Читать книгу Condemned to Devil's Island - Mary Blair Rice - Страница 4

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“May I tell you about it again?” Félix asked.

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

The two boys sat in niches formed by frames which divided the ship’s side into eighteen-inch segments. A narrow ledge connecting the frames furnished seats for a fraction of each cage’s quota. A similar ledge ran along the barred side, but the niches were the coveted places, and many convict shipments had left on the paint the dark smudge of heads and shoulders.

In their stiff regularity these niches seemed to Paul Arthur a travesty of the choir of some medieval monastery. They faced the tragedy of bars, as such a monks’ choir often faced a sculptured cross; or looked, perhaps, upon some soft old picture, whose mellow creams and blues, crimsons, and rich dark browns like oiled shadows, portrayed a life-sized Christ hung between two thieves, whom He planned that day to meet in Paradise.

From the opposite ledge under the bars near the water-barrel, this ironic symbolism crossed Paul’s mind, as he sat, a silent prisoner, moving in that strange company as though he were merely an on-looking spirit; as though he were a philosopher who but temporarily occupied the suffering physical body of a convict bound for Guiana.

But Michel, unconcerned with symbolism, stared absently straight ahead, through the bars of their cage, across the narrow passage and through the bars of the next cage, whose occupants he saw as though longitudinally divided by the repetition of vertical bars. He thought how odd it looked to see half a face, half a body, then the inch of bar, followed by the continuation of face and body, then by another bar, with possibly nothing left over, or only just a narrow slice of a man.

Yesterday the sea had been rough, and Félix a limp yellow thing, too sick for speech.

For twenty-four hours the ship had heaved and tossed, her frames groaning under the strain. Ports had been closed and hatches shut down. Waves had hurled themselves against the six circles of glass. Many were seasick, and with each hour the close air had become more and more foul. When the sick opened their eyes they saw that through the bars men traded clothing for the packets of tobacco which the sailors offered in exchange. They saw, but were indifferent as to whether or not the bartered garments belonged to them.

Closing their eyes, they listened to the rhythmic groan of the ship and waited for the waves which broke in measured beat. And always memories like colossal shadows moved through their brains, only to reappear, to pass out, and to return in dizzy procession.

To the seasick there is no future. There is only a ghastly present and an immediate past; a monstrously distorted past, wherein every emotion, every experience, is magnified and multiplied, to recur again and again with the repetition of the complaining frames and of the slapping spray.

On such a ship, a remembered corpse would take on gigantic proportions, a judge would appear of heroic size, a prostitute move with an allure greater than any reality, and lost moments of joy or pain would vibrate with an intensity they never actually possessed, while with closed eyes men waited for the deathly sinking and the wrench of the recovery as the creaking ship rolled and tossed with the measure of the sea.

And in the hold of a convict ship seasickness is stripped of all alleviations. No bells to summon attentive stewards murmuring, “Very good, sir. Coming directly.” No “Get out into the air, sir; it’ll do you good.” No lounging in deck-chairs, before which officers pause to predict better weather. No friends or relatives to suggest that you try this or that. No one who cares a damn whether you live or die. Perhaps no one ever again who cares.

In those black hours all of Michel’s past had seemed to him wiped out, except the sound of the prévôt whipping prisoners in the disciplinary cells of St. Martin. It was that sound which had beat upon his brain, assuming the rhythm of the angry sea. At the lowest depths of his misery he had heard some one exclaim:

“What do we expect? Aren’t we traveling free?” And those who were not ill had laughed loudly.

But today was calm. Under charge of the armed guard they’d been taken in squads for a fifteen-minute walk on deck, while the sailors hosed out the cages. The air and the calm had brought back speech to Félix.

“May I tell you again, Michel, how it all happened?”

Félix had been to a fête in a near-by village. He had more to drink than he was used to. So had the two friends with whom he’d gone. That was how, on the way home, they’d come to think of going to a cabaret for just a little more. And Félix paused to wonder why it is that when you have had too much is always the time when you want one more. The cabaret, he went on, had been closed for the night, but the door had been easy to force. Yes, Michel remembered that he had already told him how all would have gone no further than that, if only the patron had not got out of bed and accused them of coming to steal. So they had fallen upon him and given him a beating, a thing which, of course, they wouldn’t have done but for having had more than enough to drink. After that they had made themselves free of the bar and had robbed the box of four hundred francs.

But it had been their first offense, and the patron had had only five days in the hospital. What did Michel think about it? How did he think young fellows, who had never before broken in to steal, had come to do such a thing? And the sentence ... five years’ hard labor and deportation. Was it not excessive? And why hadn’t his mother been able to get him commutation? Perhaps she hadn’t done all she could. If she could know what prison is ... but who ever understands who has not heard the key turn in the lock? The horror of St. Martin, and now this ship ... and the terror of what was to come!

Félix grew tearful with pity for himself.

“But you don’t mind, Michel. Not as I do. Sometimes I think you are almost happy!”

It was the first time that Félix had seemed aware of any state of mind but his own. And Michel, his reserve relaxed with the lowered resistance of the past twenty-four hours, began to explain:

“You see,” he said, “I have my profession. You want your mother. You want to go on raising artichokes. You’re willing to grow old raising artichokes. But I ... I want to stand at the top. I want to do the things that take skill and daring!”

Michel spoke rapidly. He had the Latin gift of expression, and he had so often analyzed for himself the end he sought, that he did not need to grope for clarification of word or thought.

“For the big jobs,” he continued, “you have to foresee everything. Your eyes must be quick—and your hands—so that you never make a useless movement, or an unnecessary sound. Never make a mistake. At the crisis you must be as cool as ice.

“Then it’s just as though you weren’t inside yourself at all ... but somewhere out in the audience looking on and thinking how wonderfully the fellow is doing it.

“And the greater the danger, Félix, the greater your joy. You’re playing with your life and you’re playing in the dark. Any minute—even if you haven’t made one blunder—any minute it may be all up with you. You can never be certain how the cards are going to fall.”

“But, Michel, how can you like it? They’ve caught you and you’re on your way to seven years’ hard labor—and seven years’ exile after that. You’re even worse off than I am. I’ve got only five. So how can you be so cheerful? What’s the use of a profession if it ends you in prison the same as me?”

“Yes, prison is terrible.” Michel conceded it. “But I’m what you call cheerful because I’m not going to waste my time while I’m there. I’m going to learn. Why, some of the greatest of us are in Guiana. I’ll learn all they can teach—and then, of course, I’ll escape.”

In the afternoon, stripped to the waist, two men fought in the cage ... Pierre and David. Both men were elaborately tattooed in indigo against the yellow brown of bodies tanned in the service of the Public Works in Morocco.

Pierre was covered with a close pattern of the African fauna and flora—elephants and lions, baboons and strange birds with enormous beaks. At the base of his throat was etched a magnified human eye. Pierre called it the “eye of the police.” Just below the eye and on each shoulder was a pansy, which in the symbolism of tattoo signifies “thoughts of mother.” All was drawn with Egyptian feeling—straight lines and elimination of detail.

David was done in flourishes and curves. His taste had run to the heads of ladies of the era of Pompadour and picture hats; to an angel with a trumpet; to a ship, which typified escape; while across his chest ran the motto whose translation reads, “My food is tobacco,” followed by the Arabic word “Barkat,” meaning, “That is all.” As the finishing touch a blue band of tattoo circled his neck, with instructions to “cut on the dotted line.”

Men were betting their clothes on the outcome of the combat; even odds at first, for Pierre and David were well matched, hardened by the same rough life.

Scared and pale, Félix looked on. He knew that they fought for the possession of his body, and tensely he watched the victory pass from Pierre to David and back to Pierre. He saw blood, a thing which had never happened among his mother’s artichokes. He didn’t know that the fight would not be to the death, nor that each had decided that if vanquished a certain girl-faced boy named Louis was to console him for the loss of Félix.

So with numb horror Félix watched the figures thrust and parry, while the ring of on-lookers sang, that the keepers above decks might hear nothing of the battle. It began to matter to him that Pierre should win. After all, he had eaten Pierre’s food. He would be, perhaps, a little less afraid of Pierre than of David. With David he could never forget that gruesome “Cut on the dotted line.”

Thus with a sense of relief he saw David go down, and heard the shout, “He’s yours, Pierre!” But Pierre, wiping a little streaming trickle of blood from the pansy at his throat, paid no immediate attention to his prize.

“Bah, what a place!” And Michel turned to the port for air.

That night from the opposite cage a shriek woke all the hammocks. It started high and shrill, and slowly diminished in power until it died away in a low, terrible gurgle.

In the morning it was found that a man had been assassinated, and sailors brought the report of two mortal combats in the aft cages. The bodies of the dead, they said, would be thrown into the sea.

That was the day when at the early promenade Gibraltar had been sighted. Within twenty-four hours the ship would touch at Algiers to take on Arab convicts. There was talk of attempting escape at Algiers. One of the prisoners had succeeded in unscrewing a port-hole. And Félix, who had sat all day speechless, weeping in his niche, raised his head to listen. Men were saying that while officers and keepers were busy with the embarkation, the port would be removed, and one by one all who could squeeze through might escape. But at five o’clock a sailor coming in to make fast the ports had discovered the loosened screws. Never mind, escape was merely postponed until they reached Guiana.

And Félix went back to his quiet weeping.

“He’s not a bad man,” Michel comforted. “He will, I think, be good to you. He’s only following the custom, you know.”

Still Félix wept. What consolation was it to him to know that Pierre simply carried on the custom of the battalions of Africa? All his hopes, all his futile little plans, were finished. Without will-power, he had trusted to the successful intervention of his mother—and failing that, he had relied on chance, on being perhaps assigned to a different cage on the ship, and at the end of the voyage being sent to a different prison.

“But if it hadn’t been Pierre, it would have been some one else,” Michel reminded. “There’s no way out of this sort of thing unless you stand against it yourself.”

And Michel realized that the quality of strength was not in Félix.

After Algiers there would be, in fourteen days, Guiana. Life settled down to the routine of the voyage: coffee and biscuits at six; six-thirty, fold up the hammocks; at seven, walk on deck; at ten, soup and meat or soup and fish; four o’clock, soup and beans; six o’clock, hang the hammocks.

And all the hours between to kill; herded in iron-barred cages in the hold of a ship.

Little groups were formed, made up of men who had met in other prisons, or whose specialty happened to be the same, or who chanced to come from the same city or village. More of the strange prison “marriages” were arranged; some amicably and some settled by force.

Félix had become calm and strangely listless. But at least he no longer sat silently weeping. Michel thought he had adjusted himself to what he’d not had the moral fiber to avoid. And Michel’s brain was in the grip of his own thoughts. He was resolving to control his destiny. But how? And he fluctuated between detailed schemes and a certain superstitious confidence in a predetermined fate. He remembered the prophecy of an uncle;—made long ago when he was still a child. The uncle had predicted that he would grow up to become one of the greatest of rascals. A chief of police had later corroborated it: “Oh, I’ll see you again,” he’d said. “This is only the beginning for you.” Michel had thought often of their prophecy.

If they were right, then his career was not to be snuffed out in any foul prison of the Devil’s Island Colony. His uncle, now dead, he recalled as a very intelligent man. As for the chief of police ... Yes, surely he was to escape from Guiana.

So he sat apart with his thought, identifying himself with none of the groups. Listening sometimes when they bragged of their deeds. This one had robbed a jeweler to the value of many thousand francs. That one had made a fortune in the manufacture of counterfeit money.

Paul Arthur also listened. “It is significant,” he thought, “that no one boasts of murder. If life has been taken, it has somehow to be justified.” And of course a woman was the most romantic way of justification, self-defense the most convincing.

“This is all very well,” Michel said to Félix, “but none of the real Aces are on board. Those I hope to meet in Guiana.”

With the passing days all thoughts turned more and more to Guiana—from the past to the future. Like the Ile de Ré and the coast of France, the past seemed to recede. The ship sailed into a space where life hovered between what had gone before and what was to come. In that no-man’s space it was enough to be free from the cruelty of St. Martin. It was enough to be able to smoke, to gamble, and to sing in the hold of a convict ship.

Then on the sixteenth day out from St. Martin, tropical heat, like some exotic bird blown out to sea, boarded the ship. On the morning promenade flying-fish were seen, darting in and out of an oiled sea, where only the light spray of their movement disturbed the viscid calm. The cages had become suddenly unbearably hot. Several men had died in the infirmary. The news trickled from prisoner to prisoner until all knew that the decimation of the seven hundred had already begun.

On the seventeenth day the sailors promised, “In three more days you’ll see Guiana!” The period of suspension between past and future was over. Men now spoke only of Guiana. Three days. How the time dragged. They were eager to reach the prisons of Guiana in order to escape from them. All the talk was of escape. Guiana was seen in rose. They had forgotten completely that it was known as the “dry guillotine.” No one believed any longer in the ominous mortality figures. Dreyfus and Devil’s Island were no more mentioned. They were nervously impatient to arrive—that much sooner to escape to liberty.

Meanwhile the heat increased. Michel could never decide whether the minutes on deck were a relief or not, for upon return to the cage the stifling air seemed more unendurable than when they left it to go on deck. When the sailors turned the hose into the cages, the men undressed and stood in the salt spray. Sleep was impossible. From Michel’s hammock he could see Pierre’s naked chest with the light from the bulb outside streaming over it, as though by intention the spotlight had been thrown upon the “eye of the police” and the pansy which meant “thoughts of mother.”

On the eighteenth day the sailors said that tomorrow they would land in Guiana. But not until six o’clock on the afternoon of the nineteenth was land seen. Land! The news came from a convict at a port-hole, and at once there was a rush to see.

What?

Only twelve had places. They relayed their observations to the less fortunate.

Nothing but trees. The jungle, of course.

The ship seemed to be at the entrance of a river. That would be the Maroni.

The anchor rattled down.

So they would not get up to St. Laurent until the morning. The sailors had predicted this.

A canoe passed close to the ship.

There were two ... no, three ... black men in the canoe. They were practically naked.

And in the bottom of their boat was a big bunch of yellow bananas.

The canoe paddled out of the line of vision. Light failed, and then all at once it was dark. And very quiet. The stillness of the engines was as startling as sudden noise; and from the shore no sound came to fill the void they left. But in the cages there was no silence. Throughout the sweltering night men talked. And all their talk was of Guiana and of how they would soon, of course, escape—even if they had to live naked in the forest, like the blacks who had passed in the canoe.