So many verminous creatures used to make noises in the prison that Edmond had gradually become accustomed to sleeping through them; but this time, either because his senses were heightened by abstinence or because the noise really was louder than usual, or because at this final moment everything acquires some importance, Edmond raised his head so that he could hear better.
It was a regular scratching that seemed to suggest a huge claw or powerful teeth, or else the tapping of some implement on the stones. Weak as he was, the young man’s brain was struck by an ordinary notion which is constantly present in a prisoner’s mind: freedom. This noise came so aptly at the moment when, for him, every noise was about to cease, that he felt God must finally be taking pity on his suffering an sending him this noise to warn him to stop on the edge of the grave above which his foot was already poised. Who knows? Perhaps one of his friends, one of those beloved beings about whom he had thought so much that his mind was worn out with it, might be concerned for him at this moment and trying to lessen the distance between them.
No, Edmond must surely be mistaken: this was one of the hallucinations that hover around the doors of death.
However, he kept listening to the noise. It lasted about three hours, then he heard a sort of crumbling sound and the noise ceased.
A few hours later, it resumed, louder and nearer. Edmond was already interested in this burrowing that kept him company. Then, suddenly, the jailer came in.
In the week since he had decided to die and for the four days since he had begun to carry out his plan, Edmond had not spoken a word to the man, had not replied when he asked what Edmond thought was the matter with him, and had turned his face to the wall when he was too closely observed. But today the jailer might hear the dull grating sound, become alarmed by it and take steps to end it, thus perhaps upsetting that flicker of hope, the very idea of which delighted Dantès in his last hours.
The jailer was bringing his lunch.
Dantès raised himself on his bed and, in as loud a voice as he could muster, began to talk about everything: about the poor quality of the food he was given and the coldness of his dungeon, muttering and complaining so that he would have an excuse to speak louder. He tried the patience of the jailer, who had actually requested clear broth and fresh bread that day for his sick prisoner and was bringing them to him.
Fortunately, he imagined that Dantès was delirious. He put the food down on the miserable rickety table where he usually left it, and went out.
As soon as he was free to do so, Edmond joyfully went back to listen. The noise had become so clear that the young man could now hear it easily.
‘There’s no doubt about it,’ he thought. ‘Since the noise is continuing, even by day, it must be some unfortunate prisoner like myself who is trying to escape. Oh, if only I was beside him! How willingly I would help!’
Then, suddenly, a dark cloud passed across this first light of hope, in a mind accustomed to misfortune and unable easily to revert to feelings of joy: the idea struck him that the noise was caused by some workmen whom the governor was employing to repair one of the neighbouring cells.
It would be easy to find out, but how could he risk asking? Of course, he could just wait for the jailer to come, ask him to listen to the noise and judge his reaction; but if he were to satisfy his curiosity in this way, might he not sacrifice some more precious interest for a very short-lived gain? Unfortunately, Edmond’s head was an empty vessel, deafened by the buzzing of a single idea; he was so weak that his mind drifted like a whiff of smoke and could not fasten on a single thought. He could see only one way to sharpen his wits and recover the lucidity of his judgement: he turned towards the still-steaming broth that the jailer had just put down on the table, got up, staggered over to it, took the cup, raised it to his lips and drank down the liquid that it contained with an unspeakable sensation of well-being.
He had the resolution to leave it at that: he had heard that when unfortunate, shipwrecked mariners had been picked up in the last extremity of starvation, they had died after gorging themselves on too much solid food. Edmond put the bread – which he was already raising to his lips – back on the table and returned to his bed. He no longer wished to die.
He soon felt that some light was once again penetrating his brain: all his vague and almost indefinable ideas resumed their place on that marvellous chessboard where perhaps a single extra square is enough to ensure the superiority of men over animals. He was able to think and to strengthen his thoughts by reasoning.
So he told himself: ‘I must carry out a test, but without compromising anyone. If the person I can hear is an ordinary workman, I have only to knock against the wall and he will immediately stop what he is doing to try and guess who is knocking and why. But since he will not only be working legitimately, but also to orders, he will soon resume what he was doing. If, on the contrary, he is a prisoner, he will be alarmed by the noise that I make. He will be afraid of being found out, so he will stop work and only come back to it this evening, when he imagines everyone to be in bed and asleep.’
Edmond got up again. This time his legs were steady and his eyes could see clearly. He went over to a corner of the cell, took out a stone that had been loosened by the damp, and came back in order to tap it against the wall at the very point where the echoing sound was loudest.
He knocked three times.
At the first knock, the noise stopped, as if by magic.
Edmond listened intently. An hour passed, then two, but no further sound could be heard. He had created a total silence on the far side of the wall.
Full of hope, he ate a few crumbs of the bread, swallowed some mouthfuls of water and, thanks to the powerful constitution with which nature had endowed him, was more or less restored to himself.
The day went by and the silence continued. Night came, and the noise had still not resumed.
‘It’s a prisoner,’ Edmond thought, with inexpressible joy. At this, his mind began to race and life returned to him, with all the more force for having something to exercise it upon.
The night passed without him hearing the slightest sound. That night, Edmond did not close his eyes.
Daylight returned and the jailer came in with more food. Edmond had already eaten his previous meal and he devoured this one, continually listening out for the noise, which did not come, fearful that it might have ceased for ever. He walked ten or twelve leagues around his dungeon, spending whole hours shaking the iron bars on his window to restore to his limbs the strength and elasticity that they had lost over a long period without exercise, in short preparing himself for the struggle with whatever fate had in store for him, like a wrestler flexing his arms and rubbing his body with oil before he enters the ring. Then, between these periods of feverish activity, he listened to hear if the sound had returned, growing impatient with the caution shown by this prisoner who had not guessed that it was another like himself who had disturbed him in his efforts to escape – another prisoner whose eagerness to be free was at least as great as his own.
Three days went by, seventy-two deadly hours which he counted, minute by minute.
Finally, one evening when the jailer had just paid his final visit, when Dantès pressed his ear to the wall for the hundredth time, he thought that a barely perceptible scratching echoed in his head as it rested against the silent stones.
Dantès moved back to compose his whirling brain, walked a few times round the room, then put his ear again to the same spot.
There was no doubt: something was happening on the other side. The prisoner had recognized the danger of his earlier method and had changed it: certainly, in order to carry on the work in greater security, he was using a lever instead of a chisel.
Encouraged by the discovery, Edmond decided to come to the assistance of this indefatigable workman. He began by moving his bed, behind which he judged that the burrowing was taking place, and looked around for some object which he could use to chip away at the wall, dig out the damp c
ement and eventually dislodge a stone. But he could see nothing. He had no knife or other cutting implement, no metal except iron bars, and he had tested these bars often enough to know that they were firmly set and that it was not even worth the effort of trying to loosen them.
His only furniture was a bed, a chair, a table, a bucket and a pitcher.
Certainly, there were iron brackets on the bed, but they were fixed to the wood with screws; it would take a screwdriver to turn these and take off the brackets.
There was nothing on the table and chair. The bucket had once had a handle, but it had been removed.
Only one thing remained for Dantès to do, which was to break the pitcher and set to work with one of the earthenware fragments shaped to a point. He swung the pitcher against a stone and it shattered.
He chose two or three pointed fragments and hid them in his mattress, leaving the rest scattered around on the floor: the breaking of the pitcher was too natural an occurrence for it to arouse any comment.
Edmond had the whole night to work, but he made little progress in the dark because he had to feel his way and he realized that he was blunting his crude implement against a piece of stone harder than it. So he put his bed back and waited for daylight. Recovering hope, he had recovered patience.
Throughout that night he listened, hearing the unknown miner continue his subterranean burrowing.
Day came and the jailer entered. Dantès told him that, the evening before, while he was taking a drink straight from the pitcher, it had slipped out of his hands and broken on the ground. The jailer went off, grumbling, to get a new pitcher, without even bothering to take away the pieces from the previous one. He returned a few moments later, told the prisoner to be more careful and then left.
Dantès was overjoyed at hearing the sound of the bolt which previously used to make his heart sink every time it slammed shut. He listened to the noise of footsteps fading and, when it died away, hurried over to his bed and pulled it aside. By the dim light of day that entered the dungeon, he could see that he had achieved nothing by his efforts the night before, because he had attacked the stone itself, instead of the plaster around it.
This plaster had been softened by damp. With a thrill of joy, Dantès saw that fragments of it could be removed. Admittedly, these fragments were so small as to be almost invisible, but after half an hour, even so, Dantès had scraped away roughly a handful. A mathematician could have calculated that after some two years’ work, provided he did not encounter the solid rock, it would be possible to dig out a passage two feet across and twenty feet deep.
Realizing this, the prisoner regretted not having devoted the long hours that had already passed, ever more slowly, to this task, instead of wasting them in hope, prayer and despair. However slow the work, how much would he have achieved in the six or so years that he had spent buried in this dungeon! The idea fired him with renewed enthusiasm.
Over the next three days, taking extraordinary care to avoid discovery, he managed to remove all the plaster and expose the stone. The wall was composed of rubble which had been strengthened in places by blocks of hewn stone. He had almost loosened one of these blocks, and he now had to shift it in its socket. He tried to do so with his nails, but made no impression, and the fragments of the pitcher which Dantès pushed into the gaps, in the hope of using them as a lever, broke when he tried to do so.
After an hour of fruitless effort, he got up, perspiring with anguish. Was he to be defeated at the very start? Would he have to wait, helpless and inactive, for his neighbour to do everything – when the man himself might become discouraged?
Then an idea occurred to him, and he stood there, smiling. Of its own accord, the sweat dried on his forehead.
Every day the jailer brought Dantès his soup in a tin pot. This pot contained soup for him and for another prisoner, because Dantès had noticed that it was always either full or half empty, depending on whether the turnkey had started his rounds, giving out the food, with Dantès or with his fellow-prisoner.
The pot had an iron handle: it was this iron handle that Dantès coveted – and would have paid for it, if required to do so, with ten years of his life.
The jailer poured the contents of the pot into Dantès’ plate. After eating his soup with a wooden spoon, Dantès would wash the plate, so that it could serve the same purpose each day.
In the evening, Dantès put his plate on the floor, half-way between the door and the table. As he came in, the jailer stepped on the plate and broke it into a thousand pieces.
This time, he had nothing to reproach Dantès with: he had been wrong to leave his plate on the floor, admittedly, but the jailer had been wrong not to look where he was walking. So he merely grumbled. Then he looked around to see where he could pour the soup. As Dantès had only that one plate, there was no alternative.
‘Leave the pot,’ Dantès said. ‘You can collect it when you bring me my dinner tomorrow.’
This advice appealed to the jailer, since it saved him the trouble of going back upstairs, then down and back up again. He left the pot. Dantès shuddered with joy.
This time, he eagerly ate the soup and the meat which, as is customary in prisons, was put in with the soup. Then, after waiting for an hour, to make sure that the jailer did not change his mind, he moved his bed, took the pot, slipped the end of the handle between the stone block which he had scraped clean of plaster and the surrounding rubble, and began to lever it. A slight movement in the stone proved to him that he was succeeding; and indeed, after an hour, the stone had been removed from the wall, leaving a gap more than one and a half feet in diameter.
Dantès carefully swept up all the plaster, distributed it around the corners of the cell, scraped at the greyish earth with a splinter from his jug and covered the plaster in earth.
Then, wanting to take full advantage of this night in which chance – or, rather, the ingenuity of the scheme that he had dreamt up – had delivered so precious an implement to him, he continued to dig eagerly. At dawn, he replaced the stone in its hole, pushed his bed against the wall and lay down on it.
His breakfast consisted of a piece of bread. The jailer came in and put it on the table.
‘What? Aren’t you bringing me a new plate?’ Dantès asked.
‘No,’ said the turnkey. ‘You break everything. You smashed your jug and it’s your fault that I broke your plate. If all the prisoners were responsible for as much damage, the government couldn’t keep up with it. We are leaving you the pot and your soup will be poured into that. In this way, perhaps you won’t destroy everything around here.’
Dantès raised his eyes to heaven and joined his hands in prayer under the blanket.
This piece of iron which he had been allowed to keep aroused a more profound wave of gratitude towards heaven in his heart than he had experienced, in his previous life, from the greatest blessings that had descended upon him.
However, he had noticed that, since he himself had started to work, the other prisoner was no longer digging.
No matter. This was no reason to give up his efforts. That evening, thanks to his new implement, he had extracted more than ten handfuls of stone filling, plaster and mortar from the wall.
When the time came for the jailer’s visit, he straightened out the twisted handle of the pot and put the receptacle back in its usual place. The turnkey poured out the standard ration of soup and meat; or, rather, of soup and fish, because this happened to be a fast day: three times a week the prisoners were given a meatless diet. That would have been another way of counting time, if Dantès had not long ago given up measuring it.
Then, after pouring out the soup, the turnkey went out.
This time Dantès wanted to ascertain whether his neighbour had in fact stopped working. He listened. All was as silent as it had been during the three days when the work was interrupted. Dantès sighed. His neighbour was clearly suspicious of him.
However, he did not give up and continued to work throughout the night
. But after two or three hours of digging, he came up against an obstruction. The iron had ceased to cut, but slid across a flat surface.
Dantès felt the object with his hands and realized that he had hit a beam. It ran across – or, rather, entirely blocked – the hole that Dantès had started to dig.
Now he would have to dig over or under. The poor young man had not foreseen this obstacle.
‘Oh, my God, my God!’ he cried. ‘I have prayed so often to You that I hoped You might have heard me. My God! After having deprived me of freedom in life, oh, God! After having deprived me of the calm of death. Oh, God! When you had recalled me to life, have pity on me! God! Do not let me die in despair!’
‘Who is it that speaks of God and despair at one and the same time?’ asked a voice which seemed to come from beneath the earth and which, muffled by the darkness, sounded on the young man’s ears with a sepulchral tone. Edmond felt his hair rise on his head and shuffled back, still kneeling.
‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘I can hear a man’s voice!’
For the past four or five years, Edmond had heard no one speak except his jailer; and, to a prisoner, a jailer is not a man but a living door added to the oak door of his cell and a bar of flesh joined to his bars of iron.
‘In heaven’s name!’ Dantès cried. ‘Whoever spoke, speak again, even though your voice terrified me. Who are you?’
‘Tell me who you are,’ the voice demanded.
‘An unfortunate prisoner,’ Dantès said, not at all unwilling to reply.
‘Of what country?’
‘France.’
‘And your name?’
‘Edmond Dantès.’
‘Profession?’
‘Seaman.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Since February the twenty-eighth, 1815.’
‘What was your crime?’
The Count of Monte Cristo Page 20