THE DEAD-CART
Had you asked Colonel Holles in after-life how he had spent the week
that followed immediately upon his escape from the house in Knight
Ryder Street, he could have supplied you with only the vaguest and most
incomplete of accounts. His memories were a confused jumble, from which
only certain facts detached themselves with any degree of sharpness.
The ugly truth, which must be told, is that in all that week he was
hardly ever entirely sober. The thing began on the very night--or,
rather, morning--of his evasion.
Without definite destination, or even aim beyond that of putting as
great a distance as possible between himself and Knight Ryder Street,
Holles came by way of Carter Lane into Paul’s Yard. There he hung a
moment hesitating--for a man may well hesitate when all directions are
as one to him; then he struck eastward, down Watling Street, finally
plunging into the labyrinth of narrow alleys to the north of it. Here
he might have wandered until broad daylight, but that, lost in the
heart of that dædal, he was drawn by sounds of revelry to a narrow
door, from under which a blade of light was stretched across the
cobbles of the street.
It was the oddness of those sounds, as incongruous in this
plague-stricken London as if they had issued from the bowels of a
sepulchre, that gave him pause. On that mean threshold he stood
hesitating, peering up at the sign, which he could just discern to
be in the shape of a flagon, whence he must have concluded, had
other evidences been lacking, that the place was a tavern. Further
he concluded, from his knowledge of the enactment by which all such
resorts were to close to custom at nine o’clock, that here a breach of
the law was being flagrantly committed.
Attracted, on the one hand, by the thought of the oblivion that
might be purchased within, repelled, on the other, by the obviously
disreputable character of the place and by a curious sense of the
increased scorn he must evoke in Nancy’s mind could she witness his
weak surrender to so foul a temptation, he ended by deciding to pass
on. But, even as he turned to do so, the door was suddenly pulled open,
and across the street was flung a great shaft of yellow light in which
he stood revealed. Two drunken roisterers, lurching forth, paused a
moment, surprised, at the sight of him, arrested there. Then, with
drunken inconsequence, they fell upon him, took him each by an arm, and
dragged him, weakly resisting, over the threshold of that unclean den,
amid shouts of insensate, hilarious welcome from its inhabitants.
Holles stood there in the glare and stench of a half-dozen fish-oil
lamps suspended from the beams of the low, grimy ceiling, blinking like
an owl, whilst the taverner, vehemently cursing the fools who had left
his door agape, made haste to close it again, shutting out as far as
possible sight and sound of this transgression of the recent rigorous
laws.
When presently the Colonel’s eyes had grown accustomed to the light, he
took stock of his surroundings. He found himself in a motley gathering
of evil-looking, raffish men, and no less evil-looking women. In all
there may have been some thirty of them huddled there together in that
comparatively restricted space. The men were rufflers and foists and
worse; the women were trulls of various degrees, with raddled cheeks
and glittering eyes. Some were maudlin, some hilarious, and some lay
helpless and inert as logs. All of them had been drinking to excess,
save, perhaps, some four or five who were gathered about a table
apart, snarling over a pack of greasy cards. They were men and women
of the underworld, whom circumstances, and the fact that no further
certificates of health were being issued, confined to the plague-ridden
city; and, in an excess of the habits of debauch that were usual to
them, they took this means of cheating for a brief while the terror in
which normally they lived and moved in that stronghold of death. It was
a gathering typical of many that Asmodeus might have discovered had he
troubled on any of those August nights to lift the roofs of London’s
houses.
Holles surveyed them with cold disgust, whilst they stared
questioningly back at him. They had fallen silent now, all save one
who, maudlin, in a corner, persisted in continuing an obscene song with
which he had been regaling the company when the Colonel entered.
“Gads my life!” said Holles, at length. “But that I am told the Court
has gone to Salisbury, I might suppose myself in Whitehall.”
The double-edged gibe shook them into an explosion of laughter. They
acclaimed him for a wit, and proceeded to pronounce him free of their
disreputable company, whilst the two topers who had lugged him in from
the open dragged him now to one of the tables where room was readily
made for him. He yielded to the inevitable. He had a few pieces in
his pocket, and he spent one of these on burnt sack before that wild
company broke up, and its members crept to their homes, like rats to
their burrows, in the pale light of dawn.
Thereafter he hired a bed from the vintner, and slept until close
upon noon. Having broken his fast upon a dish of salt herrings, he
wandered forth again, errant and aimless. He won through a succession
of narrow, unclean alleys into the eastern end of Cheapside, and stood
there, aghast to survey the change that the month had wrought. In that
thoroughfare, usually the busiest in London, he found emptiness and
silence. Where all had been life and bustle, a continual stream of
coaches and chairs of wayfarers on foot and on horseback, of merchants
and prentices at the shop doors with their incessant cries of “What
d’ye lack?” and clamorous invitations to view the wares and bargains
that they offered, the street from end to end was now empty of all but
some half-dozen stragglers like himself, and one who with averted head
was pushing a wheelbarrow whose grim load was covered by a cloak.
Not a coach, not a chair, not a horse in sight, and not a merchant’s
voice to be heard; not even a beggar’s whine. Here and there a shop
stood open, but where there were no buyers there was no eagerness to
sell. Some few houses he beheld close-shuttered and padlocked, each
marked with the red cross and guarded by its armed watchman; one or two
others he observed to stand open and derelict. Last of all, but perhaps
most awe-inspiring, as being the most eloquent witness to the general
desolation, he saw that blades of grass were sprouting between the
kidney stones with which the street was paved, so that, but for those
lines of houses standing so grim and silent on either side, he could
never have supposed himself to be standing in a city thoroughfare.
He turned up towards St. Paul’s, his steps echoing in the noontide
through the empty street as echo at midnight the steps of some belated
reveller.
It were unprofitable further to follow him in those aimless wanderings,
in which he spent that day and the days that followed. Once he made
an excursion as far as Whitehall, to assure himself that His Grace of
Buckingham was, indeed, gone from Town, as Dr. Beamish had informed
him. He went spurred by the desire to vent a sense of wrong that came
to the surface of his sodden wits like oil to the surface of water.
But he found the gates of Wallingford House closed and its windows
tight-shuttered, as were by then practically all the windows that
overlooked that forsaken courtly thoroughfare.
Albemarle, he learnt from a stray sailor with whom he talked, was
still at the Cockpit. True to his character, Honest George Monk
remained grimly at his post unmoved by danger; indeed, going freely
abroad in utter contempt of it, engrossed in the charitable task of
doing whatever a man in his position could do to mitigate the general
suffering.
Holles was tempted to seek him. But the temptation was not very strong
upon him, and he withstood it. Such a visit would but waste the time of
a man who had no time to waste; therefore, Albemarle was hardly likely
to give him a welcome.
His nights were invariably spent at the sign of the Flagon in that
dismal alley off Watling Street into which merest chance had led him
in the first instance. What attraction the place could have held for
him he would afterwards have found it difficult to define. There is
little doubt that it was just his loneliness that impelled thither his
desire for the only society that he knew to be available, a company of
human beings in similar case to himself, who sought in the nepenthes
of the wine-cup and in riotous debauch a temporary oblivion of their
misery and desolation. Low though he might previously have come,
neither was this the resort nor were the thieves and harlots by whom
it was frequented the associates that he would ordinarily have chosen.
Fortune, whose sport he had ever been, had flung him among these human
derelicts; and there he continued, since the place afforded him the
only thing he craved until death should--as he hoped--bring him final
peace.
The end came abruptly. One night--the seventh that he spent in that
lewd haunt of recklessness--he drank more deeply even than his deep
habit. As a consequence, when, at the host’s bidding, he lurched
out into the dark alley, the last of all those roisterers to depart,
his wits were drugged to the point of insensibility. He moved like
an automaton, on legs that mechanically performed their function.
Staggering under him, they bore his swaying body in long lurches down
the lane, until he must have looked like some flimsy simulacrum of a
man with which the wind made sport.
Without apprehension or care of the direction in which he was moving,
he came into Watling Street, crossed it, plunged into a narrow alley
on the southern side, and reeled blindly onward until his feet struck
an obstacle in their unconscious path. He pitched over it, and fell
forward heavily upon his face. Lacking the will and the strength to
rise again, he lay where he had fallen, and sank there into a lethargic
sleep.
A half-hour passed. It was the half-hour immediately before the dawn.
Came a bell tinkling in the distance. Slowly it drew nearer, and a
cry repeated at intervals might have been audible and intelligible to
Holles had he been conscious. Soon to these were added other sounds:
the melancholy creak of an axle that required greasing, and the slow
clank and thud of hooves upon the cobbles. Nearer rang the cry upon the
silent night:
“Bring out your dead!”
The vehicle halted at the mouth of the alley in which the Colonel lay,
and a man advanced, holding a flaming link above his head so as to cast
its ruddy glare hither and thither to search the dark corners of that
by-way.
This man beheld two bodies stretched upon the ground: the Colonel’s and
the one over which the Colonel had stumbled. He shouted something over
his shoulder and advanced again. He was followed a moment later by the
cart, conducted by his fellow, who walked at the horse’s head, pulling
at a short pipe.
Whilst he who held the torch stood there to light the other in his
work, his companion stooped and rolled over the first body, then
stepped forward, and did the same by Colonel Holles. The Colonel’s
countenance was as livid as that of the corpse that had tripped him up,
and he scarcely seemed to breathe. They bestowed no more than a glance
upon him with the terrible callous indifference that constant habit
will bring to almost any task, and then returned to the other.
The man with the link thrust this into a holder attached to the
front of the dead-cart. Then the two of them on their knees made an
examination of the body, or rather of such garments as were upon it.
“Not much to trouble over here, Larry,” said one.
“Aye,” growled Larry. “They’re sorry enough duds. Come on, Nick. Let’s
heave her aboard.”
They rose, took down their hooks, and seizing the body by them they
swung it up into the vehicle.
“Fetch the prancer nearer,” said Nick, as he turned and stepped towards
Holles. The horse was led forward some few paces, so that the light
from the cart now fell more fully upon the Colonel’s long supine figure.
Nick went down on one knee beside him, and uttered a grunt of
satisfaction. “This is better.”
His fellow came to peer over his shoulder.
“A gentry-cove, damme!” he swore with horrible satisfaction. Their
practised ghoulish fingers went swiftly over Holles, and they chuckled
obscenely at sight of the half-dozen gold pieces displayed in Larry’s
filthy paw.
“Not much else,” grumbled one after a further inspection.
“There’s his sword--a rich hilt; look, Larry.”
“And there’s a fine pair o’ stampers,” said Larry, who was already busy
about the Colonel’s feet. “Lend a hand, Nick.”
They pulled the boots off and made a bundle of them, together with
the Colonel’s hat and cloak. This bundle Larry dropped into a basket
that hung behind the cart, whilst Nick remained to strip Holles of his
doublet. Suddenly he paused.
“He’s still warm, Larry,” he said querulously.
Larry approached, pulling at his pipe. He growled a lewd oath,
expressive of contempt and indifference.
“What odds?” he added cynically. “He’ll be cold enough or ever we comes
to Aldgate.” And he laughed as he took the doublet Nick flung to him.
The next moment their filthy hooks were in the garments they had left
upon Holles, and they had added him to the terrible load that already
half-filled their cart.
They backed the vehicle out of the alley, and then trundled on, going
eastward, their destination being the pit at Aldgate. Ever and anon
in their slow progress they would halt either at the summons of a
watchman or at what they found for themselves. At every halt they
made an addition to their load which they bore away for peremptory
burial in that Aldgate plague-pit, above which on these hot nights
the corpse-candles flickered almost constantly to increase the tale
of portents and to scare the credulous into the belief that the place
was haunted by the souls of those unfortunates whose bodies lay
irreverently tumbled there under the loosely shovelled clay.
They were already approaching their destination, and the first light
of dawn, pallid, cold, and colourless as a moonstone, was beginning to
dispel the darkness, when, be it from the jolting of the cart, or from
the flow of blood where one of those foul hooks had scraped his thigh,
or yet from preserving Nature, quickening his wits that he might save
himself from suffocation, the Colonel was aroused from his drunken
trance.
He awakened, thrusting fiercely for air, and seeking to dislodge a
heavy mass that lay across his face. The efforts that at first he made
were but feeble, as was to be expected from one in his condition; so
that he gained no more than brief respites, in each of which, like a
drowning man struggling repeatedly to the surface, he gasped a breath
of that foul contamination about him. But finding each effort succeeded
by a suffocation that became ever more painful, a sort of terror seized
upon him, and pulled his senses out of their drunken torpor. He braced
himself and heaved more strenuously, until at length he won clear, so
far, at least, as his head was concerned.
He saw the paling stars above and was able at last to breathe freely
and without effort. But the burden which he had succeeded in thrusting
from his head, now lay across his breast, and the weight of it was
troublesome and painful. He put forth a hand, and realizing by the
sense of touch that what he grasped was a human arm, he shook it
vigorously. Eliciting no response, he began to grow angry.
“Afoot there, ye drunken lob,” he growled in a thick voice. “Get up, I
say. Get up! O’s my life! D’ye take me for a bed that you put yourself
to sleep across me? Gerrup!” he roared, his anger increasing before
that continued lack of response. “Gerrup, or I’ll....”
He ceased abruptly, blinking in the glare of light that suddenly struck
across his eyes from the flaming head of the torch which had been
thrust upwards. The cart had come to a standstill, and above the tall
sides of it, rising into his field of vision, came the two horrible
figures of the carters, whom the sound of his voice had brought to
mount the wheels of the vehicle.
There was something so foul and infernal in those faces, as seen there
in the ruddy glare of the torch, that the sight of them brought the
Colonel a stage nearer to sobriety. He struggled up into a sitting
position, and looked about him, bewildered, uneasy, furiously
endeavoring to conjecture where he might be.
In plaintive impatience came the nasal voice of one of those ghouls.
“I told ye the gentry-cove was warm, Larry.”
“Aye! Well? And what now?” quoth the other querulously.
“Why, fling him out, o’ course.”
“Bah! Let him ride. If he’s not stiff yet, he soon will be. What’s the
odds?”
“And what o’ the plague examiner, you fool? Won’t he see that it’s just
a drunken cove who was sleeping off his booze? And what’ll he say to
us? Here! Lend a hand! Let’s get him out.”
But Holles was no longer in need of their assistance. Their words and
what he saw of that grim load of which he was a part had made him
realize at last his ghastly situation. The sheer horror of it not only
sobered him completely; it lent him a more than ordinary strength. He
heaved himself clear, and struggled, gasping, to his knees. Thence he
gripped the side of the cart, pulled himself to his feet, flung a leg
over and leapt down, stumbling as he did so, and sprawling full length
upon the ground.
By the time he had gathered himself up, the cart was already trundling
on again, and the peals of hoarse, obscene laughter from the carters
were ringing hideously through the silent street.
Holles fled from the sound, back by the way that he had been carried,
and it was not until he had gone some distance, not until the foul
hilarity of the carters and the clatter of the accursed cart itself had
faded out of earshot, that he began to grow conscious of his condition.
He was without cloak or hat or doublet or boots. The fact that his
sword was gone, as well as the little money that still remained him,
seemed to him just then to matter rather less. What chiefly troubled
him was that he was cold and dizzy. He shivered every now and then as
with an ague; his head was a globe of pain and his senses reeled. Yet
he was sober, he assured himself. He could think coherently, and he was
able to piece together, not only the thing that had happened to him,
but the very manner of its happening.
Mechanically he trudged on and on, aimlessly now, a man walking in a
nightmare. The light grew. The moonstone light of early dawn took on
colour and began to glow as with the fires of the opal; the sky was
invaded and suffused by the saffron heralds of the sun.
At last he paused, without knowledge or care of where he was; utterly
bereft of strength, he sank presently into the shelter of the doorway
of a deserted house, and there fell asleep.
When next he awakened, he was lying in the full glare of a sun that was
already high in the heavens. He looked about him, and found himself in
surroundings that were utterly strange to him, so that he could form no
notion of whither he had strayed.
In mid-street stood a man in a steeple hat dressed in black, leaning
upon a red wand and regarding him attentively.
“What ails you?” the man asked him, seeing him awake and conscious.
Disgruntled, Holles glared at him. “The sight of you,” he snapped, and
struggled stiffly up. “Naught else.”
Yet, even as he gained his feet, a giddiness assailed him. He steadied
himself a moment against the door-post: then reeled and sank down again
upon the step that had been his couch. For some few seconds he sat
there bemused, marvelling at his condition. Then, acting on a sudden
thought, he tore open the breast of his shirt.
“I lied!” he shouted wildly. When next he looked up, he was laughing, a
ringing, exultant laugh. “I lied! There is something else. Look!” And
he pulled his shirt wider apart, so that the man might see what he had
found. And that was the last thing that he remembered.
On his breast the flower of the plague had blossomed while he slept.