The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  They put us ashore in the drizzle; and even at this hour in the morning we found ourselves surrounded by drunken sailors out of grogshops, trulls with voices like knives, old women carrying jugs of ale and baskets full of cakes, fried eels and boiled sheep’s heads; by Devon farmers in corduroy breeches, red vests that dropped half down their fat thighs, and little tight brimless yellow caps like the scooped-out half of a pumpkin.

  Some pitied us and others didn’t. “Look at ’em!” a trull screamed, pointing at Jeddy and me, “look at ’em, sayin’ they’re Amairicans, when there ain’t nobody as don’t know Amairicans has red skins.”

  The English sailor with her looked at her gravely, raised her chin with his forefinger, and hit her fair on the jaw. She went down in a heap in the mud. He swayed on his feet, wagging his head at us drunkenly. “Sportsmen!” he said. “Tha’s what we are! Treat prisoners like sportsmen even if they be a lot o’ blasted rebels!”

  Our escort of a hundred moon-faced Devonshire militiamen started us off at last, up the steep streets of Plymouth and away from the sour smell and the mud. As we went, Plymouth seemed more than ever like a funnel; for a piercing wind roared down the abrupt roadways, rain beat into our soggy garments, and brown driblets of water wriggled from foothole to foothole in the claylike mud.

  I expected, when we reached the top of the hill, to march off on a level to wherever we were going. Yet when we had toiled up we found the top was only the beginning of another range of hills, somewhat less green than those near the ocean; and when we had labored up the second range we found a third before us, brownish and sad looking, drenched with rain, and wreathed in ragged veils of fog. Beyond the third was a fourth, and beyond the fourth, a fifth; and through all the length of that sullen, interminable day the hills mounted before us, so that the road was like a never-ending river of mud pouring down from some monstrous reservoir high up among the dirty scud of cloud and mist and rain.

  The color of those hills changed gradually from brown to gray, and then to a dark gray; so that the country was as somber as it was chill and watery. There were no trees or shrubs on that vast expanse of rolling countryside, and no houses—only here and there, at wide intervals, a hut that seemed to shrink into itself at the threatening hills that frowned upon it. As we went higher there were patches of snow, and a biting dampness to the air such as I have never felt on any ocean.

  We plodded upward all that cold wet morning, and in the afternoon we came to the longest of those long hills, its top lost in a driving gurry of snow and rain. There were stupendous granite pinnacles and knobs jutting from its dingy surface as though an angry God had pelted it with the leavings from the rest of the world.

  There was a confused babbling before and behind us, and I caught the word “Dartmoor.” Jeddy pulled at the sleeve of the moon-faced Devonshire militiaman beside us. “Is this Dartmoor?”

  The soldier looked at us stolidly. “Dartymoor be oop,” he said thickly.

  It seemed to us the hill would never end; but we topped it at last and found ourselves looking off at a country faintly like that through which we had already mounted, and yet unlike it. It was more gigantic, as though we were seeing what we had already passed through, but seeing it magnified and distorted by weariness and hunger, or by a sick man’s dream. The ground before us swept off into a broad valley, and then up to tremendous remote heights, treeless and houseless, and dotted here and there by fingers and spikes of granite, small-seeming things in that enormous expanse. The road, empty of all life and unsheltered by any tree or house from the drive of the rain and snow-laden wind, stretched off ahead of us like a dirty string.

  The valley and the distant hills were almost black, except where snow lay on them; and what was more, the drab soil around us, when I poked at it with my fingers, was not good clean dirt, but a slimy black peat, unhealthy and decayed.

  “Dartymoor,” the soldier beside us said, and I thought there was complacency in his voice. Certainly there was pride in the gesture he made with his musket toward the dreadful land that faced us, though how any person could look at it except with horror was beyond me; for if ever a place looked like an abode for devils and lost souls, it was that swarthy, sinister moor.

  We were like blind insects, it seemed to me, crawling and crawling up the roof of a great black bam: insects that might be blotted from the face of nature with little exertion and no regret.

  They gave us no rest, these pie-faced Devonshire soldiery, but drove us on, across the somber hills, past up-thrust granite arms that seemed to threaten us; up and up, and down and down, and up and up again; and late in the afternoon we came to a wretched square stone house, rising from pools of water in which sad ducks paddled. Beyond it we saw another, and beyond that a bend in the road and a downward path to a shallow, desolate valley where there were more houses.

  Beyond the houses, sprawled against a dingy hill slope, lay a circular mass of granite; a sort of giant millstone.

  We stared at it and stared at it, lurching drunkenly down the slope like mud-caked scarecrows; but if any man of us had a thought in his head, either fearful or otherwise, about that dark and hulking prison, he kept it to himself.

  XXI

  THE shape of that miserable place, as I have said, was vaguely the shape of a monstrous millstone or cartwheel. The outer rim of the wheel was a stone wall a mile in length and twelve feet in height; and thirty feet from it was the inner rim of the wheel: a similar wall, twelve feet in height as well. Around the top of each wall was stretched a wire to which bells were hung, and if any part of the wire was touched, no matter how lightly, the bells set up a clangor; and every guard in hearing came running with his loaded musket.

  Projecting from the inner rim at intervals were loopholed bastions; so when the guards ran into the bastions and up the steps with which they were supplied they could sweep the entire prison yard with their muskets and cut down any person who might be striving to mount the wall.

  This enormous tilted cartwheel was divided into equal parts by a high stone wall running through its center. On one side of the wall were offices, guardhouses and storehouses. On the other side were the prison buildings, seven of them, each one shaped like a huge New England bam, but their walls built entirely of stone, and all of them pointing inward to a common center, like clumsy spokes in this vast wheel. The seven buildings were again divided, three being in a yard by themselves on one side of the semicircle, and three in a yard on the other side; and in between, standing alone and walled off from the three to the right and the three to the left, was the odd prison, Prison Number Four, which was the deepest and darkest in the place, barring the Cachot or Black Hole itself; for it was in Number Four that those Frenchmen who were known as Romans lived, and King Dick and his court, and all the Americans who had been captured up to this time.

  The high wall that separated the prison half of the cartwheel from the other half was pierced in the center by a high barred gate, and the gate led from the prison half into a market place, a hundred feet square, which might be regarded as the hub of the wheel.

  We were driven like sheep beneath a stone archway in the outer wall, taken in hand by a detachment of bare-kneed Scotch soldiery, and herded down through the inner gate and into a small stone house that stood on our left, near the hospital. Our clothes were soaked and covered with mud. There was mud in our hair, even; and some of us could not stand upright because of the blisters on our feet.

  They wrote our names in a book, giving us numbers: putting down our rank, when we were received, where we were bom; our ages and statures and appearance; the shape of our faces, the color of our hair and eyes, the marks on our bodies—all the things that would help them catch us again in case we escaped.

  While we stood waiting for this wearisome duty to be completed there was a shouting of sentries outside, and a stir and bustle among the clerks who were taking our names, and with that in came a floridfaced, hook-nosed man with a high chest and thick upper arms and curly bro
wn hair, dressed in the uniform of a naval officer. This man was Thomas Shortland, captain in the royal navy: agent for prisoners of war at Dartmoor; and we were not long in discovering what thousands of Americans already knew—that if ever a man deserved to burn in hell, it was Thomas Shortland.

  I was sure, as soon as I looked at him, that he would have a touchy temper; for this is something, I have found, which often accompanies curly brown hair.

  “My God!” Shortland exclaimed angrily to one of the clerks, “what’s Pellew thinking of to send me this number of men! A hundred of them, and there’s already nine thousand in the prison!” He stamped up and down; and I knew, from the look of him and the rage he was in, that to attempt to speak with him about getting a parole would be doing all of us a disservice.

  “Give these men hammocks, blankets, and mattresses,” he snapped. “Yes, and mess equipment. You, Hawkens: see they get mess equipment, and spun yam for slinging their hammocks.”

  They brought us our bedding: a hammock of fair quality, a mattress about an inch in thickness, stuffed with something that felt like wet wadded newspaper, and a blanket that might have held out wind if it could have been tarred.

  When the clerks were done with us we shouldered our bedding and limped into the rain, to find our bags waiting. We picked them up, whereupon the Scotch soldiers marched us through still another gate and down across the empty square market place, which would have been the hub of the hulking wheel to which I have likened the prison. We could see the square front of Number Four Prison ahead of us, with dim lights shining from its six end windows: windows that gave it the look of glaring at us out of ancient, rheumy, hating eyes.

  The soldiers pushed us through iron gates at the far end of the market place, and a warden led us between two strong walls, up to the face of the building and around a comer to an entranceway. He fumbled at the door, rattling a key in the lock. There was a stale, sour smell around us, in spite of the bitter wind that whipped the raindrops through our sodden garments.

  When the door creaked open, a volcanic blast of noise and fetid air surged out. “Git along in!” the warden shouted. “ ’Urry up! Don’t tike the ’ole bloody night!”

  I don’t know how I had come to think of Dartmoor as a place of small stone cells in which manacled men lay eternally on the floor, groaning. This was how I had thought of it; but now that the iron-studded door had closed behind us I saw there were neither cells nor manacles. If there were groanings, they were completely lost in a deafening hubbub of gabbling, laughing and hurrooing, shot through with scraps of song, shrill whistlings, and a clatter of iron against iron.

  An enormous room lay before us, with colonnades of slender posts extending from floor to ceiling along the length of it, as though hundreds of small schooners, stripped of standing and running rigging, were moored close together, not only along the walls, but down the center of the room as well. Thus it had the look of the most tremendous stable in the world, with stalls for hundreds of horses; but instead of horses between the masts or posts or stanchions or whatever you wish to call them, there were men squatting around kettles in groups of six, eating, drinking, laughing and shouting; men sewing at garments, or searching themselves for vermin, or reading in books and newspapers, or playing games, or busy at pursuits that were mysteries to us. Among them were flickering candles whose yellow beams seemed to make their garments and their faces yellow, but to cast no illumination whatever on the remainder of their prison. Thus the masts or stanchions vanished into the upper murk, and the yellow company was outlined against a wall whose swartness glittered strangely, though it was not till later that I saw the glitter was caused by the reflection of the candles on moisture that trickled unendingly down the face of the dark stones.

  The pressure of the men pushed me into an alleyway between the stanchions, an alleyway that ran the length of the building. The men in the stalls, most of them clad in sleazy roundabout jackets, saffron yellow in color and stamped back and front with the black TO TO of the Transport Office, never so much as raised their eyes. We dragged ourselves wearily a little farther down the alley, and then a little farther, helpless and friendless, but ever hopeful of finding a spot where we might squeeze in and rest.

  It seemed to me that every inch of floor space in this great prison house was occupied, and we doomed to wander through laughing, yelling prisoners until too exhausted to move farther.

  Yet we were strangely succored, and by one who aimed to persecute us, as is sometimes the case in this life. Jeddy Tucker, suddenly dropping his bag and hammock at my feet, reached silently for a gangling, saffron-colored figure hunkered on the floor, searching his body for vermin like a yellow monkey.

  When Jeddy pulled him to his feet, I saw it was Eli Bagley, whom we had last seen heading to the westward in his crazy brig, hopeful, like Columbus, of reaching the American continent.

  He stared at us open-mouthed for a moment; then burst into malevolent laughter. “Gol durn yel” he said to Jeddy, and his wandering gaze included me as well, “they got ye!”

  He was a miserable object, dirty and with no shirt beneath his yellow roundabout jacket; and when I looked into the stall in which he had been squatting I saw men no more savory-looking than Bagley.

  He laughed again, excitedly. “I thought you wouldn’t never get took! By gorry, I wished you was here last winter, when we didn’t have no clothes nor fires nor nothing.”

  “Where can we hang these hammocks?” I asked him.

  “You go to Tophet!” he squealed, his lantern-jawed face a fiery red, and his chin whisker trembling with rage. Then he grew calmer, as though realizing we were all Americans together. “Well,” he said, scratching himself uncertainly, “well—”

  “Go on, Bagley,” Jeddy urged him. “We never did anything to you that you didn’t deserve.”

  “You belong up on the next floor,” he said, peering at us sharply. “All your people are up there. Go on up them steps—” he pointed to a long flight of stone stairs opposite the doorway through which we had entered, stairs that ascended into the darkness in which the ceiling was shrouded—“and when you’ve dumb ’em, ask for King Dick.”

  He pressed his nutcracker lips tight together, then doubled over, slapping his knees and cackling.

  We shouted to the drabbled, mud-smeared men who stood crowded in the alleyway behind us, staring at the tumult and movement of this vast cavern of a prison with the yellow pinpoints of countless candles reflected in their eyes. They turned and made their way up the stone stairway, looking, as they mounted that steep slope, bent beneath the burdens of their bags and hammocks, like the picture in the Bible that my mother brought from England in her sailing days—the picture showing the building of the Tower of Babel.

  Jeddy and I climbed the stairs last of all to find our crew huddled close together at the top. I saw there was trouble brewing; for the huddled men had lowered their bags and hammocks to the floor and were hitching at their trousers and sleeves, as men do when on the verge of using their fists.

  When we pushed through them and came into the front rank, we saw we were in another vast stable-like room, no different from the one on the lower floor. Similar rows of stanchions extended as far as we could see in the gloom, and candles made innumerable golden points through its dim cavernous length. Yet there was a difference; for it had a ranker smell to it, a smell something like that in the den of a fox; and above all else the prisoners were different. On the floor below they had paid no attention to us, so that we felt alone and forgotten, and therefore helpless. Here, on the other hand, there were faces tinned toward us wherever we looked: thin, mean, pockmarked faces that made quick movements, like animals watching in the deep forest, raising and lowering their heads as though to catch our scent.

  They were ugly faces, gray-looking even in the yellow light of the candles, and gaunt. Some of these unsavory folk were clothed, and badly clothed, in yellow rags or grayish rags; whereas others wore nothing except pieces of cloth twiste
d around their loins.

  It was easy to tell from the look in these men’s eyes that we weren’t welcome, and I knew we would do well to get away quickly, since we were in no condition to fight—not even to fight naked scarecrows.

  “I want King Dick,” I said. “Which is King Dick?”

  A voice among these watching faces said something in French. They were all Frenchmen, I saw, and bad ones, too, if it’s possible to tell anything from a man’s face. A squatting, half-naked figure close to us rose on hands and knees. A knife was tucked in his right hand so that the blade extended halfway up his bare gray arm. He snarled at us, using a word I had never heard before.

  “Shut your mouth!” Jeddy cried. He threw his clothes bag at the half-naked man, knocking him in a heap. He followed the bag like a cat, dragged the man to his feet and drove a fist into his windpipe, so that he sprawled to the floor and lay there. Jeddy snatched up the knife which the half-naked man had dropped, and recovered the clothes bag at the same time.

  The rest of the ragged men scrambled upright and glared silently at us. Most of them, I saw, had knives; and I quickly decided that if blows were to be struck, we had best strike first. The thought had no sooner passed through my head than I heard a shrill, high voice, far away and beyond the circle of snarling French faces, shouting querulously, “Frawg! Frawg! Frawg!” With that the angry Frenchmen sank back as if they had been puppets, deserted by their guiding hand. The anger vanished miraculously from their faces, and they cast only occasional glances at us from the corners of their eyes.

  The distant shout of “Frawg!” was picked up by other voices, all strangely high. It occurred to me suddenly that these were the voices of Negroes.

  We became conscious of a bustle not far from us: a scurrying and hustling. Figures approached between the stanchions, one a towering, giant figure. As it came close enough to be lighted by the feeble yellow candlelight, we saw it to be that of a gigantic Negro. He wore a bearskin hat, so that he seemed eight feet tall; and in his right hand he carried a long club, like the handle of a boarding pike, but thicker and gnarled. His face was a soft, sooty black, like the black on the bottom of a kettle, and his head seemed too small for his enormous body, rather like a melon balanced on an up-ended long gun. Yet his mouth and eyes made up in size for the smallness of his head; for his mouth stretched all the way across his face, as though slashed with a knife; while his eyes, possibly because of their whiteness against the sooty black of his skin, had the appearance of china doorknobs set on swivels.