Appreciations 
305 
At last, with some ten ific laughter, and a perfect blaze of complacency, I heard 
the man exclaim : " Well, its all A.l — A.l, that's what it is. A bit of All Right. 
Everything's going swimmingly. We're off to the Rhine for a few weeks' holiday. 
Hope to see you again, Doctor. So long!" — and he was away, with a flourish of his 
hat, down the street towards Holborn; while my husband came up to me, convulsed 
with merriment, saying : " Will you believe it ? That's another of them ! " He was, 
in fact, another convict. Also from Parkhurst. A very bad case of fraud, I believe. 
Quite unpardonable. Still, there he was : free again : at large : enjoying every 
moment of his regained existence. And, as we watched him disappear towards 
Holborn in his outrageous radiancy, the spectacle didn't merely amuse Charlie or 
stagger him, — it didn't shock him, and it didn't sentimentalise him : but it made 
him rejoice at the thing in the man that could so rejoice in liberty; that could 
swagger so in the sun ; that could be so little of a snob, and so free from the Past, 
that it could actually come bounding, in ' camaraderie,' to an official of the Prison 
in which its convict days had been spent ! That was all right in him, whatever 
else might be wrong: and it caught Charlie's affection: he liked the man. 
I hope this also may give you a touch of your friend. It is so difficult, with 
heavy words, to convey an intangible thing. But I hope your own knowledge of 
him may give you the feeling of his quality in all this. 
There is one thing more I want to tell you about him. It was last March, and 
we were in Manchester. We were having rather a rough time of it. We had no 
servant, and most of the rooms of the house were shut up, to reduce work and fires. 
The kitchen was our children's playroom, and it was our dining-room as well. We 
had breakfast there, one morning, and were, as usual, distinctly late ! and my 
husband had to hurry off immediately after into the Prison. It was a bitter 
morning : there was a perfect blizzard of snow and rain. Five minutes after he had 
gone, I heard his latch-key in the door, and he rushed back to the kitchen in 
a tremor of excitement and pity. He said he had found a woman in the street who 
was so ill she could hardly move. She was coughing herself to pieces ; and he 
thought she had consumption, or some virulent form of influenza. He had brought 
her back with him. She was in the hall. 
And here I have a confession to make. I must make it, because if I do not, 
I cannot show you what Charlie was. I was angry with him. I was angry because 
I was in deadly terror of the children catching inliuenza. It seemed to me terrible, 
at the moment, to bring that poor, infected creature into the room where the 
children were — the one room where there was a fire. 
Well, it is the look he gave me when I was angry with him that I want to tell 
you about — a look in which there were not so much reproach and surprise (though 
these were there) as a kind of lovely guilt : a baffled look : a look pleading for 
pardon, and saying in desperation : " Yes, I know, I know. But, in God's name, 
what was I to do ? " All this was in that look, which was the very essence of 
Charlie : and, without a word between us, I bundled the children upstairs, and we 
fetched the poor thing from the hall into the kitchen. 
