“If you mean a deal, I’m game for half a bull, and there’s my word on
it. But burn them duds, Johnny! I won’t take the risk on ’em.”
My master considered.
“Mayhap you’re right,” said he. “Call it done.”
The words were hardly out of his mouth before the other had jerked the
cloth from the table. And there underneath lay the dead stiff body of
a little sooty boy. His hands were griped at his chest, as if in agony
of its œdematous swelling, and his bared eyeballs and teeth were as
white as porcelain.
I could not cry out, or do anything but stare in horror, while the
gaunt man, with some show of persuasion, began to strip the little
body of its coat and vest and trousers--all its poor harness. Then, in
a sickness beyond words, I comprehended. I was to be made exchange,
for these foul vestments, my own pretty silken toilet.
“Come along, Georgy,” wheedled his late master. “You wouldn’t be so
unhandsome as to deny a lady, and she doing you honour to accept of
them.”
He rolled the body gently from side to side, so coaxingly forceful and
intent, that someone, bursting in upon him at the moment, took him
completely by surprise.
It was a wretchedly clad woman, with resinous blots of eyes in a
hungry face, and a little black moustache over a toothless
mouth--strange contrast!--that was never more still than a crab’s.
“So he’s dead, you dog!” she cried, seeming to feed on the words; “and
you druv him to his death; and may God wither you!”
The bent man jumped, like a vulture, from the body, and hopped and
dodged, keeping it between him and the woman.
“You took the odds!” he cried, coughing, and kneading his cracking
knuckles together, “you took the odds, and you mustn’t cry out like a
woman if they gone agen ye. I did no more’n my duty, as the Lord hears
me!”
“Both on us,” said the woman. “Well, speak out!”
“He stuck,” said the sweep. “He stuck beyond reason. It were a good
ten-inch square, for all it were a draw-in bend. I were forced to
smoke him; but his lungs were that crowded, there was no loosening the
pore critter till they bust and let him down. He were a good boy, and
worth a deal to me.”
“That’s true,” put in my master. “A man, though he _be_ a flue-faker,
don’t cut off his nose to spite his face, missus.”
She made no answer, staring fixedly at the corpse.
“He were my seventh,” she said. “He made no cry when you come and took
him away from me--a yellow-haired devil. Did he cry for his mammy,
chokin’ up in the dark there?”
“No,” said the man--“an unnat’ral son!”
She threw up her hands with a frightful gesture.
“I could have borne it if he had--I could have borne it, and cut my
throat. What were you doing with him?”
The sweep hesitated; but my master took the word from him.
“It’s a question of his slops, missus.” (He jerked a thumb over his
shoulder at me, where I stood in the background paralysed with
terror.) “Half a bull or nothing, and you and him to share.”
The woman put her arms akimbo.
“Ho, indeed!” she said. “And where does _he_ come in?”
“It’s my own smalls,” swore the man, excited and truculent at once. “I
won’t bate an inch of ’em, if I’m to die for it.”
They were facing each other across the body like tom cats, when my
master pulled his friend aside, and whispered in his ear.
“Amongst ladies and gentlemen,” said he, and waited, smiling and oily,
while the other fetched a black bottle from a cupboard. The woman
visibly relaxed at the sight of this. Its owner uncorked it, and
putting it to his mouth, gurgled, and smacked his black lips.
“The deal passes!” cried my master; and he snatched the bottle, and
handed it to the woman with an ingratiatory smile.
It was the psychologic moment, which loosened and harmonised their
tongues. They waxed confiding and genial. Presently the woman,
commissioned politely to effect my transformation, swaggered across to
me with devil-daring eyes, and began roughly to pull off my clothes.
“Damn you!” she said, with such a heat and violence of hate that my
very sobs were withered in my throat. “Come up, you young limb! What
the deuce! We’ll cry quits for my Georgy when the black smoke finishes
your ladyship.”
She never had had a doubt of the meaning of my presence in that vile
den, but my beauty and refinement and helplessness were only so many
goads to her implacability. Her fingers were like rakes in my tender
flesh. She would have torn me with her teeth, I believe, if any had
been left to her. And I could only shrink and shiver under her hands,
terrified if they wrung so much as a gasp from me.
When I was stripped, she seized a blunt dinner knife, and sawed off
all my golden hair close to my head, a horrible experience. The tears
gushed silent down my cheeks. They might have moved the heart of a
wolf.
“There!” she said, when finished; “chuck us the duds!” and as she
received them, scrubbed my face with the filthy tatters before she
vested me in them.
I had hoped, perhaps, until thus hopelessly transformed; and then, at
once, I hoped no more. _Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate_--I
was behind the bars; I wore the devil’s livery. O, my Alcide! Pity
this poor little Proserpine so ravished from her Plains of Enna.
III.
I ESCAPE
Hast thou the nerve to follow me, my friend? My martyrdom was
severe, but, after all, brief. Comfort thyself with the thought of the
brilliant moth which is to emerge from this sad chrysalis.
My master was an itinerant sweep. He jogged from town to village and
from village to town in his little cart, an untaxed Bohemian, and
carried me always with him. I had wild weepings at first, and frantic
schemes of escape, and fits of sullen rebellion; but they were all
persuaded out of me presently by his thick black hand. Then, as the
past grew obscured behind me in ever-densifying clouds of soot, I came
by degrees provisionally reconciled to my destiny, and even--canst
thou believe it?--to some enjoyment of its compensations.
These were its changefulness, its irresponsibility, its little
adventures, that always had our bodily solace for their end. We
pilfered orchards, snatched an occasional fat duckling from a pond,
smoked hives at night and carried away the dripping comb to eat under
warm ricks in the moonlight. And I had little to complain of
ill-treatment, except when engaged professionally. My master’s ample
receptivities laughed and grew fat on self-indulgence. Liquor made
him, to my good fortune, beatifically helpless; rich meats, paternally
benevolent, and even poetical. It was only in business that he
chastised, with a large and incorruptible immorality.
I learned the jargon more readily than I did the practice of my
abominable trade. My first ascent of a chimney was a hideous
experience--an ascent into hell, reversing all geographical orthodoxy.
But my particular devil was a Moloch, who would either be served by
exaltation or vindicate his majesty in smoke and fire. He was
diplomatic to put me through my first paces, so to speak, in a
dismantled vicarage that was in preparation for a new tenant. He
simply thrust an iron scraper into my hand, and, with the briefest
directions, drove me up. I was refractory, of course; and at that,
without wordy persuasion, he lit a brand of tow and applied it to my
bare ankles. The pain made me scream and writhe, as he had
philosophically counted upon its doing. Involuntarily I found myself
ascending the flue, as an awn of barley travels up inside one’s
sleeve. The very ease of it made me rebel, and I stopped. Immediately
the brand below, flaring at the end of a stick, was lifted to spur me.
Frenzied and sobbing, I felt its hot rowel, and struggled on. The
soot, with which the chimney was choked, began to fall upon me, half
stifling, and filling my pockets. Then self-preservation, the great
mother, recalled to me my directions. I looked up, and saw a far eye
of light denoting freedom, and I began desperately to scrape clear my
passage towards it, letting always the black raff descend between my
knees before I rose to take its place. The eye enlarged, and with it
grew the dawn of a strange new enthusiasm. I rose to it, like a fish
to the angle, as my master had calculated I should. These fiends bait
their hooks with heaven.
Suddenly, the last feet were conquered, and I emerged, and saw below
me a beautiful village prospect of trees and homesteads.
Did I then sit there and weep? On the contrary, I was radiant. Account
for it, thou _fripon_, as thou wilt. Thou knowest, Better the devil to
applaud us than none at all. I swear to thee that, for the moment, I
coveted nothing but my master’s admiring praise. Breathless as I was,
I bent and uttered down the chimney the shrill cry “All up!” as he had
bidden me. A little strained laugh came back, and, with an oath of
distant approval, a command to descend. But at that, oddly enough, the
horror came. I could not stomach the evil pit, with its reeling return
into a night from which I had mounted to heaven. My knees trembled
beneath me. I sat crying and shivering, while my master stormed thin
gusty blasphemy up the flue. At length I remembered my duck-stone. It
was in my trousers pocket, safe in its silver case, which, having
dropped in the cart, I had found again to my delight lying
undiscovered amongst the soot bags. I took it out, let myself down
gingerly to the arm-pits, clutched it tightly in my hand, and sniffed,
but not vigorously. I awoke to find myself sitting on the hearth, and
smiling foolishly into the frightened face of my master. He recovered
himself at the moment I did, and was the implacable martinet again and
at once.
“Why, you cust little back-slummer!” he said, “to let loose and think
to take a chalk of me like that! I’ll larn your nerves!”
And he pulled me to my feet, with his hand raised, but thought better
of it, and gave me another chance. Chimney after chimney I must mount,
till, fagged and heart-broken, I stood rebellious against his
extremest persuasion, and he was obliged, with at least a few healing
words of commendation, to postpone the finish of his job.
So began this terror of my new life, and so fortunately ended within a
period that was not stretched beyond my endurance.
In this phase of it, after the first, there were no compensations, but
only degrees of misery. If my master had ever thought to make capital
out of my restoration, he soon abandoned the idea as impracticable,
and devoted all his persuasion to turning me, after the inhuman
methods of his class, to his best profit. Once I stuck tight in one of
those clogged “draw-in bends” which had been fatal to my predecessor.
I could move no way, and in my struggles, a little crossed stay of
iron, fixed in the chimney, so pressed upon my breast as almost to
stop my heart. I was in a dreadful condition of terror and suffering,
and in the midst he lit some damp straw on the hearth to smoke me
down. The fumes took away my senses, and so, perhaps flattening the
resistance of my lungs, released me. But I was in a sort of conscious
delirium for days afterwards. Sometimes, where he had got the worst of
a housewife’s bargaining, he would shout to me, working two-thirds up,
“Pike the lew, boy!” which, in sweep’s jargon, meant, Leave the job
unfinished, to spite the old slut! And then I would descend at once.
Sometimes, where a cluster of flues ran into one shaft, I would come
down into the wrong room, causing consternation amongst its inmates.
But, through all, the idea of escape was very early a dead passion in
me, so utterly in soot and sexlessness was I lost to any sense of
self-identity.
So, always homeless, always enslaved, always wandering, I was one day,
some nine months after my abduction, come with my master into the
neighbourhood of Streatham, which is a little rural suburb of London,
reclaimed, with other contiguous hamlets, from the thick woods and
gipsy-haunted commons of that part of the country. For some days past
we had moved, unhurriedly as was our wont, through an atmosphere
charged with a curious nervous excitement. Housewives, avoiding
contact with us, as with possibly compromising emissaries of ill-omen,
had vanished into their cottages as we came near; tavern cronies,
grouped at tap-doors, were to be seen looking citywards, until dark,
tramping up the long white roads, drove them within with unreasonable
frights of shapeless things approaching. Then, sure enough, the night
horizon grew patched with flaring cressets, and we learned that London
was in the hands of a No-Popery mob.
Its area of destruction spreading like an unchecked ink-blot, and we
moving to meet it, brought us presently involved in the fringe of the
disorder. Protestant Dulwich had sent its contingent to help petition
Parliament against the legalising of the poor harried Catholics, and
had got its warrant, as it chose to consider, for an anti-Romish
crusade. And for that, whether right or wrong, I, at least, owe it
gratitude.
We were rolling one afternoon along a certain Knight’s Hill or road
which skirted a stretch of common, when we came upon a great inn,
called The Horns, where was a considerable concourse of people
assembled, all in blue cockades, and buzzing like a hive about to
swarm. The word most in the mouths of this draff was Pope, which at
first we took to mean the Vicar of Rome, but soon understood for the
name of a young Jesuit who was lately come as chaplain to a Catholic
family of the neighbourhood. Now, such insolent defiance of the penal
laws was not to be tolerated, and so the loyal Protestant burghers of
Dulwich were going, with no disrespect to the family, to cast down its
graven images, and hang up its chaplain for a scarecrow to all
propagandists who should venture out of the Holy See into our tight
little island. And here they were gathered to organise themselves, the
process taking good account of malt liquors; and hence, when they
moved off, we, to cut the story short, accompanied them walking,
foreseeing some prospect of “swag” in the crusade.
Going in a pretty compact body, with a great deal of howling and
hymning, such as that with which all conscripts, either of the cross
or guillotine, are accustomed to stimulate one another’s courage and
vanity, we crossed a Croksted Lane, and again a sweep of wild heath,
that spread towards the dense forests called Northwood, which fill all
that shallow valley from Sydenham Wells on the north to Penge Common
on the south. And presently coming to the trees, and entering a wide,
elegant clearing amidst them, where the woods were banked behind, and
the ground dropped towards us in terraces, on the highest we saw the
house standing, a great sunny block of brick and stone, but shuttered
now, and apparently lifeless.
The mob at first knocked on the door with a diffidence inspired of its
varnished and portly exclusiveness; but, provoking no response,
presently grew bolder and more clamorous. Still, I believe, its
fervour would ultimately have wasted itself on this inflexible
barrier, had not my master, with some disgusted expressions of
contempt, come to the front and taunted it on to a violence the more
vicious because it was shamefaced. Under his stimulus, then, the
panels were beginning to crack, when in a moment the bolts flew, and
there stood in the opening a little sinister fellow in grey, who asked
us, curt and ironic, our business.
All but my master fell back before him, though there were some broken
cries touching the Scarlet Woman, which the sweep took up.
The little man wrinkled his little acrid nose. He was nobody, it
turned out, but the Scotch steward, holding staunch to his post; but
he was cut and coloured like steel.
“D’ye ask here for your doxy?” he said. “Go back, man, and look where
you left her in the tavern.”
The sweep, only half understanding, spat out a mouthful of oaths.
“We want that there Pope!” he roared. “Bring us to the black devil,
you.”
“After you, sir,” answered the other politely.
My master, looking horribly ugly, repeated his demand.
“Well,” said the steward, “this is fair humours, Newcastle asking for
coals!”
The words were hardly out of him, when my master smote him down, and
pushed into the house. He gave a little quiver, like unstrung wire,
and lay senseless, the red running from his nostrils.
_Mon chéri_, hast thou ever seen a pack of mongrels snarl aloof,
fearful and agitated, about a dog-fight, and in a moment break in with
coward teeth upon the conquered? So over the body of the steward
trampled this rabble, blooded now at another’s expense, and reckless
in its consciousness of self-irresponsibility. They had found a
champion to take the onus of this, and all worse that might happen,
off their shoulders.
But they were destined to discover no further chestnuts for their
catspaw. The Jesuit had fled, it appeared, with the rest of the
family; and so they must content themselves with wrecking the private
chapel, where the household was wont to practise its treasonable
rites.
Now, my master, who was eager after spoil, sweating and toiling in the
thick of the press, left me unguardedly to my own devices; and
suddenly I found myself quite alone in a closet hung with vestments,
where there was a fireplace with an open bricked hearth, having no
signs of usage, which immediately, from habit, caught my attention.
And straight, at last, God, pitiful to His poor little derelict,
touched the cross on my breast, and quickened inspiration in that
where I had supposed all was dead. I slid into the chimney, and went
up, up, like an eel in a well rising for air. The sounds of
destruction grew attenuated beneath me; I smelt life and freedom, and
swarmed faster in my agony to attain them. The chimney, clean as at
its building, let down no token of my passage by it, and in a few
moments I emerged from the summit, and, tumbling into the cleft of a
long double roof--found myself face to face with a man who was there
before me.
IV.
I FALL INTO THE HANDS OF A COLLECTOR
At least I call him a man; but O, my Alcide, he was a marionnette!
His joints creaked. All the bran in his body seemed to have been
shaken down into his calves. His hat supported itself on his ears and
the top of his coat collar. His sleeves were sacks. His nose was
nothing but a wen, and being no better adapted to the burden of some
enormous spectacles he wore, had led his fingers to an incessant trick
of adjusting those in their place. He carried under his arm an immense
folio, with which, as I appeared, he aimed an agitated blow at me,
only to miss and fall forward on his face on the roof.
I instantly dodged past him, and stood panting while he collected
himself. His glasses, without which he was helpless, had flown off,
and I saw his eyes, which before had seemed to fill the whole field of
the great lenses, mere swollen slits, like a pig’s. He groped about in
the utmost consternation as he knelt, pawing the tiles for his lost
property.
“Who are you? Wait! I’ll be with you,” he ejaculated excitedly, as his
bony hands swept the roof.