COMRADES IN CAPTIVITY
After that we had much intercourse. There was, indeed, little else to
do, though now I know that the periods when I could get no answer were
those in which the three sisters still in hiding were in the habit of
visiting Elsie in company generally with Mad Jeremy. Little by little,
however, Miss Stennis--well, after being addressed as "Dearest Joe" I
suppose I may as well say "Elsie"--told me all about her position--the
manner of her capture, and the liberty, comparative though it was,
which she enjoyed. I made up my mind at once that if I were to escape
at all, it must be through her chamber.
It was about this time that the truth as to the manner in which I was
attached to the wall flashed upon me. I could see it all now, and
wondered how I had not understood it before. I have already explained
that the rings to which my ankles were attached ended in round rods or
bolts that passed through the wall. But the bolts turned easily with
every movement of my body, instead of being (as one would have
expected) firmed into the thickness of the wall. Now it was all clear
as an invoice. The bolts passed right through into the chamber
occupied by Elsie, and were there attached either to other similar
rings or held in place by a crossbar of some sort.
I used the code--my foolish thought for Joe, now so useful--to ask the
girl if she could see anything at the place upon which I knocked with
my feet. She replied that it was impossible, because in that place
there was a deep cupboard of which she had not got the key. Now, I
know the locks of cupboard doors. I sell them. And the fact is that
most of them are worthless as fastenings, except perhaps a few like the
one in Miss Elsie's room, which had been planned by the monks some
hundred years ago.
But even so, the lock would almost certainly have had to be
renewed--probably quite recently--in view of the use to which the
underground passages and cellars were to be put. I therefore "knocked"
a message through to Elsie to secrete a stout knife. She had it
already. I might have expected as much of her. Then I told her how to
slide the blade of the knife with its back downward into the crack of
the door. The supple bend of the knife blade, taking the shape of the
bolt, would in all probability after a little trial cause it to slide
back easily.
After a little Elsie succeeded. The bolt, as I expected, was a biased
one, not square on the face, and hardly caught into the bolt hole at
all. It had come from my own shop, and I knew its capabilities. They
make them by the hundred gross, all as like as peas, and just
sufficiently strong to keep out the cat. But mostly, if people think a
place is locked, it _is_ locked--especially women.
I could hardly wait the reply, after Elsie had been into the deep
cupboard. It was all I could hope for. The bolts came through into
the cupboard about three feet from the floor, which showed that my
chamber was higher than hers; they were caught by iron linch-pins in
the same way that an axle of a red farm cart is fastened on to the
outside of the hub.
"Could Elsie knock them out, did she think?"
Elsie thought she could, but she would need something heavy--like a bar
of iron. She had it--the handle of the broken rake that had been used
in the oven furnace. So the first thing after supper and the departure
of her visitors, Elsie knocked out the pins. I drew out the bolts on
my side, and was free to move about--with, it is true, the rings and
bolts jangling about my ankles. Still, in part I was free, and my
heart rose within me.
First of all I managed with the cord of my hat to tie up the bolts so
that I could move noiselessly about, being careful for the time being
not to go far from my couch. For of course it was necessary for me, at
the first alarm, to undo the cords and thrust the bolts through the
holes, so that no change might be apparent to my jailers. Still, the
thing comforted me. For not only was I able to take some exercise, but
to attend to the proper ordering of my chamber, which had hitherto been
carried out in the most perfunctory manner by Jeremy, and also at very
uncertain intervals.
But what chiefly occupied my mind was the thought that, according to
Elsie the oven was of easy access from her room, and doubtless would
have been visited frequently by whoever had the charge of the baking.
I could therefore, with Elsie's iron bar, if no better turned up, make
a good fight for both our liberties. The situation was getting
altogether too ridiculous for a man of business habits, shut up within
a few miles of his own horses, lorries, his grocery, ironmongery, and
other supplying and contracting establishments.
How I was ever to face Bob Kingsman I did not know. I wondered if all
this time he were taking his orders from "Dearest Joe." Joe indeed! I
lacked confidence in my son as a man of business--as it turned out,
without reason. He might even have brought me to the verge of
bankruptcy. There were, I was informed, two young ladies from London
dwelling in my house, of whom--especially one of them--Elsie reported
to me by code a very poor account. They seemed completely to have
gotten the mastery over my poor wife, who was, as it appeared,
prostrated with grief--a thing I should not have anticipated. On every
account it seemed about time that I should come to life again.
The question was merely one of detail. How?
Of course, I did not hide from myself that as the days went by, marked,
for me, only by the lighting and darkening of my jackdaw's entrance
above, many things would certainly be happening outside. For one
thing, I was a prominent ratepayer, and the cleaning and lighting
taxes, as well as the school and road rates for the parishes of
Breckonside and Over Breckonton, would be coming due. If for nothing
else, they would be sure to hunt me up to pay them. For, as I had
appealed against them all--on principle--Joe would not be able to
settle them without me. He would have done it if he could, having no
"fight" in him--that boy taking after his mother--but my lawyer would
see him further first, being a minor. I could trust Mr. C. P.
Richards--he would not pay a farthing till he had an order under my
hand or a proof of my decease. Yes. They would seek for me. No doubt
of that.
And Elsie? Of course she was not a ratepayer; but--well, if, as was
likely, they had seen her shake out her skirts to trip across a muddy
road they would be just as great fools as myself.
And they were greater--every man of them. I know Breckonside.
Well, now, to join on our doings in the cellar (as it were) to those up
aloft in the front hall, it was about this time that our meals began to
wax irregular. The Breckonside mob, ill led, and incapable of knowing
exactly what it wanted, had come and gone, defeated by the cunning of
Miss Aphra--very clever woman, Miss Aphra--and the cheerful, innocent
brutality of Dr. Hector.
There was still talk about us, no doubt, but desultory--some semblance
of action, too. In fine, little real work was being done, when our
provisions began to get scarce down below in the old stone storehouses
of the monks.
Indeed, so far as I was concerned, I should have starved if Elsie
Stennis, who was still occasionally remembered, had not pushed through
the bolt holes long strips of the home-made loaves with which Mad
Jeremy supplied her. As for water, she had a spoon tied to the end of
the iron rod; and I took it as a babe does pap. It was, I am free to
say, most kindly done. For at no time had she too much for herself,
and though I do not make too much of a thing like that, neither, on the
other hand, do I forget it. After a long, sleepless night of thought,
I resolved that the very next evening I should borrow the iron rod from
Elsie, which had formerly been used as a rake shaft of the bakery
furnace.
Elsie passed it to me through the communicating hole. But there was a
hooked handle at the end which prevented it coming all the way till
Elsie in her dark cupboard had made a hole sufficiently large to push
it through; while I, with Elsie's knife, cut out a piece of the wooden
lining of my cell so that it could again be fitted in to avoid
suspicion. Then I had a thoroughly strong bar of iron in my
possession, with which, considerably elated, I began to make a way
through into Elsie's room. But it was slow work. The knife had first
to be serrated on the back to form a kind of rough saw. I did this
with a sort of projecting tooth or claw of the rake handle, where it
had been broken off. And I own that the work was not without a certain
charm of its own. In my youth I remember--to my shame--to have carried
the life of a certain Count of Monte Cristo--whose name I have not met
with elsewhere, but with whom I should much have liked to have had
business relations--under my waistcoat to school. He appears to have
been, like us, a prisoner. And his account of how he pierced thick
walls was not wholly without interest. I wished I had kept the notes I
made in my pocket-book reporting his manner of procedure. It was from
him, for instance, that I got the idea of the rook's feather, while the
jackdaws, chunnering to themselves up above and occasionally descending
to peck, did the rest.
Ultimately I was enabled to cut through the wooden lining of my cell,
only to find the wall behind of solid masonry, but with the lime
hopefully crumbly round the little holes by which the bars passed into
Elsie's cupboard.
All this took some time, and I required the help of Miss Stennis at
every step. I fear some nights the young lady did not get much sleep,
for every particle of debris--stone, lime, sawdust--had to be conveyed
through the narrow holes made for the leg bolts, then taken up in the
palms of her hands and conveyed to the little trapdoor behind her bed
beneath which was the flowing water. It was not much of an operation
on my side--rough work, ill done--and had any man in my employ tried to
pass off such workmanship on me, I should have showed him round the
yard with the point of my boot--ay, and out at the front gate, too!
Still, it was done, which was the main thing. And after I had
bethought me to widen the two bolt holes by making them one--all, that
is, except the pieces of wood which hid the tunnel on either side--the
work went on much faster. You see, I was always in fear of Mad Jeremy
or somebody coming to search. But, as a matter of fact, nobody looked
near me, and on Elsie's side she was protected by the dark cupboard.
Still, it was better to leave nothing to chance, and to treat Mad
Jeremy, with his wild eyes and insane freaks, as if he had been the
most suspicious of jailers.
But any one who gives the matter a thought will see in what a
humiliating position I was placed, utterly forgotten, as it seemed,
even by those who had taken possession of my cheque in order to compel
me to sign it. Was it possible, I asked myself, that they had found
some one to forge my signature, negotiated it at a distance, and fled
with the proceeds? Of Mad Jeremy I still had news. For at intervals
he supplied Miss Stennis with food, sometimes days old, for it was but
seldom that he baked now; and though the weather was milder without,
both Elsie's cell and mine became much less comfortable, though not, so
far as I could observe, damp.
It was evidently a period of great excitement with the lunatic who had
constituted himself our caretaker. Putting my ear to the excavation, I
could hear him whistling and singing while he was in the chamber behind
the oven talking to Elsie. Once I heard him. playing upon some
instrument, which sounded like the bagpipes, but was in reality his
precious fiddle. And I will say that I lay and gripped my nails into
my hands in impotent anger to think that there was, according to my
most accurate measurements, at least a foot of stone and lime, laid
with burned shell and sand as only the old monks knew how, all to pick
out piecemeal with the point of my weapon before I could be of the
slightest use to the young lady in the case of an attack.
Once it was evident that Jeremy had been listening at the door. He
opened upon me suddenly and demanded what was that knocking he had
heard? I answered that I was trying to attract attention to the fact
that I had been several days without either food or water. He looked
at me suspiciously, and said--
"It sounded more like somebody beating a tune!"
I turned over immediately, and, with my knuckles as far away as
possible from the boards I had been so long patiently sawing out, I
tattooed the measure of "The Wind that Shakes the Barley," the
identical tune the madman had been playing in Elsie's chamber.
"Oh!" he cried, "can you fiddle?"
"No," said I, "but I have a good ear, and I used to be able to foot it
in my day!"
"So," he said, "then you shall have a bite and a sup for that. I had
thought you were only an old penny-worth-o'-snuff money-grabber!"
And along with the provisions he fetched in his fiddle, and played me
nearly out of my reason, for two mortal hours. Like nothing human it
was, and I, all the time with my toes pressed to my ill-fitting sawed
panel, fearful, that it would fall outward and reveal the work on which
I had been engaged. I declare I would rather have supped with Elsie
out of the spoon tied to the oven rake.