CHAPTER I.

THE MAN WHO LAUGHS

A Romance of English History

By

VICTOR HUGO

CONTENTS

Preliminary Chapter.--Ursus

Another Preliminary Chapter.--The Comprachicos

PART I.

BOOK THE FIRST.--NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN.

I. Portland Bill

II. Left Alone

III. Alone

IV. Questions

V. The Tree of Human Invention

VI. Struggle between Death and Night

VII. The North Point of Portland

BOOK THE SECOND.--THE HOOKER AT SEA.

I. Superhuman Laws

II. Our First Rough Sketches Filled in

III. Troubled Men on the Troubled Sea

IV. A Cloud Different from the Others enters on the Scene

V. Hardquanonne

VI. They Think that Help is at Hand

VII. Superhuman Horrors

VIII. Nix et Nox

IX. The Charge Confided to a Raging Sea

X. The Colossal Savage, the Storm

XI. The Caskets

XII. Face to Face with the Rock

XIII. Face to Face with Night

XIV. Ortach

XV. Portentosum Mare

XVI. The Problem Suddenly Works in Silence

XVII. The Last Resource

XVIII. The Highest Resource

BOOK THE THIRD.--THE CHILD IN THE SHADOW.

I. Chesil

II. The Effect of Snow

III. A Burden Makes a Rough Road Rougher

IV. Another Form of Desert

V. Misanthropy Plays Its Pranks

VI. The Awaking

PART II.

BOOK THE FIRST.--THE EVERLASTING PRESENCE OF THE PAST. MAN REFLECTS MAN.

I. Lord Clancharlie

II. Lord David Dirry-Moir

III. The Duchess Josiana

IV. The Leader of Fashion

V. Queen Anne

VI. Barkilphedro

VII. Barkilphedro Gnaws His Way

VIII. Inferi

IX. Hate is as Strong as Love

X. The Flame which would be Seen if Man were Transparent

XI. Barkilphedro in Ambuscade

XII. Scotland, Ireland, and England

BOOK THE SECOND.--GWYNPLAINE AND DEA.

I. Wherein we see the Face of Him of whom we have hitherto seen only

the Acts

II. Dea

III. “Oculos non Habet, et Videt”

IV. Well-matched Lovers

V. The Blue Sky through the Black Cloud

VI. Ursus as Tutor, and Ursus as Guardian

VII. Blindness Gives Lessons in Clairvoyance

VIII. Not only Happiness, but Prosperity

IX. Absurdities which Folks without Taste call Poetry

X. An Outsider’s View of Men and Things

XI. Gwynplaine Thinks Justice, and Ursus Talks Truth

XII. Ursus the Poet Drags on Ursus the Philosopher

BOOK THE THIRD.--THE BEGINNING OF THE FISSURE.

I. The Tadcaster Inn

II. Open-Air Eloquence

III. Where the Passer-by Reappears

IV. Contraries Fraternize in Hate

V. The Wapentake

VI. The Mouse Examined by the Cats

VII. Why Should a Gold Piece Lower Itself by Mixing with a Heap of

Pennies?

VIII. Symptoms of Poisoning

IX. Abyssus Abyssum Vocat

BOOK THE FOURTH.--THE CELL OF TORTURE.

I. The Temptation of St. Gwynplaine

II. From Gay to Grave

III. Lex, Rex, Fex

IV. Ursus Spies the Police

V. A Fearful Place

VI. The Kind of Magistracy under the Wigs of Former Days

VII. Shuddering

VIII. Lamentation

BOOK THE FIFTH.--THE SEA AND FATE ARE MOVED BY THE SAME BREATH.

I. The Durability of Fragile Things

II. The Waif Knows Its Own Course

III. An Awakening

IV. Fascination

V. We Think We Remember; We Forget

BOOK THE SIXTH.--URSUS UNDER DIFFERENT ASPECTS.

I. What the Misanthrope said

II. What He did

III. Complications

IV. Moenibus Surdis Campana Muta

V. State Policy Deals with Little Matters as Well as with Great

BOOK THE SEVENTH.--THE TITANESS.

I. The Awakening

II. The Resemblance of a Palace to a Wood

III. Eve

IV. Satan

V. They Recognize, but do not Know, Each Other

BOOK THE EIGHTH.--THE CAPITOL AND THINGS AROUND IT.

I. Analysis of Majestic Matters

II. Impartiality

III. The Old Hall

IV. The Old Chamber

V. Aristocratic Gossip

VI. The High and the Low

VII. Storms of Men are Worse than Storms of Oceans

VIII. He would be a Good Brother, were he not a Good Son

BOOK THE NINTH.--IN RUINS.

I. It is through Excess of Greatness that Man reaches Excess of

Misery

II. The Dregs

CONCLUSION.--THE NIGHT AND THE SEA.

I. A Watch-dog may be a Guardian Angel

II. Barkilphedro, having aimed at the Eagle, brings down the Dove

III. Paradise Regained Below

IV. Nay; on High!

PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

URSUS.

I.

Ursus and Homo were fast friends. Ursus was a man, Homo a wolf. Their

dispositions tallied. It was the man who had christened the wolf:

probably he had also chosen his own name. Having found _Ursus_ fit for

himself, he had found _Homo_ fit for the beast. Man and wolf turned

their partnership to account at fairs, at village fêtes, at the corners

of streets where passers-by throng, and out of the need which people

seem to feel everywhere to listen to idle gossip and to buy quack

medicine. The wolf, gentle and courteously subordinate, diverted the

crowd. It is a pleasant thing to behold the tameness of animals. Our

greatest delight is to see all the varieties of domestication parade

before us. This it is which collects so many folks on the road of royal

processions.

Ursus and Homo went about from cross-road to cross-road, from the High

Street of Aberystwith to the High Street of Jedburgh, from country-side

to country-side, from shire to shire, from town to town. One market

exhausted, they went on to another. Ursus lived in a small van upon

wheels, which Homo was civilized enough to draw by day and guard by

night. On bad roads, up hills, and where there were too many ruts, or

there was too much mud, the man buckled the trace round his neck and

pulled fraternally, side by side with the wolf. They had thus grown old

together. They encamped at haphazard on a common, in the glade of a

wood, on the waste patch of grass where roads intersect, at the

outskirts of villages, at the gates of towns, in market-places, in

public walks, on the borders of parks, before the entrances of churches.

When the cart drew up on a fair green, when the gossips ran up

open-mouthed and the curious made a circle round the pair, Ursus

harangued and Homo approved. Homo, with a bowl in his mouth, politely

made a collection among the audience. They gained their livelihood. The

wolf was lettered, likewise the man. The wolf had been trained by the

man, or had trained himself unassisted, to divers wolfish arts, which

swelled the receipts. “Above all things, do not degenerate into a man,”

his friend would say to him.

Never did the wolf bite: the man did now and then. At least, to bite was

the intent of Ursus. He was a misanthrope, and to italicize his

misanthropy he had made himself a juggler. To live, also; for the

stomach has to be consulted. Moreover, this juggler-misanthrope, whether

to add to the complexity of his being or to perfect it, was a doctor. To

be a doctor is little: Ursus was a ventriloquist. You heard him speak

without his moving his lips. He counterfeited, so as to deceive you, any

one’s accent or pronunciation. He imitated voices so exactly that you

believed you heard the people themselves. All alone he simulated the

murmur of a crowd, and this gave him a right to the title of

Engastrimythos, which he took. He reproduced all sorts of cries of

birds, as of the thrush, the wren, the pipit lark, otherwise called the

gray cheeper, and the ring ousel, all travellers like himself: so that

at times when the fancy struck him, he made you aware either of a public

thoroughfare filled with the uproar of men, or of a meadow loud with the

voices of beasts--at one time stormy as a multitude, at another fresh

and serene as the dawn. Such gifts, although rare, exist. In the last

century a man called Touzel, who imitated the mingled utterances of men

and animals, and who counterfeited all the cries of beasts, was

attached to the person of Buffon--to serve as a menagerie.

Ursus was sagacious, contradictory, odd, and inclined to the singular

expositions which we term fables. He had the appearance of believing in

them, and this impudence was a part of his humour. He read people’s

hands, opened books at random and drew conclusions, told fortunes,

taught that it is perilous to meet a black mare, still more perilous, as

you start for a journey, to hear yourself accosted by one who knows not

whither you are going; and he called himself a dealer in superstitions.

He used to say: “There is one difference between me and the Archbishop

of Canterbury: I avow what I am.” Hence it was that the archbishop,

justly indignant, had him one day before him; but Ursus cleverly

disarmed his grace by reciting a sermon he had composed upon Christmas

Day, which the delighted archbishop learnt by heart, and delivered from

the pulpit as his own. In consideration thereof the archbishop pardoned

Ursus.

As a doctor, Ursus wrought cures by some means or other. He made use of

aromatics; he was versed in simples; he made the most of the immense

power which lies in a heap of neglected plants, such as the hazel, the

catkin, the white alder, the white bryony, the mealy-tree, the

traveller’s joy, the buckthorn. He treated phthisis with the sundew; at

opportune moments he would use the leaves of the spurge, which plucked

at the bottom are a purgative and plucked at the top, an emetic. He

cured sore throat by means of the vegetable excrescence called Jew’s

ear. He knew the rush which cures the ox and the mint which cures the

horse. He was well acquainted with the beauties and virtues of the herb

mandragora, which, as every one knows, is of both sexes. He had many

recipes. He cured burns with the salamander wool, of which, according to

Pliny, Nero had a napkin. Ursus possessed a retort and a flask; he

effected transmutations; he sold panaceas. It was said of him that he

had once been for a short time in Bedlam; they had done him the honour

to take him for a madman, but had set him free on discovering that he

was only a poet. This story was probably not true; we have all to submit

to some such legend about us.

The fact is, Ursus was a bit of a savant, a man of taste, and an old

Latin poet. He was learned in two forms; he Hippocratized and he

Pindarized. He could have vied in bombast with Rapin and Vida. He could

have composed Jesuit tragedies in a style not less triumphant than that

of Father Bouhours. It followed from his familiarity with the venerable

rhythms and metres of the ancients, that he had peculiar figures of

speech, and a whole family of classical metaphors. He would say of a

mother followed by her two daughters, _There is a dactyl_; of a father

preceded by his two sons, _There is an anapæst_; and of a little child

walking between its grandmother and grandfather, _There is an

amphimacer_. So much knowledge could only end in starvation. The school

of Salerno says, “Eat little and often.” Ursus ate little and seldom,

thus obeying one half the precept and disobeying the other; but this was

the fault of the public, who did not always flock to him, and who did

not often buy.

Ursus was wont to say: “The expectoration of a sentence is a relief. The

wolf is comforted by its howl, the sheep by its wool, the forest by its

finch, woman by her love, and the philosopher by his epiphonema.” Ursus

at a pinch composed comedies, which, in recital, he all but acted; this

helped to sell the drugs. Among other works, he had composed an heroic

pastoral in honour of Sir Hugh Middleton, who in 1608 brought a river to

London. The river was lying peacefully in Hertfordshire, twenty miles

from London: the knight came and took possession of it. He brought a

brigade of six hundred men, armed with shovels and pickaxes; set to

breaking up the ground, scooping it out in one place, raising it in

another--now thirty feet high, now twenty feet deep; made wooden

aqueducts high in air; and at different points constructed eight hundred

bridges of stone, bricks, and timber. One fine morning the river entered

London, which was short of water. Ursus transformed all these vulgar

details into a fine Eclogue between the Thames and the New River, in

which the former invited the latter to come to him, and offered her his

bed, saying, “I am too old to please women, but I am rich enough to pay

them”--an ingenious and gallant conceit to indicate how Sir Hugh

Middleton had completed the work at his own expense.

Ursus was great in soliloquy. Of a disposition at once unsociable and

talkative, desiring to see no one, yet wishing to converse with some

one, he got out of the difficulty by talking to himself. Any one who has

lived a solitary life knows how deeply seated monologue is in one’s

nature. Speech imprisoned frets to find a vent. To harangue space is an

outlet. To speak out aloud when alone is as it were to have a dialogue

with the divinity which is within. It was, as is well known, a custom of

Socrates; he declaimed to himself. Luther did the same. Ursus took after

those great men. He had the hermaphrodite faculty of being his own

audience. He questioned himself, answered himself, praised himself,

blamed himself. You heard him in the street soliloquizing in his van.

The passers-by, who have their own way of appreciating clever people,

used to say: He is an idiot. As we have just observed, he abused himself

at times; but there were times also when he rendered himself justice.

One day, in one of these allocutions addressed to himself, he was heard

to cry out, “I have studied vegetation in all its mysteries--in the

stalk, in the bud, in the sepal, in the stamen, in the carpel, in the

ovule, in the spore, in the theca, and in the apothecium. I have

thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy--that is to say, the

formation of colours, of smell, and of taste.” There was something

fatuous, doubtless, in this certificate which Ursus gave to Ursus; but

let those who have not thoroughly sifted chromatics, osmosy, and chymosy

cast the first stone at him.

Fortunately Ursus had never gone into the Low Countries; there they

would certainly have weighed him, to ascertain whether he was of the

normal weight, above or below which a man is a sorcerer. In Holland this

weight was sagely fixed by law. Nothing was simpler or more ingenious.

It was a clear test. They put you in a scale, and the evidence was

conclusive if you broke the equilibrium. Too heavy, you were hanged; too

light, you were burned. To this day the scales in which sorcerers were

weighed may be seen at Oudewater, but they are now used for weighing

cheeses; how religion has degenerated! Ursus would certainly have had a

crow to pluck with those scales. In his travels he kept away from

Holland, and he did well. Indeed, we believe that he used never to leave

the United Kingdom.

However this may have been, he was very poor and morose, and having made

the acquaintance of Homo in a wood, a taste for a wandering life had

come over him. He had taken the wolf into partnership, and with him had

gone forth on the highways, living in the open air the great life of

chance. He had a great deal of industry and of reserve, and great skill

in everything connected with healing operations, restoring the sick to

health, and in working wonders peculiar to himself. He was considered a

clever mountebank and a good doctor. As may be imagined, he passed for a

wizard as well--not much indeed; only a little, for it was unwholesome

in those days to be considered a friend of the devil. To tell the truth,

Ursus, by his passion for pharmacy and his love of plants, laid himself

open to suspicion, seeing that he often went to gather herbs in rough

thickets where grew Lucifer’s salads, and where, as has been proved by

the Counsellor De l’Ancre, there is a risk of meeting in the evening

mist a man who comes out of the earth, “blind of the right eye,

barefooted, without a cloak, and a sword by his side.” But for the

matter of that, Ursus, although eccentric in manner and disposition, was

too good a fellow to invoke or disperse hail, to make faces appear, to

kill a man with the torment of excessive dancing, to suggest dreams fair

or foul and full of terror, and to cause the birth of cocks with four

wings. He had no such mischievous tricks. He was incapable of certain

abominations, such as, for instance, speaking German, Hebrew, or Greek,

without having learned them, which is a sign of unpardonable wickedness,

or of a natural infirmity proceeding from a morbid humour. If Ursus

spoke Latin, it was because he knew it. He would never have allowed

himself to speak Syriac, which he did not know. Besides, it is asserted

that Syriac is the language spoken in the midnight meetings at which

uncanny people worship the devil. In medicine he justly preferred Galen

to Cardan; Cardan, although a learned man, being but an earthworm to

Galen.

To sum up, Ursus was not one of those persons who live in fear of the

police. His van was long enough and wide enough to allow of his lying

down in it on a box containing his not very sumptuous apparel. He owned

a lantern, several wigs, and some utensils suspended from nails, among

which were musical instruments. He possessed, besides, a bearskin with

which he covered himself on his days of grand performance. He called

this putting on full dress. He used to say, “I have two skins; this is

the real one,” pointing to the bearskin.

The little house on wheels belonged to himself and to the wolf. Besides

his house, his retort, and his wolf, he had a flute and a violoncello on

which he played prettily. He concocted his own elixirs. His wits yielded

him enough to sup on sometimes. In the top of his van was a hole,

through which passed the pipe of a cast-iron stove; so close to his box

as to scorch the wood of it. The stove had two compartments; in one of

them Ursus cooked his chemicals, and in the other his potatoes. At night

the wolf slept under the van, amicably secured by a chain. Homo’s hair

was black, that of Ursus, gray; Ursus was fifty, unless, indeed, he was

sixty. He accepted his destiny, to such an extent that, as we have just

seen, he ate potatoes, the trash on which at that time they fed pigs and

convicts. He ate them indignant, but resigned. He was not tall--he was

long. He was bent and melancholy. The bowed frame of an old man is the

settlement in the architecture of life. Nature had formed him for

sadness. He found it difficult to smile, and he had never been able to

weep, so that he was deprived of the consolation of tears as well as of

the palliative of joy. An old man is a thinking ruin; and such a ruin

was Ursus. He had the loquacity of a charlatan, the leanness of a

prophet, the irascibility of a charged mine: such was Ursus. In his

youth he had been a philosopher in the house of a lord.

This was 180 years ago, when men were more like wolves than they are

now.

Not so very much though.

II.

Homo was no ordinary wolf. From his appetite for medlars and potatoes he

might have been taken for a prairie wolf; from his dark hide, for a

lycaon; and from his howl prolonged into a bark, for a dog of Chili. But

no one has as yet observed the eyeball of a dog of Chili sufficiently to

enable us to determine whether he be not a fox, and Homo was a real

wolf. He was five feet long, which is a fine length for a wolf, even in

Lithuania; he was very strong; he looked at you askance, which was not

his fault; he had a soft tongue, with which he occasionally licked

Ursus; he had a narrow brush of short bristles on his backbone, and he

was lean with the wholesome leanness of a forest life. Before he knew

Ursus and had a carriage to draw, he thought nothing of doing his fifty

miles a night. Ursus meeting him in a thicket near a stream of running

water, had conceived a high opinion of him from seeing the skill and

sagacity with which he fished out crayfish, and welcomed him as an

honest and genuine Koupara wolf of the kind called crab-eater.

As a beast of burden, Ursus preferred Homo to a donkey. He would have

felt repugnance to having his hut drawn by an ass; he thought too highly

of the ass for that. Moreover he had observed that the ass, a

four-legged thinker little understood by men, has a habit of cocking his

ears uneasily when philosophers talk nonsense. In life the ass is a

third person between our thoughts and ourselves, and acts as a

restraint. As a friend, Ursus preferred Homo to a dog, considering that

the love of a wolf is more rare.

Hence it was that Homo sufficed for Ursus. Homo was for Ursus more than

a companion, he was an analogue. Ursus used to pat the wolf’s empty

ribs, saying: “I have found the second volume of myself!” Again he

said, “When I am dead, any one wishing to know me need only study Homo.

I shall leave a true copy behind me.”

The English law, not very lenient to beasts of the forest, might have

picked a quarrel with the wolf, and have put him to trouble for his

assurance in going freely about the towns: but Homo took advantage of

the immunity granted by a statute of Edward IV. to servants: “Every

servant in attendance on his master is free to come and go.” Besides, a

certain relaxation of the law had resulted with regard to wolves, in

consequence of its being the fashion of the ladies of the Court, under

the later Stuarts, to have, instead of dogs, little wolves, called

adives, about the size of cats, which were brought from Asia at great

cost.

Ursus had communicated to Homo a portion of his talents: such as to

stand upright, to restrain his rage into sulkiness, to growl instead of

howling, etc.; and on his part, the wolf had taught the man what _he_

knew--to do without a roof, without bread and fire, to prefer hunger in

the woods to slavery in a palace.

The van, hut, and vehicle in one, which traversed so many different

roads, without, however, leaving Great Britain, had four wheels, with

shafts for the wolf and a splinter-bar for the man. The splinter-bar

came into use when the roads were bad. The van was strong, although it

was built of light boards like a dove-cot. In front there was a glass

door with a little balcony used for orations, which had something of the

character of the platform tempered by an air of the pulpit. At the back

there was a door with a practicable panel. By lowering the three steps

which turned on a hinge below the door, access was gained to the hut,

which at night was securely fastened with bolt and lock. Rain and snow

had fallen plentifully on it; it had been painted, but of what colour it

was difficult to say, change of season being to vans what changes of

reign are to courtiers. In front, outside, was a board, a kind of

frontispiece, on which the following inscription might once have been

deciphered; it was in black letters on a white ground, but by degrees

the characters had become confused and blurred:--

“By friction gold loses every year a fourteen hundredth part of its

bulk. This is what is called the Wear. Hence it follows that on fourteen

hundred millions of gold in circulation throughout the world, one

million is lost annually. This million dissolves into dust, flies away,

floats about, is reduced to atoms, charges, drugs, weighs down

consciences, amalgamates with the souls of the rich whom it renders

proud, and with those of the poor whom it renders brutish.”

The inscription, rubbed and blotted by the rain and by the kindness of

nature, was fortunately illegible, for it is possible that its

philosophy concerning the inhalation of gold, at the same time both

enigmatical and lucid, might not have been to the taste of the sheriffs,

the provost-marshals, and other big-wigs of the law. English legislation

did not trifle in those days. It did not take much to make a man a

felon. The magistrates were ferocious by tradition, and cruelty was a

matter of routine. The judges of assize increased and multiplied.

Jeffreys had become a breed.

III.

In the interior of the van there were two other inscriptions. Above the

box, on a whitewashed plank, a hand had written in ink as follows:--

“THE ONLY THINGS NECESSARY TO KNOW.

“The Baron, peer of England, wears a cap with six pearls. The coronet

begins with the rank of Viscount. The Viscount wears a coronet of which

the pearls are without number. The Earl a coronet with the pearls upon

points, mingled with strawberry leaves placed low between. The Marquis,

one with pearls and leaves on the same level. The Duke, one with

strawberry leaves alone--no pearls. The Royal Duke, a circlet of crosses

and fleurs de lys. The Prince of Wales, crown like that of the King, but

unclosed.

“The Duke is a most high and most puissant prince, the Marquis and Earl

most noble and puissant lord, the Viscount noble and puissant lord, the

Baron a trusty lord. The Duke is his Grace; the other Peers their

Lordships. _Most honourable_ is higher than _right honourable_.

“Lords who are peers are lords in their own right. Lords who are not

peers are lords by courtesy:--there are no real lords, excepting such as

are peers.

“The House of Lords is a chamber and a court, _Concilium et Curia_,

legislature and court of justice. The Commons, who are the people, when

ordered to the bar of the Lords, humbly present themselves bareheaded

before the peers, who remain covered. The Commons send up their bills by

forty members, who present the bill with three low bows. The Lords send

their bills to the Commons by a mere clerk. In case of disagreement, the

two Houses confer in the Painted Chamber, the Peers seated and covered,

the Commons standing and bareheaded.

“Peers go to parliament in their coaches in file; the Commons do not.

Some peers go to Westminster in open four-wheeled chariots. The use of

these and of coaches emblazoned with coats of arms and coronets is

allowed only to peers, and forms a portion of their dignity.

“Barons have the same rank as bishops. To be a baron peer of England, it

is necessary to be in possession of a tenure from the king _per Baroniam

integram_, by full barony. The full barony consists of thirteen knights’

fees and one third part, each knight’s fee being of the value of £20

sterling, which makes in all 400 marks. The head of a barony (_Caput

baroniæ_) is a castle disposed by inheritance, as England herself, that

is to say, descending to daughters if there be no sons, and in that case

going to the eldest daughter, _cæteris filiabus aliundè satisfactis_.[1]

“Barons have the degree of lord: in Saxon, _laford_; _dominus_ in high

Latin; _Lordus_ in low Latin. The eldest and younger sons of viscounts

and barons are the first esquires in the kingdom. The eldest sons of

peers take precedence of knights of the garter. The younger sons do

not. The eldest son of a viscount comes after all barons, and precedes

all baronets. Every daughter of a peer is a _Lady_. Other English girls

are plain _Mistress_.

“All judges rank below peers. The serjeant wears a lambskin tippet; the

judge one of patchwork, _de minuto vario_, made up of a variety of

little white furs, always excepting ermine. Ermine is reserved for peers

and the king.

“A lord never takes an oath, either to the crown or the law. His word

suffices; he says, Upon my honour.

“By a law of Edward the Sixth, peers have the privilege of committing

manslaughter. A peer who kills a man without premeditation is not

prosecuted.

“The persons of peers are inviolable.

“A peer cannot be held in durance, save in the Tower of London.

“A writ of supplicavit cannot be granted against a peer.

“A peer sent for by the king has the right to kill one or two deer in

the royal park.

“A peer holds in his castle a baron’s court of justice.

“It is unworthy of a peer to walk the street in a cloak, followed by two

footmen. He should only show himself attended by a great train of

gentlemen of his household.

“A peer can be amerced only by his peers, and never to any greater

amount than five pounds, excepting in the case of a duke, who can be

amerced ten.

“A peer may retain six aliens born, any other Englishman but four.

“A peer can have wine custom-free; an earl eight tuns.

“A peer is alone exempt from presenting himself before the sheriff of

the circuit.

“A peer cannot be assessed towards the militia.

“When it pleases a peer he raises a regiment and gives it to the king;

thus have done their graces the Dukes of Athol, Hamilton, and

Northumberland.

“A peer can hold only of a peer.

“In a civil cause he can demand the adjournment of the case, if there be

not at least one knight on the jury.

“A peer nominates his own chaplains. A baron appoints three chaplains;

a viscount four; an earl and a marquis five; a duke six.

“A peer cannot be put to the rack, even for high treason. A peer cannot

be branded on the hand. A peer is a clerk, though he knows not how to

read. In law he knows.

“A duke has a right to a canopy, or cloth of state, in all places where

the king is not present; a viscount may have one in his house; a baron

has a cover of assay, which may be held under his cup while he drinks. A

baroness has the right to have her train borne by a man in the presence

of a viscountess.

“Eighty-six tables, with five hundred dishes, are served every day in

the royal palace at each meal.

“If a plebeian strike a lord, his hand is cut off.

“A lord is very nearly a king.

“The king is very nearly a god.

“The earth is a lordship.

“The English address God as my lord!”

Opposite this writing was written a second one, in the same fashion,

which ran thus:--

“SATISFACTION WHICH MUST SUFFICE THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING.

“Henry Auverquerque, Earl of Grantham, who sits in the House of Lords

between the Earl of Jersey and the Earl of Greenwich, has a hundred

thousand a year. To his lordship belongs the palace of Grantham Terrace,

built all of marble and famous for what is called the labyrinth of

passages--a curiosity which contains the scarlet corridor in marble of

Sarancolin, the brown corridor in lumachel of Astracan, the white

corridor in marble of Lani, the black corridor in marble of Alabanda,

the gray corridor in marble of Staremma, the yellow corridor in marble

of Hesse, the green corridor in marble of the Tyrol, the red corridor,

half cherry-spotted marble of Bohemia, half lumachel of Cordova, the

blue corridor in turquin of Genoa, the violet in granite of Catalonia,

the mourning-hued corridor veined black and white in slate of Murviedro,

the pink corridor in cipolin of the Alps, the pearl corridor in lumachel

of Nonetta, and the corridor of all colours, called the courtiers’

corridor, in motley.

“Richard Lowther, Viscount Lonsdale, owns Lowther in Westmorland, which

has a magnificent approach, and a flight of entrance steps which seem to

invite the ingress of kings.

“Richard, Earl of Scarborough, Viscount and Baron Lumley of Lumley

Castle, Viscount Lumley of Waterford in Ireland, and Lord Lieutenant and

Vice-Admiral of the county of Northumberland and of Durham, both city

and county, owns the double castleward of old and new Sandbeck, where

you admire a superb railing, in the form of a semicircle, surrounding

the basin of a matchless fountain. He has, besides, his castle of

Lumley.

“Robert Darcy, Earl of Holderness, has his domain of Holderness, with

baronial towers, and large gardens laid out in French fashion, where he

drives in his coach-and-six, preceded by two outriders, as becomes a

peer of England.

“Charles Beauclerc, Duke of St. Albans, Earl of Burford, Baron

Hedington, Grand Falconer of England, has an abode at Windsor, regal

even by the side of the king’s.

“Charles Bodville Robartes, Baron Robartes of Truro, Viscount Bodmin and

Earl of Radnor, owns Wimpole in Cambridgeshire, which is as three

palaces in one, having three façades, one bowed and two triangular. The

approach is by an avenue of trees four deep.

“The most noble and most puissant Lord Philip, Baron Herbert of Cardiff,

Earl of Montgomery and of Pembroke, Ross of Kendall, Parr, Fitzhugh,

Marmion, St. Quentin, and Herbert of Shurland, Warden of the Stannaries

in the counties of Cornwall and Devon, hereditary visitor of Jesus

College, possesses the wonderful gardens at Wilton, where there are two

sheaf-like fountains, finer than those of his most Christian Majesty

King Louis XIV. at Versailles.

“Charles Somerset, Duke of Somerset, owns Somerset House on the Thames,

which is equal to the Villa Pamphili at Rome. On the chimney-piece are

seen two porcelain vases of the dynasty of the Yuens, which are worth

half a million in French money.

“In Yorkshire, Arthur, Lord Ingram, Viscount Irwin, has Temple Newsain,

which is entered under a triumphal arch and which has large wide roofs

resembling Moorish terraces.

“Robert, Lord Ferrers of Chartly, Bourchier, and Lonvaine, has Staunton

Harold in Leicestershire, of which the park is geometrically planned in

the shape of a temple with a façade, and in front of the piece of water

is the great church with the square belfry, which belongs to his

lordship.

“In the county of Northampton, Charles Spencer, Earl of Sunderland,

member of his Majesty’s Privy Council, possesses Althorp, at the

entrance of which is a railing with four columns surmounted by groups in

marble.

“Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester, has, in Surrey, New Park, rendered

magnificent by its sculptured pinnacles, its circular lawn belted by

trees, and its woodland, at the extremity of which is a little mountain,

artistically rounded, and surmounted by a large oak, which can be seen

from afar.

“Philip Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, possesses Bretby Hall in

Derbyshire, with a splendid clock tower, falconries, warrens, and very

fine sheets of water, long, square, and oval, one of which is shaped

like a mirror, and has two jets, which throw the water to a great

height.

“Charles Cornwallis, Baron Cornwallis of Eye, owns Broome Hall, a palace

of the fourteenth century.

“The most noble Algernon Capel, Viscount Maiden, Earl of Essex, has

Cashiobury in Hertfordshire, a seat which has the shape of a capital H,

and which rejoices sportsmen with its abundance of game.

“Charles, Lord Ossulston, owns Darnley in Middlesex, approached by

Italian gardens.

“James Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, has, seven leagues from London,

Hatfield House, with its four lordly pavilions, its belfry in the

centre, and its grand courtyard of black and white slabs, like that of

St. Germain. This palace, which has a frontage 272 feet in length, was

built in the reign of James I. by the Lord High Treasurer of England,

the great-grandfather of the present earl. To be seen there is the bed

of one of the Countesses of Salisbury: it is of inestimable value and

made entirely of Brazilian wood, which is a panacea against the bites of

serpents, and which is called _milhombres_--that is to say, a thousand

men. On this bed is inscribed, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_.

“Edward Rich, Earl of Warwick and Holland, is owner of Warwick Castle,

where whole oaks are burnt in the fireplaces.

“In the parish of Sevenoaks, Charles Sackville, Baron Buckhurst, Baron

Cranfield, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, is owner of Knowle, which is as

large as a town and is composed of three palaces standing parallel one

behind the other, like ranks of infantry. There are six covered flights

of steps on the principal frontage, and a gate under a keep with four

towers.

“Thomas Thynne, Baron Thynne of Warminster, and Viscount Weymouth,

possesses Longleat, in which there are as many chimneys, cupolas,

pinnacles, pepper-boxes pavilions, and turrets as at Chambord, in

France, which belongs to the king.

“Henry Howard, Earl of Suffolk, owns, twelve leagues from London, the

palace of Audley End in Essex, which in grandeur and dignity scarcely

yields the palm to the Escorial of the King of Spain.

“In Bedfordshire, Wrest House and Park, which is a whole district,

enclosed by ditches, walls, woodlands, rivers, and hills, belongs to

Henry, Marquis of Kent.

“Hampton Court, in Herefordshire, with its strong embattled keep, and

its gardens bounded by a piece of water which divides them from the

forest, belongs to Thomas, Lord Coningsby.

“Grimsthorp, in Lincolnshire, with its long façade intersected by

turrets in pale, its park, its fish-ponds, its pheasantries, its

sheepfolds, its lawns, its grounds planted with rows of trees, its

groves, its walks, its shrubberies, its flower-beds and borders, formed

in square and lozenge-shape, and resembling great carpets; its

racecourses, and the majestic sweep for carriages to turn in at the

entrance of the house--belongs to Robert, Earl Lindsey, hereditary lord

of the forest of Waltham.

“Up Park, in Sussex, a square house, with two symmetrical belfried

pavilions on each side of the great courtyard, belongs to the Right

Honourable Forde, Baron Grey of Werke, Viscount Glendale and Earl of

Tankerville.

“Newnham Paddox, in Warwickshire, which has two quadrangular fish-ponds

and a gabled archway with a large window of four panes, belongs to the

Earl of Denbigh, who is also Count von Rheinfelden, in Germany.

“Wytham Abbey, in Berkshire, with its French garden in which there are

four curiously trimmed arbours, and its great embattled towers,

supported by two bastions, belongs to Montague, Earl of Abingdon, who

also owns Rycote, of which he is Baron, and the principal door of which

bears the device _Virtus ariete fortior_.

“William Cavendish, Duke of Devonshire, has six dwelling-places, of

which Chatsworth (two storied, and of the finest order of Grecian

architecture) is one.

“The Viscount of Kinalmeaky, who is Earl of Cork, in Ireland, is owner

of Burlington House, Piccadilly, with its extensive gardens, reaching to

the fields outside London; he is also owner of Chiswick, where there are

nine magnificent lodges; he also owns Londesborough, which is a new

house by the side of an old palace.

“The Duke of Beaufort owns Chelsea, which contains two Gothic buildings,

and a Florentine one; he has also Badminton, in Gloucestershire, a

residence from which a number of avenues branch out like rays from a

star. The most noble and puissant Prince Henry, Duke of Beaufort, is

also Marquis and Earl of Worcester, Earl of Glamorgan, Viscount

Grosmont, and Baron Herbert of Chepstow, Ragland, and Gower, Baron

Beaufort of Caldecott Castle, and Baron de Bottetourt.

“John Holies, Duke of Newcastle, and Marquis of Clare, owns Bolsover,

with its majestic square keeps; his also is Haughton, in

Nottinghamshire, where a round pyramid, made to imitate the Tower of

Babel, stands in the centre of a basin of water.

“William, Earl of Craven, Viscount Uffington, and Baron Craven of

Hamstead Marshall, owns Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, where is to be seen

the finest water-jet in England; and in Berkshire two baronies, Hamstead

Marshall, on the façade of which are five Gothic lanterns sunk in the

wall, and Ashdown Park, which is a country seat situate at the point of

intersection of cross-roads in a forest.

“Linnæus, Lord Clancharlie, Baron Clancharlie and Hunkerville, Marquis

of Corleone in Sicily, derives his title from the castle of Clancharlie,

built in 912 by Edward the Elder, as a defence against the Danes.

Besides Hunkerville House, in London, which is a palace, he has Corleone

Lodge at Windsor, which is another, and eight castlewards, one at

Burton-on-Trent, with a royalty on the carriage of plaster of Paris;

then Grumdaith Humble, Moricambe, Trewardraith, Hell-Kerters (where

there is a miraculous well), Phillinmore, with its turf bogs, Reculver,

near the ancient city Vagniac, Vinecaunton, on the Moel-eulle Mountain;

besides nineteen boroughs and villages with reeves, and the whole of

Penneth chase, all of which bring his lordship £40,000 a year.

“The 172 peers enjoying their dignities under James II. possess among

them altogether a revenue of £1,272,000 sterling a year, which is the

eleventh part of the revenue of England.”

In the margin, opposite the last name (that of Linnæus, Lord

Clancharlie), there was a note in the handwriting of Ursus: _Rebel; in

exile; houses, lands, and chattels sequestrated. It is well_.

IV.

Ursus admired Homo. One admires one’s like. It is a law. To be always

raging inwardly and grumbling outwardly was the normal condition of

Ursus. He was the malcontent of creation. By nature he was a man ever in

opposition. He took the world unkindly; he gave his satisfecit to no one

and to nothing. The bee did not atone, by its honey-making, for its

sting; a full-blown rose did not absolve the sun for yellow fever and

black vomit. It is probable that in secret Ursus criticized Providence a

good deal. “Evidently,” he would say, “the devil works by a spring, and

the wrong that God does is having let go the trigger.” He approved of

none but princes, and he had his own peculiar way of expressing his

approbation. One day, when James II. made a gift to the Virgin in a

Catholic chapel in Ireland of a massive gold lamp, Ursus, passing that

way with Homo, who was more indifferent to such things, broke out in

admiration before the crowd, and exclaimed, “It is certain that the

blessed Virgin wants a lamp much more than these barefooted children

there require shoes.”

Such proofs of his loyalty, and such evidences of his respect for

established powers, probably contributed in no small degree to make the

magistrates tolerate his vagabond life and his low alliance with a wolf.

Sometimes of an evening, through the weakness of friendship, he allowed

Homo to stretch his limbs and wander at liberty about the caravan. The

wolf was incapable of an abuse of confidence, and behaved in society,

that is to say among men, with the discretion of a poodle. All the same,

if bad-tempered officials had to be dealt with, difficulties might have

arisen; so Ursus kept the honest wolf chained up as much as possible.

From a political point of view, his writing about gold, not very

intelligible in itself, and now become undecipherable, was but a smear,

and gave no handle to the enemy. Even after the time of James II., and

under the “respectable” reign of William and Mary, his caravan might

have been seen peacefully going its rounds of the little English country

towns. He travelled freely from one end of Great Britain to the other,

selling his philtres and phials, and sustaining, with the assistance of

his wolf, his quack mummeries; and he passed with ease through the

meshes of the nets which the police at that period had spread all over

England in order to sift wandering gangs, and especially to stop the

progress of the Comprachicos.

This was right enough. Ursus belonged to no gang. Ursus lived with

Ursus, a _tête-à-tête_, into which the wolf gently thrust his nose. If

Ursus could have had his way, he would have been a Caribbee; that being

impossible, he preferred to be alone. The solitary man is a modified

savage, accepted by civilization. He who wanders most is most alone;

hence his continual change of place. To remain anywhere long suffocated

him with the sense of being tamed. He passed his life in passing on his

way. The sight of towns increased his taste for brambles, thickets,

thorns, and holes in the rock. His home was the forest. He did not feel

himself much out of his element in the murmur of crowded streets, which

is like enough to the bluster of trees. The crowd to some extent

satisfies our taste for the desert. What he disliked in his van was its

having a door and windows, and thus resembling a house. He would have

realized his ideal, had he been able to put a cave on four wheels and

travel in a den.

He did not smile, as we have already said, but he used to laugh;

sometimes, indeed frequently, a bitter laugh. There is consent in a

smile, while a laugh is often a refusal.

His great business was to hate the human race. He was implacable in that

hate. Having made it clear that human life is a dreadful thing; having

observed the superposition of evils, kings on the people, war on kings,

the plague on war, famine on the plague, folly on everything; having

proved a certain measure of chastisement in the mere fact of existence;

having recognized that, death is a deliverance--when they brought him a

sick man he cured him; he had cordials and beverages to prolong the

lives of the old. He put lame cripples on their legs again, and hurled

this sarcasm at them, “There, you are on your paws once more; may you

walk long in this valley of tears!” When he saw a poor man dying of

hunger, he gave him all the pence he had about him, growling out, “Live

on, you wretch! eat! last a long time! It is not I who would shorten

your penal servitude.” After which, he would rub his hands and say, “I

do men all the harm I can.”

Through the little window at the back, passers-by could read on the

ceiling of the van these words, written within, but visible from

without, inscribed with charcoal, in big letters,--

URSUS, PHILOSOPHER.

ANOTHER PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

THE COMPRACHICOS.

I.

Who now knows the word Comprachicos, and who knows its meaning?

The Comprachicos, or Comprapequeños, were a hideous and nondescript

association of wanderers, famous in the 17th century, forgotten in the

18th, unheard of in the 19th. The Comprachicos are like the “succession

powder,” an ancient social characteristic detail. They are part of old

human ugliness. To the great eye of history, which sees everything

collectively, the Comprachicos belong to the colossal fact of slavery.

Joseph sold by his brethren is a chapter in their story. The

Comprachicos have left their traces in the penal laws of Spain and

England. You find here and there in the dark confusion of English laws

the impress of this horrible truth, like the foot-print of a savage in a

forest.

Comprachicos, the same as Comprapequeños, is a compound Spanish word

signifying Child-buyers.

The Comprachicos traded in children. They bought and sold them. They did

not steal them. The kidnapping of children is another branch of

industry. And what did they make of these children?

Monsters.

Why monsters?

To laugh at.

The populace must needs laugh, and kings too. The mountebank is wanted

in the streets, the jester at the Louvre. The one is called a Clown, the

other a Fool.

The efforts of man to procure himself pleasure are at times worthy of

the attention of the philosopher.

What are we sketching in these few preliminary pages? A chapter in the

most terrible of books; a book which might be entitled--_The farming of

the unhappy by the happy_.

II.

A child destined to be a plaything for men--such a thing has existed;

such a thing exists even now. In simple and savage times such a thing

constituted an especial trade. The 17th century, called the great

century, was of those times. It was a century very Byzantine in tone. It

combined corrupt simplicity with delicate ferocity--a curious variety of

civilization. A tiger with a simper. Madame de Sevigné minces on the

subject of the fagot and the wheel. That century traded a good deal in

children. Flattering historians have concealed the sore, but have

divulged the remedy, Vincent de Paul.

In order that a human toy should succeed, he must be taken early. The

dwarf must be fashioned when young. We play with childhood. But a

well-formed child is not very amusing; a hunchback is better fun.

Hence grew an art. There were trainers who took a man and made him an

abortion; they took a face and made a muzzle; they stunted growth; they

kneaded the features. The artificial production of teratological cases

had its rules. It was quite a science--what one can imagine as the

antithesis of orthopedy. Where God had put a look, their art put a

squint; where God had made harmony, they made discord; where God had

made the perfect picture, they re-established the sketch; and, in the

eyes of connoisseurs, it was the sketch which was perfect. They debased

animals as well; they invented piebald horses. Turenne rode a piebald

horse. In our own days do they not dye dogs blue and green? Nature is

our canvas. Man has always wished to add something to God’s work. Man

retouches creation, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. The Court

buffoon was nothing but an attempt to lead back man to the monkey. It

was a progress the wrong way. A masterpiece in retrogression. At the

same time they tried to make a man of the monkey. Barbara, Duchess of

Cleveland and Countess of Southampton, had a marmoset for a page.

Frances Sutton, Baroness Dudley, eighth peeress in the bench of barons,

had tea served by a baboon clad in cold brocade, which her ladyship

called My Black. Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester, used to go

and take her seat in Parliament in a coach with armorial bearings,

behind which stood, their muzzles stuck up in the air, three Cape

monkeys in grand livery. A Duchess of Medina-Celi, whose toilet Cardinal

Pole witnessed, had her stockings put on by an orang-outang. These

monkeys raised in the scale were a counterpoise to men brutalized and

bestialized. This promiscuousness of man and beast, desired by the

great, was especially prominent in the case of the dwarf and the dog.

The dwarf never quitted the dog, which was always bigger than himself.

The dog was the pair of the dwarf; it was as if they were coupled with a

collar. This juxtaposition is authenticated by a mass of domestic

records--notably by the portrait of Jeffrey Hudson, dwarf of Henrietta

of France, daughter of Henri IV., and wife of Charles I.

To degrade man tends to deform him. The suppression of his state was

completed by disfigurement. Certain vivisectors of that period succeeded

marvellously well in effacing from the human face the divine effigy.

Doctor Conquest, member of the Amen Street College, and judicial visitor

of the chemists’ shops of London, wrote a book in Latin on this

pseudo-surgery, the processes of which he describes. If we are to

believe Justus of Carrickfergus, the inventor of this branch of surgery

was a monk named Avonmore--an Irish word signifying Great River.

The dwarf of the Elector Palatine, Perkeo, whose effigy--or

ghost--springs from a magical box in the cave of Heidelberg, was a

remarkable specimen of this science, very varied in its applications. It

fashioned beings the law of whose existence was hideously simple: it

permitted them to suffer, and commanded them to amuse.

III.

The manufacture of monsters was practised on a large scale, and

comprised various branches.

The Sultan required them, so did the Pope; the one to guard his women,

the other to say his prayers. These were of a peculiar kind, incapable

of reproduction. Scarcely human beings, they were useful to

voluptuousness and to religion. The seraglio and the Sistine Chapel

utilized the same species of monsters; fierce in the former case, mild

in the latter.

They knew how to produce things in those days which are not produced

now; they had talents which we lack, and it is not without reason that

some good folk cry out that the decline has come. We no longer know how

to sculpture living human flesh; this is consequent on the loss of the

art of torture. Men were once virtuosi in that respect, but are so no

longer; the art has become so simplified that it will soon disappear

altogether. In cutting the limbs of living men, in opening their bellies

and in dragging out their entrails, phenomena were grasped on the moment

and discoveries made. We are obliged to renounce these experiments now,

and are thus deprived of the progress which surgery made by aid of the

executioner.

The vivisection of former days was not limited to the manufacture of

phenomena for the market-place, of buffoons for the palace (a species of

augmentative of the courtier), and eunuchs for sultans and popes. It

abounded in varieties. One of its triumphs was the manufacture of cocks

for the king of England.

It was the custom, in the palace of the kings of England, to have a sort

of watchman, who crowed like a cock. This watcher, awake while all

others slept, ranged the palace, and raised from hour to hour the cry of

the farmyard, repeating it as often as was necessary, and thus supplying

a clock. This man, promoted to be cock, had in childhood undergone the

operation of the pharynx, which was part of the art described by Dr.

Conquest. Under Charles II. the salivation inseparable to the operation

having disgusted the Duchess of Portsmouth, the appointment was indeed

preserved, so that the splendour of the crown should not be tarnished,

but they got an unmutilated man to represent the cock. A retired officer

was generally selected for this honourable employment. Under James II.

the functionary was named William Sampson, Cock, and received for his

crow £9, 2s. 6d. annually.

The memoirs of Catherine II. inform us that at St. Petersburg, scarcely

a hundred years since, whenever the czar or czarina was displeased with

a Russian prince, he was forced to squat down in the great antechamber

of the palace, and to remain in that posture a certain number of days,

mewing like a cat, or clucking like a sitting hen, and pecking his food

from the floor.

These fashions have passed away; but not so much, perhaps, as one might

imagine. Nowadays, courtiers slightly modify their intonation in

clucking to please their masters. More than one picks up from the

ground--we will not say from the mud--what he eats.

It is very fortunate that kings cannot err. Hence their contradictions

never perplex us. In approving always, one is sure to be always

right--which is pleasant. Louis XIV. would not have liked to see at

Versailles either an officer acting the cock, or a prince acting the

turkey. That which raised the royal and imperial dignity in England and

Russia would have seemed to Louis the Great incompatible with the crown

of St. Louis. We know what his displeasure was when Madame Henriette

forgot herself so far as to see a hen in a dream--which was, indeed, a

grave breach of good manners in a lady of the court. When one is of the

court, one should not dream of the courtyard. Bossuet, it may be

remembered, was nearly as scandalized as Louis XIV.

IV.

The commerce in children in the 17th century, as we have explained, was

connected with a trade. The Comprachicos engaged in the commerce, and

carried on the trade. They bought children, worked a little on the raw

material, and resold them afterwards.

The venders were of all kinds: from the wretched father, getting rid of

his family, to the master, utilizing his stud of slaves. The sale of men

was a simple matter. In our own time we have had fighting to maintain

this right. Remember that it is less than a century ago since the

Elector of Hesse sold his subjects to the King of England, who required

men to be killed in America. Kings went to the Elector of Hesse as we go

to the butcher to buy meat. The Elector had food for powder in stock,

and hung up his subjects in his shop. Come buy; it is for sale. In

England, under Jeffreys, after the tragical episode of Monmouth, there

were many lords and gentlemen beheaded and quartered. Those who were

executed left wives and daughters, widows and orphans, whom James II.

gave to the queen, his wife. The queen sold these ladies to William

Penn. Very likely the king had so much per cent. on the transaction. The

extraordinary thing is, not that James II. should have sold the women,

but that William Penn should have bought them. Penn’s purchase is

excused, or explained, by the fact that having a desert to sow with men,

he needed women as farming implements.

Her Gracious Majesty made a good business out of these ladies. The young

sold dear. We may imagine, with the uneasy feeling which a complicated

scandal arouses, that probably some old duchesses were thrown in cheap.

The Comprachicos were also called the Cheylas, a Hindu word, which

conveys the image of harrying a nest.

For a long time the Comprachicos only partially concealed themselves.

There is sometimes in the social order a favouring shadow thrown over

iniquitous trades, in which they thrive. In our own day we have seen an

association of the kind in Spain, under the direction of the ruffian

Ramon Selles, last from 1834 to 1866, and hold three provinces under

terror for thirty years--Valencia, Alicante, and Murcia.

Under the Stuarts, the Comprachicos were by no means in bad odour at

court. On occasions they were used for reasons of state. For James II.

they were almost an _instrumentum regni_. It was a time when families,

which were refractory or in the way, were dismembered; when a descent

was cut short; when heirs were suddenly suppressed. At times one branch

was defrauded to the profit of another. The Comprachicos had a genius

for disfiguration which recommended them to state policy. To disfigure

is better than to kill. There was, indeed, the Iron Mask, but that was a

mighty measure. Europe could not be peopled with iron masks, while

deformed tumblers ran about the streets without creating any surprise.

Besides, the iron mask is removable; not so the mask of flesh. You are

masked for ever by your own flesh--what can be more ingenious? The

Comprachicos worked on man as the Chinese work on trees. They had their

secrets, as we have said; they had tricks which are now lost arts. A

sort of fantastic stunted thing left their hands; it was ridiculous and

wonderful. They would touch up a little being with such skill that its

father could not have known it. _Et que méconnaîtrait l’oeil même de son

père_, as Racine says in bad French. Sometimes they left the spine

straight and remade the face. They unmarked a child as one might unmark

a pocket-handkerchief. Products, destined for tumblers, had their joints

dislocated in a masterly manner--you would have said they had been

boned. Thus gymnasts were made.

Not only did the Comprachicos take away his face from the child, they

also took away his memory. At least they took away all they could of it;

the child had no consciousness of the mutilation to which he had been

subjected. This frightful surgery left its traces on his countenance,

but not on his mind. The most he could recall was that one day he had

been seized by men, that next he had fallen asleep, and then that he had

been cured. Cured of what? He did not know. Of burnings by sulphur and

incisions by the iron he remembered nothing. The Comprachicos deadened

the little patient by means of a stupefying powder which was thought to

be magical, and suppressed all pain. This powder has been known from

time immemorial in China, and is still employed there in the present

day. The Chinese have been beforehand with us in all our

inventions--printing, artillery, aerostation, chloroform. Only the

discovery which in Europe at once takes life and birth, and becomes a

prodigy and a wonder, remains a chrysalis in China, and is preserved in

a deathlike state. China is a museum of embryos.

Since we are in China, let us remain there a moment to note a

peculiarity. In China, from time immemorial, they have possessed a

certain refinement of industry and art. It is the art of moulding a

living man. They take a child, two or three years old, put him in a

porcelain vase, more or less grotesque, which is made without top or

bottom, to allow egress for the head and feet. During the day the vase

is set upright, and at night is laid down to allow the child to sleep.

Thus the child thickens without growing taller, filling up with his

compressed flesh and distorted bones the reliefs in the vase. This

development in a bottle continues many years. After a certain time it

becomes irreparable. When they consider that this is accomplished, and

the monster made, they break the vase. The child comes out--and, behold,

there is a man in the shape of a mug!

This is convenient: by ordering your dwarf betimes you are able to have

it of any shape you wish.

V.

James II. tolerated the Comprachicos for the good reason that he made

use of them; at least it happened that he did so more than once. We do

not always disdain to use what we despise. This low trade, an excellent

expedient sometimes for the higher one which is called state policy, was

willingly left in a miserable state, but was not persecuted. There was

no surveillance, but a certain amount of attention. Thus much might be

useful--the law closed one eye, the king opened the other.

Sometimes the king went so far as to avow his complicity. These are

audacities of monarchical terrorism. The disfigured one was marked with

the fleur-de-lis; they took from him the mark of God; they put on him

the mark of the king. Jacob Astley, knight and baronet, lord of Melton

Constable, in the county of Norfolk, had in his family a child who had

been sold, and upon whose forehead the dealer had imprinted a

fleur-de-lis with a hot iron. In certain cases in which it was held

desirable to register for some reason the royal origin of the new

position made for the child, they used such means. England has always

done us the honour to utilize, for her personal service, the

fleur-de-lis.

The Comprachicos, allowing for the shade which divides a trade from a

fanaticism, were analogous to the Stranglers of India. They lived among

themselves in gangs, and to facilitate their progress, affected somewhat

of the merry-andrew. They encamped here and there, but they were grave

and religious, bearing no affinity to other nomads, and incapable of

theft. The people for a long time wrongly confounded them with the Moors

of Spain and the Moors of China. The Moors of Spain were coiners, the

Moors of China were thieves. There was nothing of the sort about the

Comprachicos; they were honest folk. Whatever you may think of them,

they were sometimes sincerely scrupulous. They pushed open a door,

entered, bargained for a child, paid, and departed. All was done with

propriety.

They were of all countries. Under the name of Comprachicos fraternized

English, French, Castilians, Germans, Italians. A unity of idea, a unity

of superstition, the pursuit of the same calling, make such fusions. In

this fraternity of vagabonds, those of the Mediterranean seaboard

represented the East, those of the Atlantic seaboard the West. Many

Basques conversed with many Irishmen. The Basque and the Irishman

understand each other--they speak the old Punic jargon; add to this the

intimate relations of Catholic Ireland with Catholic Spain--relations

such that they terminated by bringing to the gallows in London one

almost King of Ireland, the Celtic Lord de Brany; from which resulted

the conquest of the county of Leitrim.

The Comprachicos were rather a fellowship than a tribe; rather a

residuum than a fellowship. It was all the riffraff of the universe,

having for their trade a crime. It was a sort of harlequin people, all

composed of rags. To recruit a man was to sew on a tatter.

To wander was the Comprachicos’ law of existence--to appear and

disappear. What is barely tolerated cannot take root. Even in the

kingdoms where their business supplied the courts, and, on occasions,

served as an auxiliary to the royal power, they were now and then

suddenly ill-treated. Kings made use of their art, and sent the artists

to the galleys. These inconsistencies belong to the ebb and flow of

royal caprice. “For such is our pleasure.”

A rolling stone and a roving trade gather no moss. The Comprachicos were

poor. They might have said what the lean and ragged witch observed, when

she saw them setting fire to the stake, “Le jeu n’en vaut pas la

chandelle.” It is possible, nay probable (their chiefs remaining

unknown), that the wholesale contractors in the trade were rich. After

the lapse of two centuries, it would be difficult to throw any light on

this point.

It was, as we have said, a fellowship. It had its laws, its oaths, its

formulæ--it had almost its cabala. Any one nowadays wishing to know all

about the Comprachicos need only go into Biscaya or Galicia; there were

many Basques among them, and it is in those mountains that one hears

their history. To this day the Comprachicos are spoken of at Oyarzun, at

Urbistondo, at Leso, at Astigarraga. _Aguardate niño, que voy a llamar

al Comprachicos_--Take care, child, or I’ll call the Comprachicos--is

the cry with which mothers frighten their children in that country.

The Comprachicos, like the Zigeuner and the Gipsies, had appointed

places for periodical meetings. From time to time their leaders

conferred together. In the seventeenth century they had four principal

points of rendezvous: one in Spain--the pass of Pancorbo; one in

Germany--the glade called the Wicked Woman, near Diekirsch, where there

are two enigmatic bas-reliefs, representing a woman with a head and a

man without one; one in France--the hill where was the colossal statue

of Massue-la-Promesse in the old sacred wood of Borvo Tomona, near

Bourbonne les Bains; one in England--behind the garden wall of William

Challoner, Squire of Gisborough in Cleveland, Yorkshire, behind the

square tower and the great wing which is entered by an arched door.

VI.

The laws against vagabonds have always been very rigorous in England.

England, in her Gothic legislation, seemed to be inspired with this

principle, _Homo errans fera errante pejor_. One of the special statutes

classifies the man without a home as “more dangerous than the asp,

dragon, lynx, or basilisk” (_atrocior aspide, dracone, lynce, et

basilico_). For a long time England troubled herself as much concerning

the gipsies, of whom she wished to be rid as about the wolves of which

she had been cleared. In that the Englishman differed from the Irishman,

who prayed to the saints for the health of the wolf, and called him “my

godfather.”

English law, nevertheless, in the same way as (we have just seen) it

tolerated the wolf, tamed, domesticated, and become in some sort a dog,

tolerated the regular vagabond, become in some sort a subject. It did

not trouble itself about either the mountebank or the travelling barber,

or the quack doctor, or the peddler, or the open-air scholar, as long as

they had a trade to live by. Further than this, and with these

exceptions, the description of freedom which exists in the wanderer

terrified the law. A tramp was a possible public enemy. That modern

thing, the lounger, was then unknown; that ancient thing, the vagrant,

was alone understood. A suspicious appearance, that indescribable

something which all understand and none can define, was sufficient

reason that society should take a man by the collar. “Where do you live?

How do you get your living?” And if he could not answer, harsh penalties

awaited him. Iron and fire were in the code: the law practised the

cauterization of vagrancy.

Hence, throughout English territory, a veritable “loi des suspects” was

applicable to vagrants (who, it must be owned, readily became

malefactors), and particularly to gipsies, whose expulsion has

erroneously been compared to the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors

from Spain, and the Protestants from France. As for us, we do not

confound a battue with a persecution.

The Comprachicos, we insist, had nothing in common with the gipsies. The

gipsies were a nation; the Comprachicos were a compound of all

nations--the lees of a horrible vessel full of filthy waters. The

Comprachicos had not, like the gipsies, an idiom of their own; their

jargon was a promiscuous collection of idioms: all languages were mixed

together in their language; they spoke a medley. Like the gipsies, they

had come to be a people winding through the peoples; but their common

tie was association, not race. At all epochs in history one finds in the

vast liquid mass which constitutes humanity some of these streams of

venomous men exuding poison around them. The gipsies were a tribe; the

Comprachicos a freemasonry--a masonry having not a noble aim, but a

hideous handicraft. Finally, their religions differ--the gipsies were

Pagans, the Comprachicos were Christians, and more than that, good

Christians, as became an association which, although a mixture of all

nations, owed its birth to Spain, a devout land.

They were more than Christians, they were Catholics; they were more than

Catholics, they were Romans, and so touchy in their faith, and so pure,

that they refused to associate with the Hungarian nomads of the comitate

of Pesth, commanded and led by an old man, having for sceptre a wand

with a silver ball, surmounted by the double-headed Austrian eagle. It

is true that these Hungarians were schismatics, to the extent of

celebrating the Assumption on the 29th August, which is an abomination.

In England, so long as the Stuarts reigned, the confederation of the

Comprachicos was (for motives of which we have already given you a

glimpse) to a certain extent protected. James II., a devout man, who

persecuted the Jews and trampled out the gipsies, was a good prince to

the Comprachicos. We have seen why. The Comprachicos were buyers of the

human wares in which he was dealer. They excelled in disappearances.

Disappearances are occasionally necessary for the good of the state. An

inconvenient heir of tender age whom they took and handled lost his

shape. This facilitated confiscation; the tranfer of titles to

favourites was simplified. The Comprachicos were, moreover, very

discreet and very taciturn. They bound themselves to silence, and kept

their word, which is necessary in affairs of state. There was scarcely

an example of their having betrayed the secrets of the king. This was,

it is true, for their interest; and if the king had lost confidence in

them, they would have been in great danger. They were thus of use in a

political point of view. Moreover these artists furnished singers for

the Holy Father. The Comprachicos were useful for the _Miserere_ of

Allegri. They were particularly devoted to Mary. All this pleased the

papistry of the Stuarts. James II. could not be hostile to holy men who

pushed their devotion to the Virgin to the extent of manufacturing

eunuchs. In 1688 there was a change of dynasty in England: Orange

supplanted Stuart. William III. replaced James II.

James II. went away to die in exile, miracles were performed on his

tomb, and his relics cured the Bishop of Autun of fistula--a worthy

recompense of the Christian virtues of the prince.

William, having neither the same ideas nor the same practices as James,

was severe to the Comprachicos. He did his best to crush out the vermin.

A statute of the early part of William and Mary’s reign hit the

association of child-buyers hard. It was as the blow of a club to the

Comprachicos, who were from that time pulverized. By the terms of this

statute those of the fellowship taken and duly convicted were to be

branded with a red-hot iron, imprinting R. on the shoulder, signifying

rogue; on the left hand T, signifying thief; and on the right hand M,

signifying man-slayer. The chiefs, “supposed to be rich, although

beggars in appearance,” were to be punished in the _collistrigium_--that

is, the pillory--and branded on the forehead with a P, besides having

their goods confiscated, and the trees in their woods rooted up. Those

who did not inform against the Comprachicos were to be punished by

confiscation and imprisonment for life, as for the crime of misprision.

As for the women found among these men, they were to suffer the

cucking-stool--this is a tumbrel, the name of which is composed of the

French word _coquine_, and the German _stuhl_. English law being endowed

with a strange longevity, this punishment still exists in English

legislation for quarrelsome women. The cucking-stool is suspended over a

river or a pond, the woman seated on it. The chair is allowed to drop

into the water, and then pulled out. This dipping of the woman is

repeated three times, “to cool her anger,” says the commentator,

Chamberlayne.

PART I.

BOOK THE FIRST.

_NIGHT NOT SO BLACK AS MAN_.

CHAPTER I.

PORTLAND BILL.

An obstinate north wind blew without ceasing over the mainland of

Europe, and yet more roughly over England, during all the month of

December, 1689, and all the month of January, 1690. Hence the disastrous

cold weather, which caused that winter to be noted as “memorable to the

poor,” on the margin of the old Bible in the Presbyterian chapel of the

Nonjurors in London. Thanks to the lasting qualities of the old

monarchical parchment employed in official registers, long lists of poor

persons, found dead of famine and cold, are still legible in many local

repositories, particularly in the archives of the Liberty of the Clink,

in the borough of Southwark, of Pie Powder Court (which signifies Dusty

Feet Court), and in those of Whitechapel Court, held in the village of

Stepney by the bailiff of the Lord of the Manor. The Thames was frozen

over--a thing which does not happen once in a century, as the ice forms

on it with difficulty owing to the action of the sea. Coaches rolled

over the frozen river, and a fair was held with booths, bear-baiting,

and bull-baiting. An ox was roasted whole on the ice. This thick ice

lasted two months. The hard year 1690 surpassed in severity even the

famous winters at the beginning of the seventeenth century, so minutely

observed by Dr. Gideon Delane--the same who was, in his quality of

apothecary to King James, honoured by the city of London with a bust and

a pedestal.

One evening, towards the close of one of the most bitter days of the

month of January, 1690, something unusual was going on in one of the

numerous inhospitable bights of the bay of Portland, which caused the

sea-gulls and wild geese to scream and circle round its mouth, not

daring to re-enter.

In this creek, the most dangerous of all which line the bay during the

continuance of certain winds, and consequently the most

lonely--convenient, by reason of its very danger, for ships in hiding--a

little vessel, almost touching the cliff, so deep was the water, was

moored to a point of rock. We are wrong in saying, The night falls; we

should say the night rises, for it is from the earth that obscurity

comes. It was already night at the bottom of the cliff; it was still day

at top. Any one approaching the vessel’s moorings would have recognized

a Biscayan hooker.

The sun, concealed all day by the mist, had just set. There was

beginning to be felt that deep and sombrous melancholy which might be

called anxiety for the absent sun. With no wind from the sea, the water

of the creek was calm.

This was, especially in winter, a lucky exception. Almost all the

Portland creeks have sand-bars; and in heavy weather the sea becomes

very rough, and, to pass in safety, much skill and practice are

necessary. These little ports (ports more in appearance than fact) are

of small advantage. They are hazardous to enter, fearful to leave. On

this evening, for a wonder, there was no danger.

The Biscay hooker is of an ancient model, now fallen into disuse. This

kind of hooker, which has done service even in the navy, was stoutly

built in its hull--a boat in size, a ship in strength. It figured in the

Armada. Sometimes the war-hooker attained to a high tonnage; thus the

Great Griffin, bearing a captain’s flag, and commanded by Lopez de

Medina, measured six hundred and fifty good tons, and carried forty

guns. But the merchant and contraband hookers were very feeble

specimens. Sea-folk held them at their true value, and esteemed the

model a very sorry one, The rigging of the hooker was made of hemp,

sometimes with wire inside, which was probably intended as a means,

however unscientific, of obtaining indications, in the case of magnetic

tension. The lightness of this rigging did not exclude the use of heavy

tackle, the cabrias of the Spanish galleon, and the cameli of the Roman

triremes. The helm was very long, which gives the advantage of a long

arm of leverage, but the disadvantage of a small arc of effort. Two

wheels in two pulleys at the end of the rudder corrected this defect,

and compensated, to some extent, for the loss of strength. The compass

was well housed in a case perfectly square, and well balanced by its two

copper frames placed horizontally, one in the other, on little bolts, as

in Cardan’s lamps. There was science and cunning in the construction of

the hooker, but it was ignorant science and barbarous cunning. The

hooker was primitive, just like the praam and the canoe; was kindred to

the praam in stability, and to the canoe in swiftness; and, like all

vessels born of the instinct of the pirate and fisherman, it had

remarkable sea qualities: it was equally well suited to landlocked and

to open waters. Its system of sails, complicated in stays, and very

peculiar, allowed of its navigating trimly in the close bays of Asturias

(which are little more than enclosed basins, as Pasages, for instance),

and also freely out at sea. It could sail round a lake, and sail round

the world--a strange craft with two objects, good for a pond and good

for a storm. The hooker is among vessels what the wagtail is among

birds--one of the smallest and one of the boldest. The wagtail perching

on a reed scarcely bends it, and, flying away, crosses the ocean.

These Biscay hookers, even to the poorest, were gilt and painted.

Tattooing is part of the genius of those charming people, savages to

some degree. The sublime colouring of their mountains, variegated by

snows and meadows, reveals to them the rugged spell which ornament

possesses in itself. They are poverty-stricken and magnificent; they put

coats-of-arms on their cottages; they have huge asses, which they

bedizen with bells, and huge oxen, on which they put head-dresses of

feathers. Their coaches, which you can hear grinding the wheels two

leagues off, are illuminated, carved, and hung with ribbons. A cobbler

has a bas-relief on his door: it is only St. Crispin and an old shoe,

but it is in stone. They trim their leathern jackets with lace. They do

not mend their rags, but they embroider them. Vivacity profound and

superb! The Basques are, like the Greeks, children of the sun; while the

Valencian drapes himself, bare and sad, in his russet woollen rug, with

a hole to pass his head through, the natives of Galicia and Biscay have

the delight of fine linen shirts, bleached in the dew. Their thresholds

and their windows teem with faces fair and fresh, laughing under

garlands of maize; a joyous and proud serenity shines out in their

ingenious arts, in their trades, in their customs, in the dress of their

maidens, in their songs. The mountain, that colossal ruin, is all aglow

in Biscay: the sun’s rays go in and out of every break. The wild

Jaïzquivel is full of idylls. Biscay is Pyrenean grace as Savoy is

Alpine grace. The dangerous bays--the neighbours of St. Sebastian, Leso,

and Fontarabia--with storms, with clouds, with spray flying over the

capes, with the rages of the waves and the winds, with terror, with

uproar, mingle boat-women crowned with roses. He who has seen the Basque

country wishes to see it again. It is the blessed land. Two harvests a

year; villages resonant and gay; a stately poverty; all Sunday the sound

of guitars, dancing, castanets, love-making; houses clean and bright;

storks in the belfries.

Let us return to Portland--that rugged mountain in the sea.

The peninsula of Portland, looked at geometrically, presents the

appearance of a bird’s head, of which the bill is turned towards the

ocean, the back of the head towards Weymouth; the isthmus is its neck.

Portland, greatly to the sacrifice of its wildness, exists now but for

trade. The coasts of Portland were discovered by quarrymen and

plasterers towards the middle of the seventeenth century. Since that

period what is called Roman cement has been made of the Portland

stone--a useful industry, enriching the district, and disfiguring the

bay. Two hundred years ago these coasts were eaten away as a cliff;

to-day, as a quarry. The pick bites meanly, the wave grandly; hence a

diminution of beauty. To the magnificent ravages of the ocean have

succeeded the measured strokes of men. These measured strokes have

worked away the creek where the Biscay hooker was moored. To find any

vestige of the little anchorage, now destroyed, the eastern side of the

peninsula should be searched, towards the point beyond Folly Pier and

Dirdle Pier, beyond Wakeham even, between the place called Church Hope

and the place called Southwell.

The creek, walled in on all sides by precipices higher than its width,

was minute by minute becoming more overshadowed by evening. The misty

gloom, usual at twilight, became thicker; it was like a growth of

darkness at the bottom of a well. The opening of the creek seaward, a

narrow passage, traced on the almost night-black interior a pallid rift

where the waves were moving. You must have been quite close to perceive

the hooker moored to the rocks, and, as it were, hidden by the great

cloaks of shadow. A plank thrown from on board on to a low and level

projection of the cliff, the only point on which a landing could be

made, placed the vessel in communication with the land. Dark figures

were crossing and recrossing each other on this tottering gangway, and

in the shadow some people were embarking.

It was less cold in the creek than out at sea, thanks to the screen of

rock rising over the north of the basin, which did not, however, prevent

the people from shivering. They were hurrying. The effect of the

twilight defined the forms as though they had been punched out with a

tool. Certain indentations in their clothes were visible, and showed

that they belonged to the class called in England the ragged.

The twisting of the pathway could be distinguished vaguely in the relief

of the cliff. A girl who lets her stay-lace hang down trailing over the

back of an armchair, describes, without being conscious of it, most of

the paths of cliffs and mountains. The pathway of this creek, full of

knots and angles, almost perpendicular, and better adapted for goats

than men, terminated on the platform where the plank was placed. The

pathways of cliffs ordinarily imply a not very inviting declivity; they

offer themselves less as a road than as a fall; they sink rather than

incline. This one--probably some ramification of a road on the plain

above--was disagreeable to look at, so vertical was it. From underneath

you saw it gain by zigzag the higher layer of the cliff where it passed

out through deep passages on to the high plateau by a cutting in the

rock; and the passengers for whom the vessel was waiting in the creek

must have come by this path.

Excepting the movement of embarkation which was being made in the creek,

a movement visibly scared and uneasy, all around was solitude; no step,

no noise, no breath was heard. At the other side of the roads, at the

entrance of Ringstead Bay, you could just perceive a flotilla of

shark-fishing boats, which were evidently out of their reckoning. These

polar boats had been driven from Danish into English waters by the whims

of the sea. Northerly winds play these tricks on fishermen. They had

just taken refuge in the anchorage of Portland--a sign of bad weather

expected and danger out at sea. They were engaged in casting anchor: the

chief boat, placed in front after the old manner of Norwegian flotillas,

all her rigging standing out in black, above the white level of the sea;

and in front might be perceived the hook-iron, loaded with all kinds of

hooks and harpoons, destined for the Greenland shark, the dogfish, and

the spinous shark, as well as the nets to pick up the sunfish.

Except a few other craft, all swept into the same corner, the eye met

nothing living on the vast horizon of Portland--not a house, not a ship.

The coast in those days was not inhabited, and the roads, at that

season, were not safe.

Whatever may have been the appearance of the weather, the beings who

were going to sail away in the Biscayan urca pressed on the hour of

departure all the same. They formed a busy and confused group, in rapid

movement on the shore. To distinguish one from another was difficult;

impossible to tell whether they were old or young. The indistinctness of

evening intermixed and blurred them; the mask of shadow was over their

faces. They were sketches in the night. There were eight of them, and

there were seemingly among them one or two women, hard to recognize

under the rags and tatters in which the group was attired--clothes which

were no longer man’s or woman’s. Rags have no sex.

A smaller shadow, flitting to and fro among the larger ones, indicated

either a dwarf or a child.

It was a child.

CHAPTER II.

LEFT ALONE.

This is what an observer close at hand might have noted.

All wore long cloaks, torn and patched, but covering them, and at need

concealing them up to the eyes; useful alike against the north wind and

curiosity. They moved with ease under these cloaks. The greater number

wore a handkerchief rolled round the head--a sort of rudiment which

marks the commencement of the turban in Spain. This headdress was

nothing unusual in England. At that time the South was in fashion in the

North; perhaps this was connected with the fact that the North was

beating the South. It conquered and admired. After the defeat of the

Armada, Castilian was considered in the halls of Elizabeth to be elegant

court talk. To speak English in the palace of the Queen of England was

held almost an impropriety. Partially to adopt the manners of those upon

whom we impose our laws is the habit of the conquering barbarian towards

conquered civilization. The Tartar contemplates and imitates the

Chinese. It was thus Castilian fashions penetrated into England; in

return, English interests crept into Spain.

One of the men in the group embarking appeared to be a chief. He had

sandals on his feet, and was bedizened with gold lace tatters and a

tinsel waistcoat, shining under his cloak like the belly of a fish.

Another pulled down over his face a huge piece of felt, cut like a

sombrero; this felt had no hole for a pipe, thus indicating the wearer

to be a man of letters.

On the principle that a man’s vest is a child’s cloak, the child was

wrapped over his rags in a sailor’s jacket, which descended to his

knees.

By his height you would have guessed him to be a boy of ten or eleven;

his feet were bare.

The crew of the hooker was composed of a captain and two sailors.

The hooker had apparently come from Spain, and was about to return

thither. She was beyond a doubt engaged in a stealthy service from one

coast to the other.

The persons embarking in her whispered among themselves.

The whispering interchanged by these creatures was of composite

sound--now a word of Spanish, then of German, then of French, then of

Gaelic, at times of Basque. It was either a patois or a slang. They

appeared to be of all nations, and yet of the same band.

The motley group appeared to be a company of comrades, perhaps a gang of

accomplices.

The crew was probably of their brotherhood. Community of object was

visible in the embarkation.

Had there been a little more light, and if you could have looked at them

attentively, you might have perceived on these people rosaries and

scapulars half hidden under their rags; one of the semi-women mingling

in the group had a rosary almost equal for the size of its beads to that

of a dervish, and easy to recognize for an Irish one made at

Llanymthefry, which is also called Llanandriffy.

You might also have observed, had it not been so dark, a figure of Our

Lady and Child carved and gilt on the bow of the hooker. It was probably

that of the Basque Notre Dame, a sort of Panagia of the old Cantabri.

Under this image, which occupied the position of a figurehead, was a

lantern, which at this moment was not lighted--an excess of caution

which implied an extreme desire of concealment. This lantern was

evidently for two purposes. When alight it burned before the Virgin, and

at the same time illumined the sea--a beacon doing duty as a taper.

Under the bowsprit the cutwater, long, curved, and sharp, came out in

front like the horn of a crescent. At the top of the cutwater, and at

the feet of the Virgin, a kneeling angel, with folded wings, leaned her

back against the stem, and looked through a spyglass at the horizon. The

angel was gilded like Our Lady. In the cutwater were holes and openings

to let the waves pass through, which afforded an opportunity for gilding

and arabesques.

Under the figure of the Virgin was written, in gilt capitals, the word

_Matutina_--the name of the vessel, not to be read just now on account

of the darkness.

Amid the confusion of departure there were thrown down in disorder, at

the foot of the cliff, the goods which the voyagers were to take with

them, and which, by means of a plank serving as a bridge across, were

being passed rapidly from the shore to the boat. Bags of biscuit, a cask

of stock fish, a case of portable soup, three barrels--one of fresh

water, one of malt, one of tar--four or five bottles of ale, an old

portmanteau buckled up by straps, trunks, boxes, a ball of tow for

torches and signals--such was the lading. These ragged people had

valises, which seemed to indicate a roving life. Wandering rascals are

obliged to own something; at times they would prefer to fly away like

birds, but they cannot do so without abandoning the means of earning a

livelihood. They of necessity possess boxes of tools and instruments of

labour, whatever their errant trade may be. Those of whom we speak were

dragging their baggage with them, often an encumbrance.

It could not have been easy to bring these movables to the bottom of the

cliff. This, however, revealed the intention of a definite departure.

No time was lost; there was one continued passing to and fro from the

shore to the vessel, and from the vessel to the shore; each one took his

share of the work--one carried a bag, another a chest. Those amidst the

promiscuous company who were possibly or probably women worked like the

rest. They overloaded the child.

It was doubtful if the child’s father or mother were in the group; no

sign of life was vouchsafed him. They made him work, nothing more. He

appeared not a child in a family, but a slave in a tribe. He waited on

every one, and no one spoke to him.

However, he made haste, and, like the others of this mysterious troop,

he seemed to have but one thought--to embark as quickly as possible. Did

he know why? probably not: he hurried mechanically because he saw the

others hurry.

The hooker was decked. The stowing of the lading in the hold was quickly

finished, and the moment to put off arrived. The last case had been

carried over the gangway, and nothing was left to embark but the men.

The two objects among the group who seemed women were already on board;

six, the child among them, were still on the low platform of the cliff.

A movement of departure was made in the vessel: the captain seized the

helm, a sailor took up an axe to cut the hawser--to cut is an evidence

of haste; when there is time it is unknotted.

“Andamos,” said, in a low voice, he who appeared chief of the six, and

who had the spangles on his tatters. The child rushed towards the plank

in order to be the first to pass. As he placed his foot on it, two of

the men hurried by, at the risk of throwing him into the water, got in

before him, and passed on; the fourth drove him back with his fist and

followed the third; the fifth, who was the chief, bounded into rather

than entered the vessel, and, as he jumped in, kicked back the plank,

which fell into the sea, a stroke of the hatchet cut the moorings, the

helm was put up, the vessel left the shore, and the child remained on

land.

CHAPTER III.

ALONE.

The child remained motionless on the rock, with his eyes fixed--no

calling out, no appeal. Though this was unexpected by him, he spoke not

a word. The same silence reigned in the vessel. No cry from the child to

the men--no farewell from the men to the child. There was on both sides

a mute acceptance of the widening distance between them. It was like a

separation of ghosts on the banks of the Styx. The child, as if nailed

to the rock, which the high tide was beginning to bathe, watched the

departing bark. It seemed as if he realized his position. What did he

realize? Darkness.

A moment later the hooker gained the neck of the crook and entered it.

Against the clear sky the masthead was visible, rising above the split

blocks between which the strait wound as between two walls. The truck

wandered to the summit of the rocks, and appeared to run into them. Then

it was seen no more--all was over--the bark had gained the sea.

The child watched its disappearance--he was astounded but dreamy. His

stupefaction was complicated by a sense of the dark reality of

existence. It seemed as if there were experience in this dawning being.

Did he, perchance, already exercise judgment? Experience coming too

early constructs, sometimes, in the obscure depths of a child’s mind,

some dangerous balance--we know not what--in which the poor little soul

weighs God.

Feeling himself innocent, he yielded. There was no complaint--the

irreproachable does not reproach.

His rough expulsion drew from him no sign; he suffered a sort of

internal stiffening. The child did not bow under this sudden blow of

fate, which seemed to put an end to his existence ere it had well begun;

he received the thunderstroke standing.

It would have been evident to any one who could have seen his

astonishment unmixed with dejection, that in the group which abandoned

him there was nothing which loved him, nothing which he loved.

Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet--the

tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair--the north wind was

rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the shudder

of awakening.

He cast his eyes about him.

He was alone.

Up to this day there had never existed for him any other men than those

who were now in the hooker. Those men had just stolen away.

Let us add what seems a strange thing to state. Those men, the only

ones he knew, were unknown to him.

He could not have said who they were. His childhood had been passed

among them, without his having the consciousness of being of them. He

was in juxtaposition to them, nothing more.

He had just been--forgotten--by them.

He had no money about him, no shoes to his feet, scarcely a garment to

his body, not even a piece of bread in his pocket.

It was winter--it was night. It would be necessary to walk several

leagues before a human habitation could be reached.

He did not know where he was.

He knew nothing, unless it was that those who had come with him to the

brink of the sea had gone away without him.

He felt himself put outside the pale of life.

He felt that man failed him.

He was ten years old.

The child was in a desert, between depths where he saw the night rising

and depths where he heard the waves murmur.

He stretched his little thin arms and yawned.

Then suddenly, as one who makes up his mind, bold, and throwing off his

numbness--with the agility of a squirrel, or perhaps of an acrobat--he

turned his back on the creek, and set himself to climb up the cliff. He

escaladed the path, left it, returned to it, quick and venturous. He was

hurrying landward, just as though he had a destination marked out;

nevertheless he was going nowhere.

He hastened without an object--a fugitive before Fate.

To climb is the function of a man; to clamber is that of an animal--he

did both. As the slopes of Portland face southward, there was scarcely

any snow on the path; the intensity of cold had, however, frozen that

snow into dust very troublesome to the walker. The child freed himself

of it. His man’s jacket, which was too big for him, complicated matters,

and got in his way. Now and then on an overhanging crag or in a

declivity he came upon a little ice, which caused him to slip down.

Then, after hanging some moments over the precipice, he would catch

hold of a dry branch or projecting stone. Once he came on a vein of

slate, which suddenly gave way under him, letting him down with it.

Crumbling slate is treacherous. For some seconds the child slid like a

tile on a roof; he rolled to the extreme edge of the decline; a tuft of

grass which he clutched at the right moment saved him. He was as mute in

sight of the abyss as he had been in sight of the men; he gathered

himself up and re-ascended silently. The slope was steep; so he had to

tack in ascending. The precipice grew in the darkness; the vertical rock

had no ending. It receded before the child in the distance of its

height. As the child ascended, so seemed the summit to ascend. While he

clambered he looked up at the dark entablature placed like a barrier

between heaven and him. At last he reached the top.

He jumped on the level ground, or rather landed, for he rose from the

precipice.

Scarcely was he on the cliff when he began to shiver. He felt in his

face that bite of the night, the north wind. The bitter north-wester was

blowing; he tightened his rough sailor’s jacket about his chest.

It was a good coat, called in ship language a sou-’wester, because that

sort of stuff allows little of the south-westerly rain to penetrate.

The child, having gained the tableland, stopped, placed his feet firmly

on the frozen ground, and looked about him.

Behind him was the sea; in front the land; above, the sky--but a sky

without stars; an opaque mist masked the zenith.

On reaching the summit of the rocky wall he found himself turned towards

the land, and looked at it attentively. It lay before him as far as the

sky-line, flat, frozen, and covered with snow. Some tufts of heather

shivered in the wind. No roads were visible--nothing, not even a

shepherd’s cot. Here and there pale spiral vortices might be seen, which

were whirls of fine snow, snatched from the ground by the wind and blown

away. Successive undulations of ground, become suddenly misty, rolled

themselves into the horizon. The great dull plains were lost under the

white fog. Deep silence. It spread like infinity, and was hush as the

tomb.

The child turned again towards the sea.

The sea, like the land, was white--the one with snow, the other with

foam. There is nothing so melancholy as the light produced by this

double whiteness.

Certain lights of night are very clearly cut in their hardness; the sea

was like steel, the cliff like ebony. From the height where the child

was the bay of Portland appeared almost like a geographical map, pale,

in a semicircle of hills. There was something dreamlike in that

nocturnal landscape--a wan disc belted by a dark crescent. The moon

sometimes has a similar appearance. From cape to cape, along the whole

coast, not a single spark indicating a hearth with a fire, not a lighted

window, not an inhabited house, was to be seen. As in heaven, so on

earth--no light. Not a lamp below, not a star above. Here and there came

sudden risings in the great expanse of waters in the gulf, as the wind

disarranged and wrinkled the vast sheet. The hooker was still visible in

the bay as she fled.

It was a black triangle gliding over the livid waters.

Far away the waste of waters stirred confusedly in the ominous

clear-obscure of immensity. The _Matutina_ was making quick way. She

seemed to grow smaller every minute. Nothing appears so rapid as the

flight of a vessel melting into the distance of ocean.

Suddenly she lit the lantern at her prow. Probably the darkness falling

round her made those on board uneasy, and the pilot thought it necessary

to throw light on the waves. This luminous point, a spark seen from

afar, clung like a corpse light to the high and long black form. You

would have said it was a shroud raised up and moving in the middle of

the sea, under which some one wandered with a star in his hand.

A storm threatened in the air; the child took no account of it, but a

sailor would have trembled. It was that moment of preliminary anxiety

when it seems as though the elements are changing into persons, and one

is about to witness the mysterious transfiguration of the wind into the

wind-god. The sea becomes Ocean: its power reveals itself as Will: that

which one takes for a thing is a soul. It will become visible; hence the

terror. The soul of man fears to be thus confronted with the soul of

nature.

Chaos was about to appear. The wind rolling back the fog, and making a

stage of the clouds behind, set the scene for that fearful drama of wave

and winter which is called a Snowstorm. Vessels putting back hove in

sight. For some minutes past the roads had no longer been deserted.

Every instant troubled barks hastening towards an anchorage appeared

from behind the capes; some were doubling Portland Bill, the others St.

Alban’s Head. From afar ships were running in. It was a race for refuge.

Southwards the darkness thickened, and clouds, full of night, bordered

on the sea. The weight of the tempest hanging overhead made a dreary

lull on the waves. It certainly was no time to sail. Yet the hooker had

sailed.

She had made the south of the cape. She was already out of the gulf, and

in the open sea. Suddenly there came a gust of wind. The _Matutina_,

which was still clearly in sight, made all sail, as if resolved to

profit by the hurricane. It was the nor’-wester, a wind sullen and

angry. Its weight was felt instantly. The hooker, caught broadside on,

staggered, but recovering held her course to sea. This indicated a

flight rather than a voyage, less fear of sea than of land, and greater

heed of pursuit from man than from wind.

The hooker, passing through every degree of diminution, sank into the

horizon. The little star which she carried into shadow paled. More and

more the hooker became amalgamated with the night, then disappeared.

This time for good and all.

At least the child seemed to understand it so: he ceased to look at the

sea. His eyes turned back upon the plains, the wastes, the hills,

towards the space where it might not be impossible to meet something

living.

Into this unknown he set out.

CHAPTER IV.

QUESTIONS.

What kind of band was it which had left the child behind in its flight?

Were those fugitives Comprachicos?

We have already seen the account of the measures taken by William III.

and passed by Parliament against the malefactors, male and female,

called Comprachicos, otherwise Comprapequeños, otherwise Cheylas.

There are laws which disperse. The law acting against the Comprachicos

determined, not only the Comprachicos, but vagabonds of all sorts, on a

general flight.

It was the devil take the hindmost. The greater number of the

Comprachicos returned to Spain--many of them, as we have said, being

Basques.

The law for the protection of children had at first this strange result:

it caused many children to be abandoned.

The immediate effect of the penal statute was to produce a crowd of

children, found or rather lost. Nothing is easier to understand. Every

wandering gang containing a child was liable to suspicion. The mere fact

of the child’s presence was in itself a denunciation.

“They are very likely Comprachicos.” Such was the first idea of the

sheriff, of the bailiff, of the constable. Hence arrest and inquiry.

People simply unfortunate, reduced to wander and to beg, were seized

with a terror of being taken for Comprachicos although they were nothing

of the kind. But the weak have grave misgivings of possible errors in

justice. Besides, these vagabond families are very easily scared. The

accusation against the Comprachicos was that they traded in other

people’s children. But the promiscuousness caused by poverty and

indigence is such that at times it might have been difficult for a

father and mother to prove a child their own.

How came you by this child? how were they to prove that they held it

from God? The child became a peril--they got rid of it. To fly

unencumbered was easier; the parents resolved to lose it--now in a wood,

now on a strand, now down a well.

Children were found drowned in cisterns.

Let us add that, in imitation of England, all Europe henceforth hunted

down the Comprachicos. The impulse of pursuit was given. There is

nothing like belling the cat. From this time forward the desire to seize

them made rivalry and emulation among the police of all countries, and

the alguazil was not less keenly watchful than the constable.

One could still read, twenty-three years ago, on a stone of the gate of

Otero, an untranslatable inscription--the words of the code outraging

propriety. In it, however, the shade of difference which existed between

the buyers and the stealers of children is very strongly marked. Here is

part of the inscription in somewhat rough Castillan, _Aqui quedan las

orejas de los Comprachicos, y las bolsas de los robaniños, mientras que

se van ellos al trabajo de mar_. You see the confiscation of ears, etc.,

did not prevent the owners going to the galleys. Whence followed a

general rout among all vagabonds. They started frightened; they arrived

trembling. On every shore in Europe their furtive advent was watched.

Impossible for such a band to embark with a child, since to disembark

with one was dangerous.

To lose the child was much simpler of accomplishment.

And this child, of whom we have caught a glimpse in the shadow of the

solitudes of Portland, by whom had he been cast away?

To all appearance by Comprachicos.

CHAPTER V.

THE TREE OF HUMAN INVENTION.

It might be about seven o’clock in the evening. The wind was now

diminishing--a sign, however, of a violent recurrence impending. The

child was on the table-land at the extreme south point of Portland.

Portland is a peninsula; but the child did not know what a peninsula

is, and was ignorant even of the name of Portland. He knew but one

thing, which is, that one can walk until one drops down. An idea is a

guide; he had no idea. They had brought him there and left him there.

_They_ and _there_--these two enigmas represented his doom. _They_ were

humankind. _There_ was the universe. For him in all creation there was

absolutely no other basis to rest on but the little piece of ground

where he placed his heel, ground hard and cold to his naked feet. In the

great twilight world, open on all sides, what was there for the child?

Nothing.

He walked towards this Nothing. Around him was the vastness of human

desertion.

He crossed the first plateau diagonally, then a second, then a third. At

the extremity of each plateau the child came upon a break in the ground.

The slope was sometimes steep, but always short; the high, bare plains

of Portland resemble great flagstones overlapping each other. The south

side seems to enter under the protruding slab, the north side rises over

the next one; these made ascents, which the child stepped over nimbly.

From time to time he stopped, and seemed to hold counsel with himself.

The night was becoming very dark. His radius of sight was contracting.

He now only saw a few steps before him.

All of a sudden he stopped, listened for an instant, and with an almost

imperceptible nod of satisfaction turned quickly and directed his steps

towards an eminence of moderate height, which he dimly perceived on his

right, at the point of the plain nearest the cliff. There was on the

eminence a shape which in the mist looked like a tree. The child had

just heard a noise in this direction, which was the noise neither of the

wind nor of the sea, nor was it the cry of animals. He thought that some

one was there, and in a few strides he was at the foot of the hillock.

In truth, some one was there.

That which had been indistinct on the top of the eminence was now

visible. It was something like a great arm thrust straight out of the

ground; at the upper extremity of the arm a sort of forefinger,

supported from beneath, by the thumb, pointed out horizontally; the

arm, the thumb, and the forefinger drew a square against the sky. At the

point of juncture of this peculiar finger and this peculiar thumb there

was a line, from which hung something black and shapeless. The line

moving in the wind sounded like a chain. This was the noise the child

had heard. Seen closely the line was that which the noise indicated, a

chain--a single chain cable.

By that mysterious law of amalgamation which throughout nature causes

appearances to exaggerate realities, the place, the hour, the mist, the

mournful sea, the cloudy turmoils on the distant horizon, added to the

effect of this figure, and made it seem enormous.

The mass linked to the chain presented the appearance of a scabbard. It

was swaddled like a child and long like a man. There was a round thing

at its summit, about which the end of the chain was rolled. The scabbard

was riven asunder at the lower end, and shreds of flesh hung out between

the rents.

A feeble breeze stirred the chain, and that which hung to it swayed

gently. The passive mass obeyed the vague motions of space. It was an

object to inspire indescribable dread. Horror, which disproportions

everything, blurred its dimensions while retaining its shape. It was a

condensation of darkness, which had a defined form. Night was above and

within the spectre; it was a prey of ghastly exaggeration. Twilight and

moonrise, stars setting behind the cliff, floating things in space, the

clouds, winds from all quarters, had ended by penetrating into the

composition of this visible nothing. The species of log hanging in the

wind partook of the impersonality diffused far over sea and sky, and the

darkness completed this phase of the _thing_ which had once been a man.

It was that which is no longer.

To be naught but a remainder! Such a thing is beyond the power of

language to express. To exist no more, yet to persist; to be in the

abyss, yet out of it; to reappear above death as if indissoluble--there

is a certain amount of impossibility mixed with such reality. Thence

comes the inexpressible. This being--was it a being? This black witness

was a remainder, and an awful remainder--a remainder of what? Of nature

first, and then of society. Naught, and yet total.

The lawless inclemency of the weather held it at its will; the deep

oblivion of solitude environed it; it was given up to unknown chances;

it was without defence against the darkness, which did with it what it

willed. It was for ever the patient; it submitted; the hurricane (that

ghastly conflict of winds) was upon it.

The spectre was given over to pillage. It underwent the horrible outrage

of rotting in the open air; it was an outlaw of the tomb. There was no

peace for it even in annihilation: in the summer it fell away into dust,

in the winter into mud. Death should be veiled, the grave should have

its reserve. Here was neither veil nor reserve, but cynically avowed

putrefaction. It is effrontery in death to display its work; it offends

all the calmness of shadow when it does its task outside its laboratory,

the grave.

This dead thing had been stripped. To strip one already

stripped--relentless act! His marrow was no longer in his bones; his

entrails were no longer in his body; his voice no longer in his throat.

A corpse is a pocket which death turns inside out and empties. If he

ever had a Me, where was the Me? There still, perchance, and this was

fearful to think of. Something wandering about something in chains--can

one imagine a more mournful lineament in the darkness?

Realities exist here below which serve as issues to the unknown, which

seem to facilitate the egress of speculation, and at which hypothesis

snatches. Conjecture has its _compelle intrare_. In passing by certain

places and before certain objects one cannot help stopping--a prey to

dreams into the realms of which the mind enters. In the invisible there

are dark portals ajar. No one could have met this dead man without

meditating.

In the vastness of dispersion he was wearing silently away. He had had

blood which had been drunk, skin which had been eaten, flesh which had

been stolen. Nothing had passed him by without taking somewhat from

him. December had borrowed cold of him; midnight, horror; the iron,

rust; the plague, miasma; the flowers, perfume. His slow disintegration

was a toll paid to all--a toll of the corpse to the storm, to the rain,

to the dew, to the reptiles, to the birds. All the dark hands of night

had rifled the dead.

He was, indeed, an inexpressibly strange tenant, a tenant of the

darkness. He was on a plain and on a hill, and _he was not_. He was

palpable, yet vanished. He was a shadow accruing to the night. After the

disappearance of day into the vast of silent obscurity, he became in

lugubrious accord with all around him. By his mere presence he increased

the gloom of the tempest and the calm of stars. The unutterable which is

in the desert was condensed in him. Waif of an unknown fate, he

commingled with all the wild secrets of the night. There was in his

mystery a vague reverberation of all enigmas.

About him life seemed sinking to its lowest depths. Certainty and

confidence appeared to diminish in his environs. The shiver of the

brushwood and the grass, a desolate melancholy, an anxiety in which a

conscience seemed to lurk, appropriated with tragic force the whole

landscape to that black figure suspended by the chain. The presence of a

spectre in the horizon is an aggravation of solitude.

He was a Sign. Having unappeasable winds around him, he was implacable.

Perpetual shuddering made him terrible. Fearful to say, he seemed to be

a centre in space, with something immense leaning on him. Who can tell?

Perhaps that equity, half seen and set at defiance, which transcends

human justice. There was in his unburied continuance the vengeance of

men and his own vengeance. He was a testimony in the twilight and the

waste. He was in himself a disquieting substance, since we tremble

before the substance which is the ruined habitation of the soul. For

dead matter to trouble us, it must once have been tenanted by spirit. He

denounced the law of earth to the law of Heaven. Placed there by man, he

there awaited God. Above him floated, blended with all the vague

distortions of the cloud and the wave, boundless dreams of shadow.

Who could tell what sinister mysteries lurked behind this phantom? The

illimitable, circumscribed by naught, nor tree, nor roof, nor passer-by,

was around the dead man. When the unchangeable broods over us--when

Heaven, the abyss, the life, grave, and eternity appear patent--then it

is we feel that all is inaccessible, all is forbidden, all is sealed.

When infinity opens to us, terrible indeed is the closing of the gate

behind.

CHAPTER VI.

STRUGGLE BETWEEN DEATH AND LIFE.

The child was before this thing, dumb, wondering, and with eyes fixed.

To a man it would have been a gibbet; to the child it was an apparition.

Where a man would have seen a corpse the child saw a spectre.

Besides, he did not understand.

The attractions of the obscure are manifold. There was one on the summit

of that hill. The child took a step, then another; he ascended, wishing

all the while to descend; and approached, wishing all the while to

retreat.

Bold, yet trembling, he went close up to survey the spectre.

When he got close under the gibbet, he looked up and examined it.

The spectre was tarred; here and there it shone. The child distinguished

the face. It was coated over with pitch; and this mask, which appeared

viscous and sticky, varied its aspect with the night shadows. The child

saw the mouth, which was a hole; the nose, which was a hole; the eyes,

which were holes. The body was wrapped, and apparently corded up, in

coarse canvas, soaked in naphtha. The canvas was mouldy and torn. A knee

protruded through it. A rent disclosed the ribs--partly corpse, partly

skeleton. The face was the colour of earth; slugs, wandering over it,

had traced across it vague ribbons of silver. The canvas, glued to the

bones, showed in reliefs like the robe of a statue. The skull, cracked

and fractured, gaped like a rotten fruit. The teeth were still human,

for they retained a laugh. The remains of a cry seemed to murmur in the

open mouth. There were a few hairs of beard on the cheek. The inclined

head had an air of attention.

Some repairs had recently been done; the face had been tarred afresh, as

well as the ribs and the knee which protruded from the canvas. The feet

hung out below.

Just underneath, in the grass, were two shoes, which snow and rain had

rendered shapeless. These shoes had fallen from the dead man.

The barefooted child looked at the shoes.

The wind, which had become more and more restless, was now and then

interrupted by those pauses which foretell the approach of a storm. For

the last few minutes it had altogether ceased to blow. The corpse no

longer stirred; the chain was as motionless as a plumb line.

Like all newcomers into life, and taking into account the peculiar

influences of his fate, the child no doubt felt within him that

awakening of ideas characteristic of early years, which endeavours to

open the brain, and which resembles the pecking of the young bird in the

egg. But all that there was in his little consciousness just then was

resolved into stupor. Excess of sensation has the effect of too much

oil, and ends by putting out thought. A man would have put himself

questions; the child put himself none--he only looked.

The tar gave the face a wet appearance; drops of pitch, congealed in

what had once been the eyes, produced the effect of tears. However,

thanks to the pitch, the ravage of death, if not annulled, was visibly

slackened and reduced to the least possible decay. That which was before

the child was a thing of which care was taken: the man was evidently

precious. They had not cared to keep him alive, but they cared to keep

him dead.

The gibbet was old, worm-eaten, although strong, and had been in use

many years.

It was an immemorial custom in England to tar smugglers. They were

hanged on the seaboard, coated over with pitch and left swinging.

Examples must be made in public, and tarred examples last longest. The

tar was mercy: by renewing it they were spared making too many fresh

examples. They placed gibbets from point to point along the coast, as

nowadays they do beacons. The hanged man did duty as a lantern. After

his fashion, he guided his comrades, the smugglers. The smugglers from

far out at sea perceived the gibbets. There is one, first warning;

another, second warning. It did not stop smuggling; but public order is

made up of such things. The fashion lasted in England up to the

beginning of this century. In 1822 three men were still to be seen

hanging in front of Dover Castle. But, for that matter, the preserving

process was employed not only with smugglers. England turned robbers,

incendiaries, and murderers to the same account. Jack Painter, who set

fire to the government storehouses at Portsmouth, was hanged and tarred

in 1776. L’Abbé Coyer, who describes him as Jean le Peintre, saw him

again in 1777. Jack Painter was hanging above the ruin he had made, and

was re-tarred from time to time. His corpse lasted--I had almost said

lived--nearly fourteen years. It was still doing good service in 1788;

in 1790, however, they were obliged to replace it by another. The

Egyptians used to value the mummy of the king; a plebeian mummy can

also, it appears, be of service.

The wind, having great power on the hill, had swept it of all its snow.

Herbage reappeared on it, interspersed here and there with a few

thistles; the hill was covered by that close short grass which grows by

the sea, and causes the tops of cliffs to resemble green cloth. Under

the gibbet, on the very spot over which hung the feet of the executed

criminal, was a long and thick tuft, uncommon on such poor soil.

Corpses, crumbling there for centuries past, accounted for the beauty of

the grass. Earth feeds on man.

A dreary fascination held the child; he remained there open-mouthed. He

only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect,

stung his leg; then he looked up again--he looked above him at the face

which looked down on him. It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly

because it had no eyes. It was a comprehensive glance, having an

indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, and

which emanated from the skull and teeth, as well as the empty arches of

the brow. The whole head of a dead man seems to have vision, and this is

awful. No eyeball, yet we feel that we are looked at. A horror of worms.

Little by little the child himself was becoming an object of terror. He

no longer moved. Torpor was coming over him. He did not perceive that he

was losing consciousness--he was becoming benumbed and lifeless. Winter

was silently delivering him over to night. There is something of the

traitor in winter. The child was all but a statue. The coldness of stone

was penetrating his bones; darkness, that reptile, was crawling over

him. The drowsiness resulting from snow creeps over a man like a dim

tide. The child was being slowly invaded by a stagnation resembling that

of the corpse. He was falling asleep.

On the hand of sleep is the finger of death. The child felt himself

seized by that hand. He was on the point of falling under the gibbet. He

no longer knew whether he was standing upright.

The end always impending, no transition between to be and not to be, the

return into the crucible, the slip possible every minute--such is the

precipice which is Creation.

Another instant, the child and the dead, life in sketch and life in

ruin, would be confounded in the same obliteration.

The spectre appeared to understand, and not to wish it. Of a sudden it

stirred. One would have said it was warning the child. It was the wind

beginning to blow again. Nothing stranger than this dead man in

movement.

The corpse at the end of the chain, pushed by the invisible gust, took

an oblique attitude; rose to the left, then fell back, reascended to the

right, and fell and rose with slow and mournful precision. A weird game

of see-saw. It seemed as though one saw in the darkness the pendulum of

the clock of Eternity.

This continued for some time. The child felt himself waking up at the

sight of the dead; through his increasing numbness he experienced a

distinct sense of fear.

The chain at every oscillation made a grinding sound, with hideous

regularity. It appeared to take breath, and then to resume. This

grinding was like the cry of a grasshopper.

An approaching squall is heralded by sudden gusts of wind. All at once

the breeze increased into a gale. The corpse emphasized its dismal

oscillations. It no longer swung, it tossed; the chain, which had been

grinding, now shrieked. It appeared that its shriek was heard. If it was

an appeal, it was obeyed. From the depths of the horizon came the sound

of a rushing noise.

It was the noise of wings.

An incident occurred, a stormy incident, peculiar to graveyards and

solitudes. It was the arrival of a flight of ravens. Black flying specks

pricked the clouds, pierced through the mist, increased in size, came

near, amalgamated, thickened, hastening towards the hill, uttering

cries. It was like the approach of a Legion. The winged vermin of the

darkness alighted on the gibbet; the child, scared, drew back.

Swarms obey words of command: the birds crowded on the gibbet; not one

was on the corpse. They were talking among themselves. The croaking was

frightful. The howl, the whistle and the roar, are signs of life; the

croak is a satisfied acceptance of putrefaction. In it you can fancy you

hear the tomb breaking silence. The croak is night-like in itself.

The child was frozen even more by terror than by cold.

Then the ravens held silence. One of them perched on the skeleton. This

was a signal: they all precipitated themselves upon it. There was a

cloud of wings, then all their feathers closed up, and the hanged man

disappeared under a swarm of black blisters struggling in the obscurity.

Just then the corpse moved. Was it the corpse? Was it the wind? It made

a frightful bound. The hurricane, which was increasing, came to its

aid. The phantom fell into convulsions.

The squall, already blowing with full lungs, laid hold of it, and moved

it about in all directions.

It became horrible; it began to struggle. An awful puppet, with a gibbet

chain for a string. Some humorist of night must have seized the string

and been playing with the mummy. It turned and leapt as if it would fain

dislocate itself; the birds, frightened, flew off. It was like an

explosion of all those unclean creatures. Then they returned, and a

struggle began.

The dead man seemed possessed with hideous vitality. The winds raised

him as though they meant to carry him away. He seemed struggling and

making efforts to escape, but his iron collar held him back. The birds

adapted themselves to all his movements, retreating, then striking

again, scared but desperate. On one side a strange flight was attempted,

on the other the pursuit of a chained man. The corpse, impelled by every

spasm of the wind, had shocks, starts, fits of rage: it went, it came,

it rose, it fell, driving back the scattered swarm. The dead man was a

club, the swarms were dust. The fierce, assailing flock would not leave

their hold, and grew stubborn; the man, as if maddened by the cluster of

beaks, redoubled his blind chastisement of space. It was like the blows

of a stone held in a sling. At times the corpse was covered by talons

and wings; then it was free. There were disappearances of the horde,

then sudden furious returns--a frightful torment continuing after life

was past. The birds seemed frenzied. The air-holes of hell must surely

give passage to such swarms. Thrusting of claws, thrusting of beaks,

croakings, rendings of shreds no longer flesh, creakings of the gibbet,

shudderings of the skeleton, jingling of the chain, the voices of the

storm and tumult--what conflict more fearful? A hobgoblin warring with

devils! A combat with a spectre!

At times the storm redoubling its violence, the hanged man revolved on

his own pivot, turning every way at once towards the swarm, as if he

wished to run after the birds; his teeth seemed to try and bite them.

The wind was for him, the chain against him. It was as if black deities

were mixing themselves up in the fray. The hurricane was in the battle.

As the dead man turned himself about, the flock of birds wound round him

spirally. It was a whirl in a whirlwind. A great roar was heard from

below. It was the sea.

The child saw this nightmare. Suddenly he trembled in all his limbs; a

shiver thrilled his frame; he staggered, tottered, nearly fell,

recovered himself, pressed both hands to his forehead, as if he felt his

forehead a support; then, haggard, his hair streaming in the wind,

descending the hill with long strides, his eyes closed, himself almost a

phantom, he took flight, leaving behind that torment in the night.

CHAPTER VII.

THE NORTH POINT OF PORTLAND.

He ran until he was breathless, at random, desperate, over the plain

into the snow, into space. His flight warmed him. He needed it. Without

the run and the fright he had died.

When his breath failed him he stopped, but he dared not look back. He

fancied that the birds would pursue him, that the dead man had undone

his chain and was perhaps hurrying behind him, and no doubt the gibbet

itself was descending the hill, running after the dead man; he feared to

see these things if he turned his head.

When he had somewhat recovered his breath he resumed his flight.

To account for facts does not belong to childhood. He received

impressions which were magnified by terror, but he did not link them

together in his mind, nor form any conclusion on them. He was going on,

no matter how or where; he ran in agony and difficulty as one in a

dream. During the three hours or so since he had been deserted, his

onward progress, still vague, had changed its purpose. At first it was a

search; now it was a flight. He no longer felt hunger nor cold--he felt

fear. One instinct had given place to another. To escape was now his

whole thought--to escape from what? From everything. On all sides life

seemed to enclose him like a horrible wall. If he could have fled from

all things, he would have done so. But children know nothing of that

breaking from prison which is called suicide. He was running. He ran on

for an indefinite time; but fear dies with lack of breath.

All at once, as if seized by a sudden accession of energy and

intelligence, he stopped. One would have said he was ashamed of running

away. He drew himself up, stamped his foot, and, with head erect, looked

round. There was no longer hill, nor gibbet, nor flights of crows. The

fog had resumed possession of the horizon. The child pursued his way: he

now no longer ran but walked. To say that meeting with a corpse had made

a man of him would be to limit the manifold and confused impression

which possessed him. There was in his impression much more and much

less. The gibbet, a mighty trouble in the rudiment of comprehension,

nascent in his mind, still seemed to him an apparition; but a trouble

overcome is strength gained, and he felt himself stronger. Had he been

of an age to probe self, he would have detected within him a thousand

other germs of meditation; but the reflection of children is shapeless,

and the utmost they feel is the bitter aftertaste of that which, obscure

to them, the man later on calls indignation. Let us add that a child has

the faculty of quickly accepting the conclusion of a sensation; the

distant fading boundaries which amplify painful subjects escape him. A

child is protected by the limit of feebleness against emotions which are

too complex. He sees the fact, and little else beside. The difficulty of

being satisfied by half-ideas does not exist for him. It is not until

later that experience comes, with its brief, to conduct the lawsuit of

life. _Then_ he confronts groups of facts which have crossed his path;

the understanding, cultivated and enlarged, draws comparisons; the

memories of youth reappear under the passions, like the traces of a

palimpsest under the erasure; these memories form the bases of logic,

and that which was a vision in the child’s brain becomes a syllogism in

the man’s. Experience is, however, various, and turns to good or evil

according to natural disposition. With the good it ripens, with the bad

it rots.

The child had run quite a quarter of a league, and walked another

quarter, when suddenly he felt the craving of hunger. A thought which

altogether eclipsed the hideous apparition on the hill occurred to him

forcibly--that he must eat. Happily there is in man a brute which serves

to lead him back to reality.

But what to eat, where to eat, how to eat?

He felt his pockets mechanically, well knowing that they were empty.

Then he quickened his steps, without knowing whither he was going. He

hastened towards a possible shelter. This faith in an inn is one of the

convictions enrooted by God in man. To believe in a shelter is to

believe in God.

However, in that plain of snow there was nothing like a roof. The child

went on, and the waste continued bare as far as eye could see. There had

never been a human habitation on the tableland. It was at the foot of

the cliff, in holes in the rocks, that, lacking wood to build themselves

huts, had dwelt long ago the aboriginal inhabitants, who had slings for

arms, dried cow-dung for firing, for a god the idol Heil standing in a

glade at Dorchester, and for trade the fishing of that false gray coral

which the Gauls called _plin_, and the Greeks _isidis plocamos_.

The child found his way as best he could. Destiny is made up of

cross-roads. An option of path is dangerous. This little being had an

early choice of doubtful chances.

He continued to advance, but although the muscles of his thighs seemed

to be of steel, he began to tire. There were no tracks in the plain; or

if there were any, the snow had obliterated them. Instinctively he

inclined eastwards. Sharp stones had wounded his heels. Had it been

daylight pink stains made by his blood might have been seen in the

footprints he left in the snow.

He recognized nothing. He was crossing the plain of Portland from south

to north, and it is probable that the band with which he had come, to

avoid meeting any one, had crossed it from east to west; they had most

likely sailed in some fisherman’s or smuggler’s boat, from a point on

the coast of Uggescombe, such as St. Catherine’s Cape or Swancry, to

Portland to find the hooker which awaited them; and they must have

landed in one of the creeks of Weston, and re-embarked in one of those

of Easton. That direction was intersected by the one the child was now

following. It was impossible for him to recognize the road.

On the plain of Portland there are, here and there, raised strips of

land, abruptly ended by the shore and cut perpendicular to the sea. The

wandering child reached one of these culminating points and stopped on

it, hoping that a larger space might reveal further indications. He

tried to see around him. Before him, in place of a horizon, was a vast

livid opacity. He looked at this attentively, and under the fixedness of

his glance it became less indistinct. At the base of a distant fold of

land towards the east, in the depths of that opaque lividity (a moving

and wan sort of precipice, which resembled a cliff of the night), crept

and floated some vague black rents, some dim shreds of vapour. The pale

opacity was fog, the black shreds were smoke. Where there is smoke there

are men. The child turned his steps in that direction.

He saw some distance off a descent, and at the foot of the descent,

among shapeless conformations of rock, blurred by the mist, what seemed

to be either a sandbank or a tongue of land, joining probably to the

plains of the horizon the tableland he had just crossed. It was evident

he must pass that way.

He had, in fact, arrived at the Isthmus of Portland, a diluvian alluvium

which is called Chess Hill.

He began to descend the side of the plateau.

The descent was difficult and rough. It was (with less of ruggedness,

however) the reverse of the ascent he had made on leaving the creek.

Every ascent is balanced by a decline. After having clambered up he

crawled down.

He leapt from one rock to another at the risk of a sprain, at the risk

of falling into the vague depths below. To save himself when he slipped

on the rock or on the ice, he caught hold of handfuls of weeds and

furze, thick with thorns, and their points ran into his fingers. At

times he came on an easier declivity, taking breath as he descended;

then came on the precipice again, and each step necessitated an

expedient. In descending precipices, every movement solves a problem.

One must be skilful under pain of death. These problems the child solved

with an instinct which would have made him the admiration of apes and

mountebanks. The descent was steep and long. Nevertheless he was coming

to the end of it.

Little by little it was drawing nearer the moment when he should land on

the Isthmus, of which from time to time he caught a glimpse. At

intervals, while he bounded or dropped from rock to rock, he pricked up

his ears, his head erect, like a listening deer. He was hearkening to a

diffused and faint uproar, far away to the left, like the deep note of a

clarion. It was a commotion of winds, preceding that fearful north blast

which is heard rushing from the pole, like an inroad of trumpets. At the

same time the child felt now and then on his brow, on his eyes, on his

cheeks, something which was like the palms of cold hands being placed on

his face. These were large frozen flakes, sown at first softly in space,

then eddying, and heralding a snowstorm. The child was covered with

them. The snowstorm, which for the last hour had been on the sea, was

beginning to gain the land. It was slowly invading the plains. It was

entering obliquely, by the north-west, the tableland of Portland.

BOOK THE SECOND.

_THE HOOKER AT SEA_.

CHAPTER I.

SUPERHUMAN LAWS.

The snowstorm is one of the mysteries of the ocean. It is the most

obscure of things meteorological--obscure in every sense of the word. It

is a mixture of fog and storm; and even in our days we cannot well

account for the phenomenon. Hence many disasters.

We try to explain all things by the action of wind and wave; yet in the

air there is a force which is not the wind, and in the waters a force

which is not the wave. That force, both in the air and in the water, is

effluvium. Air and water are two nearly identical liquid masses,

entering into the composition of each other by condensation and

dilatation, so that to breathe is to drink. Effluvium alone is fluid.

The wind and the wave are only impulses; effluvium is a current. The

wind is visible in clouds, the wave is visible in foam; effluvium is

invisible. From time to time, however, it says, “I am here.” Its “I am

here” is a clap of thunder.

The snowstorm offers a problem analogous to the dry fog. If the solution

of the _callina_ of the Spaniards and the _quobar_ of the Ethiopians be

possible, assuredly that solution will be achieved by attentive

observation of magnetic effluvium.

Without effluvium a crowd of circumstances would remain enigmatic.

Strictly speaking, the changes in the velocity of the wind, varying

from 3 feet per second to 220 feet, would supply a reason for the

variations of the waves rising from 3 inches in a calm sea to 36 feet in

a raging one. Strictly speaking, the horizontal direction of the winds,

even in a squall, enables us to understand how it is that a wave 30 feet

high can be 1,500 feet long. But why are the waves of the Pacific four

times higher near America than near Asia; that is to say, higher in the

East than in the West? Why is the contrary true of the Atlantic? Why,

under the Equator, are they highest in the middle of the sea? Wherefore

these deviations in the swell of the ocean? This is what magnetic

effluvium, combined with terrestrial rotation and sidereal attraction,

can alone explain.

Is not this mysterious complication needed to explain an oscillation of

the wind veering, for instance, by the west from south-east to

north-east, then suddenly returning in the same great curve from

north-east to south-east, so as to make in thirty-six hours a prodigious

circuit of 560 degrees? Such was the preface to the snowstorm of March

17, 1867.

The storm-waves of Australia reach a height of 80 feet; this fact is

connected with the vicinity of the Pole. Storms in those latitudes

result less from disorder of the winds than from submarine electrical

discharges. In the year 1866 the transatlantic cable was disturbed at

regular intervals in its working for two hours in the twenty-four--from

noon to two o’clock--by a sort of intermittent fever. Certain

compositions and decompositions of forces produce phenomena, and impose

themselves on the calculations of the seaman under pain of shipwreck.

The day that navigation, now a routine, shall become a mathematic; the

day we shall, for instance, seek to know why it is that in our regions

hot winds come sometimes from the north, and cold winds from the south;

the day we shall understand that diminutions of temperature are

proportionate to oceanic depths; the day we realize that the globe is a

vast loadstone polarized in immensity, with two axes--an axis of

rotation and an axis of effluvium--intersecting each other at the centre

of the earth, and that the magnetic poles turn round the geographical

poles; when those who risk life will choose to risk it scientifically;

when men shall navigate assured from studied uncertainty; when the

captain shall be a meteorologist; when the pilot shall be a chemist;

then will many catastrophes be avoided. The sea is magnetic as much as

aquatic: an ocean of unknown forces floats in the ocean of the waves,

or, one might say, on the surface. Only to behold in the sea a mass of

water is not to see it at all: the sea is an ebb and flow of fluid, as

much as a flux and reflux of liquid. It is, perhaps, complicated by

attractions even more than by hurricanes; molecular adhesion, manifested

among other phenomena by capillary attraction, although microscopic,

takes in ocean its place in the grandeur of immensity; and the wave of

effluvium sometimes aids, sometimes counteracts, the wave of the air and

the wave of the waters. He who is ignorant of electric law is ignorant

of hydraulic law; for the one intermixes with the other. It is true

there is no study more difficult nor more obscure; it verges on

empiricism, just as astronomy verges on astrology; and yet without this

study there is no navigation. Having said this much we will pass on.

One of the most dangerous components of the sea is the snowstorm. The

snowstorm is above all things magnetic. The pole produces it as it

produces the aurora borealis. It is in the fog of the one as in the

light of the other; and in the flake of snow as in the streak of flame

effluvium is visible.

Storms are the nervous attacks and delirious frenzies of the sea. The

sea has its ailments. Tempests may be compared to maladies. Some are

mortal, others not; some may be escaped, others not. The snowstorm is

supposed to be generally mortal. Jarabija, one of the pilots of

Magellan, termed it “a cloud issuing from the devil’s sore side.”[2]

The old Spanish navigators called this kind of squall _la nevada_, when

it came with snow; _la helada_, when it came with hail. According to

them, bats fell from the sky, with the snow.

Snowstorms are characteristic of polar latitudes; nevertheless, at times

they glide--one might almost say tumble--into our climates; so much

ruin is mingled with the chances of the air.

The _Matutina_, as we have seen, plunged resolutely into the great

hazard of the night, a hazard increased by the impending storm. She had

encountered its menace with a sort of tragic audacity; nevertheless, it

must be remembered that she had received due warning.