“OH Liberty!” says the Bulgarian poet Machinchose in a fine apostrophe, too little known in this country. “Oh Liberty,” etc.
Never had George Mulross Demaine known the sweets of that word in the days when he enjoyed its privilege to the full. Now, as the brilliant dawn of that Wednesday awakened him upon the deep he learned the beauty of Freedom.
Its meaning saturated his very being as he woke in his miserable cell, refreshed but very weak, and saw shafts of the happy morning sun coming level with the dancing of the sea, and making a rhythmic change of unreal network in the oval patch of light that was cast by the porthole against the filthy rust of the walls.
He felt mechanically for his watch and found nothing but bare skin; then (such a teacher is adversity!) he to whom induction was grossly unfamiliar, began to induce away like any child of Nature.
The sunlight was level, for the image of the porthole upon the wall was but little lower than the[201] porthole itself:—therefore the sun had but just risen.
It was June, therefore if the sun had but just risen the hour was very early: how early he certainly could not have answered if you had asked him a week ago, but adversity, that admirable schoolmistress, was developing the mind of George Mulross as the blossom of a narcissus develops under the first airs of Spring, and he was capable of remembering a sunrise after the ball at the Buteleys’, and another after a big supper at Granges’. He was in bed before half-past five on each occasion. It must therefore be between four and five o’clock.
The term “solstice” was unfamiliar to this expectant member of the British Executive, but he seemed to remember that somewhere about this time of year the nights were at their shortest.
He was full of a new pride as he made these discoveries. Then two things struck him at once: the first that he was ravenously hungry, the second that all motion of the ship had ceased. He heard no sound of any kind except the gentle lapping of the tiny waves alongside, for it was calm except for the little breeze of morning.
He attempted with his new-found powers to pass the time in further induction, to guess by the position of the light how the ship lay, but as he had forgotten at which end of a ship the anchor is let go, and as he had no notion of the tide in the[202] English Channel, nor even whether tides ran for six hours or twelve (he was sure it was one of the two), and as, in general, he was grossly ignorant of the data upon which such an induction should proceed, the effort soon fatigued him. He was content to prop himself up against the wall and crave for food.
He heard a step outside, he struck the door with his fist. To his delight a key turned in it, and the doubtful visage of the boy once more appeared. Early as was the hour, and divine the weather, the boy was still gloomy.
“Gettin’ us inter more trouble, orl on us, yer dirty skunk!” was his greeting.
“I’m sure I’m very sorry,” said George. “I only knocked because I’m so terribly hungry. Can’t you get me something to eat?”
“Yus,” said the boy thoughtfully, “I dahn’t think! Yer’d myke me chuck it. Yer’s particler as a orspital nuss,” he added, with a recollection of a brazen woman in gaudy uniform whom a kind lady had thrust upon his mother’s humble home just before he had gone aboard.
Demaine was in acute necessity. “Look here,” he said, “get me some bread.”
“Whaffor?” asked the boy.
Demaine nodded mysteriously, and once again was his gaoler torn between a desire for some ultimate gain and the certitude that no present gain was obtainable.
[203]He was a London lad, with all the advantages that London birth implies, and it had already occurred to him that Demaine’s accent, manner and cuticle differed in a strange way from those of your stock stowaway. He had been impressed in the matter of the food; he was more impressed by certain little turns of language which he associated with those hateful, but, as he had been told, wealthy people, who came down and did good amid his mother’s neighbours in the East End; and when he had thought it well over and tamed his prisoner further by one more well-chosen epithet, he went off and came back with a hunk of bread.
“Yer lucky,” he said as he returned, “thet yer on a short trip. Otherwyes t’d uv been biscuit....” Then he added, “and gryte wurms in ut!”
George did not reply. He bit into the bread in ecstasy, and his eyes, which his acquaintances in London commonly discovered to be lifeless, positively gleamed upon this summer morning.
“They gotter communicyte wiv the orfferities fust,” said the boy pompously.
“Yes?” said George with his mouth full.
“Ho! yus, it is!” sneered the boy, who thought there was something of the toff in this use of the simply affirmative. “An’ after that they’ll land yer, and yer’ll ave the darbies on afore breakfast-toime.” He added nothing this time about hanging. The details of the moment were too absorbing.
[204]“How do you mean ‘communicate’?” asked George carelessly and all ears.
“Woy, wiv a flag, that’s ow,” said the boy.
Demaine had often been told of the long and complicated messages which little pieces of bunting could convey, and he had himself presented to a country school a whole series of flags which, in a certain order, signified that England expected every man to do his duty. But he could not conceive how so complete a message as the presence and desired arrest of an unfortunate stowaway could be conveyed to the authorities ashore by any such simple means, unless indeed the presence of stowaways was so common an occurrence that a code signal was used for the purpose of disembarking that cargo.
The boy illumined him.
“They got th’ flag up,” he said, “syin’ ‘Send a baht,’ and when they sees it they’ll run up one theirselves—then’s yer toime.”
But the boy’s information, as is common with the official statements of inferiors, was grossly erroneous.
A voice came bawling down from above, ordering him to tumble up with the prisoner.
Tumble up George did; that is, he crawled up the steep and noisome ladder, and as he put his head out into the glorious air, thought that never was such contrast between heaven and hell. He drank the air and put his shoulders back to it, to the risk of the green-black coat.
[205]George Mulross was one of those few men who have never written verse, but he was capable that moment if not of the execution at least of the sentiment which the more classical of my readers are weary of in Prom. Vinc. Chor. A. 1-19, Oh the god-like air! The depth and the expanse of sky!
The fatherly sky was all light, the sun was climbing, and a vivid belt of England lay, still asleep, green and in repose under that beneficence; and in the midst of it, set all round with fields, lay a lovely little town. It was Parham.
Demaine had once or twice noted how strangely glad the houses of men seem from off the sea, but as he was familiar rather with Calais and Dover, with Ostend, Folkestone and Boulogne than with other ports, and as he had more often approached them in winter weather than in the London season, there was something miraculously new to him in this vision which had been the delight of his forefathers: England from the summer sea.
The clear spirit bubbling within him encountered another and muddier but forceful current as his eyes fell upon the first officer.
That individual surveyed him with hatred but did not deign to throw him a word. He bade the lad stand by George in a particular place upon the deck till he should be sent for; he next threatened several of the boy’s vital organs if his prisoner were not properly kept in view, and having pronounced these threats, lurched away.
[206]“Th’ old man’ll want yer soon, ter fill in ’is sheet,” said the lad by way of making conversation. “Myebe ee’ll ave ye larrupped, myebe ee wahn’t. Ee didn’t the larst un,” he put in as an afterthought, as though it were the custom to larrup some seven stowaways out of eight by way of parting, and to make capricious exception of certain favourites.
“Yer’ll ave to tyke thut sheet wivyer; leastwyes whoever’s in charge of the baht’ll ave ter, an thye gives ut to th’ cops, and th’ cops shahs ut to the beak. As to do ut, to ave everyin roight and reglar. Otherwyes they cudden put yer awye—and they’re bahnd ter do that: not arf!”
But Demaine was not heeding the discomforting comment of his warder. He was balancing in his mind the poor chances of the morning, and as he balanced them they seemed blacker with every moment.
The shore was perhaps half a mile away: the hour say five, perhaps half-past. By six, or half-past six at the latest, the earliest people in Parham would be astir.
The fixed inveterate hope of the governing class that a gentleman can always get out of a hole, had dwindled within him to that dying spark to which it dwindles during invasions and at the hour of death.
He did not trust his accent, he did not trust his skin, he did not trust his parentage, he did not trust his wealth—alas, his former wealth!—to speak[207] more accurately, his wife’s former wealth,—to speak still more accurately, the former wealth of his wife’s father.
He trusted nothing but blind chance, his muscles and flight.
He hated the vision which was in immediate prospect of the little weasel-faced captain with his pointed red beard, reciting by rote yet another string of idiotic sentences from a manual; he hated the vision of the next step, the men in blue, with their violence and their closing of his mouth by brutal means. Whether he could convince a magistrate he did not pause to inquire. The way was too long—it was a dark corridor leading to Doom.
He heard a second voice calling the boy to the accompaniment of oaths quite novel and individual and in a high voice that he had not yet heard, and he thought that his hour had come.
But the boy’s reply undeceived him.
“Oi dursn’t!” he yelled down the decks, “Oi gotter look arter th’ Skunk.”
Apparently, thought George bitterly, he already had a fixed traditional name aboard the Lily, like Blacky and the Old Man.
The cook, for it was he, emerged from the galley aft, stood in the brilliant sunlight and delivered rapid blasphemy with tremendous velocity and unerring aim.
The boy whimpered and was irresolute.
[208]If the threats of the mate had been less practical, those of the cook might have had less effect, but between the prospect of the excision of his liver and of a series of hearty buffets and mighty kicks endways, what reasonable youth would hesitate in a civilisation such as ours?
The boy faltered visibly, and turning upon the Skunk informed him once again that he was always gettin’ people inter trouble. Nay, more, he threatened to pay out the innocent cause of his despair for the divided duty in which he found himself.
The cook re-emerged; he had fixed on a new belt of ammunition and began firing in a manner if possible more direct and devastating and quite as rapid, as that which had distinguished the first volley. And the boy, who was, after all, more directly the servant of the cook than of any one else on board, wavered and broke. With a clear statement of the consequences should Demaine move an inch from the spot, and a promise to return before a man could spit to leeward, the boy dashed off to the galley, and for perhaps five seconds, perhaps ten, the prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry was free.
The movement of the human mind, says Marcus Aurelius (imitative in this sentence, as in most of his egregious writings), resembles that of a serpent.
There are serpents and serpents. Minds of Demaine’s type move commonly with the motion of a gorged python but just roused from sleep; but[209] even the python will, under compulsion, dart,—and, in those five seconds, not reason but an animal instinct drove the politician’s soul.
He was up, on to the bale, over the bulwark and down ten feet into the sea, before he had even had time to formulate a plan. He could swim, and that was enough for him.
The splash made by Demaine’s considerable form as it displaced in an amount equal to his weight the waters of the English Channel, came to the ears of the Watch, who was leaning comfortably over the farther railing at the other end of the vessel, looking out to seaward and ruminating upon a small debt which he had left behind him in the parish of Wapping. With no loss of dignity the Watch shuffled forward to see whether aught was displaced. The splash had been a loud one, but it might have been something thrown from the galley.
He first of all looked carefully over the starboard bow to seaward. There was no foam upon the water: everything was still. It occurred to him to cross the deck; he did so in a leisurely manner and thought he noted far down the side, and already drifting astern with the tide, a rapidly disappearing ring of foam. He was a stupid man (though I say it that shouldn’t, for he came from Bosham, noble and fateful Mistress of the Sea), and he looked at the ring of foam in a fascinated manner, considering what could have caused it, until he was roused to life and to his duties by the thunder of the first[210] officer who from the bridge demanded of him in perfectly unmistakable language what he had done to the Skunk.
The sense of innocence was so strong in the honest seafaring soul that he replied by a simple stare which almost gave the first officer a fit, and in the midst of the language that followed, the boy, positively pale with fear, came tearing from the galley and found, not his charge, but the Bosham man gazing like a stuck pig at his superior above, and at the world in general.
The reappearance of the boy was a welcome relief to the chief officer’s lungs and intelligence; it added fuel to his flame. He very nearly leapt down from the bridge in his paroxysms of wrath, and heaven only knows what he would have done to the wretched lad whom he would render responsible for the misadventure had he not at that moment caught sight of a little speck upon the sunlit water far astern: it was the head of George Mulross Demaine, battling with fate.
The prospective Warden of the Court of Dowry could swim fairly well. It had been his practice to swim in a tank. He had swum now and then near shore, but he had no conception of the amount of salt water that can get into a man’s mouth in a really long push over a sea however slightly broken, especially if one enters that sea in a sort of bundle, without taking a proper header. Moreover, the phenomenon of the tide astonished him; he had[211] imagined in his innocence that the sea also was a kind of tank and that he had a dead course of it for the shore, the nearest point of which lay just eastward of the harbour mouth.
As it was, England seemed to be flitting by at a terrible rate, and the Lily, when he turned upon his back and floated for a moment to observe her, had all the appearance of a ship proceeding at full speed up Channel, so rapidly did he drift away.
He swam too hurriedly and he exhausted himself, for his mind was full of terrors: they might fire upon him—he did not know what dreadful arsenal the Lily might not contain!
He remembered having noticed upon the cross-Channel steamers exceedingly bright little brass guns, the purpose and use of which had often troubled him. Now he knew!—and he hoped against hope that no such instrument of death swivelled upon the poop of the Lily.
He dreaded every moment to catch the sharp spit of flame against the sunlight, a curl of smoke, the scream of the light shell, the ricochet, the boom that would come later sullenly upon the air, and all the rest that he had read of:—the first shot to find the range: the dreadful second that would sink him.
He was relieved, as minute after minute passed, and no such experiment in marine ballistics was tried. There was faintly borne to his ears as he was swept down the ceaseless stream of Ocean, a[212] little clamour which, on the spot itself, was a roaring babel; he saw a group of men wrestling with the davits, but the davits were stiff, and boat-drill was not in the programme of the Lily. Indeed of all the crew but two had ever handled such a contrivance as a davit before, and of these one was an Italian.
Another man than Captain Higgins would have been profoundly grateful to see the stowaway drown; not so that conscientious servant of the Firm. The stowaway received such food and lodging as had kept him living until such time as he could be handed over to the Sheriff or his officers or any other servants or justices of our lord the King, who were competent to deal with breach of contract, tort, replevin and demurrer. The stowaway was responsible to the Law, and Captain Higgins was responsible for the stowaway; therefore must a boat be lowered. And because there was something grander in swinging out the davits in full view of a British town and harbour than in chucking the dinghy into the water, swing out the davits he would,—and he lost ten minutes over it—ten precious minutes during which the tide had carried the little speck that was the head of George Mulross Demaine almost beyond the power of his spyglass.
Captain Higgins capitulated; he left the davits as they were—one stuck fast, the other painfully screwed half round, a deplorable spectacle for the town of Parham, and one shameful to the reputation[213] of the sailor-men aboard the Lily, and he ordered the little dinghy out over the side.
They unlashed her and let her down. Two men tumbled into her, the second officer took command, and they rowed away down tide with all the vigour that Captain Higgins’ awful discipline could inspire, directed in their course by his repeated injunctions and proceeding at a pace that must surely at last overhaul the fugitive.
When Demaine heard the beat of the oars and again floated to look backwards, he estimated the distance between himself and the shore and gave himself up for lost. Now indeed there could be no doubt of the rope’s end! He could not disappear like a whale for any appreciable time beneath the surface; the tales he had read (and believed) of heroes in the Napoleonic and other wars, who themselves, single-handed and in the water, had fought a whole ship’s crew with success, he now dismissed as idle fables. There was nothing left for him but, somewhat doggedly, to continue the overhand stroke, for now that he was discovered there was no point in the slower breast stroke that had helped to conceal him. They were making (as they said in the days of the Clippers) perhaps three feet to his one, but freedom is dear to the human heart, and he pegged away.
The Shining Goddesses of the Sea loved him more than they loved the odious denizens of the Lily; they set the tide in shore, and the Sea Lady, the[214] Silver-Footed One, led the little waves along in his favour.
He had come to a belt of water where the tide set inward very rapidly, along a gulley or deep of the shore water. It was a godsend to him, for his pursuers were still in the outer tide. He was now not a quarter of a mile from the water-mark, and still going strong, with perhaps two hundred yards between the boat and him; he could not feel their hot breath upon his neck, but he could hear the rhythmic yell of the officer astern, criticising the moral characters of his crew with a regular emphatic cadence that followed the stroke of the oars ... when his cold, numbed right foot struck something; then his left struck sand: ... It was England! And the English statesman, like Ant?us, was glad and was refreshed.
He stumbled along out of it—the water on the shelving sand was here not three feet deep. He stumbled and raced along through the splashing water. It fell to his knees, to his shins, to his ankles, and he was on dry land!
A very pretty problem for the amateur tactician learned in the matter of landing-parties, was here presented. The dinghy must ground far out: she could not be abandoned; it was an even race, and his pursuers would be one man short from the necessity of leaving some one in a boat which had grounded too far out for beaching.
Some such combination occurred in a confused[215] way to Demaine, but he had no time for following it up. He did what he had done more than once in the last unhappy days—he ran. His numbed feet suffered agonies upon the shingle above the sand, but he ran straight inland, he crossed a rough road, went stumbling over a salted field, and made for a wind-driven and scraggy spinney that lay some half a mile inland, defying the sea winds. As he approached that spinney he saw two men from the boat just coming full tilt over the ridge of the sea road; as he plunged into it they were in the midst of the field beyond.
The undergrowth in the spinney was thick, but Demaine had the sense to double, and he crept cautiously but rapidly along, separating the thick branches as noiselessly as he could, and bearing heroically with the innumerable brambles that tore his flesh. He halted a moment to look through a somewhat thinner place towards the field, and there, to his considerable astonishment, he perceived the two sailor-men dawdling along in amicable converse and apparently taking their time, as though they were out upon a holiday rather than in the pursuit of a criminal.
It dawned upon George that there was a reason for this: the second officer could not leave the boat. The boat and the sea were hidden by the ridge of the sea road, and the longer the time the hearty fellows could spend ashore, the greater their relief from labour and their enjoyment of a pleasant day.[216] He saw them sauntering towards the spinney; they took sticks and beat it in a sort of aimless, perfunctory manner, poking into the brushwood half-heartedly here and there, as though Demaine had been a hare whom they desired to start from its form. They wandered off along the edge of the wood in a direction opposite to his own, and paused a moment to light their pipes upon their way.
It was a peaceful scene: but a moment would come when that scene could not be prolonged, and when their activity must be renewed. Demaine, therefore, pushed through the brushwood, still going as noiselessly as he could, and came out to the landward side of it upon a disused lawn.
The grass was brown and rank and trampled. It had not been mown that season. An old sun-dial stood in the midst of it; a wall bounded it upon two sides, and there was the beginning of a gravel path. He followed that path between two rows of rusty laurels, and round a sharp turn came upon the house to which this derelict domain belonged. He came upon it suddenly.
It stood low and had been masked from him by a belt of trees. He saw a little back door, and,—fatal as had such reasoning been in his immediate past,—he reasoned once more: that where there was a house with servants’ offices, there would be a difference of social rank, there would be education, there would be understanding, and he must certainly come into his own.
[217]His bleeding feet, the soaked rags that clung upon him, his hair hanging in absurd straight lines clogged with salt, would, could he have seen them in a looking-glass, have given him pause. But the exhaustion of these terrible hours was now upon him; the heat of the sun was increasing,—he was under an absolute necessity for food and repose.
He boldly opened the door and went in.
He found himself in a little room of which this door was evidently the private communication with the garden; it was a room that lifted his heart.
To begin with, it was lined everywhere with books, and though he himself had read perhaps but eighteen volumes in the whole course of his early manhood, yet a room lined with books justly suggested to him cultivation, leisure, and a certain amount of wealth. A volume was lying with its flyleaf open upon the table. He saw pasted in it a book-plate in the modern style, made out in the name of Carolus Merry Armiger. Mr. Armiger, it seemed, was his unsuspecting host. Mr. Armiger’s literary occupations did not interest George Mulross; such as they were he gathered them to have some connection with the Ten Lost Tribes.
Manuscripts were lying upon the table, manuscripts consisting of long double lists of names with a date between them. The Jewish Encyclopedia was ranged in awful solemnity before these manuscripts; the Court Guides, reference books and almanacs of London, Berlin, New York, Frankfort,[218] Paris, Rome and Vienna, were laid ready to hand, and sundry slips detailing the family origins and marital connections of most European statesmen, including of course our own, completed the work upon which the chief resident of the house appeared to be engaged.
Forgetting the deplorable condition in which he was, a big scarecrow reeking and dripping salt water from sodden black rags that clung to his nakedness, George Mulross sank into a large easy-chair and breathed a sigh of profound content.
They might look as long as they chose, he thought they would look for him in vain! His pursuers did not know who he was nor that he had come back into his own rank of life again and had certainly found, though they were as yet unknown to him, equals who would as certainly befriend and protect him.
He pictured the scene to himself:—the owner of the house enters—he is wearing spectacles, he is a busy literary man, a professor perhaps—who could tell?—a learned Rabbi! The papers and the books upon the table seemed to concern the Hebrew race. At any rate, a literary man—a solid literary man. He would come in, preoccupied, as is the manner of his tribe, he would look fussily for something that he had mislaid upon the table, his eyes would light upon the form of George Mulross Demaine. At first sight he would be surprised. A man partially naked, glistening in the salt of the sea, his hair falling in[219] absurd straight wisps clotted with damp, his face a mixture of grime and white patches where the water had washed it, his nails a dense black, his bare feet bleeding, would stand before him. But this strange figure would speak............