At a Winter's Fire — AN EDDY ON THE FLOOR- Part 3

* * * * * Ill and shaken, and, for the time, little in love with life, yet fearing death as I had never dreaded it before, I spent the rest of that horrible night huddled between my crumpled sheets, fearing to look forth, fearing to think, wild only to be far away, to be housed in some green and innocent hamlet, where I might forget the madness and the terror in learning to walk the unvext paths of placid souls.

I had not fairly knocked under until alone with my new dread familiar.

That unction I could lay to my heart, at least.

I had done the manly part by the stricken warder, whom I had attended to his own home, in a row of little tenements that stood south of the prison walls.

I had replied to all inquiries with some dignity and spirit, attributing my ruffled condition to an assault on the part of Johnson, when he was already under the shadow of his seizure.

I had directed his removal, and grudged him no professional attention that it was in my power to bestow.

But afterwards, locked into my room, my whole nervous system broke up like a trodden ant-hill, leaving me conscious of nothing but an aimless scurrying terror and the black swarm of thoughts, so that I verily fancied my reason would give under the strain.

Yet I had more to endure and to triumph over.

Near morning I fell into a troubled sleep, throughout which the drawn twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever spelt out of the alphabet of fear.

If my body rested, my brain was an open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to "sit at squat" in.

Suddenly I woke to the fact that there was a knocking at my door--that there had been for some little time.

I cried, "Come in!"

finding a weak restorative in the mere sound of my own human voice; then, remembering the key was turned, bade the visitor wait until I could come to him.

Scrambling, feeling dazed and white-livered, out of bed, I opened the door, and met one of the warders on the threshold.

The man looked scared, and his lips, I noticed, were set in a somewhat boding fashion.

"Can you come at once, sir?"

he said.

"There's summat wrong with the Governor."

"Wrong?

What's the matter with him?"

"Why,"--he looked down, rubbed an imaginary protuberance smooth with his foot, and glanced up at me again with a quick, furtive expression,--"he's got his face set in the grating of 47, and danged if a man Jack of us can get him to move or speak."

I turned away, feeling sick.

I hurriedly pulled on coat and trousers, and hurriedly went off with my summoner.

Reason was all absorbed in a wildest phantasy of apprehension.

"Who found him?"

I muttered, as we sped on.

"Vokins see him go down the corridor about half after eight, sir, and see him give a start like when he noticed the trap open.

It's never been so before in my time.

Johnson must ha' done it last night, before he were took."

"Yes, yes."

"The man said the Governor went to shut it, it seemed, and to draw his face to'ards the bars in so doin'.

Then he see him a-lookin' through, as he thought; but nat'rally it weren't no business of his'n, and he went off about his work.

But when he come anigh agen, fifteen minutes later, there were the Governor in the same position; and he got scared over it, and called out to one or two of us."

"Why didn't one of you ask the Major if anything was wrong?"

"Bless you!

we did; and no answer.

And we pulled him, compatible with discipline, but--" "But what?"

"He's stuck."

"Stuck!"

"See for yourself, sir.

That's all I ask."

I did, a moment later.

A little group was collected about the door of cell 47, and the members of it spoke together in whispers, as if they were frightened men.

One young fellow, with a face white in patches, as if it had been floured, slid from them as I approached, and accosted me tremulously.

"Don't go anigh, sir.

There's something wrong about the place."

I pulled myself together, forcibly beating down the excitement reawakened by the associations of the spot.

In the discomfiture of others' nerves I found my own restoration.

"Don't be an ass!"

I said, in a determined voice, "There's nothing here that can't be explained.

Make way for me, please!"

They parted and let me through, and I saw him.

He stood, spruce, frock-coated, dapper, as he always was, with his face pressed against and _into_ the grill, and either hand raised and clenched tightly round a bar of the trap.

His posture was as of one caught and striving frantically to release himself; yet the narrowness of the interval between the rails precluded so extravagant an idea.

He stood quite motionless--taut and on the strain, as it were--and nothing of his face was visible but the back ridges of his jaw-bones, showing white through a bush of red whiskers.

"Major Shrike!"

I rapped out, and, allowing myself no hesitation, reached forth my hand and grasped his shoulder.

The body vibrated under my touch, but he neither answered nor made sign of hearing me.

Then I pulled at him forcibly, and ever with increasing strength.

His fingers held like steel braces.

He seemed glued to the trap, like Theseus to the rock.

Hastily I peered round, to see if I could get glimpse of his face.

I

noticed enough to send me back with a little stagger.

"Has none of you got a key to this door?"

I asked, reviewing the scared faces about me, than which my own was no less troubled, I feel sure.

"Only the Governor, sir," said the warder who had fetched me.

"There's not a man but him amongst us that ever seen this opened."

He was wrong there, I could have told him; but held my tongue, for obvious reasons.

"I want it opened.

Will one of you feel in his pockets?"

Not a soul stirred.

Even had not sense of discipline precluded, that of a certain inhuman atmosphere made fearful creatures of them all.

"Then," said I, "I must do it myself."

I turned once more to the stiff-strung figure, had actually put hand on it, when an exclamation from Vokins arrested me.

"There's a key--there, sir!"

he said--"stickin' out yonder between its feet."

Sure enough there was--Johnson's, no doubt, that had been shot from its socket by the clapping to of the door, and afterwards kicked aside by the warder in his convulsive struggles.

I stooped, only too thankful for the respite, and drew it forth.

I had seen it but once before, yet I recognised it at a glance.

Now, I confess, my heart felt ill as I slipped the key into the wards, and a sickness of resentment at the tyranny of Fate in making me its helpless minister surged up in my veins.

Once, with my fingers on the iron loop, I paused, and ventured a fearful side glance at the figure whose crookt elbow almost touched my face; then, strung to the high pitch of inevitability, I shot the lock, pushed at the door, and in the act, made a back leap into the corridor.

Scarcely, in doing so, did I look for the totter and collapse outwards of the rigid form.

I had expected to see it fall away, face down, into the cell, as its support swung from it.

Yet it was, I swear, as if something from within had relaxed its grasp and given the fearful dead man a swingeing push outwards as the door opened.

It went on its back, with a dusty slap on the stone flags, and from all its spectators--me included--came a sudden drawn sound, like wind in a keyhole.

What can I say, or how describe it?

A dead thing it was--but the face!

Barred with livid scars where the grating rails had crossed it, the rest seemed to have been worked and kneaded into a mere featureless plate of yellow and expressionless flesh.

And it was this I had seen in the glass!

* * * * * There was an interval following the experience above narrated, during which a certain personality that had once been mine was effaced or suspended, and I seemed a passive creature, innocent of the least desire of independence.

It was not that I was actually ill or actually insane.

A

merciful Providence set my finer wits slumbering, that was all, leaving me a sufficiency of the grosser faculties that were necessary to the right ordering of my behaviour.

I kept to my room, it is true, and even lay a good deal in bed; but this was more to satisfy the busy scruples of a _locum tenens_--a practitioner of the neighbourhood, who came daily to the prison to officiate in my absence--than to cosset a complaint that in its inactivity was purely negative.

I could review what had happened with a calmness as profound as if I had read of it in a book.

I could have wished to continue my duties, indeed, had the power of insistence remained to me.

But the saner medicus was acute where I had gone blunt, and bade me to the restful course.

He was right.

I was mentally stunned, and had I not slept off my lethargy, I should have gone mad in an hour--leapt at a bound, probably, from inertia to flaming lunacy.

I remembered everything, but through a fluffy atmosphere, so to speak.

It was as if I looked on bygone pictures through ground glass that softened the ugly outlines.

Sometimes I referred to these to my substitute, who was wise to answer me according to my mood; for the truth left me unruffled, whereas an obvious evasion of it would have distressed me.

"Hammond," I said one day, "I have never yet asked you.

How did I give my evidence at the inquest?"

"Like a doctor and a sane man."

"That's good.

But it was a difficult course to steer.

You conducted the post-mortem.

Did any peculiarity in the dead man's face strike you?"

"Nothing but this: that the excessive contraction of the bicipital muscles had brought the features into such forcible contact with the bars as to cause bruising and actual abrasion.

He must have been dead some little time when you found him."

"And nothing else?

You noticed nothing else in his face--a sort of obliteration of what makes one human, I mean?"

"Oh, dear, no!

nothing but the painful constriction that marks any ordinary fatal attack of _angina pectoris_.

--There's a rum breach of promise case in the paper to-day.

You should read it; it'll make you laugh."

I had no more inclination to laugh than to sigh; but I accepted the change of subject with an equanimity now habitual to me.

* * * * * One morning I sat up in bed, and knew that consciousness was wide awake in me once more.

It had slept, and now rose refreshed, but trembling.

Looking back, all in a flutter of new responsibility, along the misty path by way of which I had recently loitered, I shook with an awful thankfulness at sight of the pitfalls I had skirted and escaped--of the demons my witlessness had baffled.

The joy of life was in my heart again, but chastened and made pitiful by experience.

Hammond noticed the change in me directly he entered, and congratulated me upon it.

"Go slow at first, old man," he said.

"You've fairly sloughed the old skin; but give the sun time to toughen the new one.

Walk in it at present, and be content."

I was, in great measure, and I followed his advice.

I got leave of absence, and ran down for a month in the country to a certain house we wot of, where kindly ministration to my convalescence was only one of the many blisses to be put to an account of rosy days.

"_Then did my love awake, Most like a lily-flower, And as the lovely queene of heaven, So shone shee in her bower.

_" Ah, me!

ah, me!

when was it?

A year ago, or two-thirds of a lifetime?

Alas!

"Age with stealing steps hath clawde me with his crowch."

And will the yews root in _my_ heart, I wonder?

I was well, sane, recovered, when one morning, towards the end of my visit, I received a letter from Hammond, enclosing a packet addressed to me, and jealously sealed and fastened.

My friend's communication ran as follows:-- "There died here yesterday afternoon a warder, Johnson--he who had that apoplectic seizure, you will remember, the night before poor Shrike's exit.

I attended him to the end, and, being alone with him an hour before the finish, he took the enclosed from under his pillow, and a solemn oath from me that I would forward it direct to you, sealed as you will find it, and permit no other soul to examine or even touch it.

I acquit myself of the charge, but, my dear fellow, with an uneasy sense of the responsibility I incur in thus possibly suggesting to you a retrospect of events which you had much best consign to the limbo of the--not unexplainable, but not worth trying to explain.

It was patent from what I have gathered that you were in an overstrung and excitable condition at that time, and that your temporary collapse was purely nervous in its character.

It seems there was some nonsense abroad in the prison about a certain cell, and that there were fools who thought fit to associate Johnson's attack and the other's death with the opening of that cell's door.

I have given the new Governor a tip, and he has stopped all that.

We have examined the cell in company, and found it, as one might suppose, a very ordinary chamber.

The two men died perfectly natural deaths, and there is the last to be said on the subject.

I mention it only from the fear that enclosed may contain some allusion to the rubbish, a perusal of which might check the wholesome convalescence of your thoughts.

If you take my advice, you will throw the packet into the fire unread.

At least, if you do examine it, postpone the duty till you feel yourself absolutely impervious to any mental trickery, and--bear in mind that you are a worthy member of a particularly matter-of-fact and unemotional profession."

* * * * * I smiled at the last clause, for I was now in a condition to feel a rather warm shame over my erst weak-knee'd collapse before a sheet and an illuminated turnip.

I took the packet to my bedroom, shut the door, and sat myself down by the open window.

The garden lay below me, and the dewy meadows beyond.

In the one, bees were busy ruffling the ruddy gillyflowers and April stocks; in the other, the hedge twigs were all frosted with Mary buds, as if Spring had brushed them with the fleece of her wings in passing.

I fetched a sigh of content as I broke the seal of the packet and brought out the enclosure.

Somewhere in the garden a little sardonic laugh was clipt to silence.

It came from groom or maid, no doubt; yet it thrilled me with an odd feeling of uncanniness, and I shivered slightly.

"Bah!"

I said to myself determinedly.

"There is a shrewd nip in the wind, for all the show of sunlight;" and I rose, pulled down the window, and resumed my seat.

Then in the closed room, that had become deathly quiet by contrast, I opened and read the dead man's letter.

* * * * * "Sir,--I hope you will read what I here put down.

I lay it on you as a solemn injunction, for I am a dying man, and I know it.

And to who is my death due, and the Governor's death, if not to you, for your pryin' and curiosity, as surely as if you had drove a nife through our harts?

Therefore, I say, Read this, and take my burden from me, for it has been a burden; and now it is right that you that interfered should have it on your own mortal shoulders.

The Major is dead and I am dying, and in the first of my fit it went on in my head like cimbells that the trap was left open, and that if he passed he would look in and _it_ would get him.

For he knew not fear, neither would he submit to bullying by God or devil.

"Now I will tell you the truth, and Heaven quit you of your responsibility in our destruction.

"There wasn't another man to me like the Governor in all the countries of the world.

Once he brought me to life after doctors had given me up for dead; but he willed it, and I lived; and ever afterwards I loved him as a dog loves its master.

That was in the Punjab; and I came home to England with him, and was his servant when he got his appointment to the jail here.

I tell you he was a proud and fierce man, but under control and tender to those he favoured; and I will tell you also a strange thing about him.

Though he was a soldier and an officer, and strict in discipline as made men fear and admire him, his heart at bottom was all for books, and literature, and such-like gentle crafts.

I had his confidence, as a man gives his confidence to his dog, and before me sometimes he unbent as he never would before others.

In this way I learnt the bitter sorrow of his life.

He had once hoped to be a poet, acknowledged as such before the world.

He was by natur' an idelist, as they call it, and God knows what it meant to him to come out of the woods, so to speak, and sweat in the dust of cities; but he did it, for his will was of tempered steel.

He buried his dreams in the clouds and came down to earth greatly resolved, but with one undying hate.

It is not good to hate as he could, and worse to be hated by such as him; and I will tell you the story, and what it led to.

"It was when he was a subaltern that he made up his mind to the plunge.

For years he had placed all his hopes and confidents in a book of verses he had wrote, and added to, and improved during that time.

A little encouragement, a little word of praise, was all he looked for, and then he was ready to buckle to again, profitin' by advice, and do better.

He put all the love and beauty of his heart into that book, and at last, after doubt, and anguish, and much diffidents, he published it and give it to the world.

Sir, it fell what they call still-born from the press.

It was like a green leaf flutterin' down in a dead wood.

To a proud and hopeful man, bubblin' with music, the pain of neglect, when he come to realize it, was terrible.

But nothing was said, and there was nothing to say.

In silence he had to endure and suffer.

"But one day, during maneuvers, there came to the camp a grey-faced man, a newspaper correspondent, and young Shrike knocked up a friendship with him.

Now how it come about I cannot tell, but so it did that this skip-kennel wormed the lad's sorrow out of him, and his confidents, swore he'd been damnabilly used, and that when he got back he'd crack up the book himself in his own paper.

He was a fool for his pains, and a serpent in his cruelty.

The notice come out as promised, and, my God!

the author was laughed and mocked at from beginning to end.

Even confidentses he had given to the creature was twisted to his ridicule, and his very appearance joked over.

And the mess got wind of it, and made a rare story for the dog days.

"He bore it like a soldier, and that he became heart and liver from the moment.

But he put something to the account of the grey-faced man and locked it up in his breast.

"He come across him again years afterwards in India, and told him very politely that he hadn't forgotten him, and didn't intend to.

But he was anigh losin' sight of him there for ever and a day, for the creature took cholera, or what looked like it, and rubbed shoulders with death and the devil before he pulled through.

And he come across him again over here, and that was the last of him, as you shall see presently.

"Once, after I knew the Major (he were Captain then), I was a-brushin' his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass.

Then he twisted upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he,-- "'The dog was right, Johnson: this isn't the face of a poet.

I was a presumtious ass, and born to cast up figgers with a pen behind my ear.'

"'Captain,' I says, 'if you was skinned, you'd look like any other man without his.

The quality of a soul isn't expressed by a coat.'

"'Well,' he answers, 'my soul's pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one Bluebeard chamber in it that's been kep' locked ever so many years.

It's nice and dirty by this time, I expect,' he says.

Then the grin comes on his mouth again.

'I'll open it some day,' he says, 'and look.

There's something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish, with the wind in my petticuts.

Perhaps I'll get the chance to set somebody else dancing by-and-by.'

"He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in this very jail.

"It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison was deserted.

Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the empty courts.

The contract for restoration hadn't been signed, and for months, and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein' done.

"Near the beginnin' of this period, one day comes, for the third time of the Major's seein' him, the grey-faced man.

'Let bygones be bygones,' he says.

'I was a good friend to you, though you didn't know it; and now, I expect, you're in the way to thank me.'

"'I am,' says the Major.

"'Of course,' he answers.

'Where would be your fame and reputation as one of the leadin' prison reformers of the day if you had kep' on in that riming nonsense?'

"'Have you come for my thanks?'

says the Governor.

"'I've come,' says the grey-faced man, 'to examine and report upon your system.'

"'For your paper?'

"'Possibly; but to satisfy myself of its efficacy, in the first instance.'

"'You aren't commissioned, then?'

"'No; I come on my own responsibility.'

"'Without consultation with any one?'

"'Absolutely without.

I haven't even a wife to advise me,' he says, with a yellow grin.

What once passed for cholera had set the bile on his skin like paint, and he had caught a manner of coughing behind his hand like a toast-master.

"'I know,' says the Major, looking him steady in the face, 'that what you say about me and my affairs is sure to be actuated by conscientious motives.'

"'Ah,' he answers.

'You're sore about that review still, I see.'

"'Not at all,' says the Major; 'and, in proof, I invite you to be my guest for the night, and to-morrow I'll show you over the prison and explain my system.'

"The creature cried, 'Done!'

and they set to and discussed jail matters in great earnestness.

I couldn't guess the Governor's intentions, but, somehow, his manner troubled me.

And yet I can remember only one point of his talk.

He were always dead against making public show of his birds.

'They're there for reformation, not ignimony,' he'd say.

Prisons in the old days were often, with the asylum and the work'us, made the holiday show-places of towns.

I've heard of one Justice of the Peace, up North, who, to save himself trouble, used to sign a lot of blank orders for leave to view, so that applicants needn't bother him when they wanted to go over.

They've changed all that, and the Governor were instrumental in the change.

"'It's against my rule,' he said that night, 'to exhibit to a stranger without a Government permit; but, seein' the place is empty, and for old remembrance' sake, I'll make an exception in your favour, and you shall learn all I can show you of the inside of a prison.'

"Now this was natural enough; but I was uneasy.

"He treated his guest royally; so much that when we assembled the next mornin' for the inspection, the grey-faced man were shaky as a wet dog.

But the Major were all set prim and dry, like the soldier he was.

"We went straight away down corridor B, and at cell 47 we stopped.

"'We will begin our inspection here,' said the Governor.

'Johnson, open the door.'

"I had the keys of the row; fitted in the right one, and pushed open the door.

"'After you, sir,' said the Major; and the creature walked in, and he shut the door on him.

"I think he smelt a rat at once, for he began beating on the wood and calling out to us.

But the Major only turned round to me with his face like a stone.

"'Take that key from the bunch,' he said, 'and give it to me.'

"I obeyed, all in a tremble, and he took and put it in his pocket.

"'My God, Major!'

I whispered, 'what are you going to do with him?'

"'Silence, sir!'

he said.

'How dare you question your superior officer!'

"And the noise inside grew louder.

"The Governor, he listened to it a moment like music; then he unbolted and flung open the trap, and the creature's face came at it like a wild beast's. "'Sir,' said the Major to it, 'you can't better understand my system than by experiencing it.

What an article for your paper you could write already--almost as pungint a one as that in which you ruined the hopes and prospects of a young cockney poet.'

"The man mouthed at the bars.

He was half-mad, I think, in that one minute.

"'Let me out!'

he screamed.

'This is a hideous joke!

Let me out!'

"'When you are quite quiet--deathly quiet,' said the Major, 'you shall come out.

Not before;' and he shut the trap in its face very softly.

"'Come, Johnson, march!'

he said, and took the lead, and we walked out of the prison.

"I was like to faint, but I dared not disobey, and the man's screeching followed us all down the empty corridors and halls, until we shut the first great door on it.

"It may have gone on for hours, alone in that awful emptiness.

The creature was a reptile, but the thought sickened my heart.

"And from that hour till his death, five months later, he rotted and maddened in his dreadful tomb."

* * * * * There was more, but I pushed the ghastly confession from me at this point in uncontrollable loathing and terror.

Was it possible--possible, that injured vanity could so falsify its victim's every tradition of decency?

"Oh!"

I muttered, "what a disease is ambition!

Who takes one step towards it puts his foot on Alsirat!"

It was minutes before my shocked nerves were equal to a resumption of the task; but at last I took it up again, with a groan.

* * * * * "I don't think at first I realized the full mischief the Governor intended to do.

At least, I hoped he only meant to give the man a good fright and then let him go.

I might have known better.

How could he ever release him without ruining himself?

"The next morning he summoned me to attend him.

There was a strange new look of triumph in his face, and in his hand he held a heavy hunting-crop.

I pray to God he acted in madness, but my duty and obedience was to him.

"'There is sport toward, Johnson,' he said.

'My dervish has got to dance.'

"I followed him quiet.

We listened when I opened the jail door, but the place was silent as the grave.

But from the cell, when we reached it, came a low, whispering sound.

"The Governor slipped the trap and looked through.

"'All right,' he said, and put the key in the door and flung it open.

"He were sittin' crouched on the ground, and he looked up at us vacant-like.