a grave at the foot of it, and managed to kick and roll the affair into
the grave, then I took up my Kit, carried her home, and by the time I
pegged out the letter to Bob, I saw day breakin'. So I made paces for
Beccles, knocked up old Harris, and gave him the letter for Bob. By
eight o'clock I was arrested--”
At this point the 5.15 recall-bell rang out, and there was falling into
line.
The next time that they had speech together, Hogarth said: “And were you
such a clown, Fred Bates, as to imperil your life for a paltry thousand
pounds?”
“_Paltry_ thousand pounds?” answered Bates, surprised: “Hark at this!
Didn't I peril my life ten times more in Egypt for a bob a day? I tell
you I was certain in my own mind of getting out in a few weeks!”
“Well, what happened to prevent you?”
“Only this: Bob died on the troop-ship coming home; that's all”.
“But you could write old Harris to open your letter to Bob, and act on
it, or else hand it over to your father”.
“My word, but haven't I wrote? Old 'Arris is either dead and buried, or
gorn away, or somethin'. I've waited a year and nine months--good God!
and no answer yet”.
“Poor Fred! I could weep blood for you. Believe in God!”
“More Devil than God about Colmoor, it strikes me”.
“As though _you_ knew! Suppose I strike you blind--_now_--with a flash
of Him?”
“I don't take your meaning, sir”, said Bates, with a strange heart-bound
and sense of awe.
“Do you remember 33 of the quarry-gang, Fred?”
“Yes”.
Hogarth whispered: “It was _I_ who got him off”.
Bates whitened to the lips. “I--I thought as much”.
“There is yet another chance, which _you_, if you like, may take”.
Bates saw heaven opening; but with this vague hope was left two days.
On the third, Hogarth explained what he assumed to be the new plan of
Loveday.
“I take it”, he said, “that he will pass over the moor in a balloon
trailing a rope, which will have a loop to be slipped under the arms. I
tell you, there are dangers in this scheme: you may be shot. Are you for
trying it?”
“Trying it, aye”, said Bates, with fifty times the boldness of O'Hara.
And now began for these two a painfulness of waiting days, the sleep of
both, meanwhile, being one nightmare of confused affrights, balloons and
deliriums.
Ten times they re-discussed every possibility of the scheme, Hogarth
giving messages for Loveday, heaping counsels upon Bates. Nothing
remained to be said, and still the days passed over the time-worn
hearts, till a month went by.
At last something was observed in the sky--afar to the N.W.--in the
afternoon turn, about two o'clock, a mist on the moor, but the sky
almost cloudless.
Whereupon Hogarth, who first saw the object, stepped, as if looking
for something, close to Bates, hissing: “_Goodbye!_ Keep cool--choose
well--”
Bates shovelled on steadily, as though this was a day like others; but
twice his knees gave and bent beneath him; and there was a twitching of
the livid under-lip, piteous to see.
It drew nearer, that silent needle, while Bates worked, delving,
barrowing, making little trips; plenty of time; and no one noted his lip
which pulled and twitched.
Without visible motion it came, wafted on the breaths of high heaven:
half an hour--and still it was remote, fifteen hundred feet up. Bates
and Hogarth peered to see a rope, but could none.
After fifty minutes it was actually over the moor, all now conscious of
it; but the rope was indistinguishable from the air.
Yet it was there, walking the ground, at its end a horizontal
staff....Hogarth, with wiser forethought than Loveday's, had predicted,
not a staff, but a loop.
It passed twenty yards from the quarry, Loveday no doubt imagining that
Hogarth still worked there; but the quarry was some hundred and fifty
yards from the trench.
Its course, nevertheless was toward the trench: and on walked
deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the gorsey
ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come down once more
yonder.
A moment came when Hogarth, with intense hiss, was whispering to
himself: “If I were he, I should dash _now_”.
But Fred Bates did not move.
Hogarth suffered agonies not less excruciating than the rack.
“Oh, whyever does he wait?” he groaned.
But now--all suddenly--it was known, it was felt, deep in five hundred
ecstatic hearts, that a convict was gone--a man overboard--a soul in the
agony--battling between life and death.
Like tempests the whistles split the air.
Where is he? Who is he? What mother bare him? It is 57! And he is
_there!_--on high--caught, to the skies.
The tumbling of four ballast bags from the balloon was marked: the
balloon darted high, wildly high; and with her, seated on the bar, the
cord between his thighs, darted high Fred Bates.
Exultant! the five hundred faces wax fire-eyed, each heart a flame of
madness. But yonder is Warder Black taking trembling, yet careful, aim:
now the report is echoing from the two Tors, the granite-works; and
that smoke no sooner thins than a whole volley of crackling musketry is
winging toward that dot under the clouds.
And it was hideous--pitiful--the quailing heart waited and was still to
see the dot dissever itself from its rod: he had been hit: was in the
middle of the vast and vacant air: and wheeling he came.
A shockingly protracted interval did that fall fill up: the five
hundred, gazing as at some wonder in heaven, did not, could not,
breathe: the outraged heart seemed to rend the breast in a shriek. Would
it _never_ end, that somersault? Wheeling he came.
In reality it occupied much less than a minute: and now he is no more
ethereal, but has grown, is grossly near, attended by the raving winds
of his travelling: is arrived. And the thump of his coming was heard. As
he touched the earth he jerked out circular....
Here was a tragedy remembered many a year at Colmoor, and always with
feelings of the deepest awe.
XVII
OLD TOM'S LETTER
The fate of Bates filled Hogarth's mind with a gloom so funereal, that
now his strength, his great patience, all but succumbed.
One evening, while his broom lay stuck out under the notch of his
cell-door in order that Warder Black might count him, he took his tin
knife, and began to scratch over the hills and valleys of his corrugated
wall some shining letters:
VEN
He was now, after long reflection, convinced that he was the victim of
a plot of Baruch Frankl's: yet in his heart was little rancour against
Frankl, nor, when he wrote his “V E N”, was he thinking specially of
Frankl--hardly knew of whom, or what. It may have been of the system of
things which had given to Frankl such vast powers over him; but, the “N”
finished, he pshawed at himself, and threw the knife down. If something
was wrong, he knew not at all how to right it, supposing the world had
been his to guide.
But a simple incident was destined to transform his mood--a letter from
old Tom Bates, the father of Fred.
And as hitherto we have seen him passive, bearing his weight of pain
with patience, after that letter we shall find him in action.
Old Bates' letter was handed him three weeks after the scratching of his
vague “VEN”.
“DERE MISTER HOGARTH:
“thise fu lines is to ast you how you er getn on, and can you giv a pore
old feller ane noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma find you
as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad and no Go
the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he dide comen
home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im fore munths
agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london soon arter, so no
more at present from
“Yours trule,
“TOM BATES”.
The old fellow, Hogarth saw, did not know of Fred's fate: Fred, the last
of eight. He would find it hard to answer that letter.
When “beds down” was called, his head was still full of one thought: old
Tom Bates; and he could not sleep; heard the bell ring for the change
of warders; the vast silence of the prison's night; and still his brain
revolved old Tom.
The stealthy slipper of the night-warder passed and re-passed. Anon a
click of metal on metal, and the bull's-eye searched him.
Suddenly he remembered that visit to the forge at Thring, and the
present of herrings which old Tom in his guernsey, had brought.
“Here--take 'em--they're yours”, old Tom had said.
He had just then, he remembered, been on the point of going into the
cottage to examine his guns, when the old man came, and stopped him--a
fatal, appointed thing, apparently. Had he actually gone, he would have
found the guns vanished, and would never have been condemned....
And what was it that the old man had said about fish, and fishermen, and
the sea?
He bent his brow to it, and finally remembered: “The day's work of a
fisherman gives him enough fish to live on all the week, and he could
lie round idling the other six days, if he chose; only anybody can't
live on nothing but fish all the time”.
Was it true? Yes! He remembered facts of Yarmouth....
But since true, it was--strange.
Was the sea, then, a more productive element for men to work in than the
land? No, that was absurd: the land, in the nature of things, was more
productive.
Then, why could not _all_ men procure an easy superfluity by one day's
work, as the fisher could, if he chose to live naked in a cave, eating
fish alone? In that case the fisher could change some of his day's-work
fish for the shore people's day's-work things, and so all have a variety
as well as superabundance.
At the interest of this question, he leapt from his hammock, peering
into that thing, and his fleet feet were away, running after the truth
with that rapt abandonment that had characterized his hunting and
football. This was clear: that there was some difference between land
and sea as working-grounds for men. Shore people, like a shoemaker, did
not have for themselves enough shoes from even five, or six, days' work
on which to live in plenty for a week: and hence would take nothing less
than an enormous quantity of the fisher's fish in exchange for a pair of
shoes, making him, too, poor as themselves. But since land work was
as productive as sea work, and far more so, it could only be that the
shoemaker did not get for himself all the shoes which he made, as the
fisher got for himself all the fish which he caught: some power took
from shore people a large part of what they made, a power which did not
exist on the sea. That much was sure.
What was this power, this inherent difference?
He could think of no inherent difference except this: that shore workers
paid rent for land--directly and indirectly--in a million subtle ways;
but fishers paid none for the sea.
So, then, if shore folk paid no rent, they would have a still greater
superfluity of shoes, etc., from one day's labour in six than the
fish-rich fisher?
So it seemed. So it _was_--as with savages. He started! But one minute's
reflection showed him that it was in the very nature of the shore to pay
rent: because one piece of land was better than another--City land, for
instance--and those working on the better must pay for that benefit.
Civilized land, therefore, was bound to pay rent.
So that the shore people could never have the easy superfluity of the
fish-rich fisher--because land was bound to pay rent? And the fisher
must buy the shore things so dear with his easy-got fish, toiling, he,
too, all the week--because land was bound to pay rent?
The wretchedness of Man, then, was a Law?
Hogarth, confronted by a wall, groaned, and while his body was cold, his
brow rolled with sweat, he feeling himself on the brink of some truth
profound as the roots of the mountains....
“Land was bound to pay rent”: he reached that point; and there remained.
“But suppose the workers on shore paid the rent _among themselves_....?”
At last those words: and he gave out a shout which begat mouths of echo
through the galleries of Colmoor.
“If the workers on shore paid rent among one another”--then they
would--on the whole--be in the very position of the fish-rich workers
on sea, who paid no rent at all, the nation--as a whole--living on its
country rent-free: England English, America American, as the sea human:
and our race might then begin to think, to live!
It seemed too sublime--and divine--to be true! Again, point by point, he
went over his reasoning with prying eye; and, on coming back to the same
conclusion, hugged himself, moaning. At last--he knew.
And away now with the dullness and lowness! That blithe and
hand-clapping day! Good-bye, Colmoor! the daily massacre, the shame and
care. Men could begin--if in a baby way at first--to think, to see, to
sing, to live.
He saw, indeed, that that would hardly have been fair business if he,
for example, had paid his rent to the English Nation instead of to
Frankl, Frankl having bought Lagden with money earned. But he thought
that Frankl would hardly be slow to resign that rent, if once he was
shown....
But if Frankl _was_ slow--what then?
The oblong of ribbed glass over his flap-table showed a greyness of
morning, as he asked himself that thing.
In that case--Frankl could be argued with.
But if he still refused?
Then the question could be gone into as to whether that which is good
for forty millions, though apparently bad for Frankl, is not _forty
million times_ more just than unjust, goodness being justice; also, as
to which had the primary right to England, Frankl or the English.
But if he still refused?
Suddenly Hogarth giggled--his first laugh in Colmoor.
_That_ could be arranged....
For him, Hogarth, the great fact was this: that he saw light. Into that
humble cell the rays of Heaven had blazed.
After standing motionless a long time, he dropped to his knees, and “O,
Thou, Thou”, he said....
An hour later, when asked by an orderly if he wished to see doctor or
governor, he replied: “The Governor”.
XVIII
CHLOROFORM
(Captain Bucknill, the Governor, was making his morning rounds, when he
heard that among the convicts claiming to see him was 76.)
A little man, prim, snappy, compact: an army officer, with moustachios
stuck upon him, to curve and finish him off.
“Well, what is it, 76?” said he busily at the cell door.
Hogarth struck a hand-salute--his old habit on His Majesty's ships.
“Sir, I wished to tell you that I have determined to escape from this
prison--if I can”.
“Indeed, now! This is a most refreshing candour, 76!”
“I have said what I had to say”, said Hogarth. “You keep a sharp eye on
me, and I, too, will keep a sharp eye”.
The Governor puffed a breath of laughter, turned on his heels, walked
away, and that day spoke to three officials with regard to Convict 76.
And during a week Hogarth lay deep, chained, in a punishment-cell.
But during its first four days he had invented three separate plans of
escape, and had determined upon the one which seemed the surest, though
longest.
When he again came up into the light, he was a marked man, under Warder
Black's constant suspicion.
Now, however, his expression was changed: he no longer belonged to
Colmoor, though he was there. Sometimes he felt like shouting at the
burden of his secret. In his impatience to proclaim it, he pined to
write to Loveday--but now his punishment had lost him that privilege.
Meantime, the problem was to get ten good miles beyond Colmoor: a hard
one; but his brain had already accomplished a task far harder: and the
greater implied the less.
His first thought, when he had begun to plan, had been Loveday; his
second, that on no account could he permit Loveday to incur further
risk, or expense, for him; his third, that he might yet use Loveday to
any extent not involving risk or expense.
At the next weekly “School” he sat near a Thames-works hackle-maker,
who, though he could write, was no scholar, and was laboriously spoiling
a second letter-sheet, when Hogarth whispered him: “Can I help you? I
see it's to your mother. I could get her a quid from a friend of mine”.
“Well, I'm much obliged....!”
The laborious letter, after half an hour, had in it:
“If you go to 15, Cheyne Gardens, the gentleman will give you a
sovereign which he owed me for cutting down the elm in the beech-wood at
Teddington for him”.
Now, Loveday lived at 15, Cheyne Gardens, and had only to see those
words “_the elm in the beechwood_,” to scent a cypher from Hogarth.
He offered five pounds for that letter: but it was two weeks before he
decided upon the intended words: “Small chloroform--trenches--rock”.
There were several trenches, many rocks: yet one midnight, when a
blustering wind huddled the bracken, and the prison stood darkling,
wrapped in mystery, a lonely figure in an ulster was there; and under
each of three rocks he deposited two vials: for the formation of only
three gave the least chance of concealment.
What Hogarth's plan could be he racked his brain in vain to dream,
guessing that prisoners, on returning from the moor, must be searched,
even to the ears: Hogarth, therefore, could never use the vial within
the walls, and must mean to use it without--a sufficiently wild
proceeding. But the finding of the vials, was sure: for the “rock” which
Hogarth had had in mind was one of those granite ones common on Colmoor,
standing five feet high on a small base; and one day he swept his hand
among the gorse under it, and, with a glad half-surprise, touched two
vials.
Three days later he again swept his hand among the gorse, touched the
vials, breasted his handkerchief, laid the vials on it, and presently
contrived to tie them together with a twig.
At his feet now was a wheelbarrow full of marl, and two yards off Warder
Black, waiting for him to roll the barrow; but, inserting his spade
between a wheel and a side of the barrow, his back toward Black,
Hogarth, with a tug, bent the spade: then walked to Black.
“Look here”, he said, “that spade isn't much good now....”
Black strode to look, Hogarth a little behind him: and at the instant
when the officer was a-stoop to lift the spade, Hogarth took the vials
from his breast, and laid them upright in the little pocket of Black's
tunic, near his bayonet-sheath and cartridge-box, above the belt.
By the time the matter of the spade was settled, the great bell rang,
the gangs went marching over the old familiar level, up the old path in
the grass-mound on which the Palace stands, and so, in lax order, like
shabby French conscripts, powdered, toil-worn, into the gates.
Then the search on parade: during which, as Black busily searched him,
Hogarth said: “Search well”.
They were then led up to cells.
And the moment Hogarth's door closed upon him, he put his skilly-can on
the floor, and, with one stamp, stamped it out of shape; also he broke
his cup, and pocketed two fragments of it.
A few minutes afterwards, before cocoa, Black, trotting in heavy haste
here and there in the gallery, looked in to say: “Bath to-night”.
And Hogarth: “Warder! a word with you! sorry, I have trodden on my
can....”
Upon which Black went stooping to look, the can now standing on the low
shelf; and as he said “I shall report this”, Hogarth, stooping, with
quick deftness had the vials picked from the thick pocket.
“Well, fall in”, said Black to him; “better take your precious can, and
give it to a bath-room warder for the store-keeper to change”.
Hogarth, as he passed out, placed the vials on the shelf over his
door, where they were secure, since cells were never searched; and, the
bathers having formed in single file, five feet between man and man,
away they moved and down--away and down--lost in space, treading the
journey of galleries, till, at the bottom, they passed up a vaulted
corridor, monastically dim, across a yard open to starry sky, and
into the door of a semi-detached, steep-roofed building, which was the
bath-house.
A row of thirty-five baths; a very long bench for undressing; in the
space between bench and baths three warders walking: such was the
bath-house: all whitewashed, galvanized iron, and rigour; but for its
old record of uneventfulness a scandal was preparing that night.
Outside the door a fourth officer paced, and a cord within rang a little
bell in one click, to tell when, the bathing over, the door should be
unlocked outside.
After giving up his can near the door to a warder, who laid it on the
bench, Hogarth undressed slowly; got off his boots; and now had on only
knickerbockers and stockings: he got off his stockings.
And the moment his bare soles touched the floor, he felt himself once
more agile on the ratlines, larky for a shore-row, handy in any squall.
Let them all come, therefore! He smiled; passed his palms down his crib
of lean ribs.
“Good gracious, why don't you hurry up there...?” an officer came
asking, stooping.
At “there” he saw stars-and-stripes, dropped upon his back: Hogarth was
away toward the door, while the bathers started with shouts, though in
no bosom arose any impulse to follow, the bath-house being the centre of
a maze of twenty unscaleable walls, prison within prison.
But as for Hogarth, in such a dazzling flash did he dash toward the
door, that he had struck down the second officer before the outcry of
the first, and had pulled at the door-bell before the third could cry
_“Don't open!”_--a cry muffled into his maw by a cuff prompt as thunder.
This third man, however, grasped the fugitive by the middle: and while
the overthrown two were running up, and the key without seeking the
lock, a short, venomous tussle was waged just near the door, till
Hogarth, wringing his naked body free, tossed his antagonist by the
knees to slide into the path of the two on-comers; at the same time,
catching up his battered can, and smashing it into the face of the
door-orderly, who now peeped in, he slipped through, and was gone into a
yard, small, of irregular shape, and dim, with one wall-lantern, and
but one egress (except the egress into the prison-hall), namely a
blind-alley between the laundry and carpet-makers' building on one side,
and stables on the other: blind alley, yard, and all, being shut in by
big buildings.
By the time the door-orderly opened his eyes, and one of the inside
three had rushed out, Hogarth had vanished; and these two, shrilling
whistles to reinforce the bath-room guard, pelted down the blind-alley
to effect, as they thought, a sure capture. But Hogarth was not there.
Back they came trotting, breathless, rather at a loss. One panted: “He
must have run back into the great hall....”
The other panted: “He'd hardly do that--hiding in the yard still, _must_
be. There's that little nook....”
The “little nook” is a three-sided space in a corner, very dark, formed
by one wall of the campanile, or bell-tower, together with a wall of the
laundry-house, and a third wall which shuts in the yard; the entrance to
it narrow, and one looking up within it seems to stand at the bottom
of a triangular well, split at one corner. It is not far from the
bathhouse, and into it Hogarth had really darted; but when the officers
came peering, no trace of him.
He had, in fact, gone up the lightning-conductor, which runs down
a bell-tower remarkably high, Colmoor having been built during the
Napoleonic wars for French prisoners at a time when the theory was
accepted that a lightning-conductor protects a space whose radius is
double the height of the conductor. The tower is a five-sided structure
with a Gothic window into which it is impossible to get from the
conductor, because a corner intervenes, and it is a feat to swing from
the conductor to the laundry-wall coping, and thence, leaping up, to
grip the window: at each of which ordeals Hogarth hesitated, pierced
with chills; to his observations from afar it had seemed so much less
stupendous; but in each case he dared, and reached.
All this time the can was between his teeth.
Arrived on the window, his arms out groping, he felt a slanting
beam--climbed it--found it short-mounted upon a horizontal one, all
here, as he had expected, being a chaos of beams, raying every way.
Thrice he sneezed low, and felt cobwebs in his face.
And groping he went, seeking the great Bell of Colmoor, which he had
doomed, hearing sounds of the to-do, echoes that ran below, and the
vague shout of somebody, till he touched the flat top of the bell,
clamped to the swing-beam on which he sat astraddle; felt also that
along the top of the beam lay an iron bar; made sure that this was in
actual contact with the clamps of the bell: and, no longer hesitating,
set to work upon the can.