The Big Bow Mystery

The Big Bow Mystery
by
I. Zangwill
1903

I
On a memorable morning of early December, London opened its eyes
on a frigid grey mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his
molecules of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters
them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you
from twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's manoeuvring was
more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled
a dull, wretched vapour, like the wraith of an impecunious suicide
come into a fortune immediately after the fatal deed. The barometers
and thermometers had sympathetically shared its depression, and their
spirits (when they had any) were low. The cold cut like a many-bladed
knife.
Mrs. Drabdump, of 11 Glover Street, Bow, was one of the few persons
in London whom fog did not depress. She went about her work quite as
cheerlessly as usual. She had been among the earliest to be aware of the
enemy's advent, picking out the strands of fog from the coils of
darkness the moment she rolled up her bedroom blind and unveiled the
sombre picture of the winter morning. She knew that the fog had come
to stay for the day at least, and that the gas-bill for the quarter was
going to beat the record in high-jumping. She also knew that this was
because she had allowed her new gentleman lodger, Mr. Arthur
Constant, to pay a fixed sum of a shilling a week for gas, instead of

charging him a proportion of the actual account for the whole house.
The meteorologists might have saved the credit of their science if they
had reckoned with Mrs. Drabdump's next gas-bill when they predicted
the weather and made "Snow" the favourite, and said that "Fog" would
be nowhere. Fog was everywhere, yet Mrs. Drabdump took no credit to
herself for her prescience. Mrs. Drabdump indeed took no credit for
anything, paying her way along doggedly, and struggling through life
like a wearied swimmer trying to touch the horizon. That things always
went as badly as she had foreseen did not exhilarate her in the least.
Mrs. Drabdump was a widow. Widows are not born but made, else you
might have fancied Mrs. Drabdump had always been a widow. Nature
had given her that tall, spare form, and that pale, thin-lipped, elongated,
hard-eyed visage, and that painfully precise hair, which are always
associated with widowhood in low life. It is only in higher circles that
women can lose their husbands and yet remain bewitching. The late Mr.
Drabdump had scratched the base of his thumb with a rusty nail, and
Mrs. Drabdump's foreboding that he would die of lockjaw had not
prevented her wrestling day and night with the shadow of Death, as she
had wrestled with it vainly twice before, when Katie died of diphtheria
and little Johnny of scarlet fever. Perhaps it is from overwork among
the poor that Death has been reduced to a shadow.
Mrs. Drabdump was lighting the kitchen fire. She did it very
scientifically, as knowing the contrariety of coal and the anxiety of
flaming sticks to end in smoke unless rigidly kept up to the mark.
Science was a success as usual; and Mrs. Drabdump rose from her
knees content, like a Parsee priestess who had duly paid her morning
devotions to her deity. Then she started violently, and nearly lost her
balance. Her eye had caught the hands of the clock on the mantel. They
pointed to fifteen minutes to seven. Mrs. Drabdump's devotion to the
kitchen fire invariably terminated at fifteen minutes past six. What was
the matter with the clock?
Mrs. Drabdump had an immediate vision of Snoppet, the neighbouring
horologist, keeping the clock in hand for weeks and then returning it
only superficially repaired and secretly injured more vitally "for the

good of the trade." The evil vision vanished as quickly as it came,
exorcised by the deep boom of St. Dunstan's bells chiming the
three-quarters. In its place a great horror surged. Instinct had failed;
Mrs. Drabdump had risen at half-past six instead of six. Now she
understood why she had been feeling so dazed and strange and sleepy.
She had overslept herself.
Chagrined and puzzled, she hastily set the kettle over the crackling coal,
discovering a second later that she had overslept herself because Mr.
Constant wished to be woke three-quarters of an hour earlier than usual,
and to have his breakfast at seven, having to speak at an early meeting
of discontented tram-men. She ran at once, candle in hand, to his
bedroom. It was upstairs. All "upstairs" was Arthur Constant's domain,
for it consisted of but two mutually independent rooms. Mrs.
Drabdump knocked viciously at the door of the one he used for a