An Idea and an Action - Part One

So the story goes...

The cobble-stoned alley was hidden from sight by the cool evening fog, left in the shadows of the oil lamps lining the main avenue. This attribute made it the location of choice for those who wished to avoid the prying eyes of others. And so it was the case for Mister Baynes and Mister Scarsbrook that late evening in 1735.

The idea could have come in any number of ways, and by any number of people throughout human history; however, the legend you have before you spins the tale of this particular pair’s uncanny meeting, and of their subsequent resolve to forward their cause.

The evening past, Mister Baynes had been the victim of a mugging along one of London’s many dangerous thoroughfares. Mister Scarsbrook readily answered the man’s cries for help. Rather than attacking Mister Baynes’s would-be assailant, however, Mister Scarsbrook parleyed with the man. Mister Baynes was mortified to see this stranger befriending his attacker.

Mister Scarsbrook nursed the thief’s personal story into light, much to the interest of Mister Baynes. The man whom Mister Baynes imagined by first impression to be just another miscreant of the London streets was in fact a young man of eighteen years who had recently escaped from indentured service aboard a ship-rigged merchant galley to find his family in upheaval. His father had been locked away in a debtor’s prison and his mother and younger brother were presumably making their escape to the Americas. The young man had been trying without success to free his father, and had now resorted to stealing from others to pay the family debt.

To Mister Baynes’s apprehension, Mister Scarsbrook and the assailant struck an accord; the lad would work for him under salary in exchange for the blade and his vow to renounce the road of violence he had started down.

When the young man was out of earshot, Mister Baynes thanked Mister Scarbrook for his rescue, and, as any gentleman would, asked how he may repay the act. Mister Scarbrook asked that they meet again the following night to discuss that very thing.

This is how the two gentlemen came to be in the seedy alley in London’s East End. The location had been a suggestion by Mister Scarbrook. When Mister Baynes asked him why such a place should be the site of their second meeting, Mister Scarbrook is said to have responded, “Because, though I may be a gentleman, I have an insatiable thirst for the dramatic.”

In truth, and as he would later tell Mister Baynes, the building behind which they stood that night was a property Mister Scarbrook had recently purchased. His intent had been to establish a public house; however, of late he had broader goals in mind.

“I want to create a meeting house,” Mister Baynes’s journal quotes Mister Scarbrook, “for those of us who may conspire to flood the land with philanthropy.” Believing that such a meeting of individuals may in time draw the attention of greater social powers, Mister Scarsbrook fancied his new public house to be the front of this clandestine philosophical society.

Mister Baynes was invited into the pub that night, and was given the tour of the grounds. Mister Scarbrook then walked him through what he described later as a labyrinth of side corridors, gin vaults, and storage rooms, before coming to a narrow door in the stone wall. Above the door hung a wooden placard with elaborate writing painted upon it in a language Mister Baynes did not recognize.

“That,” Mister Scarbrook explained, “is what my instructor used to tell me. It means: ’Knowledge breeds understanding, which breeds compassion, which breeds benevolence, which breeds knowledge.’”

Mister Baynes never recounted in writing what lay beyond that door; however, he did outline Mister Scarbrook’s idea of repayment for his rescue the night before. Mister Baynes summates it best in his journal:

“The man asked only of my time and commitment to his dream, for which I thought him surely a fool. I begged him that I should repay in a manner more suitable to the act, but he was steadfast in his want for reward. I gladly accepted his charge, and so became the second member of his League of Adenaean Pragmatists…”