The Lord of the Sea by M. P. Shiel

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"I take it", he said, "that he will pass over the moor in a balloon
trailing a rope, which will have a loop to be slipped under the
arms. I tell you, there are dangers in this scheme: you may be shot.
Are you for trying it?"

"Trying it, aye", said Bates, with fifty times the boldness of
O'Hara.

And now began for these two a painfulness of waiting days, the sleep
of both, meanwhile, being one nightmare of confused affrights,
balloons and deliriums.

Ten times they re-discussed every possibility of the scheme, Hogarth
giving messages for Loveday, heaping counsels upon Bates. Nothing
remained to be said, and still the days passed over the time-worn
hearts, till a month went by.

At last something was observed in the sky--afar to the N.W.--in the
afternoon turn, about two o'clock, a mist on the moor, but the sky
almost cloudless.

Whereupon Hogarth, who first saw the object, stepped, as if looking
for something, close to Bates, hissing: "_Goodbye!_ Keep cool--
choose well--"

Bates shovelled on steadily, as though this was a day like others;
but twice his knees gave and bent beneath him; and there was a
twitching of the livid under-lip, piteous to see.

It drew nearer, that silent needle, while Bates worked, delving,
barrowing, making little trips; plenty of time; and no one noted his
lip which pulled and twitched.

Without visible motion it came, wafted on the breaths of high
heaven: half an hour--and still it was remote, fifteen hundred feet
up. Bates and Hogarth peered to see a rope, but could none.

After fifty minutes it was actually over the moor, all now conscious
of it; but the rope was indistinguishable from the air.

Yet it was there, walking the ground, at its end a horizontal
staff....Hogarth, with wiser forethought than Loveday's, had
predicted, not a staff, but a loop.

It passed twenty yards from the quarry, Loveday no doubt imagining
that Hogarth still worked there; but the quarry was some hundred and
fifty yards from the trench.

Its course, nevertheless was toward the trench: and on walked
deliberately the fluctuating rope, the staff now travelling the
gorsey ground, now bounding like a kangaroo yards high, to come down
once more yonder.

A moment came when Hogarth, with intense hiss, was whispering to
himself: "If I were he, I should dash _now_".

But Fred Bates did not move.

Hogarth suffered agonies not less excruciating than the rack.

"Oh, whyever does he wait?" he groaned.

But now--all suddenly--it was known, it was felt, deep in five
hundred ecstatic hearts, that a convict was gone--a man overboard--a
soul in the agony--battling between life and death.

Like tempests the whistles split the air.

Where is he? Who is he? What mother bare him? It is 57! And he is
_there!_--on high--caught, to the skies.

The tumbling of four ballast bags from the balloon was marked: the
balloon darted high, wildly high; and with her, seated on the bar,
the cord between his thighs, darted high Fred Bates.

Exultant! the five hundred faces wax fire-eyed, each heart a flame
of madness. But yonder is Warder Black taking trembling, yet
careful, aim: now the report is echoing from the two Tors, the
granite-works; and that smoke no sooner thins than a whole volley of
crackling musketry is winging toward that dot under the clouds.

And it was hideous--pitiful--the quailing heart waited and was still
to see the dot dissever itself from its rod: he had been hit: was in
the middle of the vast and vacant air: and wheeling he came.

A shockingly protracted interval did that fall fill up: the five
hundred, gazing as at some wonder in heaven, did not, could not,
breathe: the outraged heart seemed to rend the breast in a shriek.
Would it _never_ end, that somersault? Wheeling he came.

In reality it occupied much less than a minute: and now he is no
more ethereal, but has grown, is grossly near, attended by the
raving winds of his travelling: is arrived. And the thump of his
coming was heard. As he touched the earth he jerked out circular....

Here was a tragedy remembered many a year at Colmoor, and always
with feelings of the deepest awe.

XVII

OLD TOM'S LETTER

The fate of Bates filled Hogarth's mind with a gloom so funereal,
that now his strength, his great patience, all but succumbed.

One evening, while his broom lay stuck out under the notch of his
cell-door in order that Warder Black might count him, he took his
tin knife, and began to scratch over the hills and valleys of his
corrugated wall some shining letters:

VEN

He was now, after long reflection, convinced that he was the victim
of a plot of Baruch Frankl's: yet in his heart was little rancour
against Frankl, nor, when he wrote his "V E N", was he thinking
specially of Frankl--hardly knew of whom, or what. It may have been
of the system of things which had given to Frankl such vast powers
over him; but, the "N" finished, he pshawed at himself, and threw
the knife down. If something was wrong, he knew not at all how to
right it, supposing the world had been his to guide.

But a simple incident was destined to transform his mood--a letter
from old Tom Bates, the father of Fred.

And as hitherto we have seen him passive, bearing his weight of pain
with patience, after that letter we shall find him in action.

Old Bates' letter was handed him three weeks after the scratching of
his vague "VEN".

"DERE MISTER HOGARTH:

"thise fu lines is to ast you how you er getn on, and can you giv a
pore old feller ane noos ov that godfussakn sun ov mine hopn they ma
find you as they leave me at present wich i av the lumbeigo vere Bad
and no Go the doctor ses bob wot you no was in the ninth lansers he
dide comen home so ive only fred left out of the ate. I rote to im
fore munths agorne, but no anser, no doubt becos i cum to london
soon arter, so no more at present from

"Yours trule,

"TOM BATES".

The old fellow, Hogarth saw, did not know of Fred's fate: Fred, the
last of eight. He would find it hard to answer that letter.

When "beds down" was called, his head was still full of one thought:
old Tom Bates; and he could not sleep; heard the bell ring for the
change of warders; the vast silence of the prison's night; and still
his brain revolved old Tom.

The stealthy slipper of the night-warder passed and re-passed. Anon
a click of metal on metal, and the bull's-eye searched him.

Suddenly he remembered that visit to the forge at Thring, and the
present of herrings which old Tom in his guernsey, had brought.

"Here--take 'em--they're yours", old Tom had said.

He had just then, he remembered, been on the point of going into the
cottage to examine his guns, when the old man came, and stopped him--a
fatal, appointed thing, apparently. Had he actually gone, he would have
found the guns vanished, and would never have been condemned....

And what was it that the old man had said about fish, and fishermen,
and the sea?

He bent his brow to it, and finally remembered: "The day's work of a
fisherman gives him enough fish to live on all the week, and he
could lie round idling the other six days, if he chose; only anybody
can't live on nothing but fish all the time".

Was it true? Yes! He remembered facts of Yarmouth....

But since true, it was--strange.

Was the sea, then, a more productive element for men to work in than
the land? No, that was absurd: the land, in the nature of things,
was more productive.

Then, why could not _all_ men procure an easy superfluity by one
day's work, as the fisher could, if he chose to live naked in a
cave, eating fish alone? In that case the fisher could change some
of his day's-work fish for the shore people's day's-work things, and
so all have a variety as well as superabundance.

At the interest of this question, he leapt from his hammock, peering
into that thing, and his fleet feet were away, running after the
truth with that rapt abandonment that had characterized his hunting
and football. This was clear: that there was some difference between
land and sea as working-grounds for men. Shore people, like a
shoemaker, did not have for themselves enough shoes from even five,
or six, days' work on which to live in plenty for a week: and hence
would take nothing less than an enormous quantity of the fisher's
fish in exchange for a pair of shoes, making him, too, poor as
themselves. But since land work was as productive as sea work, and
far more so, it could only be that the shoemaker did not get for
himself all the shoes which he made, as the fisher got for himself
all the fish which he caught: some power took from shore people a
large part of what they made, a power which did not exist on the
sea. That much was sure.

What was this power, this inherent difference?

He could think of no inherent difference except this: that shore
workers paid rent for land--directly and indirectly--in a million
subtle ways; but fishers paid none for the sea.

So, then, if shore folk paid no rent, they would have a still
greater superfluity of shoes, etc., from one day's labour in six
than the fish-rich fisher?

So it seemed. So it _was_--as with savages. He started! But one
minute's reflection showed him that it was in the very nature of the
shore to pay rent: because one piece of land was better than
another--City land, for instance--and those working on the better
must pay for that benefit. Civilized land, therefore, was bound to
pay rent.

So that the shore people could never have the easy superfluity of
the fish-rich fisher--because land was bound to pay rent? And the
fisher must buy the shore things so dear with his easy-got fish,
toiling, he, too, all the week--because land was bound to pay rent?

The wretchedness of Man, then, was a Law?

Hogarth, confronted by a wall, groaned, and while his body was cold,
his brow rolled with sweat, he feeling himself on the brink of some
truth profound as the roots of the mountains....

"Land was bound to pay rent": he reached that point; and there
remained.

"But suppose the workers on shore paid the rent _among
themselves_....?"

At last those words: and he gave out a shout which begat mouths of
echo through the galleries of Colmoor.

"If the workers on shore paid rent among one another"--then they
would--on the whole--be in the very position of the fish-rich
workers on sea, who paid no rent at all, the nation--as a whole--
living on its country rent-free: England English, America American,
as the sea human: and our race might then begin to think, to live!

It seemed too sublime--and divine--to be true! Again, point by
point, he went over his reasoning with prying eye; and, on coming
back to the same conclusion, hugged himself, moaning. At last--he
knew.

And away now with the dullness and lowness! That blithe and hand-
clapping day! Good-bye, Colmoor! the daily massacre, the shame and
care. Men could begin--if in a baby way at first--to think, to see,
to sing, to live.

He saw, indeed, that that would hardly have been fair business if
he, for example, had paid his rent to the English Nation instead of
to Frankl, Frankl having bought Lagden with money earned. But he
thought that Frankl would hardly be slow to resign that rent, if
once he was shown....

But if Frankl _was_ slow--what then?

The oblong of ribbed glass over his flap-table showed a greyness of
morning, as he asked himself that thing.

In that case--Frankl could be argued with.

But if he still refused?

Then the question could be gone into as to whether that which is
good for forty millions, though apparently bad for Frankl, is not
_forty million times_ more just than unjust, goodness being justice;
also, as to which had the primary right to England, Frankl or the
English.

But if he still refused?

Suddenly Hogarth giggled--his first laugh in Colmoor.

_That_ could be arranged....

For him, Hogarth, the great fact was this: that he saw light. Into
that humble cell the rays of Heaven had blazed.

After standing motionless a long time, he dropped to his knees, and
"O, Thou, Thou", he said....

An hour later, when asked by an orderly if he wished to see doctor
or governor, he replied: "The Governor".

XVIII

CHLOROFORM

(Captain Bucknill, the Governor, was making his morning rounds, when
he heard that among the convicts claiming to see him was 76.)

A little man, prim, snappy, compact: an army officer, with
moustachios stuck upon him, to curve and finish him off.

"Well, what is it, 76?" said he busily at the cell door.

Hogarth struck a hand-salute--his old habit on His Majesty's ships.

"Sir, I wished to tell you that I have determined to escape from
this prison--if I can".

"Indeed, now! This is a most refreshing candour, 76!"

"I have said what I had to say", said Hogarth. "You keep a sharp eye
on me, and I, too, will keep a sharp eye".

The Governor puffed a breath of laughter, turned on his heels,
walked away, and that day spoke to three officials with regard to
Convict 76.

And during a week Hogarth lay deep, chained, in a punishment-cell.

But during its first four days he had invented three separate plans
of escape, and had determined upon the one which seemed the surest,
though longest.

When he again came up into the light, he was a marked man, under
Warder Black's constant suspicion.

Now, however, his expression was changed: he no longer belonged to
Colmoor, though he was there. Sometimes he felt like shouting at the
burden of his secret. In his impatience to proclaim it, he pined to
write to Loveday--but now his punishment had lost him that
privilege.

Meantime, the problem was to get ten good miles beyond Colmoor: a
hard one; but his brain had already accomplished a task far harder:
and the greater implied the less.

His first thought, when he had begun to plan, had been Loveday; his
second, that on no account could he permit Loveday to incur further
risk, or expense, for him; his third, that he might yet use Loveday
to any extent not involving risk or expense.

At the next weekly "School" he sat near a Thames-works hackle-maker,
who, though he could write, was no scholar, and was laboriously
spoiling a second letter-sheet, when Hogarth whispered him: "Can I
help you? I see it's to your mother. I could get her a quid from a
friend of mine".

"Well, I'm much obliged....!"

The laborious letter, after half an hour, had in it:

"If you go to 15, Cheyne Gardens, the gentleman will give you a
sovereign which he owed me for cutting down the elm in the beech-
wood at Teddington for him".

Now, Loveday lived at 15, Cheyne Gardens, and had only to see those
words "_the elm in the beechwood_," to scent a cypher from Hogarth.

He offered five pounds for that letter: but it was two weeks before
he decided upon the intended words: "Small chloroform--trenches--
rock".

There were several trenches, many rocks: yet one midnight, when a
blustering wind huddled the bracken, and the prison stood darkling,
wrapped in mystery, a lonely figure in an ulster was there; and
under each of three rocks he deposited two vials: for the formation
of only three gave the least chance of concealment.

What Hogarth's plan could be he racked his brain in vain to dream,
guessing that prisoners, on returning from the moor, must be
searched, even to the ears: Hogarth, therefore, could never use the
vial within the walls, and must mean to use it without--a
sufficiently wild proceeding. But the finding of the vials, was
sure: for the "rock" which Hogarth had had in mind was one of those
granite ones common on Colmoor, standing five feet high on a small
base; and one day he swept his hand among the gorse under it, and,
with a glad half-surprise, touched two vials.

Three days later he again swept his hand among the gorse, touched
the vials, breasted his handkerchief, laid the vials on it, and
presently contrived to tie them together with a twig.

At his feet now was a wheelbarrow full of marl, and two yards off
Warder Black, waiting for him to roll the barrow; but, inserting his
spade between a wheel and a side of the barrow, his back toward
Black, Hogarth, with a tug, bent the spade: then walked to Black.

"Look here", he said, "that spade isn't much good now...."

Black strode to look, Hogarth a little behind him: and at the
instant when the officer was a-stoop to lift the spade, Hogarth took
the vials from his breast, and laid them upright in the little
pocket of Black's tunic, near his bayonet-sheath and cartridge-box,
above the belt.

By the time the matter of the spade was settled, the great bell
rang, the gangs went marching over the old familiar level, up the
old path in the grass-mound on which the Palace stands, and so, in
lax order, like shabby French conscripts, powdered, toil-worn, into
the gates.

Then the search on parade: during which, as Black busily searched
him, Hogarth said: "Search well".

They were then led up to cells.

And the moment Hogarth's door closed upon him, he put his skilly-can
on the floor, and, with one stamp, stamped it out of shape; also he
broke his cup, and pocketed two fragments of it.

A few minutes afterwards, before cocoa, Black, trotting in heavy
haste here and there in the gallery, looked in to say: "Bath to-
night".

And Hogarth: "Warder! a word with you! sorry, I have trodden on my
can...."

Upon which Black went stooping to look, the can now standing on the
low shelf; and as he said "I shall report this", Hogarth, stooping,
with quick deftness had the vials picked from the thick pocket.

"Well, fall in", said Black to him; "better take your precious can,
and give it to a bath-room warder for the store-keeper to change".

Hogarth, as he passed out, placed the vials on the shelf over his
door, where they were secure, since cells were never searched; and,
the bathers having formed in single file, five feet between man and
man, away they moved and down--away and down--lost in space,
treading the journey of galleries, till, at the bottom, they passed
up a vaulted corridor, monastically dim, across a yard open to
starry sky, and into the door of a semi-detached, steep-roofed
building, which was the bath-house.

A row of thirty-five baths; a very long bench for undressing; in the
space between bench and baths three warders walking: such was the
bath-house: all whitewashed, galvanized iron, and rigour; but for
its old record of uneventfulness a scandal was preparing that night.

Outside the door a fourth officer paced, and a cord within rang a
little bell in one click, to tell when, the bathing over, the door
should be unlocked outside.

After giving up his can near the door to a warder, who laid it on
the bench, Hogarth undressed slowly; got off his boots; and now had
on only knickerbockers and stockings: he got off his stockings.

And the moment his bare soles touched the floor, he felt himself
once more agile on the ratlines, larky for a shore-row, handy in any
squall. Let them all come, therefore! He smiled; passed his palms
down his crib of lean ribs.

"Good gracious, why don't you hurry up there...?" an officer came
asking, stooping.

At "there" he saw stars-and-stripes, dropped upon his back: Hogarth
was away toward the door, while the bathers started with shouts,
though in no bosom arose any impulse to follow, the bath-house being
the centre of a maze of twenty unscaleable walls, prison within
prison.

But as for Hogarth, in such a dazzling flash did he dash toward the
door, that he had struck down the second officer before the outcry
of the first, and had pulled at the door-bell before the third could
cry _"Don't open!"_--a cry muffled into his maw by a cuff prompt as
thunder.

This third man, however, grasped the fugitive by the middle: and
while the overthrown two were running up, and the key without
seeking the lock, a short, venomous tussle was waged just near the
door, till Hogarth, wringing his naked body free, tossed his
antagonist by the knees to slide into the path of the two on-comers;
at the same time, catching up his battered can, and smashing it into
the face of the door-orderly, who now peeped in, he slipped through,
and was gone into a yard, small, of irregular shape, and dim, with
one wall-lantern, and but one egress (except the egress into the
prison-hall), namely a blind-alley between the laundry and carpet-
makers' building on one side, and stables on the other: blind alley,
yard, and all, being shut in by big buildings.

By the time the door-orderly opened his eyes, and one of the inside
three had rushed out, Hogarth had vanished; and these two, shrilling
whistles to reinforce the bath-room guard, pelted down the blind-
alley to effect, as they thought, a sure capture. But Hogarth was
not there.

Back they came trotting, breathless, rather at a loss. One panted:
"He must have run back into the great hall...."

The other panted: "He'd hardly do that--hiding in the yard still,
_must_ be. There's that little nook...."

The "little nook" is a three-sided space in a corner, very dark,
formed by one wall of the campanile, or bell-tower, together with a
wall of the laundry-house, and a third wall which shuts in the yard;
the entrance to it narrow, and one looking up within it seems to
stand at the bottom of a triangular well, split at one corner. It is
not far from the bathhouse, and into it Hogarth had really darted;
but when the officers came peering, no trace of him.

He had, in fact, gone up the lightning-conductor, which runs down a
bell-tower remarkably high, Colmoor having been built during the
Napoleonic wars for French prisoners at a time when the theory was
accepted that a lightning-conductor protects a space whose radius is
double the height of the conductor. The tower is a five-sided
structure with a Gothic window into which it is impossible to get
from the conductor, because a corner intervenes, and it is a feat to
swing from the conductor to the laundry-wall coping, and thence,
leaping up, to grip the window: at each of which ordeals Hogarth
hesitated, pierced with chills; to his observations from afar it had
seemed so much less stupendous; but in each case he dared, and
reached.

All this time the can was between his teeth.

Arrived on the window, his arms out groping, he felt a slanting
beam--climbed it--found it short-mounted upon a horizontal one, all
here, as he had expected, being a chaos of beams, raying every way.
Thrice he sneezed low, and felt cobwebs in his face.

And groping he went, seeking the great Bell of Colmoor, which he had
doomed, hearing sounds of the to-do, echoes that ran below, and the
vague shout of somebody, till he touched the flat top of the bell,
clamped to the swing-beam on which he sat astraddle; felt also that
along the top of the beam lay an iron bar; made sure that this was
in actual contact with the clamps of the bell: and, no longer
hesitating, set to work upon the can.

Tugging with his dog-teeth under the upper rim, he got a loose end,
and wrenched the rim off; then, tearing along the solder, got the
cylinder separated from the bottom; and, opening it out, had a sheet
of tin. And now, by the help of his fragments of cup, he set to
hack-sawing, breaking, tearing this into strips, no easy thing, in
spite of the thin-worn condition of the can: but finally had six
strips.

The edge of one strip he inserted under an end of the bar of iron on
the beam; then connected that strip with another by loops, slid
again to the window, and there lay connecting the six strips by a
smith's-trick, with skew loops, non-slipping, getting a tin string
five feet long. He then took the leap to the laundry coping, and
thence the spring to the conductor, this being all the more
ticklishly perilous because he could barely see it.

Hanging away now from the conductor by the left elbow, he reached
out the right arm across the corner to catch the tin, which stuck
toward him from the window: and he wound its end round the
conductor, electrically connecting the bell with the conductor.

And now, standing with one foot on a staple below the tin, he twice
sawed the conductor's soft metal with the fragments of cup, cutting
and tugging out three inches of it, thus isolating the conductor's
point atop from its earthing; then he tossed the piece cut out
behind the laundry-coping.

This done, he listened, cast a searching eye below, slid down the
rod.

The yard was at present silent, but as he moved to give himself up
in the prison-hall, five night-warders with bull's-eyes fell out,
still seeking him.

And as he knelt with clasped hands of supplication and bent bare
back, like a captured slave, they fell savagely upon him, and cried
one: "Well, of all the idiots...!"

XIX

THE GREAT BELL

The next morning Hogarth was not marched out, and near dinner-time
was summoned before the Governor. Here he stood in a cage of bars in
a room of "No.1" prison, devoted to prison-offences; and before him,
at a littered table, sat governor and chief warder, with the
witnesses of the outbreak near.

The case was gone into, the report made: whereupon the Governor
looked up and down the length of Hogarth, and suddenly gave vent to
a laugh.

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