The turnkey, a man with the air of an innkeeper, bandy-legged, with
a bulbous, purple-veined nose and watering eyes, slipped out of the
gatehouse door, whilst the great, hollow-sounding gate still shook
behind me. He said:
“If you hurries up you’ll see a bit of life.... Do you good. Condemned
sermon. Being preached in the chapel now; sheriffs and all. They swing
tomorrow--three of them. Quick with the stumps.”
He hurried me over the desolate mossy-green cobbles of the great
solitary yard into a square, tall, bare, whitewashed place. Already
from the outside one caught a droning voice. There might have been three
hundred people there, boxed off in pews, with turnkeys at each end.
A vast king’s arms, a splash of red and blue gilt, sprawled above a
two-tiered pulpit that was like the trunk of a large broken tree. The
turnkey pulled my hat off, and nudged me into a box beside the door.
“Kneel down,” he whispered hoarsely.
I knelt. A man with a new wig was droning out words, waving his hands
now and then from the top of the tall pulpit. Beneath him a smaller man
in an old wig was dozing, his head bent forward. The place was dirty,
and ill-lighted by the tall, grimy windows, heavily barred. A pair of
candles flickered beside the preacher’s right arm....
“They that go down to the sea in ships, my poor brethren,” he droned,
“lying under the shadow...”
He directed his hands towards a tall deal box painted black, isolated in
the centre of the lower floor. A man with a red head sat in it, his arms
folded; another had his arms covering his head, which leant abjectly
forward on the rail in front. There were large rusty gyves upon his
wrists.
“But observe, my poor friends,” the chaplain droned on, “the psalmist
saith, ‘At the last He shall bring them unto the desired haven.’ Now...”
The turnkey whispered suddenly into my ear: “Them’s the condemned he’s
preaching at, them in the black pew. See Roguey Cullen wink at the woman
prisoners up there in the gallery.... Him with the red hair.... All
swings to-morrow.”
“After they have staggered and reeled to and fro, and been amazed...
observe. After they have been tempted; even after they have fallen....”
The sheriffs had their eyes decorously closed. The clerk reached up from
below the preacher, and snuffed one of the candles. The preacher paused
to rearrange his shining wig. Little clouds of powder flew out where he
touched it. He struck his purple velvet cushion, and continued:
“At the last, I say, He shall bring them to the haven they had desired.”
A jarring shriek rose out of the black pew, and an insensate jangling
of irons rattled against the hollow wood. The ironed man, whose head
had been hidden, was writhing in an epileptic fit. The governor began
signalling to the jailers, and the whole dismal assembly rose to its
feet, and craned to get a sight. The jailers began hurrying them out of
the building. The redheaded man was crouching in the far corner of the
black box.
The turnkey caught the end of my sleeve, and hurried me out of the door.
“Come away,” he said. “Come out of it.... Damn my good nature.”
We went swiftly through the tall, gloomy, echoing stone passages. All
the time there was the noise of the prisoners being marshalled somewhere
into their distant yards and cells. We went across the bottom of a well,
where the weeping December light struck ghastly down on to the
stones, into a sort of rabbit-warren of black passages and descending
staircases, a horror of cold, solitude, and night. Iron door after iron
door clanged to behind us in the stony blackness. After an interminable
traversing, the turnkey, still with his hand on my sleeve, jerked me
into my familiar cell. I hadn’t thought to be glad to get back to that
dim, frozen, damp-chilled little hole; with its hateful stone walls,
stone ceiling, stone floor, stone bed-slab, and stone table; its rope
mat, foul stable-blanket, its horrible sense of eternal burial, out of
sound, out of sight under a mined mountain of black stones. It was so
tiny that the turnkey, entering after me, seemed to be pressed close up
to my chest, and so dark that I could not see the colour of the dirty
hair that fell matted from the bald patch on the top of his skull; so
familiar that I knew the feel of every little worming of rust on the
iron candlestick. He wiped his face with a brown rag of handkerchief,
and said:
“Curse me if ever I go into that place again.” After a time he added:
“Unless ’tis a matter of duty.”
I didn’t say anything; my nerves were still jangling to that shrieking,
and to the clang of the iron doors that had closed behind me. I had an
irresistible impulse to get hold of the iron candlestick and smash it
home through the skull of the turnkey--as I had done to the men who had
killed Seraphina’s father... to kill this man, then to creep along the
black passages and murder man after man beside those iron doors until I
got to the open air.
He began again. “You’d think we’d get used to it--you’d think we
would--but ’tis a strain for us. You never knows what the prisoners will
do at a scene like that there. It drives ’em mad. Look at this scar.
Machell the forger done that for me, ’fore he was condemned, after a
sermon like that--a quiet, gentlemanly man, much like you. Lord, yes,
’tis a strain....” He paused, still wiping his face, then went on:
“_And_ I swear that when I sees them men sit there in that black pew,
an’ hev heard the hammers going clack, clack on the scaffolding outside,
and knew that they hadn’t no more chance than you have to get out of
there...” He pointed his short thumb towards the handkerchief of an
opening, where the little blurr of blue light wavered through the two
iron frames crossed in the nine feet of well. “Lord, you _never_ gets
used to it. You _wants_ them to escape; ’tis in the air through the
whole prison, even the debtors. I tells myself again and again, ‘You’re
a fool for your pains.’ But it’s the same with the others--my mates. You
can’t get it out of your mind. That little kid now. I’ve seen children
swing; but that little kid--as sure to swing as what... as what _you_
are....”
“You think I am going to swing?” I asked.
I didn’t want to kill him any more; I wanted too much to hear him
talk. I hadn’t heard anything for months and months of solitude, of
darkness--on board the admiral’s ship, stranded in the guardship at
Plymouth, bumping round the coast, and now here in Newgate. And it had
been darkness all the time. Jove! That Cuban time, with its movements,
its pettiness, its intrigue, its warmth, even its villainies showed
plainly enough in the chill of that blackness. It had been romance, that
life.
Little, and far away, and irrevocably done with, it showed all golden.
There wasn’t any romance where I lay then; and there had been irons on
my wrists; gruff hatred, the darkness, and always despair.
On board the flagship coming home I had been chained down in the
cable-tier--a place where I could feel every straining of the great
ship. Once these had risen to a pandemonium, a frightful tumult. There
was a great gale outside. A sailor came down with a lanthorn, and tossed
my biscuit to me.
“You d------d pirate,” he said, “maybe it’s you saving us from
drowning.”
“Is the gale very bad?” I had called.
He muttered--and the fact that he spoke to me at all showed how great
the strain of the weather must have been to wring any words out of him:
“Bad--there’s a large Indiaman gone. We saw her one minute and then...”
He went away, muttering.
And suddenly the thought had come to me. What if the Indiaman were the
_Lion_--the _Lion_ with Seraphina on board? The man would not speak to
me when he came again. No one would speak to me; I was a pirate who had
fired on his own countrymen. And the thought had pursued me right into
Newgate--if she were dead; if I had taken her from that security, from
that peace, to end there.... And to end myself.
“Swing!” the turnkey said; “you’ll swing right enough.” He slapped the
great key on his flabby hand. “You can tell that by the signs. You,
being an Admiralty case, ought to have been in the Marshalsea. And
you’re ordered solitary cell, and I’m tipped the straight wink against
your speaking a blessed word to a blessed soul. Why don’t they let you
see an attorney? Why? Because they _mean_ you to swing.”
I said, “Never mind that. Have you heard of a ship called the _Lion?_
Can you find out about her?”
He shook his head cunningly, and did not answer. If the _Lion_ had been
here, I must have heard. They couldn’t have left me here.