and lay down on a grassy slope near where the people skate in winter time, and there he slept an hour or so. And about six o’clock in the morning, he was talking to a draggled woman he had found sleeping in a ditch near Hampstead Heath, asking her very earnestly what she thought she was for....

IV.

The wandering of Caddles about London came to a head on the second day in the morning. For then his hunger overcame him. He hesitated where the hot-smelling loaves were being tossed into a cart, and then very quietly knelt down and commenced robbery. He emptied the cart while the baker’s man fled for the police, and then his great hand came into the shop and cleared counter and cases. Then with an armful, still eating, he went his way looking for another shop to go on with his meal. It happened to be one of those seasons when work is scarce and food dear, and the crowd in that quarter was sympathetic even with a giant who took the food they all desired. They applauded the second phase of his meal, and laughed at his stupid grimace at the policeman.

“I woff hungry,” he said, with his mouth full.

“Brayvo!” cried the crowd. “Brayvo!”

Then when he was beginning his third baker’s shop, he was stopped by half a dozen policemen hammering with truncheons at his shins. “Look here, my fine giant, you come along o’ me,” said the officer in charge. “You ain’t allowed away from home like this. You come off home with me.” They did their best to arrest him. There was a trolley, I am told, chasing up and down streets at that time, bearing rolls of chain and ship’s cable to play the part of handcuffs in that great arrest. There was no intention then of killing him. “He is no party to the plot,” Caterham had said. “I will not have innocent blood upon my hands.” And added: “—until everything else has been tried.”

At first Caddles did not understand the import of these attentions. When he did, he told the policemen not to be fools, and set off in great strides that left them all behind. The bakers’ shops had been in the Harrow Road, and he went through canal London to St. John’s Wood, and sat down in a private garden there to pick his teeth and be speedily assailed by another posse of constables.

“You lea’ me alone,” he growled, and slouched through the gardens—spoiling several lawns and kicking down a fence or so, while the energetic little policemen followed him up, some through the gardens, some along the road in front of the houses. Here there were one or two with guns, but they made no use of them. When he came out into the Edgware Road there was a new note and a new movement in the crowd, and a mounted policeman rode over his foot and got upset for his pains.

“You lea’ me alone,” said Caddles, facing the breathless crowd. “I ain’t done anything to you.” At that time he was unarmed, for he had left his chalk chopper in Regent’s Park. But now, poor wretch, he seems to have felt the need of some weapon. He turned back towards the goods yard of the Great Western Railway, wrenched up the standard of a tall arc light, a formidable mace for him, and flung it over his shoulder. And finding the police still turning up to pester him, he went back along the Edgware Road, towards Cricklewood, and struck off sullenly to the north.

He wandered as far as Waltham, and then turned back westward and then again towards London, and came by the cemeteries and over the crest of Highgate about midday into view of the greatness of the city again. He turned aside and sat down in a garden, with his back to a house that overlooked all London. He was breathless, and his face was lowering, and now the people no longer crowded upon him as they had done when first he came to London, but lurked in the adjacent garden, and peeped from cautious securities. They knew by now the thing was grimmer than they had thought. “Why can’t they lea’ me alone?” growled young Caddles. “I mus’’ eat. Why can’t they lea’ me alone?”

He sat with a darkling face, gnawing at his knuckles and looking down over London. All the fatigue, worry, perplexity, and impotent wrath of his wanderings was coming to a head in him. “They mean nothing,” he whispered. “They mean nothing. And they won’t let me alone, and they will get in my way.” And again, over and over to himself, “Meanin’ nothing.

“Ugh! the little people!”

He bit harder at his knuckles and his scowl deepened. “Cuttin’ chalk for ‘em,” he whispered. “And all the world is theirs! I don’t come in—nowhere.”

Presently with a spasm of sick anger he saw the now familiar form of a policeman astride the garden wall.

“Lea’ me alone,” grunted the giant. “Lea’ me alone.”

“I got to do my duty,” said the little policeman, with a face that was white and resolute.

“You lea’ me alone. I got to live as well as you. I got to think. I got to eat. You lea’ me alone.”

“It’s the Law,” said the little policeman, coming no further. “We never made the Law.”

“Nor me,” said young Caddles. “You little people made all that before I was born. You and your Law! What I must and what I mustn’t! No food for me to eat unless I work a slave, no rest, no shelter, nothin’, and you tell me—”

“I ain’t got no business with that,” said the policeman. “I’m not one to argue. All I got to do is to carry out the Law.” And he brought his second leg over the wall and seemed disposed to get down. Other policemen appeared behind him.

“I got no quarrel with you—mind,” said young Caddles, with his grip tight upon his huge mace of iron, his face pale, and a lank explanatory great finger to the policeman. “I got no quarrel with you. But—You lea’ me alone.”

The policeman tried to be calm and commonplace, with a monstrous tragedy clear before his eyes. “Give me the proclamation,” he said to some unseen follower, and a little white paper was handed to him.

“Lea’ me alone,”