"Is it long since this cell was in use?"
"You're very fond of asking questions", he answered doggedly.
It was evident he would baffle me by impertinence rather than yield a
confidence. A queer insistence had seized me--a strange desire to know
more about this mysterious chamber. But, for all my curiosity, I flushed
at the man's tone.
"You have your orders", I said sternly, "and do well to hold by them. I
doubt, nevertheless, if they include impertinence to your superiors."
"I look straight on my duty, sir," he said, a little abashed. "I don't
wish to give offence."
He did not, I feel sure. He followed his instinct to throw me off the
scent, that was all.
I strode off in a fume, and after attending F---- in the infirmary, went
promptly to my own quarters.
I was in an odd frame of mind, and for long tramped my sitting-room to
and fro, too restless to go to bed, or, as an alternative, to settle down
to a book. There was a welling up in my heart of some emotion that I
could neither trace nor define. It seemed neighbour to terror, neighbour
to an intense fainting pity, yet was not distinctly either of these.
Indeed, where was cause for one, or the subject of the other? F---- might
have endured mental sufferings which it was only human to help to end,
yet F---- was a swindling rogue, who, once relieved, merited no further
consideration.
It was not on him my sentiments were wasted. Who, then, was responsible
for them?
There is a very plain line of demarcation between the legitimate spirit
of inquiry and mere apish curiosity. I could recognise it, I have no
doubt, as a rule, yet in my then mood, under the influence of a kind of
morbid seizure, inquisitiveness took me by the throat. I could not
whistle my mind from the chase of a certain graveyard will-o'-the-wisp;
and on it went stumbling and floundering through bog and mire, until it
fell into a state of collapse, and was useful for nothing else.
I went to bed and to sleep without difficulty, but I was conscious of
myself all the time, and of a shadowless horror that seemed to come
stealthily out of corners and to bend over and look at me, and to be
nothing but a curtain or a hanging coat when I started and stared.
Over and over again this happened, and my temperature rose by leaps, and
suddenly I saw that if I failed to assert myself, and promptly, fever
would lap me in a consuming fire. Then in a moment I broke into a profuse
perspiration, and sank exhausted into delicious unconsciousness.
Morning found me restored to vigour, but still with the maggot of
curiosity boring in my brain. It worked there all day, and for many
subsequent days, and at last it seemed as if my every faculty were
honeycombed with its ramifications. Then "this will not do", I thought,
but still the tunnelling process went on.
At first I would not acknowledge to myself what all this mental to-do was
about. I was ashamed of my new development, in fact, and nervous, too,
in a degree of what it might reveal in the matter of moral degeneration;
but gradually, as the curious devil mastered me, I grew into such harmony
with it that I could shut my eyes no longer to the true purpose of its
insistence. It was the _closed cell_ about which my thoughts hovered like
crows circling round carrion.
* * * * *
"In the dead waste and middle" of a certain night I awoke with a strange,
quick recovery of consciousness. There was the passing of a single
expiration, and I had been asleep and was awake. I had gone to bed with
no sense of premonition or of resolve in a particular direction; I sat up
a monomaniac. It was as if, swelling in the silent hours, the tumour of
curiosity had come to a head, and in a moment it was necessary to operate
upon it.
I make no excuse for my then condition. I am convinced I was the victim
of some undistinguishable force, that I was an agent under the control of
the supernatural, if you like. Some thought had been in my mind of late
that in my position it was my duty to unriddle the mystery of the closed
cell. This was a sop timidly held out to and rejected by my better
reason. I sought--and I knew it in my heart--solution of the puzzle,
because it was a puzzle with an atmosphere that vitiated my moral fibre.
Now, suddenly, I knew I must act, or, by forcing self-control, imperil
my mind's stability.
All strung to a sort of exaltation, I rose noiselessly and dressed myself
with rapid, nervous hands. My every faculty was focussed upon a
solitary point. Without and around there was nothing but shadow and
uncertainty. I seemed conscious only of a shaft of light, as it were,
traversing the darkness and globing itself in a steady disc of radiance
on a lonely door.
Slipping out into the great echoing vault of the prison in stockinged
feet, I sped with no hesitation of purpose in the direction of the
corridor that was my goal. Surely some resolute Providence guided and
encompassed me, for no meeting with the night patrol occurred at any
point to embarrass or deter me. Like a ghost myself, I flitted along
the stone flags of the passages, hardly waking a murmur from them in my
progress.
Without, I knew, a wild and stormy wind thundered on the walls of the
prison. Within, where the very atmosphere was self-contained, a cold and
solemn peace held like an irrevocable judgment.
I found myself as if in a dream before the sealed door that had for days
harassed my waking thoughts. Dim light from a distant gas jet made a
patch of yellow upon one of its panels; the rest was buttressed with
shadow.
A sense of fear and constriction was upon me as I drew softly from my
pocket a screwdriver I had brought with me. It never occurred to me, I
swear, that the quest was no business of mine, and that even now I could
withdraw from it, and no one be the wiser. But I was afraid--I was
afraid. And there was not even the negative comfort of knowing that the
neighbouring cell was tenanted. It gaped like a ghostly garret next
door to a deserted house.
What reason had I to be there at all, or, being there, to fear? I can no
more explain than tell how it was that I, an impartial follower of my
vocation, had allowed myself to be tricked by that in the nerves I had
made it my interest to study and combat in others.
My hand that held the tool was cold and wet. The stiff little shriek of
the first screw, as it turned at first uneasily in its socket, sent a
jarring thrill through me. But I persevered, and it came out readily
by-and-by, as did the four or five others that held the trap secure.
Then I paused a moment; and, I confess, the quick pant of fear seemed to
come grey from my lips. There were sounds about me--the deep breathing of
imprisoned men; and I envied the sleepers their hard-wrung repose.
At last, in one access of determination, I put out my hand, and sliding
back the bolt, hurriedly flung open the trap. An acrid whiff of dust
assailed my nostrils as I stepped back a pace and stood expectant of
anything--or nothing. What did I wish, or dread, or foresee? The complete
absurdity of my behaviour was revealed to me in a moment. I could shake
off the incubus here and now, and be a sane man again.
I giggled, with an actual ring of self-contempt in my voice, as I made a
forward movement to close the aperture. I advanced my face to it, and
inhaled the sluggish air that stole forth, and--God in heaven!
I had staggered back with that cry in my throat, when I felt fingers like
iron clamps close on my arm and hold it. The grip, more than the face
I turned to look upon in my surging terror, was forcibly human.
It was the warder Johnson who had seized me, and my heart bounded as I
met the cold fury of his eyes.
"Prying!" he said, in a hoarse, savage whisper. "So you will, will you?
And now let the devil help you!"
It was not this fellow I feared, though his white face was set like a
demon's; and in the thick of my terror I made a feeble attempt to assert
my authority.
"Let me go!" I muttered. "What! you dare?"
In his frenzy he shook my arm as a terrier shakes a rat, and, like a dog,
he held on, daring me to release myself.
For the moment an instinct half-murderous leapt in me. It sank and was
overwhelmed in a slough of some more secret emotion.
"Oh!" I whispered, collapsing, as it were, to the man's fury,
even pitifully deprecating it. "What is it? What's there? It drew
me--something unnameable".
He gave a snapping laugh like a cough. His rage waxed second by second.
There was a maniacal suggestiveness in it; and not much longer, it was
evident, could he have it under control. I saw it run and congest in his
eyes; and, on the instant of its accumulation, he tore at me with a
sudden wild strength, and drove me up against the very door of the secret
cell.
The action, the necessity of self-defence, restored me to some measure of
dignity and sanity.
"Let me go, you ruffian!" I cried, struggling to free myself from his
grasp.
It was useless. He held me madly. There was no beating him off: and, so
holding me, he managed to produce a single key from one of his pockets,
and to slip it with a rusty clang into the lock of the door.
"You dirty, prying civilian!" he panted at me, as he swayed this way and
that with the pull of my body. "You shall have your wish, by G--! You
want to see inside, do you? Look, then!"
He dashed open the door as he spoke, and pulled me violently into
the opening. A great waft of the cold, dank air came at us, and with
it--what?
The warder had jerked his dark lantern from his belt, and now--an arm of
his still clasped about one of mine--snapped the slide open.
"Where is it?" he muttered, directing the disc of light round and about
the floor of the cell. I ceased struggling. Some counter influence was
raising an odd curiosity in me.
"Ah!" he cried, in a stifled voice, "there you are, my friend!"
He was setting the light slowly travelling along the stone flags close by
the wall over against us, and now, so guiding it, looked askance at me
with a small, greedy smile.
"Follow the light, sir," he whispered jeeringly.
I looked, and saw twirling on the floor, in the patch of radiance cast by
the lamp, _a little eddy of dust_, it seemed. This eddy was never still,
but went circling in that stagnant place without apparent cause or
influence; and, as it circled, it moved slowly on by wall and corner, so
that presently in its progress it must reach us where we stood.
Now, draughts will play queer freaks in quiet places, and of this
trifling phenomenon I should have taken little note ordinarily. But, I
must say at once, that as I gazed upon the odd moving thing my heart
seemed to fall in upon itself like a drained artery.
"Johnson!" I cried, "I must get out of this. I don't know what's the
matter, or--Why do you hold me? D--n it! man, let me go; let me go, I
say!"
As I grappled with him he dropped the lantern with a crash and flung his
arms violently about me.
"You don't!" he panted, the muscles of his bent and rigid neck seeming
actually to cut into my shoulder-blade. "You don't, by G--! You came
of your own accord, and now you shall take your bellyful!"
It was a struggle for life or death, or, worse, for life and reason. But
I was young and wiry, and held my own, if I could do little more. Yet
there was something to combat beyond the mere brute strength of the man I
struggled with, for I fought in an atmosphere of horror unexplainable,
and I knew that inch by inch the _thing_ on the floor was circling round
in our direction.
Suddenly in the breathing darkness I felt it close upon us, gave one
mortal yell of fear, and, with a last despairing fury, tore myself from
the encircling arms, and sprang into the corridor without. As I plunged
and leapt, the warder clutched at me, missed, caught a foot on the edge
of the door, and, as the latter whirled to with a clap, fell heavily at
my feet in a fit. Then, as I stood staring down upon him, steps sounded
along the corridor and the voices of scared men hurrying up.
* * * * *
Ill and shaken, and, for the time, little in love with life, yet fearing
death as I had never dreaded it before, I spent the rest of that horrible
night huddled between my crumpled sheets, fearing to look forth, fearing
to think, wild only to be far away, to be housed in some green and
innocent hamlet, where I might forget the madness and the terror in
learning to walk the unvext paths of placid souls. I had not fairly
knocked under until alone with my new dread familiar. That unction I
could lay to my heart, at least. I had done the manly part by the
stricken warder, whom I had attended to his own home, in a row of little
tenements that stood south of the prison walls. I had replied to all
inquiries with some dignity and spirit, attributing my ruffled condition
to an assault on the part of Johnson, when he was already under the
shadow of his seizure. I had directed his removal, and grudged him no
professional attention that it was in my power to bestow. But afterwards,
locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden
ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror
and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason would
give under the strain.
Yet I had more to endure and to triumph over.
Near morning I fell into a troubled sleep, throughout which the drawn
twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever
spelt out of the alphabet of fear. If my body rested, my brain was an
open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to "sit at squat" in.
Suddenly I woke to the fact that there was a knocking at my door--that
there had been for some little time.
I cried, "Come in!" finding a weak restorative in the mere sound of my
own human voice; then, remembering the key was turned, bade the visitor
wait until I could come to him.
Scrambling, feeling dazed and white-livered, out of bed, I opened the
door, and met one of the warders on the threshold. The man looked scared,
and his lips, I noticed, were set in a somewhat boding fashion.
"Can you come at once, sir?" he said. "There's summat wrong with the
Governor."
"Wrong? What's the matter with him?"
"Why,"--he looked down, rubbed an imaginary protuberance smooth with his
foot, and glanced up at me again with a quick, furtive expression,--"he's
got his face set in the grating of 47, and danged if a man Jack of us can
get him to move or speak."
I turned away, feeling sick. I hurriedly pulled on coat and trousers, and
hurriedly went off with my summoner. Reason was all absorbed in a wildest
phantasy of apprehension.
"Who found him?" I muttered, as we sped on.
"Vokins see him go down the corridor about half after eight, sir, and see
him give a start like when he noticed the trap open. It's never been so
before in my time. Johnson must ha' done it last night, before he were
took."
"Yes, yes."
"The man said the Governor went to shut it, it seemed, and to draw his
face to'ards the bars in so doin'. Then he see him a-lookin' through, as
he thought; but nat'rally it weren't no business of his'n, and he went
off about his work. But when he come anigh agen, fifteen minutes later,
there were the Governor in the same position; and he got scared over it,
and called out to one or two of us."
"Why didn't one of you ask the Major if anything was wrong?"
"Bless you! we did; and no answer. And we pulled him, compatible with
discipline, but--"
"But what?"
"He's stuck."
"Stuck!"
"See for yourself, sir. That's all I ask."
I did, a moment later. A little group was collected about the door of
cell 47, and the members of it spoke together in whispers, as if they
were frightened men. One young fellow, with a face white in patches, as
if it had been floured, slid from them as I approached, and accosted me
tremulously.
"Don't go anigh, sir. There's something wrong about the place."
I pulled myself together, forcibly beating down the excitement reawakened
by the associations of the spot. In the discomfiture of others' nerves I
found my own restoration.
"Don't be an ass!" I said, in a determined voice, "There's nothing here
that can't be explained. Make way for me, please!"
They parted and let me through, and I saw him. He stood, spruce,
frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against
and _into_ the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a
bar of the trap. His posture was as of one caught and striving
frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval
between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea. He stood quite
motionless--taut and on the strain, as it were--and nothing of his face
was visible but the back ridges of his jaw-bones, showing white through a
bush of red whiskers.
"Major Shrike!" I rapped out, and, allowing myself no hesitation, reached
forth my hand and grasped his shoulder. The body vibrated under my touch,
but he neither answered nor made sign of hearing me. Then I pulled at him
forcibly, and ever with increasing strength. His fingers held like steel
braces. He seemed glued to the trap, like Theseus to the rock.
Hastily I peered round, to see if I could get glimpse of his face. I
noticed enough to send me back with a little stagger.
"Has none of you got a key to this door?" I asked, reviewing the scared
faces about me, than which my own was no less troubled, I feel sure.
"Only the Governor, sir," said the warder who had fetched me. "There's
not a man but him amongst us that ever seen this opened."
He was wrong there, I could have told him; but held my tongue, for
obvious reasons.
"I want it opened. Will one of you feel in his pockets?"
Not a soul stirred. Even had not sense of discipline precluded, that of a
certain inhuman atmosphere made fearful creatures of them all.
"Then," said I, "I must do it myself."
I turned once more to the stiff-strung figure, had actually put hand on
it, when an exclamation from Vokins arrested me.
"There's a key--there, sir!" he said--"stickin' out yonder between its
feet."
Sure enough there was--Johnson's, no doubt, that had been shot from its
socket by the clapping to of the door, and afterwards kicked aside by the
warder in his convulsive struggles.
I stooped, only too thankful for the respite, and drew it forth. I had
seen it but once before, yet I recognised it at a glance.
Now, I confess, my heart felt ill as I slipped the key into the wards,
and a sickness of resentment at the tyranny of Fate in making me its
helpless minister surged up in my veins. Once, with my fingers on the
iron loop, I paused, and ventured a fearful side glance at the figure
whose crookt elbow almost touched my face; then, strung to the high
pitch of inevitability, I shot the lock, pushed at the door, and in the
act, made a back leap into the corridor.
Scarcely, in doing so, did I look for the totter and collapse outwards of
the rigid form. I had expected to see it fall away, face down, into the
cell, as its support swung from it. Yet it was, I swear, as if something
from within had relaxed its grasp and given the fearful dead man a
swingeing push outwards as the door opened.
It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from all
its spectators--me included--came a sudden drawn sound, like wind in a
keyhole.
What can I say, or how describe it? A dead thing it was--but the face!
Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the rest
seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless plate of
yellow and expressionless flesh.
And it was this I had seen in the glass!
* * * * *
There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during
which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or
suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least desire
of independence. It was not that I was actually ill or actually insane. A
merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all, leaving
me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary to the
right ordering of my behaviour.
I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but this
was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a _locum tenens_--a practitioner
of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to officiate in my
absence--than to cosset a complaint that in its inactivity was purely
negative. I could review what had happened with a calmness as profound
as if I had read of it in a book. I could have wished to continue my
duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me. But the saner
medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful
course. He was right. I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my
lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour--leapt at a bound, probably,
from inertia to flaming lunacy.
I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak. It
was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened
the ugly outlines.
Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me
according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious
evasion of it would have distressed me.
"Hammond," I said one day, "I have never yet asked you. How did I give my
evidence at the inquest?"
"Like a doctor and a sane man."
"That's good. But it was a difficult course to steer. You conducted the
post-mortem. Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike you?"
"Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital
muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars
as to cause bruising and actual abrasion. He must have been dead some
little time when you found him."
"And nothing else? You noticed nothing else in his face--a sort of
obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?"
"Oh, dear, no! nothing but the painful constriction that marks any
ordinary fatal attack of _angina pectoris_.--There's a rum breach of
promise case in the paper to-day. You should read it; it'll make you
laugh."
I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the
change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.
* * * * *
One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake
in me once more. It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling.
Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty
path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful
thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped--of
the demons my witlessness had baffled.
The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by
experience.
Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and congratulated
me upon it.
"Go slow at first, old man," he said. "You've fairly sloughed the old
skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one. Walk in it at
present, and be content."
I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice. I got leave of
absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we
wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of the
many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.
"_Then did my love awake,
Most like a lily-flower,
And as the lovely queene of heaven,
So shone shee in her bower._"
Ah, me! ah, me! when was it? A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime?
Alas! "Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his crowch." And will
the yews root in _my_ heart, I wonder?
I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my
visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packet addressed to
me, and jealously sealed and fastened. My friend's communication ran as
follows:--
"There died here yesterday afternoon a warder, Johnson--he who had that
apoplectic seizure, you will remember, the night before poor Shrike's
exit. I attended him to the end, and, being alone with him an hour before
the finish, he took the enclosed from under his pillow, and a solemn oath
from me that I would forward it direct to you, sealed as you will find
it, and permit no other soul to examine or even touch it. I acquit myself
of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the
responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of
events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the--not
unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain. It was patent from what
I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at
that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its
character. It seems there was some nonsense abroad in the prison about a
certain cell, and that there were fools who thought fit to associate
Johnson's attack and the other's death with the opening of that cell's
door. I have given the new Governor a tip, and he has stopped all that.
We have examined the cell in company, and found it, as one might suppose,
a very ordinary chamber. The two men died perfectly natural deaths, and
there is the last to be said on the subject. I mention it only from the
fear that enclosed may contain some allusion to the rubbish, a perusal of
which might check the wholesome convalescence of your thoughts. If you
take my advice, you will throw the packet into the fire unread. At least,
if you do examine it, postpone the duty till you feel yourself absolutely
impervious to any mental trickery, and--bear in mind that you are a
worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional
profession."
* * * * *
I smiled at the last clause, for I was now in a condition to feel a
rather warm shame over my erst weak-knee'd collapse before a sheet and an
illuminated turnip. I took the packet to my bedroom, shut the door, and
sat myself down by the open window. The garden lay below me, and the dewy
meadows beyond. In the one, bees were busy ruffling the ruddy
gillyflowers and April stocks; in the other, the hedge twigs were all
frosted with Mary buds, as if Spring had brushed them with the fleece of
her wings in passing.
I fetched a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and brought
out the enclosure. Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was
clipt to silence. It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled
me with an odd feeling of uncanniness, and I shivered slightly.
"Bah!" I said to myself determinedly. "There is a shrewd nip in the wind,
for all the show of sunlight;" and I rose, pulled down the window, and
resumed my seat.
Then in the closed room, that had become deathly quiet by contrast, I
opened and read the dead man's letter.
* * * * *
"Sir,--I hope you will read what I here put down. I lay it on you as a
solemn injunction, for I am a dying man, and I know it. And to who is
my death due, and the Governor's death, if not to you, for your pryin'
and curiosity, as surely as if you had drove a nife through our harts?
Therefore, I say, Read this, and take my burden from me, for it has been
a burden; and now it is right that you that interfered should have it on
your own mortal shoulders. The Major is dead and I am dying, and in the
first of my fit it went on in my head like cimbells that the trap was
left open, and that if he passed he would look in and _it_ would get him.
For he knew not fear, neither would he submit to bullying by God or
devil.
"Now I will tell you the truth, and Heaven quit you of your
responsibility in our destruction.
"There wasn't another man to me like the Governor in all the countries of
the world. Once he brought me to life after doctors had given me up for
dead; but he willed it, and I lived; and ever afterwards I loved him as a
dog loves its master. That was in the Punjab; and I came home to England
with him, and was his servant when he got his appointment to the jail
here. I tell you he was a proud and fierce man, but under control and
tender to those he favoured; and I will tell you also a strange thing
about him. Though he was a soldier and an officer, and strict in
discipline as made men fear and admire him, his heart at bottom was all
for books, and literature, and such-like gentle crafts. I had his
confidence, as a man gives his confidence to his dog, and before me
sometimes he unbent as he never would before others. In this way I learnt
the bitter sorrow of his life. He had once hoped to be a poet,
acknowledged as such before the world. He was by natur' an idelist, as
they call it, and God knows what it meant to him to come out of the
woods, so to speak, and sweat in the dust of cities; but he did it, for
his will was of tempered steel. He buried his dreams in the clouds and
came down to earth greatly resolved, but with one undying hate. It is not
good to hate as he could, and worse to be hated by such as him; and I
will tell you the story, and what it led to.
"It was when he was a subaltern that he made up his mind to the plunge.
For years he had placed all his hopes and confidents in a book of verses
he had wrote, and added to, and improved during that time. A little
encouragement, a little word of praise, was all he looked for, and then
he was ready to buckle to again, profitin' by advice, and do better. He
put all the love and beauty of his heart into that book, and at last,
after doubt, and anguish, and much diffidents, he published it and give
it to the world. Sir, it fell what they call still-born from the press.
It was like a green leaf flutterin' down in a dead wood. To a proud
and hopeful man, bubblin' with music, the pain of neglect, when he come
to realize it, was terrible. But nothing was said, and there was nothing
to say. In silence he had to endure and suffer.
"But one day, during maneuvers, there came to the camp a grey-faced man,
a newspaper correspondent, and young Shrike knocked up a friendship
with him. Now how it come about I cannot tell, but so it did that this
skip-kennel wormed the lad's sorrow out of him, and his confidents,
swore he'd been damnabilly used, and that when he got back he'd crack up
the book himself in his own paper. He was a fool for his pains, and a
serpent in his cruelty. The notice come out as promised, and, my God! the
author was laughed and mocked at from beginning to end. Even confidentses
he had given to the creature was twisted to his ridicule, and his very
appearance joked over. And the mess got wind of it, and made a rare story
for the dog days.
"He bore it like a soldier, and that he became heart and liver from the
moment. But he put something to the account of the grey-faced man and
locked it up in his breast.
"He come across him again years afterwards in India, and told him very
politely that he hadn't forgotten him, and didn't intend to. But he was
anigh losin' sight of him there for ever and a day, for the creature took
cholera, or what looked like it, and rubbed shoulders with death and the
devil before he pulled through. And he come across him again over here,
and that was the last of him, as you shall see presently.
"Once, after I knew the Major (he were Captain then), I was a-brushin'
his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass. Then he twisted
upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he,--
"'The dog was right, Johnson: this isn't the face of a poet. I was a
presumtious ass, and born to cast up figgers with a pen behind my ear.'
"'Captain,' I says, 'if you was skinned, you'd look like any other man
without his. The quality of a soul isn't expressed by a coat.'
"'Well,' he answers, 'my soul's pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one
Bluebeard chamber in it that's been kep' locked ever so many years.
It's nice and dirty by this time, I expect,' he says. Then the grin comes
on his mouth again. 'I'll open it some day,' he says, 'and look. There's
something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish, with the wind in
my petticuts. Perhaps I'll get the chance to set somebody else dancing
by-and-by.'
"He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in this
very jail.
"It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison was
deserted. Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the empty
courts. The contract for restoration hadn't been signed, and for months,
and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein' done.
"Near the beginnin' of this period, one day comes, for the third time of
the Major's seein' him, the grey-faced man. 'Let bygones be bygones,'
he says. 'I was a good friend to you, though you didn't know it; and now,
I expect, you're in the way to thank me.'
"'I am,' says the Major.
"'Of course,' he answers. 'Where would be your fame and reputation as one
of the leadin' prison reformers of the day if you had kep' on in that
riming nonsense?'
"'Have you come for my thanks?' says the Governor.
"'I've come,' says the grey-faced man, 'to examine and report upon your
system.'
"'For your paper?'
"'Possibly; but to satisfy myself of its efficacy, in the first
instance.'
"'You aren't commissioned, then?'
"'No; I come on my own responsibility.'
"'Without consultation with any one?'
"'Absolutely without. I haven't even a wife to advise me,' he says, with
a yellow grin. What once passed for cholera had set the bile on his skin
like paint, and he had caught a manner of coughing behind his hand like a
toast-master.
"'I know,' says the Major, looking him steady in the face, 'that what you
say about me and my affairs is sure to be actuated by conscientious
motives.'
"'Ah,' he answers. 'You're sore about that review still, I see.'
"'Not at all,' says the Major; 'and, in proof, I invite you to be my
guest for the night, and to-morrow I'll show you over the prison and
explain my system.'
"The creature cried, 'Done!' and they set to and discussed jail matters
in great earnestness. I couldn't guess the Governor's intentions, but,
somehow, his manner troubled me. And yet I can remember only one point of
his talk. He were always dead against making public show of his
birds. 'They're there for reformation, not ignimony,' he'd say. Prisons
in the old days were often, with the asylum and the work'us, made the
holiday show-places of towns. I've heard of one Justice of the Peace, up
North, who, to save himself trouble, used to sign a lot of blank orders
for leave to view, so that applicants needn't bother him when they wanted
to go over. They've changed all that, and the Governor were instrumental
in the change.
"'It's against my rule,' he said that night, 'to exhibit to a stranger
without a Government permit; but, seein' the place is empty, and for old
remembrance' sake, I'll make an exception in your favour, and you shall
learn all I can show you of the inside of a prison.'
"Now this was natural enough; but I was uneasy.
"He treated his guest royally; so much that when we assembled the next
mornin' for the inspection, the grey-faced man were shaky as a wet dog.
But the Major were all set prim and dry, like the soldier he was.
"We went straight away down corridor B, and at cell 47 we stopped.
"'We will begin our inspection here,' said the Governor. 'Johnson, open
the door.'
"I had the keys of the row; fitted in the right one, and pushed open the
door.
"'After you, sir,' said the Major; and the creature walked in, and he
shut the door on him.
"I think he smelt a rat at once, for he began beating on the wood and
calling out to us. But the Major only turned round to me with his face
like a stone.
"'Take that key from the bunch,' he said, 'and give it to me.'
"I obeyed, all in a tremble, and he took and put it in his pocket.
"'My God, Major!' I whispered, 'what are you going to do with him?'
"'Silence, sir!' he said. 'How dare you question your superior officer!'
"And the noise inside grew louder.
"The Governor, he listened to it a moment like music; then he unbolted
and flung open the trap, and the creature's face came at it like a wild
beast's.
"'Sir,' said the Major to it, 'you can't better understand my system than
by experiencing it. What an article for your paper you could write
already--almost as pungint a one as that in which you ruined the hopes
and prospects of a young cockney poet.'
"The man mouthed at the bars. He was half-mad, I think, in that one
minute.
"'Let me out!' he screamed. 'This is a hideous joke! Let me out!'
"'When you are quite quiet--deathly quiet,' said the Major, 'you shall
come out. Not before;' and he shut the trap in its face very softly.
"'Come, Johnson, march!' he said, and took the lead, and we walked out of
the prison.
"I was like to faint, but I dared not disobey, and the man's screeching
followed us all down the empty corridors and halls, until we shut the
first great door on it.
"It may have gone on for hours, alone in that awful emptiness. The
creature was a reptile, but the thought sickened my heart.
"And from that hour till his death, five months later, he rotted and
maddened in his dreadful tomb."
* * * * *
There was more, but I pushed the ghastly confession from me at this point
in uncontrollable loathing and terror. Was it possible--possible, that
injured vanity could so falsify its victim's every tradition of decency?
"Oh!" I muttered, "what a disease is ambition! Who takes one step towards
it puts his foot on Alsirat!"
It was minutes before my shocked nerves were equal to a resumption of the
task; but at last I took it up again, with a groan.
* * * * *
"I don't think at first I realized the full mischief the Governor
intended to do. At least, I hoped he only meant to give the man a good
fright and then let him go. I might have known better. How could he ever
release him without ruining himself?
"The next morning he summoned me to attend him. There was a strange
new look of triumph in his face, and in his hand he held a heavy
hunting-crop. I pray to God he acted in madness, but my duty and
obedience was to him.
"'There is sport toward, Johnson,' he said. 'My dervish has got to
dance.'
"I followed him quiet. We listened when I opened the jail door, but the
place was silent as the grave. But from the cell, when we reached it,
came a low, whispering sound.
"The Governor slipped the trap and looked through.
"'All right,' he said, and put the key in the door and flung it open.
"He were sittin' crouched on the ground, and he looked up at us
vacant-like. His face were all fallen down, as it were, and his mouth
never ceased to shake and whisper.
"The Major shut the door and posted me in a corner. Then he moved to the
creature with his whip.
"'Up!' he cried. 'Up, you dervish, and dance to us!' and he brought the
thong with a smack across his shoulders.
"The creature leapt under the blow, and then to his feet with a cry, and
the Major whipped him till he danced. All round the cell he drove him,
lashing and cutting--and again, and many times again, until the poor
thing rolled on the floor whimpering and sobbing. I shall have to give an
account of this some day. I shall have to whip my master with a red-hot
serpent round the blazing furnace of the pit, and I shall do it with
agony, because here my love and my obedience was to him.
"When it was finished, he bade me put down food and drink that I had
brought with me, and come away with him; and we went, leaving him
rolling on the floor of the cell, and shut him alone in the empty prison
until we should come again at the same time to-morrow.
"So day by day this went on, and the dancing three or four times a week,
until at last the whip could be left behind, for the man would scream and
begin to dance at the mere turning of the key in the lock. And he danced
for four months, but not the fifth.
"Nobody official came near us all this time. The prison stood lonely as a
deserted ruin where dark things have been done.
"Once, with fear and trembling, I asked my master how he would account
for the inmate of 47 if he was suddenly called upon by authority to
open the cell; and he answered, smiling,--
"I should say it was my mad brother. By his own account, he showed me a
brother's love, you know. It would be thought a liberty; but the
authorities, I think, would stretch a point for me. But if I got
sufficient notice, I should clear out the cell.'
"I asked him how, with my eyes rather than my lips, and he answered me
only with a look.
"And all this time he was, outside the prison, living the life of a good
man--helping the needy, ministering to the poor. He even entertained
occasionally, and had more than one noisy party in his house.
"But the fifth month the creature danced no more. He was a dumb, silent
animal then, with matted hair and beard; and when one entered he would
only look up at one pitifully, as if he said, 'My long punishment is
nearly ended'. How it came that no inquiry was ever made about him I
know not, but none ever was. Perhaps he was one of the wandering gentry
that nobody ever knows where they are next. He was unmarried, and had
apparently not told of his intended journey to a soul.
"And at the last he died in the night. We found him lying stiff and
stark in the morning, and scratched with a piece of black crust on a
stone of the wall these strange words: 'An Eddy on the Floor'. Just
that--nothing else.
"Then the Governor came and looked down, and was silent. Suddenly he
caught me by the shoulder.
"'Johnson', he cried, 'if it was to do again, I would do it! I repent of
nothing. But he has paid the penalty, and we call quits. May he rest
in peace!'
"'Amen!' I answered low. Yet I knew our turn must come for this.
"We buried him in quicklime under the wall where the murderers lie, and I
made the cell trim and rubbed out the writing, and the Governor locked
all up and took away the key. But he locked in more than he bargained
for.
"For months the place was left to itself, and neither of us went anigh
47. Then one day the workmen was to be put in, and the Major he took
me round with him for a last examination of the place before they come.
"He hesitated a bit outside a particular cell; but at last he drove in
the key and kicked open the door.
"'My God!' he says, 'he's dancing still!'
"My heart was thumpin', I tell you, as I looked over his shoulder. What
did we see? What you well understand, sir; but, for all it was no more
than that, we knew as well as if it was shouted in our ears that it was
him, dancin'. It went round by the walls and drew towards us, and as it
stole near I screamed out, 'An Eddy on the Floor!' and seized and dragged
the Major out and clapped to the door behind us.
"'Oh!' I said, 'in another moment it would have had us'.
"He looked at me gloomily.
"'Johnson', he said, 'I'm not to be frighted or coerced. He may dance,
but he shall dance alone. Get a screwdriver and some screws and fasten up
this trap. No one from this time looks into this cell.'
"I did as he bid me, sweatin'; and I swear all the time I wrought I
dreaded a hand would come through the trap and clutch mine.
"On one pretex' or another, from that day till the night you meddled with
it, he kep' that cell as close shut as a tomb. And he went his ways,
discardin' the past from that time forth. Now and again a over-sensitive
prisoner in the next cell would complain of feelin' uncomfortable. If
possible, he would be removed to another; if not, he was damd for his
fancies. And so it might be goin' on to now, if you hadn't pried and
interfered. I don't blame you at this moment, sir. Likely you were an
instrument in the hands of Providence; only, as the instrument, you must
now take the burden of the truth on your own shoulders. I am a dying man,
but I cannot die till I have confessed. Per'aps you may find it in your
hart some day to give up a prayer for me--but it must be for the Major as
well.
"Your obedient servant,
"J. JOHNSON."
* * * * *
What comment of my own can I append to this wild narrative?
Professionally, and apart from personal experiences, I should rule it the
composition of an epileptic. That a noted journalist, nameless as he was
and is to me, however nomadic in habit, could disappear from human ken,
and his fellows rest content to leave him unaccounted for, seems a tax
upon credulity so stupendous that I cannot seriously endorse the
statement.
Yet, also--there _is_ that little matter of my personal experience.