Читать книгу They Seek a Country - Francis Brett Young - Страница 24

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They seemed certainly, all three of them, of a different breed from most of the prison-deck’s herded humanity. No doubt there were other countrymen in that hapless cargo. From every county assize there poured forth at that time a steady stream of common folk sentenced to transportation: the healthiest, the most highly-spirited—and, in that, perhaps, the best—blood of rural England drained away by this brutal and drastic phlebotomy to be lost in the thirsty sands of Botany Bay. Weeks passed before many of them stirred from the dumb paralysis with which separation had stricken them. When they found their tongues they gathered themselves automatically into groups made natural by community of dialect or of experience.

One such group—the noisiest and the only one that quickly adapted itself to the prison’s routine with assured bravado—found an obvious leader in the old convict Tim Kelly, who had been “through the passage” before and seemed likely, given the chance, to go through it again. They were most of them, old hands and youngsters, clearly destined for various degrees of eminence in the career of crime. They made light—or more often vied with one another in boasting—of the offences for which they had been lagged. They were generally Londoners, and John Oakley, hearing of their exploits (for he could not help listening), was fascinated and appalled by the pride they took in them and by the glimpses vouchsafed of the nightmare world they inhabited and seemingly enjoyed: a world of mean crime, of pimps and prostitutes and forgers and cracksmen and pickpockets in which nothing on earth or in heaven was held to be sacred in life—or even, for that matter, in death, since one of the most popular of their company, a benevolent-looking old man with a lardy bald scalp and a long grey beard, had been sentenced for life for body-snatching. Even in their new surroundings Tim Kelly’s gang practised their crafts, if it were only in evading fatigues or filching their comrades’ rations of food and water and contriving to fasten the blame for their subtle indiscipline on innocent shoulders.

Job Radway, because of his enormous bulk and his rustic simplicity, became the chosen butt of their tricks and depredations, while John Oakley and Dicketts, because they protected (or tried to protect) their friend, had a share in their spite, until suddenly, roused by the petty guerrilla to an access of fury of the kind in which he had “dropped one” on Farmer Burman, the blond Titan picked Kelly up by his skinny neck, and but for the guard rushing in with their bayonets, would have hove him overboard. Even then his tormentors had the laugh of him; for Job Radway, overpowered by the soldiers, was clapped into irons and shut up alone for a week in a pitch-black airless hole reserved for delinquents—a shackled Samson with hatred as well as bewilderment in his childlike eyes.

“It wasn’t the being alone as I minded,” he told them later, “so much as the company. A sick cat or summat had left a plague of fleas there; and the rats—by Jiminy, George, they was as big as rabbits sniffing all round your nose and lips and a’chewing your whiskers. If I’d had my dog Flash to that lot he’ld have enjoyed himself more than a bit!”

After that, for fear of the carter’s strength, Tim Kelly’s gang prudently left him and his friends alone. Yet still John listened to their talk and their noisy boasting. He listened because it was only from the foul lips of Kelly and one or two others that he could gather any idea of the kind of fate that awaited him in Van Diemen’s Land. Tim Kelly talked freely enough of his own experience. It was his pleasure to curdle the blood of his audience by telling them of the hardships and the brutalities he had undergone, and to prove himself a hero by making light of them. He told them gloatingly how, when the ship arrived at Hell’s Gates, the fun would begin: they would be sorted out into classes in keeping with the character of their offences. The small fry of the criminal world—mere forgers and pimps and pickpockets and passers of flash money like himself—would be clothed in grey and set to light labour on the shipbuilding slips, and might even, with luck, aspire to the liberties of “good conduct” men. But the larger criminals who had been sentenced for crimes of violence (such as John and Radway and Dicketts) would wear yellow. The authorities took no risks. Their regime was planned to break any violent spirit that remained in a convict as quickly as possible. From the first they wore irons: a ring round either ankle and the slack of the chain between picked up by a leather thong attached to the waist-belt. It was one thing, he said, to lie quiet on shipboard in irons, but quite another to work in them. At every movement the metal chafed the skin and sooner or later wore its way through. Chain-galls had a way of not healing, particularly when men worked, as the yellow man worked, up to their waists in foul mud or water, hewing timber out of the King’s River swamps and launching the massive trunks and floating them down-stream. And, to make escape more difficult, these convicts were chained in twos, so that the movement of each inflicted pain on the other. Escape? Well, some men did escape: nine or ten every year. Most of them were found sooner or later dead in the swamps or the bush. The prison smiths knew their job too well to forge chains that could be ovalled to slip an ankle or hammered apart with stones. Sometimes, when a couple escaped, one popped off before the other; and that was a nice go (he said) for a chap to wake up and find the other chap cold and himself too far gone to hoist the corpse on his shoulders and carry it back with him! There was one couple he knew who took it into their heads to get out of it by murder and suicide, and that was a nice go too, because the chap that did the job first thought better of it when it came to himself, and found himself regular dished. He couldn’t get rid of his irons nor yet of the other one; and he knew if he dragged the other chap back to Hobart he’ld be shot for the murder, and if he didn’t carry him back he’ld have to stay there till the corpse swelled up, so there it was, anyway! And there was another chain-gang, too (Kelly said), that got off with an axe. There were six of them when they started, but only one when they finished. How was that? Why, that axe came in remarkable handy: there was one of them coves that happened to be a butcher and a smart man at his job, and he kept his pals in fresh meat till there was only two on ’em—himself and another little, small chap named Higgins—left. When it come to the last, Higgins pinches the axe when the butcher he wasn’t looking and gets him fair from behind; but although he was used to the diet by now, he couldn’t touch him. Then the bloodhounds came up and grabbed him, and the guards behind them; and he comes back to Macquarie quiet as any lamb and grinning all over his face and gives himself up, stark staring gibbering mad!

What was there, John asked himself, behind these ghastly stories with which Tim Kelly entertained his rapt, gaping audience: the panders, the sneak-thieves, the pickpockets, the two wizened children whom he had claimed as his own from the first? What was it in Macquarie that could drive common men like himself (for not half of the convicts in his own batch were criminals) to murder, to suicide, even to cannibalism? The answer was not far to seek. It was fear of the cat and the triangle. The only recognized form of punishment in the penal settlements was flogging. It was meted out, in varying degrees of savagery, from a dozen strokes of the cat to a hundred, for every kind of offence, from a trivial mistake or lapse of memory or mere sullenness to sporadic or organized violence and insubordination. In the settlement known as Hell’s Gates, not one convict in ten escaped in a year the cat’s savage scarifications. In the prison yard, as a reminder (if that were necessary), stood two wooden triangles of seven-foot beams set up like a gipsy’s trivet, to which the naked victims were strapped by their wrists at the apex and by their ankles below. The daily floggings in public were the convicts’ regular evening amusement.

The warders themselves were experts, taking care to disentangle the knotted thongs from their clots of blood before every stroke, making patterns by crossing the cuts on the pulped white flesh. When they grew lazy or bored with their butchery, they would call on one of the other convicts to take a hand, maliciously pleased to pick out one whom they knew to be no friend of the victim. If the new torturer tried to “cut light,” he knew what to expect: when the flogging was over, he, too, would be strapped to the triangle. More than once, in Tim Kelly’s time, men had been beaten to death, and were thankful to die, knowing that they could not be beaten again. When he spoke of these devilries, John Oakley saw that the mere recollection of what he had seen and suffered himself was sufficient to shake his nerve and make his features go grey. His eyes narrowed, his lips twitched back like a snarling dog’s; he had the wary look of a trapped animal that smells death, or something indefinite even worse than death. And John shivered, too.

“Why do you hark to that jail-bird’s rubbidge?” George Dicketts reproved him. “He be only trying to scare us. If you’d knowed so many Irish as I have when I was out with the Duke, you’ld take no count of it. They be liars, every damned one on ’em.”

But John knew from the look of Kelly’s grey face when he spoke of the floggings that the man was not lying. As he lay in his berth at night listening to the voice of the ship, kept awake by Job Radway’s enormous flounderings, his mind helplessly pondered, again and again, on the possibilities of attempting escape.

Escape ... Kelly’s stories of escapes from Van Diemen’s Land were generally more grim in their sequels than those of life patiently endured in the settlement, and even to dally with the idea of escaping was profitless for a man enclosed in a floating prison a thousand miles from dry land (for all he knew) in mid-Atlantic. Yet day by day, insensibly, and as it almost seemed miraculously—so often did her course appear to a land man’s eyes to be set with a freakish disregard for her destination—the Minerva stole southward over the curve of the watery globe towards the Equator. John Oakley guessed this only from the increasing heat and the way in which the sun, once welcomed as friendly, became an enemy. No sooner had it blazed above the horizon at dawn than the great ball seemed to shoot to the zenith in one savage leap, and to hang there, malignantly triumphant, until, at noon, the dome of bleached sky poured down heat like a salamander—until melted pitch in the seams of the deck became scalding to the feet, and metallic objects such as the glistening binnacles, the soldiers’ brass accoutrements and the barrels of their carbines, seared the skin that chanced to touch them like a cautery. And by noon the tepid breeze which at dawn had crisped the sea with wavelets and given to the eyes at least an illusion of freshness had faltered and died. Not a cat’s-paw ruffled the surface with patches of scaly snakeskin. Only, here and there as the bowsprit lifted to the swell and the hull rolled over, a shoal of flying-fish shot out like spray spattered from a seething crucible. But the sea itself was like dark molten glass, translucent, foamless, olivine, and so profound that the huge shapes vaguely moving in fathomless glooms that no eye could reach but for the sun’s penetration, seemed phantoms of a lost world, a forgotten creation, that when the revealing light slanted westward would sink once more into obscure oblivion and never more be seen.

Though the teak planks blistered the soles of their feet like the bars of a gridiron (for only the officers on the poop and the guard on the quarter-deck were sheltered by awnings), the prisoners were still driven on deck to take air and exercise. Even that scorching midday glare was preferable to the oven heat of the ’tween-decks, where, gasping for air and stripped to the waist, they sweated through the rest of the day and the sleepless stifling nights. For the first time in their lives, these men, who had lived in a well-watered country, knew the torment of thirst. The regulated allowance of water for each was half a gallon: a portion meagre enough in a temperate climate. The stuff was tepid and turbid; it stank like bilge-water; some casks had been washed by the Biscay surges and salted. If men drank they were drenched with sweat; if they did not drink their mouths and throats grew foul and dry as kilns; if a drop of the precious liquid were spilt it could not be replaced, and much water was spilt in the reckless confusion of animals mad with thirst who jostled each other like pigs scrambling with their feet in a trough of swill. They watched each other’s pannikins with gloating, envious eyes, and schemed to steal them from the strong or to take them by force from the weak. In this struggle for water Tim Kelly’s predatory gang of desperadoes became an organized terror. It was fortunate for John and George Dicketts that their leader had learned to fear Job Radway’s strength.

For a week they lay parched in the doldrums. Now, when the convicts went above, there was no talk or laughter or movement. Each man kept to himself: some sitting helplessly on the hatch-combings with bowed heads; some lying huddled in the scuppers, seeking the bulwarks’ shade. There was no sound on deck but the rhythmical slappings of lifeless water and the flapping of slack canvas as the inert ship lurched and wallowed. On high, the sails that were set in the hope of catching the faintest waft of wind hung gleaming in rigid folds like the marble draping of statuary. Even when the sun sank, plunging into the sea like a red-hot plummet and turning the shadows of rigging on the bleached deck peacock-green, there was little relief, no movement in the water-logged air. For now, as it seemed, the expanses of wood and metal that had been baked all day exhaled the heat that had entered them, and the upper sky, from which cooler air might have fallen, was blanketed with steamy volumes of vapour that ringed the horizon with anvil-shaped masses of thunder-cloud whose purple bellies dry lightning ripped or illuminated with ceaseless flickers.

In the ’tween-decks a dozen convicts lay prostrate with heat-stroke, and many of the rest were in so poor a case that the surgeon, moved less, perhaps, by humanity than by the prospect of losing a number of the half-guinea fees that were paid to him as a gratuity for every man landed alive in Van Diemen’s Land, prevailed on the captain to grant permission for any man who seemed on the verge of collapsing to sleep on deck.

Job Radway was one of the first he chose. Half a gallon of water was no sort of ration for that bulky body with its vast evaporating surface, accustomed to sweat like a horse ploughing clay-land and make good its huge losses instantly. Such powerful louts, the surgeon knew by experience, were often the first to go under. He lay gasping like a stranded fish; when the sergeant ordered him on to his feet he could barely stand till John Oakley lent him a shoulder, and with the excuse of helping him up the companion-ladder, found his way to the main-deck with him.

By this time, though the livid lightning still washed the horizon, the sky above the Minerva’s swaying topmasts had cleared to a velvety indigo so calm and high and spacious that, gazing into its depths, and lying alone for the first time in many weeks, John Oakley experienced a strange and delicious lightening of the spirit, a sense of compression lifted, almost an illusion of freedom. A heavy dew drenched the deck: as he lay with lifted knees, the sensation of cold moisture was kind to his blistered feet. Though the sky was clear, it seemed to him unaccountably empty and spangled with constellations of strange shape. Charles’s Wain, the one he knew best, was missing: he could not think why. Even the stars, it seemed, must be different in this alien world! Ah, well ...

He grew drowsy watching them, and slipped into a dreamless sleep, that was broken in the middle of the night by a sudden shout in his ear. John jumped up with a start. The deck gleamed white with moonlight. It was Job Radway who had disturbed him. The giant was tossing from side to side. As he lay there, heaving, there issued from his cracked lips a continuous low muttering of words hard to distinguish. John shook his shoulder to waken him. But Radway was not asleep. He lay there with eyes wide open but unseeing. He was driving his plough through the heavy Ditchford marls and shouting to his horses Bloom and Vic as they turned at the headlands. He was angry, and lifting his fist to drop Farmer Burman a clip on the jaw, and laughing as Flash, his dog, scratched back the soil from a rabbit-hole. He was calling his children by name and hoisting one of them to his shoulder. He was drinking water in greedy gulps like a horse and smacking his lips and shouting and singing, and then falling to unintelligible mutters again. But never, for an instant, ceasing.

Other men who had been sleeping on deck grew angry at being wakened. “Stop that blasted row over there!” one called. “Can’t you let a poor beggar sleep?”

“Give him a kick in the ribs, mate, and wake him. He’s got the nightmare.”

“Give him a kick on his bloody head!”

“That’s no nightmare, that isn’t, that’s rambling. The chap’s off his chump.”

“Ay, that’s what it is. He’ve gone balmy lying in the moonlight.”

“How’s anyone going to sleep with that row going on? Who is it, anyway?”

“That big chap what grabbed Tim Kelly. If anyone’s going to tackle that great beggar it won’t be me!”

“Call the guard, then, and tell him to fetch the doctor. That’s his pal by the side of him. He ought to do it.”

John walked to the barricade where the sentry was standing.

“There’s a prisoner ill over here,” he said. “We want the doctor.” The soldier stared at him sullenly without answering. “Can’t you hear what I say?”

“I can hear what you say, all right; but I’m not supposed to answer you. No communication with convicts. I oughtn’t by rights to have said what I have.”

“Then for God’s sake call the corporal. You can’t leave this poor devil raving like that and do nothing.”

“I’m not calling no corporal for you nor anyone else. I know better than that. The guard’ll be changed in a few minutes’ time at four bells, and then you can tell him yourself.”

At four bells the guard changed. The corporal reluctantly opened the gate in the barricade and stared at Radway’s prostrate figure with surly eyes. The big man’s clumsy fingers were tearing at his chest. From his lips there still poured an unceasing flood of wild words.

“If I fetch the doctor,” the corporal said, “he won’t half thank me for it; but if this here beggar popped off and he hadn’t been told, it’ld be just as bad. Mind you chaps keep an eye on him, and see as he don’t chuck himself overboard. They do that sometimes.”

The doctor came, with a coat slipped over his calico nightshirt. His eyes blinked with sleep; he breathed heavily; and his breath smelt of gin. The corporal and the sentry each carried a lantern—unnecessarily, for the moon shone light as day. The convicts, who were all now awake, stood round in a curious circle as the doctor knelt on the deck and uncovered the sick man’s torso. Radway continued to stare at the sky; his clutching fingers moved; his lips muttered unceasingly.

The doctor was talking to himself: “High fever ... Muttering delirium ... No rash to be seen ... It isn’t typhus, thank God ... that’s a good thing, anyway.” His fingers searched Radway’s groins and then his armpits. In the right armpit they hesitated, palpating, and stopped. He looked up suddenly and spoke sharply:

“Corporal!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Clear the deck. Get these convicts below. Don’t let anyone go near the bunk in which he was sleeping. Pick out the fellows who share it with him and have touched him. Get them to carry him to the sick-bay, and keep them clear of the rest. Do you know which they are?”

“Yes, sir. This convict here, name of Oakley, is one of them, and I’ll soon find the others. I heard you say it’s not jail fever, I think, sir. That’s one good thing.”

The doctor laughed harshly. “A good thing, is it? That’s all you know about it. It’s twenty times worse than typhus, you fool. This chap’s got the Plague.”