The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  “Or hash,” said another voice.

  “There goes ’Lisha Whitten with his hash!” Smith said bitterly. “Can’t you talk about nothin but hash?”

  “I like hash,” Whitten said. “You take a nice hash chopped up plenty fine with boiled potatoes and raw onions, and brown her—”

  “Listen,” Smith said harshly, “do you s’pose anybody in this Cachot don’t know as much about hash as you do? We never mention food in here without you have to go to work and drag in that hash of yours. Hash, hash, hash, hash, hash! That’s all you can think about: just hash!”

  My mind seemed like a pond that is, as our Maine people are given to saying, working. The consciousness of Emily Ransome completely filled my head, yet other thoughts seemed to rise through that consciousness as air bubbles rise from the bottom of a working pond. They rose and vanished, leaving behind the deep and unchangeable consciousness that occupied me. I could hear Jesse Smith telling about the new tunnels the Americans were digging—tunnels large enough to let all of the five thousand American prisoners escape at one time; and simultaneously I could wonder and wonder unceasingly what in God’s name had happened to Emily: where she had gone and with whom; and whether she was comfortable, with enough to eat.

  “They’re going down twenty feet,” Jesse said, “straight down from the floors of Number Four, Number Five, and Number Six! Then they’re going to level out, bring ’em together, and dig for the wall.”

  He told how every American in the prison had been sworn to secrecy; how an arrangement of lamps and small wooden windmills, revolved by hand, had been invented to keep the air pure in the tunnels; how the excavated dirt was concealed from Shordand and the turnkeys by being fed, handful by handful, into the streams that rim through each prison yard for washing.

  “They’re down there now,” he said, “pecking at that damned yeller gravel an’ bringing it up in their pockets and shirt tails.” He stopped suddenly, and I knew he had remembered some of us were in the Cachot for duration; so that no tunnel could lighten our troubles.

  One of the men near the door burst into a racking, interminable fit of coughing. Another went to snoring lightly.

  There was this much to be said for the Cachot, along with the many things to be said against it: it seemed to act like a drug on most of us, so that we slept easily and heavily in it, despite the roughness of its granite floor and the brutal chill that fingered at our bones both night and day.

  * * *

  I had my first look, the next morning, at our tomb and those who shared it with me. By the faint fight that filtered through the two hand-sized slits I could see that our granite box measured six paces by six paces, and maybe fifteen feet high. The floor was made of enormous blocks: the walls of smaller ones down which there was a perpetual trickle of moisture. There was a small pile of straw for each man, and at the end opposite the door a wooden bucket for a latrine. To one side of the iron door was a shelf, and on it a bucket of drinking water. Attached to the shelf by a piece of spun yarn was a half gourd for a drinking cup. We had the clothes we lay in, and our coarse prison blanket for a wrapping and a couch. In the room there was nothing else.

  The door was of iron, with an eight-inch wicket in it. Toward night Carley would open the wicket a little, so we could look out without standing on each other’s shoulders. At eight in the morning Carley came in with our breakfast: a cup of hot cocoa for each of us, and a quarter loaf of bread apiece, though the bread was not supplied by the British. Seemingly the smuggling of it to us was known and winked at. At the same time Carley would carry out and empty the bucket, renew our drinking water and look at us to see whether we were sick. At noon he brought us a bucket of soup. At night he brought us cocoa and bread again. Usually he brought it at six o’clock in summer and at four in winter, though he made the supper-hour later on days when other prisoners were sent to the Cachot. He did this so the new men wouldn’t have to go supperless to bed. He was a kind-hearted man; and while he could do little because he had been threatened with punishment if he was caught smuggling food or liquor or newspapers to us, he did whatever he could.

  Smith explained the workings of the place to me when we had heaped our straw in piles after breakfast and covered them with our folded blankets. He was a studious-looking young man with a long mop of straight black hair that came back over his ears and hung to his coat collar behind. If it had not been for his manner of closing his eyes after saying something particularly grave, and then opening them slowly and rolling them at his hearers with an air of simulated intolerance, he would often have been suspected of being serious, which he seldom was in my hearing.

  “You got to keep busy in this place,” he said, “and you can’t keep ’em busy unless you drive ’em. They’d rather lay and brood. On account of that, we elect a captain and a first mate every week. Me, I’m captain this week, and Obed Hussey, he’s first mate. Obed ain’t a bad first mate.”

  Obed Hussey, I saw, was tall and broad shouldered: as fine looking a boy as would be encountered in a month of Sundays, except for the beard on his face and the raggedness of his clothes.

  “Mr. Hussey, prepare the race track for the first race!”

  Jesse explained while Obed Hussey busied himself in spreading his blanket in the middle of the Cachot floor. “We run a series of louse races. That’s one way to keep ’em busy. Every man supplies his own louse; and anybody that claims not to have one is supplied by the nearest contestant. That prevents shirking. The winner gets held up to the window to report on what’s going on outside. Losers have to let the winners stand on their shoulders. It’s a good idea to have your races early and late, before and after market, when there’s plenty in the yard to report. Between times you got to make ’em take exercise. They don’t let us out of the Cachot to exercise; don’t let us out for nothing except sickness, and you got to be awful sick to be took to the hospital. If you catch jail fever, they won’t let you be took to the hospital till you’re mottled with it, and that’s pretty late. In fact, it’s too late.”

  “Race track prepared, Captain Smith,” Obed said.

  The men rose reluctantly from their piles of straw, spectral gray figures in that dim tomb, and approached the blanket, on which Obed, with a bit of lime, had drawn seven narrow alleyways.

  “You got yourself a louse?” Jesse asked me.

  I told him I had come in clean.

  “We’ll fix that,” Jesse said. “Rickor, give Cap’n Nason one of your best bugs. Don’t give him none of them half-growed ones, neitherl Give him a good big one, so’s he’ll have a chance with the rest of us.”

  Rickor, a tired-looking, stoop-shouldered man, searched himself carefully: then handed me an active gray insect.

  The men knelt in a circle around the blanket, holding their entries at one end of the alleyways.

  “Are you ready?” Jesse asked.

  The others growled expectantly.

  “Gol” Jesse shouted.

  The seven entrants were dropped on the starting line. They moved jerkily and indecisively on the rough surface of the blanket.

  “I snum!” Hussey said. “I got another putterer! I ain’t had a fast one in a week!” He poked at his entrant with a straw, baulking him in his effort to go in the wrong direction.

  “Whitten!” Jesse shouted angrily, “you’re blowing on yours!”

  “I ain’t neither!” Whitten protested. “I got to breathe, ain’t I? I wasn’t doing nothin’ but breathing.”

  “Breathe through your nose, then,” Jesse said.

  My entrant tacked first to starboard, then to larboard, as if in search of a safe haven; then stood still.

  “What do you do when they stop?” I asked Jesse.

  “Hope and pray,” he replied. “They can’t be touched when resting.”

  My insect conquered his suspicions and moved rapidly ahead.

  Simeon Hays set up a shouting and snapped his fingers furiously. “Move yo’ laigs, Gray Ghost!” he cried. “Come on,
you li’l’ gray rascal!”

  His louse, a long slender one, forged across the finish line.

  “That’s the fifth time in three days you came in first, Sim,” Jesse Smith said sourly. “Either you’re tempting that insect with some kind of food, or you’re holding him over on us. Lemme see you execute him right now.”

  Simeon obligingly cracked him between his thumb nails.

  Last of all Obed Hussey glumly herded his entry across the finish line with a straw, picked him up and examined him carefully; then destroyed him.

  “I declare,” he said, “there’s something plumb contrary about these animals of mine! If I could do it, I’d be almost tempted to clean ’em out, lock, stock, and barrel. Come on, Sim!”

  Simeon Hays mounted easily to Obed’s shoulders, hooked his fingers over the sill of the small slit near the ceiling, and peered out through it. The rest of us went back to our blankets.

  “It’s kind of foggy up back,” Simeon reported, “but you can see the hills the other side of Princetown. They’s a man on a donkey on the long road, ’bout two mile away, heading north by east. Looks like a flea carryin’ a littler flea. They’s four Rough Alleys huntin’ in the swill box back of Number One cookhouse. One of ’em’s found something. Looks like a turnip! They’s about two hundred men in sight. They got a Keno table pitched between Number One and Number Two. They’s seven fellers playin’ ketch with a ball made out of spun yam . . .”

  The rest of us lay back on our blankets in the gray gloom, striving to see into the prison yards with the eyes of Simeon Hays. It seemed to me that the world of which he spoke was a foggy, unreal world of specters and pixies. I took my miniature from my pocket and unwrapped it, holding it in the crook of my arm so I could study it unseen. The lips, I thought, moved as if to whisper to me; but in the Cachot there was no sound save the slurred Baltimore speech of Simeon Hays, telling us the few things he could see and understand of the infinitesimal happenings behind Prison Number One.

  XXVIII

  IN THE Cachot every man, I think, found his sharpest suffering from a different source. My own was the intolerable pressure of my incessant wondering: where had Emily gone, and how were things with her? What did she suffer, and what did she suffer for me? I think mine was the sharpest mental anguish there. For most of the other men, what they bore physically was enough to be busy over. Added to their special ills, we had a common bitterness in the scantiness of our food and light. Perhaps the darkness was the hardest to bear for most of us; there was never any light in that place save what filtered through the two small barred windows. Yet there were some among us who seemed most discomfortable because of the skimpiness of the rags they wore. One man would talk whimperingly an hour at a time of a fine suit of clothes he had once worn. Another bragged over and over of a beaver coat his father had given him on his fourteenth birthday; and there were others whose speech dwelt eternally on the diseases to which the Cachot, as well as the whole prison, exposed us. They would shiver and pretend to knock on wood as they spoke of jail fever, smallpox, and a violent pneumonia that set the lungs to crackling. Some found it most horrid—and indeed this was a thing oppressive to the soul—that for weeks on end we might have no more news of the world and of the movement of life upon our planet than did the very dead in the churchyard. The earth seemed to have closed over our heads and to lie heavily there.

  It was not until October that we had word of how the war went, and then what we heard was horrible. Carley told us, doubtless not realizing what he added to our sorrows; for, as I have said, he was as kind as he dared be. He told us how the British had landed from their fleet in the Chesapeake and marched up to Washington, with Mr. Jefferson’s militiamen running before them like frightened rabbits; and how they had put the torch to the library in Washington, to the Capitol, to the President’s House, and to many public offices, as well as to the navy yard.

  There was no racing on the blanket, and not even any looking out through the slit in the wall on the day after we heard that.

  Perhaps it was a month after this when a New Bedford man, con-signed to the Cachot for ten days, came in with news he had from a fresh draft of prisoners just brought to Dartmoor from the sea. Thus we learned how American privateers were being built in ever greater numbers and destroying more British commerce than at any time since the first two months of the war; and how British merchants were demanding the war be stopped before they were ruined. Even a hoarse and racking cheer went up from that dismal place when we thus heard of the greatest of all the privateering feats of the war: how the American privateer brig General Armstrong lay in Fayal harbor, neutral waters, and how she was unrightfully beset by a British sloop-of-war, a frigate and a ship-of-the-line, and fought off four hundred men, who came in boats to take her, destroyed most of them, and then was sunk by her own captain, who reached the shore safe with all but two of his men.

  Through that chill autumn we gradually hardened to the increasing cold and dampness and so kept our health. Those who came in for ten-day stretches, however, having been accustomed to the use of hammocks and to better food and to exercise, developed troubles in their lungs from sleeping on the cold granite and quickly became fit subjects for the hospital.

  The chief surgeon was a man named William Dykar, who had served in America with the British in our war for independence. He was an old man, violent tempered and opinionated, like so many officers who reach high positions in every army and navy; and he would visit no sick man in the Cachot because it was his belief that Americans could never be trusted to speak the truth and claimed always to be sick so to escape. Therefore sick men could get no treatment in the Cachot; though if one of them, on being released, was unable to stand, Carley would call a sentry and take him to the hospital, where too often he died. Therefore I say, after due thought and consideration, that this William Dykar, chief surgeon of the depot at Dartmoor from 1809 to 1814, was a deliberate and coldblooded murderer.

  It was toward the end of October that a seaman from Townsend, Maine, one Jesse Field, was put in among us. Beyond the fact that he had attempted to escape, and in so doing had lain full length in freezing mud against the wall of Number Seven Prison for a matter of six hours before being discovered, we could find out nothing from him, for he was weak and shaken with violent chills. He lay all that day on the straw we gave him, since he had been sent in without any; and on the following morning we saw there was a sort of brown crust on his lips and teeth. It looked to us like typhus. When Carley came with the breakfast, therefore, I told him to go again to Dr. Dykar and ask him for the love of God to give an order for this man to be taken to the hospital before all of us came down with the disease.

  “I been meanin’ to tell yez,” Carley said. “Dykar’s out! They t’run him out!”

  “Who’s the new man?” I asked. “Is he a real doctor, or a murderer, like the other?”

  “Yez’ll soon know!” Carley said. “His name’s Magrath, and he’s one of the salt of the earth—a descendant of the Irish kings.”

  We went back to watching Field and to cursing our jailers for their heartlessness. Before we knew it, almost, there was a rattling at the door, which swung back and revealed Carley standing at the side of a tall, thin, one-eyed man. He stood staring in at us, his mouth pursed up and pushed to one side and his left hand feeling at his face as if he sought a beard that wasn’t there.

  “How many of you in here?” he asked suddenly. His voice was deep and pleasant, with none of the snarl in it we were accustomed to hear from Dartmoor officials.

  I came to the door and told him.

  He looked me up and down. “Anything wrong with you?” he asked.

  I told him there wasn’t. “It’s a man that came in yesterday: Jesse Field. He looks like jail fever.”

  “Hm,” he said. “I’ll trouble you to wrap him in his blanket and bring him out where I can see him.”

  Hays and I made a blanket snug around Field and brought him out. It was the first time we
had been in the open air since August. The sky seemed huge and brilliant, even though heavy with gray clouds; and the air had a queer, piercing smell to it, as if drugged.

  We put Field on the ground. The new doctor pulled down his eyelid and looked into his eye, then peered into his mouth.

  “Call four sentries,” he said to Carley. “This man goes to the hospital at once.”

  “Sor!” Carley said, “I’ll have to be havin’ an order. I’ll run to the office and ask kin I have wan.”

  “No, you won’t!” Magrath said. “You’ll run to the nearest sentry! Who are you to talk about the office when I can see with half an eye you have a decent heart in you? Get along!”

  He turned back to us. “Let’s see this hole you live in.” He walked into the Cachot, lowering his head as he passed through the door. We stayed behind, eager to have the air as long as we could.

  He was pale when he came out, and there were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. “How are the vermin in there?” he asked.

  “The fleas are bad,” I told him, “but we keep the lice pretty well under control.”

  “We could do better with ’em if we had some light,” Hays said.

  “You have no light?” Magrath asked incredulously. “You mean you spend your lives in the dark?” The other men in the Cachot came to the door one by one, then edged, blinking, into the open, staring up at the sky and at their own raggedness.

  “We’re not allowed to have candles,” I told him. “This is pretty brutal treatment, Doctor. If I’d ever caught one of my men treating a dog like this, I’d have knocked him into the scuppers.”

  Four sentries, militiamen, warmly dressed in long hooded overcoats, came up and looked wonderingly at us. I would have paid well for one of their overcoats if I had had the money, but Exeter jail had left me with only seven dollars.

  “Take this man to the hospital on your muskets,” Magrath said. They stood there for a second, uncertain. Magrath snapped his fingers, and they moved, then, to obey, though they were clearly reluctant.