Читать книгу Condemned to Devil's Island - Mary Blair Rice - Страница 3

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The day had come at last!

In the great square courtyard seven hundred men waited in column of fours. Each in heavy gray woolen trousers, a heavy gray wool blouse, a black skull cap, and clumsy black wooden-soled shoes; while lying at the feet of each was the canvas sack into which he had stuffed his belongings. All were thus ready for the voyage.

“I am afraid!” Félix whispered to Michel, who stood beside him in one of the units of four. “I am afraid—”

And the thought back of the words drove the blood from his chubby peasant cheeks. With that look on his face, only the dimples remained of the warm youngness which he had brought to the cold moldy walls of the prison. Not that St. Martin lacked youth. Michel, for example, was only twenty, with a slender, boyish body and big, innocent, clear brown eyes, guarded by long, dark lashes. But Michel fancied himself wise in the strange philosophy of that stealthy prowling world which had drawn him into itself; whereas Félix was but a bewildered child, whispering, “I am afraid!”

“Careful, kid,” Michel warned, for just in front of them old Pierre had turned at the almost imperceptible vibration of the terrified whisper. And of the many things that Félix feared, Michel knew that he feared most of all—Pierre.

Pierre’s hairy tattooed body was horrible to the smooth young boy. The muscles beneath skin weathered by years of African sun seemed to Félix to writhe like serpents making ready to spring. He found Pierre’s very age a thing of disgust.

Michel had, out of his sorry wisdom, cautioned against accepting part of Pierre’s food ration. But to Félix acceptance was easier than refusal, and daily he had expected commutation of his sentence. His mother, he explained, would certainly do something. Because of his youth she would convince them that he ought not to be deported to serve a term of hard labor. Why didn’t Michel’s mother do the same? But Michel protested that he never had one. “If your mother had run off to Moscow with an army officer when you were three months old, and if you’d never heard from her, would you say you’d had a mother?”

Well, wasn’t there some one else?

No, his father had given him to his grandparents to bring up. He’d hardly ever seen his father, who was the captain of a freighter and away for months at a time. The grandparents kept a boîte de nuit in Montmartre. The women who frequented it were delighted with the child, always small for his age, who regarded them with so candid an admiration. “When we are no longer beautiful to Michel,” they said, “then we shall know that the game is up.”

They looked into the mirror of his eyes, and, when what they saw there made them happy, they tossed him francs so lavishly that he early formed the habit of spending.

First he discovered that money bought sweetmeats, then that it bought amusement—merry-go-rounds and ingenious toys; later that it purchased fuel for the flame of self-respect, that it brought a boy homage, the obsequiousness of tradespeople and waiters; finally it was the price of strange new thrills which people called love.

Then the grandparents had died. The money which his father sent for schooling had some time ago ceased to come. From his mother there had never been a word since the day when she’d left his father with the three-months-old baby on his hands. Michel had been all sorts of things since then; assistant to a jockey—he liked that and would have been a jockey himself if the war hadn’t come along and made a soldier of him instead. Oh, the war! He didn’t like to think about the war. Fortunately, he’d not had to go through all the ghastly four years of it, being too young to have been involved at the beginning.

When it was over he’d gone into what was an entirely new life for him; he’d secured a position as valet de chambre in a princely establishment. That experience convinced him that luxury was for him the essential ingredient of life. It was almost by chance that he’d hit upon a way of securing it which put the champagne of adventure into the pursuit. Then he found that he loved his new profession quite as much as he did the life which it made possible.

And so Félix must see that there was no one to be interested in urging commutation of Michel’s sentence. For all he knew, his father might even be dead. And as for the women—well, they weren’t the sort who could afford to open negotiations with law courts.

And he looked so extraordinarily innocent, so pathetically young, while he outlined to Félix the events of his twenty years, that only his presence in the prison of St. Martin de Ré gave the color of reality to his story.

But in all their conversations it was Michel who urged recognition of their plight.

They were to sail on a convict ship. They had been sentenced to servitude in the Devil’s Island Penal Colony in Guiana. They must concentrate upon how best to adjust themselves to that situation and how eventually to get the best of it.

Félix would never look at it squarely. He would say that it didn’t matter what he did, because always in the end he was going to be saved. So every day he had shared Pierre’s food. It was the way of least resistance. After working-hours keepers marched him off to one dormitory, Pierre to another. And he was convinced that before it was too late, his commutation would arrive. So the months slid by.

Then information had drifted through the prison that at the end of March or early in April the convict ship was again to sail. And now two men in uniform were walking up and down the lines, counting to make sure that the numbers tallied with the roll-call. Yes, the numbers checked up. A receipt was made out and signed. And the seven hundred passed from the custody of the prison warden into that of the Commandant of the convict ship.

Discipline suddenly relaxed. The silence of months was broken; not furtively, but openly. Men began to talk among themselves. The fours split up into groups. A few brought out cigarettes, and actually there was smoking in the prison yard of St. Martin de Ré.

“God,” some were saying, “it will be good to get out of this place!”

And their voices, so long suppressed, sounded to them as unfamiliar as when one hears one’s self shout into the trumpet of the deaf.

“God, but it will be good....”

“Yes, but don’t forget we go to Guiana. And they say that’s death.”

The older men spoke out of the memory of all they’d heard of Dreyfus and of Devil’s Island.

Their words made the others remember how, when sentence had been passed, doom had seemed to echo in the very word.

Why, Guiana was the “dry guillotine”! Everybody knew that.

Seven hundred men in the courtyard. Didn’t even the official figures admit that at least half of them would die in the first year of prison in the Guiana climate? Half? Three-quarters, they’d heard, would be nearer the truth!

Which of the seven hundred would it be? But with the tenacity of the will to live each thought it would be his neighbor. And in the months at St. Martin, Guiana had little by little lost its terror for them. It had gradually become part of an accepted destiny to which the mind had at first slowly adjusted itself, until at length, in the horror of St. Martin, Guiana had come even to be desired.

“But,” a frail old voice realized, “it’s leaving France forever.”

“Forever?” Pierre jeered. “Wait and see if it’s forever.”

“Well,” Michel spoke with the fatalistic courage which sat so oddly on his thin colorless face; too young to know so much, too delicate for its brave acceptance of stern realities. “Well, at least Guiana’s not St. Martin de Ré.”

The grim massive walls gave back the pale echo of a stifled cheer. Men instinctively stretched the limbs in the baggy gray garments, as though stone and mortar and iron bars had pressed against flesh and bone.

The boy was right. Guiana would at least not be St. Martin de Ré. Their speech there in the courtyard, the smoke drifting in transparent wisps from their cigarettes, would, the day before, have meant punishment cells and blows. Guiana might not be so bad after all. And in any case all would, of course, soon escape. Upon that they were determined.

“But what shall I do?” Félix was whispering again.

“Don’t give in. Then after a while he won’t plague you any more.”

The boy caught a little of Michel’s surprising hardness, and for a moment reflected it, like an image in a cloudy mirror.

“Oh, I shall resist with all my force, Michel. You may be sure.”

Then came the sudden order to reassemble. The fours formed. Men raised their sacks from the floor to their backs. At last the hour so long awaited ... so greatly dreaded ... and finally, after all, so desired ... the hour had come!

The monstrous iron doors moved. Opened. Laboriously, ponderously, as if reluctant to let go their guarded prey. But they opened, for they, too, had to obey the Law’s decrees. They opened. And the fresh, moist April air rushed in, to be in its turn imprisoned by inflexible walls.

Slowly the column of fours passed out. You would have said they went to their death, so slowly did they move forward. Yet few went sorrowfully.

They passed out, their wooden soles clumping heavily on the courtyard floor. They advanced between a double line of fixed bayonets. Michel’s square little chin went up. “Ah,” he said, “see the precautions they have taken for us! Are we then so terrible?”

Outside in the mist of a light fog they saw that a crowd had gathered. “Are we then so beautiful,” Pierre grumbled, “that people come to see us off?”

In the waiting group there was a cry, a commotion. A mother, recognizing her son, was fainting. Félix’s mother, perhaps. A wife with a white face was holding up a baby in her arms. Accomplices in crime were there, too, scanning the advancing column to isolate the familiar features of some luckless partner. Two or three photographers ground the cranks of their cameras. Some one put up an umbrella. The salt mist was turning to fine gray drizzle.

But the moving column looked straight ahead. For there was the sea! And there like a vague ghost the solitary ship rode at anchor.

No need to hurry. No danger that she would leave one of them behind. Barges, rising and falling with the movement of the water, rubbed their wet sides against the slimy pier. All in good time they would convey seven hundred men across the drab stretch of water to the ship, whose only passengers were to be convicts.

The moment had at last come!

In the barges the men were crowded standing. Even in the rain, how wide the horizon seemed after months of prison! The focus of eyes lengthened. The air seemed to possess a quality extracted from it when filtered through iron bars. The lungs expanded, and hearts unreasonably lightened.

Then some one, catching sight of the brawny convict whose task at St. Martin had been to strike the punishment blows, shouted, “Death to him!”

“Death!”

The cry went from barge to barge and from barge to dock. The man should pay for their miseries. They would wait their opportunity, but he should pay.

“Death to him!”

But Michel shouted, “Death to Society!” It was Society which he vowed was to pay for the bitter moments of his life. He would not soil his hands with blood. That revolted him. It was, besides, a stupidity. And in all he did, Michel had the instinct of the artist; in his vengeance as well as in his calling.

“Society!” The men on the barge laughed. They were more concrete than that.

But, though they often scoffed at him, Michel, for all his youth, had their respect. They liked the absurd lack of fear which he, so small a creature, showed in the presence of burly, hardened men from the battalions of Africa. They admired, and sometimes secretly envied, the decision of his personality. He knew so well what he wanted, and could never be made to follow any path but his own. He was so fearless that they believed him to be fundamentally honest. In spite of his boy’s body they felt him to be a man, with all a man’s aloofness and inviolability of ego. So Michel said what he liked and went unmolested.

The barges put off and the Ile de Ré retreated. It became not a dock to which lighters had been moored, but an island—long and narrow, turning a rocky and forbidding face to the sea. There was the lighthouse on the northwest point. And there were Vauban’s old fortifications guarding the harbor of St. Martin. Back of that the land was flat, and but for its orchards of pears and figs, it was treeless; lying like a raft of floating salt-marshes which had drifted a little way off the mainland shore.

So it appeared to the moving barges, from which it was possible to look beyond the great grim silent prison which is the depot of the transportation of convicts to Guiana; to look beyond that to the cottages of peasants who live upon the oyster and salt industries and upon the fruit of trees which would now soon be blossoming. And then, beyond the island, there came into view the profile of France.

But they might not look longer, for already the lighters were bumping against the ship. Single file they must climb the gangway, and, under the eyes of armed keepers, march up, and then down; down two steep iron ladders to barred cages in the hold.

From the low black ceiling of the cages hammocks hung side by side and end to end, without an unnecessary inch between; for in each cage more than a hundred men were to be crowded.

Michel chose a hammock near a port-hole. There would be need of what air you could get, when they were all packed in there like herrings.

Putting himself and his sack into the hammock he proceeded to look about. Only six port-holes—small ones. He had been wise to take up a claim near one of them. No furnishings but the hammocks. A worn cement floor; at one end of the cage a toilet, up a couple of steps. Another cage opposite—a duplicate of that in which he found himself. A little passageway between, where stood two water-barrels. You helped yourself through the bars, using a tin cup chained to one of them. Coils of rubber hose out in the passageway, by which the cages were flooded and cleansed; or, Michel had been told, the hose might be turned on the men in case of disorder. Also outside were several large electric bulbs enclosed in protective wire frames, and a couple of candle lanterns for emergency use. Nothing but the hammocks inside.

Bringing his eyes back to his immediate surroundings, Michel saw that Pierre was arranging Félix’s sack in a hammock near his own. It was an end which Michel had seen from the beginning. He shrugged and lit a cigarette. It would be an hour at least, he thought, before the embarkation could be finished. He was tired after the excitement of the morning. That’s what the monotony of prison did for you; excitement tired you. How many months had he been at St. Martin? ... Four.... Four months, and now that at last something had happened, he was tired. They’d stood so long in the courtyard and in the barges. He smoked slowly to make his one cigarette last. Yes, he was really worn out. He blew the smoke into rings and watched them with a quaint, elfish smile. He was thinking of that double line of soldiers, bristling with bayonets. “They did us that much honor,” he thought.

And then the siren cut short his casual scraps of memory. The siren whistled. Engines pulsed. They were off. The impossible and the inevitable had happened. The judge had said, “Seven years’ penal servitude in Guiana.” But until the siren blew, that had never seemed real.

The ship was moving. They had, then, actually sailed. And unseen by them, Michel knew that slowly France grew dim and finally disappeared. The lighthouse would be the last thing you could see.