The Lively Lady

by Kenneth Lewis Roberts

  “Wait,” I said, “wait a minute. You’ve heard from her, or you’d never have come to me.”

  “She wrote and told us,” Mrs. Sanderson said. “We came home as soon as we had the letter.”

  “Yes,” Sanderson added, “but in the letter she said you would know everything.”

  I turned from them and looked at Shortland. He stared back at me with hard, round eyes; and his thoughts were easily read. He would have taken infinite pleasure in having me triced up and catted.

  “Letters and messages have come for me in the past seven months,” I said. “Where are they?”

  He answered as quickly as if I had asked him the number of guns on Nelson’s Victory. “There’s nothing for you. No letters or messages.” His hawk-like glare was fixed on my face; his barrel of a chest stuck out like a pigeon’s.

  “No letters or messages in these seven months? Did you say there have been no letters for me, Captain?”

  “That’s right!” he said, “that’s right! You understand me now.”

  He turned to Mrs. Sanderson. “These Americans give us a deal of trouble,” he said, seeming to speak merrily and confidentially. “It appears we can’t do anything to suit ’em.”

  I looked at the knuckles of my right hand and wondered at the whiteness of them; at the way these long months of darkness and dampness and bad food had made knuckles and joints stand out like knobs. What Shortland told me was impossible; but there was no way of knowing whether the letters had been appropriated by prison officials, or whether they had been sent to Sir Arthur Ransome, or what had happened to them. I knew the man was lying: I could see it in the defiance of his eye and catch it in his overready answers. Yet there was nothing to be gained by bandying words, and I told myself I must go easy, take it gently.

  “Seven months!” Sanderson said. “Where have you been for seven months that you couldn’t ask about letters?”

  “Buried alive,” I said, “but that’s over now. Your sister: she wrote you a letter. Where did she write it from?”

  “There was no way of telling. It was handed to the captain of a 74 in a Portsmouth gambling club.”

  “In a gambling club!” I said. “Who—not by—”

  “No,” he interrupted, “by a gentleman: a gentleman who had won money from the captain. When the captain was stripped clean, the gentleman gave back his money and the letter with it, asking that it be delivered; and in the course of time I received it.”

  “Well,” I said, “she must have been afraid Sir Arthur might find her, I think.” I looked at Shortland, sitting puffed up and angry behind his desk, eyeing me closely as though wishful of snatching the thoughts from my brain; and I made up my mind I had said almost enough.

  “I think so,” Sanderson said. “Aye, I think so.”

  Mrs. Sanderson snuffled suddenly, then dabbed at her eyes with a wisp of a handkerchief and smiled up at me mistily.

  Sanderson coughed. “It took us aback at first, the things she wrote about you. Excited—a little wild—but under the circumstances—ah —I dare say quite genuine—ah—her happiness and all that! Ah—were here because we’d like to be friendly.”

  Mrs. Sanderson nodded in agreement. “We’d like you to know it’s understood,” she said gently. “We’re taking her side, of course. Yours too, Captain.”

  “We’ve come to you first,” Sanderson said, “because we couldn’t find her in the three days since we landed. Unhappily she hasn’t any relatives but me, and no family friends to turn to. It might be you could help us find her, and, at any rate, we’ve come to take you out of prison. We’d like to do that for your own sake, Captain. We found out we can free you; and we’ll sign the papers now if you’re ready to go with us.”

  I looked from him to Shortland, doubting I had heard correctly.

  “Yes,” Sanderson said, “it’s a new ruling of the War Office. Any American prisoner must be released at the request of a British subject, or of the captain of an American merchant ship; and at his release he receives a passport from Captain Shortland.”

  “Nothing has been said to the prisoners about this,” I said to Shortland.

  “I dare say,” he returned coolly. “It’s quite possible there’s been an oversight on the part of one of the clerks.”

  I looked at him for a time, wondering whether his cruelty to helpless people was due to a poison in his veins.

  “Well,” I said after a little, “I dare say it’s an oversight you can easily correct. I hope there’s been no such oversight about my letters.”

  He started up behind his desk, his face fixed in the same queer, hook-nosed grin that Punch affects when about to thump his friends to death with his great club. “You—you damned—you presume—” He stopped, suddenly conscious of the intensity of our scrutiny, and sat behind his desk again, breathing heavily. “These Americans!” he said to Mrs. Sanderson, with that same pretense of confidential amusement. “There isn’t one who doesn’t feel competent to govern this prison.”

  Sanderson turned to me. “We’ll take you out now?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t tell you how happy I’d be to leave this place.”

  “You mean there’s some reason you can’t leave?”

  “Because of a boy from my town,” I told him. “He’s a good boy— the best boy I ever knew. He almost sacrificed his life to help me, once; and many years ago his father saved my father at the Battle of Valcour Island. I promised him I’d not go away without him.”

  “Bring him with you,” Mrs. Sanderson said eagerly. “We’ll be happy to have him. There are two of us, and were allowed one prisoner apiece.”

  “He’s in the hospital,” I explained. “He’s had typhus. The doctor says he’s to rest quiet for two weeks more.”

  “Two weeks?” Sanderson said. “That’s the eighth of April. Then we’ll come back for you and your friend on the eighth of April.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “His name’s Tommy Bickford. When you see him, I think you’ll be glad you’re taking him away from such a place as this.”

  “We will indeed,” Sanderson assured me. “We will indeed! I wish we could take all of you!”

  Shortland laughed. “You don’t know ’em as I do! If you did I doubt if you’d let ’em within pistol shot of you or your wife.”

  The Sandersons ignored him. “The eighth of April, Captain Nason,” Mrs. Sanderson said as she gave me her hand. “God send we have good news for you, too, on the day we take you and your friend out of Dartmoor.”

  XXXI

  THE effigy of Reuben Beasley had been hanged, tom down, and kicked into the gutter by the furious men who were still prisoners because of his laziness and inability. No longer did these men in patience toil over their ship models of bone, or weave hats and boxes of straw; they drank and howled and sang desperately.

  The night of the fifth of April was the worst of all, because of a sudden whim of the officials to offer us for rations the stale hard biscuits saved through the winter to guard against famine. The Rough Alleys set up an eery yelling at sundown, broke open the gates into the market, and charged up the market slope, howling for bread. There they stayed for hours, in the dim light of the market lamps, their clamor dying to confused rumbles and rising to angry roars.

  By morning we heard that all the towns on the moor were in a panic over the ferocity of the Americans. It was a morning strange and memorable for its warmth and sunniness—two things I had seen so seldom on Dartmoor as to count them miracles. So began the blackest day that I have ever known.

  * * *

  I did not think it a black day as I walked slowly along the front of the market place in the early afternoon with Tommy Bickford. “One more day,” we both said, time and again. “One more day, and then it’s the eighth!”

  Tommy was neat as a pin in a natty blue seckatary’s suit presented to him by King Dick. Dr. Magrath had given him his discharge from hospital care two days before, telling me to keep him in the sun and walk him
a little at discreet intervals, and with that had coughed, stroked his cheek, bidden us good-bye, and stalked away, as good a gentleman as I ever saw.

  “One more day and then it’s the eighth,” I said, for the hundredth time, I think, as we walked along the front of the market.

  Tommy touched me on the arm with a thin hand to which the life was returning. “One more day, and then it’s the eighth, Cap’n Dick!”

  After a time we strolled into the yard that held Prisons Five, Six, and Seven. Here we lounged, following the sun around the buildings, and we sat on the warm ground while Tommy half dozed, roused himself to murmur, “One more day,” and half dozed again.

  When the chill of sundown settled on us I roused him for a final walk before we should go in, and as we stood up, he murmured, “One more day,” and his face wore his old-time look of seeming pleased with everything and everybody.

  The yard in which we walked—that of Prisons Seven, Six, and Five —was shaped like a segment of pie. The curved crust of the pie was formed by the two outer walls and the inner barricade of iron pickets; one edge was the wall that divided us from our own prison house, Number Four; and the other edge was the wall, part masonry and part iron fence, that separated us from the barracks and the market place. We walked, therefore, along the curved iron pickets from the barracks walls to the Number Four wall, then back again, taking it slowly and having a care not to be bumped by ball players and sky-larkers.

  The sky was taking on the pale green color that I have seen only on Dartmoor on the few clear evenings I knew in that dismaying country: a green color that throws a strange illumination on the swarthy hills. The militiamen detailed to light the lamps in the yards were making ready, I saw, to come through the gates.

  There were four sailors tossing a ball near the barracks wall as we came down to it. While we watched them, the ball struck one man’s finger tips and flew over the wall into the barracks yard. The men stood there shouting for their ball like four dogs barking at a squirrel up a tree; but no ball came back to them, and one of the men pried at the stones of the wall with a sharp stick. As we looked, two of the stones fell out. The man stooped down and picked at the opening; then peered into the hole and again bellowed for the ball.

  From the direction of the market place I heard a shouting no different from what we had heard a score of times every day. Then, from the sentry walk at our left, a Somerset militiaman bawled words I couldn’t distinguish; words that he repeated and repeated, and that other sentries along the wall picked up and repeated as well.

  It sounded like, “Ear coamin droo! Ear coamin droo!” and it dawned on me suddenly they were shouting “They’re coming through!” The voices sounded panicky. I began to fear the sentries were imagining we had begun at last the attempt they had so often heard we planned.

  “A little more,” I said to Tommy, “and those fools’ll think it’s come —think we’re all going to make a breach in the wall and escape in a body.”

  I had no more than spoken when a sentry’s alarm bell clanged; then another and another. In the distance, among the buildings at the prison entrance, the big alarm bell set up a clamor, spilling brazen notes in nervous, irregular, rapid bursts, as if it, too, were stricken with senseless panic.

  The Americans near us were doing nothing—not even those ballplayers who had picked at the wall: they stood where they were, staring about them in the gathering greenish dusk as if to discover the reason for all this bell ringing.

  I took Tommy by the arm, and we moved along the covered walk toward the yard of Number Four. The big alarm bell clanged as if a dozen men were hauling at the rope; and all the other bells in the world seemed to be jangling from the walls. The shouting I had heard from the direction of the market place was echoed in other sections of the yards; the air was filled with the sound of bells and the ragged, excited outcrying of human voices. I could see prisoners running behind us from Number Seven and Six and Five: running toward the covered walk, I knew, to see why the alarm was ringing.

  “How do you feel, Tommy?” I asked.

  “Good, Cap’n Dick,” he said. “What they doing, do you suppose?”

  I swung him along, not daring to urge him too much, but eager to get into our own yard and into Number Four, where we would be away from all this running and yelling and bell ringing.

  We came to the end of the masonry wall at last and could look through the iron pickets into the market place. What I saw I didn’t like. Militiamen were tumbling through the gate at the upper end; and close to us, not ten paces from the iron fence, a file had already formed: a close-packed, red-coated line of men whose faces seemed to me to have caught some of the sickly greenish light that filled the western sky.

  What was worse, the gates broken two days before were broken again; and there were prisoners in the market place: a hundred, maybe; maybe a hundred and fifty. Hundreds more were crowding up to the shattered gates, so that those who were already in the market were pinned where they were—in the front by the Somersetshire militia, and in the rear by a constantly increasing crowd of hooting, yelling prisoners.

  Worst of all, I could see the stocky, broad-shouldered figure of Thomas Shortland standing at the end of the file of militiamen: standing there, sword in hand, signaling to other militiamen who were spilling through the upper gate and running down across the market square.

  Knowing what I knew about Thomas Shortland, I stooped and took Tommy Bickford in my arms, swung him up against my chest, and ran for the yard of Number Four. When we reached it, it seemed full of prisoners clattering up the slope toward the market gates, all strangely pallid in the greenish twilight, and shouting to know what was happening.

  Behind me I heard Dr. Magrath’s voice, deep and soothing, urging the prisoners back into their yards.

  “Now, gentlemen!” I heard him say. “Now, gentlemen! None of us wants trouble! Just drop back in the yards, gentlemen, so there’ll be no chance for misunderstanding!”

  With Magrath among the men, I thought, there would be no violence if it could be averted; so I set Tommy on his feet and looked back at the market place. I could see Magrath’s head above the prisoners and above the militia. I could see, too, what Magrath could not see: that the prisoners in the market were being pressed harder and harder by those striving to be a part of a confusion that must have been as unfathomable to them as it was to me.

  “Keno!” someone shouted. The cry was taken up by others. “Keno! Keno!” It was the battle-cry of the Bough Alleys.

  “Now, Tommy,” I said, “there’s Rough Alleys mixing in it. We’ll keep on going.”

  He smiled, though I knew he had no wish to go, and he limped down the slope beside me, dragging his leg. The men, still running toward us, dodged around us and kept on running.

  “Come on and fight, you lousy lobster-backs!” someone shouted.

  “Lobster-backs! Lobster-backs!” they howled. A roar went up behind us.

  I heard Shortland’s voice—a voice I could never mistake, because of the rasping, hurried, overwrought tone that came into it when he was excited and angry, and unbalanced because of his anger. “Get back!” he shouted. “Get back there! Push ’em back! Charge! Charge!”

  A shrill cry went up, a pallid, discordant cry that blended, somehow, with the green light in which it seemed to me we moved, all of us, like shadows on a Stygian shore. I knew, on the instant, we had come to the end of all the misunderstanding and mistreatment heaped on us; knew the hatred which had smoldered for so long had burst at last into hot flames.

  Knowing Tommy could move no faster, I picked him up again, casting a look over my shoulder as I did so. The close-packed prisoners were struggling to escape from the market place into the security of the prison yards. From the outcries that pierced the comparative silence which followed the first discordant howl it was clear enough that the Somersetshire militiamen were paying with bayonet thrusts for the insults they had received.

  “Please not to bother about me, Cap�
��n Dick,” Tommy said. “I can make out all right.” He was a good boy, always. I made what speed I could toward the lowering face of Number Four.

  I heard, then, what I had been waiting for—Shortland’s bullying, raging voice. “Damned Yankee rascals!” he shouted. “Fire!”

  Then, for a moment, there was no sound except that of scrambling and scuttling and running. There was a curious fearfulness to the sound, as to the frightened rush of mice in the walls of a house.

  “Fire!” Shortland shouted again, more loudly. “Fire, God damn it! Fire!”

  Then came a single musket shot, and after it a shrill tumult of yelling. The next instant the green twilight was ripped and slashed by a musketry volley: a ragged volley that echoed and roared among those gray stone walls and tall prison houses as though it had come from carronades.

  The shrillness of hundreds of voices suddenly became piercing. Everywhere there were men running as fast as they could; and I ran too, but heavily and slowly, because of the weight of Tommy Bickford.

  There was another volley of musketry fire, and another and another; then, horribly, firing came from the encircling walls. Spurts of flame stabbed the dusk all along the great ring about us. We seemed to be the center of a whirling confusion, a crashing, screaming dizziness, almost as though this great granite millstone of ours, in a final convulsion of cruelty, had come alive to whirl us down the barren slopes of Dartmoor to destruction.

  A black man, running close beside me, tripped, staggered, and regained his feet. When he started forward once more his leg bent at the thigh like a piece of rope, and he fell on his face, struggling to drag himself forward with hands like black claws.

  The reports of the muskets seemed in our very ears, as though the soldiers had come out of the market place into the yards to pursue us fleeing, unarmed people.

  “What they shooting for, Cap’n Dick?” Tommy asked me. “Isn’t the war over?”

  We had come close up to the front of Number Four. All around us were running prisoners, converging on the entrances. Dimly I could see that those around the doors were jammed, tossing their arms and shouting. Figures burst from among them as if popped out by the press. “Locked!” I heard them screaming. “The door’s locked!”