The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  “What are you in for?” he asked me.

  “Four of these men are in on a false charge,” I told him. “They’re in for duration. So am I. There’s more reason to what they charge me with, but I’m guilty of no crime. I’m guilty of nothing but trying to escape.”

  There was a commotion in the prison yard on the other side of the tall iron fence that separated the Cachot enclosure from the prisons. Prisoners shouted and ran toward the pickets. We saw Captain Shortland, followed by a militia officer, hastening toward us.

  We watched him coming, stocky and strong; and the prisoners in the yard shouted in time with his footsteps, “LOB ster, LOB ster, LOB ster!” By the time he reached us he was red and angry.

  “Good-morning to you, Captain,” Dr. Magrath said.

  “Who let these men out?” Shortland demanded. “Carley! Carley! What in hell do you mean? Put these men where they belong!”

  “My fault, Captain,” Dr. Magrath said. “I had a report: a case of jail fever. These men, if you’ll permit me to say so, Captain, should be looked after more carefully.”

  “Looked after!” Shortland said. “What in God’s name do you mean? I was told to put ’em in close confinement. Should I button ’em into lace nightgowns and send ’em to bed in my guest chamber?”

  “Indeed and indeed, Captain,” Magrath said, “you’ve little leeway in carrying out your ordersl Aye! What I have in mind, Captain, is that these men, after all, are prisoners of war, and I have a fixed conception of a prisoner of war. He’s a man held in trust: a man for whom an accounting must be rendered when the war’s over.”

  Shortland laughed, a sharp, mirthless bark. “Good God, Doctor,” he said, “let’s not have trouble at the very beginning! You know what orders are! These men are where they belong! What good is close confinement if you make it a damned lawn party, eh? These men get exactly what they deserve! Here, you, Carley! Push ’em back in the Cachot!”

  Carley fussed around us like a kindly old woman, saying, “Now, byes! Now, byes!”

  Magrath went on talking to Shortland in his deep, soothing voice, and we hung back against Carley’s insistent pushing so we might hear as much as we could.

  “Quite so, Captain,” he said, “but we don’t have to change close confinement to something worse, eh, Captain? Sleeping on granite, now, in this climate! There’s nothing like this in all England. Did you ever try sleeping on granite, Captain?”

  “No, by God!” Shortland shouted, “and until I do what these men have done I never expect tol”

  “Not that, Captain!” Magrath protested: “You don’t mean that! These men served their country, as I understand it. Nothing about that to deserve granite beds in winter, eh? I doubt you’d have been pleased, Captain, when you were first lieutenant of the Melpomene —hah, hah! There’s a many of us remember that cutting-out party of yours, Captain! Suppose, instead of cutting out the Avanturier and winning the rank of commander you’d fallen into the hands of the French and they’d clapped you into a black hole? Left you there with no light, and wet granite for a bed, eh?”

  Shortland made a contemptuous sound in his throat. “Punishment’s not punishment unless a man knows he’s being punishedl” he said. “Every damned one of these Americans is determined to get free! If we don’t punish ’em we’ll have ’em all breaking out and terrorizing the country.”

  “Ah,” Magrath said, “I had Americans at Mill Prison before I came here. There isn’t one of ’em that’ll give up trying to get free because you put ’em in the Cachot when they fail. No, no! Nothing gets anywhere with ’em but kindness! The harder you are on ’em, the worse you’ll find ’em. They’re not Frenchmen, Captain.”

  “You’re wasting your breath, Doctor,” Shortland snapped. “I know how to handle my men!”

  Magrath twisted his mouth and fingered his chin. “Yes,” he said mildly. “That must be true. But let’s look at the medical end of it, eh? I tell you, Captain, I don’t like this African smallpox that runs about here, nor this violent pneumonia. They’re like deadly poisons if not treated quickly and treated well. I must ask to be allowed to keep my eye on these men, or the guard may slip the wicket some fine morning and find all of ’em stiff as a stempost.”

  They turned toward the Cachot, as if already it had become a chamel house; and when Shortland saw us still crowded in the doorway, holding it open against Carley’s efforts to push us in, his face took on the look of badly cooked beef.

  Before he could speak Simeon Hays shouted to Magrath: “Feed him some calomel, Doctor! His liver ain’t what it ought to be!”

  With that, not wishing to cause trouble for Carley, we gave ground, and the door clanged shut on us once more.

  Now, whether the doctor’s suggestions had some effect on Shortland, or whether the doctor himself was responsible, I don’t know; but one November evening—a cold, dark twilight, when we were lying silently on our piles of straw, which had grown so shredded and mouldy that they were less like straw than like dusty chaff— Carley rattled the door and pushed open the wicket.

  “Here, byes!” he said. There was exultation in his voice. “I got a present for yez!”

  I got up quickly, stumbling over Hays, and went to him.

  “Don’t niwer say I ain’t give yez nothin’!” he said, handing me a piece of candle, an acid bottle, and a bundle of sulphur-tipped spunks for dipping in the bottle.

  “Who are they from?” I asked.

  “I dunno nawthin’ about it,” he said. “When yez finish with that, I’ll get yez more; but pay attention to this, for the love av Mary! Wheniwer yez use it, stuff the windys full of straw so the fight won’t show.”

  I doubt there are many folk, barring the blind, who know what it is to spend the greater part of their time in the thick dark. There is little I can say about it save that all of us dreaded the coming of night more than we had ever dreaded anything. Miller, the Englishman who had turned American, got the horrors one November evening. He burst out snuffling and groaning and hiccupping like a child, declaring he couldn’t live another day in the place, and saying there were bells ringing in his ears, piercing his brain like knives. He carried on to such a degree that Hays and I crawled over and got our hands on him, lest he knock out his brains against the floor.

  That one small point of yellow flame, almost absorbed by the dark walls of the Cachot, turned our misery into what, by comparison, seemed gaiety; for when the candle was kindled, our minds took fire from it as well, so we were able to speak, instead of lying silent and helpless. If we wished to move we could do so without stumbling over a man’s legs—which was a serious business, because our legs were thin-skinned from scanty food, close confinement and perpetual dampness. Above all we could occupy ourselves by lying around the candle as the spokes of a wheel radiate from the hub and engage in the making of hair bracelets, this being an art in which Jim Rickor had perfected himself when he should doubtless have been working at something that is known as “more useful.” Because of this I have ever since been loth to say what is useful and what isn’t.

  Since our hair had not been cut for months—nor our beards shaved, for that matter, nor our clothes washed, nor clothes or shoes given to us to replace the rags in which we lay—we were able to pull long hairs aplenty from our own heads for the making of bracelets. These, we hoped, would serve a double purpose; for not only did they occupy our hands, but Bickor claimed they were sovereign remedies against rheumatism. Therefore we made them prodigally; and each one of us had hair bracelets on his wrists and ankles, and hair rings on his fingers, while Bickor made himself a collar, an inch and a half wide, with a neat cravat, all woven out of hair.

  With the coming of December we had a fruitful subject for conversation. The month had no sooner started than Carley told us there was a rumor through the prison that American commissioners and British commissioners had met in Ghent, in Holland, to discuss peace, and were close to arriving at a decision. Thus, suddenly, we began to hope. For months we
had thought of nothing in the morning except how to get through the day, and at evening how to bear one more night. But now we had rosy and heart-stirring dreams that Peace might come at any moment to free us from cold and filth and aching bones, as it had come to free the Frenchmen. Every visit of Carley’s was an adventure: he might, we thought, have news; and whenever he came to the wicket we held our breaths for fear we might lose a word.

  Our hopes rose and fell like a fire. Jesse Smith came back to us on the ninth, swearing that if he hadn’t known us in the early days of our imprisonment, he’d have taken us for haystacks because of the length of our hair and beards. He had been caught trying to scale the wall, he said; and when we asked him why he had tried to escape with Peace imminent, he laughed sardonically.

  “Peace!” he said. “If there’s to be Peace, why are the British fitting out an expedition to capture New Orleans? They don’t know when they’re licked! They don’t know yet that we licked ’em in the Revolution! You got to lick ’em three times before it counts, and we’ve only licked ’em twice, so far!”

  Sick at heart, we told him to hold his tongue, and set him to making a hair bracelet, loaning him our own hair for it. I can hear him now, commenting on his first bracelet.

  “Hair bracelets!” he said. “My God! If the folks at home could only see me now! What if this should ever get to be known in Stonington, Connecticut! I can hear ’em, pointing at me and saying, ‘There goes Jesse Smith, that was captured by the British in the war and suffered horribly, making hair bracelets! Wounded, too, he was: cut his finger on a hair!’ ”

  But rumors of peace persisted, and so, too, did the attempts to escape, as we knew from men who were daily thrown in the Cachot.

  A part of the fever to escape, it seemed to me, was due to the approach of Christmas; for Christmas is made much of in our province of Maine as well as in all New England; and as December dragged by, on snow-laden wings, our thoughts and our speech turned continually to our homes, so that we were filled with a powerful longing for them. There were times when it seemed to me I could smell, even through and above the stench of the Cachot, the odor of roasting goose, the sweet scent of spices on apple sauce, the faint mellow perfume of cider, the fragrance of mince pie. In my imagination I could see the frost figures on the windows of our large front room and catch the smell of the house: a scent of dry pine wood and cinnamon and soap and smoke, mixed with a faint trace of hay and sea air.

  Christmas was a dark day, and we burned our candle all the morning so we could see to work on our hair bracelets; and Carley, instead of opening the wicket to give us our soup, unlocked the door and swung it open. Behind him we saw the doctor, tall and thin and one-eyed, wrapped in a heavy brown overcoat dusted with fine snow. From under his coat he drew a small bundle.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he said in his deep pleasant voice, and he wasn’t being sarcastic, either, though we were the wildest and rag-gedest looking men, I do believe, that ever in the history of the world had been called “gentlemen,” “well, gentlemen, I wish you many, many merry Christmases—in your own country.”

  “We wish you the same, Doctor,” said Simeon Hays. “We wish you the same, in this country or any other.”

  “Yes,” the doctor said, clearing his throat, “yes. I appreciate that very much. Are you gentlemen quite well?”

  “Why,” Simeon Hays said, “considering the amount of wine we drink and the number of rich seegars we smoke, were tollable, Doctor—tollable. Our appetite ain’t too good: probably there ain’t one of us could eat more than one cow, unless it was an awful small one.”

  “I see,” the doctor said. “I wished very much to bring you something to read, gentlemen, but like most other things, that seems to be forbidden. I’ve brought you a small plum pudding, and Carley has a full ration for you today instead of the regular two-thirds ration. I deeply regret the plum pudding is so small, but I’m forced to say that gentlemen who’ve been on two-thirds rations for months are almost better off with no plum pudding at all.”

  He gave the bundle to Simeon Hays. Carley, overcome with emotion, rattled our bowls against his pail of soup with as much noise as though building a new wing on the Cachot.

  I fished two clusters of hair bracelets from behind my pile of straw and handed one of them to the doctor. “Doctor,” I told him, “we couldn’t figure what to give you for a little remembrance, so we left it to each man. Oddly enough each man decided that the most useful thing would be a hair bracelet. We want you to take them as meaning we’re grateful.”

  The doctor took the lot and examined them, smiling queerly. When he spoke, he seemed to find difficulty in expressing himself. “Why, gentlemen,” he said, “this is a—this is a—I’m sure I shall never— this is a most unexpected—”

  “From his childhood he’s always hankered for nothing on earth so much as a hair bracelet,” Simeon Hays enlightened us in a hoarse whisper.

  Seeing the doctor had no desire to make a longer speech, I handed the other cluster of bracelets to Carley.

  “Timothy Carley,” I said, “these are for you, with thanks for past kindnesses.”

  “Oh, holy Mary!” Carley said, snuffling childishly, “I’m as proud of ’em as I’d be of the Garter!”

  “Why, you wicked, blasphemious old man!” Simeon expostulated, very ladylike; “whose garter?” With that, being half starved as usual, we went for our soup.

  Dr. Magrath cleared his throat. “I have one other little gift for you, gentlemen. It’s only a bit of hope, so to speak; but there’s worse gifts than hope. You may be quite certain that before this month is over there’ll be a peace treaty signed between England and America.”

  We stared at him. I know that I, for one, had such a pounding in my throat that I had trouble in downing my soup; for the face of Emily Ransome came so suddenly into my mind that an enormous hand seemed to clutch at my heart and squeeze it.

  Magrath smiled a lopsided smile at us, blinking his one blue eye; then the iron door clanged shut behind him.

  “Well,” said Simeon Hays, holding up a spoonful of soup. “Here’s to Christmas and freedom!”

  * * *

  Magrath had been right, for on the twenty-ninth day of December word was cried through the prison that on December 24th, in Ghent, the commissioners of England and America had signed a treaty. The war was over!

  Peace! Nothing to do but for everybody to go home, kiss his wife and family or his sweetheart, and go back to the counting house, or begin milking the cow or hauling the nets again.

  Peace! Nothing to do but throw the prison gates open. Nothing to do but open the door of our hell, the Cachot, and let us walk forth free men.

  No, it was not like that. It was with the very signing of peace that the climax and worst of our Calvary began.

  All the world knows that the St. Bartholomew of Dartmoor Prison came after the Peace had been signed.

  XXIX

  IN THE Cachot we innocently thought night after night that with the coming dawn Shortland would throw open the iron door; yet the days and the weeks went by, leaving us no better off than we had been before the Peace. January came down on us with a howling blizzard, and the short, bitter cold days dragged so slowly that we came to seem to ourselves like old, old men. Things that had happened a week before were lost, almost, in the dust of distant ages.

  From overmuch lying on the granite floor we had sores on our legs and hips and shoulders. Some of our sorry company were given to periods of moaning and sobbing that made me shiver and retch. For days on end Simeon Hays sat huddled in his blanket, hugging his knees, staring at nothing out of hollow eyes, making no sound except to grind his teeth. I turned more and more to my small picture of Emily Ransome, to look at it and stay my spirit with its loveliness; and when I did, my fingers shook and seemed to me more like claws than the fingers of a human hand.

  Magrath came frequently to see us, but his visits were short because, apparently, the sight of us distressed him and he could do not
hing to help us. Whenever he came we always asked about the Peace; but he could tell us nothing except that it could not be genuinely regarded as a peace until the sloop-of-war Favorite had carried a copy of the treaty to America, and until it had been ratified by President Madison and brought back again to England.

  “Look here,” I said to him one morning, late in January, “these men are losing hope. I can’t make ’em work any more.”

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “I can handle one of ’em easily, but together they can beat me. I no longer have the heart to hit ’em.”

  He nodded and left us. That afternoon he returned with Shortland; and the five of us who were for duration were brought from the Cachot and lined up before the commandant and the doctor.

  I was blinded by the glare of the open sky reflected from the snowy ground, and it was a little while before I was able to see the true fearsomeness of Hays and Rickor and Whitten and Miller, who were emaciated and horrible-looking.

  Shortland and Magrath stood and eyed us silently, Magrath tall and pale and one-eyed, and Shortland broad shouldered and curly haired and red-faced, looking like Punch and smelling so strongly of rum that he made my mouth water. Shortland looked inquiringly at Magrath. “Well, what’s wrong with ’em? They look like any of these damned tricky Yankees, so far as I can see.”

  Magrath stepped up to me and felt my upper arm. “Would you mind holding out your hand?”

  I held out my hand. It seemed almost transparent.

  Magrath thanked me: then stepped back beside Captain Shortland. “Captain, these men must be clothed. They must have fresh air each day. They’ve got to have half an hour of exercise in the open. I’ll help you do your duty, but I won’t connive at murder.”

  Shortland’s face grew purple. “Why, by God, Magrath, what do you mean!”

  “What I mean,” Magrath said, and he spoke as pleasantly as though offering an opinion on the weather, “what I mean is that these men are sick. Hope deferred maketh the heart sick, Captain. They’re not only sick; they’re being starved to death. Surely your eyes are as good as mine.”