The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton

by Robert J. Begiebing

  The next memory I have is that of waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom, a prisoner, indeed, of whom I knew not. My head ached terribly, and I felt a nausea that kept me prone on the bed. Thus began a period of captivity that was, until that time, the most difficult adventure of my varied life. If the poet wrote that hell is a city much like London, I was soon to believe that hell is a city much like Boston, no longer bright and green to me, but where all are damned to breathe a smoky air “thick, infected, joy-dispelling.”

  EIGHT

  A mysterious opportunity for liberty

  My days and nights of captivity passed in memories of my adventures on the road and in Boston, just as I have related them. And I suffered many moments of deep sorrow thinking about the likely effects of my sudden disappearance on my friends and master. What could they possibly imagine, I wondered. A month after having alerted the city’s constabulary and police, they must have secretly given up hope for my life. And what strategies of detection could have had the slightest success in finding me buried in this obscure room?

  I thought often of Tom: he who had promised me every protection and aid, now as helpless as I. And Julian: spirited Julian, whose tendency to skim the bright surfaces of life must have been bludgeoned by my mysterious vanishing. Those very qualities, I mean to say, that made Julian such a delightful companion were sure to open the poor man to great pain. Were he a more driven artist with fewer companionable sympathies, he would be, I supposed from my cell, suffering less. Moreover, his admiration of my work and his fondness for me had remained untouched by those carnal tensions that so often mar relations between men and women who would be friends. It often occurred to me that he was so different a man from my captor that one might think them separate species! And my master, who would no doubt by now have given up once more on his portrait of an unnamed lady; what must his thoughts be in my disappearance?

  Such sorrows (along with the dreams, memories, and fears I have related, and many more still) filled my days and nights. But as I have also related, my time under Mr. Dudley’s discipline gradually changed, after he began to mistake my subterfuges for compliance. Some of our excursions were among company of even lower character than those I have described. I was ever alert to the main chance of escape. But however firm the grip of his hand or of his arm about my waist, I confess that any contact with humanity, however lowly during our excursions—to say nothing of the open air, sky, trees, seasonable florescences—had become a source of vitality and courage to me. I know not how else to express it.

  But allow me to describe still one other of these outings, not only to depict the lowest among them, but to relate the wondrous strange nature of my deliverance.

  One evening (it must have been sometime in February of 1840 during a thaw), I was lying upon my bed when Mr. Dudley knocked and entered. He drew the curtain and held out a hand to stay any movement or protest. His other hand held a riding crop.

  “Please do not disturb yourself,” he said.

  I watched as he edged closer to the bed.

  “I wish to propose a further … outing.” He leaned toward me and whispered, “Tonight we shall have enjoyments unlike any encountered so far.”

  I did not speak. As he leaned closer and kissed me, I recalled myself to the need of giving the appearance of acknowledging his attentions. What other chance might I have of freedom?

  He sat down beside me and began to run the crop lightly over my chin, my lips, my stomach. With his other hand he then caressed my hair and cheek. I was unable to move. I do not think I even blinked, perhaps not even breathed. He stole another kiss while his hand began to stray, but again without insistence or desperation.

  Then he sat up and slowly untied my dressing gown, slipping it apart with the tip of his riding crop, which soon began to meander smoothly over the length of my body.

  When his hand finally slid beneath my loose chemise, I dampened my impulse to rebuff him and began to relent instead. He inflicted no pressure or pain; his satiny fingertips were well-practiced—nay, exquisitely subtile, and my heart began to flutter like a bird deep within my bosom, a bird which soon flew out to settle in a high corner of the room—aloof and untouched.

  But that evening it was only his hand, as if he were indeed perfectly willing to possess me by degrees, as if his ploy (his desire and amusement perhaps) had evolved since our initial contretemps in the garden. My own ruse, moreover, again bore fruit, for that evening I found myself once more beyond the confines of my room and house.

  Although the sidewalks grew muddy and ill-lighted, we walked but a short distance to our destination, his arm tight about my waist. In my own neighborhood, so to speak, I now had many chances to observe humanity in one extreme of its development. A number of the houses had their first-story shutters closed, but I could hear many voices from within or through a door as it opened, and sometimes music and dancing. Or ribald curses mingled with the cries of children. Or a frowzy maid screamed at an entry for a boarder someone sought. A few houses left their shutters open on the first floor, but most on the second opened to shine forth a blaze of light. I glimpsed through the redly-illuminated kitchen of a cellar tavern a fire leaping in a fireplace with two long spits, the uppermost of which held three suckling pigs whose drippings basted as many turkeys suspended on the lower. Grog shops, oyster cellars, and more suspicious looking places of every description abounded.

  Women huddled in doorways or stood on sidewalks smiling and watching, and once we had passed them as often as not I heard some jeer or laughter behind us. A number of girls, perhaps between the ages of eight and fourteen, came and went among these houses. Though we so often hear that the greater number of the women who enter into this life are victims of cunning and seduction, and from a more respectable breeding, perhaps as many others are immersed in the life of vice from the start.

  At times I could hear one of those women suggesting that some sailor or shop lad or rowdy “Come here,” or another would ask, “Where are you going, dear?” I was glad even of Mr. Dudley’s protection among such people as these, and I newly appreciated the stout, hard-knobbed cane he boldly carried during our pedestrian outings.

  At one such house, where I had noticed carriages rolling up to the door and away again, where men of trade loitered along with foppish young men and half-grown boys, we stopped and descended to a large cellar room furnished for dance and drink. Such a din I heard as we entered! And such an odor of overheated humanity, tobacco smoke, and soured liquor!

  We were accosted immediately by the largest man I believe I have ever seen, and whom Mr. Dudley called simply Bo’. Unshaven, greasy, wearing a tattered sailor’s jersey, this Bo’, or Erebus rather, seated us at one of a score of small tables set before a narrow bench that ran along the walls, under salacious pictures. The entire middle of the room was given over to a sanded floor for dancing, if one could call such wild jigging and senseless circumambulations “dance.”

  At the far end of the room a black fiddler sat on a three-legged stool mounted upon a sugar hogshead. Just below him a boyish tambourine player sat on an empty gin cask. At the other end was the bar at which a bloated man of middle years and a ruddy-faced ogress sold rum, cider, brandy, and wine into the tin cups and pewter ale pots of the girls and their patrons. It was soon clear that any man who would dance must pay the fiddler and treat his female partner to “a smile” at the bar following each musical interlude. And as soon as some men left, new ones entered to replace them.

  The revellers on the dance floor seemed to be in every stage of drunken animation, dissipation, and lethargy. The women, of course, were of the lowest character, but the men, if predominantly drawn from the mariner, truckman, and common laboring type, seemed also to include a few respectable merchants and young men of leisure larking among them. And of course one saw idlers, pilferers, reprobates, and swindlers of every sort here as up on the streets.

  Some men sat or stood about in conversation with one another or with such women as I ha
ve mentioned. There was plenty of hard talking. But most, as I say, were engaged in varying degrees of enthusiasm and horse-play upon the dance floor. Here the swarthy faces of Negresses glistened with excitement beside their pale antic sisters and their black and white brothers in sin. All on the dance floor stomped or whirled through their reels, jigs, hornpipes, and double shuffles in a most disorderly fashion, spurred on by the screeching fiddle. One enthusiast, a girl of perhaps eighteen, unintentionally kicked a Negro man wearing a sailor’s hat in the back as they spun and lurched about, accelerating to the allegro of “Devil’s Dream.”

  Only during momentary pauses when the music makers gulped their gin and blackstrap could I hear the rattle of coin in the change drawer and the curses at the gambling tables tucked into nooks and corners. Mr. Dudley and I had been served strong spirits immediately, which I took to be slightly watered, cheap brandy, and which I merely tasted once or twice. I did not know how long I could support such dreadful turmoil and dissonance, and I wondered what Mr. Dudley could possibly have in mind in leading us to such a vile spectacle. And how might I discover in such an establishment and neighborhood any unperilous opportunity for flight into the labyrinths of the city?

  After we had been watching this bacchanal for half an hour, one of the women whom I had observed came over to us. At first, she had seemed somewhat prettier than most of her sisters in service, who even at a distance and in the poor light appeared to have been wracked by disease and drink. This girl, as I say, seemed healthier until I had the chance to examine her close up. Her eyes were bright, if oddly wild, and her beautiful black hair hung beside her face in smooth ringlets. Yet now I saw the stigmata of degradation—the bones beneath the tightened flesh, the sunken chest, the cavities beneath her eyes, a pitiful frisette fastened to her death’s head. For one frightful moment it was like peering into a mirror and seeing a costumed and painted corpse, rather than a woman of living animations and passions.

  I was reminded of a most astonishing display in a traveling caravan and circus that Tom and I once encountered. After the lions and anacondas, the clowns and acrobats, the professors of galvanism—having just acquired the fresh corpses of a man and a woman hanged for murderers—burnished their plates of copper and zinc and set the dead bodies adance through the most horrible contortions imaginable, much to the amusement of the crowd who had witnessed the execution and then got themselves, many of them, drunk in celebration.

  This woman, however, now spoke to Mr. Dudley, who in turn handed her a few bills. She then led us out into another room, better lighted, more spacious still, set up as if for an intimate theatrical performance. Seated in simple low-backed chairs arranged before the proscenium of a small stage were a number of men of a standing higher than most of those I had seen in the outer room. Beside these men, here and there, sat a woman of dubious character but, generally, of more splendid dress than that of the poor creatures I have described in the dance hall. One could just hear the movements of stage hands or actors behind the curtain drawn across the stage. But I could not have imagined the little pantomimes we were about to behold.

  I call them pantomimes, but these were more a series of tableaux vivants whose Harlequin would, after a minute during which the audience might consider the frieze, call out the title of each tableau, “Guinevere and Mordred!” or some such, and during the remaining moments prance ludicrously about the stage among the living statues. These profane depictions hardly merit description, but it might clarify the nature of such theatricals, and the more sordid depths of my experiences, if I provide an example of the least offensive.

  Imagine my state of mind when the curtain drew back for the first time! Black muslin drapery at the back and sides of the stage framed the picture before us. Stagelamps, some of them globes of colored water, had been adjusted carefully to accentuate by light and shadow, or rather to throw into relief, the characters who stood like statues, in this instance three women and three men in outlandish costumes and postures. At center stage a young shepherdess knelt facing her rampant shepherd in an obvious attitude of sexual congress. Both were draped by the flimsiest of cloths. Otherwise they were naked and enwhitened as if by chalk.

  Set back somewhat to their left and right knelt four masked figures also unclothed and powdered but for their masks and loose sheepskins tied along their backs. They were meant to represent four sheep engaged two-by-two, the rams entering their ewes from behind. The white ewe masks were exaggeratedly playful and feminine, and only incidentally sheeplike, while the ram masks were both desperate and demonic, their bold expressions painted in red and black, their horns curling fiercely outward like orange flames leaping from their heads.

  In these strained postures they remained, for about half a minute, without the least movement. Then Harlequin entered, looked directly at the audience, spread his arms out over the scene, and announced: “The Shepherdess Prays to Her Shepherd.” From off-stage light flute music began to caress our ears while Harlequin slowly danced among the still motionless shepherds and sheep. Just before the curtain closed, he became more buffoonish, tweaking the noses, ears, and posteriors of the motionless actors, asking whether they enjoyed their timeless dalliance, commenting sharply upon their parts and upon the subjugated postures of the women.

  There was a burst of applause and laughter as the curtain swung across the tableau after one or two minutes of exposure. Mr. Dudley seemed to be greatly enjoying himself, as did the others, at such salacious dumb shows. I can only conjecture that Mr. Dudley had hoped, by introducing me as he had to successive levels of coarseness and debauchery, to make me pliable and game to be dragged with him at length into a secret life of dissolution.

  By the operation of my own play of light and shadow upon his overheated imagination, Mr. Dudley must have come to believe that such pernicious company and such extended diversions would eventually wear down every barrier to ultimate relations between us, perhaps later that very evening. How a man of his education and means could be such a fool is surely one of the mysteries of life beneath the sky. How could he have so misjudged my character, even despite my own dissembling to garner a little more freedom of movement and opportunity of deliverance? I can only guess that his obsessions and his selfishness blinded him to others, to the truest nature of myself. It was useless for me to look for clearheaded explanations of the machinations of a man deranged by his obsession. He had come to accept my sham, but his acceptance was to lead, I now saw, to such evenings as these!

  Yet, reader, out of such base materials did I finally craft my own liberation and regain my life. After the fifth and final frieze, I noticed that the audience seemed agitated and amused to distraction. Entitled, according to our Harlequin guide, “Cleopatra, Her Three Slave Boys, and Mark Antony,” this tableau featured slave boys painted with burnt cork and the principals, I supposed, with copper watercolors. The suggestiveness, the lewdness, the debasement of this tableau are beyond my audacity to describe.

  The audience had gathered heatedly after the performance into a kind of knot by a door which looked to lead directly out onto a street. They were all waiting animatedly for their turn to ascend a stairway which must have led up into the more comfortable regions of the house.

  I noticed a man standing against this door, as if to remain out of the press of the crowd. He watched the faces of these passersby, I saw in glimpses, with the brim of his hat pulled low on his forehead, often hiding his eyes. He had remained wrapped in a rough greatcoat (of the sort a seaman might wear) quite buttoned up despite the warmth of the crowded passageways in which we were now moving along so slowly. He caught my eye briefly, and I held his stare.

  I cannot now say just what prompted me to expect something from him. I can only say that some desperate instinct, some collection of impressions, led me to believe that this man was different from these others. In spite of his hat and greatcoat, his face, when I could glimpse it, had about it a becoming, poetic gentleness and, perhaps, a worldly wisdom. I can find
no other words to quite express my impressions at that moment and among such an ecstatic mob.

  Everyone was talking and gesticulating as we moved slowly toward the staircase. Mr. Dudley was conversing with a man who stood next to him. The man was accompanied by a fashionably dressed lady, standing between us now, who nonetheless had the yellow, sodden, dead-alive look of an opium eater. I saw my open moment and took it. I stepped aside just as we passed the stranger who had held my glance.

  “Sir,” I said softly, “I feel quite faint. Could you help me, please? Does this door open, I wonder?”

  “I’m at your service, Madam,” he said, swung around, glanced back once at Mr. Dudley and his interlocutors, and quietly unlatched and pushed the door open, leaving a narrow exit hardly more than two feet wide. He grabbed my hand and firmly pulled me through the opening and out into a byway of the neighborhood. He quietly pressed the door closed behind us, holding my hand still, and fairly spirited me away and down the chilly night-streets, as if we had been fleeing the flames of Sodom and Gomorrah. In the exhilaration of escape from my long entombment, I asked no questions at first but only made great haste, trying my best to keep up with him.

  “Fear not, Dear Woman,” he said. “My design is only to help you. I could see depths of trouble in your face. Just a little farther here and I will explain myself to you, and lead you to proper help and care.”